Q&A with Peter LaBerge | Arts Collective
The COUNTERCLOCK Arts Collective is an online, 4-week fellowship program that allows creative writers, visual artists, and musicians to explore, illuminate, and grow through collaborating on interdisciplinary projects. Learn more about the Arts Collective here.
Each week, we hosted live-streams featuring guest performers in writing and music, and allowed fellows to ask them questions about their experiences. We’re now publishing the transcriptions of these interviews on our blog. This is Week 1, featuring poet Peter LaBerge.
This interview was completed in July 2019.
Peter LaBerge is the author of the chapbooks Makeshift Cathedral (YesYes Books, 2017) and Hook (Sibling Rivalry Press, 2015). His work appears in Best New Poets, Crazyhorse, Iowa Review, Kenyon Review Online, Pleiades, and Tin House, among others. He is the founder and editor-in-chief of The Adroit Journal, and received his BA from the University of Pennsylvania. The recipient of a 2020 Pushcart Prize for Poetry, Peter lives in San Francisco.
CAC: How are you doing today?
PL: I am doing well. I am currently in the grace period between jobs, so I am currently chilling.
That’s actually such a lie – I’m never chilling, and that’s just kind of the way I roll. I’m adulting for a couple weeks, and writing a lot. When it comes to writing, my biggest limitation thus far has been time. Working full-time in marketing, especially in a fast-paced place like Silicon Valley, means that I have to be really disciplined and legitimately make sacrifices in order to write.
“Boy Saint” is a short film by Tom Speers, based on LaBerge’s poem of the same title.
CAC: Firstly, an incredibly broad question, and we are sorry to ask you to condense this topic you could probably talk about for hours into an interview answer: do you think you could talk us through your inspiration, process, and mission with several of the poems you have just read?
PL: I need to be emotionally primed to write a poem. I think my default personality is one that is silly, funny, sassy—not necessarily “deep”. I really need to enter that space and kind of remove myself from everything else, from every insecurity of the world, and that’s where I can produce my art. I turn a lot to music; I turn a lot to cinema. I also turn to dance, not myself dancing – thank God – but modern dance. Watching these sorts of art forms brings me to a place where I’m thinking about the body, poetry, and the world in a way that’s conducive to producing work that I find evocative and meaningful.
There’s this idea that dance and movement is closely related to poetry. I find all art to be related in some way shape or form. I identify as a lyric poet, so I really look to music to maintain a level of lyricism in my work. My poetry, I think, is very bodily. It’s concerned about the body, and the body’s relationship with the world – and I think that dance gets at that very naturally.
Take a peek at LaBerge’s poetry here.
“The Infinity Movement”—from Tinderbox Poetry Journal; “Boy Saint”—from Crazyhorse; “God of Compassion,” “In Mercy Befriend Us”—from Typo; “Crepuscle”—from The Florida Review
CAC: When did you begin writing poetry? What does poetry mean to you?
PL: I began writing freshman year of high school, about six months before I founded the Adroit Journal.
Freshman year of high school was really challenging for me. I was bullied and I had less than zero self-confidence, and I just didn’t have something that I was excited about. I would come home and would watch YouTube for six hours at night, which was an escape rather than a fix. I knew that I had value as a person, but I had no structure and no pursuit to channel it towards. At the end of freshman year, I happened to get published in my high school’s literary publication, and things just kind of clicked. I was like Oh! Maybe this is that channel for me.
I started writing more, and by sophomore fall, I was pretty much committed. Immediately I started workshopping my work and established a kind of literary community at my high school, but I remember, soon after, wanting to continue to expand my writing horizons.
I ended up founding the Adroit Journal; it was really impulsive. I had no plan. I had no experience in marketing. I had been writing for six months, and I had been submitting since the very beginning. There was never a period for me where I questioned if I was “good enough”. I just had this naïve confidence and started submitting to Poetry Magazine and AGNI. Obviously, I got form-rejected. They were probably laughing about my submissions because, believe me, they were pretty rough. Shivers.
Anyways, I decided to found the Adroit Journal, and I solicited a ton. The first issue was incredible. It was wild how many prolific writers were willing to take a chance on this random 15-year-old who didn’t even have a website for his publication. I was emailing people, just asking if I could just have a poem to consider, and they really had no reason to trust me, but they did! There was a lot of “no,” obviously. But there was enough “yes” that I eventually put an issue together, and then another.
Writing made me feel confident, and gave me a channel to express myself. I was a pianist for about seven years growing up, and competed and the whole nine yards, but my heart wasn’t in it. Once I found poetry, I remember thinking, Yeah, this is what it’s supposed to feel like. I really concentrated on that and never really looked back.
CAC: Do you have any advice for writers leaving high school and pre-built young writing communities (like the Adroit Journal Summer Mentorship Program)? How did you grow your writing in college/beyond?
PL: Yes! This is such an important question! You look at Scholastic, Foyle, Bennington, so on and so forth, and you think, “Huh, the objective here is to encourage kids to pursue a vocation that society actively discourages, and yet this is an incredibly cutthroat world.” It’s jarring and problematic.
But I’ve found that the actual world of writing is not nearly as competitive as the high school world of writing. (Which, honestly, is saying something — because it’s not like the real-world of writing is uncompetitive.) I started the Adroit Journal Summer Mentorship Program to create community and start conversations rather than pitting writers against each other as competitions have — I suppose unintentionally? — done. Of course, the mentorship program has become a selective opportunity, and so now that is viewed as a writing contest of sorts by some, which is something I try to discourage when I can. That’s a whole other conversation...
The silver lining about the high school writing world’s structure is that you have deadlines, and you have opportunities that are readily available for submission. It should not be the reason you are writing, but it can keep you submitting to things. And when you graduate, that doesn’t exist in college. I don’t think most teen writers—even, or perhaps especially those who run the gamut of high school writing will learn how to write without a looming Scholastic or YoungArts deadline. Then suddenly, those deadlines vanish, and you either keep writing or you don’t. It’s interesting every year to see who sticks with it—these, in my mind, are the students who really need to be writers, and these are the people I try my best to support in the long-term.
The best way to prepare for the shift, I think, is to have a support network. I got through that because of the support network I had through Adroit – we all wrote together, we gossiped. We kept each other engaged in writing. With Adroit, I’ve had to engage with writing every single day in some way shape or form… it gives you a more nuanced understanding of your work, the work of others, and how people approach different kinds of work.
The best way to prepare for the shift, I think, is to have a support network. I got through that because of the support network I had through Adroit – we all wrote together, we gossiped. We kept each other engaged in writing. With Adroit, I’ve had to engage with writing every single day in some way shape or form, whether it’s sending an email to a contributor or reading submissions, and that really helped as well. Besides giving you great experience editing, working on a literary magazine gives you a more nuanced understanding of your work, the work of others, and how people approach different kinds of work.
The transition from college to post-grad is also really challenging, and I think that’s something that’s given even less metaphorical air-time. I learned how to write a poem out of pure necessity in college, but I actually had delayed sleep disorder in college. I would just write from like 2 a.m. to 4 a.m. most nights – so unhealthy, don’t do that! That’s how I wrote the poems I loved most, though, so that’s how I would produce the work that I loved and believed in. When you’re working full-time, you simply can’t do that. The more sustainable your writing habits are, the easier that transition is.
Peter LaBerge’s poem “Midnight in Findley, OH,” courtesy of Dorothy Chan and The Southeast Review.
CAC: You mentioned “a priming” to get you into the emotional space to write poems in a poetic voice do you think there is an essential poetic voice either for yourself or for poetry as an art form?
PL: No, I don’t. I have my aesthetic, I have my mission, and I have my go-to style and voice. But I think that any attempts to “capital-P Poeticize” poetry are sometimes counter-productive.
It’s irresponsible to say there’s an essential poetic voice to which all poetry speaks. But are there aesthetic camps across the literary world, of course! Certain journals and programs and workshops cater to certain kinds of work, but poetry as a societal construct is boundless.
CAC [from 2019 fellow Olatunbosun Ogunyemi]: Talking about ‘writing what you know,’ what do you think of writing outside the self? For example, as a Nigerian, I have written about racism. Do you think a writer can write things that do not affect them?
PL: This is a great question! We, as writers, have an obligation to write what we know; that can mean research, that can mean our own experiences, that can mean what can or does happen to us as writers.
If it could happen to me based on my identity, my sexuality, my gender, my age, my ambitions – if it’s a story that can, has, or will likely happen to me, then it’s something I feel “qualified” to poetically approach. There’s an intrinsic-ness to some hot-button topics out there today, like abortion, immigration, and LGBTQ+ issues, and a lot of well-intentioned poetry slips into appropriation of others’ trauma or struggle. I think that you’re no less of a poet for saying, “I care deeply about this issue, and here’s a poem by someone else that has lived it.” It’s the definition of good editorship and good allyship.
A lot of well-intentioned poetry slips into appropriation of others’ trauma or struggle. I think that you’re no less of a poet for saying, “I care deeply about this issue, and here’s a poem by someone else that has lived it.” It’s the definition of good editorship and good allyship.
CAC: Some writers have sometimes found themselves defined or limited by their identity as writers of color or LGBTQ+ writers in their work – something like a phenomenon of minority pigeon-holing. Have you ever experienced that, being a member of the LGBTQ+ community yourself, whether it’s internalized or from the literary community at large?
PL: I think it’s both: internalized and actively encouraged by community. The success of presses like Button Poetry and Haymarket Books is driven by their political engagement; those are presses that are really hot right now, that are getting talked about. They’re not engaging politically for those reasons, I’m sure, but the reality is that a legacy publication can look at that and say, “Okay, that’s what people want.”
As a community, we really need to have a conversation about whom we give gatekeeping positions, positions of power in the literary world. My hope is that more marginalized editors means less minority pigeon-holing… hopefully we’ll have the chance to see in the years to come.
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Woody Woodger lives in Lenox, Massachusetts. Her first chapbook, “postcards from glasshouse drive” (Finishing Line Press) has been nominated for the 2018 Massachusetts Book Awards and her work has appeared, or is forthcoming, from DIAGRAM, Drunk Monkeys, RFD, Exposition Review, peculiar, Prairie Margins, Rock and Sling, and Mass Poetry Festival, among others. Her poetry has been nominated for Best of the Net. In addition, she has a regular column with COUNTERCLOCK Literary Magazine.
Sarah Feng is a writer from the San Francisco Bay Area. She was a 2018 Foyle Commended Young Poet of the Year and the runner-up for the Adroit Prize for Prose. Other organizations which have recognized her work include Teen Vogue, the New York Times, the Critical Pass Junior Poet Prize, the National Council of Teachers of English, the American Scholastic Press Association, and more. She was Kenyon Young Writer's Workshop '18 and the Adroit Journal Summer Mentorship '17. She plays piano and dabbles in charcoals, and she thinks rhythm and light and lyric pulse in every field of the creative arts – if you can call them distinct fields at all. In other words, she has faith in the power of the interdisciplinary arts and their persistence in our memories and minds. She is the founder and program director of the COUNTERCLOCK Arts Collective. You can find her here.