A Poem Insists On The Truth Of You

KARAN

Alina, thank you for these brilliant poems. “Evergreen” opens with this wild declaration: “All summer, I resolve to live / forever. There is no better time to fuck / the line, conceive a circle.” First, I like that line-break, for how it makes room for multiplicity of meaning. I love the refusal of hierarchy (“fuck the line”) and the move toward unity (“conceive a circle”), and also how you refuse linear time here, from mortality to eternal return. The poem ends with you remembering “the hour of my birth— / how it felt to be held in my entirety.” Let’s speak about process. Where do your poems come from? Why do you write?

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ALINA

Thank you for spending some time with my work, Karan. It’s truly an honor to be in conversation with you. I think I write poetry because it makes me feel real.  In a poem, I have full permission to be a complex, layered human being, without reason or apology.  Every orphan thought gets a home. Limits disappear. I can move walls, bend the rules of time and space, walk in another’s shoes,  gorge on nuance, say the thing, resurrect the dead. Fuck the line, so to speak.  While the world asks for the facts of you, a poem insists on the truth of you. It grants permission for that truth to be a question, a contradiction, a duality, an ambiguity, a horror. 

As far as where my poems come from, I believe like all art, they arrive from a deeply coded need to participate more fully in the human race. Anything that comes to me in a poem already exists in some iteration within the collective consciousness. I’m just pulling from that, marking it with my scent, and throwing it back in. It’s a form of communion, but perhaps also a kind of safekeeping. The body reaches for immortality by passing down its genetic material. The mind must do the same with the contents of consciousness, and it does so through the creative process. With all the ways our species continually threatens itself with extinction, art feels more and more like a biological imperative to save what will be lost, to survive beyond ourselves. 

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KARAN

“Visitors” is devastating. “I didn’t visit enough / in your final years but when I visit / your grave now, you’re not there.” The children dig up the butterfly expecting transformation, finding only absence. You tell them “the dead don’t like to stay / dead. It never ceases to baffle the living.” In a sense all poetry is about loss and absence — of childhood, innocence, love, loved ones, beauty, health, material possessions, etc. What draws you to write about absence as a form of presence?

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ALINA

What a heartbreak of a concept, isn’t it?  That absence is a form of presence. I’d  go further and say it’s the most distinct form of presence there is. One of my favorite poems by Mark Strand, “Keeping Things Whole,” tackles this concept  so beautifully. The idea that everything we are and have is always defined by negative space. How the presence of the life you live is simultaneously the absence of every life you are not living. And what is God if not our preoccupation with the search for presence in absence? It’s such a delicious paradox. I love poetry because it operates on this very principle: the missing word, the fractured line, the white space — loss charged with possibility.  

“Visitors” is about the death of my father. He got really sick when I was 19, and I was so hellbent on living my life at the time that I avoided coming face to face with all that darkness. Of course I now live with the requisite guilt and regret, but when I visit his grave, I find it hard to talk to him or cry.  I have the strange sensation that he’s not there. I’m not a particularly spiritual person, but that sense of absence doesn’t leave me feeling empty or desolate. Over the past 20 years, I’ve slowly been filling him back into my life with bits I find elsewhere — in memory, the forest, a sky full of stars, the eyes of my children. 

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KARAN

“Existential as a polka dot begonia” is one of my favorite titles in recent memory. The poem meditates on a plant that survives by being full of holes. “It defies logic, how a thing / intent on surviving / can forego pieces of itself.” That line floors me. Anyhow, let’s talk about titles. How do you title your poems? Do you have a method? I’m hoping you’d write a flash essay as a response, haha.

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ALINA

I have to say I feel pretty cool to have impressed you with that title! And I wish I had enough crafty trickery up my sleeve for a flash essay. I either take titles way too seriously or not seriously enough. It’s often the first line I write down, stemming from some observation or experience I’m having. No matter how the poem unfolds, I get attached and refuse to change it (for better or for worse). Sometimes, I’ve killed a darling in the body of the poem only to recycle it as a title. Ideally, the perfect metaphor presents itself and wraps the whole thing up in a neat bow. But when a poem resists being named, I often go the playful or direct route. I give it a very literal title, something pointed or something humorous. If I’m feeling brave, I’ll be deceptive or mislead, making a promise only to break it later. 

A title is a bid for the reader’s attention. There are many ways to entice someone into spending more time with you and there’s an equivalent for these in the world of titles: a longing gaze, a smile, a joke, direct eye contact, a side glance, a compliment, tucking your hair behind the ear, saying hi, oversharing (huge fan of context titles). There’s no one right way to do it, and a lot depends on who’s looking. 

As a side note, in reference to the line you mentioned, here’s an interesting fact about polka dot begonias: the white patches on their leaves, or the chlorophyll “holes” so to speak, are believed to be an evolutionary adaptation to avoid overexposure to light and prevent leaf burn. The plant is actively deleting pieces of itself so as not to be drowned in light. How freaking poetic is that? The title just wrote itself on that one. 

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KARAN

“How to Pray” reads like instructions for self-annihilation disguised as devotion. “Give up the ghost,” “Hold a body / underwater. Your own,” “Gather wood. Watch it burn.” The imperatives accumulate into something desperate, strange. You ask the reader to “Ask / for the one true thing / you really want.” What is prayer in this poem? What’s the relationship between destruction and devotion?

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ALINA

Wow, this is such a probing, interesting question and it's throwing me for a loop, in a good way. I think this poem is strange partly because, under the guise of being a prayer manual, it actually tackles my own complicated relationship with religion and authority. To me, this is maybe an anti-prayer poem, perhaps even a set of instructions on how to sin, even though ironically, the whole thing reads a bit like a sermon. I’ve always had trouble outsourcing power to an outside force: a parent, a boss, a God, an astrological sign, you name it. The idea that anything or anyone should wield authority over me makes me recoil in a way I don’t fully understand. So when I think about the destructive elements here, I don’t see them as self-annihilation, per se. Each imperative is a kind of reversal of traditional devotion. Instead of relinquishing the self at the mercy of another, the speaker is asking you to consider your own power. What would it look like to dismantle the systems or paradigms that oppress you, including the ones you’ve internalized, like fear, shame, and guilt? What would happen if you let yourself have what you really wanted instead of what was prescribed for you? The poem is playing devil’s advocate and asking you to burn your house of worship down. Perhaps the thing you're praying  for is beneath all that wreckage. 

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KARAN

I love “The weather is nice but the forecast is shitty” for how precisely it captures relationship decay — another great title by the way! “What we don’t say / sits here with us / sipping / lemon-ginger tea.” The elephant in the room is polite, domestic, deadly. You circle around a fight about a water stain, desire leaving, truth as prankster. How do you go about writing love without falling into cliché?

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ALINA

In full transparency, I  almost didn’t send this one in because I was slightly self-conscious about the offhand, casual title. Go figure! It’s true that this poem is about relationship decay. But it’s also about the strange ways people learn to live around that decay, which is what I believe to be the essential work of love. I can really only write about love if I can somehow acknowledge its absurdity. Love, in all its iterations, means entering into an arrangement with the impossible. We willingly throw ourselves at its feet knowing there’s no clean escape: people eventually change, emerge, disappoint, leave, or die. The best love poems, in my opinion, are not really romantic (and they avoid the use of the word “forever”). 

I recently participated in a workshop led by Danusha Lameris, who said that at some point, a poem must “lift its head and look around,” notice the “lion circling the den.” That’s what I think this poem is attempting to do. The best way for me to avoid cliché in a love poem is to somehow confess that this entire enterprise of loving each other is a choice we’re making against the worst odds. In some small or big way, the poem must be willing to concede that the elephant is always in the room with us. 

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KARAN

“A Woman is a Wound” takes its title from Suzanne Richardson (who we love) and refuses to look away. “She opens her sovereign heart / to the machete of the world.” The ending wrecked me—“running toward any joy / that will have her / stumbling upon it / like she didn’t know / it was there / like it wasn’t always / digging its chafed finger / into the gash and asking / to be healed.” What does joy mean here, when it’s inseparable from the wound?

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ALINA

Suzanne’s work is stunning. Shortly after I wrote this, she and I had a brief conversation around the poem from which the title of her collection was derived. Talk about utterly devastating! Ultimately, we were both writing about the different ways a woman exists as a wound in the world, and how often she is asked to see that as a form of joy, even pleasure. Traditionally, women are taught to derive joy from sacrifice. This isn’t always a bad thing. Consider her capacity for empathy, or motherhood. But often, the pleasure to pain ratio is out of balance. 

While there’s no singular narrative for the female experience, the proverbial gash feels universal: a woman opens (her heart, her arms, her mind, her legs) and the machete of the world enters. This does not always involve violence or force. But it almost always involves a request for her to soften around someone else’s hard, unyielding, or demanding edges. It very often involves mending others at the expense of herself. The woman in this poem interprets joy as anything that enters her wound in order to heal itself. It’s hard to explain, but as a woman, I can really relate to the idea of openness as woundedness. 

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KARAN

You work in lyric, relatively short-lined poems with careful enjambment. Several of these poems hinge on a turn or surprise. I’m curious about your relationship to form. How do you know where a line should end?

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ALINA

I tend to be long-winded in prose form. I want to make sure my point is coming across, that I’m being understood, that I’ve covered all my bases (see?). Poetry challenges me to break that habit. I genuinely enjoy chipping away at my lines until they’re showing, not telling. I don’t always succeed. There’s such a delicate balance to being concise without being cryptic and I’m still trying to refine it. As far as knowing when a line should end, I don’t really have a hack. A good line tends to take on a life of its own and declares itself finished when it has gathered some gravity or momentum. Sometimes this happens in short steady bursts, like a pulse. Other times, the line is inhaling, exhaling, or sighing and it may not be done until the very end of the poem. The key is for there to be some kind of sustained movement or tension. And yes,  I love a good turn, that moment when you can tap them on the shoulder or hit them over the head.  I’m drawn to poetry where the logic isn’t linear but you still feel like you’ve followed a path and arrived somewhere at the end. This is the experience I aim for when writing my own.

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KARAN

This is a question we ask all our poets, though the answers are always wildly different: there’s a theory that a poet’s work tends toward one of four major axes—poetry of the body, poetry of the mind, poetry of the heart, or poetry of the soul. Where would you place your work, if at all?

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ALINA

I really want to say I’m a poet of the heart and soul, but alas, I believe my work lives mostly in the intersection of body and mind. I struggle with anxiety and often write from a physical sensation of discomfort in an attempt to name it, purge it or give it a vessel other than my body. Other times, the mind struggles for no goddamn reason and writing is a way to invent a pain for that suffering. Many of my poems also begin with a philosophical question that I then try to anchor in the physical realm. I’d like to believe that the reader’s unique interpretation of my poetry is what gives it the “heart” and ultimately, if it resonates enough,  its “soul.” 

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KARAN

What’s the best piece of writing advice you’ve ever received? Alternatively: what would you tell emerging poets about finding their voice or staying committed to the work?

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ALINA

Timothy Green, the editor of Rattle, recently visited my writing community, Gather (hosted by the lovely Maria Giesbrecht) and said something that struck a deep chord: “Poetry is the only art form in which the reader’s body itself, the reader’s breath, is the medium.” I love this notion that a poem can take possession of another’s body. This brings up an interesting question you can ask yourself: what am I doing in this poem that has the potential to steal the reader’s breath? Make them hold it a little longer, release it a little faster, quicken it, slow it down? 

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KARAN

Would you offer our readers a poetry prompt—something simple, strange, or rigorous—to help them begin a new poem?

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ALINA

Pick a significant event or milestone in your life (a birth, a death, a marriage, a diagnosis,  a career change, a decision, a major life transition). Now rewind 5 days before the event and write a poem from that vantage point. You may want to consider what you knew then, what you wanted, what you ignored, what clues were there all along, or what other life waited for you in the shadows. Give yourself permission to touch the details that have been lost after you came to identify yourself with that event. 

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KARAN

Please recommend a piece of art (a film, a song, a photograph, anything other than a poem) that’s sustained you lately or that you wish everyone could experience.

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ALINA

“Empty” by Ray Lamontagne. I will never skip this song when it comes on shuffle. It’s a  beautiful piece of confessional poetry set to music. 

The photography of René Maltête, a master at capturing humor in everyday life. 

‍Six Feet Under. Hands down the best exploration of the human condition in a TV series and I’m willing to die and be buried on that hill. It has permanently altered my brain chemistry. If you already saw it in your 20’s, I dare you to watch it again in midlife. 

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KARAN

And finally, Alina, since we believe in studying masters’ masters, who are the poets or artists who’ve most shaped your sense of what’s possible in language?

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ALINA

This is by no means an exhaustive list, but I’ve been endlessly inspired by Pablo Neruda, Emily Dickinson, Sylvia Plath, Alexander Pushkin, Mary Oliver, Billy Collins, Ellen Bass, Jane Hirshfield, Lucille Clifton, Marie Howe and Linda Pastan. I’m also forever indebted to the work of Albert Camus, whom I’ll always credit as my first true literary love for blowing my entire life open with the notion that meaning is not a thing we find, but a thing we create.