12 or 20 (second series) questions with Sophia Dahlin

Sophia Dahlin is a poet in the East Bay. Her first collection, Natch , was released in 2020 by City Lights Books, and her second book, Glove Money , is forthcoming from Nightboat. She leads generative poetry workshops and teaches youth creative writing. With Jacob Kahn, she edits a small chapbook press called Eyelet, and with seven other poets, she curates a weekly reading series at Tamarack, Oakland.

1 - How did your first book change your life? How does your most recent work compare to your previous? How does it feel different?
When my first book, Natch came out, in 2020, it liberated me from the tremendous overwhelming exhausting desire to see my first book published. It liberated me from assembling new versions of Natch.

My second collection, Glove Money, is talkier than Natch—more narrative and gossipy and argumentative. Just as my first book liberated me, so too is Glove Money liberated of the carbon crusher pressure of the first book. Instead, it came together in a fleshier plantlike form. We’re good friends.

2 - How did you come to poetry first, as opposed to, say, fiction or non-fiction?
I like making sounds, which one does in poetry. That might have given it the leg up.

3 - How long does it take to start any particular writing project? Does your writing initially come quickly, or is it a slow process? Do first drafts appear looking close to their final shape, or does your work come out of copious notes?
It’s the eruption of new work that hooks me—the poem breaking out of the quagmire. At this stage in my writing, the first drafts of poems usually look quite similar to the final drafts, but manuscripts change a lot draft to draft. I never take notes! Even as a student, I didn’t. I don’t know what notes are for. Just write the poem!

4 - Where does a poem usually begin for you? Are you an author of short pieces that end up combining into a larger project, or are you working on a "book" from the very beginning?
I write fairly short and unrelated poems, doing my best not to think about what I am doing, and later I try to assemble them and think them through. The poems come quickly and the bulk of them get thrown away as the manuscript slowly asserts itself.

5 - Are public readings part of or counter to your creative process? Are you the sort of writer who enjoys doing readings?
I freaking love giving readings, and I always learn about the work in the process. Readings help me cut the bullshit—even when it plays well (bullshit often does), if I feel unconvinced while reading it, chop. 

I love hosting readings, and I love attending readings. My girlfriend once said to me, witheringly, “You’re just happy people are in a room.”

6 - Do you have any theoretical concerns behind your writing? What kinds of questions are you trying to answer with your work? What do you even think the current questions are?
If there are questions behind Glove Money, they are probably “What is a transamorous sapphic poetics?” and “Wow is it wild that love is charging down the avenue to destroy me and I have no desire to run or what?”

The current question for most of us right now is probably, you know, what constitutes a human poetics, and what constitutes a machine poetics. And I’d say poets were working on those questions way before Language Learning Models were on the market. 

7 – What do you see the current role of the writer being in larger culture? Do they even have one? What do you think the role of the writer should be?
I think writers have a lot of roles in larger culture! We (I’m speaking for the larger culture here) need to constantly relearn how to listen to language, and we need our experiences and our values and our strategies worded. Not all poets are good at all of those things. Not everyone is June Jordan, though if you are, you probably should be. But we need writers who can take apart a sentence, and writers who look out the window and describe the miscarriages of the breeze, and writers who can say Free Palestine and Don’t talk to cops. 

8 - Do you find the process of working with an outside editor difficult or essential (or both)?
For books, essential. For poems, generally unproductive. I’ve had the luck of working with excellent editors on both my books (Garrett Caples from City Lights and Lindsey Boldt from Nightboat) who focused on shaping the manuscripts rather than, say, line-editing. That’s what I personally need editors for the most: help me see the forest. My eyes are full of tree. 

9 - What is the best piece of advice you've heard (not necessarily given to you directly)?
The best pieces of advice I have heard are: when you think the poem is done, keep writing, and: when you think the poem is done, end it immediately. 

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?
For about five years I wrote a poem every day, and I didn’t allow myself to go to sleep until I had a draft. I slept poorly, but that’s how I learned how to write poems.

Nowadays, I work on new drafts, manuscripts, and writing-related tasks (this, for instance) Monday through Friday from about 2-4pm, on the high of post-lunch coffee, and before my evening teaching begins. 

Of course, I often end up writing alongside my students in the evenings, so we can tack that onto the routine too. 

11 - When your writing gets stalled, where do you turn or return for (for lack of a better word) inspiration?
If I really want to write poetry in the moment and can’t, I translate a poem from the Spanish.

12 - What fragrance reminds you of home?
Southern California tap water! Smells like tap, tastes like home.

13 - David W. McFadden once said that books come from books, but are there any other forms that influence your work, whether nature, music, science or visual art?
Folk music, poetry translation (it’s a separate form!), theater, comic strips—comedy in general.

14 - What other writers or writings are important for your work, or simply your life outside of your work?
My girlfriend Violet Spurlock is very important to my work. I like to praise her beauty and win our arguments in my poems. 

The Bay Area poets are kind of everything to me, by whom I mean the disorganized collective of leftist writers influenced by New Narrative, the New York School, Language Poetry, and Feminist Poetics here in the Bay who were already here hanging out when I moved to town a little before Occupy. 

I learned how to be a poet in the world from them—which is, and this is my real advice for young writers: do it yourself, together. Make chapbooks, start a press, run a reading series, reading group, writing group. Forget the gods and dads and prizes that so rarely materialize, or ask too much of you when they do. Find comrades.

15 - What would you like to do that you haven't yet done?
I would like to grow old and join an all-retiree Shakespeare in the Park community theater collective. I would like to play Viola from Twelfth Night and Jacques from As You Like It.

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 a writer?
Besides retired community-theater participant? Novelist, teacher. And I do teach and I do write novels, in fact. 

17 - What made you write, as opposed to doing something else?
When I was deciding whether to devote my life to writing or acting, I was in high school, and looking around at my peers screaming for attention in the high school theater where we all hung out every lunch period, I became convinced that acting was bad for one’s character. That’s why I’m waiting till retirement to learn how to act. I’ll finally be ready for corruption.

18 - What was the last great book you read? What was the last great film?
I just fed Vivian Blaxell’s Worthy of the Event through the book-return slot of my local library this morning. I thought it was gorgeous.

I recently saw Tarkovsky’s Andrei Rublev for the first time, at the Pacific Film Archive. It was undeniably great, but I was kind of devastated that you never see him painting. Violet says that’s the point. If so, I wish it weren’t.

19 - What are you currently working on?
Should I be honest, or gnomic?

I’m editing a collection of love poetry written during the pandemic, when my at the time brand new girlfriend and I moved in together “temporarily” ahaha.

I’m editing a collection of post-pandemic poetry about community art heaven, state-mandated hell (my brother is incarcerated), and dreams of anarchist maternity. Lots of Bernadette Mayer inspired forms in that one.

I’m not so much editing as re-reading and weighing the merits and humiliations of a book-length poem I wrote in a day. You know, like Bernadette Mayer.

I’m looking for a children’s literature agent who might be willing to sell some gay novels I wrote.

I’m being gnomic about another project that will, I imagine, fuck up everything else. 

I’m writing new poems.

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