Kelly Weber's work has appeared or is forthcoming in Brevity, The Missouri Review, Tupelo Quarterly, DIAGRAM, Cream City Review, and elsewhere. Her work has received nominations for the Pushcart Prize. She holds an MFA from Colorado State University, where she served as an intern with Colorado Review. She lives in Colorado with two rescue cats. More of her work can be found at kellymweber.com.
A Conversation with Kelly Weber
Emma Bolden: Your debut full-length collection, We Are Changed to Deer at the Broken Place, is forthcoming from Tupelo Press. Can you tell us a bit about it?
Kelly Weber: I’m so excited for this collection to be making its way into the world. We Are Changed to Deer at the Broken Place considers asexuality, aromanticism, and the male gaze broadly through the prism of the myth of Artemis and Actaeon. So a lot of the book is about myth-making and finding the lyric space and language for my experience of asexuality and aromanticism. Some of the poems are variations on prose poem sonnet forms in order to consider and question inherited poetic traditions (and assumptions) of eros and its containers. They’re poems that are heavily concerned with place, particularly the kinds of rural areas I grew up in as a queer person.
EB: One of the things I admire most about your work is the way that you work with form and structure: prose poems with virgules, lines broken internally with white space, placement on the page. How do you approach form and structure in your work?
KW: Thank you so much for saying that! When I approach structure for a poem, part of my process for finding the right form is playing with visual arrangements that excite me. Sometimes a poem that just isn’t “going” in the revision process unlocks when I start pushing it around the page in new ways—the poem begins to “move” and breathe differently and the ideas change when I try out caesura, or shift from traditional lines to a prose poem with virgules, or use any other form idea that I think is fun to play with. The poem may not stay in that form, but I always learn something in the process. Sometimes the key is just trying out different forms to unlock the poem’s rhythm. Form can be a way to find pulse. Changes in punctuation, breath, and visual arrangement on the page can make the small but ultimate difference to surprise me and, I think, surprise the poem out into the open, finally. More experimental forms also feel like less pressure than really traditional-looking sonnets or villanelles, for example. Creating my own form rules clears the room out—so to speak—so it’s just me and the poem learning the dance together.
EB: What’s the best and worst advice you’ve been given as a writer?
KW: Such a hard question! I think all writing advice I’ve been given comes from a good place, but I ultimately learned a lot by determining which advice wasn’t right for me. I think the advice to know the purpose and function of every single part of your and your book is well-meaning, but I think that can reduce some of the mystery. Some of the best writing advice I’ve received came out of a roundtable conversation with some other writers and a visiting lecturer several years ago, when this subject came up. We were talking about the common advice that, as a writer, you’re supposed to know how to justify every single choice you make in a poem and understand everything happening in a poem and a book. And basically the conversation became about debunking that—that, in fact, there’s no way to understand everything happening in a book or poem, and in fact part of the pleasure of poetry is its mystery. Like another incredible writer, Kristin McIntyre, has said—sometimes we don’t know exactly what is happening in our poems, but we know it’s poetry. There’s a lot to be said for instinct. Dan Beachy-Quick talks about finding the formal logic of the poem while also not really knowing that or focusing on that while in the writing of the poem itself (that’s such a terrible paraphrase—sorry, Dan!), and I think that’s become such a part of my poetics. You don’t have to know everything of how one of your poems is working. Sometimes it just clicks in mysterious ways. You feel it in your body like weather. Even if you’re an expert in craft and critical analysis, I think it’s important for all of us to find the areas of mystery we can’t fully explain in our own poems and books—it’s how we know the poem is an alive thing.
EB: As an asexual writer myself, I feel that your work is an important and vital addition to asexual literature. I’d love to hear your thoughts about asexual and aro/ace representation, in your own work and/or in literature more generally.
KW: Thank you so much! That means a lot to me! I think the biggest thing for me in my own work is that my poems come out of just one person’s experience. Everyone who’s ace or aro has their own unique, individual experience, so my poems reflect what it’s like for me to be ace, but others who are ace may have very different experiences from this. When I started to write poems about being queer, I had kind of a tough time finding other books of poems about asexuality. What representation there is (in poetry and beyond) is still systemically, predominantly white (and cis, and able-bodied, and thin-bodied, and neuroconforming / neurotypical, and other privileged identities) and dominated by white voices, like me—I have a ton of privilege and I’ve benefited from it. We need to improve that in our field and beyond, big time. We need a much more diverse variety of voices for true representation.
Outside of poetry, there are a couple great books out right now that I think have brought the topic and experiences of asexuality into wider conversations: Angela Chen’s Ace: What Asexuality Reveals About Desire, Society, and the Meaning of Sex and Ela Przybylo’s Asexual Erotics: Intimate Readings of Compulsory Sexuality. I hope asexuality continues to enter the discourse more.
EB: What are you working on now?
KW: Currently I’m working on and thinking about poems that engage with the people dear to me whom I love platonically—family and chosen family and the many beloveds in my life. I’m also thinking a lot about my gender identity as a nonbinary person and the communities I’m so grateful to be a part of. I’m thinking about spaces for queer joy, including—sometimes—the body.
EB: What are you reading right now?
KW: I’m currently reading the anthologies Troubling the Line: Trans & Genderqueer Poetry & Poetics and Subject to Change: Trans Poetry & Conversation. I also just started The Many Deaths of Inocencio Rodriguez, Iliana Rocha’s just stunning new book from Tupelo. I got to hear her read some of it a few weeks ago for an offsite AWP reading and it’s incredible. Highly recommend all three books, especially for National Poetry Month.
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