KARAN

Lisabelle, thank you for these deeply moving poems. I was thrilled upon reading them. The way you grapple faith, desire, and human connection speaks to me eye to eye. I’m particularly struck by how you blend religious imagery with personal experience, as in “Passiontide” where you write, “Even the son of god / knows what it is / to beg and be met / with silence.” Argh! Let’s begin with the process question. How do you approach writing a poem? Do you start with an image, a line, or an idea? Do you have a writing routine? And most importantly, what drives you to write poetry?

LISABELLE

Thank you, Karan! At the time of this writing, my poems have always begun with a line, or phrase, that emerges fully-formed in my head; I let it stew until more words come and arrange themselves around that initiatory line, which very rarely changes in the edit. But I feel as if this might change, or is changing. I’ve been stewing on images lately, trying to find the language to make them real. 

I don’t think I have a routine. Or perhaps I do, but one born from compulsion rather than the imposition of structure. Writing is a very physical process for me — a poem usually builds inside me until I feel like I can’t hold it in, then I let it rush out in full force. This means that I’m very much a poet who ebbs and flows over time; I don’t always have that internal energy building up. When I do, it does fall into a routine of letting the first rush out on my phone, then editing on my laptop later. 

I suppose I write to make my life more legible to myself. Each poem is like building a lattice of words that clarifies the muck of experience into something that can be, if not understood, at least felt more clearly — writing feels to me like a desludging, an unfogging, sometimes an unclogging.

KARAN

Your poems often touch on themes of spirituality and religious symbolism, but in ways that feel deeply personal and often subversive. For instance, in “Renunciations,” you write, “Let us come without clamor to be sanctified, against / histories and blank bodies and reasonable / expectations.” How do you navigate the intersection of faith and personal experience in your poetry? Do you find that religious imagery provides a useful framework for exploring complex emotions and relationships? 

LISABELLE

We can only write from who we are, can’t we, and I think what I am at heart is a devotee. I haven’t always been devoted to the same thing, but at times a large part of that impulse has found expression in religious faith. Devotion is desire given shape, out of which substance is formed and grown — the substance of what is unseen but no less real. Devotion is desire sustained, which is to me a very precious thing.

I find religious imagery very fertile because it’s always resisting itself, making containers for what cannot be contained out of a vocabulary of lineage and correspondences — I think it reveals a certain structure of thought that’s both recursive and expansionary, which is precisely why it lends itself so perfectly to the exploration of relationship. We can’t escape who we are in relation to other people; we return to ourselves over and over, but each return is coloured by newness from contact with the other. It’s like a tide that brings in something new each time to the same shore, sometimes garbage and sometimes treasure. Your histories are deepened and made new. And then you move outward again in search of something greater than yourself.

I experience writing, spirituality, and relationships as related embodiments of this same impulse: moving beyond myself and returning transformed, again and again and again. A pilgrim leaves in order to return. 

KARAN

I’m intrigued by the short lines in “Passiontide” — usually short lines intensifies the pace but here it somehow, almost magically, seems to be slowing the lines down, making them sound wise and dark. And then we also have prose poems (letters) which I love for myriads of reasons. Is form a big concern for you when you write, Lisabelle? Does form come to you before, during, or after the writing of the poem? Does it ever change from what you want it to be to what the poem wants it to be?

LISABELLE

Thank you for saying that about this poem. I think it’s becoming a bigger concern; I’m experimenting with being more intentional with form. Now, because I mostly make the poems in my head before vomiting them out onto the page, form usually emerges at the same time, surprising me a little — like, oh! I didn’t think you’d look like this, but of course you do.

Perhaps this is a nonsensical answer, but poetry is a nonsensical enterprise, of which I am very much an apprentice.

KARAN

“Letter to the dead” kills me, Lisabelle. Such grief, such beauty. It carries an epigraph about bee-keeping traditions and you weave it into a personal narrative about loss and memory. “The life of the bull passed into that of the bees, sudden and unquestioned. Where have you gone? Into whom has your life passed?” In a way, loss makes for most of poetry’s heart — all poems are about loss of childhood, innocence, love, beauty, etc. The loss and grief in this poem is immense. Does poetry bring you joy, Lisabelle, or does it ease your pain?

LISABELLE

Ah, Karan, I completely agree with you that all poems, even happy ones, are about loss. The compressive power of poetic language hinges, I think, on loss — both deliberate and consequential. The words have power because of all else left unsaid, because of what cannot be said despite our best efforts. 

Poetry brings me great joy. I think it’s fun! But it also clarifies everything I’m feeling, which has a temporarily heightening effect; if I’m writing out of pain then I do feel the pain more. But then afterwards the poem is written, and a container has been made for that pain. It’s complete absorption and then a letting go, a detachment.

The worst thing for me is being unable to make sense of something, and a poem eases that anguish once it’s done, because I’ve made sense of the experience on some level. I’ve confronted it, anyway, and made it more legible to myself. All poetry is a reconstruction. Something is always lost in the attempt, but something else is gained. 

KARAN

“Skin Hunger” explores desire, vulnerability, and self-discovery. “I can’t live up to the girl / in your teenage memories. / That girl had her eyes closed / in order to survive, and now / I have survived nearly everything.” What is your approach when it comes to writing about such intimate and potentially difficult topics? I can tell all your poems must’ve taken a lot out of you. 

LISABELLE

Ha! They do. I think I’m glad that comes through, because I’m trying to be more honest with my poems, less sly, less dissembling. I used to only write slantwise at things, and as a result a lot of poems in my debut chapbook are quite opaque; now I try to be clear. I’m tired of hedging out of fear, or a deeply ingrained distaste for vulnerability. So my current approach is to risk it all on the page, which I think is what creates intimacy with the reader, just as I am trying to risk more in my daily life. It can be embarrassing, but the thing about being a poet is you’re allowed to be embarrassing. 

KARAN

Alongside religious and dark violent imagery, I see animals in these poems — oxen, octopuses, worms, etc. Would you speak about your relationship with the natural world?

LISABELLE

That’s funny, because in practice I’m quite a city girl — I suppose the animalian world of the simple and the grotesque is what I yearn for. I sanitize my phone with an alcohol wipe daily and barely keep my balcony garden alive, but on some level all I want is to be absorbed into some mycelium network. I think the animal body is wondrous in its simplicity: hunger and essence. I want to be simple. 

KARAN

There’s a school of poetry that believes a poet can categorize their work in one of these four ways: poetry of the body, poetry of the mind, poetry of the heart, poetry of the soul. Where would you place your work within this framework, if at all? And do you see your poetry move in a different direction?

LISABELLE

That’s interesting! Well, definitely not of the mind, which isn’t really of interest to me, and the soul seems somewhat beyond me, at least for now — so that leaves the body and the heart. I lived for a long time completely dissociated from these two things, and now I’m like a newly birthed foal stumbling around trying to walk. So I think I’ve already moved in a different direction, and my poetry is reflecting that stumbling. 

KARAN

As a writer working across different genres — poetry, fiction, and screenwriting — how do these different forms of writing inform each other? Do you find that themes or ideas from your poetry make their way into your screenplays, or vice versa?

LISABELLE

Yes, I write about whatever I happen to be obsessed with at the time. I’m very new to writing in all these genres, so I don’t think I can say quite yet how they inform each other, except that form seems to be its own demand — I started writing my first screenplay MOMO as a novel, but its real form asserted itself. You could say I’ve just been playing and letting myself feel my way into different forms, which has been a source of great joy. 

KARAN

What is some of the best writing or writing-adjacent advice you’ve received, whether during your formal education or through your experiences as a writer?

LISABELLE

Oh, I’ve been so lucky and am absolutely swimming in brilliant advice. I immediately think of Jeanette Winterson in a masterclass I attended last year: “obsessive redrafting is mindlessness.” She said to aim for a symbiotic connection to your work by the end of the first draft, and to stop doing endless drafts — just find out what the problem is early on and fix it, and if you can’t fix it, just throw it away! Holding on to bad work is like keeping moldy food in the fridge. Most of your experiments will fail, so just play without purpose as part of your practice — trust your creativity, it’s not going to dry up. 

When she said this, I felt like I’d been given permission. I’ve always worked like this, but it often seemed to me to run counter to the common advice, and I felt like I was failing in some way at being Good and Disciplined. But every writer is different, and if what works for me, works for Jeanette Winterson — well, there’s hope isn’t there? She set me free to lean into my own disposition. 

KARAN

Well, that’s something I needed to hear, Lisabelle! Recently, we decided to ask our poets for a poetry prompt at the end. Would you provide a prompt for our readers, to help kickstart a poem?

LISABELLE

What are you most afraid of losing? Start with this line: Today I lost [this thing]. 

KARAN

That’s such a great prompt: concise, clear, and brimming with possibility. We’d also love for you to recommend a piece of art (anything other than a poem) — perhaps a song, a film, or a visual artwork — that you find particularly inspiring or that you think everyone should experience, especially in the context of the themes you explore in your poetry.

LISABELLE

I’m such a massive fan of Jess Allen. She paints shadows of people and domestic scenes, and her work often deals with the visible passage of time — another thing you can make a container for but never truly capture. A person’s shadow is proof a person is there, but is a trace and not the person themself; I think a poem works likewise. Her latest work explores ‘presence through absence’, which comes back to that impulse we talked about earlier, the reaching for what cannot be grasped but is no less real.

She says “the presence of light and shade feels inevitable [when you work from observation]” and talks about “this visual game of presence and absence” — I love that and want nothing more than to, someday, hang a painting of hers up on my wall.