3 Questions with Anthony Thomas Lombardi

Anthony Thomas Lombardi is a Best New Poets-, Best of the Net-, and Pushcart-nominated poet, editor, organizer, and educator. He is the founder and director of Word is Bond, a community-centered reading series partnered with the Asian American Writers’ Workshop that raises funds for transnational relief efforts, bail funds, and mutual aid organizations, and currently serves as a poetry editor for Sundog Lit. He has taught at Borough of Manhattan Community College, Paris College of Art, Brooklyn Poets, Polyphony Lit’s Summer Editorial Apprenticeship Program, and community programming throughout New York City. A recipient of the Poetry Project’s Emerge-Surface-Be Fellowship, his work has appeared or will soon appear in the Poetry Foundation’s Ours Poetica, Guernica, Black Warrior Review, Gulf Coast, Colorado Review, Denver Quarterly, Massachusetts Review, North American Review, and elsewhere. He lives in Brooklyn with his wife and their two cats.

Poetry Editor Aída Esmeralda chats with Anthony about his work from Issue 72, out now!

Anthony! We were so excited to publish excerpts from "fragments from Amy Winehouse's stepwork journal” this spring! In a recent essay you published over at Half Mystic, you wrote in favor of a reimagining of the elegy as a form that can reconstruct light and joy, you wrote, “risk is often spoken with a hard, cautious edge, as a thing which renders us fallible. Rarely do we hear about what waits in the darkness to trace silver around our silhouettes...What I’m most interested in is that by diving into precarity, we are also taking the risk of joy.” I’m moved by your language on risk, because often risk is used to imply the need for a certain kind of legible vulnerability in our writing. 

Can you talk more about your relationship to risk in your writing? Do you have rituals that allow you to write drafts with that intentional risk in mind, or does it become clear to you during revision?

I think we take a risk whenever we greet the page but I think we take a greater risk when we plunge into our own unknowns. What’s the point of writing about what you already know? What are you learning? What truth are you seeking if you have your mind made up? Self-validation? That’s a false pursuit. I tend to allow my subconscious to guide me when I write, rather than my conscious mind. I never come to the page with more than a sliver of an idea about what will come out and even that sliver is usually wrong, and that brings me closer to a sort of vulnerability that you can’t reach if you’re not taking any risks. If you know where you’re going. There’s always a more pronounced, knife-glinting risk when you write without knowing what will come of it. I often don’t even know what my poems mean until six months after they’ve been written, and/or through many, many sessions with my analyst. 

It’s funny because so many people call my writing “intentional,” but my first rule is to not have any intention. To just allow what is pulling at me in my core to pull me wherever it wants to go, wherever it needs to go. During revisions, I can be particularly disciplined with the way words sound—I think I’m often trying to conjure an incantation of some kind—and that sort of polish makes it seem like I know where I’m going more than I do. But I don’t know. The most important thing is leaving space for not knowing.

Many of your published poems online incorporate musical themes—either through allusions or even by writing through personas. Your poems also often gesture towards God(s). I’m thinking about how much praise and song can exist in prayer, how, often, to commemorate a beloved’s passing, we turn to song. What do you feel are the possibilities for care, memory, and joy when engaging musicality in our writing?

Part of it is ritual. Part of it is a very visceral bodily reaction that I cannot explain, or cannot hope to, or even maybe don’t want to. I don’t know which comes first. I do know that I did not learn how to write from academia or any kind of schooling—I dropped out when I was 13—but rather from music. I was always drawn to writers like Leonard Cohen, Nina Simone, Nick Cave, John Darnielle from the Mountain Goats, DMX, Kendrick Lamar…writers who approach God with equal parts reverence and a sort of illegibility; who instilled in me ideas of guilt and mercy but also an uncertainty in what to do with them. I’m Sicilian, so you know, I grew up in a Catholic family, but one of those families who invoke God hourly but don’t attend church. So I had to piece together a lot for myself. A lot of that was through music and I find God, more than anywhere, in music. Music has that feeling of outstretched hands more than anything else I can think of. A state of efficacy in grace rather than a deity. I also grew up obsessively watching and influenced by Martin Scorsese films, and all of the lapsed Catholicism and wrestling with guilt and sin that form the foundation of so much of his work. I’m thinking particularly of Mean Streets and Raging Bull, those images—Charlie with his hand over the candle trying to summon what Hell will feel like, Jake LaMotta on the ropes mimicking a crucifixion, smoke and steam swirling around him—inform my writing, especially about God, as much as any music or poetry. 

To borrow an idea from Ross Gay, joy is what happens when we combine our sorrows with the sorrows of others—when we treat them tenderly, too. I believe this. I just taught a workshop with this idea as its foundation. Then, in the middle of the workshop, I experienced an inexplicable grief, just as I was teaching how much joy can be found in grief. I struggled with it but I found that joy in my students, in their vulnerabilities, in their openness, in their generosity, in their flat-out brilliance. I find joy in feeling a communion with others, who are, all of us, at different points of orbit in our grief. For whatever reason, I’ve always felt that my subconscious was less interested in exploring my joy and more attendant to my grief, but recently, I’ve discovered they’re the same thing. They’ll be forever elusive, because we can’t wrap our arms or our minds around emotions of that magnitude. So I continue trudging toward the unknown. I continue trudging toward God. 

Is there anything you’d like to share about either the excerpts or the complete version of “fragments from Amy Winehouse's stepwork journal” that we don’t know?

The complete version—all 12 steps of AA—is the spine of not just a larger series of poems, imagining a world where Amy did not die but got sober, but of my book, as well. It forms the structure of the whole book. A lot of folx who don’t really have a working knowledge of AA don’t know that when you “do the steps”—aka step work—you have a guide, your sponsor, helping you through it. You don’t just, you know, “oh, I am powerless against alcohol, next step.” You’re doing a lot of self-searching. You’re doing a lot of spiritual work. You’re also doing a lot of written work. My sponsor had me keep a journal in which I wrote feverishly, painstakingly, through each step, and it wasn’t until I really faced my demons that I was allowed to move forward. My sponsor, whom I loved and love with a force unmitigated, passed away unexpectedly—he was a young man—on my birthday, of all days. I never finished my step work, and my grief has kept me from moving forward with another sponsor. During COVID quarantines, I had a particularly rough depressive bipolar episode, and when I tell you that Amy Winehouse kept me alive, I mean it. I decided to approach my step work in a new way, using Amy’s music, using the subjective experiences of my recovery as a compass rather than the regimental edicts of the 12 steps. It’s a found poem, which means every single word from this long and sprawling poem comes from the lyrics on Amy’s two studio albums. I suppose this also expands my answer to the previous question about praise and music. That’s what happens when you go with God.