GIOVANNA LOMANTO
GL: When I was 19, I published my first poetry collection. It's so bad. Thank you to that publisher for taking me on. But also, it was a lot of journal entries that were not edited and now they’re available for public viewing. Because it was a small press it wasn’t strangers who were reading it, it was my friends who decided to buy the book and who then knew about all my—I only came out as queer a few years ago, but that book has a lot of closeted poems, so that made me really uncomfortable with sharing those. I'm bisexual. I was dating a man. It was fine. But it was very odd. The book was me detailing how I was in love with my best friend during high school.
RLU: It sounds like you were discovering your queerness through the process of writing that book.
GL: I absolutely was. I mean, that’s the thing with poetry. I grew up really Catholic. So the attitude was very much, “your friend can be gay, but you can’t because you're a good Christian girl.” It was odd. For a really long time, I was just like, “Well, I will never be loved or accepted if I am queer.” Slowly, but surely, I think something that really helped is that my friend who I was in love with was openly out for all of high school. Seeing that they were getting so much love and attention and praise, not necessarily for being queer, but for being them, was really beautiful. The more that I came into writing about myself, I kept going back to that friendship and talking about how much that meant to me. We're still in touch. We're still really good friends.
The MFA also faciliated this deep work on who I am. In the MFA program, I was working on this big thesis that I wouldn't be able to do on my own or without the structure of the MFA. The project was based on this idea that three different versions of myself would all meet at the end of the apocalypse. There's the old version of me who's sitting in my grandmother's old restaurant and the apocalypse has happened around them—everything is burned down. She's listening to a witch conduct interviews with three different girls. Then she slowly finds out that they're all her. They all have to talk to each other in order to get out of purgatory.
RLU: In your MFA work you navigate conceptions of the self or multiplicity of selves interacting with the ancestral and with the past. What other themes do you think the contemporary canon of queer work is exploring?
GL: I see a lot of published queer writing that’s about sex, but when I go to readings that are often about queer people, they talk about community a lot more. When you look at what is a part of the literary canon—I remember a reading I was at by this amazing poet that I really adore. But there was a term like, “he touched my white flesh.” I don't have a feeling about it, but it was just very striking for me, because I feel it speeks to a dynamic in publishing right now. There's almost this undercurrent, I think, where there's a lot more like Black and brown folks who are talking about what it means to be queer and getting published by smaller presses, but not necessarily by Norton.
I think the cultural canon is a lot about sex. That's part of what makes us queer, it's beautiful. Themes of queer revolution is one I'm excited about. Talking about leaders like Marsha P. Johnson and bell hooks are probably my favorite ways of interacting with poetry because I think of the undercurrents and themes of queer poetry and queer revolution. We are born into a chosen ancestry and our ancestors chose to be public about their queerness in the time when it was not nearly as safe for them as it is for us. To embody that and take up their mantle now is the kind of poetry that I'm really interested in. Like Queers for Palestine. I love that movement. It’s my favorite way of describing contemporary queer poetry: how desire is always looking forward—desire for a future of liberation, desire for a future where you can love whoever you want.
There's something about being deserving of acceptance in the public eye as your true self. Queer identity is a lot about how the people you love are a part of who you are. I like that the fact that I love women makes me queer. I think that that's really beautiful because that's also something that I hear in a lot of poetry. The people you love—platonic community or a polycule—make you who you are; you're all a part of this collective. I think it’s really apparent in the underground literary scene that I'll only see at readings and they won't be published in journals anywhere.
RLU: We’ve talked a bit about content. What have you noticed about form, shape, and line that strikes you as particularly queer?
GL: I feel like the queer aesthetic is also a lot about experimentation formally. One of my favorite presses that does a lot of queer literature right now is Nightboat Books. I love what they do. They focus on experimental poetry. Other presses that do this are Future Con, which is doing a lot of weird, cool work and mostly publishing queer people. The queer aesthetic is not just celebration, but it’s breaking down what celebration looks like. And, importantly, What does celebration look like when it comes with a history of struggle?
The press my latest collection was published with almost explicitly works with queer BIPOC poets. We're not a big press. We're not getting big media attention. But it's lovely to have those voices in print and circulating. For instance, one collection is called Until Tender, which is a collection of poems that also has a cookbook to go with it. It’s this amazing meditation on how love and affection is all about nourishment. I recently became a co-editor there and it's been really exciting to help shepherd a new generation of queer authors into publication.
RLU: Going off of what you said about experimental forms, a poem has a shape. A poem has breath built into it. A poem is visual. And, our (queer) bodies form physical shapes. Our relationships have immaterial form, enacted by material bodies. What does it mean to experiment with form? Where do you see this experimentation happening queerly?
GL: At first, I was really into the indent. “I was like “Oh yeah, this is gonna set the poem apart.” My professor in the MFA said, “I think it's tacky.” He said that if I wanted to make something stand out, I shouldn’t just do an indent—that’s going to make me fit in with everybody else who are also trying to stand out. Yeah. Like, it's not doing what you think it's doing. I understood him, if you want to be experimental, you have to push the boundaries a little bit more.
This professor had been talking to me about the irony of the left margin being a straight line and how the body of the poem—it's also interesting we call it the “body” of the poem—takes shape. I think that a lot of the queer poetry that I've seen has played a lot with blank space. There's a lot of double spacing or there's pages where the words are scattered across the page. All of this is extremely intentional and interesting because it says something about erasure and how the blank space can be both a space of erasure as well as of opportunity. I really love the idea that a lot of experimental forms, negate space by taking up more of the page rather than the top left corner but also focus the space on like others parts of the page that would otherwise be ignored, while simultaneously making it so that you can find all the blank space as a space of intention that is where you would originally put your eyesight when you do your typical collection of poems.
One poet who comes to mind is Nicole Sealey, who isn’t necessarily queer, but the erasure of the D.O.J.'s Ferguson Report was all about the erasure of Blackness and the way that police brutality is enacted on Black people. I was looking at the pages and there are some moments where you can see the redactions and some moments where it's just white. I think for her it was also a play on whiteness.
It reminded me of Dior Stephens who in 2023 published a collection called Cruel/Cruel and there’s a lot of whitespace in it. It’s about cruelty and queerness and there's so much there that makes you feel like there's both an overflowing of things to be said, but also a repression of that. It's almost calling into attention the effort that poetry is. I think when you see a poem with the left margin, and it's maybe like 10 lines long, you don't realize that that has been edited several times. But when you see it broken up, it's almost an acknowledgment of poetic ancestry, of this is something that I'm actively working against, while also putting time into organizing on the page. It calls attention to energy and positive effort. I think it deserves props. It's really beautiful to see a celebration of the work of poetry and something that calls attention to different spaces that you wouldn't see otherwise in the page. I think that a queer aesthetic has a lot to do with blank space, what blank space means, and how we draw attention away from the straight left margin.
RLU: Part of the work of queer poetics might be to bring history forward into the present. How do you think about poetic ancestors in your own writing practice? Where do ancestors live in your poetry? More broadly, how does the past/queer pastness inform poetry in general?
GL: When I think about poetic ancestors I try to think of people who I really admire not just for their lyrical prowess, but for their imagination. One of my favorites is Theresa Hak Kyung Cha. Dictee was one of the inspirations for my thesis Purgatorial.
Claudia Rankine also comes to mind, someone also is not queer but is doing a lot to push the boundaries of what essay and poetry are. When it comes to poetic ancestors, I also think a lot about who's breaking barriers. I identify a lot with people who are still pushing the boundary. A lot of the queer ancestors were pushing boundaries of their time. If we're thinking about a left aligned margin, for instance, Ellen Bass, Mary Oliver, or Emily Dickinson, they were all burgeoning, possibly queer, possibly not queer people who were doing a lot of experimentation. Mary Oliver created new rules that almost changed the structure of poetry as a whole.
I’ve learned a lot from them and while they have built me, they aren't the ones pushing me right now. A lot of the writing that pushes me is work on Afropessimism, Franz Fanon and other theory. That is what’s driving me right now. I’ll write poems about what nonfiction work I’m reading. All of these lineages of resistance inform you in so many different ways. You pick and choose what you want to learn. And you pick and choose what ancestors you want to honor at certain times.
RLU: I do the same—read theory, draw connections to my own life, find inspiration in writing that’s so far from the language of poetry. I feel like there are poets who inform our lens or our gaze, and after that foundation is built every other work is filtered through that. Some poets are foundational and others are not, but each one’s work ends up being in conversation with the other. Gabrielle Civil is someone who has informed my own lens, and though she’s not queer, I see her as part of the queer poetic aesthetic. And if poetry is a queer language, it makes me wonder if anyone can learn it. That you can learn the language and honor the practice without participating in the community.
GL: Absolutely. There's also something to be said about baring your heart in a way that feels both confessional and tenuous. There's a guardedness mixed with openness that is very distinctly queer to me. Poetry is my favorite lens with which I can discuss myself because it's almost like I am spilling out into the page, but you're getting it 12 drafts later. I could edit out anything I want while also being honest about certain things, or naming/not naming certain people. They're all choices I get to make under this umbrella of, “I have to express this and share this with somebody.” It’s this impulse to share contrasted with the guardedness of being afraid of sharing too much. It’s very akin to being closeted in some ways, while also trying to find community while being closeted.
In my poetry the reason that I do this veiling is to write for other queer people—readers who are going to put in the effort to be closer to the center of my own language. Veiling within poetry is almost like laying an Easter egg—only for people who are looking. I want people to be able to gloss over my poetry and think, “This is a good poem.” But, if you have the energy to spend the time with the poem and really figure it out, that's the reader that I hope would get the most out of my poetry.
RLU: It sounds like you were discovering your queerness through the process of writing that book.
GL: I absolutely was. I mean, that’s the thing with poetry. I grew up really Catholic. So the attitude was very much, “your friend can be gay, but you can’t because you're a good Christian girl.” It was odd. For a really long time, I was just like, “Well, I will never be loved or accepted if I am queer.” Slowly, but surely, I think something that really helped is that my friend who I was in love with was openly out for all of high school. Seeing that they were getting so much love and attention and praise, not necessarily for being queer, but for being them, was really beautiful. The more that I came into writing about myself, I kept going back to that friendship and talking about how much that meant to me. We're still in touch. We're still really good friends.
The MFA also faciliated this deep work on who I am. In the MFA program, I was working on this big thesis that I wouldn't be able to do on my own or without the structure of the MFA. The project was based on this idea that three different versions of myself would all meet at the end of the apocalypse. There's the old version of me who's sitting in my grandmother's old restaurant and the apocalypse has happened around them—everything is burned down. She's listening to a witch conduct interviews with three different girls. Then she slowly finds out that they're all her. They all have to talk to each other in order to get out of purgatory.
RLU: In your MFA work you navigate conceptions of the self or multiplicity of selves interacting with the ancestral and with the past. What other themes do you think the contemporary canon of queer work is exploring?
GL: I see a lot of published queer writing that’s about sex, but when I go to readings that are often about queer people, they talk about community a lot more. When you look at what is a part of the literary canon—I remember a reading I was at by this amazing poet that I really adore. But there was a term like, “he touched my white flesh.” I don't have a feeling about it, but it was just very striking for me, because I feel it speeks to a dynamic in publishing right now. There's almost this undercurrent, I think, where there's a lot more like Black and brown folks who are talking about what it means to be queer and getting published by smaller presses, but not necessarily by Norton.
I think the cultural canon is a lot about sex. That's part of what makes us queer, it's beautiful. Themes of queer revolution is one I'm excited about. Talking about leaders like Marsha P. Johnson and bell hooks are probably my favorite ways of interacting with poetry because I think of the undercurrents and themes of queer poetry and queer revolution. We are born into a chosen ancestry and our ancestors chose to be public about their queerness in the time when it was not nearly as safe for them as it is for us. To embody that and take up their mantle now is the kind of poetry that I'm really interested in. Like Queers for Palestine. I love that movement. It’s my favorite way of describing contemporary queer poetry: how desire is always looking forward—desire for a future of liberation, desire for a future where you can love whoever you want.
There's something about being deserving of acceptance in the public eye as your true self. Queer identity is a lot about how the people you love are a part of who you are. I like that the fact that I love women makes me queer. I think that that's really beautiful because that's also something that I hear in a lot of poetry. The people you love—platonic community or a polycule—make you who you are; you're all a part of this collective. I think it’s really apparent in the underground literary scene that I'll only see at readings and they won't be published in journals anywhere.
RLU: We’ve talked a bit about content. What have you noticed about form, shape, and line that strikes you as particularly queer?
GL: I feel like the queer aesthetic is also a lot about experimentation formally. One of my favorite presses that does a lot of queer literature right now is Nightboat Books. I love what they do. They focus on experimental poetry. Other presses that do this are Future Con, which is doing a lot of weird, cool work and mostly publishing queer people. The queer aesthetic is not just celebration, but it’s breaking down what celebration looks like. And, importantly, What does celebration look like when it comes with a history of struggle?
The press my latest collection was published with almost explicitly works with queer BIPOC poets. We're not a big press. We're not getting big media attention. But it's lovely to have those voices in print and circulating. For instance, one collection is called Until Tender, which is a collection of poems that also has a cookbook to go with it. It’s this amazing meditation on how love and affection is all about nourishment. I recently became a co-editor there and it's been really exciting to help shepherd a new generation of queer authors into publication.
RLU: Going off of what you said about experimental forms, a poem has a shape. A poem has breath built into it. A poem is visual. And, our (queer) bodies form physical shapes. Our relationships have immaterial form, enacted by material bodies. What does it mean to experiment with form? Where do you see this experimentation happening queerly?
GL: At first, I was really into the indent. “I was like “Oh yeah, this is gonna set the poem apart.” My professor in the MFA said, “I think it's tacky.” He said that if I wanted to make something stand out, I shouldn’t just do an indent—that’s going to make me fit in with everybody else who are also trying to stand out. Yeah. Like, it's not doing what you think it's doing. I understood him, if you want to be experimental, you have to push the boundaries a little bit more.
This professor had been talking to me about the irony of the left margin being a straight line and how the body of the poem—it's also interesting we call it the “body” of the poem—takes shape. I think that a lot of the queer poetry that I've seen has played a lot with blank space. There's a lot of double spacing or there's pages where the words are scattered across the page. All of this is extremely intentional and interesting because it says something about erasure and how the blank space can be both a space of erasure as well as of opportunity. I really love the idea that a lot of experimental forms, negate space by taking up more of the page rather than the top left corner but also focus the space on like others parts of the page that would otherwise be ignored, while simultaneously making it so that you can find all the blank space as a space of intention that is where you would originally put your eyesight when you do your typical collection of poems.
One poet who comes to mind is Nicole Sealey, who isn’t necessarily queer, but the erasure of the D.O.J.'s Ferguson Report was all about the erasure of Blackness and the way that police brutality is enacted on Black people. I was looking at the pages and there are some moments where you can see the redactions and some moments where it's just white. I think for her it was also a play on whiteness.
It reminded me of Dior Stephens who in 2023 published a collection called Cruel/Cruel and there’s a lot of whitespace in it. It’s about cruelty and queerness and there's so much there that makes you feel like there's both an overflowing of things to be said, but also a repression of that. It's almost calling into attention the effort that poetry is. I think when you see a poem with the left margin, and it's maybe like 10 lines long, you don't realize that that has been edited several times. But when you see it broken up, it's almost an acknowledgment of poetic ancestry, of this is something that I'm actively working against, while also putting time into organizing on the page. It calls attention to energy and positive effort. I think it deserves props. It's really beautiful to see a celebration of the work of poetry and something that calls attention to different spaces that you wouldn't see otherwise in the page. I think that a queer aesthetic has a lot to do with blank space, what blank space means, and how we draw attention away from the straight left margin.
RLU: Part of the work of queer poetics might be to bring history forward into the present. How do you think about poetic ancestors in your own writing practice? Where do ancestors live in your poetry? More broadly, how does the past/queer pastness inform poetry in general?
GL: When I think about poetic ancestors I try to think of people who I really admire not just for their lyrical prowess, but for their imagination. One of my favorites is Theresa Hak Kyung Cha. Dictee was one of the inspirations for my thesis Purgatorial.
Claudia Rankine also comes to mind, someone also is not queer but is doing a lot to push the boundaries of what essay and poetry are. When it comes to poetic ancestors, I also think a lot about who's breaking barriers. I identify a lot with people who are still pushing the boundary. A lot of the queer ancestors were pushing boundaries of their time. If we're thinking about a left aligned margin, for instance, Ellen Bass, Mary Oliver, or Emily Dickinson, they were all burgeoning, possibly queer, possibly not queer people who were doing a lot of experimentation. Mary Oliver created new rules that almost changed the structure of poetry as a whole.
I’ve learned a lot from them and while they have built me, they aren't the ones pushing me right now. A lot of the writing that pushes me is work on Afropessimism, Franz Fanon and other theory. That is what’s driving me right now. I’ll write poems about what nonfiction work I’m reading. All of these lineages of resistance inform you in so many different ways. You pick and choose what you want to learn. And you pick and choose what ancestors you want to honor at certain times.
RLU: I do the same—read theory, draw connections to my own life, find inspiration in writing that’s so far from the language of poetry. I feel like there are poets who inform our lens or our gaze, and after that foundation is built every other work is filtered through that. Some poets are foundational and others are not, but each one’s work ends up being in conversation with the other. Gabrielle Civil is someone who has informed my own lens, and though she’s not queer, I see her as part of the queer poetic aesthetic. And if poetry is a queer language, it makes me wonder if anyone can learn it. That you can learn the language and honor the practice without participating in the community.
GL: Absolutely. There's also something to be said about baring your heart in a way that feels both confessional and tenuous. There's a guardedness mixed with openness that is very distinctly queer to me. Poetry is my favorite lens with which I can discuss myself because it's almost like I am spilling out into the page, but you're getting it 12 drafts later. I could edit out anything I want while also being honest about certain things, or naming/not naming certain people. They're all choices I get to make under this umbrella of, “I have to express this and share this with somebody.” It’s this impulse to share contrasted with the guardedness of being afraid of sharing too much. It’s very akin to being closeted in some ways, while also trying to find community while being closeted.
In my poetry the reason that I do this veiling is to write for other queer people—readers who are going to put in the effort to be closer to the center of my own language. Veiling within poetry is almost like laying an Easter egg—only for people who are looking. I want people to be able to gloss over my poetry and think, “This is a good poem.” But, if you have the energy to spend the time with the poem and really figure it out, that's the reader that I hope would get the most out of my poetry.