I adored how A Source explores poetry, with lines such as “I’m a poem, the one I lost when I was twenty / about cow’s eyes” because I love seeing poets talk about poetry (especially when within a poem). What purpose does this self-reference serve for you in A Source?
I love seeing poets talk about poetry too! I have been particularly influenced by Jack Spicer’s mode of self-referencing. Spicer ends his poem Elegy to Psychoanalysis with “What are you thinking now? / I am thinking that a poem could go on forever.” Self-referencing in poetry I think gets the reader’s attention because it doesn’t let you rest easy that you are in the hands of a poet-master but draws your attention to the fact that someone was once writing what you are reading. It makes it feel more like the poet is there, that the act of reading is communal.
The line in A Source, “I’m a poem,” is stolen from the psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan, who said in his fourth seminar “A certificate tells me that I was born. I repudiate this certificate: I am not a poet, but a poem. A poem that is being written, even if it looks like a subject.”
Being a poem, one that “could go on forever” or one that is “being written,” is better than being a poet because it means that you’re not stuck as one thing – if you keep talking or writing there’s always a new truth around the corner.
Your discussion of sustenance and growth in this poem is so stunning; with the titular phrase in “Our neighbour used to maintain the tank and the / creek, like pens and books, like friends and divinity, as a source.” What drew you to these concepts? What was the point of origin for this poem?
Thank you! This poem is about a hill above my birthplace, one of the many “sources” in the poem. There has been an issue with the water at this home, which my family still owns, and so I have been doing a lot of work, a lot of amateur plumbing, which I have found very difficult – to get the water flowing to my family home. I found this very metaphorical, haha, and so I wanted to write a poem about it. This was the point of origin of the poem.
I think in these lines you have picked out, the tank and the creek are sources for water, and pens and books, friends and divinity, are sources for making a self. Perhaps the former provides sustenance and the later opportunities for growth, as you say. I’m not sure what drew me to these concepts. I visited my old home with a new person, which precipitated the writing of the poem. There is something hidden in there about a move away from the sustenance of mother’s milk towards water, something about growing up.
What upcoming projects are you working on next and where can our readers find more of your wonderful work?
I’m working on my own poetry collection as well as a zine with a writing group that started last year during lockdown. I’m also writing a review for Cordite Poetry Review. Cordite is a good place to read some of the poems I have published and I also have a chapbook published on the Stale Objects depress website called Megalodon.
Interviewed by Munira Tabassum Ahmed
Hyades Magazine 