KARAN

Suzanne, thank you for these captivating and provocative poems. Your work is rich with explorations of desire, identity, and the body. I’m particularly struck by how you blend the erotic with the surreal, as in “The Night I Knew I Loved You I Dreamed I was a Small Horse in Your Hand” (god, that title!): “I am a mare / of your offerings, a mosaic. / Nourished in the longitude / & latitude of you.” This is both intimate and expansive. Let’s begin with the process question. How do you approach writing a poem? Do you start with an image, a line, or an idea? Do you have a writing routine? And most importantly, what drives you to write poetry?

SUZANNE

Gosh, Karan I’m so, so, grateful to be in conversation with you, with ONLY POEMS. Thank you for your thoughtful questions that make me and my work feel very seen and cared for in this space! 

So, in terms of the poem you’re mentioning, that title came from a dream. I did quite literally have this dream and it became the image that started the foundation of the poem. Many images and lines from my work come straight from dreams. I know other poets who also work this way. I like to privilege my intuition in my work and this is one way I do that. I do think the erotic and surreal are intentional places I go in my work that matter to me. Both places are about what’s possible. Both push against what we think is possible and try to make room for more. I find both the surreal and the erotic are most successful when there is play and surprise. I value those things in poems as well. I am interested in power inside of intimacy and the tradition of the surreal historically seeks to subvert power by disrupting logic—therefore to me, the surreal and the erotic have a natural relationship, a togetherness when it comes to disrupting or pointing out power dynamics. I like that you’re saying intimate and expansive, I welcome that reading as well. 

With process, each poem and each project is different, but these particular poems which are all part of one book project, The Want Monster that started a few years ago has had its own process. Most of my projects are driven by a voice, and the voice of this project has spoken to me for a few years now. Rage-filled, sexual, wry, sarcastic, depressive, submissive, pained. Many of these poems started with lines, often they came to me either while taking long walks, or when I first woke in the morning. I kept a practice of  keeping a notebook by my bedside table and if I woke in the middle of the night I would write down what was in my head, images from dreams, words, or  lines. I sometimes would set an alarm for the middle of the night and wake up and write things down. I felt I needed to do this to free myself of the logical/critical brain which sometimes when I’m more conscious takes over and tells me things are not good, or not interesting. I said before that I like to privilege intuition in my work. I also think sometimes this side of a person’s brain is coded by society as feminine. I privilege that too, the feminine. I’m deeply interested in femininity in all forms and expressions. My work has often been labeled aggressive, or bold, and that’s fine, but just know that’s also feminine because it’s coming from me. A lot of the methods for writing this work was an act of freeing myself from preconceived notions of what I should be writing, should be saying, or what is beautiful. I worked to let myself be free in these moments of invention, and then later, I would go through and pick and comb lines and words and images, often repeated phrases and work them into a piece. 

I’m working in a different way now on a new manuscript tentatively titled The Death Papers. The voice is simple, accepting, grave, meditative, knowing. I’m working on all the poems simultaneously in one document, so they’re all related, all feel like one thing. The titles are very small, sometimes one word, and the poems themselves are also hardly over fifteen lines. These I work on in sprints when the mood strikes me, 10-15 minutes at a time, or I still do my notebook method first thing in the morning and then at the end of the week I’ll pull lines and place them among the work. 

I also wouldn’t be where I am without my close readers who are my writing community, my colleagues from all stages of my schooling. They are so dear to me. They have helped me learn and grow so much and sharing my work with them, getting their feedback, has been integral to my success. 

KARAN

Your poems often touch on themes of desire, power dynamics, and the female body. For instance, in “Like Victorians Egyptomania, I Thighmania” (hilarious!), you claim, “I obey the sovereign state of your thighs. I allow myself / to be ruled under the cruel Emperor.” How do you approach writing about sexuality and desire in a way that feels both personal and universal, fresh yet ancient? Do you consciously try to challenge or subvert traditional narratives about female desire in your work? 

SUZANNE

I don’t know that I consciously try to write about sexuality, but it comes out in my work organically. I think owning that part of myself is my feminism, to say that sex is part of my humanity, and I’m not going to perform shame for an audience because it’s part of who I am as a human being. Even that simple fact of not performing shame in my work maybe brings about this “fresh” feeling, but some people really find it off-putting or simplistic. My work is not for everyone, it can elicit strong reactions because of the themes you’re describing. I  hope if my work provokes someone  they consider why, or how that provocation and discomfort might be related to acceptable or palatable ideas around desire, gender, and power. I use greater than and less than signs in my work about sex and relationships to directly signal and play with power dynamics in the work. I was inspired by Cole Depuy, a poet in my PhD poetry workshop who came in with poems using them for a concept related to his eco-poetics about debts humans owe to the planet. I thought they could be useful for my work on power and sex and so I started playing with them too. I think we were both working through trying to understand power and positionaility but in different yet essential ways. Power and sex are both ancient and I think that’s why I like them as subjects. Female desire is real, but writing about it is tricky, in so many other places it’s done so overtly, like in music for example. 

I’m inspired by female rappers, women who have since the very early 80s been blunt about their desires, their needs, who they are, and their right to their feelings. In poetry it still feels quite taboo for women to be more blunt about their desires still, maybe it’s because we’re bumping up against so much tradition. I will say it hasn’t escaped me that negative reactions to the way I write about sex in my work is coming at a time where there’s a huge rise in cultural trends like trad wives, and a public desire to return to traditional feminine roles, and that doesn’t feel like an accident to me. It’s also interesting to me how much of that culture is obsessed with reproduction but sex feels mysteriously absent from the performance, though beauty is not. I’m also writing in a post #metoo era where we have public cases of sexual assault and mass rape like Gisèle Pelicot’s and it’s demoralizing that men living under patriarchy and rape culture are interested in, or taught that assaulting women, taking from women, objectifying them, is more exciting than understanding their needs, their safety, and their desires. Women are told it's unattractive, or outrageous and offensive to own their desires or express them. I suppose once the culture accepts what women desire there’s always the possibility their needs go unmet, and that becomes emasculating, or embarrassing for the patriarchy—a clear indicator it’s an unworkable and obsolete framework. Female desire becomes the monster that will eat the patriarchy. Because of this, the culture insists women stay silent about their desires. Writing about openly female desire is one way to free us, and so I do, and it’s sometimes met with demands to stop, or stay silent, or write something prettier, but it’s important to note I’m really not doing anything other queer poets aren’t also doing, like Chen Chen, Benjamin Garcia or Sam Sax, and yet maybe because I’m a middle-aged woman it is sometimes met with disdain, though Sharon Olds, Erica Jong, Ai Ogawa, Anne Sexton, Franny Choi, and Morgan Parker have stood on the ground I’m also standing on. We really can’t afford to have cultural amnesia about confessional and feminist poets from the 60’s and 70’s because our work in these areas is not done.

I’ve been a student of power all my life. I was a girl, I am a daughter, and now I’m a middle-aged woman. I have watched my own power bloom and recede in varying spaces. Of course power is overt, political, public, but it’s also covert, intimate, private. I have seen its meaning and its consequences unfold in compelling, complicated, and sometimes tragic ways in my intimate relationships—for better or worse. This is of course related to gender, and gendered expectations of desire/power within certain bodies. Sometimes we find in intimate relationships that power is related to safety. Flexibility in power shifts connote healthy play in a relationship. Sometimes rigidity in who can and who does hold power and in what contexts (money, sexual intimacy, race, ethnicity, age, gender, career/title, daily labor, emotional labor) can make or break an entire relationship. We could say power is often about labor. Who is doing more work? Who is doing less? Where and why? The person “with more power” traditionally does less labor in certain contexts, but might choose to do more in others to please a partner or subvert their own power. The roles of the adorer and the adored. When we open ourselves up to intimacy we say (without even saying it): Do you love me? Do you want me? Then you’ll work for it. Or, yes I’m willing to work. Sexual intimacy is only one place power is present in a relationship and it fascinates me there because sex itself is often fluctuating in value and meaning each time you have it. Some find it meaningless, some find it meaningful. We are connecting but we are still having our own experiences inside sex. I think I am interested in the fact that something so connected, so intimate can often be a source of disconnection or alienation, or it can sometimes articulate the ways we won’t or can’t be close enough to another person though we are always trying. The trying, I think, is what captivates me. We are always trying, even when we fail to connect, fail to truly understand or please another. There is also power in trying to connect. I do think the sex in my work is a bit of a Trojan horse for the speaker’s alienation and disconnection and failures to connect with the intimate other. So, yes, it’s about sex, but really it’s also about the existential crisis of isolation within the intimacy, or the ephemeral nature of that close connection — it never lasts, it’s fragile, in flux and what is a poem if not furiously writing against disconnection and the death of things and experiences that matter to us? That makes sex precious and sad all at once. Sex becomes a miniature of life in that respect.

In “Like Victorians . . .” there’s a lot going on. The overt discussion of political and cultural power when talking about emperors (authoritarian), and Victorians (imperial and fetishizing), the mentioning of religion (oppressive) — devotion (care), but also the speaker at the end sort of begging to be fed like a child almost — calling their lover’s legs broth and bread, those are all up against the primary driving stylistic move in the poem which is repetition. I’m into repetition as a tool to disrupt hierarchy in my poems. I was taught that poetry “is best” when power/meaning are revealed through an intricate hierarchy of thoughts/ideas, a stacking of unique turns of phrases, but I find it just as useful that power/meaning come in small bursts of equally accrued action through repeated words or phrases. The idea that repetition causes a loss of meaning doesn’t make sense to me, though I do like playing with a reader’s threshold of how much repetition they can take and that’s also an articulation of another power dynamic (me) the writer, to the reader. 

KARAN

I’m super fascinated by your titles. They’re evocative, hilarious, interesting, sexy. I’ve mentioned a couple but want to say this one aloud: “All My Holes Except The One in My Heart.” How do you approach titling your poems? Do the titles come to you before, during, or after the writing process? What do you aim to achieve with your titles? And do you get a kick out of these? I know I would, if I came up with so many brilliant titles.

SUZANNE

Thank you for saying this about my titles! For this project the titles became a driving force in the work. Many of the pieces in this project started with the titles, and they would come to me just out of the air while walking, or out of the night when I woke. Writing them at the top of the page and then imagining what could fulfill or satiate these often large and sloshing titles became kind of exciting, a self-dare, like, will I really be able to deliver a poem that is satisfying enough for this title? Sometimes I sat with titles for days, adding little by little and sometimes poems came all at once. Most of my poems go through anywhere from twelve to thirty-something versions. I do like them. I do find them funny, and I did find them very generative. Part of the voice is the absurdity of how long some of the titles are, and also a kind of insistent sloppiness of the speaker maybe not even knowing when their own poem is starting, just kind of doing it all at once. Sometimes the space between the title and the poem itself is where I like to do the most work. Subverting or turning expectations right there between what the title is saying or instructing and what the poem actually is. The title you mentioned just came to me early one morning while I drank my coffee. I wrote the first draft of it in one burst and then played with it for many days. “All My Holes Except The One in My Heart” is an important title in the collection. It’s bold, brash, almost like a line or refrain from an early Salt-N-Pepa track. It’s accusatory, funny, but also sad and confessional. I like to walk that line too, of so tragic it’s funny, or so funny it’s tragic. The title is of course commenting about me (a bisexual woman) moving through the patriarchy, that people are more interested in my body, how it looks, how it moves, or what it does for them, than the less tangible parts of me that are just as precious, fragile, careful, complex, meaningful. To feel like people are more interested in a woman’s body as a transactional space, than in her person, who requires more work, more care, more attention, more time is frustrating, and yet — sometimes holes in our hearts are not so easily filled, and sometimes bodies have desires that are out of step with the heart. Complicated! 

KARAN

One of the epigraphs for “Botox Cento” is a particularly poignant (controversial?) statement made by Kim Kardashian. I notice other pop-culture references elsewhere in your poems. These pop-cultural references contribute to the richness of your poems by anchoring them in specific times, cultural contexts, and shared experiences. They also serve as bridges between the personal and the collective, inviting readers to relate to the speaker's reflections through familiar cultural touchpoints. How do you approach incorporating external sources or pop-cultural references in your poetry? Are these references a deliberate choice to enhance accessibility, create layers of meaning, or establish a specific tone within your work? Could you share insights into your process of selecting and weaving these references into your poems?

SUZANNE

Yeah! So as soon as I read Kim K’s statement I knew I had to do something with it because it made me so sad! And infuriated! And yet — I also understood what she was saying . . . the pressures to be beautiful and young are so intense. But I also find her to be a paradox. She literally created and reinforced half the beauty standards she and her sisters are worried about meeting so, in my mind she’s become kind of a tragic clown figure. She’s crying about her own beauty while going through expensive beauty treatments and saying she’ll eat human excrement, so yeah, I was like I’m certainly going to interact with her, with what she said. “Botox Cento” was really born out of a desire to capture a conversation about facial plastic surgery to stay youthful and all the sources I used I see as a kind of reading list of how I’m considering it, thinking about it. The cento was a very deliberate engagement with pop culture sources, poems, essays, sci-fi texts, and theory. The poem captures the confusion I feel about how we won’t stay the same no matter what, but what does it mean if we do this other thing instead (plastic surgery), or is there meaning in it and how is that related to technology, or feminism if at all? 

One of my closest friends has always said I live an alternative life with a pop soul, and I think that’s true. I really revel in pop culture, it’s just fascinating to me. If pop references creep in, I let them. I don’t stop them if it feels right. I do think they can create layers of meaning and often it helps the more playful or sarcastic tone in this manuscript. Pop references are often the humor that splits through the anger and sadness, and I do want those moments, they are a relief. I have a couple of poems in the manuscript that talk back to Lana Del Rey lyrics. I think if my work is doing its job, it’s talking to a reader and to culture, and pop references are part of that. I also use fairytales quite a bit in the collection, riddles, rhymes, queens, kings, emperors, princesses. These figures are also about preset power dynamics, and once the speaker has been a princess, and queen, she’s now a monster, a witch, an amalgamation of all the things she once was because who is there left to be but the monster who is trying to reckon with all the other roles she played?

KARAN

“The Queen of the Unchosen” touches on themes of pain, rejection, and self-worth, as do other poems. “It was a mistake to think pain connected us. / We met in a dark cycle. Venus in Leo.” I want to be light and ask about your beliefs in astrology. But I’m most interested in writing vulnerably about subjects that are personal and difficult. Does poetry bring you joy or ease your pain?

SUZANNE

Well, first of all, I am a self-proclaimed astrology ho. So . . . I do have Venus in Leo at the 29th degree in the 5th house (the house of art, creativity, self-expression etc.) and at the time the person I was seeing also had Venus in Leo, but a lesser degree, and in a different house. The 29th degree is a “fame degree,” so one could extrapolate that I will make my lovers famous through my art, or my lovers will be/become famous via art — I’ll let you guess what has been true so far . . .

The only thing that eases pain is sharing it, not being alone with it. I think poetry eases my pain in the sense that it’s the place I talk about my pain the most, therefore my reader is always sharing my pain with me and that’s maybe by design quite selfish, but a function of my work. Pain is important to me. It has taught me a lot. I have a persona poem in the collection called “Pain Queen” which is really about eroticizing pain—because if pain is your primary relational experience in the patriarchy, eroticizing it is a way to survive. It is always a survival strategy to teach yourself to want what you’re likely to get, if it’s rejection, devaluation, pain, being used then make it yours and you’ll be free. At the end of  “The Queen of  The Unchosen” the speaker has transformed her pain into elaborate jewelry she wears. It’s similar to making one’s pain into a poem. The speaker is a transformer, all artists are, and she has made her pain into things to admire, things that give her power, status, things that make her beautiful. I think poetry eases my pain that way too. It makes me feel like I have the power to transform my pain into something else, and that’s deeply worthwhile—also a survival strategy.

KARAN

This has become a staple question for us now. 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. Where would you place your work within this framework, if at all? And do you see your poetry moving in a different direction?

SUZANNE

I suppose I’m clearly poetry of the body but I was made that way — meaning my confusing or mysterious experiences that I’m trying to reckon with are of the body, or in reaction to my body. The heart is also there, though maybe not in typical ways. I’d like to move more towards the heart, the mind, but I think I will always be fascinated by the body. That feels like the lowest rung on the spiritual ladder but . . . I’m trapped in it after all. It’s the primary filter I have to understand the world I’m in. Maybe I’ll tire of it eventually? Who knows? 

KARAN

You’re currently working on a memoir, Throw it Up, and two collections of poetry, The Want Monster and The Death Papers (suzy amazing titles!). How does your work in different genres inform each other? Do you find that themes or ideas from your poetry make their way into your memoir, or vice versa?

SUZANNE

To be honest, I’ve been passed around from genre to genre in my formal schooling. I entered undergrad as a poet, but was told my work was too narrative, and was told to write fiction. There I wrote many stories that were basically true until people started telling me they weren’t believable as fiction. I then had to say they were true, and was passed to creative nonfiction. Writing in multiple genres has been a way to distribute the ego, protect it. If one project in one genre is stalling out, I’ll go to another genre. I think all my obsessions bleed into all of the genres of my work. I’ve written poems about the same things I’ve written about in memoir. The voices are different and the images or focus shifts. Being a multi-genre writer has kept me writing all these years. 

KARAN

As the current nonfiction editor for Harpur Palate, what insights have you gained about contemporary writing? How has this role influenced your own writing, if at all?

SUZANNE

I’ve been working with lit magazines for a long time. I started back in my MFA working at Blue Mesa Review and it was an exceptional experience. All of my colleagues in New Mexico had good taste in writing and cared a great deal. I then got the opportunity to work at No Contact Magazine where I once again was with an extremely talented group of people who all wanted to make something really special, and we did. Now I’m at Harpur Palate which has such a rich history. My colleagues there are working hard to make each issue fantastic. They’re also doing really important work like archiving the journal online which took tremendous efforts from our  former EIC Hannah Carr-Murphy and our current EIC Alycia Calvert. I really love the lit journal world. Every so often there are debates online about their validity, but magazines and journals have a lot of aesthetic freedom. They have more freedom to publish experimental or aesthetically risky work and push genres forward than presses do because presses are really beholden to economic expectations in a way that many journals and magazines are not, or at least not on the same scale. Having to answer to a board, or donors, or larger sales concerns makes book publishing quite different. Lit mags are often grassroots, or via university support, and run entirely by students. This is part of what makes them so important. They’re a space for up-and-coming writers to help create the world of literature they want to live inside of. I think that’s the value I find in being an editor at a magazine. I don’t take the freedom for granted. It’s a gift to be able to elevate the work I think is important for the genre and that’s my primary concern. 

KARAN

What is some of the best writing or writing-adjacent advice you’ve received, whether during your MFA, your current PhD program, or outside of institutionalized education?

SUZANNE

Well, my father always told me, “you can do anything for 100 days” which I’ve said to myself during any trying period of my life, so I keep that with me always. But, in my MFA, my professor Dan Mueller said to just write as much as possible, and to stop being precious about it, as in, yes we all have the ways we prefer to write, but to learn to write anywhere, at any time, and do it regularly and that’s really the best gift you can give yourself. I’ve kept that with me. Just keep a practice, no matter what. Let it change, let it get weird, let it get less complicated, but keep doing it. 

KARAN

Recently, we decided to ask our poets for a poetry prompt at the end. Would you provide a prompt for our readers, to help kickstart a poem?

SUZANNE

This prompt is inspired by Diane Seuss’s poem “I can’t stop thinking of that New York skirt, turquoise sequins glued onto sea-colored cotton” and Rick Barot’s “Tarp”:

Write a poem with a central image. Try to describe that one thing in as many different ways as you can, with as much detail. Use memory, and cultural connotations, make it personal, make it universal. See how that one image/object connects to everything. If you need an image, here are some image prompts: a ring or necklace, a hairbrush, a tire, a shovel, a daffodil, a mountain, a river, a favorite article of clothing. 

KARAN

We’d also love for you to recommend a piece of art (anything other than a poem) — perhaps a song, a film, or a visual artwork — that you find particularly inspiring or that you think everyone should experience, especially in the context of the themes you explore in your poetry.

SUZANNE

I’m forever in love with and revisit French new wave films all the time. My favorites are Agnés Varda’s Cléo 5 à 7, Jean-Luc Goddard’s Pierrot le Fou, and Jean Cocteau’s Orphée.  I like a good horror film too, Longlegs really spoke to me. I obsessively listen to electronic music. I’m currently into French DJ Oklou’s album Galore, as well as a UK group called Overmono and their album Good Lies.  This guy Mike Skinner has a project called The Streets out of the UK  and his album Original Pirate Material (2002) is great. A DJ based out of Berlin named IAMNOBODI has a track called “Separated” that slaps so hard. I was listening to Brooke Candy, then Eazy Mac’s Music for The Visually Impaired A LOT when I wrote most of the poems you’ve published — probably too much — that album is filthy, so absurd.