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Author interview about how to write a book of poetry
Poetry, Travel, and F*ckgirls with Emily Marie Passos Duffy
Writing poetry and reading poetry are both artistic pursuits!
How are poems written and, more specifically, how does a collection of poetry come together? Emily Marie Passos Duffy joined Ledger to chat about her first book and the journey she’s been on, both as a poet and a person.
“The process of putting a full-length poetry book together is very non-linear,” Passos Duffy says of her collection Hemorrhaging Want & Water, out now from Perennial Press.
“The writing feels like…a small fraction of it,” she continued. “There’s revision…[there’s] post-production aspects…[and] it really takes a village.”
Passos Duffy’s poems were born from years of travel and education. She has existed with “one foot in and one foot out” of academia and has written poems that mined her experiences along with the universal experience of living.
“We’re all writing from personal experience, whether it’s through a character or not,” Passos Duffy says. “That doesn’t necessarily mean…everything that appears with the [personal pronoun] ‘I’ is true or factual.”
Listen to the interview right here on Medium or on any major podcasting platform. You can also listen to it on YouTube as an audio only post.
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