I’m here with poet Alex Carrigan. Alex has written two books, May All Our Pain Be Champagne: A Collection of Real Housewives Twitter Poetry (Alien Buddha Press 2022) and Now Let’s Get Brunch: A Collection of RuPaul’s Drag Race Twitter Poetry (Querencia Press 2023). Alex has also been published widely in online magazines. He has been nominated for Best of the Net and for a Pushcart Prize.
Hi, Alex.
Hi, Robert!
Where are you from? Is there an active poetry scene there? Does sense of place play into your poetry?
I currently live in Alexandria, VA, right outside Washington, DC. DC has a thriving poetry scene with awesome poets like Regie Cabico, Hannah Grieco, Sunu Chandy, and more than I can list right now. I wish I could use the city more in my writing, as I’ve only lived in the area since 2017. However, there are a lot of socially active poets and organizations in this area, and I feel like that can at times inspire me to write about social topics or interact with socially progressive writers.
How long have you been writing and publishing poetry? Who are your influences?
I mostly focused on fiction and book reviews in my early 20s, but I was continually exposed to poetry through various organizations. It was definitely once I moved to the DC area and took generative poetry workshops with Split This Rock that I began writing poetry more frequently. I very much consider myself a pandemic poet in that I feel lockdown is when I really started making more efforts to create poetry.
It’s a little bit hard to say I have any specific influences due to my style never really staying in one lane. I really like to try finding out what I like about a certain poet’s style or themes and seeing what I can do with that in my own point of view. This can range from how I structure a poem in terms of stanzas and line breaks, or even finding a specific topic. For example, Diane Seuss’s frank: sonnets has a lot of sonnets about death, so I tried to write one (which I hadn’t attempted before) and wrote about an encounter with death from my teen years.
You write a lot of centos, collage poems with the lines taken from other poems. What attracts you to this form? Both of your books, May All Our Pain Be Champagne: A Collection of Real Housewives Twitter Poetry and your most recent, Now Let’s Get Brunch: A Collection of RuPaul’s Drag Race Twitter Poetry are cento collections too, right? And Tweets at that! Can you share one?
Cento writing is a tedious, long process, but I think it helps when you find a source material that really stirs your mind. Plundering the Twitter accounts of reality TV figures is not something I expected to produce whole collections, but it really surprised me with what I could find. With Champagne, the work is largely more satirical since the franchise I was creating accounts from was from people who lacked self-awareness at times, and trying to ascribe an artistic lens to inane social media postings was a hilarious challenge. It’s a dumb chapbook, but I think it reveals a lot of subtext regarding reality TV and social media.
For Brunch, I was working with figures who had all the awareness in the world and also knew how best to utilize the platform. Because of that, I was able to produce poems that could address social topics such as toxic fandoms and homophobia, but also could present queer joy and discussions about art. I could have probably made the book four times as long as it is with how much I had to work with.
I’d love to share from Champagne, “Mia Thornton Flipping Through an Inspirational Quotes Coffee Table Book” from Red Ogre Review, as I think it’s one of the chapbook’s best mixes, and because I know for a fact Mia Thornton has read it and may have bought a copy. From Brunch, I have three here in The Gorko Gazette that range from humorous insults to singing praises for marijuana to criticizing toxic fans.
Not all your writings are centos. In those poems, is there a theme or themes that follows through them? What’s your process in writing them?
Most of my non-cento writing comes in binges. I’ve begun to really enjoy setting monthly writing challenges where I have to write a poem a day for thirty days, and with a specific theme to do so. I’ve twice done months where I’ve had to reread a poetry book I own and then write an original poem as soon as I finished that drew inspiration from the work. This has allowed me to produce publications inspired by authors I admire like Ilya Kaminsky, Mahogany J. Browne, Raegen Pietrucha, Christine Sloan Stoddard, Jericho Brown, Thaddeus Rutkowski, and more.
I also did one recently where I chose thirty albums I loved and tried to create collage poems inspired by them. I’d go down the track list, and from the lyrics I would pull words to create new stanzas, so Song 1 makes the first stanza, Song 2 makes the second, and so on. I didn’t have as much success creating whole poems, but I created enough lines and stanzas that I’ve used those as launching pads for new works. These new works would either be me collaging stanzas that fit themes like alcoholism and gun violence, or would be new works based off a line like “There’s someone down in the tall grass I couldn’t just let go of” from my collage of Fleetwood Mac’s Rumours, as the image of searching through tall grass really inspired me to work with it further.
Tell me about your new book, Now Let’s Get Brunch: A Collection of RuPaul’s Drag Race Twitter Poetry. Could you say something about it, about the process of writing it, about its structure and form? And where you got the idea to make poems out of Tweets. It seems like a signature kind of form.
Now Let’s Get Brunch definitely wouldn’t have existed if I hadn’t made May All Our Pain Be Champagne first, which was only made because I learned what a cento was and had the dumb idea to make a poem out of Erika Girardi’s Twitter to submit to a call from The Daily Drunk. Champagne was chapbook length because I couldn’t make too many poems off Real Housewives Twitter, but I knew I could pull more from RuPaul’s Drag Race contestants since they were more active on Twitter.
I’m not entirely sure where the idea of Twitter and centos came from specifically. I think it was in part because Girardi was in the media due to her connections to her ex-husband’s alleged embezzlement. But I think once I got the process down, it made sense to want to expand it to full-length with Now Let’s Get Brunch.
Brunch had way more figures to draw from, aside from the fact that the Drag Race franchise had more figures to draw from in its international series, but also from how much they put out on Twitter. I basically went through my favorites or the ones I knew were most active on social media, while some I dropped due to reasons like not having much of a social media presence, no longer doing drag, or just being figures I didn’t like that much.
Of course, now that I’ve released Brunch, I’m not sure where to go next with Twitter centos. I haven’t exactly found another reality TV franchise to plunder from that’s at the same level as Drag Race, but Twitter is also a dangerous field at times. I had to drop some figures due to controversial statements or some quotes because they were statements that I didn’t want to ascribe artistic merit to. It may be some time before I do Twitter cento poetry again, but I don’t think I’ll ever return to it. I’ll just need to find the right subject or challenge to use to create the pieces.
Many of your poems are funny, and full of pop cultural references. Tell me about your feelings on humor and poetry, and how you decide on your topics. Let’s have an example:
I think that’s just an extension of my personality. I’ve pretty much always been into pop culture and references, and I’m (apparently) a funny, witty person. If I’m asked to just speak about a subject, I feel I do drift to humorous takes or presentations of the information. When it comes to poetry, I think because I’m using my point of view to write, I’m prone to going into humorous beats or pop culture references because it’s natural to me to do so.
But also, pop culture is such an interesting subject to examine since it’s essentially the most well-known art. Anyone can consume pop culture and form an opinion about it, and I think trying to find a new artistic spin on a piece of pop culture is fascinating. I’ve really come to enjoy some pop culture poetry works lately, such as the Let Me Say This anthology of Dolly Parton poetry or Chase Berggrun’s Red, which erases the entirety of Bram Stoker’s Dracula into a poetry collection that examines subjects like violence against women, power dynamics, and more.
When it comes to creating pop culture poetry, it really comes down to finding the media that has most spurred me to write. I published a poem in Balm I wrote after watching the film The Double Life of Veronique. My Pushcart-nominated poem “Four Women Laying Domino Trains” was inspired by Mahogany J. Browne and the Nina Simone song “Four Women.” I’ve also got some unpublished pieces inspired by works like the Korean TV drama Hotel Del Luna and the video game Disco Elysium. I feel like I only know to write a poem about pop culture when I find a work that truly grips me or has some character or moment who I want to explore more in verse.
You also do book reviews. What prompted you to begin to write about other people’s work?
I was doing reviews for a lot of subjects like film and television, but I think the more I got involved with literary groups, the more I wanted to write book reviews. It’s just an engaging way to engage with an artist’s work. I personally enjoy writing reviews that are more like essays, where I’m attempting to figure out the themes or intentions of the author. By doing so, I’m hoping to appeal more to those who may want to read a book by highlighting themes or topics that may interest them.
Three personal questions for you, to get to know you better: who’s your favorite musician? What’s your favorite movie? And I always love to know a poet’s favorite novel, it says a lot about their poetry. What’s yours?
My favorite singer would be Nina Simone, someone who I have made plenty of poetry in response to, although my favorite band is Florence + The Machine, who I haven’t made a lot of poetry in response to, but I wish I could because I’ve seen writers like Katharine Coldiron and Sadee Bee create magic from FTM’s work. My favorite movie would be Three Colors: Red from the Three Colors trilogy. My favorite novel is probably The House of the Spirits by Isabel Allende.
And finally, what advice would you give to a poet that wants to publish and is new to the process?
While it’s easy to want to be like other poets, I think it’s more interesting to do the kind of writing that comes naturally to you, but also be open to trying new things. I feel I reached poetic success when I started creating the poetry that I found the most fun to create, and that was something that had been missing from a lot of my previous work.
All the best with your new book. Thanks, Alex.
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Alex Carrigan (he/him) is a Pushcart-nominated editor, poet, and critic from Virginia. He is the author of May All Our Pain Be Champagne: A Collection of Real Housewives Twitter Poetry (Alien Buddha Press, 2022), and Now Let’s Get Brunch: A Collection of RuPaul’s Drag Race Twitter Poetry (Querencia Press, 2023). He has had fiction, poetry, and literary reviews published in Quail Bell Magazine, Lambda Literary Review, Barrelhouse, Sage Cigarettes (Best of the Net Nominee, 2023), Stories About Penises (Guts Publishing, 2019), and more. Follow him on Twitter @carriganak.
Robert Allen is a poet, teacher, and writing coach, living with his family in Oakland, CA. He has been published widely in online magazines and in print. He is currently completing his first poetry manuscript. He has had poetry nominated for Best of the Net.