Language Is Also A Place: An Interview with Lena Khalaf Tuffaha

This interview was recorded in the summer of 2023, and has been delayed for a series of accidental and unforeseen reasons. We thank TriQuarterly for their patience, and feel the need to add a disclaimer about this timing, given the past 8 months of genocidal escalation in Gaza committed by the Zionist entity. The official death counts exceed 35,000, but due to the sheer quantity of unidentifiable bodies who are excluded from the count, the real death count is likely over 100,000. These are the stakes in which this conversation, featuring two Palestinian writers, is grounded. We feel worlds away from this conversation, and life before October 2023, and are publishing it with a heavy hearted retrospection that is sharpened by the current reality. For more information on Palestine, we recommend resources such as Decolonize Palestine and the Institute for Middle East Understanding, as well as literary journals such as Mizna and Fikra Magazine. We encourage readers to follow GazaFunds, adopt a campaign, and help donate and share to mutual aid efforts in Gaza.  

This past month, Lena Khalaf Tuffaha and I had the chance to gather at the Wordplay festival in Minneapolis, where we sat for this conversation before the Mizna 24.1 Myth and Memory Issue Launch – the release party for my inaugural issue as Mizna’s executive editor which features some incredible new poems from Tuffaha’s next book, Something About Living, winner of the 2022 Akron Poetry Prize selected by Adrian Matejka and forthcoming in 2024! Tuffaha’s other books include her debut Water & Salt, which was an honorable mention for the Arab American Book Award among other honors, as well as several incredible chapbooks such as Letters from the Interior and Arabs in Newsland. She also served as an editor of the Poems from Palestine translation series with The Baffler, and was an invaluable advocate and adviser to Noor Hindi and myself as we co-edited a Palestinian poetry anthology these past few years for Haymarket Books. 

As a long-time fan of Tuffaha’s work, it was an honor to sit and talk about her newest book, Kaan and Her Sisters, which was just released this summer with Trio House Press! One of the many things I loved most about Kaan and Her Sisters was its treatment of language, and especially, the relationship between English and Arabic. The title is a reference to a grammatical family of verbs which all behave like the Arabic verb Kaan (the past tense of to be). Just as grammatical constructs become characters and generative structures for various poems in this book, these poems also tell stories of various Arab and Palestinian women in Tuffaha’s life – all of whom are written into the recurring character of Miss Sahar. This is a rich, dynamic poetry collection that lives through language as much as it languages Arab alive-ness – Tuffaha has written among my favorite poetry books of 2023 thus far.

– George Abraham (July, 2023)

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George Abraham: So before we started this recording, we were just talking about how groundbreaking Edward Said’s The Question of Palestine is for our community. I was talking to my advisor Rebecca Johnson about how it was written before the Israeli archives opened as well, which of course induced the flood of new historians (mainly liberal zionists). Palestinians have known what happened to us before these historians’ “interventions” into Zionist society (and look where that consciousness has gotten us… Thinking about Gil Hochberg’s idea of archival fatigue here…). But you were noting how Said translated these concrete Palestinian realities into questions of language instead of, say, putting it into the colonially-mediated terrain of archives, which have histories of looting (Masalha et al) and which are inaccessible to so many of us because of the Zionist state apparatus (Azoulay et al). These are all levels of narrative mediation come into play, and folks like Hochberg, Azoulay, etc are doing such interesting work thinking about how Palestinians are engaging with our pasts beyond the constraints of archives. Said’s book preceding the archives says a lot about the قضية (qadia) logic of how Palestinians talk about our history via questions, cases, etc. It’s so key to understanding how Palestinian memory functions – this is how we preserve our memory. There’s something powerful about this convergence that I don’t have words for yet. 

Lena Khalaf Tuffaha: There's what happened, and then there's how we talk about and how we remember what happened. Capturing those dual experiences is about choosing language. And there is a really important move you're making like we were talking about earlier with this idea of describing the occupation and apartheid as the قضية (qadia), “the court case” or “the cause,” and this business of I'm arguing it as a legal case, which we do, having international law very clearly on the side of the Palestinians, while in real life, that hasn’t amounted to anything. I mean: how international law has just been ignored. There's a fracture between the language that we Palestinians first used, when we believed that we would be heard, that international law could deliver justice, and the reality that we find ourselves in decades later.

I'm also thinking about a quote from the Palestinian novelist Ibrahim Nasrallah: “our writing is intended for us to own our stories, because if we do not write our story, it becomes the property of our enemies.” This encapsulation is amazing. An example of this is Edward Said’s The Question of Palestine. Among its many accomplishments, it created a language that is authentically Palestinian to embody our experience, and put a stake in the ground so that everything else would need to respond to that authentic telling. And maybe, in the midst of daily resistance to the violence of occupation, we don't all have the luxury of thinking about that, but as a writer and as an academic, it was a really important contribution for him  to make that lens available to a Western readership. 

George Abraham: It's such a clear and readable text. You don't need to have a high entry bar. It's sophisticated, yes, but you don't need to have a high entry bar to get into it. You know. It's never been complicated. I'm very interested in, maybe transitioning us into poetry, this idea of narrative complexity, and how zionists try to complexify our narratives as a weapon against us. You know, it's not very complicated. There are nuances, I mean, like everything in life. But what happened to us was devastatingly simple: a textbook case of ethnic cleansing. An Indigenous population was displaced at the hands of another population, both backed by and marginalized by Western forces. It is and has always been a textbook case of a colonial project. And this gets me thinking about your poetry book, and the ways our narratives are refracted through a lyric modality that both cuts to the essence of the music, but also allows our stories to live in a new way. I would love to hear more about this narrative lyric interface, and the stories that inspired the book?

Lena Khalaf Tuffaha: Thanks for saying it that way. To me a lot of the impetus to write this book had to do with the feeling of narrative interruption. Palestinian life outside of Palestine is the one that I know, and that I have experience with, so the first interruption is that I and my family are absented from our homeland, I am outside of Palestine because of the violence of occupation. But even this life, my normal day-to-day, is always interrupted and corrected and imposed upon,  and you know, if you have to live your life while simultaneously being told you don't actually exist, that has an impact, right? In different ways and across multiple generations. The interruptions are myriad and so many of them are enacted in language. But there’s a throughline of knowing you’re Palestinian, whether in the Arab world or in a refugee camp or somewhere in the West, and we continue to be Palestinian, and there is a vocabulary that comes with that. 

I wanted to try to honor that life and I didn't feel like it was represented anywhere in poetry that felt familiar to me, especially the lives and work of  women. Many of the women in my life – the Palestinian and Arab women, Levantine or Shami for lack of a better word – have been the keepers of stories and of euphemisms, and those euphemisms are stories, and are deeply rooted in our history and our traditions, and in histories of traditions we don't get to experience because we are exiled from our homeland. I wanted to show what that kind of freedom could look like. Yes, there are wars and during those wars we're also falling in love and breaking up and getting married and getting divorced and having kids and losing things and experiencing disappointments. All those human experiences are braided through the bigger stories of war, dispossession, and horror; everything is happening together all at the same time. I needed poems that captured all of those levels so, humbly, I hope that’s what the poems, these braids of songs, might offer. You can see different modes in the book: letters, snapshots of quotidian experiences, and sketches of a remembered house, all of these exist for Palestinians in many places in the world.

George Abraham: That was definitely my experience reading the book! That leads me to a more contextual question, as I lived with the characters of this book – it’s interesting, characters is not really a word I use to talk about poetry, per se, but this book is one of the rare cases that enlivens so many people through poetry! I would love to hear more about Miss Sahar (who is a central character in several poems such as this one & these ones), especially for readers who are less familiar with the concept behind this book and your relationship to language through learning Arabic from characters like Miss Sahar. 

Lena Khalaf Tuffaha: Miss Sahar is a composite of different people, different women, Arabic teachers, etc. There's a way in which the transmission of history – but not history as this dead, static thing, history, we know as Palestinians, is history ongoing, is constantly shoving its way into the present–there's a way in which the Miss Sahars of my life – and also in the lives of people in my parents' generation,  time is smashed a lot in this book – those different Miss Sahars have had a really important role to play beyond simply teaching poems or the rules of grammar. They help us understand how to think about ourselves and our lives. I just felt like the past tense verb-sisters were a really great way to embody some of those considerations: that we can have our own language, how to talk about ourselves and how to envision ourselves, past and future.

And it felt really fitting to me, that it would be a woman narrating our moment and shaping our understanding of past and future, because that's who it's been, certainly in my life, as a Palestinian who grew up in different countries and school systems and cultures. I think about those young women teaching in refugee schools, you know, and what they have to teach is so much more than reading, writing, and arithmetic. There is a life-saving function in such an extreme circumstance and such a massive burden is placed on their shoulders. So I wanted both to capture some of that, and also to honor it. 

George Abraham: Being US educated, the only equivalent I have is that life-saving English teacher stereotype – there was a meme going around on the internet like “raise your hand if your high school English teacher saved your life” like… Reading texts like Woman Warrior by Maxine Hong Kingston and Things Fall Apart by Chinua Achebe was so formative for me, thinking back in retrospect, and I’m so grateful for the ways feminist and post/anti-colonial texts played such a central role in my public high school education, and entry into English more broadly. It all just gets me thinking about the life-saving function of pedagogy.

Lena Khalaf Tuffaha: Absolutely, and if you think about it, Ghassan Kanafani was a teacher. You know, we're coming up on the 50th anniversary of his assassination. But I also think about, in my life, Miss Rabiha –  I wonder where she is today. She's a Syrian woman and she was my Arabic teacher in eighth grade. She taught us a poem that was in the curriculum (but Miss Rabiha taught it Miss Rabiha’s way!) and it was a poem called, بطل الجزائر or “The Hero of Algiers.”  I’ll let you imagine what that means, and how she taught it. At the point in my education, all I knew of Algeria was that it was an Arab country in North Africa, a North African country on a map, but Miss Rabiha enlivened it in a way that was deeply relevant to me as an Arab, as a citizen of the Global South, as a Palestinian. 

So there are moments, in which the teachers might save our lives. They might also blow up what we think our lives are in ways that are really necessary and important, and make us better than just who we are as individuals. They place us in a community, especially overseas, there's a way of dressing down that hyper-individualism and rooting you among your people, and to me that feels like a central function of the Arabic teacher featured in this book. 

George Abraham: That’s so beautiful – I love all these unplanned detours our conversation is taking! Another thing I love in this book is the language of time that's also emerging. One of my favorite quotes in your book is, “Repetition is a Nakba,” for example, which is established earlier in the book, and it sets us up for a lot of the repetition forms (like pantoums) and resonances (like poems which incorporate song lyrics from Fairuz or words from Edward Said or W.B. Yeats) throughout the rest of the book. Every time we see a repetition form like a pantoum, I’m reminded of your “Repetition is a Nakba” line. Every time we see another person’s words resonating within your poem, we’re seeing a kind of refractive, anti-individual poetics. I’d love to hear more about how form, and specifically through repetition and/or resonance, has been generative for you in this project. 

Lena Khalaf Tuffaha: The pantoum is a form I didn’t know. One of my mentors and dear friends from grad school, the poet Oliver de la Paz, said do you know about this form? This would be relevant to what you're trying to do when I had started to really work on this manuscript in earnest in the second year of my MFA program. I had these Fairuz poems, some letter poems, and I didn't know what to do with them. They just felt overwhelming; these poems were just beating me up, you know, poems can really abuse you sometimes! And so he suggested think about pantoums. And to his great credit, the form really gave me room to process my own relationship to my Fairuz obsession. In many Arab capital cities if you turn on the radio in the morning you'll hear Fairuz. She is who you listen to when you drink your morning coffee. That was certainly true in my childhood, and it was true again when I moved to Amman as an adult I would take my kids to school and there was Fairuz on the radio in the morning. There was this beautiful throughline of mostly love songs – not all, but, overwhelmingly love songs like, no matter what was happening, including during the Arab Spring revolutions, which were unfolding when I lived in Amman end of 2010 into the beginning of 2011. Fairuz songs became a soundtrack of a particular and ongoing era, and this contrast was very generative for me. Because, again, we're not historical characters and we're not victims, we're human beings living these large-scale events while we fall in love and fall out of love and whatever else happens in ordinary people's lives, singing along to these songs.

The pantoum felt like a great frame to put around unwieldy experiences. For example, the poem “Miss Sahar Listens to Fairuz Sing I'll Write Your Name” – it’s an almost giddy kind of love song, but the poem is talking about something much darker – a prisoner and someone being taken away and those contrasts interact every day. I loved finding a container for that contradiction. The repetition in pantoums creates an important echo: it's not just saying the same phrase, but it's turning it a little bit differently in the light each time. And I think that’s a critical aspect of repetition in a poem: the way that it can change the phrase each time you repeat it, change its weight. 

And in terms of the “repetition is a Nakba” line you referenced, it’s interesting because “What Happens Next” was one of the last poems I wrote for the book. I had rearranged the manuscript several times and it felt like something was just missing and I couldn’t figure it out. There were many places where I worked with anaphoras, and I was worried that I was leaning too much into that. In my process, I thought about how we Palestinians are forced into debates about our own value, as human beings, which happens all the time. We’re confronted with idiotic phrases like, why can't you just move on? I think all of us growing up have been subjected to a dehumanizing debate with, like, students that will grow up to work for AIPAC, who repeat you guys just need to move on. It’s such an interesting thing to say, because what  is being described as a past is, of course, not at all in the  past. And you know, we’re seeing that with the violent incursion in Jenin this week, in Sheikh Jarrah before that, and Gaza – I've lost track of how many times we’ve seen this, over and over, and in our refugee camps all the time. And in Lebanon. And in Syria, certainly during the Civil War and the images of coming out of Yarmouk camp like…  lf that doesn’t explain how repetition is a Nakba, I don’t know what does… I felt I just needed that to be very explicit about the destructive force of that repetition. Once I wrote into those phrases, I realized, this is the connective tissue for the book.

George Abraham: Wow, I’m so emotional right now! It’s so interesting, I’ve been thinking a lot about repetition forms like the pantoum as ways of unlocking the unconscious almost? When Kay Ulanday Barrett taught a pantoum workshop, they called it “the buy one get one free” of the poetic forms because if you write one stanza you already have half of another one for free. There’s a way it may take us in a direction we don’t expect, which I love. I love how your “Repetition is a Nakba” line arrived later for you, like you arrived at it through the book. There’s a way that poetry naturally makes us prioritize process, in this way, over end goal or product. And, you know, all of these threads made me so interested to return to your incredible debut, Water & Salt, and notice so many threads of continuity here with your second collection. I’m curious about what changed, or stayed the same or perhaps surprised you most, about your process for writing Kaan and Her Sisters relative to your debut?

Lena Khalaf Tuffaha: The first book was written over 20 years, much longer than the second one, maybe almost double? I think for a long time, when I was writing the poems of Water & Salt, I wasn't thinking of them as a book. That process came much later, and that's probably a good thing? With Kaan and Her Sisters, I didn't necessarily set out to write a book either. I followed what was speaking to me, and had, what I felt in the beginning were strange threads that I wanted to pick up and see what they meant and what they were about. These are poems that I was writing while I was in the Rainier Writing Workshop. In the beginning, I was more consciously asking what does this mean? But I couldn't satisfactorily finish the book until I let go of that; it was an interesting learning experience. I probably couldn't have written Kaan and Her Sisters if I hadn't written Water & Salt first, because this book has characters and is trying so many different things formally. I needed to write Water & Salt first to have permission to try something a little stranger, and something that has more of a narrative arc.

George Abraham: Ocean Vuong once talked about how there is often a single poem in one's debut which will lead a poet to their second poetry collection. What, if any, was that poem for you?

Lena Khalaf Tuffaha: I’ve been scanning my brain trying to think of an answer and I’m thinking about the poem “copy books” which is very much about teachers and parents and I remember the feeling of writing, of drafting at home very clearly, and this other side of that anti- individualism is also the reality of growing up in the Arab world. Of standing in a lot of lines and reciting a lot of anthems and being told things, of being directed. And having to figure out a way to find the self inside despite that. Poetry is what did that for me. So maybe that's the only little seed I can really think of… 

George Abraham: I love how everyone has answered this question in such different ways across the series (see the Hayan and Safia interviews here). I know that you have another book coming out soon – Something About Living – which was also announced around the same time as Kaan and Her Sisters and the internet went up in flames celebrating this Era Of Lena! I’m curious about the timelines of both projects – are they sort of sister books? How did you navigate writing and/or submitting them? How entangled were their timelines, process wise versus more publishing industry constraints? I think about how a lot of poets have such non-linear paths with their books coming out on such different timelines than the ones in which they were written. 

Lena Khalaf Tuffaha: I always find it terrifying to say what I think about this, because really, once you publish a book, it belongs to the reader in that they're sort of in charge of how it's read, despite whatever you want. But in my mind, the books are not related. Kaan and Her Sisters was done and I was sending it out for a while and it had an interesting set of experiences – it was an “almost” for a lot of presses, with poets and thinkers I really love, and I’m so grateful and happy it ended up with Trio House, because I love my editors there so much! I’m glad it had a happy ending, of course, but almost-ing can be really painful because it sends you back to thinking: do I stay the course? Is something off? I hate that headspace. I like writing poems way more than publishing them. I lived in that headspace for this book for a relatively long time. There were times I felt it was being misread, you know, I had some WILD, wild feedback about it that made me realize, ok this wasn’t the audience for this book. And you learn a lot about yourself, as a writer and a person from those experiences. Meanwhile, I was writing other poems, and mostly those other poems became the manuscript for Something About Living. I didn't start off thinking I was writing another book. I was just writing my poems, but there's a point at which it turns and you realize, oh, I'm doing a thing – these poems fit together. You know, there's that way in which a manuscript can sort of show you that it's happening. I started to see that, and I was quietly working on this manuscript. I have to say, it was the least stressful book? I felt more playful, and I was just messing around and not hating my poems. Because I had been so frustrated with some of the tension around Kaan and Her Sisters for so long, I wrote this other thing really for me. I think Something About Living is very much my explicitly Palestinian American book, while Kaan and Her Sisters was more Arab and Arabic, even though I wanted it in English, and we can talk about that contradiction more. It doesn’t have to make sense to everyone to say that, but I know there are people out there who need the book as I did.

George Abraham: ABSOLUTELY, as a learner of Arabic, I felt the biggest gravitational pull towards Kaan and Her Sisters. 

Lena Khalaf Tuffaha: Exactly, I knew I needed it, and I trust that others needed it. There are plenty of other poetry books on the shelves – it might not be for everyone. My next book, Something About Living, felt very deeply Palestinian American, Palestinian-within-empire, in this moment. And it does engage with language and similar obsessions that I’m going to have my entire life, but it’s written in an American context and is contending with that. There’s a poem in the book that I think of as a love letter to June Jordan, whose language and life are really important to me. You can arrive in this country and be unseen and erased, and then you happen upon a book that just gives you a seemingly small gift that heals something in you. The title of Something About Living is borrowed from Jordan’s poetry. 

George Abraham: Wow, this is so funny, we’re sitting here having this conversation on July 8, just one day before June Jordan’s birthday (allah yerhamha). Getting goosebumps right now! But this dovetails perfectly into the next question, thinking about the ways this book speaks in English to an Arab and Arabophone audience. I know you’re also doing a lot of great translation work, with The Baffler’s Poems from Palestine series for example, and I’m curious about how this work has shaped your own poetry? At stake in your books are not just relationships to other poets but to languages themselves, you know? 

Lena Khalaf Tuffaha: My parents took me to Palestine once when I was very, very young, two years old or something, so I don't really have a memory of that. I didn't go to Palestine again until… I think I was 20? The Palestine I knew was the product of the language of people I grew up reading – Ghassan Kanafani, Mahmoud Darwish, and Fadwa Touqan. Those were kind of my trinity of Palestinian imagination. So many of us owe our sense of self and lineage and belonging to language that was intentionally and defiantly crafted by our poets and writers. Language is also a place, and a way to build home. It felt important to really lean into that. 

I feel like there are two sides, the Arabophone side of course, and I feel like… I don’t want to limit Kaan and Her Sisters, but some of it is generational, you know, those of us who grew up in the 70s and 80s, many who are parents now, in-betweeners, trying to hold on to the things we got from our parents, and trying to make some version of that heritage available to our kids. It’s that in-between-ness – it’s heavy, and weighted in all different ways. I wanted to write into that as well. You see it in the letter poems, where a student grows up, becomes a mom, and is trying to figure out how to keep and pass on what she carries. 

For translation, I read a lot in Arabic, but I think, like many people who left home, a lot of what I read was not from living writers. Certainly more living novelists than poets, I’m embarrassed to admit, because access is complicated and awareness of what’s on the scene is complicated. And so, when Fady Joudah started doing the Baffler series, it was an invitation to connect with and learn about new-to-me Palestinian poets I had never heard of, and to read them in Arabic and find out more about their work. And I felt like they touched a piece of me that I didn’t know was missing. It was a very selfish endeavor like, please give me more poems! It was an incredible and humbling experience to work alongside these poets and to be entrusted with their work. One of the effects of diaspora life is, it can reduce so much to kitsch.  It can shrink things and make them two-dimensional. Interacting with living writers destroys all of that, and you encounter real people and their real concerns that may not fit into whatever hyper-sanctified version of Palestinians you built in your mind. Translation also feels like a re-education for the translator. It enriches my own languages (plural) and trying not to sound over-the-top here, but I think of it as an active service to art, you know? Palestinian writers should be read by a very wide audience. Palestinians read everyone too, you know. We’re reading June Jordan, we’re reading in English and in translation, we’re reading world literature, we are members of the world. Our poems should be available as well because we are part of the conversation. This is my humble attempt to give attention to some voices that I found fresh and exciting. 

George Abraham: It’s so crazy, in going through yours and Fady’s Baffler poems, Noor Hindi and I were just blown away by so many pieces from it that we’re considering for our upcoming Haymarket anthology. Like, that poem “Mahmoud” by the incredible Maya Abu Al-Hayyat still literally haunts me at night… Some of these folks are doing things I’ve just never seen in poetry before, and not in some weird imperial fetishism for novelty kind of way, but more like what you’re saying about how interacting with actual people’s words like shatter open our notion of Palestine. And I definitely think of y’all’s work as a huge service to Palestinians in diaspora, especially folks like myself who were socialized in environments where it wasn’t safe, let alone encouraged, to speak Arabic. I was raised by my primarily Arabophone grandmother, but when she died when I was four years old, Arabic was socialized out of me, and I’m only now returning to formally learn it in my late 20s, and like, it’s great – slow, but necessarily so. I love that Arabic slows me down, and forces me to sit with language more carefully in ways that enrich my English, my French, etc etc. But translations like this are so much of how I can access Palestinian poetry in the homeland. I know I’m not the only one who feels like this, as a Palestinian in diaspora. 

Lena Khalaf Tuffaha: You know, I think it's good if there's a range, because not everything will be for everyone. It’s okay to read a Palestinian poet and to think I really don’t like that work. There's a place for all varieties of tastes and styles! Palestinians should have the right to have the same range everybody else does. We don’t need to all be Mahmoud Darwish.

George Abraham: I love that we live in an era now where it’s okay for us to have beef with each other in our communities? Editing this anthology has taught me that there’s NOT a scarcity of work in our community, counter what neoliberals like to do to us. I’ve always hated scarcity models, but like, this anthology aggressively gave me a reality check on how UN-scare Palestinian poets are in the world?? We have nearly 100 poets in the anthology and had to turn away like over 4 times as many open submissions as we received, and most of these folks are people Noor and I hadn’t really heard of, and we’re so grateful Haymarket is giving us this space for such a rich anthology. And there’s part of me that loves how huge the anthology is, you know? How insistently and resistively massive, taking up this much space on your shelves? How to say look at this, the mass of us, as an act of resistance and steadfastness, or sumud as Palestinians know it? How to be anti-definitive and say, even this mass will neither be the first nor last anthology of us? And at the end of it, we’re seeing several gaps of communities around the world we’re still estranged from, but still, the work continues - we want to open up ideas and invocations for future projects and expansions to further connect us globally. And we’re also thinking about our recently departed legends who we can uplift in the anthology, like Salma Khadra Jayyusi and Mourid Barghouti, allah yerhamhom. And, you know, you almost signed on as our third co-editor for this anthology, and you were so helpful in advising Noor and I, alongside Naomi Shihab Nye, and Rasha Abdulhadi, and so many – it has been such a hugely communal process editing the anthology. But in that spirit of Palestinian collectivity, my final question is: what advice would you give a poet – perhaps a Palestinian, or anyone in the world – struggling to write their first book? 

Lena Khalaf Tuffaha: The very short version: don’t rush. I know that's not a very original piece of advice but I really think it can’t be overstated. I was writing poems for so long and I didn't know that I was making a book for a time, and I'm grateful for that. It can feel scary not to be on the publishing track, or not to be very young, and there can be a manufactured sense of urgency that doesn’t come from the poems themselves. I find in conversations that many poets worry about Publishing™ standards, and worry that they have to get an MFA and I really want to insist that there are no must’s! It’s all made-up! Just do what you want! Living is a great way to arrive at poems, and writing mediocre poems for years is a great way to arrive at your best poems, and just having permission to be a human being who’s engaging with art and reading 50 times more than you write, and drafting and letting drafts sit in drawers or boxes under your desk. The truth is, there is no rush… Time! Time is important. Brine those poems! Another valuable lesson I learned at Rainier Writing Workshop is that book-making and writing poetry are different skills and art forms, and it’s great to learn both of those if you want to write a book. Someone might have beautiful poems, and they might feel rushed, and feel a need to smash them together into a manuscript, but if there’s no rush the poems (and the poet) will grow and change and evolve… You want to be able to look back with love at your first book, not to  cringe, you know, and so I wish you the ability and space to go slowly. Publishing will be here for a while, and your voice is necessary, and needed, and will have its moment. It’s just really about being patient with yourself and letting the poems take the time they need. I just think there's such pressure to hurry up while people are young, and I don’t mean that to be dismissive of anyone. If you're a young artist, and you're writing or creating, that’s amazing! And know that at any age, whenever you begin, you can do that for as long as you want. Trust that you are not late.