12 or 20 (second series) questions with Allyson Paty
Allyson Paty
[photo credit: Brittany Dennison] is the author of Jalousie (TupeloPress, 2025), winner of the 2023 Berkshire Prize, and several chapbooks, mostrecently Five O’clock on the Shore (above/ground press, 2019). Her poemsappear in publications including Denver Quarterly, Fence, Poetry,The Recluse, and The Yale Review, and her nonfiction can be foundin The Baffler. A 2017 NYSCA/NYFA Artist Fellow in Poetry and aparticipant in the Lower Manhattan Cultural Council’s 2017-2018 WorkspaceProgram, Allyson Paty is co-founding editor of Singing Saw Press. She works andteaches at NYU Gallatin and with NYU's Prison Education Program.1- How did your first book or chapbook change your life? How does your mostrecent work compare to your previous? How does it feel different?
Jalousie is my firstbook, so I’ll have to report back! My first chapbook, The Further Away,was published by artist Jonathan Rajewski, when he was running a small presscalled [sic] out of his home in Detroit, in 2012. I was just starting to thinkof publication in terms beyond the creation of a book object, that a book isnot only its contents or even its material properties but a document that marks—andmakes—relationships to other people, to particular places, and moments in time.Going to Detroit for a reading when that chapbook came out and then giving away(and occasionally selling) copies of that chapbook over the next months andyears helped me to learn that.
2- How did you come to poetry first, as opposed to, say, fiction or non-fiction?
Evenin grade school, I liked sentences more than plots. I liked arguments andideas, but I paid closer attention to the words that made them happen. When Iwas a senior in high school, a beloved teacher, the late Marty Sternsteinoffered a course in twentieth-century American poetry. He gave us this packetof maybe fifty poems to read over the summer. I found it a few years ago, andsurprised at the variety—Baraka, Eliot, Harjo, Jeffers, Niedecker…At seventeen,I knew nothing; these were meaningless names to me. But I loved my totallyuninformed encounters with the texts. Two poems in particular I read and rereadall summer: an excerpt from Spring and All (yes, the red wheelbarrowpart) and “Susie Asado.” I picked up Williams’s selected poems and Stein’s TenderButtons sometime that fall. The attention to language I’d felt I wassneaking around for in other kinds of literature was suddenly there in thefore.
3- How long does it take to start any particular writing project? Does yourwriting initially come quickly, or is it a slow process? Do first drafts appearlooking close to their final shape, or does your work come out of copiousnotes?
S-l-o-w.Slower than slow. So slow I sometimes don’t know it’s happening, or I worrythat it’s not. I write regularly in that I set down language, but most of thetime it’s not toward anything. Once in a while, I’ll start to see something inmy notes—usually a tension in logic or sound—that I recognize as part of theshape of a poem. Usually some part of that language stays through to the end.But the revision process continues for a long time. There’s often not even asingle version or document I can point to as a first full draft. And I scrap alot. The poems in Jalousie were written between 2011 and 2021. Apostcard featuring cartoon snails sits above my desk, but when I see livingsnails on the move, they look to me like they’re going pretty fast.
4- Where does a poem usually begin for you? Are you an author of short piecesthat end up combining into a larger project, or are you working on a"book" from the very beginning?
Depends.Jalousie is truly a collection but contains two long poems. Over theyears that I writing the poems in Jalousie, I wrote a differentmanuscript that is a single project. What I’m working on now began with theform and length of a book in mind.
5- Are public readings part of or counter to your creative process? Are you thesort of writer who enjoys doing readings?
Bothpart and counter, and I enjoy it. Sometimes, if I have a reading coming up, Itake it as a deadline where the stakes are social embarrassment. It helps me tocast the language I’ve been keeping so close out, toward others. But I admit,it’s happened before that the reading is drawing near, and I’ll cut parts of apoem I’d felt committed to if they’re not working yet, or even change them tosomething I think will land. The lure to write what you know you can alreadywrite well is a conservative one. It’s is a concern I have about the workshopmodel in most contexts. But without the chance to share with others at aparticular time and place, I’d burrow into the mess of my notes without end.
6- Do you have any theoretical concerns behind your writing? What kinds ofquestions are you trying to answer with your work? What do you even think thecurrent questions are?
Ihave this idea that most artists—most people—have a few fundamental questionsto follow that become the arc of their creative work, their lives. They’re soclose to me, they’re hard to articulate. One, though, has to do with therelationships between the language and the real, especially in description. Iused to teach a creative writing course on writing and the visual, and it beganwith examining the mechanics of literary images—what relationships do they haveto sight, and what extra-visual elements come into play? How about to anyparticular referents? I’m not trying to answer that question so much as towrite alongside it.
7 – What do you see the current role of the writerbeing in larger culture? Do they even have one? What do you think the role ofthe writer should be?
Definitelynot one. As in, I think different writers have different roles,differently perceptible. Sometimes that has to do with what a particular pieceof writing offers others, but sometimes it has to do with how one enters anysocial space (and I would argue that any social space has—or is—a culture). Forexample, at my job, I often track how language is being used (or withheld) innon-literary contexts, like in policy memos, or at meetings, say, and thatgives me a different—I’d say, fuller—picture of what’s happening than I wouldotherwise have.
8- Do you find the process of working with an outside editor difficult oressential (or both)?
Essential,and a gift.
9- What is the best piece of advice you've heard (not necessarily given to you directly)?
My undergraduate adviser, choreographer and dancer Leslie Satin, had just watcheda dance in progress and was giving me notes about a part that didn’t work. Shesaid to “fix the mistake or make it more itself,” meaning, to work the mistakeinto the piece, to follow it.
10- What kind of writing routine do you tend to keep, or do you even have one?How does a typical day (for you) begin?
I’min an extended moment of transition. For a long time, I wrote every day beforework, and at least one afternoon every weekend. I still like those times, butat a certain point, I needed more sleep and the rigidity of my routine wasproducing more guilt than writing. Lately, I’ve been writing in whatevermoments I can carve into the day, and I try to set aside a longer block of timea couple times a week.
11- When your writing gets stalled, where do you turn or return for (for lack ofa better word) inspiration?
Toreading, usually something I haven’t read before. And I run.
12- What fragrance reminds you of home?
InNew York’s warmer months, after the sun goes down, the sidewalks give off aparticular scent that feels to me like home. It’s different than the New YorkCity summer garbage/urine stench, but I do associate that smell withexuberance, excess life, celebration, even though I don’t like it.
13- David W. McFadden once said that books come from books, but are there anyother forms that influence your work, whether nature, music, science or visualart?
Absolutely!Dance and the visual arts especially. There are some ekphrastic poems in Jalousie,and one poem is a performance score, it’s one in a series I was writing for afew years, eventually published as a chapbook called Score Poems (PresentTense Pamphlets, 2016).
14- What other writers or writings are important for your work, or simply yourlife outside of your work?
Toomany to name, from the canonized to the to small-press writers from othergenerations to my friends. But there are a handful of books I read in mymid-to-late twenties that spoke to me differently than others I’d read before:Simone White’s Of Being Dispersed, Lucy Ives’s Orange Roses,Sawako Nakayasu’s The Ants and Texture Notes, Mei-MeiBerssenbrugge’s Hello, the Roses. I felt a kind of proximity to theseworks—not that I felt my writing was comparable; I admired these bookstremendously and still do—but like they were opening the way into my ownconcerns. Although he’s not contemporary, I had a similar feeling in thoseyears when I was reading the collected poems of George Oppen.
15- What would you like to do that you haven't yet done?
Whyis this question stumping me? Maybe because I’m so attracted to dailiness andharbor such distrust of goals.
16- If you could pick any other occupation to attempt, what would it be? Or,alternately, what do you think you would have ended up doing had you not been awriter?
Myfull-time job is as a university administrator and writing teacher, so I dohave another occupation. But it’s one I came to in figuring out how to make alife and livelihood in writing, so maybe that’s not a good answer. I’d beinterested to work in sanitation, but I’d need more physical strength and a lotof practice to drive a vehicle as big as a garbage truck.
17- What made you write, as opposed to doing something else?
Continuingin dance meant rehearsal space, money to rent it, and time to coordinate withothers; writing was so flexible and available by contrast.
18- What was the last great book you read? What was the last great film?
Book:Bob Gluck’s About Ed. Film: Hong Sang-Soo’s A Traveler’s Needs.
19- What are you currently working on?
I’m working on a manuscript that is in someways a breakup story, and in some ways an extended work of ekphrasis. At theend of a long-term romantic relationship, as I navigated the impulse to parsewhat was happening, what had happened, etc., I found affinities with questionsthat have long interested me about narrative, representation, and figuration.Some of the artworks that come up in the book are Nam Jun Paik's 1962 Zenfor Head, the 15th century Noh play Ashikari (TheReed Cutter) by Zeami Motokiyo, three 18th century still-life paintings by AnnaMaria Punz.
