Séamus Isaac Fey (he/they) is a Trans writer from Chicago. Currently, he is the poetry editor at Hooligan Magazine, and co-creative director at Rock Pocket Productions. His debut poetry collection, decompose, is out with Not a Cult Media. He has an essay forthcoming in Dopamine Press’ WITCH anthology, edited by Michelle Tea. His work has appeared in American Poetry Review, Poet Lore, The Offing, Sonora Review, and others. He loves to beat his friends at Mario Party. Find him online @sfeycreates.
Our Culture caught up with Séamus to discuss the unpredictable life of poems after publication, the transformation of poetry into music, and the importance of finding humour in vulnerability.
Decompose has been out in the world for seven months now. Has anything about how readers interpret or connect with the collection surprised you?
Thank you for this question. It’s always good to check in, time-wise. Since the book came out, time has moved so strangely. It feels like it was yesterday but also ten years ago. I will say, something that surprises me a lot is who finds the collection. I don’t know if this is just me or if other poets also feel this way, but I’ll receive a DM from someone saying they picked up my book at a bookstore in Albuquerque, a place I’ve never been, and that just feels wild to me. Something else that surprises me – in a super grateful way, for both statements I’m making – is which poems people love. As poets we often speak about how the poem we spend twenty hours arduously editing is never the one everyone loves; it’s often the one you write in five minutes or the one you don’t expect. In my case that’s been my poem ‘I want to text you but I’m tired of looking at screens’. That poem has been on @poetryisnotaluxury, Tom Snarksy shared it… That might be my most-read poem, and of all the ones in the book, I would’ve never anticipated that. I don’t have a problem with it – I mean, I love them all equally. But it’s just never something you can expect. You can never predict how things are gonna reach people, or where, or what poems they’re going to love. And that’s something I look at with so much gratitude because I’m so grateful it’s entering anyone’s hands. I feel the way I’ve approached this book is with low expectations and high enthusiasm.
When you’re in the midst of writing a poem, how often do you consider the reader’s experience? Does their potential interpretation ever shift the way you structure or choose to express a piece?
You know, there are two sides to this coin. The first is that I try not to think about audience while I’m writing at all, because while I’m writing I just try to get out of my own way. There’s a great chapter on audience in Carl Phillips’ book My Trade is Mystery, which I highly recommend to anyone reading this who likes to write. On the one side of that coin, I don’t think about audience, I try not to even edit while I’m writing. I focus on getting the poem on the page. I feel similarly with fiction and screenplays, but poetry is the genre I have the most practice with in terms of detaching myself from the idea of an audience while writing. On the other side of that coin is that when I do think of the audience, I think about how I can help guide them through the poem with a torch or a hand – that’s important to me. Echoing back to your last question, the reason it’s not helpful to think about whether or not it’s going to resonate with people is because you never know. So it’s more helpful to think about it in terms of clarity, about whether the reader feels welcomed into this portal of a poem and is able to follow along. That’s what I try to consider more than anything. But there will be times when I’m writing a line and think – oh, I need to add this phrase from earlier again, to make sure readers know what I’m talking about. That might be the only time.
I like the idea of repeated words to guide the reader “with a torch” – I think you do that very successfully in this collection. Something I particularly enjoyed in decompose was how your poetry moves between moments of witty cynicism and deeply sincere imagery, with ‘lesbians are exhausting’ offering a perfect example. What interests you about that space between irony and earnestness?
I love this question! I think I live in the space between irony and earnestness. I think there’s hope in humour. Humour is how I get through everything, really. In ‘Everyone calls me their husband’ there’s the line “Taylor says when I’m really upset I avoid the question and make a lot of jokes.” And it’s true. I think that when I’m struggling and really in pain, I look to humour. In the poem ‘Pop’, there’s also the line “if you can both dance & cry to a song, it’s probably up my alley.” That’s just where I live. There’s hope in humour, and I use it as the light that keeps me walking forward.
Since you mentioned ‘Pop’, I have to say that’s one of my favourites in the collection. I find unapologetic enjoyment of pop music to be a huge green flag.
You know… That feeling I wrote the poem about, when in a relationship someone makes you sort of self-conscious or hate something about yourself… It’s very strong, I still sometimes feel it. It is what it is – I just love pop music sometimes!
I noticed the epigraphs in decompose pair bell hooks with Mitski, which feels telling – do music and literature occupy similar spaces in your world of creative inspiration, or do you see the two art forms as distinct influences?
I think I see them together. I’m moved similarly by great lyrics and great literature. There are so many musical artists that inspire me. To name a few that really hit home – Mitski, MUNA, Megan Thee Stallion. They’re my Shakespeare. You know, there’s this card in the tarot called the Hanged Man. It’s about a perspective shift – a forced perspective shift – you’re looking at the same scene from a different angle. In a lot of the cards, he’s hanging from his ankle. He doesn’t look uncomfortable, he’s just upside down. I think about the Hanged Man moments in my life as these small epiphanies that help connect a lot of dots or place a piece in the puzzle. For me, a lot of the time, it’s lyrics, it’s just listening to a song clearly enough that the lyrics move you. I think music, in a similar way to great literature, hits us in this place that’s so vulnerable, where it’s easy to move us. When I crave that movement, music is often what can do that for me.
Of course, you yourself are also a musician. I’m curious about the process of creating an audio companion to decompose. Was that always a part of your vision for these poems? Did the process of setting them to music reveal anything new about them?
Actually, yeah. The studio process was incredibly fun. It was one of the most creatively fuelling experiences I’ve had in such a long time. When I made the album, I just didn’t give a damn who was going to listen to it or not. I hoped people would listen to it – I still hope people are listening to it – but if they’re not it’s okay, because I had so much fun making it and it really inspired me. I actually made the album once the book was already done. Edits were still being made to the book, so sometimes the song will have a different version of a given poem, from before the edits. Initially, I tried to see the book and the album as the same, but they ended up going down different paths and became two distinct projects. Originally, I also had way too many epigraphs for this book. I had two epigraphs at the beginning and two for each section, back when the book was divided in three parts. I cut those from the book but they stayed in the album, they’re the intros. So it’s kind of a different lens and a different side of decompose that the book had to shed in order to become itself.
I worked with so many incredible, talented musicians on this album who have helped me see the poems, and their possibility in terms of music, differently. Just to name a few: Roberto Murillo was the music director and my partner in making the album, Macias, KONISHI, Collin McNern, one of my producers My Compiled Thoughts, and everybody at the Perlita Village Studio, which is mostly where I recorded the album. It required me to be super malleable, which I appreciate a lot as an artist. I was forced to slow down and really feel the music. We had to do multiple recordings of most poems, because the first couple of takes I’d present the poem the way I do at a reading, cause I’ve been doing that for years. Then I’d have to unlearn that and listen to the rhythm of the music and the heartbeat of the song and read it differently. So making the album really taught me to be malleable in my readings. If you read your poems the same way all the time, it’s easy to get stuck in a specific flow. I think the album helped me become much more fluid with it.
Is it fair to say that it’s not just an audio companion, then, but a full project in its own right?
The Libra in me wants to say it’s both. I do think it is an audio companion, but I think it’s just its own project. You’ll get a different experience listening to the album than you will reading the book but they’re both decompose.
There’s ongoing discussion about what constitutes ‘queer poetry’ – whether it’s poetry explicitly about queer experiences, poetry by queer writers, or something else entirely. How relevant is this category in your own experience and work?
Well, I love this question because it’s one of the many moments where bell hooks really shines. She has a quote on queerness that I love: “‘Queer’ not as being about who you’re having sex with (that can be a dimension of it); but ‘queer’ as being about the self that is at odds with everything around it and that has to invent and create and find a place to speak and to thrive and to live.” I think for me, everything I do is queer. All of my work is queer, it always has been and always will be, and that’s one thing I can be certain of in a world that is devoid of certainty. I do think anything a queer person makes is queer because queerness is so much bigger and broader than people sometimes think it is. So, whether or not my work is about a queer romantic experience, it is queer.
I really enjoyed your interview with Lynne Thompson and was particularly fascinated by your use of tarot as a structural guide, with your poems progressing through the sequence of the death card, your invention of the footstep card, and then temperance. Beyond structuring your work, what role does tarot play for you personally?
For me, I like to think of myself as a reader of books and a tarot reader before I am anything else. I think I need those things in order to be a writer. Although I shouldn’t say I need tarot to be a writer, because I started reading tarot around six years ago and I was a writer long before then… But I do feel like tarot is a lens through which I see most things and is also a way in which I survive. In times of grief or doubt I can go to a tarot reading and just view my situation from a different perspective. Also, I think that it’s a good way to connect with people. I love reading my friends’ tarot cards because it can help me talk them through what they’re going through. I even tell people who don’t believe in tarot – which is fine, I just know that for me it’s one of the ways in which I see the world – I tell them the worst thing that’s going to happen is you’ll find a new perspective, a new way to think about what you’re going through. That might help you figure it out a little bit, or at least comfort you. So for me, tarot is definitely a spiritual practice, and I don’t always read my own cards. I know a lot of tarot readers – we find each other – but when I’m struggling with something, therapy and tarot are two ways in which I am able to gain a new perspective on a situation.
Your work often returns to cycles of breakdown and renewal. What poets or artists do you turn to when you’re trying to make sense of your own periods of transformation?
Quite a lot. There will be times where I’m so unwell that I can only handle poems. To name a few, I turn to Diane Seuss, Khadijah Queen, Megan Fernandes as well as Natasha Rao, Taylor Byas, Dare Williams, who all have their interludes on the album. They are very helpful in those moments, and I think poems are always something that feel… they feel like me to me. I can read a poem and feel more like myself. Sometimes, that’s what I really need. In terms of music, my favourite harpist is Lavinia Meijer. I have a harp playlist I listen to a lot when I’m undergoing transformation or just when I’m writing. In terms of fiction, I’d say Ling Ma, Sally Rooney, Octavia Butler. Ironically enough, Stoker’s Dracula, it’s one of my favourite books. Also poetry podcasts, Poem-a-Day by poets.org – I get that email and read a poem everyday. I read many poems a day. Sometimes they’ll be poems I wasn’t expecting but that I really needed at that moment.
To wrap up, are there any particular areas of your life that have been drawing you to explore them in your creative work lately?
For my second poetry collection I’m thinking a lot about estrangement, I’m thinking a lot about the nuclear family. I’m writing a lot about family, about rebuilding after collapse. I’m also working on a novel where one of the characters is a whiskey taster and writes about whiskey, so I’ve been doing weekly tastings and writing out the taste notes to get into the character’s headspace. So yeah – estrangement, nuclear family, and whiskey.
That’s amazing! So you’re also becoming a whiskey expert?
Maybe a little bit, which is not something I ever saw coming. I’ve been calling it ‘field research’. I’m starting to love it as much as I love coffee – I was a barista for almost ten years, I love tasting coffee, and I’m now starting to feel similarly about whiskey.
Is the experience of writing a novel quite different to writing a book of poetry?
It is, but since I write poetry, non-fiction, fiction, screenplays, plays, I think each genre feeds the other. Even though they’re different, when you’re working on one, you’re working on yourself as a writer. I see genres as one begets the other.
