KARAN

Patrick, your poems are beautiful, insightful, sorrowful in all the right places, and I love their precision. As I mentioned before we read over ten thousand poems for the prize and your poems stood out because of your stark lyricism from the very first lines:

Listen, I have nothing to say to the wren

that ruffles its feathers in my heart.

I do not swear my loyalty to men, to 

presidents who walk on shards of skeletons 

with a scroll of blood in their mouths.

Trust me, I owe no god my soul.

Kill me now! Let’s make this a more traditional interview. Where do your poems come from? How do you begin, write, and finish a poem? Do you have a routine, a method that you follow? And then more importantly, what pushes you to write?

PATRICK

This is such a beautiful question but, it is also, even in its simplicity, a difficult one for me. Most of my poems just happen. Of course, their origin is my mind. I am a very casual writer. I write with my phone, and I write my poems just as they come. I am not the one to think about writing for too long before writing. I just write. I begin with recklessness, playfulness, and end that way. I hardly think too much of what I am going to say when I start a poem. Not to be too “serious” with my term here, but I just “let language take control.” 

I’d say I don’t necessarily have a routine, but the absence of routine is itself a routine. I write whenever I feel like it, whatever time of the day, and whatever comes to my mind. Now that I think of it, the only ritual I may call a routine is: I write with music. Always with music. Music without words. Usually classical music. In the past, I may have given a comprehensive reason for why I write, for what pushes me to write. Now, I can say the only thing that pushes me to write is curiosity. What might, for instance, writing about desire in a poem about God read like — a desire that isn’t about knowing God? For example, what might it feel like to build a poetic world where God is a child, a little child? These are big questions for me, considering my religious background. Also, in the act of writing poems, I am giving my curiosities language — one I never think myself capable of.

KARAN

These poems serve as meditations on personal experiences, existential thoughts, and profound contemplations that appeal greatly to me. How you delve deep into the complexities of existence, identity, and human connection, weaving together the thread of thought and emotion. I feel that you’re reaching for a higher truth in these poems. For example, in “Meditation of ____,” the speaker discusses their disillusionment with worldly and political affairs, expressing a deep internal dialogue and self-awareness. This introspective tone is consistent across the poems, focusing on the interior life of the speakers and their emotional landscapes. Is poetry a way for you to investigate the vagaries of existence?

PATRICK

In a poem, as much as I am very interested in the outside world in which the speaker exists, I am more interested in the relationship between that world and the inscape of the speaker. In my poems, I want to know the world, to see the world, but through the interiority of the speaker. How can I, through the speaker's voice, understand myself as a person — as a political being? Most of my poems are packets of questions I struggle with — and in writing them, the questions grow larger; they don’t distill as one might hope. I love your use of the word “self-awareness” because that is what the speaker in “Meditation of _______,” confirms — that self-awareness is an important tool to possess in times like this. What does existing in the empire, in empires with their various acts of violence against lands, peoples, and names do to the citizens of such empire(s)? So yes, I am figuring out my existence in the world, in this current politically tense world, through my speaker.

KARAN

This is kind of an extension of the earlier question, or coming at the same thing from a different, more specific angle. There’s a persistent theme of seeking understanding and clarity, both from within and from the external world, most apparently in “The Quest for Understanding and Clarity.” The poems often grapple with the tension between knowledge and confusion, between seeing clearly and being lost. The speaker's journey toward enlightenment, however, is fraught with ambiguity and uncertainty. Would you speak about how this tension influences your approach to the structure and imagery in your poetry?

PATRICK

The structure and imagery in my poems have little thought behind them. Here is a piece of information that may justify that tension: my poems constantly straddle the space between dreams and the waking world. That is, in the world of knowing, of consciousness and not-knowing, unconsciousness. I think the tension that you speak of arises from my attempt to bridge these worlds. And that is reflected in the structure and imagery in most of my poems. 

KARAN

God appears often in your poems. Faith/faithlessness colors these words. In one poem, you say: “Trust me, I owe no god my soul.” And then in another: “In church, I pretend to see God. // I write the psalms in my diary / just to tear them out for spilling into my dreams.” And also: “I took my hands to an old temple / & forgot to touch God with them.” Reflections on God indicate a deep engagement with spirituality as a means to navigate and make sense of the world. I don’t really have a question here but this was an observation that I made when I was deciding why these poems speak to me so. In a way, all poetry is arguing for faith, for some kind of hope, and a kind of kindness. What is your relationship with god? Why do you think God appears so often in your poetry?

PATRICK

I love that you asked this question. I spent most of the summer talking about why God appears so much in my poems. Short response: “God” appears in my poem because I consider myself a spiritual person, and as such, I am very interested in the divine. However, having come from the Catholic church where God as Being, and as “concept” made me want to become a Catholic priest, and having to change my mind about becoming a Catholic priest, I have returned to thinking broadly about God outside the confines of doctrinal definitions. In my poems, I am working with my curiosities to explore the divine. I am constantly thinking about the connection between spirituality and desire, spirituality and grief, spirituality and violence, etc.. One constant symbol of spirituality for me as a person, and as a poet, is the uppercase “God”. To move toward poetry is to move toward God, I believe, and to move toward God is to be spiritually filled with the consciousness of one’s (im)mortality. In my poems, I write to make God very concrete: make God a child, make God a gardener, make God a drummer, etc. This is not to make the divine ordinary, but to make the ordinary divine, to make the divine more accessible to my mind as a person. I am writing, through my speaker, myself into this space where God exists. I also do these because I don’t necessarily buy the idea of “feeling” the presence of the divine. In my poems,  I am trying to touch the divine, to touch God. However, I use the lowercase “god” to mean obsessions, addictions, infatuations, etc. This, god vs God topic, also boils down to how written language signals the differentiations that oral language might be unable to effectively capture.

KARAN

I see a lot of nature imagery in your poems. Here, we encounter: feathers, prairie, butterflies, river, greenfield, fog, evening light, stars, wounded bird, pebbles . . . I’d like to hear about your relationship with nature. And how do you see the relationship between nature and human experience in your work? What does nature mean to you as a poet? 

PATRICK

I grew up with my grandmother in a small village in one of the western states of Nigeria. I was very close to nature, and nature was part of my childhood. My favorite childhood memories were on the farms or in the rivers in the village. I have since loved nature. Nature, for me, is a paragon of tenderness, and that tenderness, as a poet, is something I hope to constantly live toward. I want to be read as a poet whose language offers tenderness despite what the poem might be about. But there’s something more interesting about nature: the silence and the sound of their existence are marked and are constantly being marked by divinity. I consider the silence of nature to be a form of prayer, and the sound of nature to be the music of God. Again, the divine circles back to my love of nature.

KARAN

Rivers too appear frequently in your poems, and other water bodies. I notice that in my own poems, as well as Bob Hicok’s, who I admire deeply. What I make of this is that there’s a longing to return to a place of comfort, or just that water bodies are fucking cool and we should all be obsessed with them. They represent flow, emotions, the passage of time. Maybe you’re a Pisces too. I don’t know where I was going with this and this was more an observation than a question, but what do you make of this in your poems? What pulls you to water?

PATRICK

I love water. I grew up around water. It’s hard not to love water. But I keep coming back to water because it is one of those elements that serves as a reminder of where I am from. Water holds stories, histories, memories, etc., and travels with or transforms them. There used to be a scribbled sentence on the threshold of my grandmother’s house: “Ranti Omo Eni ti Iwo n Se” which translates to “Remember the child of whom you are.” Water, water bodies, is a constant reminder of that quote. It is also a reminder of how far I have come; how far I still have to go. 

KARAN

This next question has become a staple for us and I’m always delighted by the variation in the answers. So, there’s a school of poetry that believes a poet can categorize their work in one of these four ways: poetry of the body, poetry of the mind, poetry of the heart, poetry of the soul. I can, of course, see all these elements in your poems, as one would expect in any good poet. But I’d love to know where you feel you're writing from. And do you see yourself moving elsewhere?

PATRICK

I don't know what category it’d fall on. Maybe poetry of the soul. Mainly because the word “soul” suits what I am trying to do with my poems. 

KARAN

What is some of the best writerly advice you’ve received so far, whether it be during your MFA, or PhD, or even outside of institutionalized education that you’d like to share with other young writers? 

PATRICK

1. Don’t write a poem for approval. 2. Trust the language. 3. The poem knows more about itself than you know about it. Tracie Morris said these at Cave Canem.