GW English Alums on the Move: The Poetry of Andrew Kozma
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| Andrew Kozma |
“GW was the place where I first dreamed myself as a writer.”
GW English and Dramatic Literature Alum and poet Andrew Kozma recently had one of his poems selected for inclusion this year in The Best American Poetry. Professor Margaret Soltan caught up with Andrew to talk about poetry and pedagogy, and about his time at GW. The poem of Andrew’s that Professor Soltan mentions is reproduced at the bottom of the interview.
First, congratulations on having one of your poems selected, by Sherman Alexie and David Lehman, for this year’s edition of The Best American Poetry. I look forward to reading it.
Meanwhile, I love your poem, “Ode to the Love Bug,” which concludes O Tiny Fuckers, teach us to let the world consume us. I find your ‘ode to bugs’ series of poems wonderful, the work of a postmodern John Donne. Tell me something about your approach to poetry, your influences, etc.
First, thank you so much for the comparison to Donne. Though he’s not a direct influence of my poetry in the past, he was definitely an inspiration for the insect odes. Part of what I wanted to do was combine the highest diction with the lowest possible subject, which is in Donne’s line of conflating the spiritual with the sexual.
You’ve written in a number of prose as well as poetry modes. Talk a little about the other kinds of writing you do.
I like writing every genre except that of academic essays: non-fiction, plays, novels, stories, flash fiction, and poetry. In every case, the mode of writing does something different for me, allows me to tell a specific kind of story or create a specific effect. For example, the difference between fiction and drama: in fiction I’m often trying to make the unreal seem real, while in drama I’m twisting the real so it seems unreal.
Do you enjoy teaching writing?
What did your experience at GW mean to you? Were there particular professors who made an impression on you?
The professors who made the most impact on me were Patricia Griffith and Faye Moskowitz. Patricia was so supportive with my playwriting and encouraged me to do whatever I wanted within the form—as a fan of the absurdists and Eugene Ionesco in particular, this encouragement was very welcome. Faye, on the other hand, was encouraging more simply by who she was and is. She gave me the sense that I could do anything, and that if obstacles showed up in my path, I should simply push against them until they gave way.
4. Finally, there was no job I was itching to get out into the world to do. I wanted to write, and if you can go to a graduate program that pays you for being there, then it is sort of like having a fellowship specifically to write. I didn’t go into higher education expecting a job to be there waiting at the end of it, and you shouldn’t either if you are studying writing. Writing itself is the end point, and whatever you can do to make that happen is what you should do, whether that’s taking a job that allows you freedom outside of the job to focus on writing or going on to get your MFA.
I miss the city a lot. I miss being able to walk across the breadth of D.C. in a day through sidewalks crowded with people. I miss the way the city empties out at night to become its own ghost.
Where I write definitely influences the sort of writing I do—or, more specifically, what I end up writing about. The writing itself has a lag time, though, in that even after having lived in Houston for thirteen years now, I feel that it’s only just becoming a major force in my writing. It’s a city that’s constantly changing, reinventing itself, re-constructing, not its ideals, but its body, the roads, the buildings, the parks, all of it ever in flux.
What are some of your future writing projects?
I have been working on young adult novels recently, mostly science-fiction and fantasy. Though I never think of myself as a horror writer—though my poems might disagree—each novel is strewn with horrific elements. To return to an earlier question, one of the benefits of writing in multiple genres is that you learn things about your own writing you might not otherwise, in the same way you learn more about your native language by studying other languages.
On the poetry front, I have a new manuscript consisting of the bug poems plus songs—more persona-esque poems sparked by states of being or, more concretely, how someone might be identified. A couple of the latter, to give an example, are the “Song of the Starving” and the “Song of the Psychopath.”
Sometime this year I’ll be doing another postcard-based Kickstarter called Mailpocalypse that, if funded, will tell the story of the end of the world via alternate futures described in letters by those experiencing it. This will happen over the course of a year with one postcard being written each day, and then collected into an on-line repository (so that everyone can read all the postcards) that might then be further collected into a book.
Ode to the Love Bug
O Unthreatening Sex Fiend, climb your gendered body-twin
and strive to futurize. Four days alive (a little more
and strive to futurize. Four days alive (a little more
if male) is barely time enough for love, or even death.
But, O Fragile Gloves, how you throw your bodies into it!
But, O Fragile Gloves, how you throw your bodies into it!
In smokes of thousands, you dress the baking highway
and declare your passion to every passing glass. Do you see
and declare your passion to every passing glass. Do you see
yourself eternal? Even as you die, your angel-self in air
declares another love affair, and those two, too,
declares another love affair, and those two, too,
are crushed against the grill of this fine day. O girl, come with me
and love as only insects can. Let us be reborn
and love as only insects can. Let us be reborn
a hundred times an hour to fresh our faces to each other’s lips.
O Tiny Fuckers, teach us to let the world consume us.
O Tiny Fuckers, teach us to let the world consume us.
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(“Ode to the Love Bug” originally appeared in Kenyon Review.)
