Some Weird Sin: Featured Writer: Cristin O'Keefe Aptowicz

Cristin O'Keefe Aptowicz is about as well-established a poet as you can get without having died first. She has five books of poetry to her name with a sixth one on the way this fall. She is also the author of Words in Your Face: A Guided Tour Through Twenty Years of the New York City Poetry Slam, a non-fiction book about the history of the poety slam in New York City, of which she has been a big part having founded the well-known NYC-Urbana Poetry Slam. Cristin has also been featured in numerous anthologies (both print and CD), published in several periodicals, and has written many essays and articles and a screenplay. She recently moved into the Amy Clampitt House near Lennox, MA for the Amy Clampitt Residency, adding to her already long list of awards, which includes a National Endowment of the Arts Fellowship for Poetry. All of that said, Cristin is an incredibly humble woman who still sifts through the many badges of honour that are the rejections letters she receives and still submits her to work to small magazines like this one. Her poem, "Genius Bar", will be featured in the next issue of Some Weird Sin due out in February. We are incredibly honoured to be able to publish a piece by her.

First, some basics:

How did you get started in writing? In other words, what inspired you? One day you weren’t a writer and the next, you were—what changed?

My mother instilled in me a deep love of all kinds of writing. She had wanted to be a writer, but grew up in a different time and under much harder financial circumstances than I did (I’ve written a poem about it: “Mother”). I told my mom I wanted to be writer in the third grade, and it has stuck ever since.

However it terms of making the leap between wanting to BE a writer and feeling like I AM a writer was when I first got involved in the New York City Poetry Slam movement. I founded the NYC-Urbana Poetry Slam series when I was 19, and it was first experience of being treated as an adult in an artist’s community—for better or worse. I always tell young writers, if you want to learn how to be a great writer, then be an organizer! Start your own reading series or lit journal! See what it is like from the other side of the divide, and what they want and need from the artists with whom they are working. It is surprising and helpful and the lessons I learned then continue to guide me to this day!

What would you say inspires you the most? Is your writing fueled purely by emotion, topical in nature, or are you just trying to tell a story?

I read almost exclusively nonfiction: nonfiction prose, nonfiction poetry, nonfiction graphic novels. I love hearing about true stories, and especially love hearing true stories from the people who experienced them first hand. Poets like Kevin Young, Bob Hicok, Jim Daniels, Denise Duhamel, Bethann Fennelly, James Hearst, Shanny Jean Maney, Mahogany Browne and Matt Cook have allowed me very intimate access to their lives through their poetry, unafraid to be funny or heartbreaking, heartened or crushed, beautiful or ugly depending on what was true for them in that moment.

When it comes to my own writing, my sole focus is on being as honest as possible about what is going on, and see where the poem wants to take me. I have unlocked so much insight into my own life through the process of writing poetry about it. And it is even more thrilled to see audiences react to that work—whether on the page or on the stage—and now that I am not alone in having a shitty time at an office holiday party (“At the Office Holiday Party”), or embarrass themselves dining with ex-paramours (“A Short History of UnusualFish”) or unbelievably feels twinges of hope in their battered heart after a bad break-up (“June”).

Who are some of your favourite writers? What do you like about them and how have they influenced your writing?

Oops! I answered this question early!

Now, let’s get a little harder:

You have had immense success with your writing, including five full-length poetry books, a non-fiction book on the history of poetry slams, a play, and a whole slew of awards and residencies. How have you done it? What do you feel has been the key to your success not just as a writer, but also as a person? Where/how do you feel you’ve been most successful?

Thank you for your very generous compliments about me and my career! What’s interesting about success if that I think from the outside it looks like a straight line going up—all of the projects you’ve done seem to snowball and help from a clear path to where you have ended up / where you are going.

But from the inside, success often just looks like chaos. For every grant or residency I’ve been awarded, there are dozens which have rejected me! Even more so with literary journals! And for every project that I’ve been able to push forward, there have been tons which died on the vine—unable to move forward because of lack of interest or support or both.

Any success I’ve had has been a grateful, humbling surprise, and one I try to honor by working really hard to live up to the opportunity I’ve been given. And that to me is what I consider the area I’ve been most successful in: working really hard. You can’t control whether or not you have talent. You can’t control whether or not your work will be recognized or valued. But what you can control is how much work you put your art—both in terms of creating it and in terms of getting it out there—and that is where I try to focus my energy.

And the advice I always give to artists who are first starting out, or maybe have been doing it for a while and feel lost, is to really focus on what you want to do. So many artists base their career path on what they see other artists doing, and having those opportunities or following that game plan. But you should always ask yourself if that’s really the artistic life you want. For me, touring all the time is a possibility, but when I tour I can’t write. So I tour a lot less than I can (and maybe should!) tour, but it works for me because I leave the space for the work I want to do: the actual writing.

There are many strategies to being a successful artist, and sometimes young artists spend so much time trying to knock off all the items on that to do list that they forget to enjoy the act of creating art. They lose site of the finish they actually want to cross.

So that would be my advice: figure out what you REALLY want out of creating art; build a life that supports THAT; work really hard; and try to honor every opportunity you are given by giving your all.

With everything you have accomplishment as a writer, how do you keep yourself going? In other words, what keeps you trying for more? Surely, at times you must think to yourself “What next?” I must say, though, I certainly get the impression that you are not someone who takes things for granted and always appreciates even the littlest of things, such as publication in our small, non-paying magazine. What would you say remains your biggest goal in life?

A woman writer (and perhaps more specifically a working class woman writer who uses humor in her work) I realize that the opportunities that are given to me—in terms of living the life I do, having the opportunities I have, writing the work I write and meeting the people I meet—simply did not exist for other generations of women like me, my own mother included. I deeply appreciate and am grateful for all the opportunities I am given and all the doors I am lucky enough to walk through.

When it comes to my writing, that is definitely in the background. That I am lucky enough to have a platform where I can share my story and having other people engage with it. What a gift!

In terms of my poetry, it is all autobiographical, so as life unfolds, there are always new things to write about! And the poets I’ve loved the most are the ones who have allowed me access to the full spectrum of their life: the happy years and the lean years, the bright and the dark. I try to do that with my own work, being as honest as possible and recording everything.

Slam poetry is becoming a legitimate form of entertainment with multiple open mics in pretty much every major city across the nation. How do you feel this has impacted poetry, both positively and negatively? Having been in the slam scene for many years, even founding one of the most well-known open mics, how has it changed since you first discovered it?

The year my book, Words In Your Face (my history of the poetry slam movement) came out, I did an interview with the Best American Poetry blog about slam and its impact, including its impact on me personally. You can read the full interview here, but I want to pull a quote from it which still holds true for me to this day:

The first Poetry Slam held in NYC happened in the late 1980s; in the nearly two decades since, the scene has changed a lot. My book is actually broken down into three distinct Waves, described as "times when the attention paid to the slam surged or waned, when certain styles of poetry were favored or discouraged, when certain factions within the community got along or were at one another’s throats." Additionally, the opportunities and projects that the slam attracted, and the type of people who might make up the audience have all wildly vacillated over slam's long history.

One of the more interesting end products (to me, at least) of this constant shifting is that poets in the slam always worry that something -- a style, a project, a poet -- will become so dominant that it will kill the scene, but it never does. Ranting hipsters, freestyle rappers, bohemian drifters, proto-comedians, mystical shamans and gothy punks have all had their time at the top of the slam food chain, but in the end, something different always comes along and challenges the poets to try something new.

Having been in slam for nearly a decade myself, this is the thing that keeps me coming back: what is going to hit next? who is the voice that I never saw coming? what poem is going to break my heart tonight?

As you know, the theme for this next issue is ‘Unconditional Love”. What would you say is the single greatest act or instance of unconditional love you have ever seen or experienced?

Wow! What a great question! I suppose as you get older, and your friends and siblings start having their own kids, it is a real trip to reflect back on the relationship you have with your parents. My mother and I have a very special relationship that isn’t always cute or easy—one of my nicknames for her is “Prickly Mo” because she can be really barbed sometimes!—but which is always a touchstone for me in terms of love.

And just for fun:

If you could only listen to one album and only one album for the rest of eternity, which album would it be and why?

You know, I rely heavily on others to introduce me to good music. So I would likely ask one of my savvier pals to create a mix CD for me—knowing that it would be one that I’d have to listen to for eternity—and trust they’d know what they were doing!

If you could force your worst enemy to listen to one album and only one album for the rest of eternity, which album would it be and why?

Probably be the one rap song I did in my entire life. It’s called “Secret Levels” and it was recorded in one night with two other NYC poets who probably should remain nameless. I rap about video games in it. And sing the hook: “Hey baby! You gotta hit A-A-B!” I would force my enemy to listen to just that song, again and again. It would torture because it is terrible song—but it is AWESOME in its terribleness. And that would be their bitter pill to swallow!

What is your favourite colour and why?

Burgundy. I wear burgundy so much that my friend, poet Anis Mogjani, once though a woman who looked nothing like me and was walking a dog that looked nothing like my dog, was me simply because she was decked out in a burgundy track suit.

Just because it’s the holiday season, what is the best gift you have ever received?

Man, that’s a tough question! I have a lot of really incredible friend and family who know just how to make my heart blossom. If we are looking at a really broad vision of gifts, I would say the greatest gift I’ve received so far is that night that the NYC slam community came together for the Bowery Poetry Club book release of Words In Your Face. Twenty years worth of slam poets all in the same room, all sharing their work and their stories. It was the most magical nights of my life.

But if we are talking literal gifts, than I just got a really rad one for my most recent birthday. A friend who knew how much I loved Scrabble got me a vintage Franklin Mint gold Scrabble set. It comes with gold letters, gold racks, gold inlay board, velvet platforms for the racks and its own wooden pedestal. It is beautiful and without a doubt that nicest thing I own.

And some final words:

What is some advice you could pass on to all of our readers and, especially, the young writers out there?

I already shared some advice above, but I will add this. Read, read, read. Read work you LOVE. And then tell other people about it. Tell the writer about it too! Writing is a solitary act, but the writing community is a family. Support it!