The Work of Joy

KARAN

July, these poems are fantastic and I’m excited to speak to you about them. In “the desert is metal,” the coyote believes you’re “urgent and champing for crucifixion, / so sinless I heave with it.” You write, “Someone should / get to move through this world / powered by their sheer conviction in it.” What draws you to write about performance, about being misread? How does gender shape the way animals (and men) see you?

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JULY

Hi Karan! Thank you so much. I really love Only Poems, and I'm honored to be in such good company. I love what you all do, and I love the ferocity and thoughtfulness with which you do it. Thanks for existing! 

This is such an interesting question for several reasons. First, apart from my first book, I don't tend to write super autobiographical poems. The last few collections have ventured into the cerebral (Via Negativa) and the eco-grief/speculative (moon moon). This new collection I'm working on, however, is utilizing the eye as a speaker much more heavily than I've ever done before. It is true that many of these poems come from the experience of being a person in the middle of the desert. 

Disclaimer given! I'll speak now to your question directly.

I'm a genderqueer person who uses they/them pronouns and who happens to present in a low femme way. I'm almost invariably read in the world as female. I have a spectrum of feelings about this—a spectrum being a place where feelings live best, of course. I see myself as a person who moves along the gamut of gender feelings, often minute to minute. Externally, my gender rarely matters with strangers, whether they be strange animals or strange men. What matters and what is privileged in that moment is how they see me.

With animals, I've been spending the last three years living in Tucson and observing birds and other wildlife from my rural home. The female birds, of course, are always more muted. They're not as brightly colored, but they tend to do most of the grunt work. A friend of mine said that he once asked his grandfather about why this was. Bird beauty, I mean. His grandfather gave a great answer, which I think about often. He said, “It's because the females are so important.”

Important or not, personally, the way I'm read in the world is often as unimportant, small, vulnerable, unintelligent, and here to serve. This sometimes works greatly in my favor, in part because I figured out how to make it. To answer your question, it isn't so much how gender shapes how animals and men see me, but a certain kind of presentation, a certain kind of being-in-the-world-ness.

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KARAN

“Ode to Stepmoms Stuck in Washing Machines” is wild. You’re collaging first lines from famous novels with a pornography trope. “Can she still / get the flowers herself?” meets “when they executed / her, not by firing squad, but by tedium.” This feels like a critique of narrative, of how women get trapped in stories (literary, pornographic, domestic). Where did this poem come from? What made you want to smash these registers together?

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JULY

Wow, thank you so much first, seeing what I was trying to do here! Kind of doesn't really matter what my intention was, of course, but as I was writing it, I was trying to figure out the right balance of nuance and maximalism. That's hard to do, especially with the famous first lines of famous novels and especially with porn. I think a lot of my work that tends to fall into this vein of gender expression and perception in the world is often situated at the crux of many overlapping feelings and observations. Brutality, of course. Anger, of course. A kind of dark sense of humor about it. This is a wild thing I'm about to say, but I think I believe it philosophically that many of the female characters in these quoted books are in a not dissimilar position to women in "stuck porn." There's an understanding of the construction of being stuck, and even in the case of this being a porn genre, the idea of being stuck is imaginary. Part of the appeal is that a) it's a circumstance outside the woman's control, and b) it is a circumstance inside her control because she's not really stuck. 

Wanting to smash these pieces together is a bit thematic for me now. I think it comes from living in a world where I can’t not be perpetually online, even if I wanted to. There's all this content rattling inside my brain, you know-- a deep well of literary knowledge from being a lifelong lover of books and a literature student, but also internet detritus: earworms, memes, jokes and joke songs from reels, devastatingly clever things filtered through Slack, and yes, porn + the genrefication of porn. These feel like they all live in the same place, they all come from the same place, which is to say, the digital or brain world (rather than the built world). 

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KARAN

The desert appears throughout as both setting and philosophy. In “the desert is metal,” you write, “Would that I was worthy. Would / that the world warranted it.” The landscape feels punishing, testing. You’re from the American Southwest. What does the desert teach that other landscapes can’t? How does place shape consciousness in your work?

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JULY

I’ve always felt deeply informed by place, and maybe we all are, because maybe we can’t help but be. I was born in the desert, then lived out of it for two decades, then moved back to it as an adult when I felt ready to witness it. It can be a punishing place, absolutely. But mostly if you’re either unprepared for it, or if you’re trying to turn it into something it isn’t. Which I guess is a good formula for turning anything into punishment, yeah? 

I do love this question, though, about what the desert teaches us that other landscapes can’t. I think the desert teaches us to be present, which sounds like a flip answer, but isn’t. Daily, when I’m taking my walks in the open desert near my house, I must watch my feet and make sure I’m not encroaching upon rattlesnakes or tarantulas or stepping or earth that looks solid but is loose and destabilizing. Long game, I must watch the landscape in order to learn how to orient myself in this world that is both lunar and oceanic: the flowers on the Texas rangers open when it’s about to rain, the plumpness of the creosote and the saguaro and the prickly pear tell me how green of a Spring I can anticipate, the waxing and waning lushness on the mountain in my front windows gives me insight into if I need to shake my shoes or bedsheets out before I put my body inside them. The desert teaches absolute presence the way a poem teaches absolute presence; it’s about survival, but it’s mostly about the work of joy.  

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KARAN

“the avian aria” chronicles jet lag in Barcelona, that parrot screaming what sounds like opera. You end with your partner dropping their ice cream cone, opening their mouth in recognition. The poem is about dislocation, translation, “soul loss.” You kept saying “mareada” — seasick — instead of jet lag. How do you think about translation in your work? What happens when we don’t have the right words?

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JULY

You just keep going with the bangers! Thanks for this. I’ll try to be succinct and keep discussion to this specific poem, but the truth is that I could talk about translation and poetry for actual ever. 

Translation and poetry (and translation in poetry, translating poetry, etc) both feel like attempts to conduit the experience of something into a different way of experiencing it, or re-experiencing it again and again. In this way, they’re uniquely set up for failure. Like, how can you translate everything about the experience of seeing the sky in the southern hemisphere for the first time? How can you translate a poem in Spanish from a southern region in Chile circa 1954 into English? You can do both things but doing them absolutely isn’t really the point. It’s a disservice to language to think it’s the point. The point is to grapple. The grappling invites the conversation. It says: sit with me. Sit with this. 

Choosing to demonstrate the disorientation of newly landing somewhere through the mismatch of language (‘sea sick’ as ‘jet lag’) was an intentional choice that mimics the way we make linguistic logic (vocabulary, grammar) from something felt and difficult to quantify (jet lag and sea sickness, which are not the same thing, but they both deal with the way your body feels when you are trying to physically orient yourself to a new place). I think even when we don’t have the ‘right’ words, the words we choose are meaningful; they are right for the situation, or they can become so. 

A friend who has known me and my writing for a long time recently said to me: “this new collection you’re working on is so joyful.” And I thought—I’ve been learning a lot about joy in the last six years. How it isn’t about the high-octane, steady thrum of happiness. But it’s about surrender, about what we talked about above, about not trying to turn anything into something it’s not, being prepared for the world to interrupt. My partner will drop everything, including ice cream, for a good gander at a bird (pun intended). It’s simple, but it’s everything. 

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KARAN

I also love your titles, July. They intrigue me deeply: “the desert is metal,” “the avian aria,” “the loneliness empire.” Do you have a method? I’m hoping you’d write a short essay on titles as a response.

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JULY

That’s a thoughtful thing to say, thank you. I know more people who dislike or feel befuddled by titling than who don’t. I’m someone who has always loved them, I think because they’re the ultimate opportunity for juxtaposition or scene-setting. I tend to write them last, and I tend to revise them wildly—with some exception, early poem drafts often have the first line as a title, in [], as a placeholder, since it isn’t until I feel the poem is largely formed/done that I can add the finishing touch in the form of a title. This is sort of fast and loose, but I tend to think about titles in a few different ways: 

• A way to underscore or drive home the framing device of the poem (theoretically, musically, etc).  This is true of “the avian aria” and “the loneliness empire”—the first is a title that invites you to think about opera and birds as genre, the second recalls internet buzzwords and plays into it (more about that below). The latter is also true of “Ode to Stepmoms Stuck in Washing Machines).
• Juxtaposition. Consciously or unconsciously, I’m often subverting or complicating knows in my work—through word play (something I love and learned from Bob Hicok’s work, especially Elegy Owed), through polarity (a simple example: what happens if you write a poem about an atom bomb and title it “love poem”? Something I learned in part from the poetry of Kevin Prufer and Patricia Lockwood), or through my sheer inability to leave a joke on the table. Compulsive joking is a wild framing device! Humor can undercut, it can enrich, but good humor often demonstrates a deep knowledge of the emotional horizons of something; it’s just as dramatic as non-humor, but it also turns on itself. 
• Found material. This is sort of a cheat, because it can be either of the first two, and often is. Honestly, my information architecture (bullets) here is just robustly a scam, because all of these could be all of these, there’s no real disambiguation here. But I’m often in a privileged position to be delighted or devastated or intrigued by how the world interrupts me from my own feedback loop. My friends, loved ones, their children, decontextualized flotsam and jetsam—they’re funny and poignant and perfect. I have a metric ton of what my friends Morgan and Natalie and I call ‘headless notes’ in my phone, which is shit I overhear (there’s a poem in this manuscript called “it could be worse. you could be inside a wall”) or headlines that are so terrible or bonkers that I can’t stop smoothing them over, like a rock tumbler (something in my notes app that hasn’t yet made it into a poem but is a good example is when Tr*mp, reflecting on his first year in office, said something to the extent of “God is very happy.” Just think about that. It’s deeply fucked and so funny.)

Ultimately, what I’m saying here isn’t new. Titles aren’t just unintentional tags of metadata for one’s work (though they can ALSO be that). They’re part of the poem, they’re the logline, the first impression, the connective thread, the chaotic wrench. They have incredible weight and should be taken very, very seriously. 

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KARAN

“the loneliness empire” is a stunning catalog. “Someone helped me out of a chair. Someone helped me out of a pickle. / Someone helped me out of a womb.” The repetition builds then fractures: “Someone’s my plum. Someone’s my trash.” You end with “Someone said we are in this alone.” Argh, I like this poem a lot. List poems are so hard to pull off, even as they seem one of the easiest forms. Tell us about your fascination with the form of the list?

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JULY

Drawing back on the last answer a bit, the list form works here in part because a “loneliness empire” is a currently (?) buzzy way of talking about the fragmentation we all experience and the disconnection we all feel from one another thanks to the internet. It’s used to talk about YouTube, it’s used to talk about porn, it’s used to talk about incels (which can be considered here as part of a larger conversation/Venn diagram of YouTube and porn), it’s a damning of the pretty millennial  ideology that social media, once upon a time, served as a democratization of ‘community’ (it did! But it also accelerated our loneliness). So, “the loneliness empire” as a title frames the conversation we’re about to have here, which is a) full of declarative sentences (which can be used as a mantra-like way to shore ourselves up when we’re disoriented), and b) a list form, like clickbait is list form: easily “scannable.” The list form does some heavy juxtaposing lifting here by evoking clickbait; clickbait is meant to be extremely surface and often nonserious. But what is more serious than our loneliness? 

Additionally, I am deeply obsessed, to a damaging degree, with repetition in poetry. It’s so fucking powerful! Can I say fucking? Feel free to edit out OR repeat it so many times it loses its meaning. That’s one of the many things repetition can offer us: obliteration of meaning, which we can then project over with different meaning (think about Gertrude Stein’s poem “lifting belly” which says the words ‘lifting belly’ like 37294738723 times. This is not real data, but it’s a high number). 

Repetition can also emphasize something. It can lead the reader to understand what’s important, or at least a space worth watching. It can also be, like I said above, a mantra-like incantation for what I like to call “a spell against bad things happening.” I mean, aren’t hail marys kind of marvelous that way? 

A list form is a great enabler of all of these moving parts, and it helps keep what could be a preachy poem from being a preachy poem. 

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KARAN

“things I have said to strangers in bars” catalogs beliefs and non-beliefs. “I do believe / in self-actualization though not in manifest destiny.” You end with “But we were discussing the devil. / No. Before I made this about me, we were talking about you. / Talk about a religion I can stand behind.” That pivot is brilliant. What belief systems sustain you? What do you refuse to believe in?

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JULY

Oh, thank you so much. I am just going to keep saying thank you over and over until we both die, but we will die so grateful and tender with one another, which is an exalted way to go. 

In the same way I’m often clowning, or obsessively turning things around, or repeating to the point of new meaning, or wearing something out, I’m also often in a position where I say something, and then I realize that I don’t actually know if I believe it. Maybe because the speaking it aloud does something to it (weatherizes? Gives patina to? Asks for witness?) that I’m not ready to commit to, or maybe, generously, it’s because I think beliefs really work that way—they’re always being modified, reconsidered, used as compost for new growth. This makes me sound like I have no set belief system or morality, which is deeply untrue; I’m steadfastly faithful to curiosity and letting myself be changed by the world. This is part of that practice of joy. I’m dogmatic about it. For years, I wrote the last line of that wonderful Kim Addonizio poem on my bathroom mirror in lipstick, but I changed it—she wrote “Listen. I love you. Joy is coming.” And I wrote “Joy is here.” 

I grew up in a religious household; my grandpa (whom I adored and had a tender, uncomplicated relationship with) was a preacher. I don’t consider myself a religious person, but I grew up thinking about liturgy, hymns (which are in ballad form!), sermons, and oral recitation as powerful shit. The conduit for transformation, for seeing people, for being in communion with. Underlining all my “do I believe what I just said?” is the baseline of that unshakable faith, with has not changed a whit. 

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KARAN

Your work mixes high and low relentlessly: famous novels and porn, opera and ice cream cones, the devil and mood boards. You write, “The gradation / between truths and untruths is worth living for.” (!!!) How do you think about hierarchy in poetry? What makes something worthy subject matter?

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JULY

I feel so seen by this question! I’m always joking that I have friends in high and low places. It’s factually true, but it’s also figuratively true. Polarity is interesting to me because it’s two sides of the same coin; maybe this is too pat (I don’t know if I believe what I’m about to say), but maybe high/low is not dissimilar to the conversation re: gender identity vs how one experiences gender or others’ experience the gender of that person (which are kinda not entirely the same thing). Stay with me here—what separates a great novel from porn? Both sets of players are probably not getting paid well. Both curate experiences for their consumers. Both have downstream impacts on how said consumers think about the world as a result. And only one is considered “high” and one “low”, and by what standards? Again, I’m being reductionist, but let’s ball. 

To answer your actual question, I think about hierarchy as another variation of juxtaposition, so that’s a nice opportunity. And speaking of opportunities, nearly everything is a worthy subject. The only prompt I’ve ever been giving that has stumped me entirely is “write a poem about grocery store chicken-in-a-bag”. Some things are just too holy. 

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KARAN

You’ve co-edited and translated for the Unsung Masters series. How does translation work shape your poetry? What does it mean to bring lesser-known voices into English? Tell us more about Rolando Cárdenas’ work.

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JULY

These are massive questions, but luckily I’ve spoken a bit already about translation and some of the ways it shapes my work. One last thing I’ll say about that—I sometimes feel like the work of translation is as intimate as I can possibly get with the work of someone else. You know how when you’re in love with someone and you kinda want to unzip them and crawl inside? Translation is basically that, maybe especially (?) poetry translation. You’re unzipping the words and stanzas and line breaks and spatial choices and getting inside and considering how to enact this poem from as context-rich a place as possible. We don’t often think about the poet in the poem, but we do in translation; the poet is high up in the Great Chain of Being, especially if they’re dead because when a poet is dead, I think their poetry becomes much more about them as a poet. I don’t know if I can substantiate what I just said, this really just occurred to me. 

About Rolando Cárdenas’ and bringing his work into English— he was a poet from the Magellanic region of Chile whose work was beginning to come into prominence in the 1960s. And when the coup and consequent dictatorship happened in 1973, not only did he lose his livelihood as a civil engineer for his political leanings and art, but his work also went out of print due to censorship, and his literary career was entirely felled. I first fell in love with his poetry when I was an undergrad in Chile xx number of years ago, before Pinochet had died. It wasn’t lost on me that the CIA’s role in the dictatorship was financially responsible for the mass deaths of Chilean artists and art.

My day job is working as a government contractor, which has mostly meant (under this administration) being in the actual fire of the inner workings of intentionally produced systematic trauma. It’s “quieter” in many ways than authoritarianism under Pinochet, but a spade is a spade. 

And while the Cárdenas project has been almost ten years in the making, getting this book to the finish line in 2025 took on an uncomfortably prescient meaning.

My desire to translate his work didn’t come from altruism or guilt or a sense of responsibility, exactly—my love of his work did. But my privilege made it possible. It’s a heavy and complicated thing, far from resolved. 

Aside from the political importance of Cárdenas’ work, he was also a poet deeply informed by place, obsessively thumbing his own feedback loop, and ritualistically discursive with his ghosts. It makes sense I’d love him. 

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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?

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JULY

This is such a good question. You’ve stumped me! I like thinking about the use of an axis here—a way to quantify something qualitative. Hmm. 

Do you think this is static? Because I’ve mostly been a poet of the mind. But I think I’m growing into a true-blue poet of the heart. Thanks, birds. 

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KARAN

What’s the best piece of writing advice you’ve ever received? Alternatively: what would you tell other young poets by way of advice or caveat?

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JULY

I keep repeating this one because it’s just so good. Carl Phillips once gave me and a workshop full of people a wonderful piece of advice: if you’re writing poems within a certain period of your life, you don’t necessarily need to worry about superimposing a theme on them—humans think circularly and within themes (consciously or unconsciously). So, there’s no need to force it. Your job is to write, and then go back and listen (take inventory, index, find the theme).

Isn’t that so comforting?

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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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JULY

Write a poem about grocery store chicken-in-a-bag. I walked so you could run!

More seriously: find a piece of found common knowledge and complicate it. In Kim Addonizio’s book “Ordinary Genius,” she has a prompt that’s something similar—“a man walked into a bar”. How would you write that poem? What’s the “punchline”? It doesn’t have to be a punchline at all. Or maybe it’s a million punchlines. 

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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.

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JULY

I’m going to recommend Rosalia’s entire album, LUX, which is an honest to God masterpiece. She sings in like, a dozen languages, the genres rub up against one another, the lyrics are smart, and just when you think it can’t get any more ecstatic, she brings in Bjork and a fuckload of violins. The first time I heard this album, I thought—I want to write poems that do that. I felt wrung out and reborn by it. 

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KARAN

And finally, July, 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 playful and this smart at once?

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JULY

The language you’ve been using to engage with my work here means so much to me. ‘high/low’, ‘playful/smart’. I hope every poet gets the chance to be read so thoughtfully by someone. 

I mentioned a few folks already, but here are a few more: Robin Coste Lewis’ “Voyage of the Sable Venus” is the catalogue book of all catalogue books. It’s smart and cutting. My all-time favorite American poet was Linda Gregg, whose work taught me how hard won and true simplicity is. Laura Jensen’s “Bad Boats” gave me permission to be a little mean, if I did it by design and made sure no one could dismiss me. Ross Gay’s everything taught me about the modern ecstatic—talk about a practice of joy! Ada Limon didn’t know what she was doing when she paved the way for me to write poems with horses in them (!). Marie Ponsot’s tiny poem “Grief” (which goes something like “no one is here right now”) does everything poetry is meant to do, it’s upsetting how perfect a poem it is. Carl Phillips’ lyricism is devastating, and life-giving and reminds me not to be lazy with music and lyric. I’m missing so many I love, but I’ll stop here. 

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