I had a baby about nine months ago, but I had her very early, three months before I was due. When she was born I felt bombarded by people wanting to come and visit me in the hospital and celebrate her birth. I wasn’t sure if she would live, and yet people were filling my room with all of these celebratory, joyful flowers. I just remember being really angry at people trying to respond to what was happening that way. Of course the reality of the flowers was mostly very sweet, and sometimes even comforting, but the poem started from an anger at people wanting things to be OK and normal and predictable and the way they think they should be. We want things that happen to other people to be normal and OK because then we feel safe, as though bad things couldn’t happen to us. And so a lot of my writing of the poem came from thinking about that desire for normalcy, a desire which I understand, but which often makes me really angry.

Yeah, I wanted the rhyming to have an eerie quality. I love children, I love children’s literature, children’s culture and I’m fascinated by the darkness of childhood. I’m interested in how we want childhood experiences to be purely innocent, yet we can almost resent it when they aren’t. I also love horror movies, which often play on that darkness. A horror movie will have an innocent childhood moment which starts placidly, only to be upset or undermined – a weird sound will come in, or a disturbing image. I wanted the half rhyme in the poem to have a similar impact, to give the sense of something being slightly wrong.

I should give credit for the ‘tiny vixen’ to my friend Heidi Julavits, a fiction writer, who wrote me an email when my daughter was born, describing her as a tiny vixen. That description gave me solace for some reason, perhaps because it seemed not to describe a totally out of control event, but a situation where the baby has some intent, where the universe has given her some power. So I really loved that. But in general I’ve learnt (and I could probably have predicted this, but couldn’t have totally understood until I experienced it) that with many life events that connect us to society – weddings, funerals, and especially some forms of motherhood – there’s an element of performance. You are expected to perform your devotion, perform your love, perform your caretaking and perform your protection. You have to show that your instincts are constantly about caring for your baby. That came out in the poem, how false all that performance is, because true love bonds are so private that they actually cannot be performed. Anything you put out to illustrate them is a conscious choice, it can’t represent the real experience, which is silent and is meant to be preserved in its mystery.

Something I also couldn’t truly understand until I experienced it is that there is something magical about the fact that a person can’t be generalised. Often people want to make everybody’s experience have this shared trajectory of events, because we’re all going through the path of being human together. So: this will happen to you and your baby at 5 months, this will happen at 6 months, etc. That scientific approach can be very helpful, and yet it doesn’t capture the magical fact that each person has a very specific spark, that they are capable of doing something totally new. Even though I deeply respect history, I have always been very reverent of the new, believing that it can change everything, that it can create difference. I love that idea. It isn’t so important that it’s my baby, more that any baby, any new person is an individual and has the potential to do wonderful, unexpected things.

Yeah, and in some ways that was a necessity. It’s hard to approach the things that happen to me in a way that society makes obligatory without feeling very fenced in. So it makes sense that I’d want to try and approach motherhood differently in my poems.

It was a conscious choice. When I started writing poems, especially whilst studying for my MFA, I didn’t celebrate emotion in my work but tried to cover it up, couch it in fake language constructions. That was partly because I’d had certain experiences talking to fellow poets and teachers who said that emotion and emotional life within poetry is bad poetry, and there had been all sorts of ways that my education in poetry had sought to convey that. I remember talking to a professor in college, and he asked me who my favourite poet was. I said Sylvia Plath and he said, ‘I detest her pathos.’ I remember thinking, ‘So, if I want to appeal to this revered older male poet, I should take away any sort of emotional life, or make it not obvious…’

Yeah, find a way to hide it, show my chops through how I could create language, because people come to poetry for the beauty of ornamental language and not for emotion. However, right after I finished my MFA I was doing a lot of teaching, a lot, and I had to teach people who weren’t necessarily empathetic audiences to how I spoke, to the ‘poetic’ or to me as a poet. So I had to think about how to convey information to people in a way that wouldn’t withhold access to what I was trying to say, or what I was trying to show. You may be preaching a really good word, but if no one understands then what’s the point? So I made a conscious choice at the language level that that’s the way I wanted to construct the poems. I’ve felt tiny hints of frustration since then because sometimes I’ve had criticism – some of which may be mired in misogyny, but some of which may be valid – that calls my way of writing childlike, or stupid, or without intent. That’s not a big suffering, but there have still been some annoying, fly-buzzing aspects to some of those comments. But I’m still really glad that I made that choice.

That’s very related, and all the poets who have told me they don’t like Plath up until this point do happen to be men. I’m sure, though, that there are women who don’t like her poems. Maybe I just don’t meet them that often.

I do feel a vindication when particular types of people, the exact people you’d expect, say they don’t like her. Also I do think that overall people haven’t read her in the right way yet. It might take 100, 200 years for us to really get a perspective on her sheer talent as a poet, what’s happening in her poems, in a fair way. I’m actually teaching a course this semester called ‘Beyond Confession’, looking at Plath and Sexton and also Bernadette Mayer, Audre Lorde, Bhanu Kapil, Maggie Nelson and lots of others, through a radical feminist lens. I’ve always felt that making those connections was part of my life’s work. In fact I used to feel like it was my life’s work to save her – to save Plath! I know that probably sounds really stupid, but I wanted to protect her, to create some opening in which people could read her work seriously. Which is a really arrogant thing to say, that I could try to save someone who’s given me so much. But I felt a protectiveness, and that circle of protectiveness has now extended to other poets. But she’ll always be my main squeeze in that way.

I don’t feel as negative about it as some other things people could say about me. I understand that when you’re writing a review you often have to be quite pat, and think in terms which are very generalised. Especially now that most reviews are online, and you only have, like, five seconds to get somebody’s attention, you need terms they can relate to. But it does still feel like we’re putting something we don’t totally understand under the ‘confessional’ label, and to me it feels very old and tired and boring.

I think that great strides have been made in the ways we think about emotions, the ways we think about sadness. There’s nothing really wrong with talk shows like Dr Phil that talk about feelings and give people a lifeline: ‘I was a drug addict but then Dr Phil told me to go to therapy and I feel better.’ That can be really positive. But I do think that it does reduce these experiences in a way that doesn’t take into account what’s dangerous, what’s universal within them. We talk about Sylva Plath and say, ‘Oh, she was this crazy person, she committed suicide while her children were in the next room, I would never do that, what a lunatic.’ What we don’t realise is that anyone could go down the path of doing really anything – any action that a human has done we’re all capable of. It’s not really that she’s crazy; we’re all crazy. We’re all capable of that, and facing that is really facing what it means to be human. So I do think there are problems when we talk about sadness, especially in internet culture, where we write a status update saying ‘I’m sad,’ wanting everyone to give all of this fake love, but no one is really there helping with the sadness. I can go into the Coliseum and say ‘I’m sad’ and all these people may cheer, but they’re not going to be there tomorrow to actually help with what that means.

Yes, but I want my poems to be a space where people can feel an actual deep care, where they can feel like they have a place to go that is beyond getting a status like. I want my poems to be like a really good friend that’s there for you every time you want them to be. If you create a poem which you are lucky enough to be able to get published somewhere that is accessible for readers, then when a person comes along and needs you as this friend, you’re there. And like any good friends, you’re not afraid of what could happen between you, whether that’s joy or sadness.

I don’t think of it exactly as myself, as I’m sitting here now, but as a persona, which may have elements from me but is a character. But I do like the gesture, from O’Hara and Bernadette Mayer, of using your own name, because it’s disarming. It’s a way of saying, ‘I am not this separate person in society, a POET. I have one name, just like you.’ It’s meant to make the reader feel more comfortable.

The reader is really, really a person to me. I mean, I could be writing to a robot, if they’re capable of reading, and if we get to a place in the future where that’s possible that would be wonderful, but I can’t really conceive of that. So for now the reader is actually a person – no matter what time they’re reading in they have some element like me, even if they have very different lives and seem very different. We can still share the emotions that poetry gives us access to.

Hopefully everyone at school has some sort of language education, or at least they are speaking and learning how to write in some form, and so language is this almost universal way of communicating. Because we’re always talking, because we spend so much of our time constructing our emotions and thoughts through words, poetry can be a special place to make connections that everyone can experience. I really do think that everyone writes poetry or wants to write poetry. I did research years ago in a set of public schools – I was sitting in science classrooms and there were so many students there, writing poems in class. It was wonderful to see that I was not special, that so many people were using poetry to process what was happening to them. It’s a source we can really tap into.

I don’t know if I can. I’ve always deeply blamed our education system, because I do think there’s elitism at play that wants to make not only poetry, but all the arts very specialised past a certain point of development. Certainly in high school only the ‘smart’ children (‘smart’ of course being so mired in other things: socio-economic situation, race, and class) – only those kids are privy to learning how to ‘unpack’ a poem, how to really tackle poem and conquer it, because their intellect is made to seem so specialised. We don’t, especially in the US, want to look at poetry as something every student is capable of, because that would be dangerous to those who control the school systems. All students, regardless of their backgrounds, would realise that they are capable of speaking very well; that there are not certain individuals who control what constitutes good language. They would realise that language is not just this agreed upon set of constructed ideas, that it’s not an MLA citation or a five-paragraph essay, that everyone can create new and beautiful language. So it is very frustrating to me when people say, ‘I don’t like poetry,’ or, ‘I don’t understand it,’ because all of that seems the fault of a system that doesn’t want to give poetry its power, and that doesn’t want to give people their power either.

Yeah, because then I think that the people who get to define what ‘good’ poetry is will be at a great disadvantage. Because the ways they define it are not really based on poetry at all.

As if when you have the key to the form you can understand the poem, and it becomes totally vulnerable to your intellect!

Yes. It’s aesthetic logic, aesthetic understanding – you’ve taken in something and something has changed within you. That may not be obvious, it may not manifest itself for months or years, but it’s a form of understanding. Especially in educational systems, that kind of aesthetic understanding is very dangerous, because it can’t be quantified or formally understood. It’s very hard to explain how a poem changed you, how a painting changed you. You might not be able to say for years.

Yes, I was. I had been up until this point been working, or more so thinking, of my next book as something called The Moon Book. I thought that it might function much like an occult text, something like The Rainbow Book (edited by F. Lanier Graham and published by Shambhala in 1975), which is a collection of texts devoted to thinking of the possibilities of the colour spectrum. So, when I wrote this poem, I was thinking that: ok, I am writing a book with poems all about the moon in certain ways. And of course, I was also thinking of that rule people often promote in poetry workshops –don’t use the moon in a poem, it’s been done! I’ve always wanted to play with words or ideas that people have felt were overused or couldn’t be done well anymore. I’m not sure if this poem is a success in that regard, but all of these notions are the light of the moon that fell over my working of the poem.

Yes! My favourite movie ever is The Shining, and that movie – obviously being an occult text too, in its own way – deals with the backwards elegantly and beautifully. When Jack Torrance visits the ghost of a murdered woman in Room 237, after she starts running after him, he backs away and even steps backwards out into the hallway as he’s leaving the room. When Jack comes at his wife abusively down the set of stairs in the grand room of the hotel, she walks backwards down the stars, trying to swing at him and defend herself. When his son is trying to get away from him near the end of the movie – as Jack has tried to kill him and his mother – in the snowy maze he walks backwards, tracing his steps backwards through the snow. And then of course there are all of those moments in Twin Peaks, where the characters speak backwards and make a kind of magic of regular speech. I think I was thinking of these sorts of images and scenes when I wrote the poem, because the poem is so much about the trauma of birth, and when I gave birth it had a particular air of trauma, and produced in me the act of replaying certain scenes over and over again, almost as if one could go back in time and make them play out in another way. The backwards is always about the power of where memory and the imagination coincide – how when you exist in a place of no atmosphere, you see what could have been and what is all at once.

Yes, I think so and I hope so. I’ve always been tied in lots of ways to the idea of witchcraft and how it is and is not misogynist to call a female poet a witch (or any female for that matter). I worship Alice Notley, and she’s a poet who seems to have endless insight into the intersection of the occult, poetry, and what it’s like to be a female in the world. I’ve been obsessed lately with the idea of the infinite circle and the goddess, and I believe the poem explores these ideas, as will the book it’ll be in.

Yes. A big reason is that one of my favourite books has always been Maggie Nelson’s Bluets, in which she explores how blue is a kind of passionate colour, one that is not of the calm and tranquil forgiving ocean, but one that is of the hottest kind of feeling, and I think this kind of aim is forever interesting. Not only did her book change my ideas of blue and the potential of blue as a colour, but it made me consider how all colours can be beyond the ways we think of them. So I think I was exploring this idea of inverted associations of colour in this poem. I was also thinking of the bili light, which is a light therapy tool often given to newborn babies with jaundice. It has such an unearthly glow. What does it mean for a new life to bathe within this light? That question is what my poem is about.

Colour, for me, is the reason to read and write poetry. If I had any sort of talent in visual art, I would love to be a visual artist, because it is the visual field that holds excitement for me, more than words do. Thank you so much for mentioning Stevens, as his work is so key to the ways in which I consider using colour in my poems. His poems are paintings and that’s what I want my poems to be as well.

I think that language happens at the very first – like, a line will seem ‘poem-like’ and I will think to record it, and then I will have a set of images that feel necessary to the poem, and I will attempt to describe them. Subject matter is often of no interest to me, but just sort of happens. I wish I could be more keyed into it, as I know that is mostly what makes writing important to an audience beyond the traditional poetry readership. But for me, when I write a book of poems I am making an album or a visual piece, and the subject itself seems ten steps beyond everything else.