Alex Carrigan (he/him) is a Pushcart-nominated editor, poet, and critic from Alexandria, Virginia. He is the author of Now Let’s Get Brunch: A Collection of RuPaul’s Drag Race Twitter Poetry (Querencia Press, 2023) and May All Our Pain Be Champagne: A Collection of Real Housewives Twitter Poetry (Alien Buddha Press, 2022). He has had fiction, poetry, and literary reviews published in Quail Bell Magazine, Lambda Literary Review, Barrelhouse, Sage Cigarettes (Best of the Net Nominee, 2023), Stories About Penises (Guts Publishing, 2019), and more. For more information, visit @carriganak on Twitter or carriganak.wordpress.com
You can read In Comfort for a Time in the January 2024 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?
“In Comfort for a Time” was part of a writing challenge I gave myself in August 2023. I would write a duplex poem each day of the month, but I would use a line from another poet’s work as the first/last poem of the work. I had queried folks in my writing group and from my Twitter feed to send me poems of theirs, and if I found a line I could build a poem off, I used it for the challenge.
Anna Gasaway was one of the poets who replied with a link to two of her poems in One Art. I chose the line “You sleep in comfort for a time, but then it starts again” because it could be interpreted in so many different ways, which would allow me to pay homage to Gasaway but also make the line my own. I chose the lines long before I wrote the poems for the challenge, so how I read it the day I chose it was different from how I read it the day I wrote it.
Why was the poetic form the best fit for this particular piece of work?
The challenge in writing duplex poems is that you have to be economical and confident in your word choices. The first and last lines repeat, the end of the even-numbered lines get transformed into the beginning of the odd-numbered lines, and you only have fourteen lines total. Because of the cyclical nature of the poem, the line worked wonderfully for the format because it forced me to think what “starts again.”
Gasaway’s original poem was about health, while I chose one about uneasy sleeping and grief. Sleep and grief are things we have to revisit again and again in our lives, and both can be challenging to deal with. I was definitely inspired by my current sleeping habits as my apartment vents can get loud at random times, so it’s something I’ve had to accept in my living situation. I imagine it’s the same as when dealing with severe grief, so constantly falling into a cycle of comfort and discomfort felt fun to explore in this format.
What are you working on now?
I’m at a stage where I’m submitting more than I write. I’m trying to commit to doing three month-long poetry writing sprees after having done so in April, August, and November last year. If I come across a themed call that interests me, I try to write when I can. But for the most part, I’m trying to think about the writing challenge I have planned for April. I’m still developing it and will share it on my social media, so be on the lookout for it.
I published my first full-length poetry collection last year, Now Let’s Get Brunch from Querencia Press. That was a themed collection of cento poems created from Twitter accounts of famous drag queens. I would like to work on a new poetry manuscript this year, but I’m unsure if I’ll do a duplex collection or something else. I’m hoping to have more ideas as the year progresses.
Are there other art forms that inspire or inform your poetry?
I like to be surprised by various media I wouldn’t expect to inspire me but somehow gets me writing. Last year I wrote a few pieces inspired by some Korean media I watched such as Hotel Del Luna and The Glory, both of which enraptured me so much I had to make poems based on characters and motifs from the shows.
I’m also trying to be inspired by clothes or locations I write in when I’m writing outside the house. There’s a bar in Washington DC that looks like you’re sitting in a drained pool, and that inspired a poem I published last summer as the image of a drained pool inspired me. I wrote a romantic poem based on a t-shirt I saw in another bar and a poem based on two people I saw sitting on a stoop one evening, so I’m really trying to be inspired by places and moments now.
Do you belong to a writer’s group? If not, where do you find poetry community and feedback?
I’m connected with a lot of writers through social media and in writing groups on Discord, such as Fifth Wheel Press and Sage Cigarettes. I meet with a group every Thursday night over Zoom full of writers from all over the world. We share our recent acceptances and publications, read our work, and share feedback with each other. That’s been great at gaining feedback on my work, while also inspiring me to write more so I’m always able to participate in the group. It’s also just a fun time, so the more fun I have, the more I want to continue writing poetry.