1 - How did your first book or chapbook change your life? How does your most recent work compare to your previous? How does it feel different?
My recent book All Empires Must is my first full-length, and I'm not sure if its publication has changed my life. My main feelings toward its release have to do with the strangeness of being nearly a decade removed from the process of writing it. The years I spent working on those poems (2015-2017), however, certainly changed my life. It was my first experience working on a project at that scale, and it was also my deepest experience with writing to date, in the sense that I discovered how an immersive conceptual engagement could process personal experience into something else. I think the book is more serious, maybe braver, than what I've written since, but it's also less honest, or self-accountable. I guess that's the description of being young.
The best way of describing the difference between my recent work and my previous is probably to say I have become less precious about poetry. Part of that is that I've become less ambitious, in the sense of some external idea of "achievement" as a writer. I want to be serious, but I do not want to be prestigious, which I desperately did want when I was younger. That allows me to be looser, to try more varied approaches, and to let things take the time they take.
2 - How did you come to poetry first, as opposed to, say, fiction or non-fiction?
As a kid, I actually tried to write fiction first. But I could never get a story to go anywhere. I would get mired in description. Plot held no interest for me. When I first started getting serious about poetry, after I moved to NYC in my late teens, I also tried to write non-fiction intermittently. I could only really do it in email form. There's a trove of long emails I wrote to family members from the years I was 17 and 18, plus a bunch I wrote to a mainly email-based lover the years I was 18 through 20 or so. But I've never succeeded in connecting with the essay as a form for my own thinking. I have the vague memory––possibly fabricated––of my first poems being written on scraps of paper. Poetry writing, in that sense, was easier to hide. Haha.
3 - How long does it take to start any particular writing project? Does your writing initially come quickly, or is it a slow process? Do first drafts appear looking close to their final shape, or does your work come out of copious notes?
Total variety. I tend to start from some kind of fixation. I've probably grown more attuned over the years to what kind of fixation might be likely to hold up as the basis for writing and what might not, but I still get surprised. I think I used to be closer to writing on a day-to-day basis; I used to find that first lines or sticking phrases would pop up and I would go from there. Since having my relationship to reading and writing completely reconfigured by various engagements with institutions (that's the avoidant way of saying graduate school), I've had to work much harder to make space for language to show itself. I'm not very disciplined about it, frankly, and sometimes I feel bad about that.
The poems in All Empires Must often came in a single sitting, but each poem (and the book as a whole) was at one point or another completely taken apart, edited, and reformulated. Some of the early drafts would eventually kind of splice into each other and become different poems. My second manuscript (unpublished, titled PERISH / ABOLISH) arrived more intact––individual poems still required refinement, but not in the same "down to the studs" kind of way. More of the thinking was done exterior to the poetry, in the second book. Also I was really, really, really angry all the time. Poems would get spit out in an already hardened state.
4 - Where does a poem usually begin for you? Are you an author of short pieces that end up combining into a larger project, or are you working on a "book" from the very beginning?
I guess I jumped the gun and answered the first part of this above. I'm always thinking in terms of projects, whether the project is a "book" or something else. I can't stomach the notion of a poem that stands alone.
5 - Are public readings part of or counter to your creative process? Are you the sort of writer who enjoys doing readings?
Still trying to figure this out! I do enjoy readings, kind of. I like the physical act of reading aloud, and I'm interested in the thing that can happen when that happens with an audience. However, I am also someone who finds it hard to track a poem when I'm listening to it being read aloud. I greatly prefer reading from the page. I know not everyone is like that, but it always makes me feel weird about reading publicly myself.
6 - Do you have any theoretical concerns behind your writing? What kinds of questions are you trying to answer with your work? What do you even think the current questions are?
Yes. What is writing? Why am I doing this? Who am I doing it for? What does writing do?
7 – What do you see the current role of the writer being in larger culture? Do they even have one? What do you think the role of the writer should be?
See questions in answer above.
8 - Do you find the process of working with an outside editor difficult or essential (or both)?
I can't say that I've had too much experience working with an outside editor on poetry. With my first chapbook, City Poems, I got some great edits from the folks at ignitionpress. There was one long poem in particular that they helped me refine over several versions. At the time, I hated the process, but it absolutely made the book better, and I think I would be much more appreciative of that kind of editing now. I wish I had had the chance to work with an editor on All Empires Must. It won a book contest, so it was published basically exactly as I submitted it.
9 - What is the best piece of advice you've heard (not necessarily given to you directly)?
I don't know if I think it's the best piece of advice, but it's the first thing that comes to mind: don't give up on a piece until you've gotten 100 rejections. Sadly, much about publishing is a numbers game, given the total lack of infrastructure for poetry.
10 - What kind of writing routine do you tend to keep, or do you even have one? How does a typical day (for you) begin?
Alas, I have no routine. My day begins with feeding cats and making coffee. From there it unravels.
11 - When your writing gets stalled, where do you turn or return for (for lack of a better word) inspiration?
To writers and books I love. I'll reread the poetry books that have been most important to my writing life. I'll especially turn to the work of dear friends. But also, and maybe more importantly, I need to go outside of writing. Learning something new helps, as does engaging with the material world (cooking, gardening, cleaning). Visual and performance art have often been the things that get what's stuck to move.
12 - What fragrance reminds you of home?
Copal.
13 - David W. McFadden once said that books come from books, but are there any other forms that influence your work, whether nature, music, science or visual art?
My study of art history has run alongside my writing since the beginning, I guess. Architecture moves me more than probably any other visual form. Watching and thinking about and sometimes making dance and performance have been central to my writing as well.
14 - What other writers or writings are important for your work, or simply your life outside of your work?
Wayyyyy too many to name, so I'll just say Cam Scott because everybody knows it already.
15 - What would you like to do that you haven't yet done?
You're catching me in August, and I've been to a lot of baseball games recently. I really, really want to be able to walk on the field at the Phillies' ballpark, with few or no other people on it. Maybe this is the memory of the proscenium; I just feel I need to experience this.
16 - If you could pick any other occupation to attempt, what would it be? Or, alternately, what do you think you would have ended up doing had you not been a writer?
I'm a nonprofit administrator, occupation-wise. I'm also qualified as an art historian, though I'm not teaching much these days due to the terrible conditions of that occupation. I'm working toward sitting for a CPA license. I wish I could be an NBA player (I have never played basketball at all). I estimate I will attempt 5-7 more occupations before I die.
17 - What made you write, as opposed to doing something else?
I do many things else. Mainly else. I started my life as a dancer, and I got injured. Writing is less expensive than say, painting, which I have no talent for anyway. Language is a source of pleasure and the stupidest kind of cage (the one you make yourself!). Everything is writing.
18 - What was the last great book you read? What was the last great film?
The last great book was Emily Skillings' second book, Tantrums in Air, which came out recently from The Song Cave. I first read it in manuscript form over a year ago, and it is beyond fantastic and everyone should read it. I barely watch movies. The last great film I watched was probably Scarface, because I watch it once or twice a year, and I don't think Center Stage (with which I maintain a similar schedule) counts as a great film.
19 - What are you currently working on?
I am working on a book tentatively titled Rookie of the Year. The book centers around a long, overdetermined metaphor between my failed engagement and the so-called Process, the strategy by which the Philadelphia 76ers have been trying to build a team and win a championship since 2013. I'm still early on in the project, but I think the book is really about the beauty of devotion and the incongruity of the devastation by which it is accompanied. Several basketball-related poems from the project have appeared on The Rights to Ricky Sanchez podcast over the past year or so. None of these are published in a normal way yet, but you can hear Spike Eskin read "Breach of Promise," or you can see me give a live performance on the occasion of the NBA Draft Lottery. I have a lot of problems. Daryl Morey, please give me a press pass so I can write this book.
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