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?
I wrote my first book, Okay, Okay (Truck Books 2012), mostly by collaging found language related to women crying at work. I’m not sure publishing that book changed my life any more than a great fling or a bad fall would have, but both have consequences.
I was interested, then, in the apparent tension between emotional “content” and formal strategies (like appropriation) often set against the personal-emotional-lyric impulse. I was also in my mid-twenties, with the heartbreak common to those years; as Okay, Okay came out, I found myself much more often in the position my poems had been meant to represent at a distance. By making it clear the speakers of the poem were the pitiable chorus found on forums or HR webinars, and not myself, I tried to generate a protective, ironic distance. I did the opposite.
But my recent books still take comfort in attributing speech to someone else. I’ve restored the quotation marks, the tags, rather than playing with the flattening effect of a cut-up or collage that puts all the found language on the same level, but I still need the poem to stage a conversation.
2 - How did you come to poetry first, as opposed to, say, fiction or non-fiction?
I tried to cure my childhood stutter by reciting TS Eliot’s “The Waste Land” aloud in my bedroom at night. I had found an excerpt of Eliot in the opening to one of Stephen King’s Dark Tower books, and then went to the public library to request the full text on interlibrary loan. I memorized just the first few stanzas, but I loved reciting them, and they gave me the sense that poetry could contain a lot of language without explaining why. I was often wandering around Terre Haute, Indiana muttering “they called me the hyacinth girl.” It wasn’t until many years later that I learned the “Frisch weht der Wind / Der Heimat zu / Mein Irisch Kind” was from Wagner. I had taken it as a sign that it was a good idea to throw a bit of German nonsense in.
That said, I came first to fiction. My best book remains one I “published” in elementary school, Murder in the Mansion, a wallpaper-covered hardback with spiral binding, about the NYPD murdering rich people to inflate the crime rate and get more overtime.
Because I was reading a lot of very good novels—A Wrinkle in Time, say—and only what kitsch poetry appears in children’s books, I was in a better position to pull off a story. Total unfamiliarity with a genre or medium can be generative: if you have never seen a poem, or a movie, you’d probably make a good one. But as soon as you’re exposed to conventions, you need experience to know which ones to adopt and which to reject. This is why very young children are good poets, but middle school students write schlock.
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?
It takes a long time for me to find out what book I’m writing, but it comes quickly once I know. Each book began as an unfocused manuscript collecting whatever scraps of language I had managed to eke out since the last one. Eventually, one or more of the poems gained authority, and the others are all cut to give it room to grow.
This process started with Okay, Okay. I sent a manuscript to Truck Books, and they liked two pages of it, asked if I could write another book that looked like those. Taking this advice was pleasurable.
4 - Where does a poem or work of prose 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 am always trying to write a book-length poem, but again, it takes time to find out what that poem is. With Lilacs, for example: I wrote “Images Lilac” first, and then I didn’t write another poem I liked for many years. I had a .doc on my computer titled Lilacs and Complaints that included this poem, some short stories, a few assorted paragraphs about my cat, some metered sonnets I had been playing with, and so on. It was an ugly, purposeless book, one that gave the sense of a good student’s exercises. This changed when Brandon Brown suggested I keep going with the other senses, which started a satisfying year of taking notes, getting ready, and then writing them each in one sitting. By the time I had a poem for each sense, “Image” was my least favorite, and only stays in the book as its foundation.
But as soon as the premise changes, I slow down again. That book ends with “Love Lilac,” a poem that argues that love is a kind of sensory organ, or at least a particular mode of perception. It went through many, many drafts, and even through many loves. It needed a form capable of synthesis, and of disagreeing with itself.
5 - Are public readings part of or counter to your creative process? Are you the sort of writer who enjoys doing readings?
I love reading in contexts that make it easy for the audience to pay attention: a two-person reading, say, at the Poetry Project, where the soundtechs are Heaven-sent, or a house reading where everyone is comfortable and fed and cuddled up on the floor. I absolutely hate the kind of reading where six unrelated poets are given 15 minutes to torture the unwitting drinkers at a Bushick bar, or an outdoor reading with a mic that seems specially programmed to dissolve the lines into the sounds of rustling leaves.
Sometimes the perfect conditions surprise me. I loved reading at Anthology Film Archives last year (once, among dozens reading from Shiv Kotecha’s book Extrigue, while a slowed-down version of Double Indemnity played behind us; another group event on Shiv’s invitation for Prismatic Ground). I think more poetry readings should happen in movie theaters. In each case, the theatre gave a dignity to the performances that made it easy to listen to everyone, since theaters are the last secular places where people are free from both phones and the expectation they’ll understand everything, and their seats are meant to hold you there.
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?
I want the poem to represent a total thought, with all of its references and digressions and changes of heart. Questions I’ve tried to answer include “How can a poem be as good as a donkey?” or “Why does early love make us so curious and good at learning?” or “How to sublimate instead of repress?”
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?
The culture we have, right now, in the US, is proudly illiterate. In this context, I imagine that the most important writers are those whose books get more people to read? But beyond that, I think writers should try their best to be idiosyncratic, pleasurable, surprising, and difficult, and to resist all the forces that make cynicism or dishonesty tempting.
8 - Do you find the process of working with an outside editor difficult or essential (or both)?
I have depended outside editors. I loved working with Anna Moschovakis on God Was Right, for example, and there was the better part of a decade where Shiv Kotecha read all my early drafts. When I am edited badly, though, I feel crazy and sad.
9 - What is the best piece of advice you've heard (not necessarily given to you directly)?
“Go to sleep.”
10 - How easy has it been for you to move between genres (poetry to stories to essays)? What do you see as the appeal?
I can’t help myself, but it causes problems: the poems are too much like essays, which are too much like stories, which are too much like poems.
11 - What kind of writing routine do you tend to keep, or do you even have one? How does a typical day (for you) begin?
If I have the day off work and my plan is to write, I pull the covers over my head and try to think about what I’ll do first while I hit snooze. Then I have coffee, read something unrelated to my project, go for a walk. There’s a lot of nervous getting ready. I try as much as possible to avoid long stretches where I’m at the computer or notebook and failing to write, because I find sadness unhelpful.
12 - When your writing gets stalled, where do you turn or return for (for lack of a better word) inspiration?
If I’m in the middle of a book, and I know what I’m meant to be doing? That’s the time to talk the project over with a friend, or read, or do a little timed writing to break the spell. If I’m between projects, what works best is to see as many good movies as possible, read widely, get hungry, try to find the will to live that I find creatively generative. And then, once I have an idea, return to this paragraph’s start. But occasionally in grad school I had a real routine (breakfast, writing, run, writing, reading, walk, writing, see a friend), and it was lovely.
13 - What fragrance reminds you of home?
Smoke, sage, cinnamon.
14 - 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?
For better or for worse, my work tends to be about whatever I’ve recently experienced, learned, perceived, whatever. So anything perceptible, imaginable, thinkable is a possible influence.
15 - What other writers or writings are important for your work, or simply your life outside of your work?
Oh my god, it’s too many. But I hope my own books answer this question.
16 - What would you like to do that you haven't yet done?
I am not fluent in any languages but English, which is shameful.
17 - 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 considered dropping out of my PhD to go to nursing school, but I feared the long shifts!
18 - What made you write, as opposed to doing something else?
It is so satisfying to take language and rearrange it. I remember showing my mother a draft of some homework in the first grade, an unstructured list of all the facts I had learned about koala bears. She said, “Do you want to add paragraphs?” Of course I asked what a paragraph is. She took down some books, and we thought about how the writer decided where to add these breaks, what kind of unit a paragraph is.
I wrote the essay again from the beginning, thinking about what relationships my sentences had to each other. This was really thrilling! But my handwriting was terrible, preventing my satisfaction. My mom then also taught me how to use the typewriter, so that I could see my new koala paragraphs cleanly.
As I type this out, I realize it sounds exactly like the process by which I revised all my books, and that’s just fine. I wrote because it was the only way to find out what a paragraph does.
19 - What was the last great book you read? What was the last great film?
I’m just finishing my friend Andrew Durbin’s The Wonderful World That Almost Was: A Life of Peter Hujar and Paul Thek, which is as much a great book about the pleasure of research as it is about the life and work of Hujar and Thek. I had such a good time following this narrative built between archived letters, photographs, and interviews—work I’ve never done, somehow—and it led me to read the letters in Bruce Boone’s papers at Buffalo.
As for movies? My friend Peter and I just saw Mohsen Makhmalbaf’s Gabbeh, which tells the narrative of a rug,
20 - What are you currently working on?
I am finishing a novel, Shit Advice Columnist, about a woman named Artemis who writes an advice column about defecation. Her advice suffers when she cures her IBS. A new friendship helps her develop more creative bowels.
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