Brandi Bird is an Indigiqueer Saulteaux, Cree, and Métis writer from Treaty 1 territory. They currently live and learn on the land of the Squamish, Tsleil-Waututh & Musqueam peoples. Bird works as a freelance writer, workshop facilitator, and manuscript consultant. They are currently an MFA candidate in Creative Writing at the University of British Columbia where they are writing their first novel.
The All + Flesh was shortlisted for two League of Canadian Poets’ prizes and explores the internal and external cultural languages and legacies, and their effect on the body, land, and relations. Their work can also be found in Poetry is Dead, Room Magazine, Brick Magazine, Prism International, Hazlitt, Catapult and their website, brandibird.com.
Brandi Bird is being interviewed by Brianna Lou Bock.
Brianna Lou Bock (BLB): In writing/gathering poems for The All + Flesh, how did you bring them together for The All + Flesh? Was there a deciding factor for the chosen poems, like a certain theme?
Brandi Bird (BB): I think it was more the latter. This is the work of three years of writing. I had another manuscript that I scrapped because it just wasn’t ready and I’m still learning how to write poetry. I started writing when I was 26, I’m 33 now, I wrote as a teenager but at the age of 16 I stopped and didn’t pick up a pen to write poetry or fiction or anything until I was 26. But then I had this drive to get better and try and experiment. I think naturally the poetry had connections because I have these preoccupations and obsessions, and I get very obsessive about things and ideas. I think my family history, Indigeneity, disability, how they all intertwine, I think that really informs how I created the order for the book and what I included and what I didn’t include. There was poetry that I specifically wrote to add to the book. For example, Everything Flesh and Brandi is also Alessio are newer poems, and I noticed that you wrote in the questions about those two specific ones, and I think those were very purposefully chosen. But a lot of this poetry, a lot of it’s from my chapbook, my first chapbook I am Still Too Much, heavily edited of course. I feel like the beginning of the book is newer poems, the end of the book is older poems. I also began with this Poem for White People because I thought it was just cheeky.
BLB: I definitely feel like all the poems in The All + Flesh are in conversation with each other and are grappling with similar themes. Even having Everything Flesh and Brandi is also Alessio next to each other feels like a statement in and of itself. Everything is flesh, including the digital. When putting this collection together, how did you decide the order of the poems?
BB: I’ll go into how I chose the first and last poems of the book. Initially the book was going to begin on a different poem than Poem for White People. I didn’t know where to put that poem, it’s a longer poem in the book. I just decided with my editor that it would be the first one because, well first off, it is cheeky. But there’s this consumption of trauma that comes with Indigenous literature. I think people come into it with an expectation, and I think The All + Flesh sort of fulfills that expectation but I wanted to be aware of that and try to disarm people as they open the book. Beginning the book with the word “circle” and ending the book with the poem What Joy? with the line ‘We are nothing if not forgiving’ was very intentional. But I didn’t want to worry too much about the order really. Because it was so stressful to me. So the things that happened, happened coincidentally or maybe they happened coincidentally at first and then I saw meaning in them and stuck to that meaning. For example, Everything Flesh and Brandi is also Alessio, they work really well together. I noticed that, as I was putting the work together but that happened purely through coincidence.
BLB: Building off the previous question, did you find new meanings/interpretations in your poems that were previously in separate publications once they were put together into this collection?
BB: In my new work now, I’m finding as I’m ordering things, I have another book on the go that I’m writing, I find I have a few poems that are published right now but I find the order, with one book under my belt, I’m feeling like the order of my next one is coming together, it feels more organic and less like a struggle. My next book is going to be framed around these poems called Autobiography, they’re autobiographies but they’re from different perspectives of my life. It’s a book about eating disorders. I think The All + Flesh taught me that, how to really focus on meaning in order and the chaos that a book is, and how to find meaning in that chaos. Because I’m writing these things and sometimes it feels like I’m overtaken, and I don’t know why I’m writing the things I’m writing. I just know that I’m obsessed with them. Again, obsession is a big part of my process.
BLB: I’m always fascinated by how poets format their poems. You have a variety of different formats through this collection. How did you decide which format to use for each poem?
BB: I think form is the struggle of poetry. I’m always second-guessing form. For example, the title poem, The All + Flesh, it’s shaped like a needle, a puncture, a wound. And that was very purposeful but it also quite obvious. I was like, ‘Is this too obvious?’ I experimented with form before that, and I made the lines couplets in that poem and it just didn’t work, it wasn’t working. I was trying with different spacing, I was like ‘Maybe I can make this fragmented’ because it feels like a fragmented experience. But it always went back to that puncture mark. So I think there is an element of feeling the form in your body, an embodied form in language. Another poem, Ode to Diabetes, that’s in long couplets and that was very intentional. It felt like that poem needed to be contained. That poem was very emotional for me. And that poem didn’t go through a lot of editing. It came out of me, complete, it felt like. It was something I think I needed to write. That doesn’t happen often at all, for me anyways. Usually, I have to edit poems to death. That poem has always felt alive to me. I’m always chasing that feeling of creating a poem that feels alive through its whole lifespan. Form for that poem, the couplets felt natural, and the Poem for White People, I struggled a lot with form for that one. First off, it’s hard to format poems in Microsoft Word. It’s really annoying. I would work with form so much more if I had access to Illustrator or the knowledge to use Illustrator. Maybe I will learn that one day and try some new things. Right now, it’s pure laziness. And maybe just not having the time at the moment. I have ideas, but like all ideas you need to do them. Form is interesting. I read this review of my book that was saying the form felt maybe juvenile, maybe I had been experimenting instead of being intentional. And I think that’s wrong. Everything I did was very intentional. Maybe it didn’t land for everybody but that also served me right for reading reviews of my book.
BLB: Isn’t an experiment intentional?
BB: Yeah, I think so. Experiments are intentional. Even if doesn’t land or it doesn’t work, the experiment itself is the point.
BLB: I adore the body motifs/themes in your poetry, especially how visceral you make it. A Glossary of Illness, Everything Flesh and Ode to Diabetes really stood out to me in the details and imagery you call attention to. As a poet, what is it about the body that inspires your writing?
BB: The body is an obsession of mine because, well, my next book is about eating disorders. I had an eating disorder for sixteen years. I don’t think I have a single memory before the age of 26 that doesn’t include being self-conscious about my body or being aware in a negative way about my body. In eating disorder treatment, we’re told that the average person thinks about their body 25% of the time. Don’t know where they got that figure. But I feel like for me, it was 100% of the time. The only thing I could think about was my body and how it was perceived and how it took up space in the world. And food, and how it nurtures or destroys the body. For me, writing this book, The All + Flesh, it was the only thing I was thinking about. I was also quite sick when I wrote this book. A Glossary of Illness is about me getting diagnosed with gastroparesis, which is a consequence of diabetes which is a consequence of medication I’ve had to take and my eating disorder and things like that. It’s all connected. Sickness. The body. Bulimia. Anorexia. They overtook my life for so long. Now I have a good medication regime, I have a good handle on my health. For my next book I’m dealing more with the actual eating disorder, because before I don’t think I was ready to write about it. I tease, I talk about it inside things, but now I’m really ready to go into it.
BLB: Building off the previous question, I especially love how you weave the body and the land together in your poetry too. I love the physical, visceral details of connection and harm that body and land both share in your poetry. When writing, how do you select those essential details that make the poem click?
BB: I feel like sometimes its intuitive. But other times it’s not intuitive, and it takes a long time. For example, 1999 is one of the first poems I ever wrote, as an adult anyways. But, of course, it’s been very edited. It was a poem that was inspired by 1992 by Liz Howard, who is the reason I write poetry. I read her book when I was 25 or 26 and started writing poetry almost immediately. I was very much trying to emulate her in my early work, and I think still probably try to do that same thing now in a maybe more unconscious way, but we’re all the collection of our inspirations and influences. I think that how I decide, I couldn’t tell you. Sometimes it feels like magic and it’s not. Poetry’s not magic, poetry’s very real and very active. At least when you’re writing it, it doesn’t feel active sometimes on the page. Sometimes it just feels like it’s dead. But when I’m writing a work, a poem, like I said, I chase that feeling. So the body and the land, they’re very connected for obvious reasons. The only reason that we have bodies is because of the land. Again, one of my obsessions is displacement, displacement from my own body, displacement from my lands. I live in Vancouver, but I’m from Winnipeg and I feel sometimes that I can’t go home for a multitude of reasons. I kind of long for that feeling of home, even though it doesn’t exist for me anymore, and same with my body. I grieve the body I used to have. But then I take pleasure in the fact that I am pretty much a confident, healthy person now.
BLB: Continuing to build off of themes in your poetry, God and faith. The last passage of You Have To Give Up Hope really spoke to me, as well as Vomit Manifesto. In the connection between bodies and the land, why is it important to root the various forms of faith and belief to the body in all its illnesses and physicality in your poetry?
BB: I think God is just, for me anyways, God was always a reason to stay on control and be a good person, and eventually shifted from God to my eating disorder, to my mother’s voice, to my own values now that I don’t have to rely on this external pressure to ‘be good’. Now it feels more intrinsic, it feels more internal. I also grew up in a doomsday church. I grew up in a church where we spoke in tongues. A girl had a seizure once and they didn’t call an ambulance. They said she was drunk on the lord. We did the eucharist even though we weren’t Catholic, we were nondenominational. There was a lot of emphasis on the rapture. God came with a lot of fear too. That control, keeping control of myself, was very fearful. I think fear is one of the most memorable emotions, that anxiety you feel. It’s like pain, you can’t really understand it until you’re in the moment but afterwards it’s this uneasy, unsettling feeling that you carry with you. And fear for me is, it used to be one of the only emotions that really was accessible to me. Now I have a multitude of emotions that I can access. I can be sad, and I can be happy, and everything in between. But I still remember that fear, and that’s what I think I write about when I write about God.
BLB: There are a few poems that are either for, or after, someone or something. To you, what is the difference between a poem ‘for’ or ‘after’ someone? What is the difference in the conversation?
BB: I think one particular poem that is for and after someone that maybe can merge those questions is It Is and It is for and after Selina Boan. It’s a poem that I wrote for my best friend, Selina Boan. She has a book called Undoing Hours that is lovely, pick it up if you haven’t read it. Go to your local library, go to Massey, go to Munro’s. Pick it up, it’s amazing. So that poem is for her, in that I wrote it because I was overcome, and I couldn’t not write that for her. I just had a lot of feelings that I needed to get out, and I don’t often write poems that are just, ‘I need to write this or else I’ll die!’ But that’s sort of how I felt with this poem. It was a joyous poem, which I don’t write a lot of. I feel like the ‘for’ imbues the poem with a gratitude. So grateful for Selina. I think the ‘after’, I also have poems ‘after’, like Liz Howard for example, it’s just an acknowledgement of the fact that this has been done before what I’m trying to do. I’m not trying to reinvent the wheel, I’m just trying to acknowledge my influence and also have a piece of those poets in my work, like for example, It Is and It is for Selina. It’s for and after her, it’s after her poems because I feel like there’s pieces of her poetry in my work as well.
BLB: I’m fascinated with exploring the influences of an artist’s work to see where we ended up. Sometimes it feels like when you’re just starting out you want to hide those. You want to stand out on your own. It’s just so fascinating to see how an artist grows and changes. ‘Yeah, this is from when they were obsessed with this’ or ‘they really liked this’ and see what that creates.
BB: I love finding those threads. Even if I’m just imaging them, like I read this book called Nerve Squall by Sylvia Legris, about meteorology and the apocalypse. It’s a book of poetry, and I saw so much of Liz Howard in that work, and I thought, ‘Maybe this is something she read.’ But who knows. I might be making assumptions, but it felt like an influence, and to me, became an influence. Nerve Squall is one of my favourite books, I think it’s great. I love reading writer’s biographies and autobiographies and finding their own influences. I have a group of friends who are all writers, and we influence each other. I’m so excited to have one day, a little group dynamic that is talked about by other people. I think that would be really cute. That’s my dream, to have a little writer crew.
BLB: I read in a previous interview that crafting titles are your least favourite parts of writing (same). How do you craft them then? Is it a last-minute decision or an agonizing struggle? Or both?
BB: I’m actually really enjoying titles. So that’s shifted. I will often, now, begin a poem with a title and an idea especially because I have a specific subject I’m writing about right now, like eating disorders. So everything comes back to this theme, this subject. So there’s the autobiography poems, those poems started with that title. For the first poem I wrote for this collection, the first autobiography poem, I wanted to write a poem with no pronouns in it. No ‘I’, ‘We’, ‘They’, it was very hard. I think I still put ‘it’s in there because it’s impossible not to put ‘it’s in there. I think I can let that slide. It’s actually published in Hazlitt if anyone wants to look it up. You can also go to my website and read it in the publications section. I find titles really inspiring now. I used to not think about titles before, they were the last thing I thought about. But now I don’t think about poetry that way. And titles shift and change as the poem shift and changes, but I have a core idea for every poem I’m writing right now. And maybe that will change, and it will go back to me hating them.
BLB: If poetry is a conversation with itself, the writer, the reader in all combinations and more, and interpretations are numerous, what is the conversation you wish to initiate?
BB: I’ve been thinking about this question since you sent it to me. I think what I wish to initiate is curiosity with the world and experience. I had a friend once who said, ‘White women love your poetry’. And maybe they do, but I don’t think that’s necessarily a bad thing. I think that I write poetry to be understood in different contexts. I may be controlling the way I’m understood in different contexts, and I don’t think that’s a bad thing. I think the curiosity, the understanding, the seeing, the discussing parts of a human being and a human body, the human experience, and still feeling the words in yourself and seeing yourself in those poems is very important to me. That’s how I read poetry. I feel things very deeply first and then I go back and realize why I felt that so deeply. What the technique was, what the context was, what about the musicality inspired me, or affected me so deeply, or what about the form was interesting. The punctuation, it’s a whole gauntlet of things, but first, I feel the poem.
BLB: What conversations do you plan to have with your future work?
BB: This is tough one because my next book, I’m thinking, will maybe be called Pitiful. I’m not sure. It’s going to be called Pitiful because I don’t have a single memory from before I was 26 that didn’t involve food or my body and feeling like I wanted to play this sick role. I wanted people to see that I was ill, and through my body, that I was suffering. I don’t feel that way anymore, and I think I’m trying to find for myself why I felt that way, and also write about eating disorders that maybe hasn’t been written about before. I want to talk about body sovereignty, and I don’t know if body sovereignty even exists. I’m doing a lot of research for this book, I’m reading Leanne Simpson, I’m reading memoirs and essay collections about hunger and eating disorders, such as Dead Weight, which is a book I’m reading right now. I just think about all the literary heroes I’ve had who have struggled with eating disorders or disordered eating in some way, and how it’s not really talked about in the same way. It’s romanticized or it’s ignored, and I think we can do more than romanticise something or ignore it. And of course, I’m sure parts of it will be romanticised in my new book because I think the nature of suffering is romanticised, especially with mental illness and stuff like that. I don’t necessarily think romanticization is a bad thing, especially for teenage girls. I fully acknowledge that without my eating disorder, I would not be alive, which sounds weird, but it really did keep me going. I had a goal, even if that goal was terrible, it was better than dying, even though I could have died in the process. But I didn’t. And that’s what’s important. And so this book is going to be about how I didn’t die.
BLB: I’m currently researching what I would call the quintessential suffering artist archetype, at least in the Romantic movement, and I think we want our suffering to mean something,
BB: Yeah.
BLB: That it wasn’t just for nothing, or didn’t just happened because the people, the world is just cruel, there has to be something. A reason behind it.
BB: Yeah, I don’t know if there has to be a reason behind it. For me, I build meaning into it in a way that isn’t trying to find reason, but maybe it’s explanation? Maybe? I did this because I needed to survive by any way possible. But not, I did this to survive because so and so, and that’s why I have an eating disorder. I’m trying to learn not to ask why all the time. It’s very hard because the world is unfair and there’s nothing we can do about it, we can try to live our best lives and live aligned with our morals. The not asking why and leaving things a mystery is sometimes the best way to move forward.