Interview with torrin a. greathouse

Erika Walsh:

In a recent interview with the Poetry Foundation, you stated that poems are "inevitably altered by their being in the world" and expressed joy at seeing how different writers have adapted the burning haibun, a form you created, in their own work. You also state that the "after" poem is "inextricable" from your work. Who are some of the most influential writers that have informed your poetry, and what is the extent to which community with other writers shapes your work?

torrin a. greathouse:

The first part of your question is always such a hard one for me to answer. I feel like my influences and interests change so much with each project I work on. However,  I’ll do my best to give a satisfying answer. Two of my greatest teachers, both major influences on my work, are Douglas Kearney and Amy Gerstler. The rising generation of poets preceding me were also huge, folks like Jennifer Espinoza, Christopher Soto, sam sax, Hanif Abdurraqib, Danez Smith and Franny Choi and the rest of the Dark Noise collective. 

And related to your question about community, I think my work (and personhood) are so deeply shaped by the poets and artists I am in direct community with, whether that’s physical spaces or group chats, particularly the Double-Six Collective—composed of me, Julian Randall, George Abraham, Bradley Trumpfheller, and Tarik Dobbs. Honestly though, I could keep listing poets for days.

Erika:

You have a background as a journalist, and stated in an interview on VS that you find poetry to be a "more solid way into the truth." How can you tell when something you're reading is the truth, and what are ways into the truth that feel most authentic to you? What writing devices and ways of being in the world can we employ to get closer to the truth?

torrin:

Okay, so, first off apologies, I’m going to go a little bit off script with this question because I have complicated feelings when it comes to the concept of the truth—even more so than when we recorded that episode of VS. I don’t think that authenticity or objectivity are frameworks that I’m particularly compelled by at this point, and honestly who the hell am I to be the arbiter of authenticity or truth anyway? When thinking about journalism’s relationship to the truth, though, I was specifically railing against the ways in which financial and bipartisan political interests shape so much of the field. I was really invested in capital t Truth in my early twenties and grew pretty jaded with journalism when I realized how little the field was really interested in that kind of truth. But the longer I write, the more interested I am in subjective truth than a kind of platonic ideal of objective truth. In a way, poetry was a welcome escape from the pressure of objectivity because it has allowed me to really lean into just writing my own subjective truth, the kind of experiences mainstream journalism largely doesn’t give a damn about anyway.

The techniques I’ve found useful for approaching that personal truth are largely shaped by the way that severe PTSD has altered my perception of time. I am often trying to capture the cyclical and recursive nature of traumatic time, via poems that either engage in cyclical poetic form or rewrite their own narrative as they go on. Etymology, which I’m never not talking about, has also been really useful in that regard. For other writers though, I’m not sure I can provide the most helpful advice. All I can really offer is this: lean into your own subjectivity, and seek out poetic devices that might provide inroads to the particularities of your experiences.

Erika:

You've mentioned that your forthcoming book DEED includes triptychs that subvert the form's relationship to christianity as a "social mythology." How can subverting traditional poetic forms encourage writers to write in ways that subvert and challenge their ideas about history, the "truth," and societal norms at large?


torrin:

Phew, these are some big questions. Alright, so, let me start by saying that I think about any form (received or invented or quotidian) is an architecture of meaning. By this I mean that the confines of a form constrain and shape thought. The majority of sonnets end up feeling like arguments because the sonnet’s defining volta implicitly shapes poems within that form into that kind of rhetorical structure. Likewise, most forms are not empty containers when we arrive. They are filled with the baggage of their respective traditions, the subject matter, themes, etc. And I think that each of these aspects of form make it ripe territory for [sub/per]version. 

In the first case, I think that breaking or modifying forms can be such a generative way of engaging with the structuring logic of a form, like my own burning haibun’s torquing of the haibun’s logic through engagement with erasure, the way Franny Choi’s Hangul Abecedarian form disrupts the assumed structuring logic of the English abecedarian, or how George Abraham’s Markov Sonnet uses the structure of Markov probability chains to alter the sonnet into something almost more akin to a pantoum or other cyclical form. Meanwhile, the latter opens up chances for more thematic subversion. For example, one of the many historical themes of the sonnet (particularly the Elizabethan sonnet) is courtly love. In the writing of DEED, I became very interested in what might be altered by shifting that frame subtly. What happens to the energy of a sonnet when its topic is not courtship but the failure of a marriage or lust without love? 

All of which brings me to your original question. I try not to speak for other writers and their individual practices, but what I can say is that this kind of formal subversion has often allowed me to kind of shadow box with tradition, history, and myth in my work. The use of triptychs in DEED is a play on the way that Christian religious art often uses the triptych to kind of Cliff Notes religious stories—the most common kind being three panels showing the birth, life, and crucifixion of Jesus—to instead constellate the collection’s story of desire, shame, and violence across the course of my life.

Erika:

You've expressed that language is a tool that can become a weapon, and that part of the mission of your poetics is to reclaim or remake language, transforming it from a weapon back into a tool again. When language is not being wielded as a weapon, what are the ways it can be beneficial to us as a tool? How can we as writers work to foster this transformation from weapon to tool in our work?


torrin:

The truth is, I’m still trying to find these answers for myself and that they’ll differ for every writer because of the different subject positions we occupy. I do think that it’s deeply important that, as people who espouse a deep and abiding love for language, we engage with curiosity and care. There are far too many writers I’ve encountered who use language in dangerous, lazy, and (unintentionally) violent ways. 

A big part of my own practice is etymological research; excavating where a piece of language comes from can often provide a deeper understanding of how it can/should be used, as well as what weight it might carry for different readers. There is also, frankly, so much racist, anti-Indigenous, queerphobic, and ableist language that has slipped into the English language, and I think that the bare minimum we can do as writers is to excise these things from our work and speech.


Erika:

You've credited the internet and online communities as places where you were able to engage with a writing community for the first time. What can happen in an online literary space that is not possible in print, or perhaps even in-person? How do online spaces increase and expand accessibility and community?


torrin:

When I started writing, I was pretty geographically isolated. There wasn’t a ton going on in Orange County, where I attended undergrad, besides the spoken word club I helped to run and the small reading where I got my start—shout out Two Idiots Peddling Poetry at The Ugly Mug Cafe. As a result, I ended up really finding community via Facebook and (the artist formerly known as) Twitter, as well as via online poetry classes and founding a small, now-defunct, poetry journal. I think that online spaces provide a lot of opportunities that in-person spaces don’t, in terms of access, whether that is because of disability or geographical isolation. I also think it’s particularly important that we continue to maintain these spaces, given that Covid shows no signs of going away and that collective attempts to ignore it just further marginalize disabled and chronically ill members of our communities.


Erika:

I hear you’re a triple Virgo! As a fellow Earth sign (a triple Taurus, with a Virgo rising), I'm curious about the ways in which your Earth sign sensibilities come up in your work. Where does the earth live in your poems?


torrin:

To be a little glib about where the earth lives in my work—everywhere. Under my feet and flourishing in the white space of every page. More seriously, I think my formalist streak is really where the Virgo comes through, I love just digging really deep into the mechanics of a form. I also think the degree to which I love researching etymologies for use in my poems is very Earth sign. My absolute favorite story to tell in regards to this, though, is that I will often try to fact check my metaphors and images, to see if they hold up. There’s these lines in a poem about disordered eating from Wound from the Mouth of a Wound where I say “Each calorie / a single match / struck in the gut,” and I ended up actually calculating what the change in energy necessary for igniting a match was to see if it was close enough to one food calorie, or kilocalorie, for me to feel okay using that line in the poem.


Erika:

What does a perfect day look like for you?


torrin:

Waking up early, going to bed late. Cooking a big breakfast and reading until I feel called to write. Dinner with whatever loved ones I can draw near to me. A day of love and art, bookended by the motion of the sun.

torrin a. greathouse is a transgender cripple-punk poet and essayist. They have received fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Effing Foundation for Sex Positivity, Zoeglossia, the University of Arizona Poetry Center, and the Ragdale Foundation. She is the author of Wound from the Mouth of a Wound (Milkweed Editions, 2020), winner of the 2022 Kate Tufts Discovery Award, and DEED (Wesleyan University Press, 2024). She teaches at the Rainier Writing Workshop, the low-residency MFA program at Pacific Lutheran University.