How did you first come to poetry? What is it about the form that resonates?
To a kid mucking around in the woods, Frost was very accessible, very tangible. There was lots of memorizing and translating in school. Filter that foundation through the early days of the Internet, free boxes full of literary magazines, and a Liberal Arts education. I attended a lot of readings in college, and at like The Cantab Lounge. Sometimes I feel like an audience member that's rushed the field.
But I'm drawn to the risk and amorphousness. As much as I've had love affairs with French form. At least compared to other genres, there’s a certain willingness to work beyond punctuation and paragraphs. To wander into the gullies. I had a poetry professor who described something like the silhouette of a poem as: as unpredictable as a coastline.
How does a poem begin?
At the BFI Soundbank with a bag of oranges
Do you see your writing as a single, extended project, or a series of threads that occasionally weave together to form something else?
They're related like opossums and bandicoots are related. They are both of this planet, of this moment in evolution, but are a bit scattered to the winds. And yet there's something deep in their nature holds them together.
They all derive from the same spring. It's all an extension of the self, isn't it? I don't believe in the separation of art and artists so we're a bit stuck with one another. But not like children. Like creations. Like David. Or Ulysses.
Have you a daily schedule by which you work, or are you working to fit this in between other activities?
Sometimes my work is writing. Sometimes I'm working, so I can write at night and in the mornings and when I'm b-lining to the station. Sometimes I'm writing in the margins when I'm supposed to be doing my reading. Sometimes I listen to books instead of writing my own. There's a consistency to the instance of the habit. There’s lots of jotting half-thoughts into my phone and laughing to myself.
If I have ~a room of one's own, I have buffers built in around deadlines. Or designated work periods. Depending on the time of year, there's a right time of day. Soft light. Of course, some chairs are better than others. It is the same with pens, but I try not to wed myself to too much specificity. It's easy to write on trains- maybe there's something in the motion. Planes can be equally generative, but that's also the time for the long thoughts from which ideas sometimes come. That and walks.
But you can be all lined up and suddenly the cat vomits. So, maybe more than time, it's important to have support. To offset pets or kids or anxieties of war, if only for a few hours. And eyes for after.
What are your favourite print or online literary journals?
I'm tempted to suggest that the best lit journal is the one in your hand. Otherwise it can be rather conceptual worship.
I'm very invested in the next generation of publications. How is the landscape being redeveloped? Especially since so many have gone under. But this time of year, there's hope for a bit of necromancy.
I admire SAND, Astrolabe, the Furious Beautiful Review of Books. Talk Vomit, of course. Anything that's printed with personality. And texture.
Who are some of the writers you are reading lately that most excite you?
Leigh Chadwick
Hera Lindsay Bird
Ann Carson always
Zoe Grace Marquedant is a queer writer. She earned her B.A. from Sarah Lawrence College and her M.F.A. from Columbia University. Her work has been featured in Fruitslice, WAS, In the Mood, as well as elsewhere. She is also a columnist and contributor for Talk Vomit.
A selection of her poems appeared in the twelfth issue.