Louise Akers is a poet living in Brooklyn, NY. She is a PhD student in English at NYU and is the co-organizer of the small press and working group, the Organism for Poetic Research. Akers is the author of two books of poetry, Alien Year (Oversound, 2020) and Elizabeth/The story of Drone (Propeller Books, 2022).
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?
My first chapbook came out in 2021 with the exceptional people at Oversound, but the process of writing it had begun probably in 2016. It was a sharply condensed version of a much longer, more gangly and amorphous manuscript that I had taken a pretty sculptural approach to cutting down. Working with Oversound was a wonderful and generous experience, and I am very proud of that little chap! My second book, Elizabeth/the story of Drone (Propeller Books, 2022) is a very different beast. I wrote it mostly in the summer and fall of 2019 while I was working part time at a museum, and it is much more project-based, much less distilled. For instance, it has characters and scenes, which was a stretch for me! My editors at Propeller were also incredibly thoughtful and supportive, so it retains, I think, a kind of frantic, creepy spontaneity that’s much less condensed. Now my work feels much more personal; both of those books I think were self-consciously non-confessional, almost anti-autobiographical. I lost both of my parents in the last two years, which really put my writing on hold. It also kind of disallowed me from avoiding myself in my work anymore. I think going through that really changed how I approach language and self-disclosure in language. Grief makes your brain different.
2 - How did you come to poetry first, as opposed to, say, fiction or non-fiction?
I’ve always been really attracted to language as a medium you can manipulate or organize into something that can exceed or subvert or complicate its so-called “content.” I’m fascinated by how far away language can get from its meaning, from anything resembling “information,” but still do or activate so much else. That’s really what got me into poetry. Admittedly, I tried to make Elizabeth into a novel, but fell quite short of the mark, I think. I struggle with maintaining that level of fidelity to an object, maybe.
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?
My writing comes quickly or not at all really, haha. I write in pretty huge deluges and then kind of try to take a scalpel to it. In some cases, the first shot is the final one, but in others only a line or two will survive the purge so to speak, so it really depends. I take a lot of notes. I go through periods where I feel like I am just accumulating and accumulating language in a kind of stockpile, and then suddenly, without warning really, I am ready to let her rip.
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?
I think I am always aware of a future life of a poem in a book, but I don’t necessarily proceed with that intention. I will have one document full of writing or poems that I can fully conceptualize many different books around. I think I am more successful when I am more conceptually agnostic and just kind of let my writing develop constellations of meaning over time.
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–because they are fun and social and ephemeral experiences, but also it is a hell of a way to edit a poem. When I know I am reading something out loud in front of strangers, I will be totally ruthless in a way that only vanity can inspire. Also sometimes while I’m reading it, and really hearing and feeling its living reception I will change little things to allow for clarity or rhythm or some other immediate and interpersonal effect.
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?
My questions or concerns have emerged really out of my professional/institutional backgrounds, which include the art world and academia. Elizabeth was really concerned with the media-technological intersections between the commercial art world and the USAmerican war machine; drones became a kind of figure for that acute anxiety, but also defanged self-disgust in a sense of complicity. Now, I am thinking more about grief, on an individual level but also on a social level. Covid happened and f*cked us all up in ways that we are still only just beginning to recognize, let alone understand. The ongoing genocide in Palestine has revealed many things about the West and the US, including just how tight the chokehold that the executive branch of government has on the academic and cultural institutions that we, as writers and artists and scholars, have tried very hard to be a part of, actually is. Grief feels really close, and closer still the more it is held at bay. There is so much more to say about this, but I’ll leave it there for now.
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?
Oh, it’s hard not to just quote Walter Benjamin on this one. I think critique is important; I think it is important to register the fact that throwing language at a problem (“problem” standing in here very broadly and clumsily for any of the myriad social-political-environmental-economic cataclysms we are enmeshed in currently), policing the language around a problem, or even diagnosing a problem discursively are all deeply incomplete projects, while also realizing that that is not an excuse or a reason not to do those things. Very clunky sentence, but hopefully you get the drift.
8 - Do you find the process of working with an outside editor difficult or essential (or both)?
I like it. I find it pretty easy to take criticism, and also I kind of appreciate the moments where I instinctively dig my heels in. I think it’s revealing about what is important to me in ways I might not register otherwise. I do have to say I have had really exclusively wonderful experiences with editors, so maybe I am just lucky!
9 - What is the best piece of advice you've heard (not necessarily given to you directly)?
Not every single thing you do has to be done in the most efficient way. It’s ok to get somewhere via a circuitous, delayed, or otherwise imperfect route.
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?
I am in graduate school getting a PhD so maintaining a routine is really a cherished pipe dream of mine. I am working with my therapist on it! My only real routine comes from my dog, Moose, who needs four walks a day. Everything else can fall apart, but she always gets me out of bed for that first walk!!
11 - When your writing gets stalled, where do you turn or return for (for lack of a better word) inspiration?
When I am really struggling, the only way for me to move at all is to read. I often will just grab a comically heavy hitter like Rimbaud or Ashbury or Dickinson off the shelf and open to a random page and start reading until I feel like I have a brain again. It doesn’t always work.
12 - What fragrance reminds you of home?
The ocean and those little lavender scented pillows that deter moths.
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?
My sister is a visual artist and she and I are very close, so visual art has always been really important to me and my practice. I worked in galleries for a few years, and studied art history in undergrad. I think a lot about Impressionist painters like John Singer Sargent and Romantic painters like JMW Turner, because their work seems to suggest a lot about what I think poetry can do: say a lot with a little, which is to say, perform a deceptively spontaneous gesture, and perform it with excruciating precision despite its purported lack of realism. I also listen to a lot of music, but have famously uncool taste haha.
14 - What other writers or writings are important for your work, or simply your life outside of your work?
A brief and non-exhaustive list of writers who are very important to me presented in no particular order: Anne Carson, William Blake, Fred Moten, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Sean Bonney, Samuel Delany, Wallace Stevens, Denise Ferreira da Silva, Diane di Prima, Alice Notley, Louis Zukofsky, Lucretius, John Donne, Dionne Brand, William Wordsworth (I’m a Romanticist, technically, so I can’t help it), Lyn Hejinian, Walter Benjamin…the list goes on and on!
15 - What would you like to do that you haven't yet done?
I would like to write a play. That form of collaboration and interpretation and spontaneity attracts me immensely, but also intimidates me!
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 think if I had not been a writer, I would still be in the art world. I think if I could start over and have a different life, I would be a professional athlete lol.
17 - What made you write, as opposed to doing something else?
Growing up, my older sister was always demonstrably exceptionally talented as a visual artist; I was not. I think my parents really didn’t want us to be in direct competition with each other, so I was kind of pushed into sports because I was better at that. I had this kind of complex that because she was so good at creative arts, that wasn’t for me. I had to be good at something else entirely. It wasn’t until after college really that I started writing creatively, and I think it was mostly because my sister wasn’t a poet, so I thought I could do that. I got into poetry because it seemed the most precise way to get at wiggly, uncertain feelings and thoughts and desires I didn’t have language for otherwise.
18 - What was the last great book you read? What was the last great film?
I very rarely read novels, which I shouldn’t admit, but I read Portrait of a Lady by Henry James last month and it was an absolute delight. I also really loved Robert Eggers’ new take on Nosferatu, with the caveat that film is not my strong suit.
19 - What are you currently working on?
Right now I am working on a book about grief. It’s also about certainty. It hasn’t really happened on purpose, but whenever I start writing it’s like this kind of elliptical return. It’s also heavily influenced by my very conflicted but somewhat obsessive reading of Immanuel Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason. I’m very curious about ways in which philosophers, misguidedly and dogmatically, try to make their readers feel better about how impossible it is to know anything about anything or anyone with any certainty. Philosophy is supposed to be something like therapy, you know? But it fails, and often leads us down worse rabbit holes with more distressing questions, or accusations. I miss my parents and I feel like time stopped when I lost them. But it didn’t for anyone else. I don’t know what to do with that, so I’m writing about it.
