Annie Diamond is an Ashkenazi Jewish poet and breakfast enthusiast living and working on the traditional unceded homelands of the Council of the Three Fires, sometimes called Chicago. Her poems have appeared and are forthcoming in No Tokens, Yemassee, Verklempt, Western Humanities Review, and elsewhere.
You can read her poem Zelfportret in the July 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?
This poem was inspired by a trip I took to the Netherlands in 2015, where I visited some cousins. One of my cousins (my dad’s favorite first cousin) works as an art restorer at the Mauritshuis Museum in The Hague, where she literally touches Rembrandts on the regular, and she is predictably the best person I have ever met to visit a museum with. We went to the Van Gogh Museum together in Amsterdam and this poem largely started to come together there.
Why was the poetic form the best fit for this particular piece of work?
Recently I have been working a lot with the kind of disjointed couplets that comprise this poem. The couplet is my favorite poetic stanza, and only in the last few years have I really started testing its limits. The first couplet of the poem looks like a regular couplet, but then as the poem begins to explore questions of identity and language, the couplets deliberately fall apart. The final stanza may not even really be a couplet, just one split line.
Do you have a collection of poetry or even a single poem that acts as a touchstone?
A Year & other poems by Jos Charles, published in March 2022, is a more recent book that has been a huge talisman for me as I have reworked a lot of my older poems formally. Seeing the ways Charles employs absence on the page and really tests the line break have emboldened me to look at my own poems in new ways. “Power” and “A Valediction Forbidding Mourning” by Adrienne Rich are two poems that act as my poetic true north, and have for a long time. The epigraph of my manuscript is two lines from the latter poem: “When I think of a landscape I am thinking of a time./When I talk of taking a trip I mean forever.”
If you didn’t write poetry, how do you think you might access the same fulfillments that poetry offers in your life?
This is a strange question to me, because I have never thought about not writing poetry. I would probably still be in graduate school, getting a PhD in English. My life would be a lot worse without poetry.
How do you revise your work?
Usually I start by leaving all the words as they are and changing the form first (typically I will try to expand a very neat poem of regular couplets or tercets into something messier, if the poem feels stagnant or wrong to me). Then, if it still feels bad, I will mess with the words. I write pretty painstakingly and tend to revise a lot as I work on a first draft of a new poem.
What are you working on now?
Right now I am trying to publish my first book of poems! I have been entering my manuscript into contests regularly for about two years now.
How or where or with what does a poem begin?
Usually with one line or image that I wrote down a long time ago in either the Notes app of my phone or in a recent journal that I have gone back to.
Are there other art forms that inspire or inform your poetry?
I have recently, for the last two years or so, been reading a lot of nonfiction, on lots of different subjects. The attention to detail that nonfiction writers bring to their work is incredibly inspiring to me.
How do you make space for poetry in your daily routine?
This is something I am still working on! I try to write in the mornings; the longer the day goes on, the less likely I am to write. I feel best writing in the morning, before my mind is cluttered with all the various refuse of the day. I like best writing when I am home alone, which is not that frequent, but I know I could ask my husband to leave the apartment and go for a walk for an hour so I can write and talk to myself out loud. I will start doing this more.
Have you ever received advice (or has there been something you’ve learned on your own) about writing or revising poems that has made you a better poet? What was it?
I have learned that, if I am unhappy with certain poems but cannot figure out why, putting them away for a few months or years (the longer the better) is often the key to resolving them. When I physically put them away, I forget about them, and that allows my mind to clear. I do not remember who first gave me this advice, but it has come from multiple people over the years, and has proven incredibly effective for me.