KARAN

Aimee, I love these poems. I am so pulled by your colloquial, nonchalant tone, especially because the content is often unusual or strange. I mean, look at the beginning of “When Your Entire Life is One Big Freudian Slip of the Real You”: “Oops there I go again being myself. Silly me, showing my intentions.” These poems are rendered very accessible by this tone. I feel like even a pre-teen could read these and have a really cool experience, which, I think, modern poetry often lacks. The colloquial tone of these poems complement the sometimes weird turns of phrases — “This is my life and it goes with me like butter.” Or “you laid down the gun / and fell into years.” Do you think about striking a balance between the unusual and the accessible as you write? What is your process like when you sit down to write?

AIMEE

Thank you, Karan, and thank you for having me on ONLY POEMS! I am deeply appreciative to you and Shannan for recognizing my work. I truly admire this publication and the amazing poets you showcase. ONLY POEMS has a “fresh” feeling which I imagine is not easy to do.

My writing seems to reflect my love for brevity and play. I think complex language does a great job taking us somewhere new, but my goal is to go somewhere familiar. Once I’m there, I want to turn on the lights and play around a little bit. It’s not to say I don’t appreciate complexity (because I do, greatly), it’s more to say I am not good at seeing life without a distillation process.

I think the best way to get somewhere fast is to drop extra weight. So, my writing goes exactly like that. I capture whatever strikes me like a gong, then see if the words are common enough to describe your living room instead of mine. 

KARAN

Hunger often crops up in these poems, of course most starkly in “You Asked Me What I Wanted”: “I’m hungrier than a bird that swallowed the big blue sky.” Several other poems express a deep yearning for completeness and a desire to embrace all aspects of life, juxtaposed with the recognition of unfulfilled desires and the fleeting nature of satisfaction. “Asking myself how a rock can be more than a ripple.” Is desire, and more specifically the tension between desire and the inefficacy of achieving complete fulfillment a concern for you?

AIMEE

I’m laughing at being so called out by this question! Yes. I could talk about writing and the arts and how tension holds a poem together like the neck of a harp, but I think this is mostly a reflection of where I am in life. 

If you are a creative person, you cannot escape yourself. When I was younger, I would write like it was a possession. I needed it to cope. Then, some dramatic things happened, and I tossed all of my work into a wood burning stove. I put blinders up and drowned myself in math and engineering.  

I am at a point where self-abandonment has caught up to me. We are complex creatures who have needs outside of food and water and security, like expression, purpose, and resonance. I want to be full in more ways than one. I talk a lot about hunger because I’m looking in the mirror at a thin figure.

KARAN

These poems also carry so much sadness. In one sense, all poetry is about loss — of innocence, time, places, people, love, beauty, joy — even as it tries to capture these. Time comes up in your poems often — “three years late,” “all the time,” “seasonal change,” “when I arrive,” “thawed / unthawed” — and its tone is that of nostalgia, or anticipation. Do you feel the past feeds your poetry? How much of your poetry is an exercise in dealing with loss? Is it a distraction from grief/loss/sadness, an exploration of grief, or a movement through grief? Does poetry bring you joy or ease your pain?

AIMEE

Infusing a poem with sadness feels like laying flowers on a tombstone. It commemorates a moment of time that could have existed, or should have existed, for just a little, or just a little longer. It doesn’t make the thing real or return, and it doesn’t make the grief any less. But we’re called to do it because we’re human. 

Like any human, I have specific events that inform my unique heartache. For a period of my life, I think I turned a part of my brain off. When we feel sick, we go to sleep, and hope to be better in the morning. My morning seems like now. 

KARAN

Prose poetry is my most favorite form to both read and write. Would you speak about your fascination for the form? I see that these poems couldn’t be any other way. What do you think the form of the prose poem allows you that lineated poetry won’t? And when one thinks of prose poems, one usually imagines a block of text, but most of your prose poems are broken up into paragraphs. Would you say something about that decision? 

AIMEE

I, too, love prose poetry. Prose feels like conversation mixed with narrative. I struggle to maintain a sense of conversational wholesomeness in lineated form. When I write prose, I am usually just talking to myself. It feels like rambling as I attempt to hold a mixed bag of ideas. During the editing process I go back and rearrange these conversations. 

Then, I enter the line breaks.

I like to think the paragraphs invite a sense of pause between ideas, which builds a scene as opposed to internal dialogue. Scenes make a story. Right now, I prefer stories over personal expositions, as I am still a bit of a coward.

KARAN

I love how these sentences and lines flow — there’s a rhythm in these poems you can’t look away from. You have a strong hold on repetition, and I love the constant back and forth between staccato and lyrical sentences. I was wondering if you’re influenced by music in some way? Is music a part of your writing practice?

AIMEE

Well, firstly, thank you for hearing my metronome. This is one of those things you don’t see in yourself until others point it out. I did grow up playing piano but was terrible at music theory. My instructor once explained at length why she enjoyed teaching my brother more than me. But I suppose you don’t have to be good at something to be influenced by it. In my day-to-day, I love reading song lyrics and losing myself in a beat. I also admire spoken word poets so much, and grew up on HipHop and rap. I am not sure how I would make the leap, but song-writing is a space I would love to explore a bit more.

KARAN

I really like your expression of the tug of war between beauty and rage. “You want your tantrum to be matched in a big beautiful tempest.” Or: “I think the flowers are beautiful despite them trying to kill me.” I see that you’re looking within and also outside at once. There’s a school of poetry that believes a poem or 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. Where would you put yourself? And do you see yourself moving elsewhere?

AIMEE

I’ve never heard about this school of poetry! Thank you for introducing me to it. I will need to give this some thought. Usually when boxes are dropped at my doorstep, I like to take their contents out and build a giant fort. Which is to say, I am horribly stubborn and afraid of categorization. One reason I write is to bridge all of the gaps. I think I see myself moving closer to completing that. 

KARAN

We interviewed Mikko Harvey last week and he has a line in his poem: “I typically arrive about three years too late.” It is so starkly reminiscent of the ending of “Unplucked:” “I was three years late and you didn’t recognize me.” After his interview, we decided to ask our poets for a poetry prompt (indebted to neonpajamas for the inspiration). Would you provide a prompt for our readers, to help kickstart a poem?

AIMEE

I am a big fan of Mikko Harvey’s work. Three years seems like the sweet spot for nostalgia. It is the right distance away to hold both a truth and a lie. The following prompt is to be written in the form of a prose poem unless it decides to escape, of course ☺

Prompt:

Today you are a wishing well. Can you describe yourself without stating what you are? Now, describe the person who is on your mind. Imagine this person walks to you and makes a wish. Can you describe what they are wearing? Describe the scene where they toss the coin. Do you know what they wished for? Do you want to know?