Poet, activist, and educator Anthony Thomas Lombardi absolutely slays the page in his debut collection murmurations from YesYes books. It is a collection steeped in survival and song—with the iconic Amy Winehouse at its center, the patron saint of the collection, Lombardi revels in variations of doomed beauty, over and over, until there is nothing left but sacred stain.

And love. Lombardi loves right into rapture.

If you know Toney, you know he lives and breathes lyric, and every conversation with him is wildly impassioned. His poems are no different. Lombardi goes hard. In this conversation, Toney and I chop it up about recovery, community, lyrical haunts, pedagogy, Nas, the MFA machine, and more. Dive in, and buy the book, “if you’re lucky, it will bring you to your knees.”

Note: This interview was conducted over video call and edited for clarity.

Adele Elise Williams (AEW): I wanted to start with the first thing I thought of; something no one has really asked me. When I was talking with Kate Sweeney for Michigan Quarterly Review about Wager (University of Arkansas Press 2024), I had the opportunity near the end of our conversation to talk about this: why my first book was so much bigger than just that. I suspect it's similar for you. 

It's a huge question. It's kind of a cheesy question, but what does this first book, murmurations, mean to you personally, and “professionally” (of course the answers there are more obvious)? 

… This specific collection, this time in your life … What does it mean? 

Anthony Thomas Lombardi (ATL): That’s a question with so many layers. I think it means different things to you throughout time and so we're talking about a moment right now, you're asking about a moment, right? It could have been different to me two years ago. It's going to be different two years from now. 

I think this book is as close as I was able to get to capturing what it was like navigating through this chaotic mess of a life I lived for so long. I don’t even remember my twenties, I literally don't remember probably 80-to-85% because I was blackout every single day. Everything that I remember, I don't remember—I know through somebody telling me. This is me trying to retake the reins because it's not always important what the truth is—not in poetry. Sometimes not in real life, too.

A human’s recollection is really flawed. It's very unreliable. What we do remember isn't what happened. We're remembering the way we wanted it to be or the way trauma is forcing us to engage with it. That's the important part of it: the truth exists only insofar as it is able to take us. I wanted to see how far it would take me. How deep I could dig into this sprawling time in my life, back to my childhood, where a lot of these everything is always rooted.

AEW: The Twelve Steps—we are taught these things as a literal process, though of course they abstract themselves. To think of them as emotional or more figurative defies their established linearity. Each step builds. Where you begin and end is very intentional, and you can't mix and match the order of the steps.

I believe this book could be reordered and make similar meaning(s) via its emotional trajectory. So it's interesting to think of applying or mapping the Twelve Step framework onto it. For what purpose, then, do these steps serve the book? 

ATL: Here's the real thing: I never finished the Twelve Steps. I still haven't. My sponsor died when I was doing Step Four. I haven't really been able to return to them. murmurations is me taking the Steps and applying my own process to them, and not the edicts that are followed in the program, right? I'm in and out of the program, it's not a thing that affects my life much, but I do have other communities in recovery that have been helpful to me, even being in dialogue with you and other poets who orbit this kind of thing that we try to grapple with. Whether it's addiction or the larger thing around it, or what's underneath it, or the familial aspect or the cultural aspect or whatever it might be.

I've gotten more out of that than I've gotten in the rooms. Which isn't to say that I didn't get anything out of the rooms, I did. My life is incalculably better because I met my sponsor. I dread a world in which I did not meet him. I was able to do so much because of him, but now that I'm trying to put it together—there's no way you could put it together in order. There's no linearity.

This is the emotional mess of recovery. My mess. Maybe it's one step forward, two steps back. Maybe you go through this thing here and it's traumatic, and then you overcome it in the next one. But then you come right back around and you have to … it's a mess. Recovery is a mess.

AEW: And people don't want to talk about that. 

ATL: No, they want it to be this clean and clear thing.

AEW: And people do stay sober and recover without the Twelve Steps. All the time. I mean, I couldn't have. To relate, I would not be alive without entering the Twelve Step program, like 100%, but here and now, that is not how I maintain any sense of recovery or sobriety. 

ATL: You get what you can from it. It's like anything in life, you get what you can and move forward with it. Now I have different tools and it's not just poetry. It's my life. It's my partner. It's my friends. It's my community. It's the other things that I'm writing. It's the dead people from my life. This book was finished before the death of multiple people in my life who all died within a very short span of time because of their addictions. This book is about me and my dead. I learned more from all that than I did with the program.

AEW: Because you brought it up and it's something I know about you: You have your communities. That is especially thorny for extroverted introverts, people like us that are really sociable, but are kind of meant to be alone and lonely. So who do you call upon? Who is your community? Who's in your canon? Tangible and not.

ATL: Again, the dead are a big part of our community. People like my sponsor, my best friend, my mother, … cousins and friends and uncles, an aunt. They're all dead, but they're still here with me every day. I frequent poetry spaces but otherwise I don't really leave the house for much.

In those spaces I am a ball of energy and I am wired and people know me as this excitable person, but I come home and I'm not like that. I have the community that I engage with there and I have the community that I engage with when I'm at home. As far as outside of the sphere of my individuation, I teach for Brooklyn Poets and they're my family. 

AEW: Yeah, They take good care of you. 

ATL: Yeah! In my gratitude section, I tell them they're my family. First and foremost. I ride for them, my students especially. I would kill for my students and they know that's true. They mean the world to me. When I enter these spaces, I can feel that love. I could go anywhere at any poetry event in New York and I feel that love. 

AEW: Yeah, it's the best.

ATL: It's a welcoming thing and it's not even a popularity thing. It's more like I'm a Frank O'Hara man-about-town kind of guy and I just go to all of the things. If you go to the things, sooner or later you’re going to know everybody. So there are different layers to that, whether it's the strength or the longevity of it. There are people that I've known for a long time. There are people that I met last week and I love them. That is particularly important to me and the book says it. And the dead people in my life are my foundation.

But my canon—it's the people on the back of my book. I got these blurbs from these people for a reason. There are folks like Hala Alyan, who has been here since day one. The last poem in this book, “self-portrait as murmuration,” was the first poem I wrote and it was Hala who helped me finish it, and her reading series, Kan Yama Kan, started in 2020 and I've been helping her with it since the very first day, which also means that I was reading open mics it throughout. I honed my skills at those open mics with other folks from my generation, with my friends. Now we all have books out and we all wrote our books at those open mics. When my mom died, I went straight to Hala’s backyard with all my bags from the funeral because I needed home.

Hanif Abdurraqib has been an incredible mentor to me. Kaveh Akbar has been an incredible mentor to me. Megan Fernandes has been such a good friend; I mean, we've read from here to Paris together. She's the first one who got her hands on my book and handed it off to Tin House to see if they would take it. I am only what I am because of the hands of these people. They have shaped me in indelible ways. It's exciting in a way to be like, well, who's that going to be next week? Who will we fall into orbit with? 

AEW: I'm thinking of collapsing the distance between our heroes, our muses, our inspiration from our dead to our canon. You (largely) haven't mentioned anyone you don't know personally, which I think is important for a sense of practicality. I think it also speaks to the literary community in a wonderful way, to sing the praises of the people that inspired us and then support us. That's ideal. That's how it should go.

Maybe a tackier question, because I'm a tacky bitch: Where have you not been supported or have felt alienated? This is something I think about because I came to artmaking as an outcast in many capacities, and then was like, “Oh, it's more of the same thing.” There is a hierarchy in the literary community. People don't want to say that and not that you need to call anything/anyone out specifically (unless you want to and I know you would, ha!), but I can think of where I've been failed, sometimes by individuals but mainly by structures—academia, presses, publishing houses…

Anyway, I don't know if you want to speak to any of that. 

ATL: I’m well known in my communities, especially Brooklyn Poets, as the anti-MFA guy. My students will be like, “Hey, can you write me like a rec letter? But it's for an MFA program. Don't hate me!” I'm like, “I don't hate you. I hate the program!” I understand some people have to play the game. I'm not kicking anybody for that. Academia for sure, though. I stopped going to school in seventh grade. I learned everything from music, from the streets, from community. Academia, at every turn, makes things difficult purposefully so that they could shed the people that they don't want in their inner sanctum.

I taught a couple of years at Borough of Manhattan Community College and I was told by the higher-ups, from the powers that be—this was never put on paper—I was given an ultimatum: that I could stop teaching Palestinian literature and resistance…

AEW: I remember this. 

ATL: …or I could walk, yeah. And I walked. That's academia. That was them having my back. I had sent emails nobody responded to, because they didn't want a paper trail. The classes there were hit or miss. Some of the classes, the kids just didn't give a fuck, and I don’t really blame them. I taught a David Lynch film class, which was really cool and those kids were really engaged. There was actually an English Comp 2 class that I taught that was the best class I've ever taught my entire life. 

AEW: Oh, that's good to hear.

ATL: I just deconstructed everything that they were doing. Y'all get an A. We’re engaging with this text this week, we're reading this, write 200 words about it. I don't care how lucid it is. I don't care if there's grammar or punctuation, I don't care if you come to any kind of realizations, just make sure that you have the minimum amount of language so that I could have something from you and A, A, A, A, A. Once you do that they start getting really into what you're doing, what they're learning, because they're not pressured or stressed about grades. So I'm teaching them Ghostface Killah, and they're all about it. I'm teaching them Noor Hindi, and they're all about it. Those are spaces where it wasn't the academia, it was me deconstructing the academia that led to that bond. It was me having to find ways around it.

That entrenched me further into the communities I’m in now. I got  this book deal without any institutional support. I just wrote that shit, somebody read it, and they liked it. I did it the old fashioned way. I didn't need a fucking MFA. I didn't need a fucking degree. I didn't need a college to tell me I was good enough. I needed my people around me to love me and support me—that's it. 

AEW: It's such a fucking bummer that the old fashioned way—which for me was DIY punk rock, those are my roots—of creative success, however you define that, is hard to come by these days. For me, that success would be a book. It's really, really hard to achieve without an “approved” literary network.

ATL: You know, like Etheridge Knight didn't go to an MFA program, right? 

AEW: Right, exactly. 

ATL: …and everybody who's anybody nowadays has an MFA. The thing that's actually really mind-boggling and infuriating is that when people hear I don't have past a seventh grade education, they’re like, “oh, then how do you write that?” As if there aren't other modes of education and academia is responsible for your talent. Are you kidding me? I learned to write from rap.

AEW: YES.

ATL: I grew up in the projects. And you know what everybody was playing on every stoop, out every window? Jay-Z, Biggie. I absorbed that every single day. Nas, especially, Illmatic. Illmatic has been more influential on me than every other poet combined.

AEW: I'll never forget. I first got it on tape. Those are formative lyrical moments for me. My formative lyric moments are rap, and then like, Ani DiFranco and Tori Amos. That's it. There was no “poet” to be found for a while.

ATL: No, the musicians were the poets. I don't do differentiation. There's such a playfulness with language that isn't in the MFA-driven world where every book you feel a thousand different fingerprints. Whereas those lines were honed on the streets, they were honed in their bedrooms and mirrors. Those were the people I learned from. There's a reason people tell me that my work is musical. It's because I write like a rapper writes. 

AEW: Everything's out loud. 

ATL: Everything's to the beat in my head. I write to that beat and if something isn't right on that beat … I am a very obsessive editor and I edit towards that. When I say I learned from rap, it isn't some blanket statement about a culture I learned from. No, I very legitimately, literally learned line for line how to write from rappers. And Kurt Cobain and Bob Dylan.

AEW: Bob Dylan, man.

ATL: Bob Dylan directed me towards Rimbaud and Rimbaud is the reason I'm here. He was the first poet I fell in love with. He's the reason that I'm actually writing poetry right now—if I didn't encounter Arthur Rimbaud, I probably would have failed at being a rapper. We could thank Rimbaud for bringing me into a different space.

AEW: You talked about relentlessly editing. And when we started this conversation, you emphasized the importance of raw generation. This is something I think about all the time and I'm sure you do too, not only as a writer but as a teacher. For your own practice, what is the importance of revision and editing? 

Does a typical poem go through a shit ton of revisions? Do you have poems in this book that are just like, that's the way that poem came out? Do you think a good writer has to revise—what’s the quote, “Revising is where good writing happens?” What are your thoughts? 

ATL: I kind of believe in that. Never ever has a poem come out fully. That doesn't happen. It's like you're vomiting something onto the page. Are you just gonna leave that vomit? You need to clean it up a little bit. Even when I write a poem and I think no, this is great. You wake up the next day and you're like, no, no, no. Poetry writing needs time. It needs time! 

I'm really disciplined. If I'm working on a poem or two, I wake up every day earlier than I normally would and I treat it like a job. I spend six to eight hours, sometimes ten, as much as it takes and I do that daily until it feels done and then I could step away from it for a week and then come back to it.

I write towards musicality. I write towards the unknown. I don't want anything in my poems to be familiar. What's the point of that? If I write an image that's familiar it's one of two things, either it’s gotta get cut because it's repeating an idea, or it's something that's threaded through different poems that needs to exist. That kind of repetition is like an album for me. I write poems like they’re albums. I learned from music and I started off as a music writer. That's how I write.

AEW: Yeah, what's your writing practice?

ATL: Every day, every day, every day, but it's not the thing, like, “write every day.” I think that's bullshit and I think people who don't write every day are still as much poets. It's just not their process. Everybody has a different process. if you're writing every day just because somebody's telling you to write every day, then you're just producing a product and you're doing it to have a product. It is capitalism, educator’s capitalism: write every day because the only time you're writing is when fingers are to keyboards or pens are to paper, and that's just not true.

We're writing right now as we're talking. We write as we read, as we sleep, as we dream. I didn't used to be like this, but for three years I couldn't stop writing. It's not just poetry; I've written 600 pages of a memoir. That was a thing where I sat down every day for 12 hours, every day for a month and a half. Didn't break, didn't have a social life, didn't do anything. I sat and wrote 12 hours a day. I do that with poems. This morning I just woke up and was like, “You know what? I'm gonna write a prose poem, it's been a minute,” and I wrote three prose poems. I would say over the past month or two I've written 30 poems and they just keep coming. Whether or not they’re good …

AEW: You have all this material. I can only imagine. This is a big book and then you had to streamline this project. How did it materialize? Did you know going in that Amy Winehouse would be such a throughline? Did you know the organization or did you just have 300 poems to whittle down? How did you get here?

This is a selfish question. I'm always interested in how people get to a book.

ATL: It’s an interesting question, especially for writers because we all have our different access points. It's fun to see where people are similar and how they're different. As with anything I write, I don't plan shit. One foot in front of the other into the black, that's it. That's how I write anything. We don't choose what we write. Do you ever sit down and think, “I'm gonna write about this thing?” That's not how writing works.

AEW: Dude—the poet will remain nameless. But it was like a year ago. I was at an artist talk or something, and the poet was talking about mapping out the entire book and then writing the poems to fill the book. And this is a published poet, someone we both know. I was just like, “Ewwwww.” 

ATL: I don't even go into it knowing the first line of a poem! 

AEW: I forgot about that until now; it blew my mind. 

ATL: If you didn't hear that, we would say something like that as a joke.

AEW: Right, because it’s so ridiculous.

ATL: It's so terrible! No, I sit down and I just write. Whatever comes out of me comes out of me. I'm making it sound easier than it is, but I'm a really hard-working writer and I'm not afraid to say that. I'm not patting my back, I'm just not gonna be falsely humble. I am the hardest working writer I know. 

I sit down all the time and I fucking do the work and I don't do it for the product, I do it because there's something fucking hungry and growing in me and I can't not write. I'm writing because it means something. It's coming out of me because it means something.

I spent a lot of years working very hard on developing a connection, a relationship between me and my subconscious—which is never ever gonna be anything that you could truly get your hands around or know is happening—but you know when it's happening and how to wrangle it once it gets out.

I learned that not from poets; I learned this from David Lynch. Filmmakers like Scorcesse. A lot of filmmakers are just as influential, if not more Influential for me, than poets. I just trust my subconscious. I let the shit come out and then I shape it.

Everything ends up getting made within the idea of being part of something else: series, books. It’s like an album, a bunch of songs you can put into an album. You write a bunch of songs and eventually you're like, “oh these work together.”

I was writing about musicians who were addicts or outcasts in some way and they died because of it. That was a very obvious throughline for the book. I was obsessed with Amy when Back to Black came out and I followed her career. 

AEW: And it was like a wrap for you.

ATL: Yeah, that record was one of the very few records like Illmatic where every single time I listen to it, it sounds good. Every single time. I was obsessed with that record but then I also watched the world be ruthlessly cruel to her. It really broke my heart. It just shattered me every day seeing people treat her like that, especially since I lived in a family of addicts. 

I didn't know I was an addict at the time. I was a kid. I didn't touch booze or a drug until I was, I don't know, 18, then once I did I was off to the races.

AEW: Yeah, that was like me. I went from zero to sixty.

ATL: Exactly. When she died, I was in the blooming phase of my alcoholism and drug addiction. That's when I was starting to really hit the skids. There's an arc of falling in love, seeing somebody treated that way—again, I didn't know that I was an addict, but I was treated like that later. That kind of camaraderie you feel with somebody that you don't know is so powerful. It's the subconscious. I subconsciously knew that Amy was somebody who was kindred to me. I didn't know it at the time. 

Years later, I can't remember if I watched the documentary because I wrote the poem or the other way around. I put off that documentary for so long because I knew it was gonna destroy me. I can't even tell you how much it ripped me apart. I don't know if I've ever cried harder in my life. After that, I wrote one poem that was based on a dream where I was quarantining with her. Then they just kept coming. They didn't stop.

Everything came together very organically and needed some harnessing here and there: let's pull this here, cut this here. I've come to accept that the series isn't over and it's never going to be over. Two months ago they came back. I hadn't written an Amy poem in five years and I wrote 13 of them in two weeks and they're all four pages long. They're very lucid narratives and I don't know where they came from. Some of them I can't read without crying. 

The only thing that I do know and that I'm able to accept is that she's never gonna fully go away. Five years might go by, a year, maybe ten years where I don't work on this but she's gonna keep coming back to me at important moments in my life. I'm gonna follow that because I love that woman more than I've ever loved a person I know personally.

AEW: This is certainly not correct, but it feels like there's just a handful of poets that are autodidactic and writing about addiction, recovery, mercy, grace, failure, all the things that are often so voice-driven. And, I picked up on you; when I saw your name and read a couple of your poems, I started tracking what you were doing because it just felt like, “Oh, we're doing similar things as different writers, but this is in my family.” Somehow this person's in my orbit.

For those of us who were keeping up, the book was so obvious.You could see it all working. It was just a matter of time. It was exciting talking to other people, too, about your poems. It was exciting to see who took the book, where the book found its home. I was so fucking stoked that it was YesYes. I just want to share that like from the outside, it was really cool to watch it all and know the book was coming.

ATL: I appreciate that more than people just being like, “I love your work,” which I don't not appreciate but there's a visceral reaction we have to people's work who we feel camaraderie with. Something that moves us in any kind of way. 

To the whole whatever-you-write-is-gonna-hang-together … I just have to trust that whatever I write is gonna either hang together or that it’s part of something else. I'm constantly like, what if it doesn't? I'll look back and ask, wait, how the fuck did I do that? How did I get from point A to point B and point C and then from this anecdote to that anecdote? How did that happen? Each time I'm just like, what if that doesn't happen again?

I have to trust that it will. I trust it and it does. Every poem has a life in itself and as part of something larger. I'm also obsessed with microcosm and macrocosm and that's kind of it insofar as craft goes. That’s my idea of craft. I don't teach craft.

AEW: I would push back on that. I think you're highly crafted and that's, like, where I wanted to go with form. You know exactly what the fuck you're doing. I got to poet school and suddenly learned all the words and terminology for all the shit I’ve been doing. All of a sudden I’m assigning ideas—and then more problematically, theories—to those things. To me, the craft of this book is really advanced.

Formally, I know sound and image are the beating heart of your work. Movement, breath, pacing, and musical influences are obvious. But God, you break a line like the fucking best of them. How you turn and turn and come full circle … that takes being really well-read. Not just in one type of poetry, but being genreless as far as your creative allegiances.

ATL: Again, I didn't go to school. So craft: I read every poem I came across. I read every poetry book I could get my hands on and I devoured them and I studied them and I tried to be them. Any good artist, anybody who's good at their craft looks at something they love and tries to do that. That's how babies learn, echolalia. The sounds they make to copy adults.

I was always really drawn to Elvis Costello, who has never met a genre that he didn’t like and wasn't really good at. I listened to so much Elvis Costello growing up and I mean his whole catalog. I'm a drug addict. I just need all the things; I am a completist. I'm not gonna listen to one album – if I listen to one album, I'm listening to your entire catalog. One book, I'm reading every single fucking book you've written.

I teach this Jane Hirschfeld essay that Kaveh taught me, about originality. In the essay she talks about how originality comes from copying other people.

AEW: It’s all been done. Let's be real, it's all already done!

ATL: Everything's been done! And Hirschfield traces it back to Japanese traditions and brings it up to today. I teach that essay all the time because that struck a chord with me. My craft comes from me trying to copy something else. I'm not only addicted to everything but I get fixated on them in really intense ways.

I am good at all those things because I fixated on them until I was fucking good at them and I wouldn't stop until I was great at them. I honestly did this day and night for years and years and years. I just didn't do anything else.

AEW: I totally relate. I put all my eggs in this basket. It was poems or bust. I’m not great, or good, really, at much else. 

ATL: It's funny because I know people who are good at everything. It's actually annoying. They pick something up one day and the next week they’re masters of that craft. Those are the people who fascinate me. How are y'all good at all those things? And they are fascinated with people like us who just get their claws around one thing and hold onto it until they die.

AEW: One thing I am curious about, selfishly, is your classroom. As a teacher, I wonder what goes down in there? Highly generative? Multimedia? What's your pedagogy? Do you have a plan or do you just go in and wing it? 

ATL: Never. There is never a plan. I just go in. The way I trust that a poem will hang together, I trust that a class will hang together except that what I'm trusting is a class to hang together, I'm trusting the students. Because the students make up a lot of what we do in class. 

I don't go in there more than like, okay we’re going to do this text and this text. I don’t have any other ideas outside of that. Then I watch them and see what they're responding to. Then I make the next thing that I bring in based on that. So they're the ones without even knowing putting these classes together. But generative? Never. They do a little bit of a writing exercise in the middle of class because you kind of have to.

AEW: Oh, this is interesting. So what—a lot of discussion, only talking?

ATL: We read everything together. We go around the room and everybody reads. We mostly read essays. I don't teach that many poems because I think there's poetry in everything but also we read poetry all the time. Let's see where we could come to poetry from something else. So we go around and we each read and then we talk about everything together.

I also put time aside in every class with no poetry allowed. We're just talking. Let's get to know each other! They do that every single day and by the end of the class everyone's in love with each other. The way to write a really good poem is to do it next to someone you love and trust. That's literally everything that I teach—that communal way of writing. The modern writer’s workshop with the dead author bullshit, and everybody coming in and going right to poems without saying a word to each other is designed for people to resent each other, and not to know each other and have everything based on individuality rather than…

AEW: Right, create a national product.

ATL: Yeah, which is literally made by the state and we still fucking use it. So I do the exact opposite of that. I'm not saying we don't do craft. I'm not saying craft doesn't matter. I'm saying insofar as teaching goes, I don't teach craft. I never will. Process is more important. You get craft in every other workshop. Nobody teaches fucking process. 

Nobody teaches how you reach the things that matter to you and why you need to write about these things. Nobody teaches that, and so I teach that. It's very high energy. I'm jumping around and yelling like a maniac. Students are jumping in. We really are like a big, messy, boisterous, funny family.

I come in with a couple of ideas then we all figure out together where we're gonna go. I'm really good at harnessing people and energy. That's all of the things that I do whether it's teaching or emceeing. I'm good at bringing people together.

AEW: First of all, I totally agree with that. That is totally what you do.

As someone who's teaching currently in academia, I'm forever floored by how the expectation is for students to learn in such a siloed fashion without community. It's so illogical. I mean, it's against the fabric of who I am as a person, but it also just doesn't make sense. If I’m not comfortable somewhere, how am I even gonna pay attention?

Academia’s larger objectives of the state and/or nation are just so obvious, it's just hysterical to me that it's still the same formula that it's been for so long.

ATL:  For so long, and nobody's really pushing against it. When you step into a classroom and you go around and everybody's supposed to critique your work but the person whose work is getting critiqued isn't allowed to talk—how is that not going to breed resentment? I don't allow critiques in my class. Never, never, never, ever, ever, ever do we talk about our own poems in class. I save that for Wet Ink, the organizing and texts and assignments platform we use at Brooklyn Poets.

Writing out critiques for everybody is required because it's different. You're not in a classroom like, “oh my god, I have to sound…”

AEW: Performing.

ATL: Yeah, they're not performing. They're sitting down writing about somebody that they've already grown to love. Because I don't even give them poem assignments till week three—by the time they get there they know and love each other.

Also, poems are entirely optional in my class. I don't force or require anyone to write a poem. Good poems come when they're good and goddamn ready, not from a deadline. 

AEW: I hope I didn't take us off the rails by asking about your teaching, but it's something I've always wanted to ask you.

ATL: It's kind of my favorite. I don't differentiate teaching and poetry really and it’s honestly my favorite thing in the world.

AEW: It's such an important part of your poetics. As an outsider, I would characterize it as community and play and experiment and fucking up and revising and doing it again. Not only do I know you enough to know that about you, but your poems have iterations of the same idea retried again. Like your self-portrait where you're reworking and reimagining origin stories.

There's a lot of going back, redoing, recycling, reimagining, recasting. I don't know if that's something you notice as much as your reader would, but I think it feels like—maybe a wild connection, but—Marcello Hernandez Castillo's Cenzontle. Have you read that book from BOA? It is so gorgeous.

ATL: I've read a poem from it, but I haven't read the whole thing.

AEW: There's something about how tightly he sticks to his symbolism. I haven't encountered a book in a while that has its own image bank or its own vocabulary, its own ecology. 

ATL: Any good writer, any good musician, they develop their own language. The musicians and rappers that I loved growing up like A Tribe Called Quest and Wu-Tang all had their own language, vocabulary that comes from repetition, choruses, hooks, refrains. But it's also the way that those things subtly shift and change every time you say them and how by the end we're somewhere different.

It's almost like we're mimicking a rotation around an object. We are always on track, but we are looking at things from a different perspective. The languages and the phrases and even phrasings, not even just linguistically, but musical and phonetic phrasings, are really important for me.

The way things sound out loud is really, really important to me. I read everything as I'm doing it. If it doesn't sound right together, there's no music to it. It needs that music, that repetition. We all have the same tools and we all have the same images or things that we return to over and over again. And we don't lose them, they just evolve with us.

I'm writing my second book. I'm over 200 pages into it and it's not stopping. It's so different now from when I started, which was a little before my mom died. And now it's all over the place.

Full phrases, ideas, images, language, pop up in multiple poems. It serves to unify the book—think of Nebraska by Bruce Springsteen. Lines like, “debts no honest man could pay,” turn up in multiple songs.

Bruce decided on that; he did that for a reason. He realized that there was something to their recurring presence. Part of that was that repetition. Part of it was that unification through language and themes, whether it's musical, phonetics, anything, and on that record—it’s one of my all-time favorite records—because they're demos, he didn't clean it up.

“I gotta rewrite this line now because I …” No, he's saying this here because that person there said it because they're both fucked. They're both in the same place. I learned from that. Instead of being like, “oh, I already used that phrase before,” I'm like, so what? I have lots of repeating phrases and imagery. There's a lot of poems and it serves to unify them.

AEW: I wanted to end with what are you working on? Because I know you have a shit ton of work that's not in this. You're always publishing, obviously. Are you just generating, generating, generating? Or like you said, I guess you're starting to see some cohesion, some connective tissue.

What are you working on? 

ATL: I always have about 10 different pots on the stovetop. I have to be working on a bunch of different things because they all feed off of each other. If I'm burning out at one thing, I could work on another.

I wrote a little over a hundred pages for what I think is going to be my second collection before it took a radical turn. I already have a title: It's going to be called mother wound. Obviously it's entirely about my mother, but the poems I was writing in the beginning are so much more reined in.

I wouldn't call them quiet because I'm me and I’m always going to have a lot of language, but it doesn't spill over as much. I reined it in, cleaned it up a little bit. And when I got about 120 or so pages in, I just kind of stopped writing. And so I was like, oh, this must be it. I will go back to this at some point, edit, see where things go, whatever.

Then I started writing the memoir, which I didn't specifically plan on or think was ever going to happen. I've had the idea for years, but I didn't think it was actually ever going to come to fruition.

It combines my past as a music journalist and the more personal narratives I'm writing about my life, my grief. It's a collection of essays about breakup songs. They all come together and form the fragmented story of me and my mother. There's other people; every essay has a song and every song is paired with a person or an experience or a thing. 

I had the clarity of these poems that I was writing … not even clarity, but just less noisy. I was walking a line, very straight, because I wrote that shit right after my mom died. They're still a little catatonic in ways.

I called Hanif. Hanif is such a great mentor because we come from the same stock. He's a music journalist and he doesn’t have an MFA. He’s a poet and everything he writes about is music—the Marvin Gaye series from A Fortune for Your Disaster, that's where I got the Amy Winehouse series. I'm very much in his lineage. 

I called him almost crying and I'm just like, “this is never going to happen, what do I do?” And he gave me some of the best writing advice I've ever gotten: don't write trying to get the reader to feel something, or the same thing, about the thing you're writing about, the way you feel about it. Try to get them to remember and feel something from their lives from what you're writing.

That stuck with me. A few months later it all started coming out. I started writing the memoir 12 hours a day for a month and a half, and I wrote 130,000 words. I was like, all right, this is gonna be so quick! But no, now I have to gut half of it because prose is very different. 

AEW: It's such a tremendous book. It's a tremendous press. I know you're proud and you should be proud. It was like, again, I think it's similar for you—  putting out my first book was the most important thing I've ever done. And now that you have it, the reality is that it opens a lot of doors.

Education is one of the gates. But the first book is the bigger one.

ATL: I weave in and out of thinking this is going to pop off and believing, truly believing, that nobody will give a fuck. Nothing's gonna happen.

AEW: Oh, yeah. I do that back and forth all day. 

ATL: YesYes is amazing. They're my favorite press. How lucky am I to be on my favorite press? But they are a small press. As KMA [Sullivan] told me, they’re a publisher, not a publicist. She does help as much as she can. Right now she’s sending my book out for consideration for a bunch of awards and offered, if I find any more I want her to submit to, to just send them to her.

So who knows, maybe I'll get an award. That's what I need. I need a campaign to start.

Like Oscar consideration, we need murmuration consideration. Baby, I need that award. I need that money.

AEW: I know, man, I feel you. Mine was submitted for this most recent award round, and you know, it's not winning anything. Then I see someone else placing, and I’m like, “I'm not winning shit” hahaha!

ATL: You ever deadass look at what’s getting all the hype and just be like, “I know my shit's better?”

AEW: Oh, that's all I do. Really before it even happens, I think I'm like gonna win the Norma Farber Award, obviously. I actually think I'm going to. And then I just definitely don’t. Ha!

I'll tell my mom, “I'm pretty sure. I feel like I have it in the bag.” It's just ridiculous. But you got to take yourself seriously, right? That's a lot of what we've talked about. First and foremost, I have to take myself and my work seriously and believe that I'm the shit. I think that's important.

ATL:  I'm at a point where—fuck false modesty, my shit slaps, I don't give a fuck. But I've been sitting down every day, trying to set up interviews, trying to send out my shit for review, trying to find places for readings. That's what I'm doing every day.

My friend’s book came out last year and she told me this is the hardest part. Once the book comes out, I'll get a chance to breathe a little bit.

It sounds wrong, but it's not a race, it's a marathon. People aren’t gonna love it as soon as it comes out. Sometimes it takes a year. 

AEW: Oh, yeah. I've decided maybe my career might be as such that at some point, people are gonna want to get their hands on my first book because my fifth book is really good.

And they’re gonna be like, “I got to go back to the beginning. And it'd be like, “Damn, this got completely overlooked.” It's gonna have like this revival.

ATL: Yeah, like the completist. I need every single book.

AEW: Yep. Oh, you're hysterical. This was fun. What did we not cover? 

ATL: God.

AEW: No, we didn’t, shockingly. 

ATL: It's okay. My second book is much more Catholic.

AEW: So is mine! It's funny to hear you say you have a title. I have a title. And I was like, I know what this is. I know all the poems are performing a crisis of faith. I guess that's the next one for me.

ATL: I think titles generally tend to come first, right? I had murmurations very early.

AEW: Oh, yeah. I have cover art.

ATL: I did too. But I couldn't get it. It was a Francesca Woodman photo. No. I love mine.

AEW: It's so good. 

ATL: Yeah. We’re gonna end up doing Catholic books. And then I don't know what's gonna happen after that. We're gonna figure it out. It'll still fucking come together.