The Rorschach Blot

KARAN 

Anthony, “Sparse” is hilarious and devastating. “Remember when muses were / decent enough to sear a singular image / in the mind?” You’re rewriting Petrarch for the algorithmic age, where the muse is “peddling Dr. Squatch bodywash / as Sydney Sweeney the next chopping / cilantro seductively for 64k samba-loving / followers.” That’s so good. How do you write about desire when attention itself has fragmented? What made you want to update Petrarch? 

ANTHONY 

Recently, I was rewatching a favorite movie of mine, Her. It takes place in a near future, and it’s about this lonely, recently divorced guy, Theodore, who falls in love with an AI chatbot named Samantha. Theodore can use his phone and his laptop to carry Samantha around with him, but her presence is only partial, as this disembodied voice he can listen to on his headphones or read in text. It occurred to me that Samantha wasn’t actually too different from Petrarch’s Laura or Sidney’s Stella; she was this intangible and fragmented form that Theodore could shape into his ideal lover. And so that’s something I’ve been writing a lot about recently, how the digital world serves us a repackaged version of the Petrarchan muse—it presents us with these half-present forms that can be whatever we want them to be at all times. That’s also why I make mention of the “Blazon,” which is this Renaissance poetic form that catalogues the lover’s physical features, describing her eyes like emeralds or her hair like wheatfields at dawn, or whatever. The love becomes this cascade of images in her lover’s imagination that no real person could ever live up to. My fragmented form hints at this, but also the highly mediated way we’re presented with what’s “desirable” in a digital space.

My poem takes its title from Petrarch’s Rime Sparse, which is a collection of 366 poems, mostly consisting of sonnets, that were written for his lover Laura. This title is often translated into “Scattered Rhymes,” getting at the complicated and overwhelmed emotional state he’s in. While I hint at something similar, I think it’s also important to think about “sparse” as being “meager” or “scant.” While the digital world might present itself as this really full place that’s bustling with images and affect, it often feels quite lacking in anything substantial. Like Petrarch’s “Sonnet 35,” one might find oneself there “Alone and thoughtful, [moving through] the most desolate fields.” Then again, it’s a very absurd space, and I wanted to capture that too. I figured, why not throw in a “sexy nurse costume” and a “4chan Roman forum.” 

KARAN 

I love your relationship to pop culture—Honey Boo Boo, Labubu, Tamagotchi, Furby, Sydney Sweeney. In “Ode to Labubu” you write, “Timeliness is not / my forte. I spent a full decade / wanting a Razor scooter and / kicking rocks.” You seem to be negotiating between the ephemeral and the eternal. How does pop culture enter your poems? What role does kitsch or nostalgia play in your work? 

ANTHONY 

I’m a big fan of the New York school poets—folks like John Ashbery, Frank O’Hara, Kenneth Koch. One thing that they do so well in their poetry is mix high and low culture. For instance, in O’Hara’s poignant elegy “A Step Away from Them,” you get these fleeting everyday images of a “Coca-Cola,” “hum-colored cabs,” “a cheeseburger,” that clash with his somber subject and the respected artists he references like Jackson Pollock and Pierre Reverdy.  John Ashbery has an entire sestina, a super challenging traditional form, that is all about Popeye. I think it’s so fun and exciting when writers can take the ordinary, the mundane, or something that seems frivolous and give it some heft. That’s why I was so delighted when I landed on “Tamagotchi” as the final word of that poem. It felt like the inevitable ending in how it ascribed elemental perfection to this very silly fad toy. 

I also think that pop culture is a kind of shortcut for closeness with your reader. If you’ve watched the same movie or played with the same toy as a kid, there’s an intimacy to that. I find that making these references is a great way to connect with your reader in the brief span of the poem. At the same time, you can also be someone other than who you really are in the poem. I’ll admit it, I never wanted a Furby, and I don’t really regret not immortalizing Here Comes Honey Boo Boo, but the poem needed me to do a little cosplay. 

KARAN 

“Femme Fatale Ode” addresses the noir archetype directly. “Why must you pay for the flaccid schemes / of has-beens and statesmen, shady casting / agents who would box you like a stock character / in a warehouse?” You’re defending her while also reveling in the tropes. How do you think about gender performance in your work? Is the femme fatale redeemable, or is redemption beside the point? 

ANTHONY 

One way I think about gendered performance is through the framework of Laura Mulvey’s Gaze Theory, which she articulates in an essay called “Visual Pleasure in Narrative Cinema.” What resonates with me from that piece is her contention that, in film, traditionally, men often have the position of being the looker or the maker of the image, while women are often looked at and have a more passive role. In this way, women are objectified and subject to male control. To me, it’s important not to engage in that dynamic, and so, in some poems, I try to identify where it’s happening and think about what the implications of these representations are. 
 

That poem, in particular, reflects on mobility and the age-old notion that women who aren’t tethered to a home and husband will experience some sort of moral decay. I wanted to craft a poem that celebrated ambitious women who play it fast and loose, which is why it has a lot of quick movement and different settings. I also used heavy enjambment, letting sentences run past the end of the line so that they could continue to build momentum.  

KARAN 

“He Called Her a Melon, a Pineapple, an Olive Tree” catalogs all the ways men try to pin women down through metaphor. The poem is after Virginia Woolf’s Orlando, and it accumulates these absurd comparisons until language itself breaks down. “He tried / his hardest to put her into words while they scurried / to the corners of pages.” What draws you to the catalog form? When does a list become a poem? 

ANTHONY 

I guess the thing I like most about catalogues is the tension you get between form and content. When your listing things, the poem is limited in a sense. You have a clear form that you're bound to, and, in the case of that poem, a repetitive syntactical structure that keeps bringing you back to the phrase: “He called her....” Since the poem’s framing is so clear, it frees you to make some bounding leaps and associations that might not work otherwise. The reader knows the poem’s premise, so now you can jump from a “pincushion” to a “cast-iron skillet” without so much as blinking an eye. You’ll also notice that I did break my own rule about a few sentences in so that the poem could move in and out of its list format. It’s not just a poem about man’s failure to pin down women, but also it’s about listening to what women themselves want.

I should note, too, that the title of that poem was taken directly from a line in Orlando. It’s a book that’s all about gender and performance as its main character, somewhat magically, transitions from male to female about halfway through the narrative. When I read that short list, it was so evocative and suggestive of the difficulty in trying to put someone into words. I think this actually works really well as a prompt. Take a list in a book you love and just keep it going. See if it suggests a story, argument, or idea that you find compelling. 

KARAN 

“Rashomon” moves through perspectives—woodcutter, commoner, priest. “It’s a matter / of perspective, the wife / takes up a knife after years of carrying bruises / under camisoles and turtlenecks.” The poem connects Kurosawa to a deli visit, high art to Fritos. You ask, “who will drive the stake / through my heart today?” How do you think about truth in your poems, especially in relation to the imaginative? 

ANTHONY 

I don’t know if I’m as concerned with arriving at truth as I am with getting at something that feels true or genuine. A lot of the time, this means inhabiting (or, more often, trying to inhabit) a rhythm or a voice that’s undeniable, that is so self-assured that it is beyond any consideration of truth. I think Keats has it right when he suggests we should venture into uncertain terrain without any “irritable reaching after fact and reason.” Not that the truth is unimportant, but if you write freely and inquisitively, I think the truth will work itself out.  

KARAN 

The final poem is a masterclass in self-awareness. “There he goes again (the poet), / making the elegy all about himself.” The parentheticals multiply, creating this hall of mirrors where the speaker and the deceased and the dirt all blur together. “I don’t envy him (anyone).” I really like that ending. Talk to us about the meta nature of that poem? 

ANTHONY 

That was such a weird poem in terms of its composition. Usually, I go through this laborious process when I’m writing. I collect words, ideas, and lines in my notebook and phone notes for days or weeks before I even write a single line. In the case of that poem, I jotted it down in my phone notes without any preparation or conception of what it might be. After getting the title down and the first few lines, I realized that the blurring you mention was already happening. Like many poets, the one being referred to is described as commandeering the life of the deceased, but also, we know that a poet is presumably writing the poem, so there is this second level of uncertainty because the poet could be self-referencing their own commandeering. From there, I thought it would be funny to keep returning to those parentheses and seeing how they could complicate or undermine the subjects that preceded them. 

The poem gets indulgently self-deprecating at the end, but I do think (or hope) it saves itself with that final parenthetical “everyone.” It’s just one word, but it turns self-pity into this broad societal pity that might accidentally create a sense of comfort, like, “we’re all in this shitshow together.” Also, I should just say that when I wrote about that mixture of “self-doubt and ego,” I had the comedian Larry David in mind. He’s got this brand of humor in Curb Your Enthusiasm and Seinfeld, where he’s hypercritical of everyone and everything, especially himself.   

KARAN 

You work in multiple modes—odes, elegies, ekphrasis, after poems. “Sparse” is after Petrarch, “He Called Her” is after Woolf, “Rashomon” is after Kurosawa. What draws you to working in conversation with other texts? How do you decide when to signal that conversation explicitly versus letting it operate beneath the surface? 

ANTHONY 

Getting started, for me, is so much easier when I have another text or artist in mind. Rather than having to look inside myself, which sounds horrible and scary, I like to look outward and just cross my fingers that, like a Rorschach blot, whatever I’m describing is revealing something personal or connected to my unconscious preoccupations (which it usually is). 

I’m also really interested in the art of adaptation. The critical theorist Walter Benjamin said that “The art of storytelling is retelling,” and I wholeheartedly agree with him. We like the familiar, but we also like to change things up and find new ways to riff off the old. So many of my favorite movies and books are adaptations of other materials. Also, there’s this productive uncertainty when you are trying to translate something from one genre to another. For instance, I write a lot of poems that respond to film, and I’m always thinking about how I can bring the unique qualities of film into a poetic space. Can a line break function as a scene change? Can I give a sense of a high-angle or low-angle shot through my description? Elizabeth Bishop has this wonderful poem called “Night City” about riding on a plane that unfolds in a beautifully cinematic way. It starts from what is akin to the vantage of a giant looking down at a cityscape: “No foot could endure it, / shoes are too thin. / Broken glass, broken bottles, / heaps of them burn.” To me, these lines feel like they could be transforming a vertiginous film shot into poetry, making a fear of heights into an anticipation of pain.   

KARAN 

This is a question we ask all our poets, because the answers are always so 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? 

ANTHONY 

I’d place my poetry right at the intersection of the body and the mind. My debut collection, Splice, which came out with Trio House Press last summer, is, in part, about my experience having a neurological condition called Chiari Malformation. This is caused by having a misshapen skull that squeezes the back of the cerebellum (the back of the brain), causing headaches, brain fog, dizziness, and a laundry list of other possible symptoms. In Splice, I meditate often on the interplay between body and mind, how bodily discomfort can stoke anxiety and depression or how fantasy can momentarily make you less aware of your body. I have this one poem called “Resonance Imaging” that is about my frequent trips to the MRI machine. I’m not a big fan of closed spaces, and so 45-minutes inside this knocking, clanging tube is not something I look forward to. However, the poem is all about the places my mind goes while inside it. One way I distract myself from the experience is, like a true Jeopardy-obsessed nerd, by listing world capitals. And so, the poem begins with me listing those capitals, but as it proceeds, the sounds of the MRI imaginatively transport me to them so that I’m in Algiers’ Casbah quarter and pumping my fists at a “techno-rave in Copenhagen.”  

KARAN 

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

ANTHONY 

Sure! Like I said, I’m really into movie-inspired poems, so here’s a prompt for producing them that your readers might want to try: Think of a director who is an auteur (French trans. author), meaning one who has a strong personal style i.e. Hitchcock, Wes Anderson, Kubrick, Gerwig. Watch several of this director's movies to get a sense of their common subjects, moods, hues, etc. Incorporate these narratives, images, and styles into a poem of your own. If you’re feeling really ambitious, you can even write a triptych poem where you reimagine the same poetic scene or meditation through the lens of three different directors.  

KARAN 

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

ANTHONY 

I just watched this Norwegian Cinderella adaptation called The Ugly Stepsister that was really wild! It marries the quite violent Brothers Grimm version of the folk tale with the tropes of body horror in an incredible way. Don’t watch it if you have a weak stomach, though. 

Also, this might be using the term art loosely, but the reality/game show The Traitors has been sustaining for me. You have these celebrities in a Scottish castle who are trying to figure out who among them are the murderous traitors. And, the cherry on top is that it’s hosted by the amazing Alan Cumming whose beautifully rolled R’s I could listen to all day.  

KARAN 

And finally, Anthony, 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? Who taught you that poems could be this smart and this funny at once? 

ANTHONY 

So many people! With older poets, as I mentioned before, I’ve been thinking a lot about Petrarch and Phillip Sidney. Sidney, especially, because he is genuinely funny and has this ironic anxiety of influence where he wants to say something profound and original, but is constantly alluding to other poets. At times he seems overwhelmed by writers in the past, like in “Astrophil and Stella 1”, where reading other’s books has given him a “sunburn’d brain.” And yet, he manages to work through this and bring his muse to the page, even if it’s just so she can yell at him to  “look in thy heart, and write.” You know, his self-deprecating language might actually be a little bit like Larry David’s comedy. 

In terms of current writers, some folks I greatly admire, in no particular order, are Marcus Wicker, Natalie Shapero, Joshua Beckman, Ron Padgett, Ross Gay, Paisley Rekdal, and Jennifer Espinoza. Also, Katie Berta is amazing. Her most recent poems are so witty and profound and sonically textured. And Cate Marvin, who was my first poetry teacher and really illustrated for me the power of tonal juxtaposition and humor within a poem. 

It is so important to keep pushing yourself to learn and find spaces where you can be a student. I wasn’t sure exactly what that would look like after finishing my PhD, but one way I’ve been able to continue my poetic education is by interviewing poets for a website called Divedapper, an archive of poetry interviews that was the brainchild of brilliant poet and novelist Kaveh Akbar. If you’d like to see me fawn over more of my favorite poets and talk with them about craft and inspiration, you should check it out! Our most recent interview is with National Book Award-winner Lena Khalaf Tuffaha, an amazing poet whose collection Something About Living is achingly lyrical and morally resolute. Speaking with her was such a treat and a great reminder of poetry’s power.