This is a collection of love poems, but it has a strong secondary theme of communication and miscommunication—and a lot of nature imagery, such as birds. Were these themes and preoccupations something you set out to investigate or were you somewhat randomly writing poems only to have these commonalities pop up when you started to edit?

I think Murmurations is a multi-threaded meditation informed by all these preoccupations, and I was relatively conscious of this while writing the book. With Murmurations, I quickly had the sense I was working towards a full-length collection; there were maybe two or three poems drafted when I realized I wanted to carry the conversation forward. Two things helped me organize my writing, while still allowing space for surprise and discovery—the model of a book of love poetry as its own kind of poetic project and genre, and the double definition of ‘murmuration’, a word that designates both a flock of starlings and a murmuring sound.

In thinking about a love relationship, I considered questions of resonance, communication, miscommunication, and meaning—questions that led me to think about other kinds of sound and other kinds of meaning and meaning-making, like bird songs. This is pretty typical poet fodder, because poetry is that bizarre form that takes written human language and manipulates it to communicate something beyond the literal linguistic meaning of what’s on the page. I think of instrumental music, for example—it communicates without human words. So, too, does poetry—a construction of written human words—communicate an additional element in its music, in its spacing on the page, in its other extra-lingual characteristics, like its music, and in what the words themselves do or make when they come together. A counterpart to this would be the languages of nonhuman animals, which I of course don’t claim to understand, but which can still have resonance for me, as a human listener.

Can you talk a bit about your approach to form? Do you have specific influences?

I’m no formalist—I have some friends who delight in writing within the constraints of fixed forms, and that kind of writing is not for me. What I do like to do is engage with formal elements or fixed forms in a sparing, loose way, and certainly it’s important to me to pay attention to the sound in my work. This seems to be the style of many contemporary anglophone lyric poets.

Beyond this, I find it difficult to speak about influences, because I don’t believe poets are always (or even often) aware of what work has left a mark on them. That being said, the Renaissance sonnet is a pretty obvious influence in my case, particularly the sonnet as practised by Petrarch and his French imitators—Pierre de Ronsard, Joachim Du Bellay, Louise Labé, Agrippa d’Aubigné… Many of the poems in this collection are approximately fourteen lines, and I often structure these pieces around a kind of turn. Some of the poems are also quite conceit-heavy, which at times felt indulgent, but I decided to go with it. The book itself, too, as a collection of love poetry, is influenced by the notion of a romantic canzoniere, a cohesive suite of work on love that talks to itself.

In a couple other places (“Ringbolt,” “Of Gold Arms, You,” and “Vespers,” for example), I aimed to imitate the sapphic stanza (a poetic form invented by the Archaic Greek poet) in English. Here my imitations are more visual and impressionistic, and I intend these poems as a kind of homage to Sappho and her work.

Writing love poetry is obviously both a personal and a public act, but for a queer writer publishing poems in a predominantly straight culture, does it also inevitably feel like a political act?

It certainly started to feel political when I stopped to think about it! But in the process of writing the book, I was absorbed by what I was doing. And I was buoyed by the model of other queer love poets—Sappho, of course, but also contemporary voices like Carol Ann Duffy, Audre Lorde, Colette Bryce, Kevin Shaw, Arleen Paré, Adrienne Rich, and my friend Sam Sternberg. In this poetic company, my identity is not such a problem, or even worth remarking on.

When I stepped back from the work and thought of its place in the world, there was a feeling—maybe a mix of fear and concern—and a hesitation, which came from an awareness of the book’s political function. This is all part of the experience of writing a collection of love poetry, of course, as a queer person, but also as a woman. I know what history did to Sappho—male poets made fun of her, they invented a fictional husband with a crude name for her, centuries later they mistranslated her so that her voice would be read as heterosexual, and her story was lost for a long time. Similarly, the French Renaissance poet Louise Labé was condemned as a plebeia meretrix (“a common whore”) by Jean Calvin because she wrote erotic and romantic (though not even necessarily queer) poetry. And there are obviously much more violent consequences for being queer and/or female. I continue to live and exist in a world that is both deeply misogynistic and deeply homophobic, and these are not realities I can shake off. To, on top of that, write about love and eroticism as a female queer subject—yes, it’s definitely political.