12 or 20 (second series) questions with Jeannette L. Clariond

Jeannette L. Clariond [photo credit: Daniel Tamez] is an award-winning Mexican writer and translator. She has published many collections of her own poetry as well as Spanish translations of Elizabeth Bishop, Anne Carson, Primo Levi, and other writers.

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 confirmed writing as a long-term vocation rather than a passing impulse. Though one knows since birth that the vocation lies within. 

2 - How did you come to poetry first, as opposed to, say, fiction or non-fiction?
I only read and write poetry and essays. It is hard to read fiction. And harder to distinguish it from reality.
 
3 - How long does it take to start any particular writing project? Does your writing come quickly at first, 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?
For me, writing always begins with reading. I read slowly and deeply, feeling the author's voice and allowing it to find its way into my life. No notes, just memory and previous experiences. 

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?
A poem usually begins with a line, an image, or a rhythm. I like listening to Gregorian Chants. Dreams also start a project. This happened with Leve sangre (Unburdened Blood), translated by Curtis Bauer a few years ago as Image of Absence. That collection is sustained by music. 

5 - Are public readings part of or counter to your creative process? Are you the sort of writer who enjoys doing readings?
I’m afraid I’ve read too much of Job: If I speak, the wound bleeds. If I remain silent, it bleeds too. 
 
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?
No theoretical concerns. I write questions for which I find no answers. 

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 role of a writer is to create consciousness of our world, as scary as it may be. 

8 - Do you find the process of working with an outside editor difficult or essential (or both)?
Working with an outside editor can be disturbing, as it requires letting go of certain attachments. In this book, we (Forest and I) discussed many lines. I am happy because he was much of an editor at his best, not only a translator. 

9 - What is the best piece of advice you've heard (not necessarily given to you directly)?
What I am doing new is writing by hand, eyes closed, allowing myself to see images inside the words I write, no matter how strange or extravagant they might seem. My fears, old and new, my desires, ancient and actual, flow along the ink in an endless drift. 

10 - How easy has it been for you to move between genres (poetry to translation)? What do you see as the appeal?
Translation is (to me) the best way to learn how to deep read. I do not feel I am taking time out from my work; on the contrary, it is a way to nourish my own process. 

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?
Not too much of a routine. Your eyes stare at poetic figures, and you learn to decipher the ones that will start-jump you into a poem. 

12 - When your writing gets stalled, where do you turn or return for (for lack of a better word) inspiration?
Good cinema. 

13 - What fragrance reminds you of home?
Face cream.

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?
Theatre, opera, woods, dawns. 

15 - What other writers or writings are important for your work, or simply your life outside of your work?
Hölderlin, Trakl, Benn, the poetry of Kabbalah. 

16 - What would you like to do that you haven't yet done?
Drama. One actress. A soliloquy. 

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?
Poets are born poets. No options here. 

18 - What made you write, as opposed to doing something else?
My mother’s eyes and her way of reciting Hamlet or Kipling. 

19 - What was the last great book you read? What was the last great film?
Francesco Petrarca & Giovanni Boccaccio. 

Film: Jim Jarmusch’s Father Mother Sister Brother

20 - What are you currently working on?
I am working on two prose books that I started during COVID. Both are the continuation of Cuaderno de Chihuahua. They both relate to my ancestors, exile, and madness.  And in a poetry collection, Abandonments. 

12 or 20 (second series) questions;

12 or 20 (second series) questions with Aaron Fagan

Aaron Fagan [photo credit: Camilla Ha] is the author of five poetry collections, including Atom and Void published in October 2025 by Princeton University Press. His poems have appeared in Harper’s, Granta, The New Republic, and other publications.

1 - How did your first book change your life? How does your most recent work compare to your previous? How does it feel different?
My first book changed my life by showing me that culmination is less about arrival and more about departure. In that sense, the new work mirrors the old; it revisits the same enduring questions but through a shifting lens, say, the way Powers of Ten by Charles and Ray Eames moves closer and farther from a single point of view.

2 - How did you come to poetry first, as opposed to, say, fiction or non-fiction?
I came to poetry thumbing around in an English textbook in the 6th grade. Our class almost entirely ignored the poetry section, but I stumbled across an Edgar Allan Poe poem, “A Dream Within a Dream,” and that made me a true believer in the magic trick of poetry that happens by virtue of breaking short of the margins.

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?
At this point, I write consistently, not in a set way; it’s become a recognizable feeling, a physiological pang no activity will satisfy but writing itself. It comes in stops and starts, and I don’t fight the rhythm it takes. Up to now, I have not been a project-based writer with a clear thematic subject in mind. The sonnets were an exercise in constraint that interested me, but they are tied together by an informal exploration of that form, not by any explicit unified vision.

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?
Poems can begin in a few ways. They can arrive in a flash, and I race to write them down before I forget them. I can misunderstand something in a way that feels interesting and write down a line or grab a group of abandoned poems, and then I dump what I have collected into something new and play musical chairs until it feels satisfying. Books come together the way poems come together, critical mass is reached, and some intangibly emergent quality arises, but no book I have published resembles its first manuscript in any way.

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; I rarely have the opportunity. I do think a poem working in its own way, read aloud, is part of its completion, even if it’s a challenging piece that would be hard for a reader to absorb on the spot.

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 some personal philosophical preoccupations that come out sideways in the work, but I do not write about things directly, and philosophies are always provisional, always doomed to fail. If anything, I write to shed my philosophies rather than reinforce them. Answers don’t interest me, but refining questions in the open-ended theater of awareness does.

7 – What do you see the current role of the writer being in the larger culture? Do they even have one? What do you think the role of the writer should be?
There may have been a time when the writer played some kind of role in culture, but that seems utterly anachronistic at this point. And the notion of the sage, the shaman, the canary in the coal mine, and the prophet all seem to have become suspicious enterprises. I wholeheartedly reject the Shelleyan assertion that poets are “the unacknowledged legislators of the world.”

8 - Do you find the process of working with an outside editor difficult or essential (or both)?
I can’t say as though I have ever had the experience of an actual, extensive discussion of my work with an editor or anyone, where poems or books are engaged with any degree of depth and consideration. That absence has probably shaped my independence of mind, for better or worse.

9 - What is the best piece of advice you've heard (not necessarily given to you directly)?
Yusef Lateef, an advisor of mine when I was a student at Hampshire College, once corrected me for using the word “jazz” in his presence. He said, “I have never heard of this jazz that you speak of,” then wrote on a piece of paper, “Autophysiopsychic Music Definition: Music from one’s physical, mental, and spiritual self.” That has probably taught me more about poetry than I am even aware of. He was a paragon of artistic integrity.

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 write when I feel the need to write, which is not to say I have something to say. My day begins with coffee, walking the dogs, and enjoying time with my wife before I drive her to work and then come home to do what I need to do for the gear engineering magazine I edit.

11 - When your writing gets stalled, where do you turn or return for (for lack of a better word) inspiration?
I don’t think in terms of my writing ever getting stalled. I trust the ebb and flow. Inspiration has never been a part of the equation for me. I do not wait for it; it only comes through making. Inspiration is a byproduct of action. If I have ever felt inspired to write something, it almost always ends in a disaster.

12 - What fragrance reminds you of home?
My wife loves to burn Palo Santo. And she has a ranging perfume collection, so every day there is a rotating sillage to experience.

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?
Too many visual artists to name, but lately I feel the closest kinship with Richard Prince and Paul McCarthy. Music in rotation lately is The Moon Lay Hidden Beneath a Cloud, Magic Is Küntmaster, Amanaz, Broadcast, and Solid Space. Quanta magazine to stay up on physics. Too many movies to name, but I did watch Synecdoche, New York and Dead Poets Society again recently.

14 - What other writers or writings are important for your work, or simply your life outside of your work?
Eliot and Ashbery are poets I found impenetrable, and now I can’t imagine my life without them. Osip Mandelstam, Yehuda Amichai, and Alan Dugan were once indispensable to me. But not any longer, which saddens me. Albert Camus. Joseph Campbell. Gaston Bachelard. Haruki Murakami. Rene Ricard. John Berryman. Chögyam Trungpa. Denis Johnson. Mark Ford. Carl Jung.

15 - What would you like to do that you haven't yet done?
Read for more than ten minutes at a literary event.

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?
My dream has always been to teach creative writing or return to editing a literary journal. I was the Assistant Editor of Poetry from 1998–2002 and that experience was the joy and education of a lifetime.

17 - What made you write, as opposed to doing something else?
The low cost. I loved painting, film, and photography, but those are expensive media.

18 - What was the last great book you read? What was the last great film?
The Cool School, edited by Glenn O’Brien, and rewatched The American Astronaut and Moments Like This Never Last.

19 - What are you currently working on?
I am writing a nonfiction book about DNA as the Dynamic Narrative Archetype.

12 or 20 (second series) questions;

12 or 20 (second series) questions with Simon West

Simon West is the author of five collections of poetry, including Prickly Moses, published in the Princeton Series of Contemporary Poets, and The Ladder, which was shortlisted for the Australian Prime Minister’s Literary Awards. He is also the author of Dear Muses? Essays in Poetry and The Selected Poetry of Guido Cavalcanti. He lives in Melbourne, Australia.

1 - How did your first book change your life? How does your most recent work compare to your previous? How does it feel different?
The themes that recur in the poems I write today are similar to those in my first book, First Names, published back in 2006. Maybe I’m less shy about them today, more willing to accept them and give them the space they need to ring out. If there was a moment when poetry suddenly changed my life, then it came when I read Sylvia Plath’s ‘Morning Song’. I was a teenage boy growing up in country Victoria. The experience of early motherhood that Plath evokes in that poem was not something I had much interest in. But I was amazed by how those words and images bristled and came alive, as if a spirit leapt off the page and entered me. Perhaps everything I have written is a homage to that spirit as I have discovered it in many poems and poets since. My new book, Prickly Moses, is no different.

2 - How did you come to poetry first, as opposed to, say, fiction or non-fiction?
Delighting in nursery rhymes and nonsense rhymes as a kid. Growing up thinking words are not just sense but something alive and mysterious, and that rhyme and reason are sometimes two distinct modes of language.

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 poem has its own peculiar conception, birth and growth. You learn to let them find their own way. Saying to yourself, for the next 6 months I’m only going to write sonnets, or now I’m going to write a book of poems about bonsai or whatever … I can’t see much point in that.

4 - Where does a poem or work of fiction 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?
One small, difficult birth after another. No grand projects.

5 - Are public readings part of or counter to your creative process? Are you the sort of writer who enjoys doing readings?
It’s a question I often get asked in an interview. And I wonder if the question is really asking,  why are poets so bad at finding readers, or is there even an audience for poetry? I enjoy reading in public and meeting other people interested in poetry, but I worry it’s not the way my poems should be encountered. My ideal audience is someone reading alone under their breath, slowly, thoughtfully, letting their own voice merge with that of the poem, maybe sharing their excitement with an intimate friend.

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?
If I could write a poem to resolve climate change or the mess in Gaza I’d do it today. But poetry works not so much by answering questions as by following intuitions.

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?
Blow the minds of readers, connect them to a richer human culture. Although I’d try to formulate it in a less grandiose manner, I like what Wordsworth says:

‘[the poet] is the rock of defence for human nature; an upholder and preserver, carrying everywhere with him relationship and love. In spite of difference of soil and climate, of language and manners, of laws and customs: in spite of things silently gone out of mind, and things violently destroyed; the Poet binds together by passion and knowledge the vast empire of human society, as it is spread over the whole earth, and over all time.’

8 - Do you find the process of working with an outside editor difficult or essential (or both)?
You need readers whose opinions you respect, but in the end you have to be your own best critic, and that is so hard to do. After 25 years of reading and writing seriously I still despair at how fickle my opinions can be. One day a poem I’ve written seems fantastic, the next it’s worthless.

9 - What is the best piece of advice you've heard (not necessarily given to you directly)?
I think the advice that continues to be most relevant to me, is to learn to be your own best critic.

10 - How easy has it been for you to move between genres (poetry to essays to translation)? What do you see as the appeal?
I don’t really think in terms of genres. I take pleasure in writing and speech where language is wielded well, and I try to live up to that in my own work.

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?
It’s good to have a routine. Mine is to write in the mornings mostly. But the reality is some days there are bills to pay. Some days you have nothing to say, or you are gripped by the need to write while you are doing chores or out with friends and you have to stop everything.  

12 - When your writing gets stalled, where do you turn or return for (for lack of a better word) inspiration?
To reading and walking.

13 - What fragrance reminds you of home?
Living between Italy and Australia, and between the present and the past, I feel like I have multiple homes. All of them incomplete. Even when I am at home in Melbourne, there’s a part of me longing for the home where I grew up in country Victoria. Lately I think about the wind as moving the air between these various places, connecting them somehow in my imagination.

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 and more.

15 - What other writers or writings are important for your work, or simply your life outside of your work?
The ones I discover by chance, that I wouldn’t consciously set out to read.

16 - What would you like to do that you haven't yet done?
Be more widely read.

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 like the idea of the quest narrative that scientists often evoke to describe their work. To discover some truth or law of nature. And I’m fascinated by rocks. So maybe a geologist.

18 - What made you write, as opposed to doing something else?
Awe and devotion for our language, and a need to pay homage to our forebears.

19 - What was the last great book you read? What was the last great film?
I’m rereading Thoreau’s Walden and I am amazed by his enthusiasm and curiosity. How dogged his celebrations of both the natural and the human realms, and how much clarity and liveliness in his prose.

20 - What are you currently working on?
A poem about the weeds and self-seeding plants that grow in the laneways in the inner city suburb of Melbourne where I live. Why? I don’t know. It sounds like a terrible idea for a poem. But there is something that niggles at me that I can’t identify whenever I walk in those lanes. I need to know what it is.

12 or 20 (second series) questions;

12 or 20 (second series) questions with Myronn Hardy

Myronn Hardy is the author of several books of poems.  Aurora Americana is forthcoming, October 2023 (Princeton University Press).  His poems have appeared in The New York Times Magazine, Ploughshares, POETRY, The Georgia Review, The Baffler, and elsewhere. His books have garnered the PEN/Oakland Josephine Award among others.  He is an assistant professor of English at Bates College.

1 - How did your first book change your life? The first book truly gave me confidence.  It confirmed that it was possible to do this thing I thought impossible which was to write and publish a book of poems.  How does your most recent work compare to your previous? Aurora Americana and my previous book, Radioactive Starlings, are both thinking through the notion of place.  They are doing this in different ways but the notion of place is the link by which they connect.  How does it feel different?  Aurora Americana is a dawn book.  Most of the poems take place during or close to dawn.  I’ve never centered time in this way.      

2 - How did you come to poetry first, as opposed to, say, fiction or non-fiction?  I think I initially found the shapes of poems curious.  When I started learning more about what they do, how concentrated language can create feeling, make music, I knew I wanted to attempt to make poems.

3 - How long does it take to start any particular writing project? I’ve written poems that have taken years, a couple took a decade to write.  I need time to figure out what poems need and how I can give them what they need.  Does your writing initially come quickly, or is it a slow process? Slow.  Do first drafts appear looking close to their final shape, or does your work come out of copious notes? Rarely do poems resemble first drafts.  Attempting to make and know a poem take a lot of time.  I spend a long-time compiling images, lines, phrases, sentences.  I write several versions before the version is set.  Often, during a reading, I’ll even change a word or phrase.     

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 write poem after poem.  I never know if single poems will compile into a book.  After several years, I’ll look back to see what I’ve been writing, of what I’ve been fixated.  Sometimes that looking back tells me that a book might be emerging.

5 - Are public readings part of or counter to your creative process? Are you the sort of writer who enjoys doing readings?  I like doing public readings because they allow me to see and hear reactions to the work. As someone who attends poetry readings, I know that hearing poems read by the poet reinform one’s experience and knowledge of the work.   

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’m very interested in how we connect and disconnect.  How do we live, thrive despite everything?  How does place inform? How do we sustain our humanity?    

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 role of the writer is to see what they see and write what they write.  To always go there and get to the truth despite the pull to be untrue.

8 - Do you find the process of working with an outside editor difficult or essential (or both)? My experience with editors has been good.  A good editor asks questions as opposed to saying, “This is wrong. Do it this way.”  And this, for me, has always been helpful.   

9 - What is the best piece of advice you've heard (not necessarily given to you directly)?  Be free.  Your work, your writing (your poetry) is perhaps the only place where you can be free and dangerous.  You are in control of that danger.    

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 write every day.  I wake up very early, before sunrise.  I like to have that new day’s sunlight fall over the page as I write.  I usually write for four hours in the morning.  I end the morning writing session with a run.  I dedicate the evenings to revision. 

11 - When your writing gets stalled, where do you turn or return for (for lack of a better word) inspiration?  When the writing is stalled, I read; sometimes I’ll listening to music, I’ll force myself to get lost within it. 

12 - What fragrance reminds you of home? Pine. 

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?  The natural world is my most profound influence.  It’s an inexhaustible resource.   

14 - What other writers or writings are important for your work, or simply your life outside of your work?  Fernando Pessoa.  Bob Kaufman.  Gabriel Garcia Marquez.  Lucille Clifton.  Mahmoud Darwish. Elizabeth Bishop.   

15 - What would you like to do that you haven't yet done?  I would like to visit Oman. 

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?  If I hadn’t become a writer, I think I would have liked to have become either an architect or astronomer. 

17 - What made you write, as opposed to doing something else?  Writing is a necessity for me.  It selected me.  And I said, yes. And despite that selection, I didn’t believe it was possible.  But here I am and here it is.  And I’m grateful. 

18 - What was the last great book you read? What was the last great film? Book: MPH and Other Poems by Ed Roberson; Film:  Death for Sale

19 - What are you currently working on?  I’m writing poem after poem.  And I have novel manuscript.  We’ll see what happens. 

12 or 20 (second series) questions;

12 or 20 (second series) questions with Tawanda Mulalu

Tawanda Mulalu [photo credit: Joseph Lee] was born in Gaborone, Botswana, in 1997. His first book, Please make me pretty, I don’t want to die, was selected by Susan Stewart for the Princeton Series of Contemporary Poets and is listed as a best poetry book of 2022 by The Boston Globe, The New York Times and The Washington Post. His chapbook Nearness was chosen as the winner of The New Delta Review 2020-21 Chapbook Contest, judged by Brandon Shimoda. Tawanda’s poems appear or are forthcoming in Brittle Paper, Lana Turner, Lolwe, The New England Review, The Paris Review, A Public Space and elsewhere. His writing has been supported by Brooklyn Poets, the Community of Writers, the New York State Summer Writers Institute and Tin House Books. Tawanda has also served as a Ledecky Fellow for Harvard Magazine and as the first Diversity and Inclusion Chair of The Harvard Advocate. He was recently awarded The Denver Quarterly’s 2022 Bin Ramke Prize for Poetry.

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?
Hmm. It hasn't actually changed much about my day-to-day life. I still have to labor and breathe and stuff. I feel marginally more confident in my ability to get published, but I don't actually feel more confident in my ability to write (actually, a little more horrified: I keep thinking of the poets I admire and what they did for their second book and, often, the jump in quality of writing from first to second book for those folks is absurdly large…) It's changed a few things socially. For my friends who believed I could be a writer, it was simple confirmation—which warms my heart, because I didn't feel that great about the whole endeavor (even though it was a dream of mine to get this thing out there). Those same friends say nice things about me at parties when I go with them, so I get cute introductions to new people (which is kind of helpful in New York for all sorts of reasons, both good and bad).

2 - How did you come to poetry first, as opposed to, say, fiction or non-fiction?
I used to write a lot of personal essays, particularly in college. They were all hyper lyrical and suffered from a lack of cohesion and scattered, imagistic narratives. Eventually I gave up on being able to write something extended that could make 'sense' in the way that fiction and non-fiction tend to. So I ended up committing to the thing that made my brain feel safest. Poetry was, is, really good for the way I think: which tends to be deeply affective, wildly associative, etc. It's the only place where I don't have to feel ashamed for not having my thoughts altogether—and often, not having my thoughts altogether makes the poems more interesting (though the editing thereafter becomes a nightmare…) I’m suddenly worrying now because I’m remembering the much-quoted Auden phrase, “Poetry might be defined as the clear expression of mixed feelings.” Maybe let’s all focus on the “might be” part.

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?
Honestly, I don't know. This is my first real (finished?) writing project. I wrote this book from a place of extended depression. A lot of it feels like it sort of just happened to (with?) me. I think, in writing terms, the book came relatively quickly (the first poems are from the fall of 2019, the last poems are from the summer of 2021). I have a strong feeling that the next project that I'd like to write will be long and torturous—which is fine. Totally fine. Genuinely fine. Yeah.

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 don't want it to be like this moving forward, but for this project anyways, the poems tended to come to me from places of feelings that weren't fun (pandemic depression, seasonal affective disorder, pretty-normal-in-retrospect heartbreak, persistent fears of racialized harm, diasporic longing, etc, etc—) I often wrote in a way that's kind of like listening to music when you need a pick-me-up. I was also fairly desperate—given my overly-large imaginations of the various failures I had accumulated during my time at Harvard—to write something to prove to myself that I could matter in some way (an insipid motivation for art, obviously). Some of the poems in the book are "project poems" that I wrote for the sake of filling in perceived gaps in the book (this is particularly true of 'Frenzy' which was basically an attempt to justify having the cover of the book as the cover of the book). For now, I have an idea for a second collection that involves writing several poems that sound like arias (even more so than in this one). We'll see how that actually ends up going. I’m pretty optimistic about it to be honest.

5 - Are public readings part of or counter to your creative process? Are you the sort of writer who enjoys doing readings?
Not really? I read some of my poems to my friends sometimes when I was tipsy at parties or cuddling on a bed with them or whatever—all those things ended up being strangely helpful because I trust(ed) them. Also, reading poems out loud in writing workshops is also a little helpful because you get a sense of when the music is actually doing what you wanted it to do (or something worse, or something better). But mostly I read out loud to myself. I read out loud to myself a lot while writing the first book, and often did so when I wasn't feeling very happy in the vain (very vain) hope that the poems would somehow inevitably make me feel better. Which sometimes worked. Sometimes. Those were lucky moments that made me believe in the poems a lot more than was likely warranted (but I wouldn't have it any other way, really).

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 really need to get over Sylvia Plath but I have absolutely no intention of doing that anytime soon.

(I worry, like everyone else, that I'm not good enough. I mean, there shouldn't be a 'good enough' aspect of writing poetry in terms of the desire to write poetry. But I care a lot about writing something that outlives me. Not even for the sake of being remembered or whatever (that's what love and family and friendship is for). Mostly, I care about having poems outlive me because I think poems are beautiful and I want to be good enough to honor that beauty (also a little insipid, but, in this case: why not be? It's a maudlin, flowery, sentimental and astonishing art.))

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?
I have no idea, sorry. I want to believe that poetry matters more than, I don't know, economics. It feels like that to me. But I don't have a good, universal theory regarding the importance of being a writer (tried that—failed horribly, got depressed again). I suppose we could acquiesce to pleasure: the idea that writing, like any other art form, when received or produced invokes pleasure, and that that pleasure is its own justification for writing. I actually don't believe that, and have always modestly resented that argument (yes, yes, pleasure need not be trivial, but the word itself sounds a little trivial, no?).

I guess I want writing and reading to feel more significant than whether or not it invokes strong feelings in me—even if that contradicts the fact that I do this precisely because it invokes strong feelings in me (and, hopefully, others). The best theory I have, at least for poetry, is that it feels like the closest representation of what it's like being a person, of what it's like being a mind in this world that I know and can personally understand (to the extent that poetry can be 'understood'). I think it's important to understand what it's like being a person because we have to live with ourselves and with each other. We can't escape our minds, the feelings within ourselves and others that our minds and other minds provoke. And, since we can't escape that, we should at least pay a great kindness and respect to the fact of our experiences. Poetry is a way of honoring each other, even if that honoring is so absurdly and blatantly materially useless.

8 - Do you find the process of working with an outside editor difficult or essential (or both)?
Please edit my work, please please please. I love it when I submit stuff to journals and editors suggest I cut lines or re-arrange something or fix a poem in any way. shape or form that they desire. For one thing, if I don't like the advice, I can just ignore it and the work typically ends up getting published anyways. But—and here's the cool part—edit suggestions teach you how to read a poem even if you disagree with them. It's really fun seeing where other people's minds receive or reject ways that you wrote the lines of a poem. And it can also teach you how to read the poem, surprisingly, in its own terms, separately from how you thought you knew how to read it as the ‘original’ author. This is because you end up wondering to yourself: Why did I want to 'fix' the poem a certain way? What is the poem trying to do that is making my mind warrant that kind of intervention? Etc, etc.

I struggled a little because I was so used to taking edit suggestions from classmates and poetry professors and so on (I accepted, about, maybe half of whatever I got and revised my poems accordingly) But the editor for the series my book was published in, Susan Stewart, gave me, like, five edit suggestions and said "do what you want ,it's your book" which made me freak out for about two-plus months. I'm honestly not sure that anyone below the age of 30 should be allowed to publish a poem without editorial intervention (I'm obviously being facetious, and 30 is an arbitrary cut-off age…I'm just admitting to my own anxieties given that so many of my favorite poems that I've read recently have been written in a kind of "late" style that you basically only acquire after having been doing this for decades. I don't think it's me being too self-effacing to say that I trust that kind of learned beauty more than whatever it is that I end up cooking because I felt sad in college. Though, obvious counter-example: Rimbaud).

9 - What is the best piece of advice you've heard (not necessarily given to you directly)?
Don't laugh, but, genuinely, every time Naruto said "Believe it!", both in the manga and anime, he kept me going even up to my early twenties. I say this completely unironically. Perfect anxiety antidote.

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 don't have a writing routine. Right now, a typical day begins with an alarm ringing "Wake-up!" and my body saying "No".

11 - When your writing gets stalled, where do you turn or return for (for lack of a better word) inspiration?
Music. Always music.

12 - What fragrance reminds you of home?
I don't know. I didn't even know I didn't know. I haven't been home in three years.

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 music.

14 - What other writers or writings are important for your work, or simply your life outside of your work?
Sylvia Plath. Morgan Parker. T.S Eliot. F. Scott Fitzgerald. Robert Hayden. Okot p'Bitek. Chinua Achebe. Ngugi wa Thiong'o. Josh Bell. Jorie Graham. Jay Deshpande. Sharon Olds. Haruki Murakami. Vamika Sinha. Isabel Duarte-Grey. Emma de Lisle. Darius Atefat-Peckham. Noname. Earl Sweatshirt. Childish Gambino. Kanye West. Adrianne Lenker. Robin Pecknold. Haolun Xu. Others more. Others more to come.

15 - What would you like to do that you haven't yet done?
A good long poem.

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 wanted to be a theoretical physicist, but I failed at that. For the past year-and-a-half, I had been working as an investment researcher, which I wasn’t super good at either (I’ve recently resigned). I kind of wanted to try being a clinical psychologist at some point—but maybe later in my life? I was good at teaching, I could maybe try that again. Actually, no: I'd sing. If I could sing, I'd sing. Like in the Dorothea Lasky poem, 'Me and the Otters':

There is no poem that will bring back the dead
There is no poem that I could ever say that will
Arise the dead in their slumber, their faces gone
There is no poem or song I could sing to you
That would make me seem more beautiful
If there were such songs I would sing them
O they would hear me singing from here until dawn

17 - What made you write, as opposed to doing something else?
At first, it was because I wanted to be smart. Then it was because I didn't really have much else going on (of course I did, we always do. People love us. We love them back.)

18 - What was the last great book you read? What was the last great film?
The Way of the Earth by Matthew Shenoda (still reading). Aftersun, directed by Charlotte Wells.

19 - What are you currently working on?
There's people I need to talk to. 

12 or 20 (second series) questions;

Tawanda Mulalu, Please make me pretty, I don’t want to die: Poems

 

AFTER HISTORY

Has anyone managed to make a world.
after race we turn to genetics, return
after to the archives for new history. Who
then determines when we’re from. Roots,
we learn to speak of them. The baobabs do
not speak of themselves. We hear wind flee
through their leaves. We see our minds feast
through bark as ants warring with termites.
Has anyone managed to make themselves.
We wonder our excitement when we see
only our wide teeth speak, only our large lips,
anything so small as proof that we could not
hold one another. We do maybe. We did not.

I was startled by the poems in New York City-based poet Tawanda Mulalu’s full-length debut, his Please make me pretty, I don’t want to die: Poems (Princeton University Press, 2022). There is such a smart and vibrant energy and confidence to this collection, composed through a thick, complicated series of wisdoms, descriptions and lyric offerings. “So,” he writes, as part of the poem “STILL LIFE,” “I’m part of this thing where fish learned to walk. / Your first baby pictures look like seahorses. / We stop now to consider our lungs. / Look at all that we have made / and behold it is very good.” Referencing his debut, then still in-progress, as part of a short write-up on the Tin House website, he offers that:

The poems within it seem (to me) to be about the failure of intimacy and frequently ask what it means to be (or not be) seen by others and by oneself. They are written from, for and against: America, blackness, Sylvia Plath, prettiness, song, poetry, and mind.

In many ways, Mulalu offers his collection as one structured two-fold: an engagement with form, and an articulation and examination of placement and positioning, each thread an essential way through which an engagement with the other is achieved. Mulalu writes through the form of the elegy and the sonnet, for example, offering a lyric as much music as it might be a kind of dream; as much sadness and grief as he includes a kind of dreamy optimism. Across a wide scope of attention, Mulalu writes of the difficulty of families, traditional poetic forms and ecological concerns; he writes of racism and America; he writes of difference and division, citing aggressions and encounters that exhaust, but offered in a way that enlightens as much as documents. As he writes to close the poem “SECOND SONNET”: “There is too much potential in this dying / planet not to believe you are at the end of this. yes even I / hear you long enough to hear another person: and think she / was as clever as you said you were at the start of this: who / is not the point. I meant this Earth.” One can’t help but admire the seemingly straight lines, lyric ease and accumulations of Mulalu’s poems, composing lines that bend in the light, or perhaps even with gravity, given their incredible density and strength. These are highly structured poems that read with such a lightness of line that one might get lost. There’s so much happening in these poems, so much spoken and hinted, such as the poem “MY SISTER LIKES GIRLS AND DOES NOT / RETURN FOR MY MOTHER’S FIFTIETH,” a poem that begins: “Months after I hadn’t had my first oyster / before I came to America. My sister in Canada now // where it starts snowing soon. Things I haven’t seen / keep cropping up. Movies are colonialism // and I’m such a dutiful director, swerving cameras / around oceans I hadn’t had before.” Mulalu’s poems point to song, but a song that carries the enormous weight and heft of love and loss and being, articulating clever turns of narrative and turns of phrase, showcasing some of the best the lyric form might offer across a canvas as wide as it is precise. “My open window / a synecdoche of country.” he writes, as part of the poem “MISCEGENATION ELEGY,” “No matter how much smoke a pig / roasts won’t erupt into song.”