How did you first come to poetry? What is it about the form that resonates?
When I was really little, in that time around when you just begin to remember things, I firmly recall carrying a battered hardcover Mother Goose book around until it fell apart. I couldn’t read it yet, but there were pictures, and I could get my mother to read them to me on occasion. I had another book of children's songs and poems that was part of an encyclopedia set that belonged to my grandmother I was obsessed with. I wrote my first poems when I was 14, though, for English class. It coincided with the year I started keeping a diary, so I just kept going writing poems about kittens and flamingos all that summer and into the next year. I guess I never stopped…
How does a poem begin?
I will usually have a line that sparks a poem. I tend to work in projects and sequences , usually chapbook length, so I sometimes have a vague concept of the nature of the project, but how that manifests depends sometimes on that single line that sets the fire. I can keep it rolling, wither with sound or image or central idea usually. That first line that is the roughest part sometimes. I recently finished a project semi-inspired by TS Eliot's The Wasteland and had struggled for months on how to approach. I was talking to many people about lockdowns and how I barely felt like a person anymore, so much of our interactions were limited by the screen and other modes of being in the world. . My boyfriend suggested we go to an actual movie and I think I said excitedly "You mean like real people again?" After he left, I sat down and quickly wrote the first part of a long poem beginning with "Back when we were people---" and just kept going...
Have you a daily schedule by which you work, or are you working to fit this in between other activities?
For years, I was terrible at writing regularly. I could produce when pressed, and so many of my poems were written in spurts. My MFA years were reasonably prolific and forged the better part of my first three books, but left on my own, with work and other editor responsibilities, I tended to barely write at all for months then write half a book in a week. I was mentally struggling at the beginning of 2018 after losing my mother and I decided to focus on finishing 30 poems in 30 days during National Poetry Writing Month. I sort of clung to that task to keep me sane, and for the first time ever, I made it all the way through the month. It felt so good, I just kept going. My key was writing first thing in the day, not saving it til the end when I was already mentally exhausted. When there were six million other things I’d rather do. When I had a studio space, I would sit down with my breakfast and coffee and write while I started printing dancing girl press chaps. Later, when I left there, I would do it at home, rolling out of bed and still in my pajamas to get the poem down and then commence the day. I kept at this steadily, using weekends to edit and attend to writing business. Now, I do a lot of freelance work at home that involves writing, so I try t get that stuff out of the way and the poems and other creative writings have been happening late at night since, in general, I have a bit more bandwidth since leaving my full-time job.
What are your favourite print or online literary journals?
Online journals were really important when I was first publishing work in the early aughts, so I have many old favorites that have been around forever, including Stirring, DIAGRAM, and Pedestal Magazine. Print journals I love include Denver Quarterly and Black Warrior Review.
Who are some of the writers you are reading lately that most excite you?
I have been really excited lately about Sarah
Mangold's Her Wilderness Will be Her Manners, Kelly Gray's Instructions
for the Animal Body, and Candace
Wuehle's FIDELITORIA: fixed or fluxed.
