1 - How did your first book change your life? How does your most recent work compare to your previous? How does it feel different?
This is my first book! Though I simultaneously, or nearly so, published a book-length dos-a-dos with DoubleCross called Zero Point Dream Poems, after Nawal El Saadawi’s Woman at Point Zero. I produce a lot but publish a little. In my opinion, writing is socially produced and produces socialites. Publications need to be brought into the world by the right people by the right press at the best time if they are to be received as meaningfully as possible by the right reading public. While this is not always probable or even possible, working with MC Hyland and Anna Gurton-Wachter at DoubleCross in 2023 and Dan Owens, Kyra Simone, Serena Solin, and Milo Wippermann at UDP in 2024 checked all these boxes.
More broadly, I break my weekly habit tracker down into three categories: being, doing, and making. My first book has shifted my way of being most: it’s a feeling state or felt sense of having landed somewhere. Or maybe it’s the felt sense of having finally cast off, the feeling state of “far out” or “offshore,” where, paradoxically or not, I feel most grounded. That felt sense is the biggest shift.
2 - How did you come to poetry first, as opposed to, say, fiction or non-fiction?
The desire to write fiction is what propels me as a writer. Poetry that plays with narrative comes out when I sit down to write. It’s the shape my thinking takes on the page. I’m also an academic writer. But even as a scholar writing scholarly prose, I write associatively, sentence by sentence, without a roadmap or an outline. Whether I’m writing poetry or critical theory, language is like a stone pathway that precedes my arrival on the scene of the text. Step by step. I follow the stones. I don’t know where I’m going or when I’ll stop.
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?
Writing is like precipitation in my life. Sometimes the weather is too wet. Sometimes too dry. Most of the time there is too much rain and too little containment: flood. Some of the time there is too little rain and too much thirst: drought. Sometimes the weather meets the needs of its immediate terrain: poetry!
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’m a project-based poet and my books reflect that fact. A conceit becomes a preoccupation that I iterate until I’ve cycled through all possible variations on a theme or method available to me. The circuit of experimentation eventually completes itself and I begin to edit. Many times, during the editing process, subcircuits present themselves. Fractal arguments and counterarguments open doors into doors.
5 - Are public readings part of or counter to your creative process? Are you the sort of writer who enjoys doing readings?
Only since having a child! Recently, my friend said to me that when she had a child she was able to forgive herself for existing. This is true for me, too. There are many societal reasons this is a very distressing sentiment! A subject for a scholarly essay or book, to be sure. But nonetheless, when I gave birth, I forgave myself for existing, and as a direct or indirect result, began to enjoy reading in public.
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?
So many! Too many to list, but here are some main preoccupations.
Is empathy a virtue that affords greater social cohesion or a narcissistic expression susceptible to political exploitation? What is compassion and how do we act appropriately on its injunctions in contemporary life? How are we to live “the good life,” by which I mean a values-driven life that makes room for the possibility of joy, in the age of climate breakdown?
Who am I; and who are you; and who are we; and where do we begin and end in relation to the total environment, if at all?
Because I work in the knowledge sector, a lot of my poetry is concerned with the ideological and material conditions of knowledge production and circulation. I’m interested in knowledge economies in general, or where and how knowledge is made, received, and interpolated, and by whom. I’m interested in the ways situated, lived, or embodied knowledge is honored (or not) in mainstream scholarly discourses and policy development. I’m interested in research, or how humans learn what they need to know in order to live well and remove barriers to collective wellbeing. And I’m interested in meaning-making, or how humans weave together their personal and social lives through deeply contextual, cultural, community-led, and value-laden activities, like for instance, poetry!
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?
In my poems, I often ask how we can loosen the strictures of Western, empirical knowledge regimes without descending into a pit of relativisms that render thought vulnerable to conspiracy, misinformation, and polarization. Can poetry help us live with integrity while accepting uncertainty? Certainly. Can we critique patriarchal scientific methodologies while embracing the fruits of scientific study and analysis? Yes, I think so. Does poetry contribute to efforts led by theorists working on the ground, in the streets, or in the academy who advance situated, embodied, and author-saturated understandings of the worlds we inherited alongside the worlds we want to pass along? Totally. Are phenomenological understandings of meaning-making inherently feminist? Subversive? Dissident? Is poetry research? What would it mean to read it as such? I don’t know!
8 - Do you find the process of working with an outside editor difficult or essential (or both)?
Helpful! The more dialogic the writing and editing process, which are continuous and coextensive in my practice, the more faceted the crystallized artifact of that interaction becomes.
9 - What is the best piece of advice you've heard (not necessarily given to you directly)?
Write in community. Deepen your relationship to your existing communities. Seek out new communities to be, do, and make with and for. Weave yourself into ever more complicated social fabrics with your words.
I’ve just realized I didn’t really answer your question. That’s my advice.
Advice that I recently heard and really appreciated is to ask yourself everyday, “what am I walking toward and what am I walking away from?” Step by step, you can get “there” from “here,” wherever here and there are for you. Walking may be an alienating verb for some, since it implies a baseline of personal mobility and/or environmental safety that is not universal by any stretch. So if that’s your experience, maybe you could swap “walking” out with another verb that resonates with your intrinsic motivations, like “writing.”
10 - How easy has it been for you to move between genres (poetry to art to critical prose)? What do you see as the appeal?
I am a poet, a scholar, and an artist. My art practice is what is sometimes termed social sculpture. I build boats, teach people to build boats, and get people out on local bodies of water to talk about environmental ecologies and economies as part of a collective called Mare Liberum. I like to think that building boats has prepared me to move between genres: land and sea, public art and activist scholarship, academic administration and poetry creation. It’s a continuum of practice.
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?
I have a small child who has more power over my daily routine than the sun and moon could ever hope to! I have no routine. I write whenever I find a minute.
12 - When your writing gets stalled, where do you turn or return for (for lack of a better word) inspiration?
I read. I wait. I exercise. I play. I work. I get outside.
13 - What fragrance reminds you of home?
What a lovely question! It reminds of the PJ Harvey song, “You Said Something,” from Stories from the City. Stories from the Sea. While looking at Manhattan from a rooftop in Brooklyn she sings about the “smells of our homelands.” This line always reminds me that I don’t know where home is: the city (where I live) or the seaside (where I grew up). Depending on my mood, the smells of my homeland are either trash & heat (rising from asphalt) or salt & sulfur (released by dead and dying plants in the marshland). Home is such a scary place for so many. I am privileged to love my homes.
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?
All of the above! I would add that institution building and institutional ethnography both layer my thinking about poetry creation. The practice of institutional ethnography was developed by Canadian sociologist Dorothy J.Smith. It’s a research methodology that aims to describe how individual behaviors, beliefs, and activities, taken en masse, give form to the social. This way of looking at things helps me understand the coordinated doing, making, and working across scenes, sectors, and geosocial spaces that give rise to poetry as an institution. Counterinstitution is actually a more capacious and less contestable term to describe the work of poetry in the world. Ammiel Alcalay’s motto for Lost & Found is “follow the person.” I think of counterinstitutional ethnography, and I’m not sure he’d agree with me here, of “following the people,” to understand poetry and its operations at scale.
15 - What other writers or writings are important for your work, or simply your life outside of your work?
Too many to name! I’ll give a shout out to my Lost & Found poetry fam. Ammiel, Sampson Starkweather, Stephon Lawrence, Joseph Caceres, Tonya Foster, Coco Fitterman, Daisy Atterbury, Irish Cushing, Zohra Saed, Oyku Tenken, Miriam Atkin, and Marine Cournet. I’ll also shout out my Geopetics working group: Celina Su, Sahar Romani, Mónica de la Torre, Richa Nagar, and Kahina Meziant. And my poet.mamas listserve!
16 - What would you like to do that you haven't yet done?
Just keep writing, publishing, performing, and archiving. Write continuously, like Diane di Prima. Publish continuously, like Alice Notley. Perform continuously, like Mariposa Fernandez. Archive and activate/preserve archives continuously, like Lois Elaine Griffith. I’d also like to focus on a daily visual log, like Etel Adnan. I was trained as a painter and I’d like to paint more like I brush my teeth, every day, as a kind of maintenance. (Naming aspirations here; not making comparisons between myself and these phenomenal beings!)
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 work my dream job. Even so, I have a fantasy that one day I’ll go to Yale’s forestry school.
18 - What made you write, as opposed to doing something else?
It’s possible that I began writing seriously after 9-11 in NYC because painting and boat making, my two main visual arts practices, required too much storage. Poems don’t take up any space; on the contrary, they create space.
19 - What was the last great book you read? What was the last great film?
Richa Nagar’s Relearning the World through Radical Vulnerability. Alice Diop’s Saint Omer. Both, to me, in part, develop methods for building solidarity with near and far “others” without the crutch of identification.
20 - What are you currently working on?
An institutional ethnography of CUNY called Uneven Ground: Making the Public University Work Anywhere People Gather, Learn, and Grow.
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