TtD supplement #278 : seven questions for brandy ryan

brandy ryan is a queer poet who likes to slip between genre and form. she has published four chapbooks – full slip (Baseline Press, 2013), once/was (Empty Sink Publishing, 2014), After Pulse (with Kerry Manders, kfb, 2019), in the third person reluctant (Gap Riot Press, 2024). other pieces appear in lockbox, long con magazine, CV2, Windsor Review, and MediaTropes, among others. brandy has become obsessed with collage over the last few years, leaving tiny bits of paper and sticky surfaces in her wake. two collage series appear in Contemporary Collage Magazine 31 and Beautiful Trash Vol. 3. in August 2024, her “strange creatures” collages were part of a group show alongside Gap Riot’s Kate Siklosi and poets Brian Dedora and Kate Sutherland.

An excerpt from her “other ways to hide” appears in the forty-fifth issue of Touch the Donkey.

Q: Tell me about the work-in-progress “other ways to hide.”

A: “other ways to hide” is a long poem in fragments. i’ve called it a “queer-coming-of-femme,” but it’s also a series of goings-back, an excavation of memory. some of its fragments step into the past – what we never, as Bronwen Wallace would say, “get over” but learn to carry as gently as possible. anger and sadness, mixed in the same soil. other fragments poke around in pockets, those spaces between: queer and straight, bi and lesbian, who i am in the world and how i perform those selves.

the current MS also includes some collage work as another medium in which to show and hide simultaneously, taking up the poem’s threads and weaving them anew.

Q: How does this work compare to some of the other work you’ve been doing lately?

A: hmmm. i want to say that the work i’ve been doing lately is a step away from language and into the visual, which is true ... and – it feels like a different kind of language to me. images instead of words; scissors (or knives) and glue instead of screen and keyboard/pen and page. the concept of “paper” remains the same in both the MS and my most recent work. trying to express something, trying to create shapes that others might recognize. some delightful, others (hopefully) discomfiting. but work that matters, in some way.

Q: What has prompted this shift, as you say, away from language and into the visual?

A: two things. first – i had a crisis of faith early in 2020. i was leaving a full-time agency job that i had taken with the (mistaken) idea that it would support writing poetry. the money was decent, but i was so wrung out from that kind of work that i had nothing left for my creative life. i hadn’t published anything since After Pulse in 2019, and i was getting rejection after rejection after rejection. i know it’s part of this life ... and i’m still trying to learn how to navigate it. i reached out to some of my creative kin and asked for their help. what do they do when they lose confidence in their work? the answers were beautiful and supportive and inspiring. and they led me to this.

second – i needed to get off screens. with the pandemic and my paying job, i am sitting, onscreen, most of my working days. i wanted something handsy, something tangible, to take up. and something beside language, maybe just outside it. that led me to erasure poetry, to which i began to add some collage (what i call “erasage”), after which i set language aside for a bit and have spent time mostly in the visual world. (the launch video for my chapbook explains a lot of this in a show-and-tell, with the bonus of some cute cat pics https://www.gapriotpress.com/season-ten-launch-party). i fell pretty hard. i don't think anything i've made has given me such uncomplicated joy as making collage has.

Q: I’m curious to know if you’ve seen a difference in the work since this push to return. Does it feel different? Do you?

A: that’s such a great question. yes, absolutely. when i first started to write poetry, i was really interested in the play of language, in exploring the page, in pushing words and meanings as far as they seemed to go. that was me coming out of academia, in love with the OED, shedding my 19th century poetry skin, and encountering this wild, fantastic world of experimental poetry. but i had to put it aside in order to afford to live in this city. when i came back ... my sense of language had changed. the communications world i work in doesn't really go for word play and experimentation. things need to be concise, clear, accessible. my poems have necessarily shifted that way also. since i’ve been so deep in the visual work, i’ve had some close friends ask if i’m coming back to poetry. always and of course, because language is my first love. maybe the visual is my way to play and experiment again, while letting the way i am in language be what it is now, rather than mourning what it used to be.

Q: Do you have any models for the kinds of work you’ve been attempting, whether text or visual (or both)?

A: my poetic model, the one i always aim for and fail to achieve, is Nathanaël. i fell so hard for their poetry that i kept a collection, Touch to Affliction, out of the library for a year (accruing U of T library fines the whole time). i didn’t want to let the book out of my reach – but their poetry absolutely is. that's what i’m trying to fail at.

also: Margaret Christakos, who is always exploring different ways to be in/around language. Sachiko Murakami, who writes so beautifully and hauntingly about raw things. Annick MacAskill, who pushes language to its undoing and back again. for poetry that invites me in and keeps me there, poets like Tom Cull, River Halen, Jim Johnstone, Julie Joosten. and when i think of memory, both cultural and individual, and the work poets do archaeologically – Billy Ray Belcourt. Saeed Jones. Liz Howard. Canisia Lubrin.

on the visual side, Tom Phillips’ A Humament was a book i didn’t know i was working in the vein of, until Stuart Ross recommended it. (his erasure poetry is on an artistic level that i don’t have the training for, so another reach i cannot grasp.) Kate Siklosi winds her way between the visual and poetic in murky waters, careful stitches, inky designs. Kate Sutherland and Jennifer Lovegrove, both poets who have found their way into paper and knife and glue. there are a ton of collage artists on Instagram that i could also shout-out, artists who lean into the minimal and discomfitting. That’s a place i like to be.

Q: With four chapbooks under your belt, as well as your current works-in-progress, how do you feel your work had developed? Where do you see your work headed?

A: i’d love to have a full-length published, like this WiP – but am otherwise happy to keep collecting chapbooks, as publishers and presses might be interested in them. there’s something about my attention span and chapbook length that makes sense for me. so, more of that. in process: a death chap, a scent chap, a Burrow chap. more collaborations (including with my partner, Kerry Manders). i’d also love to work harder at bringing these two loves of mine in closer proximity. could i do my own ekphrasis, in both directions? to work with another poet or visual artist on ekphrasis would also be dreamy.

Q: Finally, who do you read to reenergize your own work? What particular works can’t you help but return to?

A: when i need to re-energize my own work, i go to readings. i haven’t been great at this, since the pandemic started, but it is one of the best ways for me to be in poetry. partly for the poets/poetry i know; partly for the poets/poetry i don’t know. i bring a notebook and pen and am always catching lines that resonate – often for epigraphs and quotes in my own work.

work i return to, Nathanael’s Touch to Affliction and Somewhere Running (their ekphrasis is unlike anything else). Anne Carson’s translation of Sappho (If Not, Winter) and her Autobiography of Red (also “Essay on What I Think About Most” from Men in the Off Hours). Ocean Vuong’s Night Sky With Exit Wounds. Saeed Jones’s Prelude to Bruise. and finally, this opening piece from Lise Downe’s The Soft Signature: “All of these words have appeared elsewhere. Only their order has been changed, to maintain their innocence.”