Gina Nutt: I’m curious if we can talk a bit about prose poetry. What draws you to this form?
Kelly Xio: I can’t say I am drawn to prose poetry as much as it’s simply how my writing has evolved over the years. It’s an amalgamation of how I speak, decades of keeping digital diaries, and my experience of occupying the oxymoronic, liminal space that prose poetry inhabits in my own life. I also mostly read prose writers. The last piece “Universe Becomes” I’ve included in the selection I shared with you is actually one of the first poems I ever wrote at and during one of my earliest readings. I find myself artistically susceptible to the vibe of a room. Sometimes what I’ve prepared to say isn’t necessarily what I want to say once I’m standing in front of people, so I let myself follow whatever comes to mind.  I recall feeling particularly insecure about my upbringing that evening, and thinking about how much it can hurt to become the person you want to be, or even to feel personally affirmed by the decisions you’ve made along the way. I loosely recorded what I said on my phone and immediately wrote it down after the show.

Much of my older writing was composed on my phone while walking home (dangerous, I know), on long walks, or somewhere between commutes to work. I’ve often held multiple jobs and rarely had the luxury of dedicated time or space for writing, but it was something I made time for anyway. I’ve always believed that however you manage to get it in (your art practice,) the important thing is that you do.

There’s something about the form of prose poetry that mirrors the geography of the streets I roam: blocks of language, fragments of memory, the architecture of everyday life. The shape of the prose poem feels akin to the geographies of the fleeting moments I’m trying to capture. I often don’t find safety in line breaks.

I do write poetry in more traditional forms, but much of my work begins with observation, with writing things as I see and hear them, and with exploring the possibilities of the vernacular. I’m drawn to the cruel poetry of life and death, to the absurdity and humor of awkward moments, to the ways tragedy and comedy coexist, and to what it means to experience so much of our lives while interfacing with a digital world. Prose poetry allows those things to exist alongside one another without necessarily having to resolve their contradictions. I think there’s something honest about that.

GN: Your poems here, as well as those in your collection One More Day on Earth Together, are assemblages of love, grief, violence, illness, flowers, the universe, survival.  How do you navigate pulling the pieces together and streamlining toward clarity?
KX: As I mentioned before, I often try to write in the moment when I can. For instance, One More Day on Earth Together was written as I sat in the dark of my house on the same day. I recall speaking with someone who doubted me when I told them how many shots I’d heard and how I couldn’t get the sound out of my head. Over the years I realized that your memory after those things blurs some details and defines others. It was easy to recall like the practiced digits of my social security number. The sharpness and speed of a gunshot, once you’ve heard one, have a distinctly drier quality than a firework. I’m not saying the two can’t be confused, but it’s like the difference between lip gloss and lipstick—they both get the job done, but they feel different when they do.

I had a feeling the shooting would be covered by a local crime beat rather than the news, unless there had been a fatality, so I kept refreshing a particular Twitter account until something appeared that affirmed the moment was real. After witnessing something like that, your mind becomes hypervigilant. It’s not that you remember everything, but that certain details become almost impossible to forget: seven shots, the giggling of children followed by their screams, the warmth of a summer day, and the smell of freshly cut grass. Those things stayed with me even as fear rushed my nervous system in illogical ways.

There’s something important about documenting a moment in real time and sometimes I don’t have anything to comment or a slant I want to give. Sometimes life is watching a life end and be packed up and you’re sad but also worried if the ambulance will be blocking the parking lot and if it’ll be hard to get out to go to work. Life continues and I think that’s the brutal clarity I chase to illuminate my writing after ordeals. It’s about standing as close to it as possible before memory begins to rearrange it. I don’t necessarily begin with an understanding of how all the pieces fit together. 

I begin with what I remember, what I felt, and what refuses to leave me and then I begin to find my way to my left brain. The work of writing is figuring out what those things have to do with one another without forcing them into a coherence they might not naturally possess. Sometimes the juxtaposition is the clarity. The violence and the freshly cut grass belong to the same afternoon. Neither cancels out the other.

GN: I also appreciate the voice here, which takes on the serious experiences, while also at times bringing a sense of humor and fierce hope. How do those sensibilities align for you in poetry? Where do you find them at odds?   
KX: I always think that if you can still take a breath, you may still be able to laugh. The particular wheeze of carbon dioxide is proof of hope because it’s a response that isn’t lying down. I don’t know if I find these sensibilities at odds beyond the fact that I’m a bit odd myself, you know? I am an unbearable optimist to my core, and while I can admit that the world is difficult and can be an awful thing, I genuinely believe in the joy of simple living. 

I have the worst days and still come home to a bed that’s mine, to a mess that says I’m still here to fix it. It can feel overwhelming, surely, to know that life comes to unjust conclusions, that so much of what happens to us is beyond our control, and that there are seemingly endless horrors levied against us. I don't think optimism requires me to look away from any of that. If anything, it requires me to look more closely at what remains.  I think humor is part of how I reconcile those contradictions. Sometimes things are so terrible that laughter feels like the only reasonable response, not because anything is particularly funny, but because the alternative is to surrender entirely to despair. 

And I don't want to do that. I don't think grief and joy are opposites, either. They can exist in the same room, sometimes in the same breath. I can be devastated by the world and still find something beautiful about being alive in it.  If there is a tension in my poetry, perhaps it's that I don't always know how to make room for hope without feeling as though I'm diminishing the seriousness of what I'm writing about. But I don't think suffering becomes more meaningful simply because we refuse ourselves pleasure. Sometimes the joke is the most sincere thing I can offer. Sometimes the hope is absurd. I think there's something deeply human about insisting on both.

GN: What’s in your creative mosaic? Books, music, restaurants, films, visual art, fashion, ephemera, architecture, anything that energizes your writing.
KX: Creative mosaic! I’ve never heard that phrasing before, but I love it so much. It really is a mosaic. I’ve been obsessed with Lucian Freud, Joyce Mansour, Racing Mount Pleasant, and I’ve watched Tarsem Singh’s The Fall several times recently now that it’s streaming on MUBI. I also revisited Big Fish and Lady in the Water, which are both these saccharine mythologies about grief-stricken narrators trying to make sense of disappointment and hardship. It’s a little silly! I love watching them back to back. I’m interested in the way grief forces people, whether through a mythic narrative or a road trip, to reassess what happened to bring them to where they are. 

My sisters and I had such pronounced speech impediments as children, and there’s something about the way Paul Giamatti sputters through his grief and his desire to be left alone in Lady in the Water that stirs something in me. His character doesn’t seem to recognize that he’s remained curious despite the horror he’s experienced, and I think that’s the seed of hope and change. I once read that Lee Pace stayed in character around the young actress in The Fall, and she believed he was actually paraplegic. Watching it now, that knowledge adds this strange, metatextual layer of deception on top of the long con his character is pulling on her. I always cry.

I love watching old skateboarding videos. I’ve figured out how to make a single-person batch of waffle batter, and it rocks, so sometimes I’ll make myself a waffle and sit down to watch them. I always feel this keen envy because I didn’t really have the kind of childhood that allowed me to pursue sports the way I would have wanted. As an adult, I’ve managed to do some of those things, but it took a lot of work to simply go for it, regardless of the shame or limiting beliefs I had about my age, body type, or proficiency. I’m obsessed with motion, with what bodies can do and how they move through the world. 

Recently, I’ve gotten to spend a lot of time around horses and it rocks. Having the opportunity to paint them in the morning, to sit outside and breathe in these spaces that are often on or near an undeveloped strip of land, surrounded by so much green, has been delicious for my nervous system! It reminds me of a Klimt painting I adore called The Park. There’s something about being enveloped by that much green, and being near these enormous, sensitive animals, that feels restorative.

Right now, I also get so much energy from live music, and I’m often listening to or watching a recording of a concert or studio session. Anyone who’s heard me babble about music knows I simply adore Annabelle Dinda’s “The Hand.” There’s a line about opening your mouth and being startled by the noise you make that I’ve definitely related to on some of my harder days. Ouch! I love the DIY scenes in DC and Baltimore and have been taking in as many shows as I can stand. There’s such a gorgeous and intense matrix of art, food, and music here. Locally, I’m eternally floored by the work of Sejong Cho. She has such a gorgeous practice, but I particularly love these watercolor microcosms she makes. I’m inspired as much by the work itself as by everything I see people in these communities doing for one another.

My life has certain imbalances of isolation, and I often eat alone, but lately I’ve been obsessed with midnight dinners and late-night diner stops with friends. My friend Anna made this clarified tomato martini that I had alongside a plate of gildas at Le Comptoir, a spot I frequent, and I still think about it. I’m a big fan of omelets, drinking a pitcher of coffee, and seeing the sunrise in my rearview mirror. On weekend mornings, I try to make a perfect French omelet in a stainless steel pan, which is really a practice in patience and control. When you get the eggs to release perfectly from the pan and there’s nothing left scorched—incredible.

Bashō’s haikus has altered my DNA! Adriana Keaton’s CIGS chapbook is brilliant. I love Rhea Ramakrishnan’s zine Roadhead about her insights on tour and also catching her perform live— what a phenomenal front person. Dynamic and savage and a boundless energy on stage.  I love all the texts I own from DC’s Shining Life Press and have been waiting to stock up on more zines. Been reading art reference books as mentioned and listening to audiobooks while I paint, and they vary from lowly smut to cavernous fantasy. I’m all over the place. My friend Kaiman put out a magazine called Lovergirl and it gives me a digital nostalgia for a time of early blogs and diaries and unlabeled selfies. I recently listened to East of Eden, which reaffirmed my belief that Steinbeck is truly the GOAT. I’ve also been reading and looking at anything I can find about Bonnard and Leonora Carrington. They’re such different artists, but both made such passionate, gorgeous work, and I’m fascinated by the worlds they inhabited.

I went on a vacation and read Sylvia Jones’ Dope Calisthenics and Scott McClanahan’s Fights! I got to sit for a while with Francis Bacon’s triptych of Lucian Freud in Los Angeles, and I was overwhelmed by the thought of a friendship and rivalry that could be both beautiful and ruinous. It felt so perfect! I think about that a lot: how much art is shaped by the people we love, admire, envy, or simply happen to share a moment in history with. I am in awe! Maybe that’s what I love about the idea of a creative mosaic. So much of what inspires me has less to do with any singular work than with the strange, beautiful, sometimes painful ways that everything touches everything else.