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DeeSoul Carson: I think, you know, I also, I have to say for the record, I think every episode, I say that people either aren’t reading, don’t like to read, or are bad readers, or something of the sort, and I just wanna… dear listeners, I believe you can read! I believe you can read, I just, just expand… expand what reading can be. I promise I’ll stop bashing people who don’t read, but…
Kay E. Bancroft: Yeah, I mean, people can be, you know, I mean, just because you are a bad reader doesn’t mean that you’re not reading.
DC: Yeah, you’re doing your best.
KB: Yeah, you’re trying. Honestly, people who are reading at all, that’s better than most people, you know?
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DC: Hello, poets of the internet! I’m DeeSoul Carson , and this is O,Word?, the podcast that is interested in craft, poets, their obsessions, and the things that keep them writing. Today’s episode is “O, Hybridity!”
I am joined by my friend, Kay E. Bancroft. Kay E. Bancroft is a writer, educator, and artist from Cincinnati, Ohio. They hold an MFA in Creative Writing Poetry from Randolph College, and a BA in Rhetoric and Professional Writing from the University of Cincinnati. Their writing has appeared in Poet Lore, Pleiades Journal, Rhino Poetry, Passenger’s Journal, The Rumpus, and more. Explore more of their work at kayebancroftpoet.com. Kay, hello!
KB: Hi, DeeSoul.
DC: It’s so nice to see you.
KB: It’s so good to see you, too.
DC: I feel like I haven’t, we haven’t seen each other in person since AWP?
KB: Yeah, yeah, it’s been a minute.
DC: Yeah, so it’s so nice to see you and to hear your voice. What’s been going on with you?
KB: Oh, gosh, what has been going on with me? Well, my debut poetry collection comes out next year.
DC: Yeah?!?
KB: you know, just working on finishing that. She’s coming out…
DC: Tell the people what it’s called.
KB: Yes, it’s called Bloodroom. It comes out next June, with Sundress Publications. I’m sooo excited. Yeah, we’re just finishing editing, and I just picked fonts the other day. Yeah, very excited.
DC: Super excited for you, super excited for your book.
KB: Thank you.
DC: As you know, the thing that I have invited you here to talk to me about today is hybridity. I would love if you could tell me in your own words, or tell the people in your own words, what hybrid work is in poetry, or what that entails?
KB: Yeah, I think… okay, so I have my own definition of it, which is, getting really freaky on the page, and whether that’s finding a document and breaking it, and taking it apart in pieces, or… using found footage, or photography, and doctoring with that, and using something that already exists, or taking a photo and getting weird with that. Hybridity is all about play and being able to find ways to break something and build something, or break the page, or find a new way to use the page.
That’s how I define it, and I think it’s really fun. I think it’s very loose, so I don’t have to stick to too much of a definition for it, but I mean…that’s how I ultimately perceive hybridity, is that there’s a way to break and then rebuild something.
DC: I think the way that I usually think about poetry kind of goes into this. I love what you’re saying about play. I think a lot of poetry kind of inherently is based on play, some sort of thing with language. Yeah. The way that I usually define poetry at large, is “any kind of text that engages in rhetorical experimentation.” Cause I know poetry is a weird genre, because usually if you ask someone what a poem is, they’re like, well, it’s not prose, except, you know, when it’s a prose poem.
KB: Right.
DC: You know, or it’s not XYZ thing until it is, right? And so, because poetry can be whatever it wants, the way that I usually try to tell people is, well, if I think someone’s writing a poem, I think they’re doing something intentional with rhetoric that’s different from how we usually use that rhetoric, right? So I love what you’re saying about hybrid work. I think a lot about hermit crab poems. Because I think it estranges our usual relationship to those kinds of documents, right? So if someone.. who has a really good one?
Aris Kian Brown has a poem in the form of a multiple-choice test. And I think…you know, we don’t typically think of a multiple-choice test as a…kind of poem, right?
KB: Oh, yeah, but it is inherently.
DC: Yeah, and especially when you’re, you know, when you’re doing the… when you’re using the form of a multiple choice test as a basis for some other kind of commentary, right?
KB: Yeah, absolutely.
DC: That’s really fun. Do you have any particular kinds of hybrid work that you really enjoy, or that you find gravitating towards? I know you mentioned a different kind, like, there’s documents, there’s photos, there’s found poems. Yeah.
KB: Yeah. I love this question, because I kind of dabble in all of them, but I think my favorite is, I find that erasure is hybridity, and that you’re redacting something and finding something new in it, and that in itself feels hybrid to me.
And the work… I really love visual erasure, so…the work of torrin a. greathouse with the Burning Haibun, and also, Krista Franklin‘s work. Huge, huge inspiration to me. I mean, I’m… everything that Krista does, I’m just constantly blown away. So yeah, I think that that kind of work is what I’m most drawn to, is finding something in… finding new elements of something and something that already exists.
And even if it’s just erasure of an article you find online, or… you know, whatever. I’ve done erasures of medication receipts before, and I think… I don’t know, it’s just fun. It’s… it’s also just kind of, a fun warm-up when you haven’t written for a while, and you’re like, I just need to have something to dig myself into the space of being a “writer” again, you know what I mean? And it’s just my favorite thing. I don’t know why. I’ve always been drawn to it. And I also love when people get really freaky with an erasure, and they make it super, visually stunning,
The work of Tom Phillips in A Humument, I’m particularly obsessed with, because it’s so beautiful, and it just gets so weird, and sometimes you just draw a random shape on a page, and then you’re like, damn, that’s actually just a poem that I just did, and that’s pretty cool. So yeah, I always find myself drawn to that, but also I really love hyper-experimental hybrid work, like Anthony Cody‘s work, or Mai Der Vang, those…those titans of… just abstract hybridity, ugh. I could go on and on. I’m obsessed with that.
DC: I’m really glad you brought up erasure, too, as a kind of hybridity. I think… very often, and even I fall into this sometimes, I think of erasure as it’s, really its own thing, so I don’t even always think about it as hybridity, but I think there’s a really expansive way of thinking of hybridity, not just, what you’re… like, how freaky you’re getting on the page, but also how you’re choosing to engage with other texts, to the hybrid nature of interacting with someone else’s work.
So as you’re talking, I’m thinking about Nicole Sealey’s book, The Ferguson Report. Which is that palimpsest of the actual Ferguson report, and it really becomes… it’s really interesting, because the whole book is the entire report, but there’s actually only, like, 7, 8 poems in it. But it’s such a painstaking — for anyone who hasn’t read it yet, if you go and look at the book, you’ll find that Nicole is really, she’s pulling out pieces of words and letters, and as you’re going through it, it slowly unfolds these poems over the course of this, really long and bureaucratic and probably not really interesting to read texts, and she makes these really beautiful poetic pieces. I’m also thinking, Chase Berggrun’s R E D, which is a redaction of Dracula, if I’m not mistaken.
KB: I love that book so much. It’s so good. I think about that book all the time. It’s so good. I love that. And I also, Mary Ruefle has a book of poetry, A Little White Shadow, I think is what it’s called. (The erasure poetry. Obviously, she has a book of poetry). But I love that small, just, handheld, pocket-sized book of these white-out erasures that she did. I don’t know, there’s something so tactile and hybrid about it to me, and so funky.
DC: I think you’re right. Yeah. And that’s another really cool thing, we’re going off our knowledge of other kinds of texts. And there’s a really interesting thing, too, I think, that applies often to… erasure poems, but I think, you can really probably get expanded to any kind of hybrid work. But, when you’re using whatever that source material is, what commentary are we also making on… use or reconfiguration or redaction or destruction of a work? What are we using? How are we manipulating it? There’s a lot of ethical things that go into a lot of these.
KB: Yeah, the ethics of it is really interesting, and I’ve done a lot of… I’ve done a lot of sitting with this personally, because some of the work that I’ve done is… is personal, my familial archive, using some, like, photos and documents from that, and yeah, there’s kind of a lot of… ethical discussion that goes on with it. I’ve heard Diana Khoi Nguyen talk about this with her collection, Ghost Of, which is just perfect.
She talks a lot about the redaction of people’s faces and… and… and different likenesses, and… talking about people who aren’t necessarily in the room. And I… I think that that’s really important to think about, and… I talk about it a lot, and I’m thinking about it a lot when I’m working in erasure, of, like, okay, how… how is this in conversation with what the text is originally saying, and who was originally here? And I think that’s a really important part of hybridity, too, is… really thinking through that… that source material usage, and… whether it’s photographic, or video, or sound, or whatever that is, really digging into, like, “why am I using this specific thing?” and, “what’s the impact of this, and then what’s the further implication of that?” and sifting through that as you’re moving through the work, because I think if you’re not doing that, then it, it just feels… I don’t know, a little bit empty, maybe? I just feel like it’s really important to think about as you move through work in a document, you know?
DC: Yeah, and Diana Khoi Nguyen’s, especially, is super interesting. I mean, she’s using… is using photographs, which I think sometimes poets get a little more scared when you’re asked… when we’re asked to bring up, we’re like, whoa! But she’s doing something so interesting because she’s writing around absences. Like, physically on the page, she’s writing around an absence, or writing into an absence. And I’m thinking of her poem “Triptych,” which does that kind of inversing or inverting of a photo through the text, and what that becomes throughout the collection, as you’re mentioning, right? And so I think about often what we sometimes lose when we move to the page, and luckily we have so many examples of great poets who find their way to the page and do a lot of really great innovations, and I think that often even goes into the hybrid work, because there’s a kind of a sense of freedom, or an idea to fuck shit up, to get freaky on the page.
But I think, yeah, hybridity on the page is a great example of what that form can achieve, what that medium can achieve, rather, is what I’m trying to say.
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DC: Do you ever feel intimidated by hybrid work? Not even just writing it, but even when you approach, when you see hybrid work, do you sometimes get scared, or like, oh, how do I read this?
KB: Oh, I don’t know if I feel fear. I think I get excited by being intimidated on the page, because… I think it’s just something new that I haven’t experienced yet, and maybe that sounds cliche or whatever, but I just…
DC: We love cliches.
KB: Yeah, they’re replicates for a reason, right? They exist for a reason. But I think a lot about, if I’m going into a collection of Douglas Kearney’s poetry, and I’m looking at that page, I’m like, yeah, I’ve never seen that before, and that is, like, mind-blowingly cool. And I think that I just view it as a way to find new elements of writing that feel cool to me. Does it feel like they’re fueling my creativity, and like…how… how are these artists thinking? What are their intentions with the motion of words on a page, the way that they’re using media, the way that they’re making the page the screen, they’re making the page their surroundings.
I think it’s really exciting, and I think people often are like, well, that looks crazy, how do I even approach that? It’s like, just look at the first word, and then if… move to the next one, and see where you land, because I think that that’s part of the point. It’s not supposed to be this beautiful, polished thing, that it’s just a rectangle on a page, and that’s beautiful in its own right. But I think digging into being a little bit excited and scared is a really good thing. And…
DC: It drives us!
KB: Yeah, it drives us… it keeps us curious. I was just talking to my dear friend, Dr. Taylor Byas, the other day. And I was talking with her about writing, and we were just chatting about, kind of, you know, like, how we reignite our love for writing when we have had, like, kind of a dry spell. And she was talking about how we as writers need to stay curious, and a lot of writers maybe don’t stay curious. And so I think that that’s what excites me about hybrid work, and how people are deciding to break and reshape, is that they’re staying curious. And so that helps me stay curious, because then I’m not complacent. And then I find a new way to work.
DC: Yeah, there’s this great invitation for astonishment, when you get to hybrid work. I know when I get to a poem that I don’t immediately understand, I think that I used to feel fear, because I felt a need to understand. I felt like I had to understand what was going on. And I think the way that poetry is often taught — especially when you’re in grade school — it’s taught with, like, here’s what the poem means, here’s what this metaphor means, right? And we’re expected to just, like, get it. We’re expected to know what the metaphor means, what the image means, what it’s all doing, right? So when you get to some of these hybrid works, which they’re not giving me in grade school, you know, they’re not giving me Douglas Kearney in 10th grade lit.
KB: They sure aren’t.
DC: They should be. They should be, but they’re not. And I think it would be so fun in high schools to give more kids hybrid works, to have them experiment with… what does understanding even mean? What does it mean to come to your own understanding of a text, right? That’s a big part of critical analysis, or, you know, literary analysis, is to be able to pull things on your own from what you’re looking at, right? I had a professor who told me, you know, if you don’t understand necessarily what’s going on in a poem, it’s a great opportunity to ask, what is this poem telling me that I have permission to do? So even when I come to a poem, and I’m like, I don’t have… the slightest clue what this poem is trying to say, what it means, but… oh, but they’re doing this really cool thing with language, or, oh, they’re doing this really cool thing with image, and maybe I can try that with something that I do understand. I don’t know what the fuck they’re doing over there, but…
KB: Oh, yeah.
DC: But I can do it!
KB: Yeah, exactly. I think a lot about how…how my mentors have broken and rebuilt things, and how they’ve inspired myself and many other writers in that way. And so, like, I think about Eloisa Amezcua, one of my mentors, who is just a master of hybrid work, and she’s creating all of these stunning video poems, and I’m like, oh man, it makes me really want to, like, get into Premiere and just, like, mess around. I don’t know, it just… it’s… it provides you with new tools that you haven’t gotten to explore yet. And…on your note of people not knowing, like, what’s going on in a poem, I think whenever I talk to people who don’t read poetry about how much I love poetry and how I’m a poet and live in that space, people are like, well, I just never know what’s going on. Like, people always say that they know exactly what’s happening in a poem, and I’m like, well, people who are telling you that, that’s bullshit.
There’s no way that you can have just one interpretation of a poem. It’s also subjective who’s reading it. In what context are they reading it? Are they really sad? Or are they just coming off of a date with someone who they’re really into? Like, what’s affecting their perception of this poem right now? So I don’t know. I think… I just think it’s so cool. I don’t know.
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DC: We’ve talked a little bit about it already, but how… what are some other, like, kinds of ways you’ve seen poets approach hybrid work? Or how even do you yourself approach it when you go to write it?
KB: Oh, gosh. I think… I think it’s a lot to do with what you’re obsessed with, and… and what kind of space you’re sitting in with your work, like, what you’re working towards in a project, or if you’re discovering what the project is that you’re working on, or if there is a project at all. I think that it’s what I’m obsessed with, is what really gets me into it. So, like, when I was writing Bloodroom, I was really delving into my familial lineage and what does… my relationship with the matriline mean, and all of these things, and so I was asking myself a lot of questions, and I was given this box of ephemera that was my grandmother’s, and it was correspondence with my grandfather while he was overseas, and there were tapes, and all these things, and there was this one document that I ended up latching onto, because it was the perfect… thing, and I was obsessed with the idea of, like, it’s a military ID document, and it has our fingerprints on it, and I was like, okay, well, what if I… what if I make this, like, the structure of a poem, and then that becomes this thing that… it’s… this embedded in the book? And so I did that, and I just became obsessed with it, and I started tinkering with it, and… and so I think it’s, like, I find a place that I am just constantly writing about, and then I find something that I’m like, this is the thing. And I get really into tinkering with it, and breaking it apart, and, like, getting into its guts a little bit. And I think that’s really fun.
DC: Yeah.
KB: I also, you know, it’s scary.
DC: Yeah, I mean, I can only imagine. It’s… I mean, part of it’s really great when you can see a poet being led by their obsessions, you know, it makes… I think it makes the work a lot more interesting when someone’s writing about something they’re really passionate about, also allows for a far more diverse kind of field of literature. I, you know, I like to think that there’s not anything too sacred for poetry. Especially when you think about poetry as, like, almost like its own kind of act of… of talking to the divine, the spiritual kind of thing, right? There’s nothing to, you know, if we can write it down in history records, we can write it down in poetry, like, it can be poeticized.
KB: Yeah, I mean, I also think… I’m thinking a lot about the people that, their… their hybrid work is inspiring to me. I don’t know, Layli Long Soldier, her hybrid work is incredible, and she plays with form and breaks it in such unique, incredible ways, and I think a lot of her work is so inspired by her culture and history, and the storytelling in that way, and I think about Eloisa Amezcua’s work, and the way that she uses hybridity in her work, and shape, and repetition, and just all of the things that make her work so hybrid incredible. And it all feels like it’s centered around the thing that they love and are “obsessed with,” right?
All of the writers that we’ve kind of talked about, it’s like, there is a crux upon which they are hybridizing. We’re gonna make that a word. Yeah, yeah. There’s a central thing that they’re orbiting around, and so they have this space in which they can play and break and get super weird and find new ways to dig into language.
DC: Yeah, I think… I think hybridity also becomes really interesting, especially for folks like yourself, or… I just spoke with Remica Bingham-Risher, people who are working with their familial histories, records, ephemera, those sorts of things. Instead of being stuck in the sonnet, or the ballad, or whatever kind of, like, the stuff that we’re used to, it gives us new ways to dig into that kind of work, and I think expanding our, even our idea of form expands the ways that we even feel that we can engage with those kinds of materials, right? I just love the kind of permission it even gives us to go back to things.
It’s like, now that I know that I can do this with a photograph, or I know I can do this with a pill bottle or a medical form, it’s not necessarily, … for example, it’s not necessarily a hybrid work, I won’t say, but Nicole Sealey has this other poem that I really love, it’s called “Medical History,” right?
So it’s not a form, but she’s going back and she’s going through, you know, in a sense, her family’s medical history. And it would be really interesting, you know, if we were thinking in a hybrid sense, like, what would that poem look like if it actually was done in the form of, like, a medical form, right? Like, if we’re thinking, like a presentation or a translation of that work into a visual artifact, you know, what can that look like?1
I think you talked about this a lot already, but just in case you have any other thoughts, just how do you feel, how do you feel existing document… document forms, how do those serve as a unique basis for visual hybrid work? Where do you feel like… are there any particular kinds that you see yourself gravitate towards the most, or anything like that?
KB: Man, I love that question so much, because there’s… I don’t think that there’s a single kind of document that I wouldn’t be interested in seeing be broken, you know? I think it goes back to, the basic of, you know, the grocery list poem, the receipt poem, like, those are awesome, and they’re such great entryways into seeing what expansive territory there is for form breaking. Which is just so fun and liberating when you realize, like, oh, I can just throw some words in this thing, and maybe that would be… that could be poems, I don’t know.
Yeah, I’ve worked within this particular kind of document before, the government agency application and so that’s really cool, because I think it gives you agency in a place where maybe you don’t feel like you have a lot of agency, which I think is really fun. But yeah, I think every kind of document, like, I want to see someone make something out of a birth certificate, or an adoption form, or, like…
DC: I want a brochure poem. I wanted a brochure poem so bad. Once again, I’m not doing it, but I want someone….
KB: Yes. And, like, I think we’re also kind of entering, like, a zine territory, right? Because zines are awesome, and that’s just…
DC: Shout out Summer Farah, one of my favorite zine makers.
KB: Yeah, I mean… listen, I love a zine. I love a zine so much. And, you know, you could do, like, you could truly make anything of, like, any kind of document, poem, and I think I would be kind of into it, because I think it just… when you remove some of the content, or all of the content, and leave some intentionally, there’s so much weird wiggle room to play in, because there’s already…
a scaffolding upon which you can complete. It’s a new linguistic jungle gym, because there’s not… a structure like that before. So it gives you a lot of agency to move about it in a way that nobody else has before.
So I just want people to be playing in documents. I just want them to get super weird, like, oh no, look at your tax form. Look at a donations request form. Look at, like, a sample ballot you get from your local election office. I don’t know, just…
DC: I actually am… I am working on a ballot poem. It was because I saw something, or I had a poem where I was… I had a series of questions or something, and I was like, you know what would be really good here? If this became something else.
KB: A dotted line? Sign me up!
DC: Yeah, I love the idea of, you know, call it a poem and see what it does to the thing, right? See how it changes our perception of it, our reading of it. I think that’s great. And…I would like to thank you, Kay, for your wonderful time. I think we’re nearing the end of this episode here, but I would love it if you could read a hybrid work of your own.
KB: I would love to.
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Read “Applicant” by Kay E. Bancroft
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DC: Thank you all for listening to this episode of O, Word? Podcast, produced by me, DeeSoul Carson. If you are interested in this topic, I’ve added some folks recommended by our guests in the Substack post. The music for O, Word? is provided by Esoteric Creations. Check them out on Spotify.
Check Out These Poets from Kay E. Bancroft!
The poet Alison C. Rollins actually has a hybrid poem after Sealey’s, also titled “Medical History”
