we all have armadillo days.

[note: riles is a bad interviewer and forgot to ask aishwarya to introduce herself. #priorities. but i will do it for her. aishwarya is a poet, a friend, and basically the best human.]

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alright so, if you could be a toucan or an armadillo, which would you be?

i don’t know what i said the first time, but i’m gonna go with armadillo.

what? i’m pretty sure you said toucan the first time, why are you feeling so armadillo?

i don’t know, that’s just what i’m feeling today.

aight, that’s fine, you can have armor today. okay, well now we’ve got that out of the way... when did you start writing poetry?

seriously? maybe four years ago. but just writing poetry in general.. maybe since i was 11 because this sad boi had too many emotions as a barely teen, and i just needed to make sense of whatever the hell was going on in my head.

why at that time was poetry your outlet instead of something else?

i think it was mostly because it was the least disruptive. i could be doing my own thing in one corner of the house, and nobody would pay any attention to me, because i’m not causing a disruption, there’s no noise. so it just made the most sense to do that.

who’s the first poet that you felt inspired by?

i think the first poet i was introduced to was mirza ghalib when i was seven by my mom because she really liked him. and i didn’t know what the deal was, but he called himself a nutcase, and that was a huge mood at that time. i’ve always had an affinity for people who are like “you know what? no, i am crazy, and i’m proud of it,” and that’s something that i definitely related to, even as a seven year old. even though i didn’t understand what he was talking about because i was too young to understand the vast life that he had lived.

and then there was neruda. and there was anne sexton, virginia woolf, sylvia plath. just a bunch of amazing people who spoke of how life worked for them and didn’t work for them (big mood) and it was like “hey, you know what, i’m not alone. there are all of these people who have been through these things, it’s okay.”

so you started writing when you were eleven and you said you’ve been writing more seriously the last four years or so. what inspired you to start taking it more seriously? and when you say take it more seriously, is that when you started sharing your writing? or?

yeah, i guess that’s when i started sharing. i don’t know what inspired me to start sharing my writing, actually. like even now there are times where i’m just like “this is dumb, i don’t think anyone wants to read this” because that’s just how brains work.

my poetry works in a way where i have one line that just runs through my head for hours at an end. and it started off where i would just post “hey, this is a thing that’s going on in my head” and people would be like “oh this is cool we want more of this”

where were you posting at the time?

i think tumblr

cool.

and it just kind of went from there. i don’t actually remember how it happened, it just happened.

and you’ve published a book before?

mhmm.

wanna talk about that?

no.

okay, that’s fine. we can leave that in the past. so, we talked about some of your first poetic loves and people you’ve read along the way; who are some of your poetic inspirations right now? (besides kaveh akbar.)

yeah, shout out to kaveh akbar for just existing. it’s amazing that you exist. (all praise kaveh akbar. but not in a weird way.) but so, i’m inspired by anyone and everyone i meet. and i’m lucky to have so many artists to call my friends. definitely riles, they inspire me in ways they don’t know. nicole sealy, rachel mckibbins, paige lewis, fatimah asghar, just all these amazing people. (shout out to all y’all. please be our best friends.) but not in a weird way. (no definitely not in a weird way.) also i just think that it’s amazing that fatimah does what she does.. it’s nice to have someone like her existing. even though i don’t share her story, it’s so important to see that representation existing.

so getting to your writing process.. do you have a specific process? do you have certain things you like to do, a certain time of day? talk to me about how you make your poems get from your brain into the world.

no, it’s definitely just like me as a person. very unpredictable. but lately i’ve been waking up from my sleep because i’m remembering things or seeing things that i want in print, so i wake up at 3am, put it down in my notes, and then go back to it when i’m more awake. like, do i have something here, is this something i want to get into.

okay.. so, you had a lot of good questions for me about the current state of poetry. what are your feelings on what one needs to have to be a poet. are only people who feel a certain way able to be poets? do people have to have read a certain number of other poets? is there some sort of bar for entry, and if so, what is it?

you definitely have to have read things. it doesn’t necessarily have to be poetry, but you have to have read things to get into writing. but otherwise, no. not like, you have to be sad, or you have to be happy. i think those kind of rules are dumb. poetry is constantly evolving. social media is a thing. i don’t know if i would say that “insta poetry” is not poetry because at the end of the day it’s people expressing how they feel and what they are feeling and just being human, doing their best at being human.

would you say “insta poetry” a different genre of poetry, or how would you characterize it as different?

yes, i would definitely say it’s a different genre, but i wouldn’t say it’s not poetry. did that answer the question? what was the question?

sure. it doesn’t matter. the questions are really just to facilitate you talking about yourself and your thoughts, so who cares if it answered the question. what are questions really? (that wasn’t a question.) but here’s one. so. you do share you poetry on instagram now. do you plan on continuing to do that? do you see yourself moving toward publishing poetry in a different way? or do you have thoughts on what your future might look like as a poet?

uhhh, not really.

no thoughts, or no plan to publish elsewhere?

both? that’s the thing about thinking about the future. you don’t know what’s going to happen, so planning for it in any way is pointless, because most likely it’s not going to work out the way you want it to work out.

big mood. so. what inspires you to write?

oh, everything. the way i feel things is very intense, so it’s very easy for me to be inspired. i’m inspired by my sadness, i’m inspired by my happiness, other people’s happiness, by my friends, by dogs, by cats. (butts? are you inspired by butts?) sure. (she rolled her eyes at me.) personally i believe inspiration is everywhere if you just care to look.

word. so, what do you think characterizes a “bad” writer or “bad” art, if you think there is such a thing.

hmm. one of the things about being an artist is that you know what it feels like when someone says your poem is shitty or your art is shitty, and you don’t want to do that to another artist. so i don’t think i’m qualified enough to say “this art is shitty.” i just think there’s art that i don’t understand, and that’s okay, because that art makes sense to someone else.

do you think anyone is qualified to do that? do you think there is someone who is like, the person qualified to say “that’s bad”?

no. because we’re different people who feel things and understand things differently, so something that’s nice to me might not be nice to you. something that’s shitty to me might not be shitty to you.

what advice would you give to someone else just starting out writing poetry?

find your voice. don’t try to emulate someone else. i mean, you probably will because you’re inspired by someone, and that’s okay. be inspired by them, but don’t try to be them. and be patient. there’s a lot of media to consume, and it’s human to think people don’t care about your art. and that’s not the case, but there’s a lot of media in the world and people will get to you. you just have to be patient.

what are you reading right now?

women of resistance. (who gave that to you?) you did. also there’s a poem by kaveh akbar in there (what up kaveh, didn’t actually know your poem was in there when i bought that book, but i was pretty stoked to see it. had to give it to aishwarya.) shout out to kaveh akbar, thank you for existing. i’m also reading touching the void. it’s not a light subject, so i won’t get into it.

what do you think there is to be gained from reading poetry? why should people read poetry?

i think the movie dead poets society said this way better than i ever will. “we don't read and write poetry because it's cute. we read and write poetry because we are members of the human race. and the human race is filled with passion. and medicine, law, business, engineering, these are noble pursuits and necessary to sustain life. but poetry, beauty, romance, love, these are what we stay alive for."

so yeah, that says it way better than i could.

oof. yeah. love dead poets society. so.. do you think poets feel differently than other people?

i wouldn’t say they feel differently than other people. i would say they have the tools to express those feelings.

do you think anyone can learn those tools? or do you think it’s something innate to being born a way or raised a way or something?

no, i think anyone can do it if they try.

so what are your goals for whispers from home? what do you see this as? what do you want this to be?

i don’t know. when i thought of this it was something. i wanted it to be the vlogbrothers but in print form and related to poetry. but i don’t like to plan for the future. (good thing we’re both like that.) not in a “i have no goals” way, but in a “i don’t want to pay so much attention to this thing” kinda way. six months from now we could be like “this was a dumb idea we can’t keep up.” (and that’s fine, or six months from now we’re touring the world like rock stars. but poet rock stars.) right, exactly.

(shout out to kaveh akbar.)

oh as we’re doing this interview, divedapper has it’s festival in indianapolis.

why aren’t we there?

i don’t know, because we’re stuck in seattle.

we’re not stuck in seattle! we’re not stuck anywhere. except your own mind.

oh god.

okay. okay. so this first thing is an interview. what do you think your next article will be? (i’m just trying to cheat. i need to know what you’re going to do, so i know what to do.)

i have some things in mind.

c’mon let me see your answers for this test. is number 17 c?

no, it’s actually false.

fuck. i’m gonna get an F.

is there anything else in particular you want to share with the millions of people who are going to be reading this interview?

that kaveh akbar is amazing and i’m so glad he exists. (shout out to kaveh akbar, we love you). also danez smith, paige lewis, fatimah asghar, hanif abdurraqib. so many people. it’s amazing to exist at the same time as these people. also i really love riles. (grumble noises). and connor. and i love my mom.

you can (and should) follow aishwarya’s poetry on instagram and facebook. prints of all her work are available on request. she’s also an amazing photographer you can book for events. check out her portfolio.

The introduction to end all introductions.

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Who are you?
Ha! I love that we’re starting off with an existential crisis. I’m riles. Your local non-binary queer street poet and art vandal.

Poetry! How did you end up in this space?
I wrote fiction when I was really little, like full novels at the age of 8. Most of them were about being able to climb through your closet into a different world. Fun fact, my stepmom is an English major so we always had a ton of books on the shelves and that’s what I read. Or, I’d go to the library and find an author and read all of their stuff. I went through a John Grisham phase when I was 10 where I consumed a lot of his media and decided I want to be a lawyer. Then I had a Tom Clancy phase when I was 11. I vividly recall my first foray into poetry in 6th Grade. My teacher, Ken Sarkis, was known to be a hard ass, but he was also amazing, and he made us write moon poems. Basically, he told us to go outside on a full moon night and write a poem. So we did that every month. Coming back to your question, I guess I’ve always been involved with writing in some way or another; but I think I started seriously writing my own poetry around high school.

What’s the first book or the first poem that you made you feel like “yeah, this gets me”?
I don’t think I can recall the exact book or exact poem, but one of the first poets that I fell in love with was Anne Sexton. Live by her is definitely a big one for me because she struggled with suicidal thoughts and did, eventually, kill herself but in that poem she chooses life.

Have you ever had to deal with reader’s block?
No. I have had periods where I have read less, but I wouldn’t call that reader’s block because it wasn’t a result of the lack of desire to do so.

You said your first poet/lover was Anne Sexton, and since you are familiar with her work you would understand why people associate her work with intensity. Would you say someone cannot be a poet if they don’t feel things that intensely, or that think things that deeply?
Initially, sure, I probably agree with that but I am absolutely wary of making statements like “if you cannot be a poet if…”. I think characterizing anything as you can’t do this because you’re not a part of the feeling things club I’m a part of sounds gatekeepey and I’m not into it. I think that human feeling and depth of emotion are things that are incredibly subjective and while we can have conversations about how it can feel like no one feels things the way I do or no one is affected by things the way I am, at the end of the day only I know how I feel, and you know how you feel, and they know how they feel. And it’s just shitty to be like “oh, someone doesn’t feel as deeply as I do so I guess they’re not that deserving”. I connect with poetry in a way that someone else probably connects with running. I don’t think that means anything except the fact that we all feel things and experience life differently.

Yeah, I hear you. Because, you know, there’s always people giving other people shit for being unconventional. Every now and then you’ll hear someone putting someone else down for not being “legit” enough, or focusing too much on being accessible on social media. What do you say to that?
I think this same argument can be made against slam poetry, or spoken word, or if we want to go all the way back— all poetry was spoken and it was in long form. But no one’s writing the Odyssey today. It’s evolution of a medium, and there’s always going to be kickback against evolutions of mediums. Just like there will always be people who do stupid things. There are totally people on Instagram that are sharing things that I think are cliché or just total nonsense or are just playing off the fact that it is a social medium that has of a lot of people who are not really invested in poetry but want those feel-good slogans anyway. If that’s your thing, fine. Do I think an argument can be made that we shouldn’t call that poetry? Sure. Do I think that someone sharing their poetry on social media makes them a lesser poet? Absolutely not. That’s stupid. Mediums change. People change. Art changes. Society changes. How we share things and interact with them also changes. To paint the entire thing with the same brush is small minded.

Again, going back to feeling things and doing something with those feelings, what do you have to say to people who don’t really pay much heed to that but instead give the public what they want?
We can sit down and write a poem about the same experience, but it will be from the lens that we view life through. Like mine will be shaped by my life experiences on the whole, and yours will be shaped by your life experiences on the whole. That’s what makes art from different artists really important. I really like it when people say “the world needs to hear what you have to say” and so it’s important to be saying what you have to say as opposed to what you think others want you to say. When you do that, it comes from a place that is not really you, and people will eventually figure that out.

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When I’m reading a book, I don’t necessarily see potential poems. Since your form of poetry is, again, more unconventional… how did you get started with that?
I’m definitely not the first person to do it, and I have enough faith to know I won’t be the last. It’s something that sometimes comes up a lot in writers’ workshops as a way to cure writer’s block. “Take your favorite poem, cut it up, rearrange it to make a new one.” Which I did, by the way, back in college. And then didn’t do it again for 10 years until I started doing it again last year. I do also write poems, with a pen, which is a totally different style but something I really like about taking other words and rearranging them is how it brings together these different authors or sentences to form one idea. It’s fun. I like the aesthetic of it. It gets me out of my head when I’m having writer’s block with pen and paper poetry, because I can cut up sentences or words and rearrange them like puzzle pieces and then something comes together and sticks. I also like that I have to work with what I have, instead of all the sentences and words to exist in all of human language. It’s a weird sort of formal poetry and I dig that.

What poets did you dislike at first but then grew into? Or even just authors that you couldn’t vibe with at first...
Hmmm, I liked Fitzgerald from the get-go. I won’t lie, I love flowery language. I love poetic prose. I love Tom Robbins who will spend an entire page talking about a cigarette pack. I didn’t really like Hemingway when I first read him. I guess I didn’t really like how he narrowed it down to a sentence or two. Or how his mantra seemed to be to use as few words as possible. I remember reading The Old Man and the Sea for school and absolutely hating it, even though I loved reading just in general. Then I remember going back to his work in college and appreciating his brevity. I still love flowery language, but I am also down with Hemingway now.

Who do you think is an underappreciated poet?
You, but also this feels like a hard question to answer because there are so many poets in the world and I don’t really know how appreciated they all are. I love Richard Siken, and I don’t think he’s very well known, but he did win an award a while ago for his book Crush. I don’t know what’s happened to him since then. I do also think Kaveh Akbar, Danez Smith, Hanif Abdurraqib, Fatimah Asghar, Nicole Sealey are not appreciated enough.

What’s a poem you find yourself going back to no matter how you’re feeling?
I have a few, and I know you asked for one, but you’re not getting just one. First one’s not a poem but I have to mention it because of how much it means to me, it’s Letters to a Young Poet by Rainer Maria Rilke. If you’re a poet, read that book. If you’re an artist of any kind, read that book. If you’re a human, read that book. Second is Boot Theory by Richard Siken, which is one of my favorite poems. It’s very sad and I love it to the point of memorization. I won’t recite it right now, but I love the rhythm and cadence to it. Third is Wild Geese by Mary Oliver which is a fairly well known one, I’m going to plug a lesser known one by her named Going to Walden because they feel the same to me.

Would you say writing is a spiritual practice?
Yes, and I would argue that all making of art is a spiritual practice.

What does your spiritual practice look like?
There have been times in my life where I have not made art at all and it has been because I didn’t make space for it. And because now I do have some amounts of free time to spare, it involves making time. Making time to be alone, and taking that time to really feel what I’m feeling and letting it just be what it is and not lying to myself about what’s happening in my brain’s art space. Also not trying to force the words to be here sooner than ready. I love turning the analytical part of myself off. That’s another one of the things I like about how I do poetry right now. Often what I do is sit down and cut lines for a while, because that gives my monkey brain something to focus on for a while instead of thinking. It is meditative in the way that all I’m thinking of is cutting these lines. It allows me to just be, instead of having me focus on sorting through emotions or things like that. Once I’ve held that space for myself, and had some quiet, I look at what can be through how I’m feeling. It all feels like an uncovering, in a lot of ways.

Do you have specific hours of the day dedicated to your practice?
Yes, when my routine is not being disrupted, morning is the best time for me. When it is in a good place, I have to get to my day job at 9 AM which means I leave my house between 8 or 8:30 AM. I get up at 5:30 or 6 AM, make myself a cup of coffee and then spend the next 2 hours just creating. I really like those early mornings to myself.

When do you find yourself writing the most?
Periods of emotional turmoil definitely see a rise in creativity, but I also think it’s important to not say that “you have to be sad to be an artist”. For us artists, our outlet is our art and when we’re especially upset we especially need that outlet so we just kind of dive head first into it. That is not to say I don’t make art when I’m happy, because I definitely do and that has been a big part of developing it as a practice— remembering to not just use my art as an outlet, but just making it a daily routine.

What is the one thing you would give up to be a better poet, or a better artist?
Need to sleep and eat, because that would increase the amount of time I could spend making art which would be awesome. I don’t think I can give you a more serious response than that because everything I am also makes me the artist I am, so giving up some part of it under the illusion that it will make me better at my art is silly.

If you could do something differently as a child, or a teenager, to become a better poet and artist now, what would you do?
To be very clear I have a philosophical opposition to questions like this because I think that you can’t change things and everything came together to make the person you are today, so it’s kind of silly to muse on what could have been done differently. That said, I choose to not stop writing. But who knows, I probably would have written a bunch of bullshit because I hadn’t gone through like more life. I was also a lot more insecure, and a lot more terrified so I wouldn’t be doing the work I’m doing right now at the age of 22.

Would you recommend other people read poetry? If yes, why?
I think reading is good for everybody, irrespective of the type of reading you are into. I think that one of the things about reading is that it’s like traveling, except that you don’t pay the expense of traveling. And I think poetry in particular is trying to share the emotional experience of being human, and yes, a lot of fiction also does that, but poetry gets to the roots of those emotional bits, which is awesome and I love it. If you read a poem and don’t like it, fine, read another one. You have so many options because there’s so many different poets who write in so many different styles. It’s like seeing a piece of art and not liking it and saying you hate all art. I don’t know, dude, Picasso is so different from like, something I would paint. I’m not even a painter. That’s not a good comparison. I thought of Rembrandt, but I was confused because I’m pretty sure they’re different but I also don’t remember. Like, people reading this can easily Google it but I can’t.

Picasso and Frida Kahlo?
Yeah! Pretty different! She’s dope. Everyone should go look at some Frida Kahlo right now.

Do you believe in the concept of writer’s block?
Yes.

What would you say is a good remedy for it?
It definitely varies from person to person and prescriptivism is dumb. That being said, what works for me is, like I said earlier, doing something art related every day.

What other artists are you friends with, and how did/do they help you be a better artist yourself?
You, obviously, who I met on Instagram because your bio mentioned you liked dad jokes and then we became best friends. We’re a part of this little tight-knit group of poets and that has been nice because I’m regularly reading other people’s work and I get to see how they grow and evolve and how they live out their life experiences. I also have a local friend that I go around and put up visual art with and that has been great because we make plans to hang out and that forces me to make some art and also gets me out of the house.

Is there a book you’re digging right now?
I’m actually reading a few books right now. One is Black Girl Magic which is a collaboration between Mahogany L. Browne and Jess X. Snow which I picked up at this really cool bookstore in Chicago, Don’t Call Us Dead by Danez Smith, Bluets by Maggie Nelson, and Simulacra by Airea D. Matthews.

Where can people find you?
Facebook, Instagram, Street Poets Society and most likely your local street corner (buy my stuff if I’m not there already!).