{"id":153708,"date":"2021-07-23T09:00:57","date_gmt":"2021-07-23T13:00:57","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/?p=153708"},"modified":"2021-07-27T13:58:44","modified_gmt":"2021-07-27T17:58:44","slug":"procrastination-pressure-and-poetry-an-interview-with-kendra-allen","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/2021\/07\/23\/procrastination-pressure-and-poetry-an-interview-with-kendra-allen\/","title":{"rendered":"Procrastination, Pressure, and Poetry: An Interview with Kendra Allen"},"content":{"rendered":"
\"\"<\/a>

Photo: Clara Lee Allen. Photo and cover courtesy of Ecco.<\/p><\/div>\n

Kendra Allen told me that when she feels stuck writing, she starts hitting the space bar to get things going again. This refusal to get bogged down by hesitancy or fear translates into her writing, which has a sonorous and raw vulnerability. Allen sees herself less as a capital-W Writer and more as a person in the world, using language to work out how she feels about family, death, and pop music. Our conversation took place on a phone call between New York City and Dallas on a July afternoon. Allen\u2019s energy is infectious even from a distance, rigorously turning over ideas with me about everything from lyrics to reincarnation.<\/em><\/p>\n

Fittingly, the word <\/em>essay\u2014to try, to ascertain, to weigh\u2014originates not with formal constraints of prose but with experiments in ideas. Kendra Allen\u2019s 2019 essay collection, <\/em>When You Learn the Alphabet<\/a>, is a fearless attempt by Allen to weigh her themes\u2014family, inheritance, identity. Her debut poetry collection, <\/em>The Collection Plate<\/a>, published earlier this month by Ecco, revisits much from the essay collection but also moves into territory farther afield. Some of the most ambitious and captivating poems in the book are from a series based on Lonnie Johnson and the invention of the Super Soaker. Sometimes a poem, with its title politely positioned in the header position, won\u2019t get started until the very bottom of the page. Rereading those poems now, I feel the weight of that space and am right there with Allen, mind whirring brightly as she taps the space bar, waiting for the words to come.<\/em><\/p>\n

INTERVIEWER<\/p>\n

You recently wrote a recommendation<\/a> of theMIND\u2019s album Don\u2019t Let It Go to Your Head <\/em>for The Paris Review Daily<\/em>. In the recommendation, you mention that you had just met a deadline for your manuscript, and then you listened to the album and had a moment of thinking, Now I need to rewrite everything. How often is music this essential to your writing?<\/p>\n

ALLEN<\/p>\n

I literally would not be writing anything if I was not obsessed with reading lyrics. I think that\u2019s what sparked my interest in creative writing. So many of my greatest memories are me in the car listening to a specific song or me buying a CD and just replaying it over and over and over. The artist I wrote about, theMIND, has a song called \u201cAtlas Complex,\u201d and I was thinking about the line where he says, \u201cI told you everything, gave you everything, you always wanted me naked, and now I\u2019m telling everything, I\u2019m changing everything, I hope this honesty saves us.\u201d I would hear something like that, and I would want to write it. I would create prompts out of song lyrics. So music has sustained me with something to write about. I can always find a line in any song and make a prompt out of it and apply it to my own life. <\/p>\n

INTERVIEWER<\/p>\n

The recommendation also mentions that you finished your manuscript at 2 A.M.<\/small> Are you a procrastinator?<\/p>\n

ALLEN<\/p>\n

Oh, a hundred percent. I\u2019m procrastinating as we speak. As soon as you called, I was procrastinating. I\u2019m not a writer who can set a certain time every single day when I\u2019m going to sit down and write ten pages. That\u2019s just not how I\u2019m wired. I need pressure or I won\u2019t do anything. I will sit at the computer and have intentions of opening up the document, but then I will look at emails. I\u2019ll get on YouTube. I\u2019ll try to read a book. I procrastinate on reading, too. I\u2019ll try to read, and I\u2019ll just get distracted. I\u2019m not the kind of person who has to go outside and clear their mind to do things. I\u2019m more likely to sit in a room and drive myself crazy until I\u2019m stressed out to the point where I\u2019m like hours away from my deadline. And then I just pump it out. I need stress. That\u2019s weird. I need to work on that. I don\u2019t know why I need stress.<\/p>\n

INTERVIEWER<\/p>\n

Do you do a lot of revision, or does what comes out feel like the finished product?<\/p>\n

ALLEN<\/p>\n

Oh no. Never the finished product. I\u2019m a big, big revisor. My revision process is more eliminating than adding things. I think with my first drafts it\u2019s kind of just whatever comes out of my head. It\u2019s not supposed to be good. When I get to that fourth or fifth draft, I can sort of see whatever I\u2019m working on shaping itself and revealing itself to me. A lot of times when it reveals itself, I\u2019m taking things out instead of adding in because I don\u2019t need to say everything I\u2019ve ever thought about what I\u2019m writing. I\u2019m learning that as I go. So when I\u2019m revising, I\u2019m saying, Is this necessary? Is this three essays in one essay, and what do I need to take out? Or is this poem just trying to sound cooler or smarter than what it is? When I see the bare bones of the piece, I\u2019m like, I could have said this in maybe three or four sentences instead of three pages.<\/p>\n

I have a better time revising poetry than I do with essays. I feel like having fun when I\u2019m writing poems. Not in the first draft, but when it reveals itself, poetry gets to be fun. But with an essay, I put so much pressure on myself because it\u2019s so many words and it kind of throws me off. And so I just have to strip everything away.<\/p>\n

INTERVIEWER<\/p>\n

Do you work from notes?<\/p>\n

ALLEN<\/p>\n

When I have something good, yeah. I realized there\u2019s a pattern. Like, all of my stuff that I think is good\u2014not good to the public but good to me\u2014has been the product of me waking up at 2 A.M.<\/small>, writing a sentence down, going back to sleep, waking up forty-five minutes later, writing a hundred sentences down, going back to sleep, and then sort of copying and pasting it all into a Word document at a later date. Like, a way later date. And it\u2019s been like that since I started taking writing seriously. That has been my main process.<\/p>\n

INTERVIEWER<\/p>\n

The Collection Plate<\/em> is a perfect title for a collection of poetry. I want to hear you talk a little bit about what the image of a collection plate means to you.<\/p>\n

ALLEN<\/p>\n

I grew up in my great-uncle\u2019s Baptist church, so I was thinking about the things that we are given and that we give away. I\u2019ve seen people take things out of actual collection plates in church. [Laughs<\/em>] With this collection I also wanted to think about water and what it takes away from us. So I was just thinking about things that water has taken out of and from me, whether that\u2019s tears or sweat or spit.<\/p>\n

I\u2019m a person who will pick a title and try to write a complete thing around it just because I don\u2019t want to change it. I feel married to it. It\u2019s so crazy! [Laughs<\/em>] With The Collection Plate<\/em>, I started with the title and was like, This encapsulates the whole aura of where I\u2019m at mentally right now, and I just wanted to write around it.<\/p>\n

INTERVIEWER<\/p>\n

When you say it captures where you were mentally, do you mean that you felt a lot of giving or taking from the poems?<\/p>\n

ALLEN<\/p>\n

I wrote most of the first drafts of these poems in 2019, and that was just not a good year for me. There was a heaviness on me, and I turned to poetry. I couldn\u2019t write essays. My mind wouldn\u2019t allow me to do it, and so I turned to poetry not thinking that what I was writing was going to be a book. I was just doing it because I couldn\u2019t write essays. Sometimes with essay writing I feel like it\u2019s a lot of overexplaining. Like with detail. Well, that makes no sense\u2014the point of writing is to have detail. But during that specific moment when I was just solely writing poems, I didn\u2019t want to do the essay thing anymore. I was like, Okay, I tried it out, and I tried to take risks, and I\u2019ll come back to it later. What can I do with poetry that I haven\u2019t discovered before? I wouldn\u2019t define myself as a poet because I don\u2019t know enough about poetry. I didn\u2019t take classes on it. I\u2019ve been in poetry workshops, but I don\u2019t know a lot about structure and all the names of the different forms and things like that.<\/p>\n

So I was going into writing poetry with a clean slate, and I think that served me because I didn\u2019t have so many rules set in place. I could go to the page and think with my poems. When I was writing, I wasn\u2019t thinking, I want to structure it this way. It just comes up. It does the work for itself if you put the work in, if that makes sense. Like, if I\u2019m talking about a swimming pool, I\u2019m not going into it trying to form a structure where it looks similar to the lanes of an Olympic pool. It just sort of came out like that and I wasn\u2019t really aware of it. But I think now I\u2019m at a point where I don\u2019t want to keep doing things by accident. I want to do them on purpose.<\/p>\n

INTERVIEWER<\/p>\n

Do you think, in a way, poetry is nonfiction?<\/p>\n

ALLEN<\/p>\n

I think poetry is fiction and nonfiction. I think we assume it\u2019s nonfiction. But some of the poets I\u2019m obsessed with, a lot of their stuff is not even happening in their lives. It\u2019s just imaginative. It\u2019s blending truth with fiction and creating new worlds. A lot of my poetry is personal, and so I\u2019m like, Oh, everybody\u2019s just writing about what\u2019s happening to them, their lives. But what could happen if we did this, or what shouldn\u2019t have happened, or how can we do it differently?<\/p>\n

I think with poetry, it\u2019s easier\u2014it\u2019s not easier\u2014but it\u2019s like, I think that\u2019s when it sort of shifts from truth to like this fantastic imaginative world that doesn\u2019t lend itself to one genre. If that makes sense. And it doesn\u2019t even matter if it\u2019s true or not at that point. It\u2019s just about the feeling of it.<\/p>\n

INTERVIEWER<\/p>\n

Is intuition a large part of how you like to do things? Like you said, you\u2019re not coming to a poem with a form in mind, a sonnet or whatever, but rather feeling your way as you go?<\/p>\n

ALLEN<\/p>\n

If I\u2019m assigned an essay to write, it\u2019s very hard for me. That\u2019s when the procrastination comes in and I\u2019m just sitting there for three days straight with three words on the page because it\u2019s just not clicking for me. If it feels forced, that\u2019s what causes me to hit the space bar, that\u2019s what causes me to sort of break a line or a sentence up in a random spot and try to create a double meaning. But music is involved in that, too. I listen to a lot of rap, and I\u2019m always thinking of rappers I love who do double entendres and things like that.<\/p>\n

INTERVIEWER<\/p>\n

In both When You Learn the Alphabet<\/em> and The Collection Plate<\/em>, one of the main themes you like to return to is your family. What keeps drawing you back to them as subject matter?<\/p>\n

ALLEN<\/p>\n

I think it\u2019s because my family members are like characters. Literally, I\u2019ve always said if my family got a TV show, TV would shut down, and not in a good way. As in, we can\u2019t have nobody on TV no more because this is crazy. This is wild.<\/p>\n

My family is just full of stories that nobody got to tell. And you could see that weight of not being heard or not being seen. I didn\u2019t really learn that until I got past twenty-five. A light went on and it was like, Okay, we\u2019re all a part of one another. There\u2019s so much to talk about, and it\u2019s not being talked about, and I always want my family to see themselves in my work. If my auntie reads something, I want her to be like, I\u2019m glad you said that because I\u2019ve been trying to tell people and they weren\u2019t listening. Or my granny, who was like, Thank you for telling a part of my story. It makes me feel like the stuff I reveal about myself is worth it.<\/p>\n

INTERVIEWER<\/p>\n

Do you think that\u2019s connected to being raised in a religious and spiritual environment, where there\u2019s so much storytelling? I\u2019m thinking of the family superstition about death coming in threes, which comes up in your essays and in your poetry.<\/p>\n

ALLEN<\/p>\n

I grew up in a very spiritual, religious place, but I didn\u2019t feel that spiritual or religious in it. I think that\u2019s why I lean so much on trying to unpack it now. For example, my mama told me people die in threes, three people at a time, and I would just take it. Then I\u2019ve seen it happen, and then I\u2019ve seen it happen again. I just became very content with the concept of death. Me and my mom always talk about death. We talk about our own deaths. That\u2019s when I feel the most in tune with my spirituality. I think about endings all the time in my work. Like, I could write the ending, but I don\u2019t even know how it\u2019s going to start. I just know how it\u2019s going to end.<\/p>\n

I will probably always write about the same thing, a subject, until I figure it out clearly for myself, because I\u2019m not going to want to talk about something else, not when I haven\u2019t even figured this out. I don\u2019t care if it takes me writing three more books about the same thing. I promise I won\u2019t make it boring, but until I can figure something out, that\u2019s always going to be what I go back to and lean on.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

Lauren Kane is the assistant editor of <\/i>The Paris Review.<\/em><\/p>\n

Read Kendra Allen\u2019s poem \u201cThe Super Sadness! Feels Like Anger, Which Feels Like<\/a>,\u201d which appeared in the Spring 2021 issue.<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

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