Kia Alice Groom on Her Poems
Back in grad school, I was really hung up on writing poems that felt Serious and Literary. I had decided, I guess, that being a real poet meant following in the footsteps of William Carlos Williams and obsessing over the detail of one otherwise mundane image. I stripped all the magic out of my writing in an effort to write what I knew. The relentless demands of weekly output and the internal terror of having a workshop full of near-strangers pick apart what I was writing had made me very afraid to write as honestly and viscerally as I had before the MFA. Then one week, our professor gave us an assignment to keep a dream journal and use that as a jumping off point for poems. Great, I thought, I've been keeping a dream journal for decades and have balls-out crazy lucid experiences several times a week. Let's do it! This one exercise gave me permission to dive back into writing what I truly know: other worlds, liminal landscapes, the horror and glitter and snarled crystal teeth of sorcery, witchcraft, and dream. My full-time job is doing psychic readings, spellwork, and spiritual counseling. I unironically pay my bills by talking to spirits and removing hexes. These poems speak to that experience—what it's like to live in the in-between, where your realism is magic and where magic merges with the mundane. On a language level, I'm obsessed with sound—I want the reader to drown in the wordspace, go down into the current and feel the language. It's still about the image (with all respect to William Carlos Williams)—but the image is a fractal spidering out into the web of the collective unconscious. There's no way to make that tidy. My poems will always be a lush mess, and I'm finally okay with that.