Writing in the Present: An Interview with Alexandria Peary
by Poetry Editor TJ Prizio
Alexandria Peary is the outgoing Poet Laureate of New Hampshire, serving from 2019-2024. She has earned MFAs from the Iowa Writers’ Workshop and UMass Amherst, as well as a PhD in English from the University of New Hampshire. The author of nine books, Peary has received the 2013 Iowa Poetry Prize for her collection Control Bird Alt Delete, an Academy of American Poets Laureate Fellowship, and most recently, a Fulbright. Among other courses, Peary teaches mindful writing and poetry at Salem State University. To learn more about mindful writing from Peary, read Prolific Moment: Theory and Practice of Mindfulness for Writing, her recent article at Mindful: https://www.mindful.org/free-yourself-from-reader-ghosts-for-deeper-more-mindful-writing/, or watch her TEDx Talk How Mindfulness Can Transform the Way You Write: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3yxnFac7CNA.
TP: I was really happy to read through some of your work, especially surrounding what you talk about in your pedagogy with mindfulness. When students worry about their audience before they even start writing, how can they learn to be present?
AP: What I would say to anybody who’s trying to write: we often off-road from the present moment, transport ourselves to the future or to the past, and we often bring in an imaginary being called a reader who’s not physically in the room where we write, a creature who exists in a separate space and time from our actual space and time at the desk. So all of us have been trained through traditional education to import this creature from the past or the future. What’s viciously unfair is that this audience demon does not want to nurture our rough drafts or our free-writes or our messes. They’re creatures from the future, so they’re looking for the product from the future, the perfect final draft, which we logically haven't had time to write. Or they’re creatures from our past, and they're lugging around our errors, faults, and successes from the past, caught in the concrete of a previous moment, and make us feel that we will perform in the same pre-set way.
I teach mindful writing at the undergrad and graduate level at Salem State University. With mindful writing, we need to notice, assess, and mitigate, as needed, our instances of mindlessness. For example, you need to notice when you’re off-roading from the present, you’ve got to check in, you’ve got to assess, and then you take measures to become more mindful. If you find yourself procrastinating or having low energy or spending so much time on the intro that you could practically move your furniture in, this typically means that you’re performing for someone who’s not in the room. Notice your behavior, notice your energy levels, while being kind to yourself because all of us have been trained by school to always think about our audience, this nonexistent being.
To notice these imaginary beings, these products of our mindless self-talk about the act of writing, I tell my students to do a quick free-write, nonstop writing. ‘How am I talking to myself right now about this act of writing? What’s on my mind about this thing I have to write, this creative writing or this assignment for school or maybe my own writing?’ And then free-write, time it, and then afterwards act like it’s a piece of writing that you picked up off the floor that belongs to someone else, and re-read it. ‘Oh, what did this person have to say?’ Just take a look at the self-pathos like what you are convincing yourself of emotionally, about your act of writing, and also any preconceptions that you’re bringing to the moment of writing.
Look at it rhetorically: ‘What’s this person telling themselves?’ though of course it’s you, and you can kind of gauge if you’ve got what I call an audience demon or a reader ghost in your head, and then take measures to banish them. Free-writing works because its non-genre specific. It’s not a poem and it’s not a short story, it’s not your essay, it’s free-writing, it’s your voice. Or you can manage through your materials like the type of paper, or the pen, or the font, that you would never show your judge, your teacher, or the editor. So writing with magic markers on dollar notebooks—you’ll never show that short story that way to your editor. That way can buy you space and time from people. But most of all just kind of grounding yourself in the present, watching the breathing, anything physical noticed in the present moment, even the hand on the desk. You don’t do that noticing in the past or the future. You notice it right now. It puts you in the present moment, so anything to notice where you are. This is my desk where I write, right here, and if I move my desk chair a little bit I can see my Mara behind me, and it functions as a reminder that anytime I’m acting a certain way at the desk, it’s because I’m entertaining a reader that's only in my head. It’s just the creature of my imagination.
In my undergraduate mindful writing class, one of our favorite assignments is summoning an audience demon, or a reader ghost to manage audience proximity. It’s so much fun, and I think they have a good time too. I give them prompts asking them to remember a certain circumstance with writing that previously stressed them out, and I ask them for details that summon the audience demon, or a ghost. (Demons are mean and vicious, ghosts can be friendly.) And then students generate this creature, and they show themselves interacting with this creature in their essay, and what they do with mindfulness to get them out of their moment. Or, if it’s a ghost and it’s a nice ghost, how to bring their ghost closer.
TP: When practicing mindfulness in a non-generative meditation setting, how do you practice nonattachment? This is a problem that I have, where poetry kicks in and a line comes up, and I don’t know if I’m supposed to write that down and ditch my practice, or whether I hold onto it, or whether I practice that nonattachment and let it fall back into the ether from where it came.
AP: Allen Ginsberg struggled with that, right? Did you know this?
TP: No, I didn’t, but that sounds right.
AP: He would go to the monastery, and he’d sit on his cushion and he’d have a little notebook next to his side and he’d get these ideas, and he’d feel compelled to write them down. The monk would approach Ginsberg and hit him lightly on the shoulder. So I do meditate, sounds like you meditate regularly yourself?
TP: I try my best to. I do not as much as I nearly want to.
AP: It’s great that you do. When I’m at the desk, it’s my form of mindful awareness. It’s my form of meditation. I do have a cushion, I do meditate, but as with my students, my focus is on mindful writing and not mindfulness, because we’re actually after something in our classes. We’re after fluency, we’re after confidence. We’re after product: successful pieces of writing. Which you wouldn’t want in a Buddhist sense, right? So, I say if you have an idea, why not? I feel like if you’re meditating, good for you. And then if you enjoy this added benefit of a line of poetry coming, it’s like your dessert. You deserve it, you know, why not write it down?
TP: Yeah, there’s always in the back of my head: you’re being so capitalist about this moment that’s supposed to be so holy.
AP: But let me ask you: why is the poem not holy?
TP: The poem is holy, and that is of course what you walk away with after a holy moment.
I’ll jump into the next question here where I’m wondering how editing mindfully looks. I’m wondering if you do kind of fall into the Ginsberg “first thought, best thought” or if there is a final draft, or if a poem is always in revision?
AP: Yeah so for me, I don’t draft. As a writing professor, I have to keep people accountable. But for me, the writing is constantly shifting and changing moment by moment, so that’s how I’m editing: moment by moment by moment. I tell my students it even changes after I publish. For instance, it sounds like you’ve read or you’re looking at Prolific Moment, right? So I tell my students I’ve worked for two years back-to-back on that book. It was like having two pregnancies back-to-back. It was worth doing but it was a huge labor. And then even like an hour before it was due at the publisher, I was free-writing an idea, so invention can happen in any moment, even when you’re about to hand your efforts to the publisher. When you give a reading to an audience, changes in phrasing and images arise as a primary text in your mind, a revision, seen only by you, the author. Change constantly happens and I think that’s a good thing. I don’t see it ending.
I think what you’re also asking is at what point do I start thinking about readers. And I definitely do, but as I advise in the classroom…not too early. I think we have been trained to think prematurely about other people when we write. We really need to train ourselves to just listen to that internal rhetoric, that voice, much longer for most of us. But if someone feels like, ‘Oh I’m ready, I'm ready to consider other people or show this piece to another person,’ they need to follow their instincts. If that’s what’s helping them, they should go for it, you know? I think it’s case-by-case, moment-by-moment.
TP: That makes sense. That kind of ties into another question that I have. And it’s something that I’ve bumped into as a problem over the past couple semesters, where I will write a poem and then in the course of editing the draft over and over, I’ll realize when I revisit it that I no longer feel the way that I felt when I wrote the poem. Like on a feelings level, my mental scape has changed. If you approach that problem, how do you feel about it? Do you want to bring the poem into the present? Or do you want to preserve how you felt as you were writing the poem?
AP: No. I’m not saying what you’re saying isn’t interesting, because it really is interesting—I don’t have that experience. I’m just listening, it’s not about me. It’s a call and response to possibility. It sounds like you get a little uncomfortable when the initiating emotion has changed, right?
TP: Right. Reevaluating a poem from maybe months ago, and thinking now, ‘Oh, I feel totally different about this’ but the sentiment of the poem as it started its occasion might be altered now in revisiting it.
AP: Sure, I think that’s cool that it’s changed, right? I think that’s healthy. That’s my opinion. I feel like honoring what you’re feeling right now as opposed to thinking, ‘Oh I should be feeling the same way I felt when I started that piece of writing…’ Let it go! Trust that possibly, very possibly, it’ll come back, that feeling. Whatever it is, it will return.
TP: I’m also wondering how you read poetry mindfully, especially from a subject standpoint. Is a semantic or a tonal understanding of a poem more important to you? How does one mindfully read poetry?
AP: Do you know John Brehm? I teach a grad class in mindful writing, and I would say about 85% of students love Brehm's The Dharma of Poetry, this book, and most of them are not poets. It’s this little, skinny book. Brehm offers a pair of books: one is an anthology of poems, and the other one is a philosophy of how to read poems. You might really love that book. I would not say I am a mindful reader. When I read poetry, I am a writer more than a reader. So I’m reading to write, I’m always cannibalizing. I’m not like stealing people’s ideas, but rather, I read because I want to get to my own writing. I’m eating, eating, eating, so I’m not a very mindful reader.
Brehm's book is phenomenal; I would really recommend it because it addresses exactly what you’re interested in. How to look at poems and how lessons of mindfulness like interbeing or change, impermanence, how you can actually learn about these components of mindfulness as a practice from reading poems. And it was a beautiful book.
TP: In reading Control Bird Alt Delete, while reading those poems, I was struck by the breath of the line, the pleasure of the skipping, the precisely pronounced words, the colorful range of sounds, careful and trusted wisdom, all of these things and I’m wondering if you’re attentive to the physical experience of your work. Especially from a mindful standpoint, paying attention to the body, the breath, whether it’s in the body, the lungs, the breath? Is it important to you that poetry engages with the physical world?
AP: I’m not sure it’s important. I think it’s really important to have the sensory information, the detail and whatnot. When I’m writing, those are not considerations I have in mind. It’s like a call and response. I’m listening, I’m basically trying to access some sort of unconscious Jungian field, and there’s very little critical evaluation happening at that moment. I ask what’s on my mind right now, and the matter of which poem it is or which genre. So I don’t have those conscious thoughts when I’m working. But it sounds like you do? That’s beautiful! You think about breathing and all of that?
TP: Well, just as I’m reading your work, I have to notice that you may be trusting your ear. Maybe it comes so fluidly, intuitively, but it sounds like everything is so pre-set, or pre-discovered.
AP: How do I explain it? It’s not pre-set. Well, maybe pre-set might be the right word. It’s like this: it’s a call and response. I’m really, literally, sending a question to my unconscious, and I’m waiting to see what comes back. And it’s often fragmentary, phrase-like, and sometimes I just jot it down, not knowing where it’ll go eventually. Other times, it’s attached to a piece that's been in progress sometimes for years. In Battle of Silicon Valley at Daybreak, my last book, published in 2022, there's a poem I started in 2001. So it took a long time for the pieces to attach, and I'm fine with waiting. I think it’s a little different, not pre-set; more I’m really tapping into that unconscious.
TP: As I was reading, for instance, “Exquisite Corpse”, you sometimes break the line mid-word. And I was wondering what your process for breaking the line is, whether it’s syllabic or if it’s more intuitive and by ear.
AP: It’s intuitive for sure. I think sometimes breaking the line in the middle of a syllable or a word, you just see the texture, the language.
TJ Prizio is the Poetry Editor of Barnstorm Journal and an MFA Poetry student at the University of New Hampshire. Raised in Connecticut and living in Dover, NH, his work has appeared in CausewayLit, where it won the 2021 Winter Poetry Contest.