Poetry, Queerness, and God

KARAN

Natasha, your poems have moved me deeply. I’ve been a fan since you won the Leonard Cohen Poetry Prize. So getting a chance to read more of your poems and spend time with them has been wonderful. They are formally spare but emotionally orchestral — full of grief, sanctity, queerness, devotion, weariness, reach. There’s a tonal clarity here I admire deeply: the speaker is never ornamental or indirect, but precise, haunted, vivid. Let’s begin with “Virgins,” which I keep returning to. You write: “It’s not the queerness of Christ that holds me, or Mary’s tears, / but her weariness.” That one word — weariness — recasts the entire icon. I see this in “Psalm 23 as the Temperance Card” too: “O Inconvenient Lord, unsheath / my sword and let me do the thing I know.” What is your relationship to scripture, to myth, to spiritual fatigue? What happens when reverence wears itself thin?

NATASHA

This is such a generous reading, alongside such generous questions. Thank you for them.

My earliest canon is the Bible, so much of my linguistic and mythological schema is rooted in biblical language and stories. Like most kids, I found the King James Bible to be a drag to read. Now, I find much of it beautiful beyond words. But this is in no small part due to how my faith now looks nothing like what I was raised to believe in— a fact I’m immensely grateful for. In no small way, poetry has been the thing that has most mended my relationship to myself, and to God. When (arbitrary)  reverence wears itself thin, poetry is what brings me to my knees in every sense—even in the middle of severe spiritual fatigue, which has shaped the majority of my conscious life. A pastor’s kid, I grew up in the Bible belt, in the very belly of Evangelicism. The evangelical church was my earliest exposure to the concept of the divine, and the earliest foundation of my relationship to Christian tradition. I had a fervent and tortured relationship to my faith all through my teens and early twenties: I was deeply governed by fear. Fear of disappointing my elders, fear of angering God, fear of sinning past the point of forgiveness, fear of sinning at all, fear of being found out, fear of hell, fear of failure—the list was endless. Moreover, the spiritual and psychic bondage of spiritual abuse takes a profound psychological toll, one I’m still contending with well into my 30s. I left the evangelical church at the age of 23, long before I came out. I had no more tolerance or patience left for the rampant racism inherent to evangelical beliefs and practices, and I knew that if I remained in the church any longer, I would lose my faith entirely. And so I left, and threw myself even deeper into poems. Poetry saved my life because it saved my faith and transformed it into something new. Learning to read with sharpness and embodiment and care is what allowed me to really read that first line of the poem that opens the Gospel of John: In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. The idea of God quite literally being a living poem changed me profoundly. That was a God who spoke to my heart, an embodied God, a God of language, a God of invention, a God who was by definition queer, a God of trans-formation, a God I could worship and fight with without reservation or fear. This is what poetry is to me, what spiritual devotion is to me. Ardent, devoted conflict in pursuit of a kind of  harmony that’s somehow greater than the sum of its human components.

KARAN

What does your writing practice look like — structurally, emotionally, spatially? How do you usually begin, build, and finish a poem? I would love to hear how a piece like “What Victoria’s Secret Taught Me About God” came to be — it’s elegant, tender, so formally contained and yet bursting with implication.

NATASHA

Thank you for saying this. That one is a poem I started years ago once in a writing workshop. Because I wasn’t yet out to my parents or extended family—an event I knew would permanently change my life forever—I could not, and did not, address my queerness on the page. So I remember this poem being the first explicitly queer poem I ever wrote, and it’s pretty much just stayed in my computer since. It’s hard to remember the details now but I recall the title popping in my head out of nowhere, some weeks before that workshop. I’d spent a lot of time in between thinking about my earliest queer moments as a child, long before I actually wrote down any of the words.

Which brings me to my writing practice. I must confess it’s erratic and half-baked; I believe the technical term for what it looks like is “fucking disaster.” For so many reasons. A major one being that I live with severe and disabling clinical depression, worsened daily by the sadistic effects of late capitalism, financial instability, housing insecurity, and other relentless barriers. These barriers interfere mercilessly with my ability to create the vast majority of the time. And when I’m in the depths, I find no relief in writing, even if by some small chance I’m able to rally my threadbare executive functions to do it at all. I’ve been contending with this for years now, and I must admit it eventually breaks the spirit.

But whether it simply breaks it, or breaks it open, is a constant point of negotiation and discovery for me. These days, I’m writing in the middle of whatever exists beyond burnout. It’s a strange sort of afterlife, but I’m finding my way through it. There are some days, even some weeks, where there is mercy. And in those moments when writing feels available to me, I write as much as I can, before the clouds come back. I’m never not thinking about the world or about my life, whether it’s in therapy or on the page, and so I feel grateful (and lucky) that when I sit down to write a first draft, the vast majority of the time the poem is more or less fully formed, having already revised it in my head for weeks or months before writing it down.  

KARAN

Queerness in these poems is lived, risked, held close, pushed against scripture and family and history. I’m thinking of the girl in the bathroom of the “House of God,” of the wife of “somebody’s daughter, somebody’s son,” of the speaker who nearly calls herself Danielle just to “see his face / glow luminous.” You trace the queer self not just in confession or desire, but through social performance, medical timelines, humor, and exhaustion. What does it mean to render queerness so interiorly (is that a word?), so publicly, and so spiritually?

NATASHA

Again, these are such generous and attentive readings. I hardly know how to answer this question! I’ll start by saying I don’t really think consciously about rendering my queerness in any particular way in my poems. I mean yes, I embrace a queer poetic in both my craft and in my subject matters: it’s an attitude on the page as well as a fact of who I am and what interests me as a poet. But my interior queerness, on or off the page, is for me, my journals, and sometimes the few friends and lovers I choose to entrust with that private aspect of myself. My public queerness is also for me, an ultimate expression of my agency—but it’s also carefully crafted and on my terms. (What can I say? I’m a Taurus Sun, Scorpio Moon.) As for rendering queerness spiritually, I’d say I’m still trying to figure that out. But it helps to have been granted a renewed view of a complex, ungendered God, I’ll say that much.

KARAN

Your work pulses with a very specific kind of religious trauma — not just punitive doctrine or ritual shame, but the hunger for God that persists even in the wreckage (I resonate with that so fucking much!). You don’t throw faith away — you metabolize it, refashion it, sometimes curse it. I’m struck by how often your speakers still pray. Can you speak to the tension between longing for divinity and surviving the structures that claim to speak for it?

NATASHA

Mm. For me, surviving the structures that claim to speak God has been the thing that’s made me long for divinity the most. There’s a great deal of cognitive dissonance that goes into sustaining religious fundamentalist belief systems. For me, that cognitive dissonance showed itself in my own conscience, but mostly in the moments of my life where I’ve genuinely felt like God was in the room. I know it sounds insane to say that. But I have felt God before. In fact, I think the vast majority of us have—we simply have different language around it. But to my point. When you’ve heard God in your niece’s laughter, or seen Them in the eyes of someone who loves you just as much as you love them; when you’ve felt God in a kiss or in the warm breeze of a Virginia summer night, hell, when you’ve seen Li-Young Lee, barely mortal, read his poems live in front of an audience and bring half the room to tears with his mind and voice—when you’ve experienced divine things like this, and then some asshole with a Bible comes and tells you that you’re hellbound for the way you have been made— well. You just know in your guts what is and isn’t God. You just have to listen to that still, small voice in you that so often gets drowned out by pettiness, fear, and a lack of imagination.

KARAN

These poems are so funny in places too. I laughed at “Goodbye, Elon. Farewell, Jeff.” There’s cleverness here, but also a willingness to undercut it with pathos or ambivalence. I think humor, especially from poets of faith or poets of witness, is often undervalued. What role does humor play in your work? What does it allow you to say that solemnity alone might not?

NATASHA

Okay I first must say that I wrote “After Reading Li-Young Lee, I Contemplate” in the summer of 2021, when the Gulf of Mexico had been set on fire from an ignited underwater gas leak. Elon was despised back then too of course, but I’ve always wanted it on record that I’ve been cursing him on the page long before it was a routine thing to do in real life!

To your question, though. I’m very much a “laugh to keep from crying” type of person who still cries a lot anyway. Life is brutal and so often cruel, and I know that I quite literally wouldn’t survive this life without having a sense of humor in tow. That it comes out at all in my poems is a pleasant surprise to me, largely because I don’t think I’m funny on the page. Not in the way that say, Donika Kelly or Sasha Debevec-McKinney or Charles Wright are often side-splittingly, mercifully funny in their poems. I admire that so much in poets, those who don’t just tend to the heart, but also entertain their audiences in a sort of arch but deeply generous sort of way.

KARAN

“After Reading Li-Young Lee, I Contemplate” is a wild ride — it moves from flies to pastors to billionaires to yearning to a package mix-up to existential ache, and it’s all totally believable. It feels like a poem that performs loneliness in order to understand it. How do you think about the role of solitude in your work? And is there a difference, for you, between solitude and loneliness?

NATASHA

These days, I can’t tell the difference between the two. Intellectually, I know solitude and loneliness are distinct, but they feel the same for me—especially when the isolation (physical, emotional, spiritual, sexual, you name it) is imposed entirely without one’s consent.

But it’s true that solitude and loneliness both have been my most well-worn entryways into poems. It’s all a somewhat-humiliating longing for connection, reaching out into the world the way a poem does. In my work, I think what I’m trying to do is connect with God by reasoning out a problem on the page. And I hope someone will read my poems and feel seen and understood by some of them, but then at the same time, I don’t want anybody to see them. When the psychoanalyst D.W. Winnicott said, “It’s a joy to be hidden, but a disaster not to be found,” I wonder if he was also thinking about Elizabeth Bishop, who said, “There’s nothing more embarrassing than being a poet, really.” I mean, he probably wasn’t thinking about her at all because hardly anybody thinks about poets, but at any rate, I do like thinking of these ideas put together.

KARAN

“Sodom and Gomorrah” is one of the sharpest poems I’ve read about church, performance, and spectacle — it’s the kind of poem that both mourns and indicts. You write: “And the queers and fags and dykes expend themselves, / coursing through the body of Christ like blood.” That image! There’s so much language of embodiment and evisceration here. How do you think about the role of the body in your work — especially the queer, Black, faithful, exhausted body?

NATASHA

I used to be afraid to write explicitly from my life. For a long time, my body was wholly evacuated from my poems, because I couldn’t conceive of a way to bring myself directly into my work without also feeling utterly exposed and in danger of being seen. With age and deeper comfort in myself, this has become less of an issue. I no longer see my body—my femme, queer body—as a problem to be solved, or a thing to hide. I’ve been learning to regard it as a source of information—about the divine, about my limits and boundaries, and about my ability to adapt and transform to a myriad of circumstances. Writing the body is spiritually liberating for me, I'm finding.

KARAN

This is a question we ask all our poets, though the answers are always wildly different: There’s a theory that a poet’s work tends toward one of four major axes — poetry of the body, poetry of the mind, poetry of the heart, or poetry of the soul. Where would you place your work, if at all? And do you feel it moving to another direction?

NATASHA

I don’t know for sure—I think it may be for other poets and readers to decide. But what I’m aiming for is poetry of the soul, through whatever means it takes to get there. If I can achieve that or make it feel possible for another person, then I feel as though I’ve succeeded.

KARAN

You’re building something singular and sustained, Natasha. Your work has clarity, depth, and hunger. What advice would you give to younger poets who are beginning to take their voice seriously? Or alternatively: what is some of the best writing or writing-adjacent advice you’ve ever received?

NATASHA

I’ll answer both questions. First thing I would say is that there is nothing more important to your writing and developing your sense of voice than reading—and reading deeply, and well. Read everything, not just things that you like (though you should read those too). Read nonfiction, read poems, read fiction by dead and living authors both. Read voraciously, read skeptically, read with an open heart. You will not, and cannot, grow as a writer if you are not an attentive reader. I promise you this. If you don’t engage with other voices seriously and with intention, you will have no way to recognize and tend to your own. Give yourself the gift of reading. It’s not just a luxury, it is bread.

Second: the best writing advice I ever received was from a mentor I had in undergrad, a Virginia poet named John Casteen. I remember John telling me, one bright day in early spring, “Natasha, never homestead in just one genre! If all you know how to write are poems and what you really need your piece to be is an essay, you’re going to write a shitty poem because you don’t know how to write an essay. And if all you write are essays and a given piece actually just needs to be a short story, you’re going to write a shitty essay because you’ve never worked on a piece of fiction. Write in more than one genre.”

KARAN

Would you offer our readers a poetry prompt — something strange, simple, or rigorous — to help them begin a new poem?

NATASHA

Yes! Here’s a prompt meant to help you play to your “weaknesses”—to identify what you feel most uncomfortable doing in a poem, then try to do that thing.

For instance: If you tend to write long lines, try writing very short ones—without sacrificing deliberate intention. Or if you tend not to write about things that have really happened in your life, try tackling something more personal. (Remember, you never have to show it to anyone unless you want to.) If you tend to write in first person (“I”) try switching to 2nd person, and see how it shifts your orientation to the subject. If you tend to rely on punctuation, try removing it entirely. And so on. You are your own best guide for this. The goal here is to use this opportunity to write about something that scares you, but also thrills you. What are you running away from that you’d like to face in the safety of the page?

KARAN

Please also recommend a piece of art — a film, a song, an image, a text (anything other than a poem) — that’s sustained you lately or long haunted your imagination.

NATASHA

There are so many I could choose from, but I’ll go with one that’s haunted me for about the last decade: Jane Campion’s brilliant 1993 film, The Piano, starring Holly Hunter. It’s an exquisite film: tense, humane, beautifully shot. I won’t spoil anything, but the story is set in 19th century colonial New Zealand. It’s about a woman named Ada and her young daughter who are shipped off from Britain to NZ so that Ada can marry an English settler there. Due to an unnamed trauma, Ada has not spoken out loud since she was a small child. She communicates strictly through sign language with her daughter, and through fervidly  playing her beloved piano, whether anyone is there to listen or not. It’s a gorgeous, sexy film about many different things, but what strikes me the most is how it’s primarily about expression in the absence of speech and shared language. A poet’s movie, if there ever was one.

KARAN

And finally, which poets have most shaped your sense of voice, lineage, or permission?

NATASHA

I owe an enormous debt to the work of Lucille Clifton, Li-Young Lee, and Charles Wright. The way these three poets astutely explore the nature of the divine couldn’t be more different from one another, but it’s that variance in approach that has given me all the permission to write about God and Eros in my own way. Their poems have enriched my life in ways I’ll never be able to repay, but that’s not really the point, is it? All I can do is walk through the doors they’ve blown open for me, and find what work there is for me to do on the other side, for someone else.

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