Adrienne King (she/they) is a settler and a writer on Treaty 6 territory. She spends long prairie winters plotting her garden and short summers failing her plots. Their poems have been published in antilang.
You can read How to Love Your Weeds in the October 2023 issue.
Would you like to tell us a little bit more about your poem? For instance, how or why you wrote it, or perhaps provide some extra context?
Sure! I wrote How to Love Your Weeds at a moment of uncertainty. For better or worse, my garden is often where my anxieties become embodied, because it’s truly wild and beyond my capacity to tame or even manage. And so the arrival of all of these weeds needing either to be pulled out or accepted—even as I felt lacking and unwanted myself—seemed worthy of being remarked on and I tried to do it with this poem.
Do you have a collection of poetry or even a single poem that acts as a touchstone?
There are a lot of true possible responses to this question, but if I haven’t read or recited some lines from Anne Carson’s The Glass Essay over the course of about ten days, it’s a good way for me to know that I’m not feeling deeply enough to write.
If you didn’t write poetry, how do you think you might access the same fulfillments that poetry offers in your life?
The two modes where I feel most nearly myself are when I’m writing (usually at home alone) or when I’m talking through some kind of campaign or project with a friend or fellow traveler (usually over a coffee or a beer). So, I suppose I’d spend even more time plotting in lieu of writing.
How do you revise your work?
There’s always something I’m trying to hew to—some core image or question at the heart of anything that’s worth revising. So, I try to honour that core while being playful with everything else. Asking “What if” and “What could be” rather than “What is” and “What should be”… And trying to be realistic about whether the word or the line that I’m clinging to is in fact a load-bearing wall in the poem or if it was providing some scaffolding in the drafting process and its job is done now.
What are you working on now?
I’m working on some poems that explore religious trauma and all its comorbidities. I’m trying to have fun with it, though—to make space for both anger and full body laughter. There’s no point being quite as earnest as I was in my youth group days.
How or where or with what does a poem begin?
The easy ones arrive with one or two lines… and then the rest of the first draft is just an exploration of what else might be found nearby. For me, the harder ones to draft usually feel more distant when I sit down to write; when I have two words scribbled in my notebook and I can’t quite remember what I was thinking or feeling that caused me to make that connection in the first place. But when I keep returning, I usually find a way into it or through it.