Alexa Doran : part five

What do you find most difficult about writing poetry?

The most difficult part of poetry for me is not returning to the same words, same body parts, same moments. You fall so deeply in love with a word like mouth or crescendo and suddenly mouths are gaping from every line, and every climax sounds the same. So, the hardest part for me is to keep expanding my toolbox, to keep letting the world in.

Alexa Doran : part four

How do you know when a poem is finished?

For me it’s a combination of image and sound. The sounds in the poem will start working up and up and all the sudden I will feel the need to deflate, to yank back out. When I feel that moment musically, I try to catch it in an image, like the sounds are runoff and that last image the perfect basin.

Alexa Doran : part three

When you require renewal is there a particular poem you return to?

I turn to Anne Sexton’s “Self in 1958’ for renewal. Life is so damn harrowing it seems impossible to approach without humor, and this poem is a perfect pairing of existential dread and inward chuckle. Sexton’s coy “They think I am me!” always makes me smile as it touches on the impossible distance that we are all faced with while also making you feel like you are in on a big secret. She talks about the pressure to “swing the doors open in wholesome disorder” and then responds with a literary fuck you. The poem always lets me feel again when everything else in me has turned off.

Alexa Doran : part two

What do you feel poetry can accomplish that other forms can’t?

Poetry offers a closer understanding of the world around us, one that isn’t obscured by plot. Plot makes life easier to conceive of but it’s a lie. The whole idea of beginning, middle, and end, which constructs so many other art forms, is pushed aside by poetry so that we can travel in the quick of it, where life is at its rawest.

Alexa Doran : part one

Alexa Doran is the author of the chapbook Nightsink, Faucet Me a Lullaby (Bottlecap Press 2019), and is currently a PhD candidate at Florida State University. Her series of poems about the women of Dada, “The Octopus Breath on Her Neck,” was recently released as part of Oxidant/Engine’s BoxSet Series Vol 2. You can also look for work from Doran in recent or upcoming issues of Los Angeles Review, Passages North, Salamander, Pithead Chapel and New Delta Review, among others. For a full list of her publications, awards, and interviews please visit her website at https://aed16e.wixsite.com/alexadoranpoet.

What are you working on?

Currently I am working on tidying up my first full length manuscript, DM Me, Mother Darling. This collection intertwines the descent (some might argue ascent) of Mother Darling, the mother from J.M. Barrie’s classic tale, Peter Pan, with my personal struggles as a mother in twenty-first century America. From casinos, to boxing matches, to Jewel concerts, what it means to mother is constantly challenged by Mother Darling and myself as we try to make sense of modern society’s kaleidoscopic backdrop. The manuscript is meant to work on the reader like a potion, slowly but powerfully transporting them into the Mother Darling-Me galaxy until, like the speakers in the collection, they are released. Even though motherhood is the lens through which these narratives churn, they hold weight for anyone who has ever felt the mire of grief or the desperation of joy.