pixie (any pronouns) is a creative chaos goblin king who paints, writes poetry, collages, and refuses to settle on one medium. she lives and works in gothenburg, sweden, with their cat narya serving as the least helpful but most adorable studio assistant of all time. they’ve had some education in creative writing and painting, and been published a few places, but they don’t find that super important.
AUTHOR LINKS
Website: pixiewithpens.com
Social Media & Newsletter: Handy Links Page
Tumblr: @pixiewithpenspoetry
Threads: @pixiewithpens
Substack: The Creative Chaos Goblin Club
Your poetry collection, Poetry Fucks, recently came out, comprising of 69 poems (nice). What was the main idea or bunch of ideas behind this title/the collection as a whole, and how hard was it to come up with 69 pieces and edit them all?
‘poetry fucks’ is a phrase i initially thought of when trying to come up with something fun to put on a cap because i got offered a free merch sample. it made me giggle, but it also felt instantly right to me, so i got the cap.
what i love about it is the contrast between cerebral and carnal, delicate and crass, high and low brow. when i started compiling the poems i’ve been writing, a title idea that stuck with me a long time was “tonal whiplash”, due to the variety of topics. but in the end, the power of ‘poetry fucks’ was undeniable, so i settled on that and made some adjustments to level up the collection to the decisive power that title embodies.
the choice to have 69 poems ALSO started as a bit (are we sensing a theme? lol) that i couldn’t bring myself to let go of. it’s such a stupid way to make artistic choices, of course i wanted to do it. the hardest part was choosing poems to leave out! and also to stop writing new ones to cram in there.
How long have you been writing poetry, and what/who are your main influences? Has this changed over time for you?
in one sense i’ve been writing poetry since i learned to write, but i’ve been taking my poetry practice seriously for the past two-ish years. one of my most formative experiences was in prose form, while reading winnie the pooh as a kid, where aa milne uses the poetic device personification and writes “the sun had kicked off its covers”. brain chemistry changing moment.
poets who have influenced me include: karin boye, dorothy parker, sylvia plath, oscar wilde, vladimir mayakovsky, wendy cope, bertolt brecht, langston hughes, federico garcia lorca, mary oliver, ryan stephen thornton.
the collection also bears traces of various gothic tv series, japanese animation, and hozier. this will change forever, anything i come across might spark something!
Can you tell us more about your own poetic style and voice, and what we’ll see in this collection?
i tend to balance on a knife’s edge between the silly and the serious. which is how you get a joke about pickles in the middle of a poem about crying over your disability while your partner is sleeping next to you. or “your mom” jokes in a poem about depression, isolation, and feeling like a lost cause.
i also balance between saying things plainly and leaving them to be inferred. i reference classic literature and i reference memes. i’m interested in contrast and duality, and also always looking to amuse myself with what i make, i think that’s what primarily defines my style as it is now.
Some poems in the collection have a serious tone: can you tell us about the darker themes of the collection, how they relate to your title, and why these themes are important to you as a person and a poet?
although i love to do bits and make jokes, i’m not interested in pretending life is all fine and dandy when it’s not. honesty is an important artistic value for me. these things must be faced and aired if the jokes are to be able to lighten the mood, in my experience. the themes i would call darker are: the father wound, disability grief, religious trauma, bullying, and reflections on past relationships.
these things have shaped me, but they don’t define me, and the book is me asserting my power over these past experiences. we don’t get to choose these things happening to us, but we get to choose how we relate to them and how we move forward. as for their relation to the title: see next question!
How did you choose to order the collection – was it hard to find that perfect poem to open and close with, and how did you structure it as a whole?
weirdly enough, the opening and closing poems selected themselves, that was one of the easiest tasks in the editing process. the rest of the order has been through a lot of experimenting. the final order came from a suggestion by my poetry collaborator ryan stephen thornton: sections based on turns of phrase that include the word fuck.
so we have pt I, in which we fuck around, starting with some playful and exploratory poems.
pt II, in which we find out, where we get into the more somber poems on darker themes.
pt III, in which we give a fuck, where we raise our sights and address revolution, natural history, humanity, a bigger picture.
pt IV, in which we fuck with ourselves, where darker themes are addressed with defiance, where the script is rewritten.
and lastly pt V, poetry fucks, which brings the threads together in a hopeful finish.
Can you share with us one of your favourite poems from the collection (or a few lines) and tell us what that means to you?
am i allowed to say no? 😅 this question is stressing me out! it’s too hard to choose! but i’ve been sharing poems and spilling the tea about them for the past three months on my substack, so you can find a dozen examples of this at https://creativechaosgoblinclub.substack.com/t/poetry-fucks
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