Good poetry writing advices? Repetition involves repeating a line or a word several times in a poem. Poets use this to emphasize a point, to bring attention to a particular item or theme, to achieve a particular effect, or to provoke an emotional reaction from the reader.
I’ve talked about different kinds of poem content. But what about form? For very experienced poets, formal aspects of poetry can become second nature, so that they sometimes know right away what form they want to use for a poem. This is probably not your situation. My suggestion is to focus first on your subject and get all your ideas down on paper. Then, once you’ve written down your ideas, start experimenting with the shape. You can read about poem structure here. Try organizing your poem in different ways and see what happens. Try shorter lines and longer ones; try breaking the lines in various places and observe the effects.
What are you writing about Rachel Rabbit White? Before, I was constantly running things through the lens of theory and philosophy, creating multiple dramatic voices in the text. I am still thinking about the phenomenology of romance, but the problem of romance is something that’s passed to you as a child, through the family, through the entire world around you. It’s something I’ve always known so intimately, so maybe that’s why in addressing it. There’s a softness, there’s lyricism. I was beating that out of the poems before.
How do you stay political in all the different things that you’re doing? Mine is a politics that comes from care, and mutual aid. I think the poems come back to that core. It’s not this idea of self-care, which I think can be very individualistic, and almost selfish. To me, care is community care. It’s keeping an extra space for friends who end up homeless or in between apartments, which often happens when people are criminalized. There’s ways to use your money to maintain spaces of care. Throwing parties to me is care. All these people come together at my parties, and everyone is intellectual and sexy and smart and [they] have all of these interesting things to say, and the girls end up doing a lot of care for each other when they’re coming down from working too much. A lot of what happens during the parties [that I throw] is people intellectualizing what is happening at work and what their burnout is doing to them and how the proximity to money and wealthy people is fucking with their brain. It’s almost therapeutic care that we do for each other. It’s also care to fuck people who aren’t clients and take back sexual energy. See extra information at Poet Rachel Rabbit White.
I met Rachel Rabbit White last December. Her first collection of poems, Porn Carnival, had just come out the month before. I’d read an article about the release party, about some angel dust, a little cake-sitting, a DJ, and then something like “Rachel Rabbit White is a sex worker.” It all seemed glamorous and no-fucks-ish. And this was about poetry. I first got in touch with Rachel because I was working on a project for a magazine, and I needed contributors. I emailed her from the burner phone I’d bought at Wal-Mart the day after I got out. I told her about the project, said I liked her poems, her journalism. She didn’t act stuck up or anything. We talked about books and shit. It came naturally to us. Still, she had a critic or two: people who thought the book and its promotion were at once decadent and thirsty, people who thought that things so decadently thirsty weren’t right for the culture of poesy, people who thought the hype was on account of the party, not on the merit of the art. Naturally, these were educated people. And they were entitled to their ideas, even if they were wrong.