Katie Longofono will be reading at Difficult to Name on March 11
Your poetry collection "Angeltits" came out last year. Have you found that your approach to poetry has changed since its release or is your new work a sort of extension of what you accomplished with that collection?
So, my answer to this is a little twisty because Angeltits came out about a year after I wrote it -- so I would say by the time it was published my approach has shifted slightly, and in turn it has shifted again between the release date and the present.
My work does tend to be an extension and exploration of a number of themes -- obsessions, really -- I write a lot about female desire, objectification, uncomfortable power roles. Playing into and out of them. Being trapped, or feeling trapped. I see that in all of my work. Angeltits was definitely dealing very closely with being objectified, and what it means to participate in that and what it means to refuse. How sometimes I do both at the same time, and trying to figure that out.
In my work that followed Angeltits, there's still a lot of objectification, but through the lens of identification. I guess I've been thinking about the implications of "owning" an identity, or assuming one, at the possible expense of subsumption. Is that a kind of objectification? I worry that it is, and is that what I want -- do I want to be a "woman poet," or a "sex poet," or a "body poet," or a "stigma poet" ? I guess I am all of those things, but how to write about those topics without feeling like a caricature?
You co-host a really awesome reading series in Manhattan called The Dead Rabbits Reading Series. How did you first get started with that?
Oh, rabz! That came out of Sarah Lawrence -- Katie Rainey, Devin Kelly, and myself were all in the MFA program at SLC together. We had a group of pals that spent a lot of time on couches reading and writing together, sometimes doing living room readings. One day Devin texted us like "hey should we do a reading?" and we were like "okay, yeah" and then I sent around a list of logistical things we needed to sort out to make it happen, and we did. Devin walked into DTUT and somehow convinced them to let us take over a corner with a mic one Sunday a month, Katie R. got some SLC faculty to headline our first readings, and we went from there. Now we are in our 3rd season and I can't believe people keep coming back, but am enormously grateful that they do. We're accepting submissions for our March reading, by the way ;)
What can people expect from your reading?
Uncomfortable poems and spit-takes. Maybe you'll feel awkward and debate if you should do a weird sympathetic arm-pat (don't). Hopefully you'll laugh with me at the absurdity of life. I think my life (and the poems I write about it) are hilarious so don't worry, I won't be offended if you laugh.