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?
The primary change for me is that the creation of Nerves Between Song allowed me to conceive of writing “books”. As a young poet, I could write series -- 5-7 poems -- before losing focus, then I eventually shifted to chapbook length forms for the next decade of writing. NBS accumulates from these 10 - 20 poem series. Now, I write in terms of the book-length work, as if the book gave me permission for this practice.
I feel more assured in my activity as poet and it’s been nice to have more people reach out to me. More friendships, more sense of the visible nexus of poets and our community that invigorates the writing.
In some ways, Nerves Between Song is my “previous work”: the oldest poems in the book are over a decade old, though edited and changed over that time. Across my work there’s an attention to the motion of the poem -- a sense that the poem beckons, but does not dictate meaning. The writing that follows is always going to play against the impulses driving the previous work, as I try to ascertain what new possibilities can emerge.
2 - How did you come to poetry first, as opposed to, say, fiction or non-fiction?
I wanted to write fiction at first: it seemed the only way to be a writer. I soon realized that I was not interested in narrative, in character, and that instead I was interested in the emergence of detail and language as in motion. I’ve always been drawn to improvisation when it comes to creative activity, and poetry seemed the ideal medium for me to explore this.
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?
Each work is continuous on some level, though I have been interested in exploring particular forms. Despite writing within somewhat similar structures throughout my work, on some level it is impossible to repeat the form of the poem as it moves with a continually altering pulse of consciousness. We respond to unceasing change: the conduits of material crisis promulgate poetic intent. Writing exists as accumulating gesture of undercurrent and submerged energy.
Poems start in motion and do not change much from initial writing. There’s a pruning of the work that always happens: cutting away here and there, growing out other aspects.
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?
It is difficult to think of the short pieces that I write over time and the final book itself as distinct. It tends to morph as it moves along. That said, my recent manuscript, Rend, -- a portion of this has just been published as the chapbook In Sleep the Searing -- was intentionally prepared as a book-length series of formally united poems: my first time writing a sustained work where the form is stable and self-contained, rather than determined in its gradual unfolding over a series of poems.
5 - Are public readings part of or counter to your creative process? Are you the sort of writer who enjoys doing readings?
I love doing readings! In the past, I would get so nervous and do them rarely, but I’m fortunate to have had enough opportunities to do them over the years so that the anxiety they generate can be channeled into excitement. I want to think more about my reading practice, particularly in relation to music. Readings with the musician Ceremonial Abyss, who generates a sonic field alongside the poetry, have been incredible experiences and helped me hear the work in new ways. I know I’m not alone in this -- Ceremonial Abyss has been relentlessly touring and reading with so many poets across the US. It’s energizing to see the collaborations he’s convening, not just with him but with other musicians, such as with composer and movement artist Lia Simone, who performed with poets Jared Daniel Fagen and Jessica Elsaesser the evening of my first reading with Ceremonial Abyss.
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?
This is a huge question! The current question for me is how can the US continue to exist in this way where it exploits beings all over the planet so as to perpetuate the control of the wealthy? And then the second question, which comes from this, is where does poetry arrive and occur in this calamity? What is the space of imagination as interwoven with our concerns for survival? I also wonder at what can be “said” with the poem, and become more immersed in it as beautiful noise, churning within what I experience, what I want to know, what I fail to understand, and yet still drawn to a more abstract music that moves with this, vacated of me. There’s always a certain skepticism involved in my approach to language, and with that a lot of uncertainty.
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?
Reading Eleni Stecoupolous’s wonderful new book Dreaming in the Fault Zone: A Poetics of Healing reminded me of the George Oppen quote that poets imagine themselves “legislators of the unacknowledged”. This brings to mind Robert Kocik’s call for poets to make law. I don’t know where I stand. In the unknown probably.
8 - Do you find the process of working with an outside editor difficult or essential (or both)?
Working with Beautiful Days cofounders and editors Joshua Wilkerson and George Fragopoulos was such a satisfying and supportive experience. They were very thoughtful about the work and only lightly intervened to refine Nerves Between Song. Poet and novelist Brenda Iijima, who published my chapbook NECK FIELD several months ago, is a longtime friend and influence. I am deeply fortunate to have her as an astute reader of my work for almost two decades now, and as an editor she helped me hone in on the underlying root structure of the poems. It’s essential!
9 - What is the best piece of advice you've heard (not necessarily given to you directly)?
Alan Davies once told me that one has to do the same thing again and again first before the new emerges, but to do this without repetition. Something about being in the dialectical tension of the repetition and the seemingly new is where poetry happens for me. I feel the process is generating a personal syntax, and rhythm, as if one is improvising on an instrument. That all the discipline is turning toward the practice in motion.
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?
My practice is centered on reading and listening. “Writing” is a continuous occurrence, typically inside as I move about my day. I usually write in the interstices of my reading, since with poetry or theory and then turning to my notebook and writing out a poem. I always handwrite poems and type them out usually months later.
I work a fulltime job as a staff at the New School, so most days start with a commute, but I do try to read poetry in the morning.
11 - When your writing gets stalled, where do you turn or return for (for lack of a better word) inspiration?
Back to music, back to reading, back to film. Medium transfer transmutes stall into flow.
12 - What fragrance reminds you of home?
Decaying leaves. I grew up on the edge of a forest. Teenage afternoons were spent on the paths that ran through the woods. I just would walk and be slightly spooked by the surroundings.
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?
Music always and often film. The poetry I’ve been working on lately has been influenced by electro-acoustic music and field recordings, and often pieces of music that operate in both genres. Taku Unami and Toshiyo Tsunoda’s Wovenland series heavily influenced my recent chapbook NECK FIELD, particularly their attention to estranging “natural” sounds, generating a sort of anti-pastoral of parks and streams and other populated outdoor spaces. The established the field in which the horrors of the genocide in Gaza were reverberating through my daily attention and remain the focus of my political activity outside of poetry. My work is (for better or worse) never direct, yet something about how they were approaching sound obliquely let me register more in the poems the dire urgency of this moment, when the United States continues to arm Israel’s war machine over 600 days into this intensification of the genocide.
As for film, I’m still trying to clarify its direct importance to my work. I often reference films in my poems -- frequently it’s been the filmmakers Apichatpong Weerasethakul or Tsai Ming-Liang. They both offer a duration of image that feels like thinking. I like to write alongside and into the feeling that opens up.
Recent work has been engaging with the films of Robert Beavers after I had the chance to see many of his films at a retrospective at the Anthology Film Archives. Rebekah Rutkoff’s incredible recent book on his work, Double Vision: On the Cinema of Robert Beavers led me to read his film almost as poetry, and as a medium of language, even if that may not have been his intent. I’m into rendering as poetry that which cannot be truly held by it.
14 - What other writers or writings are important for your work, or simply your life outside of your work?
My core poets: Leslie Scalapino, Will Alexander, Larry Eigner, P. Inman, JH Prynne, Myung Mi Kim, Roberto Harrison, kari edwards, Brenda Iijima, Nathaniel Mackey.
For theory (recently): Samir Amin, Vladimir Lenin, Raymond Williams
15 - What would you like to do that you haven't yet done?
Write many essays and reviews. This has been something I’ve found very challenging for some reason. It feels abrasive in relation to my poetry practice, requiring a focus that does not come to me easily. I would also like to write a long poem, though this may or may not already be underway.
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 honestly don’t know how to answer this. Maybe a musician, though part of why I became a poet in the first place is because that dream of music collapsed pretty quickly.
17 - What made you write, as opposed to doing something else?
I wanted to be a musician at first -- I play the piano, pretty much purely improvisation in solitude. When I began to recognize that wasn’t going to go anywhere, I switched to poetry as an improvisational mode that seemed more suit me much more, and not require performing with others, which seemed impossible at the time.
18 - What was the last great book you read? What was the last great film?
The last great film was Frederick Wiseman’s Essene: his documentary of a Benedictine monastery in upstate New York, released on public television in the 70s. There is a beautiful intimacy and fragility to how the monks relate to each other. It was moving, even if religion is not a part of my existence.
The last great book is challenging so I will list three! Tessa Bolsover’s Crane is a uniquely ambitious work that straddles theory and poetry. I was rapt reading Jennifer Soong’s My Earliest Person. Thomas Delahaye’s Numéraire was a work that truly surprised me, a work that delights as the poetry turns inward on itself.
19 - What are you currently working on?
I started a second manuscript in 2021 while I finished editing Nerves Between Song and submitted it for publication (which took three years from the completion of the MS).
This work, Rend is much more dense and led by sound that the more diffuse and ambient Nerves Between Song.
While wrapping this work up on Rend, I have started a long poem. It’s not clear to me yet what this will be as it’s still unfolding. I want it to be something unspooling wildy, playing with the sentence, which is not usually the level I operate on.
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