Rainer Diana Hamilton is the author of
five books, including This Reasonable Habit (co-authored with Violet Spurlock, Spunk Editions, 2026) and Lilacs (Krupskaya Books 2025).
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 on 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.
12 or 20 (second series) questions;
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