Michael talks with Taylor Byas about the release of BLOODWARM, Twitter feeds becoming too much, saving yourself, writing about race and patriarchy through the personal, revising while drafting, finding the form for the content, erasure, Mama Byas, her forthcoming full-length with Soft Skull Press, lineated vs. prose poetry, and more.
Michael talks with Taylor Byas about the release of BLOODWARM, Twitter feeds becoming too much, saving yourself, writing about race and patriarchy through the personal, revising while drafting, finding the form for the content, erasure, Mama Byas, her forthcoming full-length with Soft Skull Press, lineated vs. prose poetry, and more.
Taylor Byas is a Black poet and essayist. She is a PhD student and Yates scholar at the University of Cincinnati, and an Assistant Features Editor for The Rumpus. Her chapbook, BLOODWARM, is out now from Variant Lit (2021), and her debut full-length poetry collection, I Done Clicked My Heels Three Times, is forthcoming from Soft Skull Press in the Spring of 2023.
Podcast theme: DJ Garlik & Bertholet's "Special Sause" used with permission from Bertholet.
Michael Wheaton 00:06
Welcome back to The Lives of Writers, a podcast presented by Autofocus, an online lit mag dedicated to artful autobiographical writing, which you can read today at autofocuslit.com, and follow on Twitter and Instagram: @autofocuslit. I'm the publisher and editor of Autofocus, Michael Wheaton. Today on the show, I talk with Taylor Byas. Taylor Byas is a Black poet and essayist. She's a PhD student in Yates scholar at the University of Cincinnati, and an assistant features editor for The Rumpus. Her chapbook Bloodwarm is out now from Variant Lit, and her debut full length poetry collection, I DONE CLICKED MY HEELS THREE TIMES, is forthcoming from Soft Skull Press in the spring of 2023. All right, let's get to it. This is my conversation with Taylor Byas.
Taylor Byas 00:56
Yeah, so I had a virtual release, just because I thought that would be the best way to do things at this current moment. The Rumpus and White Whale Bookstore hosted it and had it on Zoom and it was really, really, really wonderful. I just recently got around to getting the footage, and uploading it to YouTube. So I will probably be sharing that with Twitter sometime today, but it was just... you know, I've been to virtual launches before in virtual events and you have these writers who are there to celebrate other people's books, and oftentimes, it's sort of just a quick 'thank you for having me', and 'really excited for this book', but it was really surprising that the people that I invited to read with me just took, I feel like, so much time to express just how happy they were to participate. And just like the love that was in the room. And I told myself I wasn't going to cry before the event, and I totally cried. But I just, I didn't anticipate feeling the amount of, just, love that I felt during that event. And I will definitely cherish that moment. It was very special.
Michael Wheaton 02:24
Oh, good. Congratulations on it. I'm glad it was so successful. You never know how the virtual stuff's gonna go.
Taylor Byas 02:30
I know!
Michael Wheaton 02:30
And as I mentioned earlier, I thought the book was incredible. The language, form, content, you know, everything. But speaking of Twitter, the first poem in that book, about all the protests, that slew of police brutality and all the violence, physical and emotional in the heights and depths of 2020, reading that poem, even for me, just a random, general white dude, it was difficult to watch. So I can only imagine what it must have been like for you and others who feel like these instances of brutality are not just aimed at the particular people who are being brutalized. I imagine it must feel like it's aimed at you in some ways, and that's what I kind of felt like, in that poem, the different incidences of violence and kind of reflecting on it, and that use of repetition on 'the page refreshes,' and this kind of repetitive mundanity of horrific stuff. And you're just dealing with it. And you know, the poem is called "My Twitter Feed Becomes Too Much", which is a title you could put for so many possibilities. But particularly this. So, you know, I just thought... like I said, even for me it was challenging, but I can't, it's not even an iota of what so many other people experience and it must be like, I don't want to see this. But, you know, I can't look away.
Taylor Byas 03:57
Yeah, absolutely. I love that poem for a lot of reasons. And I think one of the reasons is I find it difficult, and I think a lot of people find it difficult, to write about or to incorporate current technology into poetry. And I think one of the goals of this poem, especially was to capture the insidious nature of Twitter sometimes. And, we always talk about this, how Twitter can just become this hellhole that you just fall down into and you can't get out of, and it can become that way with things that are not as violent. And so to be sort of exacerbated by that specific brand of brutality and violence was such an experience. And I think also you talked about the repetitive mundanity of that and opening with that poem and with that feeling was so important because the entire book is about the repetitive, mundanity of these instances of racism and violence that a Black person, a Black woman in particular, has to endure in moments that are supposed to be mundane and moments that are supposed to be pedestrian, like going to the grocery store, going to the gas station, teaching your first class at a new institution, but quickly realizing that you are the only Black person in the room, and you're supposed to be an instructor, but all of a sudden this feeling of authority is challenged by the fact that you are the only Black person in the room, and what happens in all of these moments where we're supposed to be living normal life like everyone else. But these sort of insidious moments that can't really be seen or experienced from the outside also, these are moments that I might have in the grocery store or at the gas station, that no one else knows I'm having. And so there's also this really isolating nature of this type of thing, because no one knows it's going on. And I think being able to communicate that or hearing you say, I felt the difficulty, I was reading this poem and I felt how hard this was and I felt that sense of, I don't want to look at that, makes me feel really good about what the book was able to do. Because I think one of the things I also wanted to do with this book was to undo some of that isolation that happens in these moments where I'm sort of the only one panicking, or the only one coming apart, and no one else is experiencing the same thing and to be able to share that. It is uncomfortable, but it also is community building. And it also is, as I'm saying, undoing that isolation and bringing people closer to me. So I think, in that poem, but also the project of the whole book is definitely in that vein as well.
Michael Wheaton 07:01
Yeah, definitely. It's a very coherent collection. And then I thought the blurb, all the blurbs are great on the back, but the one by Jason B. Crawford, I feel like his sentence in the last part of his blurb was really perfect. And he says, "The collection is a mirror of the Black experience through the murder, erasure, and displacement of Black people in the world, and how Byas hopes to one day save us all." And, so, the first part I find to be a really great summation of the themes in the book, both literally and figuratively. And the second part made me want to ask regarding your intentions as a poet. Because it's a big thing to say, "Byas hopes to one day save us all". And I was just wondering, do you identify with that idea? Is your poetry trying to "save us all"? Or is there a different or maybe further personal intention for you?
Taylor Byas 07:51
I think first and foremost, whenever I come to the page, I'm trying to save myself. And I think that's true of this collection. And this collection was also a part of a full-length at first, so this was a part of a much larger thing. And then I started to realize that, Mmm I think some of these poems are maybe fighting for their own space. But the larger project that it was a part of was a much earlier draft of the full-length collection that just got picked up by Soft Skull. But in that collection, I was sort of trying to make a larger connection between what was happening racially, in Chicago, Birmingham, and then Cincinnati. And so it was just a lot more going on. But I felt like these poems are needing to be in their own space. But even in that instance, with that manuscript, I'm always trying to save myself, I'm always trying to rewrite the history that I feel like was unfairly written in the first place. And I think all of my work is doing that in some way. Whether it's about race, whether it's about the patriarchy and trying to rewrite the history of being a woman in America, which is more close to what I'm writing about now. But I think I'm saving myself first. And I think in the process of saving myself, and sharing that with other people, naturally I'm saving other people who look like me, I'm saving other people who have had similar experiences as me who can relate to my poems who can read the Twitter feed poem and know what that feels like and have felt what that feels like. And I think as long as you're coming to the page to save yourself that you will save someone else. I think as long as you're coming to the page and impressing yourself and surprising yourself you're going to impress and surprise other people. And I think that should be a central goal for people when they come to the page. Save yourself first and press yourself first because if you're not doing that for yourself, then how will you do it for others?
Michael Wheaton 10:14
And I think that's what makes your writing about race and patriarchy so good is because it's so personal. It's not taking a top-down viewpoint. It's on the ground and right on you and I think that's what makes it land so powerfully. It's not fair, I know, to say the poet is the speaker but this is a production by Autofocus. So I am curious as to what degree do you consider your poems to be autobiographical? Or do you consider them that? Or is it just using your experiences to draw from but you don't maybe see yourself as the speaker?
Taylor Byas 11:01
In this collection, I definitely do see myself as a speaker for a lot of these poems. I mean all of these are drawing from personal experience and I think with all of my poems, largely, they start from some sort of personal experience, some moment, something that has happened to me, and then how close they stick to that experience, in the process. So it depends on what the poem is asking for, but they always start as some version of me, I think. And a lot of these poems in this collection stayed very close to being those versions of myself. And I think it was because as I was writing these poems, I realized that there was really no other way that I can say these things, there was no other voice that could say the things that I wanted to say, besides the voice that I had written it in, which was essentially mine. And sometimes you write a poem, and you realize that the perspective isn't right, or you realize that, Hmm, maybe I'm too close to this, let me find a way to get away from it. But I think, as you said, being up close and personal, was really, really important for this book, in creating closeness, but also creating discomfort, which I think is really necessary and important for this book, as well. So I do think that all of my poems start at some version of me, but here, in particular, a lot of those poems stay close versions of me for sure.
Michael Wheaton 12:33
And I wanted to talk a little bit about your forthcoming collection, but we'll take care of that later. I kind of want to talk to you first about process. First, the language in your work is very clear, but also very exact, and at times surprising and unexpected, kind of refreshing. So I was wondering about your revision process for finding that right language in poetry, a genre that attempts to waste none of it. How much do you tend to work through a poem to find the language? I kind of want to talk about form and a little bit, but for now, maybe just the language part.
Taylor Byas 13:12
I feel like I get in trouble when I talk about revision, because revision is something that I personally don't actually spend a ton of time doing. And I think that's probably the way that I write poems. When I write, I do a lot of editing as I go. So when I finish a first draft, it's been sort of torn apart and...
Michael Wheaton 13:40
Your first draft is your tenth draft.
Taylor Byas 13:43
Exactly, exactly. You know, we get to stanza eight and then we realize that stanza three through seven is not doing what it needs to do. And so that goes, and then we rewrite, and then it's sort of that process. But I don't know, I feel like I'm just so careful in the first draft process. And I know that a lot of people are just sort of like, Let me just get the draft out and then I can do whatever I need to do in the revision process. But I'm like, No, I want this to be as precise as it can be in this first iteration of the thing. And then I just let the poem tell me what it needs. And a lot of the times it might be, Oh, this line needs to go or maybe there's a better word for this. But I'm so, I guess, anal in that first go around that I worry a lot about precision in the first draft process. And so I actually don't spend a lot of time in revision. I sort of get the first draft down and I have a group of trusted first beta readers that I send things off to to get their feel because they're familiar with my work and know what I've always tried to do with my work and always give me good advice and a good idea of what the poem needs, if it needs anything, or if it's doing too much. And I kind of work from there. I think a lot of it is also about trusting your own sense of when something is done, or if something is doing what it's supposed to be doing, which is its own separate process of learning how to trust that own inner sense of like, Okay, I think this poem is ready to go out into the world, or whatever the poem needs to do at that point. And I think trusting that sense, has been one of the most important parts of the process, one of the hardest, but learning to do that has been really important to me. And yeah, I just don't spend a lot of time on revision, I feel like I do get in trouble sometimes.
Michael Wheaton 15:44
No, it's just not a simply delineated, your revision process is not delineated from your drafting process. And I've talked to writers who that's very true for, and I'm definitely not one of those people. I'm a mess.
Taylor Byas 16:00
You get it together after.
Michael Wheaton 16:01
And I just try to do something with it later. A lot of times, I can't, but it's just kind of how I do it. But anyway, like I mentioned, I wanted to talk a little bit about form and kind of finding the right form for the content. I found in this collection that you merged form and content so well. So I wanted to ask about your use of forms, like existing forms and breaking those forms, or not using them and how that process happens, or really doesn't happen for you. Do you usually start with one or the other in mind? Like, you have a form in mind, or you have the content in mind? Or does it all kind of come at you at once? Some of your poems are more narrative, some of them are more lyrical, some of them use a form that I somewhat recognize, or at least if I don't recognize it, there's a form here that I feel because everything's connecting so well. And anyway, how does that process start for you?
Taylor Byas 16:54
With formal poems, I always start knowing what form I want to write in. And I have an idea what I want the poem to be about. And that's where we start. I know the form and I know what what I want to happen on a very general basis. It's important to me when it comes to form to not come into the poem with some sort of overdetermined idea of where the poem needs to end up, because, on a very literal level, it makes the process harder for me. But there are so many restraints when working in form that you need everything else to be as free as it possibly can. And that includes where the poem is going to go. I think I talked a little bit about this...I think somebody asked a question about form during my launch. For me, it's one of the most rewarding things to get into a poem and to get into a form, and to say, Okay, I'm going to let the form organically develop what's happening in this poem. And I think that's especially true with the sestina, which is the first poem in the book. And then the poem also has multiple pantoums, which is probably one of my favorite forms. One of the wonderful things about the pantoum is in every stanza, two of your lines are already sort of predetermined. So it then becomes this puzzle of like, Okay, how do I get from here to here to here? And not only how do I get from A to B, but how do I get from A to B, and then make sure that B is somehow made new by the time I get there, by the time it comes back around. And it becomes this really refreshing and amazing puzzle that I create for myself. And I think I see form poetry as puzzle a lot of times like these really fun puzzles that I that I'm setting out to solve. So more than anything I make form a game for myself. And I think that helps retain some of the enjoyment and joy that we're supposed to get out of writing. It makes it this really fun and enjoyable process for me. But I like a challenge also. It's something really rewarding about putting that last puzzle piece in and being like, I completed that thing, I did it perfectly, I somehow managed to figure out where all these pieces go and form is 100% that puzzle for me. And I get that reward when I'm able to get it right. But I think the narratives and the stories definitely develop more organically. I definitely think in free verse poetry I have more of a sense of where I want to go or I might even have lines that I put on the page. I typically open a document and I have images or phrases that are in my head and I just throw them all there. And sometimes I might have some sort of ending that I'm like, I want the poem to end in this direction and I work towards that. With form poetry, that never works for me. I just have to have some sort of idea of where to start and it just has to go from there. I've never been able to get to a preconceived ending form poem. I've learned to just not come into the form poem with that.
Michael Wheaton 20:15
I also wanted to talk about erasure and your themes, but literally in the form, too. You have one entire erasure poem and then other smaller instances worked into little poems, where you might erase one thing in there, black it out, and then cross out another thing. Actually, I think the one that has the blackout and the erasure is the one on being a Black instructor? And the forms of other poems are communicating with that poem, in my mind, and so I was wondering, when did you get into the form of erasure? It's not a new thing, but I see it a lot more now. Usually I'll see a whole erasure poem. But I'm wondering when did you start being like, Oh, I could just erase one thing in a poem?
Taylor Byas 21:12
I think I was in a class. I think this was my first semester of my Ph.D program. And in that class we looked at a lot of different forms. And we looked at erasure. We also wrote a lot of imitation poetry, we wrote poems that were imitating these different styles and forms of other people. And I think I encountered some sort of exercise or prompt maybe where I had to use strikeout. And I think in doing that exercise, I started to think more about the purpose of strikeout. I've seen it before, I've read poems that use strikeout. And, of course, there's the typical erasure, as we've talked about, where things are completely blacked out. And I just started thinking about different kinds of erasure. The difference between an erasure where you can't see the original text, and something being erased but you can still see the remnants of it, and what does that mean. And thinking about those differences is what really got me into thinking about erasure, which this book, as Jason wonderfully put it, is about Black erasure. But what happens when you can see that erasure happening, what happens when you can see the actual act of someone trying to get rid of something, and I think that, again, goes back to the discomfort that I was talking about earlier. It's a lot easier to turn a blind eye or it's a lot easier to stomach something if you can't see the damage or destruction that's been done. And I think that's what got me to the form of "How I Take My Morning Tea". In that poem, it's not exactly erasure. There's one version of the poem and then, underneath, there are these lighter words that you can see. So nothing has really been erased. Some things have been doubled in this case, and sort of create their own separate poem. But it still kind of feels like erasure, right? It sort of has the remnants of the erasure. But I think in that form, which is a form that I guess I've created, and probably should name, maybe, I don't know. I think there's a feeling about calling attention or calling the poem out. And I think erasure does that, it calls things out. And it highlights these certain elements. But I feel like in that instance, it was a call out, like calling the poem out by doubling these certain elements, or echoing them, I guess, in a case. And so I think just experimenting with the strikeout and then also experimenting with complete erasure, which is something I did in that class, I did both of those things, just started this whole process of thinking about what these different kinds of erasures mean? What are they actually doing on the page? And what are they doing for the reader? And then thinking about the different kinds of eraser that I want to incorporate into this book, and what type of effects they would have here. And I guess they're sort of working.
Michael Wheaton 24:26
Yeah. I mean, it's effective, but it's also cool, you know, to see someone take this form that we're seeing more often and then to trickle it into other work is really exciting. I hadn't seen that before. I don't know if other people are or aren't and if somebody out there is listening like, I do that too. Sorry. When I encountered it in your work it was very fresh to me. But I wanted to ask about your mother, because you've dedicated the book to her, but also talk a little bit about your childhood and experiences with her and what led you to...I mean, it's not a hard sell to dedicate a book to your mother, but you know, why in particular?
Taylor Byas 25:10
So, my mom, I talked about her so much on Twitter that she's affectionately known as Mama Byas now to my Twitter followers. But my mom is just really, really special. And I know that sometimes in this writing life family members aren't always the most supportive of work, or maybe don't always make the effort to understand what you're doing. Which is fine for some people and others feel differently about that. But I've also written about my father and his alcoholism, and how that has torn our family apart in some ways. And my mom has just been my best friend for as long as I can remember. And I've just watched her hold it together and hold my family together as things were sort of falling apart. And she's always believed in me more than I believed in myself. And I went into undergrad...I was an English major, but also I was on a pre-med track, because my mom was a doctor. And I was like, Oh, surely this is also what I want to do. I got through my first year of undergrad, and I was like, Just kidding, this is absolutely not what I want to do. And for some reason, I was really nervous to tell my mom that I was like, Oh, my gosh, she's getting so upset. And I'm not following in her same footsteps. And I remember calling her and being like, Oh, yes, I think I'm gonna change my track here and I'm going to go after what I really want to do which is to teach writing. And she was like, Oh, thank God! She was kind of like, I'm so happy. You figured this out. Before we got to med school. I think she probably had known all along and was waiting for me to figure it out myself. You hear these, I guess, cliche or they sound like romanticized or dramatic, Oh, my parent has taught me that I can be anything that I want to be, type of thing. But my mom really did instill that in me that I could go after whatever it is that I wanted to go after, and that I would get it. And it is that confidence with which she built me up that I am able to do what I do now. And I come to the page, I come to everything that I do, with the confidence that whatever I go after, if it's for me, I will have it, I will get it. And you know, as a kid, you don't realize the things that your parents do for you, or you don't realize that the things that they're doing for you are going to serve you later in life. My mom was always very, very serious about school and grades and very serious about me pushing myself to be the best version of me. And I always used to be so annoyed by how hard she was on me when I was younger. I was like, Oh, my God. I'm fine. But I realize now that you get out into the real world as an adult and no one goes harder for you than yourself and no one is going to push you as hard as you will. And now having gone through my mom, and how strict she was about school and not enough, not in a harmful way, but just how much she cared about how hard I was pushing myself and making sure that I was being the best version of myself. Now, of course, I see the value in that. Because I wake up every day wanting to be the best version of myself. I come to the page every time wanting to be the best writer version of myself. And I literally would not be here. I would not be who I am and what I am if it hadn't been for my mom. And she motivates me every day. She's always so proud of me. I can't say enough wonderful things about my mom.
Michael Wheaton 29:18
So where did where did you grow up? Where were you raised?
Taylor Byas 29:21
I grew up in Chicago. Southside of Chicago. And then as I grew older, we sort of like gradually moved out to the suburbs more and more. But yeah, I spent most of my life in Chicago, on the south suburbs of Chicago, as well as my mom, as well as both of my parents. So, definitely a Chicago kid. And then undergrad came and I went to Birmingham for six years. And now I'm coming into my third year at Cincinnati, which is like a very interesting mix of Chicago and Birmingham for me. There's kind of like both parts of those places, which I think probably played a role in my decision to come here, having both pieces of those homes for me.
Michael Wheaton 30:16
What were you doing in Orlando, Florida? That's where I live. When I saw your poem "The Titanic Museum in Orlando, FL" I was like, Uhhp, she was in my town! I never been to the Titanic Museum, but I was just wondering how and when did you find yourself there?
Taylor Byas 30:36
My family was there. My sister had a volleyball tournament, actually. And unfortunately, this time around, she was playing in the afternoon. And I don't know how much you know about these sorts of tournaments, but basically, if you play in the afternoon it becomes an all day thing. Because typically they have to be at the convention center, wherever they're playing, at maybe like one o'clock p.m., might not leave until seve, eight p.m. So it kind of just takes up your whole day. And we were sort of frustrated by that because we were like, Well, that sort of cuts into what we can do outside of this. It cuts into our vacation time. And so me and my mom basically decided that we were switch off and one day she would go with my sister, and then I would go do something with my brother. And so we could get some sort of vacation experience. So on one of the days of the tournament, I took my brother to the Titanic Museum, and it was also just a very terrible weather day. I remember it was raining so hard. And it was just miserable outside. So we were like, Definitely indoor activities today. And so we ended up in the Titanic museum and that was an interesting experience as you can see from the poem.
Michael Wheaton 31:56
Yeah, I've experienced a lot of Orlando "attractions" and to write about how strange they are...obviously, I can only write about them from the experience of a white man experiencing them. It was definitely interesting for me to read about a Black experience at one of these things, because I never really thought about how white theme parks are in general. It's almost so self-evident. Not that the crowds aren't diverse, I mean the crowds are relatively diverse at theme parks, but I mean just the construction of it. And all these Disney movies and maybe like 1990-2000 are just like excessively white. And it just kind of struck me like, Oh, I never thought of that before, what that must be like. So, thanks for giving me a new view on my own city, like another experience of going to these strange places. But not to make it too much about Orlando, which I'd love to talk about. I do, like I said, want to talk about your forthcoming book with Soft Skull, and like I said, congrats on that. Was it not for another year or two?
Taylor Byas 33:00
Yeah, Spring of 2023. We got a while.
Michael Wheaton 33:03
They really make you play the waiting game. I hate that. I've talked about this before, but it just always ticks me off when I get excited to read something. Like, Two years? I gotta wait two years? Let me get it. So anyway. I have looked a little bit about it, but for the listeners who aren't familiar, what's it called and what's it about?
Taylor Byas 33:27
Yeah, absolutely. My forthcoming full length, it is called I DONE CLICKED MY HEELS THREE TIMES and is inspired by one of my favorite movies, which is The Wiz. And if you've watched The Wiz, you know it's this really magical, Black version of The Wizard of Oz. And of course, that whole storyline is about home and finding home and what it means to redefine what home means and what it is. And that's essentially what the book is about. It is starts in Chicago and it follows the speaker's journey as she ventures away from home, and is in a lot of ways about what happens to the Black female body, when you leave the safety of home, what happens and how do you define when home is in a place where you don't really belong, or where people don't really want you to be at home. And so it's really at its foundation about, What's home mean? What's home look like for the Black female body and in America, as someone who has grown up in Chicago, which is a very, very Black place, and was a Black place where I grew up. It had its own dangers, but then it's like, well, what are these other dangers look like when you get swept away by the tornado and end up in these places that are unfamiliar, where the people don't look like you necessarily. And so that's what the book is essentially without giving too much away. But it was a lot of fun and I like really look forward to the whole editing process. It's so funny, I'm like, I don't do revision, but I'm really excited to edit this book and to work with Soft Skull just because I feel like they really, really understand my vision for the book. And I'm really also excited to play around and play up, I think, The Wiz in the book, which is, I think, something that we're going to do with it. So I'm really, really excited about that process. But yeah, that's the book that's coming out. And it's also got a whole bunch of form in there. I think there might be three sonnet crowns in that book. There's a lot going on.
Michael Wheaton 35:51
Do you find that this work is, I don't want to say more imaginative, I don't think that's the word, I don't even want to say fictional, I'm not sure what the word is. Do you see what I'm getting at? Like what we were talking about with Bloodwarm, the poems, as I mentioned, hit on these huge issues, but from this really deeply personal place. Do you find that the poems in the new book are, not that they're not personal, but do you feel like you're doing more imaginative leaps of your own experience? Or do you feel like it still sticks pretty grounded, like Bloodwarm?
Taylor Byas 36:25
I think this collection definitely still sticks pretty close to me. And that's probably because, as I said before, these poems actually came from an earlier version of that manuscript. And so I think the poems in the book are still sticking pretty close, and are still pretty grounded in my very, very specific personal experience. I think the work that I'm writing on now is definitely taking some leaps and some imaginative risks that I didn't really take in Bloodwarm and that I don't think I really take in I DONE CLICKED MY HEELS THREE TIMES, which isn't bad, just makes it this different project. But I think now I'm experimenting with these different ways of, How do I get at this thing? And I have a lot of a frantic poems that are talking through art. And then I have some persona poems that are talking through these other voices. And then I was in a theory class this last semester of school in the Spring and that greatly influenced the poems that I was writing. So I also have a lot of poems that are dealing with theory, which, you know, sorry to my professor, but I hated theory class. So if he's listening, I apologize. But that class was just so hard. Theory is just really, really difficult to grasp. And a lot of the big thinkers and writers of theory wrote in these really difficult and inaccessible ways, and so it's just something that's really hard to get into and to understand. But I think one of the ways that helped me to process it was like, Okay, how can I apply this in my poetics? And so I just included a lot of theory in the current project that I'm working on now. And so this project feels very, very different from both Bloodwarm and I DONE CLICKED MY HEELS THREE TIMES. And I think it was just like I hit this sort of natural phase of just like...you hit a point where you're like, Ooh, my work is changing, something different is happening here. And I think that was what happened before I started this current project, which is also just really exciting, when that happens.
Michael Wheaton 38:39
It'll be exciting to see where you move with that. And kind of, maybe related, what's your experience with prose? Are you someone who feels like prose is somewhere you want to go? Is it somewhere you've been? Are you someone who's like, Mm, I'm good right here, maybe I'll think about it later if the mood strikes, but not something you're interested in?
Taylor Byas 38:58
It's so funny you say that. There's a lot of prose in this current project, a lot of prose, a lot of prose poems. The opening poem actually is this long, sort of prose poem in sections. And that poem, which is also the titular poem, at this point, we don't know if the title will change, probably not. But that poem was actually an honorable mention for Ninth Letter's literary awards in poetry. So, I'm working on prose and it seems to be going well, but it's so funny that you say that because a lot of the poems in this collection are actually prose. So I think that's also another way that I'm experimenting and trying new things. Because they're some more prose poems in the full length as well. But I think much, much more in this current project that I'm working on, for sure.
Michael Wheaton 39:52
And thinking about lineated poetry versus the prose poem. I'm wondering, your thoughts on how and when do you decide, Hey, this needs lineation? Or do you decide, No, this is just a prose poem, it just needs to stay chunky. The reason I say that is because so many of your poems...I mentioned the clarity of the language and the sentences, while broken up and moved around very strategically for great effect. When when are you working on a poem, and you're like, It doesn't need that. It needs to just read straight.
Taylor Byas 40:26
That's a hard one but I think it has a lot to do with where the surprise is happening in the poem. And I think in lineated poems, there are these opportunities that you create for surprise with line break. Or if you're working with a form, for example, or a pantoum. So there's the surprise that is worked into the form of these lines coming back. I think in prose poetry, it's not so much about the surprise of the language itself. But it's more of making something strange or making something just unexpected out of the story that's happening there. So there's not so much emphasis on like, Oh, I broke the line here and this is doing something cool and surprising. It's more so like, I started this prose poem at what seemed like a normal point and I have now turned this story on its head, and the reader has no idea how we got here. And in a good way. So I think there's just different emphasis on where the surprise or the unexpected is happening. And I think in lineated poetry a lot of the time that's like, Well, I'm doing something really exciting or different with these line breaks. I'm surprising my reader with where I'm breaking the line and how I'm taking them from here, and pulling them down to here. Whereas I feel a prose poem is less about the line breaks, but it's more about, I'm writing what feels like... Because also, you'd see prose, you would expect, I think, narrative, too. We see prose and we expect storytelling and fiction. Not to say poetry isn't, but there's a different expectation when we encounter prose. And so I think when we encounter those pros blocks, and then we make something strange out of that narrative that's happening, that's when the surprise really blossoms in a prose poem.
Michael Wheaton 42:20
Yeah, yeah. Like these different modes of transportation.
Michael Wheaton 42:20
I like that. That's a good way to explain it. Because I've always struggled with wondering about that. I don't write too much poetry, but sometimes I'm like, This poem is not working. And then I'll just delete all the spaces, and I'm like, Okay, there we go. I start it as prose, and I'm like, Oh, is because maybe it's not a poem. But yeah, that's a really good answer. The prose poem is the train coming through and the lineated poem's like a car and traffic trying to go somewhere.
Michael Wheaton 43:04
All right, that's my conversation with Taylor Byas. Go by her chapbook, Bloodwarm, right now from Variant Lit. And find out more about her and read more of her work at TaylorByas.com. Alright, that's it. Thanks for listening. 'Til next time.
[episode transcribed by Brian A.Salmons]