Q&A with Lily Holloway (round 2!)
“open my mouth and sand spills out in towers and slipping hills endless / open my mouth and vomit is shot at speed chunks of green monopoly / houses marbles clumps of drain hair and pineapple lumps…”
~ ‘you are my night terror, i hope i am yours’ by Lily Holloway
Your poem "you are my night terror, i hope i am yours" is a powerful and 'revolting' outpouring that mixes the abject and the everyday in surprising ways. What was your inspiration behind this piece?
This poem was my first attempt at a creative response to a traumatic event which left me with a lot of unbridled rage and pain. The sensation of getting it out onto the page felt cathartic (a lot like vomiting!) and writing remains one of my main ways of dealing with the emotional journey I'm still undertaking.
I wrote this poem to the world and to the people who had hurt me both during the event and in the aftermath. I wanted them to feel as though they had opened Pandora's box, that they had unleashed this furious, dangerous and powerful force that would destroy them. It's a 'look-at-all-I-encompass' poem, it's a 'you-will-rue-the-day' poem, it's a poem that allows my emotional response to be messy and gross and all over the show!
I think the abject and the everyday exist so closely in the poem because trauma is simultaneously both of those things: something so extreme you could never have prepared for it but also something that could happen at any moment during your everyday life.
The phrase "open my mouth" is repeated throughout the poem, each time building a sense of energy and urgency. How important is pacing and rhythm in your writing process?
I really enjoy experimenting with pacing and rhythm (I had a teacher who once set us the task of writing poetry to different speeds of a metronome, which was fun)! I like poems that are so fast that they knock you off your feet but I also like poems that allow the reader to take a moment mid-piece. I always read my writing aloud (whether that be poems... or contributor interviews...) to get a greater sense of how it flows in terms of rhythm and pacing (even though I don't often perform my work to an audience). Sometimes a poem will really obviously have a rhythm and pace that works, other times it takes a bit of fiddling before the poem settles.
You have a chapbook forthcoming in AUP New Poets 8 - congratulations! Can you give us a taste of what's inside?
Funnily enough, this poem is one of the poems that will be included! The other poets included in the edition are Tru Paraha and Modi Deng. I feel really honoured to be included alongside them as they write incredibly beautiful and impactful poems. In my section (which is called A child in that alcove) recurring images include: eels, mothers, flatbed trucks, bodies of water and supermarkets. Velma Dinkley shows up and so does Smurfette. I play around with form a lot.
What's at the top of your to-be-read stack at the moment?
Emma Barnes' ‘I am in Bed with You,’ Courtney Sina Meredith's ‘Burst Kisses on the Actual Wind,’ Tara Black's ‘This is Not a Pipe’ and Ingrid Horrock's ‘Where We Swim.’ What really should be on the top of the stack are all the secondary readings I need to work my way through for my English 707: Writing WWII course (shout out to Dr Summers-Bremner, please give me an A) but how can I resist when such beautiful works keep being released?
Lily Holloway (she/they) has been published in Starling, Scum, The Pantograph Punch, Landfall and other various nooks and crannies (see a full list at lilyholloway.co.nz/cv). She is an executive editor of Interesting Journal and has a chapbook forthcoming in AUP New Poets 8. Lily is based in Tāmaki Makaurau, is a hopeless romantic and probably wants to be your penpal! You can follow her on Twitter @milfs4minecraft.