1 - How did your first book change your life? How does your most recent work compare to your previous? How does it feel different?
It has not been out so long, so looking back on its publication in terms of a life narrative turn is difficult. But having a book to share and knowing that the work and the object is having a life beyond me feels strange and expansive. I don’t want to over-legitimize the book for book’s sake, but it’s true that a reader can live more immersively in a poet’s world with the physical fact of a book, or can co-create a world with them, and I feel lucky that some people are living and co-creating with mine. It was also cool as hell, very lucky, and very affirming to publish a book with Omnidawn, which has long been legendary to me. Learning I won their contest (back in 2022) encouraged me to keep doing my thing—after much rejection and discouragement, of course. I wrote most of that book like 5 and 6 years ago, so it feels like a different era of aesthetic attentions and impulses. Life has changed a lot since then. I always feel like my new work is very different—I like to chase new music!—but there are certainly shared concerns.
2 - How did you come to poetry first, as opposed to, say, fiction or non-fiction?
I don’t think I came to poetry first—I think I wrote prose first, in a poets’ manner. I read a lot of fiction as a kid. I wrote everything/anything through high school and college, honestly don’t think I considered genre much, maybe because my favorite writers even then wrote in-between things. And I also didn’t have much conception of doing it for any other reason than the making of it, so I didn’t have to decide on a genre or figure out what to call it. I never really tried to publish anything until much more recently. A professor senior year of undergrad told me what MFAs and suggested I consider one, and I said thank you, ain’t no way. I was done with school, until years later, you know how that orientation changes sometimes. But I was still fully engaged with literature, it’s always been a main obsession in my life.
I guess my last year of undergrad is probably when I stepped more firmly into poetry. I began to feel that poetry could contain or obtain the possibilities of all other forms of literature because poetry is beyond literature. It’s the form that felt most porous to life itself and opened new pores in life, and life was my main concern. I was exposed to some important things that year—I read Aimé Césaire for the first time, when I was assigned Notebook of a Return to the Native Land, Clayton Eshleman’s translation, and I read it in one sitting late at night and everything was different afterwards. I couldn’t believe it. Carried the book around with me for days rereading it. I was also working with a poet named D Wolach who introduced me to George Oppen and a lot of contemporary experimental poets—David Abel came to our class; Rob Halpern’s work was another revelation. That was an important dive into more contemporary poetry and after all that I just kept going deeper.
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 varies a lot. Though it does tend to all be very slow for me, and rarely do first drafts appear close to their final form. Things come in bursts, then I tinker endlessly and put things away for long periods. Everything is long gestation, and things get shuffled around. In a way, I feel like all the writing projects are just the writing project, because anything might belong to another thing.
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?
They begin everywhere and anywhere. Sometimes I write fragments in notebooks or notes app when I’m driving, or voice-to-text dictations (I like the errors), and later—days or months—I cull and combine lines and see what’s there. Sometimes I work out a few stanzas by memory over the course of a couple hours before I write them down. Sometimes I decide I’m working on a longer thing and find a form and start throwing everything into that vessel for weeks or months at a time. I get ideas for “books” a lot, but you know, very few of them have actually happened.
5 - Are public readings part of or counter to your creative process? Are you the sort of writer who enjoys doing readings?
I enjoy doing readings a lot, yes, usually. Especially if it’s a good space with some good people (‘good’ can be a lot of different ways, ofc). The poems change when I bring them to a reading, and I get excited by that. One thing I love about poems is their ability to shape-shift, to be different things at different times. I like to see what poems can be when they are arranged differently, new cadences, in new rooms… I don’t ever want the poems to be static. The pressure before performing is good for editing too. Sometimes I edit as I’m reading—like suddenly I realize just in time that a line or stanza really ain’t going to hit, or I decide I don’t like it, so I skip it and know it’s never coming back. Or other times, I might accidentally say the wrong word and roll with it—gotta roll with it in my opinion—sometimes you say a better word. All that is fun, making it live in whatever present.
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 have theoretical concerns behind my writing, sure, some are lasting, and some are constantly changing based on whims or readings or various encounters. Sometimes I figure them out after things are written. Lately I’ve been thinking about metaphors for God, and the language of infrastructure. I do not try to answer any questions; I prefer finding more questions. Answers in poetry and literature generally usually feel like dead ends, or concerns for the marketing, and I don’t care for that.
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?
There are so many kinds of writers, so it seems tricky to pin that one down. But the kinds of poets I love best—I think they make things new (and/or to show how they are very old)—to expand what’s possible in language, and therefore in thought.
8 - Do you find the process of working with an outside editor difficult or essential (or both)?
Depends on the editor? I’d say both. I like being made to question choices or defend them, when I feel like the editors have something of an aligned vision or imagination. It was great, for example, working with Kelly Clare, Nora Claire Miller, and Alyssa Moore, the editors at Ghost Proposal on A Seam of Electricity, a chapbook of mine they published. They pushed me to expand and sharpen it.
9 - What is the best piece of advice you've heard (not necessarily given to you directly)?
Here are two that often come to mind, from my teacher Laura Mullen:
“Notice what you notice, that’s who you are as an artist”
“See what happens when you try to test your endurance in the wilderness of experimentation”
10 - How easy has it been for you to move between genres (poetry to translation)? What do you see as the appeal?
Very easy. They move through each other. Translation can be very difficult of course, but it can also at moments, feel as easy as good reading. And it opens new possibilities for my own poetry constantly. Questions of translation are also the essential questions of language.
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?
No routine. No typical days if I can help it. I have little discipline in such things, and I suppose I avoid routine. I always walk my dog in a different direction. I drink coffee. I look out the back door. I keep a garden in my yard, and sometimes I look at it while the water boils. If I can read or write first thing when I wake up, I love to, but that’s rare, unfortunately.
12 - When your writing gets stalled, where do you turn or return for (for lack of a better word) inspiration?
Anywhere but a screen. I like to walk. I also like to drive. And to read, of course. Talking to certain friends puts a faith back in me—I remember that a few people care about what I’m doing and are doing it too.
13 - What fragrance reminds you of home?
River water or frying garlic.
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?
Encounters with good visual art make me want to write. Music is everything, it’s all music. One time I thought suddenly that my love of DMX as a kid had been the basis for my entire understanding of poetry. Not the specifics of his lyrical style—but his sonics. I not sure that’s true, but I’m not sure it’s not. The cadences of rappers I listened to growing up (Ghostface is a big one) are like bedrock in my mind.
15 - What other writers or writings are important for your work, or simply your life outside of your work?
Aimé Césaire, Alice Notley, Etel Adnan, Ed Roberson, Henri Michaux, Lisa Robertson, CD Wright, Jimin Seo, fahima ife, Laura Mullen, Sebastian Gómez Mátus, Javier Raya, Carlos Cociña, Diana Garza Islas, many more.
16 - What would you like to do that you haven't yet done?
Get these two chapbook/press projects in operation that have been long in planning. (On the way! LUCIUS, co-edited with fahima ife—first chap summer 2025—& mf editions, physical branch of mercuryfirs.org, coming…soon…). I’d like to be able to publish full-lengths someday.
Also, I’d like to put out a few albums of my own music that no one listens to.
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?
If I hadn’t decided to go back to school when I was 28 or so, and ended up teaching as I’m doing now, I might have kept farming, which was my occupation for most of my 20s. Often I wish I were a good carpenter. I don’t dream of employment; I do dream of non-employment. And I do think about useful skills for the commune.
18 - What made you write, as opposed to doing something else?
I have done and do plenty of something else’s, but I think I always come back to writing because, for one thing, it’s always available, always an option, there as “a refuge but also a centrifuge,” as Eric Baus said to me once. Like back in high school, which I did not like and did not excel, I’d ignore lessons and write long free-associative prose-poem things for pages and pages, getting into a trance—that shit was thrilling, life-giving. It is a sort of meditation or transportation that I need—desperately then, and still now. I was semi-serious about music from my teens through my mid-20s, wrote lots of songs, moved to Austin for a while with a band. We were a mess and it fell apart quickly but I loved it and I miss that mode of creation/attention/collaboration. But it’s a lot to get band members and space and equipment together. And I tend towards solitude—being in a band and playing out is very social. Writing has been the most consistent thing, partly because it was something I could do under any circumstances—moving around, broke, odd housing situations, etc. Poetry stays free.
19 - What was the last great book you read? What was the last great film?
The Grimace of Eden, Now by Cody Rose Clevidence. I’ve been watching Kiarostami films for the first time—can’t stop thinking about Where Is the Friend’s House? Also, Close-Up. Great-great-great.
20 - What are you currently working on?
A life outside of time (nothing doing). A book of poems called Vegetable With, that I’ve been working on quite a while. A translation of Chilean poet Sebastián Gómez Matus’s collection Animal Muerto. Another bunch of poems collectively called Half the Soybeans of the World Float by Me on the River, and maybe another bunch called 2 or 3 Houses. Always a lot of different things. And always the editorial/organizational/etc. work of running mercury firs, and the aforementioned LUCIUS. All that is a ton of work, but I love it a lot.
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