Note: This transcription is edited to facilitate the reading experience. To see every word uttered in this recording, please click the “Transcript” button for captioning you can follow :)
DeeSoul Carson: And it was just like, what a crazy thing to say! You know, you’re a professor of poetry at this big institution and you’re just like, people of color aren’t doing sonnets?!?! They aren’t doing sonnets?!?!
Taylor Byas: Yeah, like just say, you don’t read. Just say that.
DC: Right! Just say that. I would have respected that answer. I won’t like it, but I respect that.
TB: Right. I might email you some recommendations after class, but okay! Yeah!
DC: But you’re like, what am I going to do? I get it. I also have the things that I prefer. But she was just like, they don’t write them.
TB: Like alright, well —
DC: Wrong answer, fo’head, let’s try that one again!
[The poets laugh and the intro music plays]
DC: Hello, poets of the internet! I’m DeeSoul Carson, and this is Eponymous, an extension of the O, Word? podcast that is interested in poets, their collections, their title poems, and how they find their ways into our hands. Today’s episode is on Resting Bitch Face by Dr. Taylor Byas. Dr. Taylor Byas, PhD, edits for The Rumpus, Jack Legg Press, Beloit Poetry Journal Editorial Board, and Texas Review Press. Her debut full-length, I Done Clicked My Heels Three Times from Soft Skull Press, won the 2023 Maya Angelou Book Award, among others. Her second full-length, Resting Bitch Face (2025), which we’ll be discussing today, is a September pick for Roxane Gay’s Audacious Book Club. She is represented by Noah Grey Rosenzweig at Triangle House Literary. Taylor, hello!
TB: Hello, hello.
DC: How are we doing?
TB: I’m wonderful. Happy to be here. How are you?
DC: I’m doing great. I’m so happy that you’re here. I’m super appreciative. Your new book is in the world now. How do you feel?
TB: It’s like, exactly a month now, maybe two days past a month, and it has been good. It’s interesting because the first book came out almost exactly two years ago. And, you know, I had no expectations for the first book. And somehow, interestingly, I’m, like, simultaneously more nervous about this one. But then I also have these moments where I feel kind of completely detached to it. And I think that’s a symptom more so of just the state of the world more than anything else. And maybe things just feeling not as important as maybe they would if we were in a better moment.
DC: Yeah, I mean, I’m super excited about it. I finished reading it yesterday. I was trying to prepare for this interview. And I think it’s just so great. I understand what you’re saying, like the second book is kind of its own thing. Like there’s that energy around the first book, you’re like “the debut, now it’s out,” then it’s like, “oh, I have to do that… again.” Is that kind of the sensation you had while you were putting it together?
TB: It is. You know, I think one thing that maybe people didn’t really tell me was… you know for a lot of people — unless you have just won like a ton of huge awards, and you’re someone who just has a lot of eyes on you — it’s very easy for people’s second and, you know, third, fourth books to kind of like not get the same attention as the debut as well.
DC: Yeah. A lot of hype around a debut.
TB: Yeah, yeah, a lot of hype around a debut and then it’s just, there’s just a difference with that second book, and I’m very fortunate that there was still some really great publicity around Resting Bitch Face but, for example, we didn’t get any blurbs for the second book. Like, we sent out blurb requests we didn’t get any blurbs for Resting Bitch Face, and they were like “this is actually something that’s pretty common with second books,” which I didn’t know. And so I just think it’s so interesting that there are things that happen the second go-round that no one really kinda tells you, that you aren’t really prepared for. And I know now it’s not personal, like I know those people that we asked were just busy and had 10,000 things to do but you know sometimes you do take a little personally and your feelings do get hurt and you do feel...
DC: I mean, it’s your baby. How could you not?
TB: You know, it’s my baby. Right. And of course, you know, no one cares about it likely more than I do, and that’s its own thing. But there is a way that I think you have to reshape your expectations for a book after the debut, for sure.
DC: That’s fair. I never even thought about, like what that… ‘cause in my head, I keep tabs. I’m like, “okay, I want this person to talk in the second book, this person talking in the third book,” but that’s really actually, really eye opening.
So given that this is Eponymous, I did want to start with the title. And I’m curious, was Resting Bitch Face always, like, did you always know that’s what it was gonna be? Or were there like other titles that you were also kinda juggling?
TB: So the first version of this book was my dissertation. And Resting Bitch Face absolutely was not the title.
DC: [Laughing] That’s not what you put to the — to the people at the PhD?
TB: — That’s nottttt what I put on there. Don’t go look it up y’all. It’s a different title on the dissertation. The title for the dissertation, if I remember correctly, was Corrupt[i]on and then the “I” was in parentheses because I do think that there is something in the collection about the I, that it kind of emerges or kind of breaks out of this mold and moves towards a more autonomous being. And so that was actually the title. Then we sold it to Soft Skull. And that’s actually when we changed the title.
And I was so happy that they were like “Resting Bitch Face is it” because I was kind of like, “oh, I don’t know how the press would feel about, you know, having this curse word in the title. If they’re kind of like, oh, that’s too much.” They were like “Resting Bitch Face is the title.” So it actually didn’t change until we had gotten to the Soft Skull and talked about it with them, yeah.
DC: Speaking of that I that you’re talking about, your eponymous poem “Resting Bitch Face,” kind of speaks a bit to this phenomena of both being observed and the observer. And I’m wondering if you could speak to more of how you feel this poem represents the collection as a whole.
TB: So, that poem came into being because of the height of the pandemic when masks were like, heavily mandated everywhere, I like, it occurred to me that men had stopped telling me to smile because I couldn’t police my face because I couldn’t see it. And so then I got to thinking about this way women are not only observed, not only constantly under surveillance, but all of the different ways that we are expected to appear a certain way, expected to behave a certain way, how even as we’re going about our days, minding our business — as we’re deep in our thoughts, as we’re stressed, as we’re worried — we’re expected to kind of be approachable and welcoming and warm and inviting.
And interestingly enough, the phrase, “resting bitch face” is this thing that gets weaponized and thrown at you if you don’t appear that way. It’s like, you know, this insult. So I, the poem, kind of confronts that gaze, which is something that I wanted this book to do. I wanted this book to be the stare down, like, that stares back at the, sort of, watcher until they back down ,sort of thing. I wanted “resting bitch face” to go from this insult to this kind of act of resistance, like yes you’ve called out my resting bitch face and now I’m going to look even meaner in your face until you leave me the hell alone, type of thing. And I think the book is very much engaged in a similar sort of movement. It definitely goes from being watched, poems in which there is a lot of watching happening — the speaker is being watched, the speaker finds themselves in these scenes where they also find themselves being watched. And then, as the book progresses, the speaker emerges more and more, “Resting Bitch Face” is kind of, like, right at the center of the book. It’s kind of like a hinge point. After that poem, you see the speaker kind of getting more ballsy, and getting more empowered to speak in similar ways.
[Transitional music plays]
DC: There’s definitely this emphasis in the book on performance and presentation that I felt throughout, that I think you’re speaking to here. And, you know, this assumes this sort of interpretation of the woman’s expression by some external party. You know, a lot of what we’re talking about is like the presence of the male gaze. And I’m thinking a lot in this book of just how much the speaker is moving through that, right? It’s a book that is ostensibly dealing with a lot of art, you know, art pieces, art styles, art techniques. But it’s really kind of the subtext that is tracking this woman’s movement through these things. There’s this double consciousness happening.
Speaking more about the art part, though, for people who haven’t read the book yet, the sections of the book are named after different kinds of art making techniques. And so much of the book itself is inspired by various kinds of art. So I’m wondering if you can — this is more of a craft question — can you speak about your relationship to ekphrasis?
TB: Yes. That’s my girl. Yeah, I was a fiction writer in undergrad and, you know, I had it in my mind that I was gonna graduate and go on to write the great novel and that’s hilarious and —
DC: — you still can, you still can! It is poets’ time for fiction, it really is.
TB: I know, I say that as I’ve actually started a novel, so just like, just bear with me. But at the end of undergrad, I actually took an ekphrastic poetry class. The entire semester, we were just given art to write poems in response, and we had to do all of these different approaches. And then there was one class in particular where the professor literally, I think it was a folder and we had to like pick a piece of art out of the folder and I got, I can’t remember the name right now, but it’s a Rene Magritte painting. It’s just a huge egg in a cage. And I was like, “What? What am I supposed to do here?”
But that challenge of figuring out a way to enter that art somehow or to have some sort of conversation around that. I was like, “Oh, this is fiction.” In a different way. Like I’m still telling stories, but in this way that can be, you know, weird and experimental — not that fiction can’t be weird and experimental — but it was just, there’s this different obsession with language. There’s just this different way of thinking.
DC: And a different kind of permission.
TB: Absolutely. Yeah. Different, a different way that you can kind of move throughout space and time and things. That might not feel as welcome in fiction and so I think that was the moment that really unlocked it for me, and so then I switched over to poetry for the masters, for the PhD, it’s like my main, it’s my main baby now. And so, it’s important to me because it quite literally is what kind of brought me back to poetry, it’s sort of like my central artistic practice.
But I also, there’s something about ekphrasis, and as I’m also now getting back into photography, which is something that I had an interest in in high school. I took a photography class, and then I just never really kind of came back to it. And now, coming back to it is something that I’m enjoying doing. I think there’s a lot of kinship between the poet and the photographer in a way that we’re kind of asked to look at the world and consider the world. And so I think to be engaged with visual art feels very natural to me.
DC: Yeah, I think it’s really interesting bringing that seeing that you have in the poetry ekphrasis out into the world. I really enjoyed reading “Discomfort at the MoMA,” not only because I was there when the events of this poem happened. [Laughs at the memory]
TB: In… in the building.
DC: But it’s like, it’s really interesting watching… It’s really interesting to see a real life moment become a piece of, captured in a moment of time, which is often what poetry is, right? We’re often capturing these moments and that, the real life thing is kind of ekphrasis, right? And it’s interesting watching and considering these things as a piece of art or, you know, almost like a performance piece, right? For this couple to be moving around the space to these different paintings all up on each other and things like that. And in the space of all these people, it’s kind of like, what does that do to the gallery space and the space that we’re in? So I thought it was really interesting, and also, I was just happy to be there. I guess, because I could see your mind working when it was happening. I’m happy to see the product.
This is another kind of craft question. But can you talk about your broader interest in form, both in Resting Bitch Face and in your previous collection, I Done Clicked My Heels Three Times? There have been a lot of times where I’ve read a poem of yours — for example, there’s a poem in here called “When I Say No, The Joker Smiles” — and it’s not until I get to the end of the poem that I realize a form has been done because you’ve done it so seamlessly, which I really appreciate. And I’m wondering how it feels for you, working in these really tight forms and how that relates back to like the project as a whole, if at all.
TB: My introduction with form, I think, greatly influences how I continue to interact with it. So I was introduced to it by way of what I affectionately called “Formal Bootcamp,” which was quite literally, like, an 8-week summer course with my instructor, within the first week, we went in the classroom and he gave me an Expo marker and like quite literally on the whiteboard, we were like, “okay, write a sentence in this meter” or, you know, “do this, scan this out.” And I, you know, I quite literally had to start hearing the meter and those sorts of things in my head. So then we got the meter and then each week you hand me a form and say, “here’s the form, here’s the rules. And then here’s like two other weird things I’m going to throw in the box. You got a week to come back with this form.” And it kind of gave me this opportunity, like the pressure of it turned it into kind of like a game, I think for me.
And so now form and working with form very much feels game-like to me. It feels like I’m puzzling through something. It feels like this thing that I, it feels like a Rubik’s cube and I have to kind of solve it, that sort of thing. And I like the challenge of form. But what form also does for me, and I think that really comes through in this collection because I do revert back to prose poetry, for example, so I do come out of the traditional forms quite a lot in this collection, but form sharpens my language sword.
When I’m working in a sonnet and I have those syllables and I have only 14 lines or when I’m working in a villanelle, which is, you know, “When I Say No, the Joker Smiles,” and you have those repeating lines, for example, you have to get really, really creative with how language is turning on those line breaks or how we’re using punctuation. Working in forms, it sharpens my poetry brain every time. I have to get creative. It pushes me out of my comfort zone when we could very easily kind of stay in our comfort zones. And I’m not in school anymore. I’m not in class where people are pushing me in that way. So I think form is a way that I can keep myself accountable when it comes to, you know, staying kind of comfortable and stagnant versus challenging myself. Form always challenges me.
And then there’s the historical aspect as well, thinking about the way form has existed in history, how it exists in classrooms, how it’s taught, and who sort of gets lauded as formalists, who gets taught in those environments. I keep saying, the students who are in class today are not the students who were in classrooms 5 years ago, 10 years ago, are not the students who were in classrooms when we were in those classrooms. And so you’re still going to have your students who love Shakespeare and who love the old formalists. But I think more often than not, these days, you’re going to have students who are going to struggle to engage with the material, are going to struggle to access the material if they don’t have any examples that they can see their own lives reflected back to them, they don’t see language that is familiar to them, you know?
And also, because I love form and I want form to continue to be taught and to be a part of the way that we think about poetry, I think it’s important to be writing the type of formal poetry that I want students to be, to have access to. And so also for that reason, I think, it’s always going to be important for me to be writing in form because I want those examples to be there. Like, reading Patricia Smith’s sonnets was critical for me.
DC: Yeah, oh my goodness, absolutely.
TB: I wouldn’t be the poet that I am if I hadn’t found her sonnets. And so I hope there’s a student out there that becomes the poet they’re supposed to be because they found my sonnets or my pantoums or my whatever.
[Transitional music plays]
DC: This is my last, it might be my last question for this whole thing, but it’s also my last form question. But as a lover of this form, from one to another, I am really wondering what draws you particularly to the pantoum?
TB: So, the pantoum… and I, oh my God. I think this is what I did my first ever craft talk on — incredibly nerve wracking. I was, like, ready to pass out the entire time. But what I love about the pantoum, ‘cause you have those repeating lines that come super close. Like, they’re like, right, next stanza, they’re like, “hey, I’m back.” And there’s something about that challenge, because it’s not even about the language then, because the language is the same and there’s nothing you can do about that, unless you’re, you know, kind of breaking the form and playing with it. But the way that I do it, the language is there, and there’s that sort of whole new challenge. And I’m never as creative as I am when I am in a pantoum and I’m faced with that exact same language and I’m like, “okay, I have to make a new sentence, this has to hit differently in some way, shape or form.” Like we have to break it in a new place. Punctuation’s gotta do some crazy stuff. This has to be dialogue all of a sudden. I am never as creative as I am when I work in a pantoum.
It’s probably the form that challenges me the most. It’s probably one of the hardest forms for me to complete and get right. And there’s also something really rewarding about that. Like I think a sonnet, which still has its challenges, I think that’s probably one of the easier forms that I can work in. I feel like I have a sonnet down to kind of a science, which feels kind of crazy, but I put three sonnet crowns in I Done Clicked My Heels Three Times, like, it was insanity. But it was practice. I was working that muscle until there was some sort of ease in the repetition. I don’t know if that will ever happen for the pantoum, just because I feel like that challenge always sort of reshapes, reforms each time I approach it.
And the reward, when I get it right. And I feel good about it, like nothing, no other form feels as good as when I get a pantoum as well. So it’s like, high-challenge, high-risk. But also that reward is just as high. And for that, you know, I love her. And I continue to come back to her when I can.
DC: Yeah. And I mean, it feels rewarding as a reader as well, right? I think what’s also nice about a pantoum, it’s one of those forms where you recognize pretty quickly that it’s happening, as opposed to maybe some of the other ones. When you see a pantoum, or you hear that, you see that first two lines appear or whatever, you’re like, “oh, we’re in it.” And I think it’s kind of a magic thing as well when you see the way that the, you know… sometimes I’ll encounter a line in a pantoum or one of your pantoums and I go, “how the hell is she going to change this line up to make it feel different?” There’s that magic in the same language, same words are there, but it’s a different sentence. Ostensibly, it’s a different thing happening, And so it feels just as, you know, when talking about observed and observer, it feels just as rewarding reading it to go, “oh, she did it. She got it.”
TB: That’s a good point. Some of the other forms can kind of sneak up on you, like in a way, like a sonnet, you can go through a sonnet and be like, “oh, wait, I didn’t realize it was a sonnet.” But because you have that language so soon, it’s harder for a pantoum to kind of sneak up on you. So then it’s you like, you gotta, the reader at this point, because they know the challenge now. So it’s like, are you gonna, are you gonna…
DC: — you know, rise up to it —
TB: — Yeah, you’re going to rise up to it. And yeah, there’s something rewarding about rising up to the challenge for the reader.
DC: Taylor, thank you so much for this conversation, I really appreciate it. I would love it if you could close this out by reading your title poem.
TB: I would love to. Look at her, already marked, because I have been reading her as much as I can. Okay.
[Taylor reads her eponymous poem]
Read “Resting Bitch Face” in Hooligan Mag
DC: Eponymous is a companion segment to the O,Word? podcast, produced by DeeSoul Carson. The music for the theme is called “Canary” and is provided by Esoteric Creations. Check them out on Spotify.
