Beatrice
Szymkowiak is a
French-American writer and scholar. She graduated with an MFA in Creative
Writing from the Institute of American Indian Arts and a PhD in
English/Creative Writing from the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee. She is the author
of Red Zone (Finishing Line Press, 2018), a poetry chapbook, as
well as the winner of the 2017 OmniDawn Single Poem Broadside Contest, and the
recipient of the 2022 Agha Shahid Ali Prize in Poetry for her full-length
collection B/RDS, published by the University of Utah Press in 2023. Her
work also has appeared in numerous poetry magazines, including The
Berkeley Review, Terrain.org, The Portland Review, OmniVerse, The
Southern Humanities Review, and many others.
1 - How did your first
book or chapbook change your life? How does your most recent work compare to
your previous? How does it feel different?
The publication of my first chapbook Red
Zone was definitely a moral poetry boost! Being a writer means dealing with
a lot of rejections, so every publication is a celebration and an
encouragement!
Red Zone and my full-length
book B/RDS are located on the same ecological axis, and belong to the
same investigative project into the roots and consequences of the Anthropocene:
Red Zone through the ecologically devastated lands of WWI, and B/RDS through
the ecologically shattered skies of North America. Both are experimental and
intersect history and science. However, while Red Zone plays with some
external texts, B/RDS is bringing intertextuality to its full extent, as
the collection was written by erasing the entirety of Birds of America ––the
iconic ornithological work of John James Audubon. B/RDS is also
purposefully much more lyrical, as if a song.
2 - How did you come to
poetry first, as opposed to, say, fiction or non-fiction?
To some extent, I inherited my
father’s love for poetry. Also, what I always have loved about poetry, is its
capacity of dissent, against ideas but also against language itself ––both being
intertwined. Discovering Baudelaire and Rimbaud, two poetry dissenters, was a
defining moment for me, as a poet. Baudelaire shattered the idea of beauty and
developed a symbolist aesthetic towards Modernism, while Rimbaud shattered
metric versification towards the Modern free verse, and then, just abandoned
poetry!
I will not abandon poetry, however I always
have been interested in non-fiction too. Non-fiction finds its way in my poetry
through preliminary research and/or through intertextuality.
3 - How long does it take
to start any particular writing project? Does your writing initially come
quickly, or is it a slow process? Do first drafts appear looking close to their
final shape, or does your work come out of copious notes?
It always takes me a while to start a
writing project. I do a lot of thinking and research beforehand. For example,
for B/RDS, I researched 19th century naturalists and explored
posthumanist philosophy and Object Oriented Ontology (OOO). The work of
philosopher Timothy Morton (another dissenter!) who wrote the fascinating The
Ecological Thought, was particularly influential. Morton’s work led me to
wonder what could be an ecological, lyrical pronoun, and to experiment with the
pronoun “we.”
I still continue researching and
reflecting, even after I start the project. I am rather a slow writer. I like
to spend time on a poem, which means that revisions are usually not extensive. For
B/RDS, the revisions were mostly focused on the prose poems and the
organization of the manuscript. The constraint that I had given myself on the
erasure poems (keeping the order of words from the original text) made any
revisions of these poems difficult, so I really spent time on their initial
draft.
4 - Where does a poem
usually begin for you? Are you an author of short pieces that end up combining
into a larger project, or are you working on a "book" from the very
beginning?
I like to have a project ––to have a
rough direction towards which I write my poems. Then, overtime, I redirect,
which may lead me to drop some poems or revise others for the coherence of the
project. For example, Red Zone was included in a much bigger project.
However, I felt that the project was lacking coherence, so I decided to cull it
and keep only the poems related to the ecological and historical impact of WWI.
Poems themselves often begin with an
image, a moment, or a word collision. For example, the poem “Vimy” in Red
Zone comes from the paradoxical, bucolic sight of the sheep used to mow the
grass in the red zones of France. The red zones are former WWI battlefields prohibited
to the public because unexploded explosives and harmful chemicals, from leaking
ammunitions, riddle their soil. Hence the use of sheep to mow the grass.
5 - Are public readings
part of or counter to your creative process? Are you the sort of writer who
enjoys doing readings?
I absolutely enjoy readings! I love
how a poem becomes different once you voice it, where you recite it, or how the audience interprets it in so many
various ways. Because my poetry projects are research projects, I also like to
provide the background or context that help readers appreciate the poems more
fully. It sometimes generates incredible discussions.
6 - Do you have any
theoretical concerns behind your writing? What kinds of questions are you
trying to answer with your work? What do you even think the current questions
are?
My projects are conceived within
postcolonial and posthumanist theoretical frameworks, and work towards
developing a poetry of ecological awareness. I am particularly interested in
environmental writing in the context of a critical investigation of settler
colonialism, extractivism, and ecological imperialism. For example, my poetry
collection B/RDS questions the disconnected approaches to the
more-than-human world, through a lyrical erasure of Audubon’s iconic Birds
of America.
I am also fascinated by how the lyric
“I” can withstand the interconnectedness of all beings, or translate the
ecological subject. What about a lyrical “we”?
7 – What do you see the
current role of the writer being in larger culture? Do they even have one? What
do you think the role of the writer should be?
In these present times and society, I
see writers as disrupters, inspirers, and/or awakeners. I write with the hope
that poetry can shift perspectives and ways of seeing and being in the world,
towards a kinder and more sustainable future.
8 - Do you find the
process of working with an outside editor difficult or essential (or both)?
My work always benefits from the
perspectives of outside readers/editors. And when the feedback or the
conversation become challenging, it means it hit an important question or
point. For example the final lay-out of B/RDS only came about after
several discussions with poets Brenda Cárdenas and Kyce Bello, as well as my
wife, who is always my first and bluntest editor. So, yes, feedback is
essential and challenging. But, to some extent, if it weren’t challenging, it
would not be constructive!
9 - What is the best piece
of advice you've heard (not necessarily given to you directly)?
I had a mentor, Joan Kane, who
suggested that before workshopping a poem, somebody else read the poem back to its
author. Having somebody else read your own poem back to you, should be part of
any feedback process!
10 - How easy has it been
for you to move between genres (poetry to critical prose)? What do you see as
the appeal?
Moving between poetry and critical
essay allows me to approach a topic from different angles, so I do see them as
complementary. I think they also influence each other. The critical prose might
affect formal choices in my poems, while my poetry might support theoretical
creativity.
11 - What kind of writing
routine do you tend to keep, or do you even have one? How does a typical day
(for you) begin?
I like to have a wide swath of time to
write, because I need to really dive into a poem, to spend time with it. So I
often write on the weekend. If I am really deep in the mix of a project, my
writing might spill over into the week, whenever I have time. I don’t really
have a routine, except a cup of tea, that inevitably gets cold!
12 - When your writing
gets stalled, where do you turn or return for (for lack of a better word)
inspiration?
All my experiences somehow inform my
writings. For example, B/RDS was written during the covid lockdown, which
had a direct influence on the collection ––the “cages” we were in, the birds we
could hear louder, the death toll, etc. However, to bring these experiences to
the surface, I sometimes need a catalyst: non-fiction and poetry books,
podcast, documentary films, etc., and nature. So when I get stuck, I delve back
into these catalysts: grab a book or go for a hike!
13 - What fragrance
reminds you of home?
The smell of bread, croissants, and
books!
14 - David W. McFadden
once said that books come from books, but are there any other forms that
influence your work, whether nature, music, science or visual art?
Nature greatly influences my work. I
am particularly interested in the relationship between humanity and the
more-than-human world, in its zones of conflict and confluence. I am lucky to
live in an area (Northern Arizona) with magnificent and vast expanses of wild
life, however inexorably encroached upon. For example, the poem “Out of their
Breast / as if” in B/RDS came from hikes in the forest around Flagstaff.
Other great influences are science, history,
and art. My poetry is always in dialog with external fields.
15 - What other writers or
writings are important for your work, or simply your life outside of your work?
As mentioned earlier, the work of
philosopher Timothy Morton has deeply influenced my poetry. My poetry is also
indebted to the work of many poets: CD Wright, WS Merwin, Craig Santos Perez,
Sherwin Bitsui, Joan Naviyuk Kane, James Thomas Stevens, Santee Frazier, Alice Oswald, M. NourbeSe Philip.
16 - What would you like
to do that you haven't yet done?
I would love to work in collaboration
with an artist from another field, or a scientist. I can’t but wonder for
example, what a collaboration with a scientist researching whale songs in the
disrupted oceans could bring. I am fascinated by forms of expression, human or
other!
17 - If you could pick any
other occupation to attempt, what would it be? Or, alternately, what do you
think you would have ended up doing had you not been a writer?
I would have loved to be an
environmental scientist, an archivist, a medievalist, a park ranger, or an astronomer!
18 - What made you write,
as opposed to doing something else?
I am passionate with language and
books. How fascinating that we can dialogue across time and space through
writing, or that words can sometimes change the course of history! Think about
Martin Luther King’ s “I have a dream...”!
Also, I might have leaned towards writing
because it is an activity I can practice anywhere, at my desk, by a river, on
top of a mountain, etc.
19 - What was the last
great book you read? What was the last great film?
The last great book I read was To
2040 by Jorie Graham, and the last great movie I watched, Portrait of a Lady
on Fire by Céline Sciamma.
20 - What are you
currently working on?
I am working on a new poetry project and a non-fiction essay.
12 or 20 (second series) questions;
