I met Nora (they/them) last summer in a creative writing workshop. Before the official start of the program, when the studio coordinator sent me the list of the writing instructors who would be hosting specialized, genre-specific workshops, of course, I typed each of their names into the Google search bar. Nora’s website greeted me with a hand-drawn, artery-red clock, with sections of their works scattered around its circumference instead of numbers. Their poetry was a Dadaist montage of drowning, eggs turned inside-out, groceries which may or may not be rooms, lava lamps teetering on the fault lines of time and space. You know the rest: I signed up for their poetry workshop and had one of the best two weeks of my life.
Nora is a multidisciplinary poet and artist whose work has been published in The Paris Review, Bennington Review, and FENCE, among other places. They are the editor-in-chief of Ghost Proposal, a literary journal that publishes unconventional and genre-transcending work, and hold an MFA from the Iowa Writers’ Workshop. They are also a writing instructor at the Iowa Young Writers Studio. Well, that’s the safe answer if you want one. But just so you know, reading is never safe.
When I asked Nora about their “initiation journey”, they told me the story of their first multimedia poem they wrote when they were 10 years old. “I was feeling rebellious at the time,” they said, writing their poem with a sharpie on a broken clock, a broken cellphone, old glasses, and some other things salvaged from their parents’ junk drawer. Nora’s first formal encounter with multimedia was in a creative writing workshop in graduate school . They were cooking dinner and, feeling frustrated, threw their poem into the stove and deep fried it.
“The way the language felt to me, it was deep-fried, it was brittle, it was falling apart,” they said. They realized that in order for poetry to mirror experience, “they had to start working outside the traditional 26 letters”.
There’s something strangely prophetic about this first encounter, as Nora’s obsession with these seemingly innocuous domestic items doesn’t end there. Nora’s poetry is full of these mushroom-like, wingless words, drilled into sirens and thrown into shadows: phone books, omelets, teeth, hospitals, a post-apocalyptic paradise. “Life on earth is so strange. I could press a button and within seconds an object can be dispatched to be picked up in a warehouse by someone and sent to me via airplane very quickly.” Nora wonders at the efficiency of machines and technology in the modern world. “To live on Earth is to live with all of these paradoxes and all of these absurdities.”
This reminded me of a poem we read at the writing workshop – “Diving into the Wreck” from Adrienne Rich’s poetry collection of the same name. One quote stuck with me – “the thing I came for: / the wreck and the story of the wreck” – a sentiment Nora seems to echo. “To write right now is to have one’s body and language distorted,” Nora responded. “If the language is wrecked, it’s to show a wrecked world.”
I asked Nora about whether their work is an attempt at piecing together shards of the wreck or relishing in the ruins, the beauty in decay. Nora’s manuscript in progress, Groceries, contemplates on the silence and the glitch of language, a manifestation of how the wreck of everyday life invades our speech and the spaces between our speech: when you send an emoji to someone else but the emoji doesn’t show up at the other end but instead appears in the form of little squares, which Nora calls the “silent squares of untranslatable noise”.
I was intrigued by Nora’s frequenting of the grocery. Groceries are the embodiment of a consumerist culture, a webbed hell of commodities. They can be nutritious but also dangerous, poisoning bodies and dulling flesh. “Food is the most dangerous thing in the world. The grocery store is full of those blanks I’m thinking about.” At the same time, the act of consumption seems inherently political. “Food is something whose access is incredibly tied to power,” Nora explained. To write about food is to engage with discourses surrounding class, mobility, culture, gender, and bodies.
Is poetry, then, political? Nora responded with a firm “yes”. Is experimental poetry political? “Yes and no.” Nora proceeded to read me “I Woke Up” by Jameson Fitzpatrick: “I thought I was not a political poet and still / my imagination was political. / It had been, this whole time I was asleep.” Bound up with the notion of perspective, poetry is political regardless of whether you know it or not. Reading is political. The fact that you are reading this is political. The fact that I’m speaking to you is political. “Sometimes experimental poetry tries not to be political by trying to appear random and scattered or anything. And I think that’s false. Any poetic choice is political.”
The story that stuck with me the most was the one of Nora meeting their wife through Adrienne Rich (indirectly). I remember Nora telling the story during one of our meetings, but I made them tell it again, just for the sake of its magic. Nora’s friend (who happens to be Adrienne Rich’s granddaughter) was buying a couch from them but couldn’t get the couch out of their apartment. The friend then called her next-door neighbor Kelly to move the couch out from the door. “Kelly came over and got it more stuck,” Nora smiled as they said, “But luckily she stuck around too.”
“Just like experimental poetry breaks the rules of language, I think queer love breaks the rules we’ve been given about what a relationship is meant to be like,” Nora said when I asked them about the particularity of queer love.
That summer workshop with Nora, these two weeks drowning in the sultry honey of words, have hung like a polaroid on the strings of syllables I spit and swallow. As a poet, I know the immeasurable, damp weight of words in my palm and on my tongue. For a queer poet like Nora, to speak is to rebel, the sheer materiality of wave particles in protest. To experiment with multimedia, clocks and groceries is to dapple in the danger and strangeness of speaking. We live in a strange world of machines and electrical cords, one in which nothing is apolitical. Nora’s poetry is a testament to such strangeness but also how we, especially queer people, survive in it.