Q&A with Diannely Antigua at Reedmor Books & Brews
In celebration of National Poetry Month, local bookstore/bar, Reedmor Books & Brews in Portsmouth, NH, hosted an evening of poetry featuring Diannely Antigua. Our Editor in Chief, Cari Moll, was able to join in for a post-reading Q&A. The two discussed craft, obsession, and love, amongst other topics inspired by Diannely Antigua’s two poetry collections, Ugly Music (YesYes Books, 2019) and Good Monster (Copper Canyon, 2024). Read the transcribed conversation below!
This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
Cari Moll: I wanted to start off talking about Ugly Music, since that was the first collection I read from you. Personally, I am always thinking about audience and who it is that I am writing for, asking myself if the poem is more for me or more for who is going to hear it. I was struck by the opening line of your first diary entry poem, which reads “I hope no one reads this.” I thought it was so funny, but also so intimate and defiant. It’s like we are being invited into something deeply personal, yet it isn’t necessarily intended for us. How do you navigate the tension between writing as a private practice, while also shaping your work for the public, especially within the context of your diary entry poems?
Diannely Antigua: That's a wild poem. I love that one. For context, the “diary entry” is a form that I invented, which is essentially a collage poem. I go through my old journals, which I've been writing in since I was nine years old, and write poems using the lines I collect. Each poem is numbered based off the journal that I use. The language that I collected for that poem, Diary Entry #1: Testimony, was from my first diary ever.
The diary entry series ends up being a place for me to play with language. It allows me space to enjoy the writing process by letting it be more of a game or an activity, as opposed to something where there is a lot of pressure to be poetic. I allow myself to enjoy language: the sounds, the weird juxtapositions that I create. It ends up being something that creates a lot of joy, even though I am writing about some pretty heavy things. It’s also a place where I can bend the truth, or imagine a different truth. The emotional truth is always there, even though it's not necessarily the factual truth.
So, I think I come to the page without worrying about who is going to read it. Otherwise, I would censor myself a lot, which would prohibit some of the strangeness and play from coming out. I have to come to the page thinking, no one ever is going to read this, and no one wants to read it. That gives me permission to write some really wild shit, which feels good to me. The wilder, the better.
When I'm considering the work as public, I don't even worry about telling the reader too much. I don't really care. I don't give a fuck anymore, and I think it's because of the way I was raised. I was raised in a cult, in a really strict religious system, where what I said could do a lot of harm to me and my family. I had to play by the rules. Talking about mental health, or sex, or queerness was not allowed. I wasn't allowed to see a therapist, even though I was struggling with self harm as early as 16.
Poetry is a place where I allow myself to say the radical thing and do the opposite of everything that I was taught. I am going to continue to spend the rest of my life trying to heal from all the damage that was done in those first two decades of my life. One of the ways I do that is by no longer censoring myself. That's been a really important part of my my healing journey. I don't think it’s necessarily for everyone, but I know that, for me, it is so important to just say the thing.
Audience Member: Are there poems that you keep to yourself?
DA: Yes and no. The poems that I keep to myself are ones that I don't feel do much in relation to craft. If they are just a rant about something and there isn’t anything else happening, then that may be a poem that I don't show anyone. Maybe, it was just an exercise in getting me to a place where I can write another poem. But, for the most part, I'm open to sharing my work with other folks as long as I feel good about it craft-wise. That’s when I want to share it with the public.
CM: I'm glad we got to hear that poem. I would love to hear more about the diary entry form, because it creates such a personal, intimate bridge between your past and your present self. I was wonderng if working with that form feels like a way of reconnecting with earlier versions of yourself. Does it feel like having a conversation with the younger you, or is it like sliding back into that person in order to give them a voice?
DA: That's such a good question. As I mentioned, I think that the diary entry form inhabits an emotional truth rather than a factual truth, so there is that. But I think the speaker in these poems might not always be me. I wouldn't say that in Diary Entry #1: Testimony, I am the speaker. I think that I am related to the speaker: maybe a sibling or a cousin. I think the diary entry series allows me to, in a way, appropriate this younger version of myself and her language.
It’s also a way to honor her. It is a way to give her a voice. But, it is also a way to give myself, my present self, a voice, too. She [the speaker] is the vehicle and the instrument in which I I work through. I think that we are both present: the past version of me and the present. We are both there in the writing of the poem.
It's really strange when I write the diary entry poems because I put all of the language that I've collected on a piece of paper, or several pieces of paper, and I go through with different colored pens, using whatever pen color is calling to me, and I put little dots next to any of the sentences that could be the first line. It feels like a spiritual experience. It's a way for me to commune with the language that I've collected. I'm allowing it to call to me, as opposed to trying to be an architect. I am more like a medium. I'm allowing myself to feel for the heat in this language that I've collected. I allow it to speak through me.
It's been a really interesting interesting journey, seeing how the diary entry form has evolved over time. Before, a lot of them were free verse poems. The later poems, especially in Good Monster, are sonnets or sestinas or pantoums, and I've allowed myself to add another constraint to the constraint that I've already created – which definitely sounds like a Virgo thing to do – and I love it.
CM: I love how much you talk about holding space for the emotional truth over factual truth. It’s something I try to tell my students all the time. If you have to lie a little bit to get the emotion across, it isn’t the worst thing!
I love how those emotions come through so viscerally in a lot of your work, especially when exploring themes of loss or impermanence, and the emotional experience around that. In one of your sad girl sonnets, you write “why does everything feel like dying?”
This really lingered with me. Sitting with all your work, it reminded me of another one of your diary entry poems, in which you write, “every photograph is an elegy.” I was wondering if you could talk about how that emotional atmosphere shapes your work, and how you think about the balance between holding on to experiences as you're writing them, as you're revisiting them, versus the idea of letting things go and embracing impermanence.
DA: I would say that my work does deal heavily with loss, and different types of loss. My first book is dedicated to my grandmother, who was a big part of my life. I wouldn't be a writer without her. She was the first storyteller I encountered. I remember she had this one story about this old couple who were so poor they had to share a pair of dentures. And, because of that, they would know what each of each of them had eaten that day. I heard that story so many times. When she would tell it, she wasn't always wearing her dentures, so she would have this huge gap in the front of her teeth. It was because of her that I realized that stories are powerful things.
My grandmother ended up passing away in 2011. It was kind of the catalyst to a lot of pain, and also a lot of transition in my life. I had just graduated from undergrad. I had just started a job as a substitute teacher. I was trying to be in the real world, but I had never been taught how to do that because I was taught to be a preacher's wife. I was learning how to play piano. I was reading my Bible. And here I was, at 22, in a world that didn't make any sense to me. I was underprepared. I was just learning about myself. And then a person I loved so much passed away, and it threw me completely into a spiral. That's when everything I had been holding on to finally came to the surface.
All of the other traumas, all the other losses that I had experienced prior to that, started coming to the surface. I was dealing with the loss of innocence, of agency, of self. Being a survivor of sexual abuse and a survivor of domestic violence, I had lost so much. All of it was screaming at me in that moment. That’s when I was first hospitalized. That's when I started to have some of my attempts. It was a really difficult time for me. I have never felt a pain quite like that, and it it broke me, even physically.
I think that loss, or at least the poetry of loss, is a way for me to reckon with it again. There is enough distance between what occurred and what is happening now for me to feel safe diving back into those losses. If it had happened just a few years ago, it wouldn't be the right time for me to go back. I wouldn't be able to write poems about it. I need distance to feel safe enough to explore loss. I'm also always writing breakup poems, because this bitch is always getting broken up with, and that loss is a different story. But, it is still a loss, you know? There's loss everywhere.
I think that I let go of something when I write a poem about it. I'm releasing it into the universe. I am deciding to write it on the page and let it become something more than just the experience of loss. I am letting it become art. It's when I don't write about the thing that I know it still has a home in me. When I write about something, I'm allowing it to make a home in other people so they can help me hold that experience. So that it won’t be on my shoulders alone. I think that's a big thing about my poetry. I feel like it finds the right people. It finds the people that need it.
I don't think I'm for everyone. I don't think everyone wants to hear about suicidal ideation and sex. But, the right people will find it. I've had folks come up to me after readings and be like, hey, I’m so happy that I found your work because now I don't feel so alone anymore. That is a letting go: when you're allowing other people to come into your experience as well.
CM: That’s so beautiful. On the topic of emotional experiences within Good Monster, there seems to be a persistent rumination on certain themes, emotions, images, or even little details. Sometimes, it feels like the speaker is circling back to something that is still unresolved. How do you validate that need to revisit certain elements, while still allowing each poem to stand on its own?
DA: I love this question. As some of my students in this room know, I am obsessed with obsession. I remember when I was putting together Ugly Music and I did a word cloud of the document. I put it online, downloaded it, and then a word cloud appeared. It showed me, in bigger font, the words that I had used more frequently: God and blood and sex and love were the ones that appeared in the biggest text. Also, the moon, of course, because I'm a poet. I remember thinking to myself, never again am I going to write a poem with any of those words. No. Never again. I cannot write about blood. I can't do it.
But I have to. I need to. The obsessions don't stop.
Some of it has to do with mental illness, and some of it has to do with just being an artist. Sometimes, I think those things overlap. I do have OCD, so rumination is a part of it. Compulsions are a part of it. You think about the same things over and over and over again, and they don't seem to leave you, as much as you try. Sometimes, the more you avoid them, the louder they get until you satisfy that compulsion, and then you're just feeding the compulsion even more. I think that happens in poetry for me, but then it is my way of allowing myself to have a compulsion, except, this time, with art as the tool. I love seeing how the things I obsess about are transformed and how the poems end up having conversations with each other. It's interesting to see, even between these two books, how the word God or egg comes up. My relationship in the poem, or my relationship to that word within the poem, is always different.
I love being able to explore that over and over and over again and see how things change. That's why I love forms like the pantoum because there are repeated lines. That's the whole reason you write a pantoum: to ruminate and cycle through something over and over again. You end up back where you started, basically, and it just continues the cycle.
CM: I love that idea of form. I always think of form as so constrictive, but I was introducing different forms to my students recently, and we were talking about form as a way to channel energy when you are not quite sure where to put it, and you're not quite sure what to talk about. So I think that's a really cool way to look at it.
I know your sad girl sonnets delve into sadness and and loss, and they use the sonnet form as a way to guide that, but I do think there's this quiet undercurrent of love that exists within them, and it almost feels instinctual. I think of the line, “I find something to love. Like, I find air in a room. I just walk in.” That's so beautiful. How do you navigate such conflicting emotions in your work, and how does love emerge for you while you're writing? Is that something that occurs naturally alongside your sadness, or do you find yourself having to seek it out, or wanting to seek it out, in ordinary moments where you could feel sad, but you could also feel love?
DA: I think, in my relationship to love and sadness, they walk together. They have conversations. They're neighbors. I do feel like it's easy for me to love: to love anything, to love people, in either platonic or romantic ways, or to love a place. I do just walk into a room and fall in love.
Growing up in the church, who I could love was dictated. The pastor of the church counseled you on who you could marry, and you didn't date. You courted to marry. I remember asking the pastor if I could date a boy that I liked who was in the church at the time. I remember he said no because he wasn't preacher material, and I was supposed to be a preacher's wife. So I learned, in my early years, that love was transactional. Ever since then, I have tried to undo that.
I just fall in love with everything that I possibly can because no one is telling me who I can love anymore. It is my way to rebel against the system that held me back from so many things that I love now. For ten years of of my life, I didn't listen to secular music. I missed out on all the music that I love to listen to now. I would have never encountered Bad Bunny. You know what I mean? I can't live a life without Bad Bunny.
It's just a way for me to gather and bring back everything. It’s kind of like when a squirrel is about to hibernate and they just get all of the acorns they can possibly find, you know? That's me. Anything I can find, I want it, because so much has been denied. So much has been taken from me. I want to just gather it all for myself. It's so important that my work also reflects that need that I carry so deep within me. There's a little girl within me that needs so much, and she was constantly told that she needed too much. No, you shouldn't need that much. That's not healthy. That's not good. No one's ever gonna give you that.
I've just come to to know that it is okay for her to need. It's very much okay for her to need. But where she's getting things from, that's what matters. I'm here to provide for her what others can't. What the church couldn't provide for her, I'm here for. I'm a grown up. And it’s the same if a relationship can't provide something. I'm still here. I'm not going anywhere.
I want that to be reflected in my work. Yes, there is this overwhelming need to connect and this need for love, but the speaker still remains. Even with the pain she holds onto, she is still here. She's still working through it, and that is a determination like no other.
I want to honor both my speaker's experience and my own because, again, I don't always feel like I am always the speaker of my poems, but we are very much related, and we just continue to persevere through loss and through love, whether it is reciprocated or not.
It's just all beautiful, you know? I didn't think I was going to live this long. I planned to live less, but the universe said, fuck that. You're gonna be here for a while. Buckle up, bitch. And I did. Now, my my task is to enjoy my time, even though there there is still a lot of sadness.
I love being alive. Just as there is sadness and pain, there is still so much love there. It doesn't stop.
Diannely Antigua is a Dominican American poet and educator, born and raised in Massachusetts. She is the author of two poetry collections, Ugly Music (YesYes Books, 2019), which was the winner of the Pamet River Prize and a 2020 Whiting Award, and Good Monster (Copper Canyon Press, 2024). She received her BA in English from the University of Massachusetts Lowell, where she won the Jack Kerouac Creative Writing Scholarship, and received her MFA at NYU, where she was awarded a Global Research Initiative Fellowship to Florence, Italy. She is the recipient of additional fellowships from CantoMundo, Community of Writers, Fine Arts Work Center Summer Program, and was a finalist for the 2021 Ruth Lilly and Dorothy Sargent Rosenberg Poetry Fellowship. Her work has been nominated for the Pushcart Prize and chosen for The Best of the Net Anthology. Her poems can be found in Poem-a-Day, Poetry, The American Poetry Review, Washington Square Review, and elsewhere. From 2022-2024, she was the 13th Poet Laureate of Portsmouth, NH, the youngest and first person of color to receive the title. In 2023, she was awarded an Academy of American Poets Laureate Fellowship to launch The Bread & Poetry Project, and in 2024, she was awarded an Excellence in Artistry Award from Black Lives Matter New Hampshire. She currently teaches in the MFA Writing Program at the University of New Hampshire as the inaugural Nossrat Yassini Poet in Residence. She hosts the podcast Bread & Poetry which seeks to make poetry accessible to all in a way that nourishes the soul.