An Interview With Alex Baskin
In honor of the publication of Alex Baskin’s I wake up tangled in pillows and sheets, winner of Fork Apple Press’ The Slice Poetry Chapbook Contest, we interviewed Alex for our readers of The Juice to learn more about his project, influences, and craft. Below are his responses.
I dare you not to to cry when you tell me
the color of your childhood home.
— “wa wa wa wa wa—wordland”
Was there a catalyst or inciting incident for the authoring of this chapbook? Were there certain poems that came first, and led to the creation of other poems?
The poem that appears first (“slef protriat”) came first, or at least very early on. It’s a self-portrait poem with some proximity to Adam Zagajewski’s work and I think I was reading some of Chen Chen’s self-portraits at the time too. This chapbook was definitely not planned though. For me, poems just happen. But I can see in hindsight that “slef protriat” set up some of the themes of embodiment, lineage, selfhood, and just really overwhelming emotions, like that feeling of bursting at the seams with the intensity of one’s own experience. Plus it establishes the first-person perspective which there’s a lot of in the chapbook. I can see now that that poem led to other poems.
Memories and heritage play a big role in many of the poems in the chapbook. Can you speak to how you access and work with memory as a poet?
Yeah, there is often a particular snapshot in the mind’s eye that leads to a poem, like remembering climbing onto the roof of a poolhouse as a boy and being so afraid, which led to the last poem in the chapbook “maybe a twelve-foot leap.” If you read the collection you’ll see that these poems hit you with lots of images, so yeah it does very often start with a specific memory or a dream.
Meditation helps too; sometimes a childhood scene that was stored in the cob-webby attic of the mind emerges seemingly out of nowhere during my regular meditation practice and I’ll realize that there may be something to write towards there. Many of these poems happened that way.
Who are your poetic influences? What writers do you see yourself in conversation with?
This list might sound basic, but fuck it.
Ocean Vuong’s style of writing poems that are in and of the body—even just the implicit injunction that the word “body” better show up a lot—that’s definitely a huge influence. I love Ross Gay and the poem “Me and My Sister in Hats at the Top of the Temple” is fully me trying to break lines and stanzas the way he does. I worship Ada Limón’s plain-spokenness and so I try to emulate that. And Victoria Chang’s way of pivoting from the ordinary to the strange quickly and magically is in the back of my mind as I’m writing.
I also have read a lot of the Jewish-American fiction tradition from Philip Roth to Nathan Englander and that kinda works its way in here.
In a moment where the very acknowledgment of identity and diversity has been politicized, do you see your work’s engagement with intersectional identities as in resistance to or in defiance of particular events or policies of our contemporary moment?
Big question! Damn, you guys ask hard ones.
I’ll say something about the poem which previously appeared in Redivider “you love me in white underwear.” I shared that with a Jewish friend around the time it was published, which was many months into Israel’s bombardment of Gaza. I was feeling so much anger and beneath that, really shame—all this senseless killing was being carried out in my name, as if it was somehow for my benefit. My friend reflected that it was meaningful to read a poem that connects us to Jewish pleasure. Now hopefully that isn’t a cop-out, of course we still better be standing up for what’s right and showing up in solidarity with Palestinians. But shame is very debilitating and I think celebrating and also wrestling with our heritages can be a buoy.
Fork Apple Press prioritizes work that engages with themes and symbols of desire, consumption, spirituality, gender, environment, cultivation, and wildness. What are some of the symbols you bring to the table in this chapbook? What drew you to those motifs or images?
Well, there are familiar religious symbols here like the sweet fruit in the garden and some that are stranger, like the Buddha as a hammerhead shark. Look, obviously I am interested in religion. I work as a chaplain and many people assume I must think religion is a straightforwardly good thing. I don’t. But religion also won’t go away and I see in my chaplaincy work that there are a thousand and one ways that we are shaped by the stories we have heard about the divine, especially in childhood. I just love playing with these images because we will never exhaust them, there will always be more there to mine.
What did your generation and revision processes look like in the development of this work? Did you encounter any roadblocks or moments of inspiration?
There is a lot of truth in the adage that projects aren’t finished, they are just abandoned. I guess I don’t want to pretend to be more deliberate or organized than I actually am. I feel like I know when a poem is finished and when I had enough of them that I liked, it seemed like maybe a chapbook. The funny thing is that I didn’t have to decide on the themes of this collection. I didn’t say to myself, “Maybe a chapbook about the questions of home, spirituality, and sexuality.” These are just the things I tend to write about and so that led to a gestalt across a bunch of poems all on its own.
What advice do you have for poets building their own chapbooks right now?
Oh gosh, I feel like I’m way too new at this to be giving out advice. I mean, it was helpful for me to understand that rejection is a big part of the process, so I say that for anyone who needs to hear it.
And I’ll pass on one other piece of advice that I heard from the fiction writer Jay Cantor who I did a workshop with when I was an undergrad:
The world has enough great books to last any reader a lifetime. So don’t pretend that you are writing your book because the world needs to hear it. You write it because you need to write it. If others like it, great, but it’s not about that.
If there is a word or line from your chapbook that you hope dwells within readers long after they’ve read this chapbook, what is it?
Hmm, I was going to give some options and make it situational, like “if you’re looking for hope, how about this line, and if you’re needing to stew in despair right now, try this,” but I think I found one that cuts both ways:
“I dare you not to cry when you tell me / the color of your childhood home.”
Purchase Alex’s chapbook at the Fork Apple Press Bookstore, or wherever books are sold.
Alex Baskin is a hospital chaplain and a poet, rooted in over a decade of Buddhist practice and his upbringing in an orthodox Jewish family and community. He holds a bachelor's degree in philosophy from Tufts University and a master's of divinity degree from Harvard Divinity School. His poetry has appeared in Gulf Coast, Redivider, The Christian Century, poetry.onl, and elsewhere. He is a Best of the Net nominee, a runner-up for the MoonLit Getaway Poetry Contest, a finalist for the Lucky Jefferson Poetry Prize, and an honorable mention for the Northwind Writing Award. He has an essay in Refuge in the Storm: Buddhist Voices in Crisis Care (North Atlantic Books, 2023) and a poem in the anthology Ache: The Body's Experience of Religion (Flipped Mitten Press, 2024.) This is his debut chapbook. Originally from New Jersey, he lives in Massachusetts.
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