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.
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!).