Alyssa Moore
My life is more writing than reading these days. It all happens here with a stack of books close by that I can emphatically show off to people on video calls.
Readings
Some poetry that was important to you when you were starting out as a poet and how has that shifted or remained constant for you over time
Chelsey Minnis, Poemland (Wave Books, 2009)
“With this book I have made a very expensive joke . .”
In college, I had a professor who would sort of lob random books over the fence at me to see which things would stick. And they did! Natalie Shapero, Cate Marvin, Roger Reeves, James Tate, Ishmael Reed, Sabrina Orah Mark. And, Chelsey Minnis. Over the fence dropped Poemland but also Bad Bad and Zirconia.
Yes, I was changed. I opened the first book and my mouth went with it. I opened my paper mouth a bit wider, then the memory of reading those ellipses’d poems hovered over me for years as I timidly dabbled with some formal experimentation.
I am fully converted now. No longer just an experimenter. Calling anything and everything a poem. And in this state, last year, I revisited Minnis’s books. It was really beautiful to have an equally religious experience many years later. To feel so shocked, delighted, rocked. I marked the above quote as a potential book epigraph. Because honestly, goals. Who isn’t in the Minnis fan club?
Alice Notley, Descent of Alette (Penguin, 1996)
“Then I / understood” “I was to follow it:” “& so it led me—” “through deep / woods” “& clearings,” “for” “a long while”
I can’t remember how I encountered this one, but it was early on. For too long, I thought I wanted to write a novel? But I didn’t fully understand how that worked. Still don’t. And the whole sentence, paragraph, chapter thing seemed a little . . . impossibly monotonous. So I was struggling with narrative and then descended. Descent was one of my first lessons in how to sustain a voice over the course of a manuscript. Another lesson in formal experimentation. Sure, everyone has read it, but it was formative for me. Was and still is a guiding star of what a project might look like, feel like.
Three books of poetry from the past year
sadé powell, WORDTOMYDEAD (Ugly Duckling Presse, 2023)
This chapbook is unquotable, unexcerptible.
Okay, okay perhaps this is not totally true. I could say “the red slit of a legible day / isalwaysaviolentphenomenon” or “iwantmydesireback” or “DIE OR SUBJECT” but then we’d all be missing the point. These visual poems in this collection stagger and breathe across the page.
I hesitate to call it performance, the icky connotations of that, but this text is performing in the most denotative sense. You will–I did–catch your breath at the curving, eliding, congregating, dispersing. This is a gorgeous, brutal visual work. I am so excited about this poet. I want everyone to read this chapbook. I feel Pritchard in the lines. I accept the instruction on how to be il/legible, numerous. I learn how to be a bit more resistant to my own exploitation.
As a visual poet & editor, I think a lot about the codependencies of form and content. Often poems force you to think about it. Here, in these poems, I don’t think about it. I’m with it. I intuit the happening. It’s happening.
Robyn Schiff, Information Desk: An Epic (Penguin, 2023)
“When someone tells me he’s inspired/ I usually take / it to mean someone else / does his dishes, laundry, /or at the very least cleans under the couch / where the muses visit him / disguised as students.”
I am a proud student of Schiff! Yes, literally–I had the incredible fortune of actually being Robyn’s student at Iowa years ago. (Great experience; would recommend.) But primarily the stamina of her attention and curiosity is endlessly instructive. Somehow, in every poem, there is an archive of the entire world, its links and networks. I’m always surprised by what she methodically unearths and connects. Less idiosyncratic association than a focused drilling down and down and down until she finds the heart, the heat of the thing.
Unrelatedly, once she wrote in another poem “I feel a great pressure positioning / me. It has no regard.’ And I felt that.
m. mick powell, threesome in the last Toyota Celica & other circus tricks (Host Publications, 2023)
“lair where i was laid and parsed, bent to an ominous glow / gardenesque damiana leaves dripped from a wrought gold / ceiling rod, rust and stain removed from the campus carpet”
Last year I read a lot of chapbooks and this one really stayed with me. This chapbook is packed with really lush, queer ass poems. Often haunting, always so decadent. Spiraling through pop culture while stitching together Black femmehood adolescence into its own mythology.
Writings
I want to be inducted into the flow of living
Any day can become better. You can
Start off a convict of constant scrutiny
& gain some substance. You can be hungrier
Than a bedsheet & given a week a cultivated
Weakness and distance concerto adjacent to
Pleasure. Anything is
Within your grasp. I initiated
Initialized came into being plain
Speckled oats sans inheritance
Feed on a white bread plane of thoughts & your hunger
Can market a hunger manual. That tough love cell
A hot air balloon for two. For you or a
Hinge. An economy exists. I have good thoughts
A good life A way to pursue & A hateI
wearied by waiting
In the wings. Those periods ebb
and resurface. What should
Anyone so hungry pursue. Young, perusing
The travel maps, the perpetual range of
Existence, I remember now as a screenshot,
A movement economy came into being.
Dogged path yet emerald. Adjacent to plane.
To take the spot on O.
No rain in the scan
The time incorrect
I could not correct it
Alyssa Moore is an intermedia poet and artist. They hold degrees from Harvard and the Iowa Writers’ Workshop where she was an Iowa Arts Fellow. She was the inaugural winner of Poetry Magazine's Prize for Visual Poetry. She is an editor for Ghost Proposal, a journal for poetry and work outside of traditional notions of genre. Their chapbook WET MEDIA is forthcoming from Tilted House Press.. Alyssa was rhizomed to Etcetera by Kelly Clare.