Brendan Lorber and Lauren Ireland in Conversation at the Poetry Project Newsletter

Brendan Lorber, author of If This Is Paradise Why Are We Still Driving (Subpress, 2018), and Lauren Ireland, author of Feelings (Trembling Pillow Press, 2018), discuss their creative processes and the ways that they experience the world-at-large. Lorber kicks off their correspondence: "Hello from Moose Bar where people want to know why I’m sitting alone reading a book called Feelings." From there: 

Lauren Ireland: Hello from the sky somewhere over Montana’s crumpled brow. Remember when we lived in the same city, and we could sit together in your kitchen with a bag of just-the-right-level-of-stale Mi-dels and some whiskey and read other people’s poems? I do. And this plane is a bullshit substitute. However, I have a PDF of Paradise to guide me over the scary red parts of the planet. And every flight attendant on this plane is a huge fan of whatever snippet of your work they glimpse as they rocket by.

BL: I explained to the people in the bar that Feelings is an over the top title that kneecaps the naïve idea a legit book of poems could feeling-driven. But at the same time, it’s maybe a nod to the fact that what else is there to write from? Like we live in the pretense that life keeps going forever when, spoiler, it won’t. So the title is a kind of doubling, saying the book is not about the one thing it has to be about. Or tripling, if you consider that feelings might not be the things we have, but rather what we do with our hands in a dark place when we are trying to figure out what is going on. They didn’t seem to buy it, and I’m really good at misunderstanding things — but is this an okay way to start talking about your book to strangers?

LI: I think it’s extremely accurate—you just left off the part about how I’m still wearing a chip on my shoulder w/r/t feelings and poems. I learned about confessional poetry at the same time I learned that mostly women wrote it, and no one liked it. But if writing about my life and my feelings isn’t how to make a poem, what am I supposed to do?

Read more at the Poetry Project Newsletter.