By-Natalie Solmer

NS: I have to start with the ‘at what age did you know you wanted to be a writer?’ question. I didn’t find the answer to that in any of your interviews that I read; however, I did see something about you knowing how to play piano! I was also wondering if you ever wanted to be a musician, particularly because music is so important to your life, and because so many writers before they were writers (including myself) go through a phase of wanting to be musicians.

HA: I think I kind of always knew I enjoyed writing. My mother wrote, and my house was one where reading was prioritized from a really early age. I think my siblings and I were consistently reading above our expected reading level. I also knew that I enjoyed writing as a way to kind of poke at the hive of questions that I consistently turned over internally, be it about music or sports or the world in general. I didn’t really think any of this would lead to a career path in writing, but I knew that I liked anything that helped me make sense of a world that I often felt was moving too quickly for me to engage with in the way I wanted to. Writing was my way of trying to press pause on the things that excited me, before they breezed past. I think in my early 20s, I began to pursue this idea of writing as something that could sustain a life and career for me, but I had no idea what that looked like. I was a music critic before I was a poet, so I was largely shouting into a void about the things I loved and enjoying whatever echoes danced back. I was speaking to no one at first, and that was really satisfying. I think there’s something to be said about learning to write about your passions with few people watching. It allows for someone to fail forward, in a way that’s harder for writers to do now.

I was once in a short-lived band. I played keys and wrote the songs. We broke up halfway during our first and only show, due to a disagreement over creative differences between the drummer and bassist. We had a good run. I’m hoping for the reunion tour someday. Maybe we’ll get through a whole show.

HA: Jessica Hopper has been vital to my growth as a music writer. Lester Bangs really laid groundwork for me, as far as learning how to write about music as a fan first. Terrance Hayes, William Evans, Scott Woods — these were all poets who I looked to at the earliest stages of my writing. I do think that the mentors I feel most close to and involved with are my direct peers. I understand why this is, but so often the mentorship model is based off of this hierarchical structure, where someone is looking up to/at another writer. And I’m with that and have benefited from that in my life and career. But I’m at a point now where I find myself most excited about looking to the writers beside me. The ones who have endured some of the same things I’ve endured at the same time I’m enduring them. A few weeks ago, I was at this self-fashioned retreat with Angel Nafis, Fatimah Asghar, Kaveh Akbar, and Safia Elhillo. And it dawned on me that these are some of the many peers I look to for direct guidance. Not only in my work, but also in my life. I feel like we are all linked by our being on this path together in this particular moment in American Letters. And so, it seems that these are the people who can help me best claw through my fears, anxieties, my language for this mess of a world. I want those beside me as my mentors now, because those are the people who know that, together, we can reshape the canon we’ve been sold for so long. And they want me there at that finish line as much as I want them there.

HA: Well, I think a major thing is that gentrification is structural and generational, you know? It is hard to articulate that in a book of poems, and so some of that failure is entirely on me. But I hate that the talk of gentrification still centers on the material aspects of it. Yes, it is definitely about buildings and homes and stores and all of that. But what I was trying to hone in on in the book is the idea that it is even more about people. And not just one person, but potentially an entire lineage of people. To be displaced is to cause a disruption in lineage, and to have your former neighborhood become illegible to you is a disruption in your understanding of place. Those things reach beyond the material aspects of gentrification. That impact reverberates, and it is hard to track with that in a single collection of poems. I don’t really feel like I failed, but I do think that if I could do it again, I would try and trust myself more.

HA: I got a lot of joy out of editing myself into restraint. Then again, I suppose becoming immersed in serial poems isn’t exactly restraint, it’s just a different form of excess. I think it all became easier for me when I realized that the same idea can live in many different ways. What has really changed is my thinking around production, and what it means to produce one’s way out of a curiosity. There’s labor in that for me that sometimes extends beyond the single poem. I want to do justice to all of my ridiculous excitements, and I don’t know if that justice can be or should be tied to writing a single poem, or writing two poems. I got better when I stopped looking for answers as a conclusion. I think there are many ways to fulfill artistic questioning that don’t end in answers, but that end in a satisfaction with the exploration. I had to learn to restrain myself in how I overturned rocks in my writing, and I had to learn to restrain myself when being honest about what I was actually looking for in that overturning. I’m still using far too much language, probably. I’m still stretching sentences beyond their most logical stopping point. But the biggest shift in my writing is that I’ve learned how to make better use of the sprawling. A weapon can be a tool, and a tool can be a weapon. When I’m chasing these poems about flowers, for example. I realized before starting them that I knew very little about flowers. But I didn’t start writing the poems to (only) gain some deeper intelligence about flowers. I started writing the poems to find out all of the different ways flowers could help me unravel several other things rattling around in my head. Sure, I maybe know a little more about flowers than I did when I started, but I’m really just shaking a tree until all of the fruit is at my feet, and then I’m trying to make as many uses of the fruit as possible.

HA: So, I think so much of my work is, or at least has been inextricably linked to Fall Out Boy, for better or worse. And, at its most base level, the title comes from the opening line in the Fall Out Boy song “Don’t You Know Who I Think I Am,” from their album Infinity on High. The full line is: “Penny for your thoughts / but a dollar for your insights / or a fortune for your disaster.” There’s much more to it than that, of course. But I’m always struck by how Infinity on High, as an album feels now, compared to where the band is. It was their third album, released in 2007. I have little interest in the album that makes a band famous, and all of the interest in the album that comes after the album that makes a band famous. Infinity on High is this really long meditation on what it is to desire fame, but not want to be famous. Especially for a band like them, that came from a scene where the performance of closeness and intimacy with fans was a type of currency. It was a brief era for them, before they got very comfortable with their status, but I thought it was refreshing and interesting to see a music group wrestling with those concepts as they were happening to them. Especially on an album that, like, literally had Jay Z on its intro.

Beyond that, I was thinking a lot about heartbreak, fear, anxiety, and loneliness and how there can be a currency to the articulation of those feelings. Even in my attempts to test the great expanse and see if I am not alone in my particular agony, there is a reward for that. The series of Marvin Gaye poems existed in the book first, because I was thinking about his album Here, My Dear. It was an album he made in the late 70s, and it was wrapped up in his divorce proceedings. He was getting divorced from Anna Gordy — the older sister of his boss, Berry Gordy. And as a part of the settlement, he was instructed to pay her half of whatever royalties he made from his next Motown album. So he made this album, Here, My Dear which is over seventy minutes of mid-tempo emotional exhaustion. Marvin, fighting through his own rage, and heartbreak, and self-pity. It was a failure when it came out, both critically and commercially. The story goes that he went into the album recording process just wanting to make anything to get through the legal process of his divorce, but then became consumed by making the project one of the best. It really made me think about what it is to be publicly sad, and to use that sadness to propel you towards some brand of prosperity. I was really heartbroken when I sat down to write the first few poems in this book. And as I worked my way through them, my life drastically shifted in ways I was unprepared for and had to learn to keep up with. It felt like I was writing my way out of an older, sadder version of myself and into a newer, slightly less sadder version. Here, My Dear wasn’t valued until after Marvin was dead, which is the way of it, I suppose. But it also made me think about cost. Always, at what cost.

HA: I like to think more about revision now as a sonic practice, and a sonic exercise. I came into poetry through slam, which meant that I came into poetry in a space where I was consistently reading my work out loud and being made very aware of how it sounded coming out of my mouth. This is a great editing tool that I didn’t appreciate until now. The fact that each word can be its own type of instrument tells me that words make different sounds when paired with other words, and I’m really eager to take advantage of that, always. Sure, I’m more into writing short and editing into length than I used to be. But really, I’m thinking about lines on a language level now. I’m structuring my poems as I would make a musical arrangement. I’m looking at them and wondering how I can add more bass to certain parts, or how I can add more wind to a crescendo. I feel that I am tasked with building arrangements that serve the needs of the poem, from a sonic standpoint. Every poet is a bandleader. We write the instruments first, and then we spend our revision time placing them where we believe they belong. That’s what excites me now.