A Conversation with Anthony DiPietro, interviewed by Joanna Acevedo
Joanna Acevedo: So my first question is about the title of your collection [kiss + release], which kind of mimics the catch and release that fishermen do. Can you talk about the title, what its significance is, and how it relates to the context of this book?
Anthony DiPietro: Sure. It's sort of a combination of that and the adage that you have to kiss a lot of frogs to catch your prince. So I was having a conversation with a writer friend, and the background of my life was that I was dating and going through break ups, and when that phrase came out of my mouth, I just knew that it was going to be the title of this book I was already working on. In the end, I feel like the book is a kind of meditation on things that happen over and over again. In a way, it becomes a meditation on how things just stay the same, because you’re always stuck in some place on a cycle. So I liked how it played into what the poems were dealing with.
A big part of that was the poem “love is finished again.” It anchors the work. I wrote it as a long poem of eleven sections, and at one point I just considered it one section, but at a certain point—we’ll talk later about how the book is structured—but I realized as I tried to break it apart, we keep returning to this “love is finished again,” which keeps turning over the same thing, or trying to find another metaphor to say the same thing. And that was the moment when I knew I had a book on my hands.
JA: I love that book moment.
So these poems sort of fall into a couple of distinct forms. There’s the one that zig zags across the page, then there’s the kind of blocky prose one, and there’s one more that I don’t remember. So can you talk about what form means to you, and how these forms came to be? And what they mean to the book?
AD: Sure. I was writing a lot of prose poems at the time, because I was taking a short forms course with Amy Hempel, who’s a fiction writer, and she said things like “I would be a poet, but I’m just not a poet, so I write short fiction,” and it’s hard to tell when you get these little blocks of text—it’s hard to tell the difference. When you’re the kind of writer who obsesses over every word and every cadence, it becomes hard to tell. Is it prose? Is it poetry? Is it fiction? Is it memoir? I was writing a bunch of those, and it was really successful. And then I was seeing how they interacted with the other poems I was writing.
I think the reason you have a lot of poems on the left margin is that sometimes, left to my own devices, I’ll just write poems that look the same over and over again. I’ll just write tercets, I’ll just write quatrains. Actually, my chapbook is all quatrains. It’s about the pandemic. And the monotony really worked for that collection, the sameness of the form with the different content in between. But with a regular poetry collection, I didn’t want to turn every page and have every poem be the same. It wasn’t like, okay, this is going to be in couplets, this is going to be in quatrains. I kind of fuss with the form until I find something visually interesting that’s also saying something with the content to me. So yeah, I often stumble on them just kind of by play.
And you know, another thread through the book is that I’m in conversation with other writers, or even song lyrics, things like that. So something about the book is playful, how it bounces around the page, mimicking this conversational back and forth. That’s happening in a lot of these poems.
JA: And I’ll ask you about that conversational aspect in a minute.
But a lot of your poems hinge on some kind of irony, I think, especially earlier in the book. A lot of the titles are very ironic. Do you want to talk about irony and titles?
AD: Oh, your question made me think that I’m definitely the kind of writer who, in workshops when someone’s reading my work, I’ll get laughs, and I’ll be like: I don’t get it. Why is it funny? I guess I have a very dry sense of humor. And sometimes I think people are laughing because it’s awkward. But sometimes it’s these juxtapositions that I put together that create irony, and I think that can be part of the queer aesthetic, just like a different way of seeing how things interconnect. I definitely think a lot about my titles. For years I didn’t get how a title was good or not good with a poem, and at some point we had people who were interested in that topic in my graduate program, and I think that was part of what led me to have some aha moments about titles and how they interact with a poem in a way that takes it to a completely different space. You know the poem would make no sense if the title didn’t give you the context that you need. So once I learned how to make the title not only interesting but intrinsically connected to the poem, it became one of my strengths as a poet. It’s like adding another layer.
JA: Pivoting a little bit, but I think there’s such a rich history of writing on desire and love and lust, but specifically, and maybe more recently, queer desire. Can you speak to this as your subject?
AD: Desire, and I usually say, Eros, just seems to be my subject matter. As for why I’m drawn to it, and why it’s important—there’s a lot of reasons, and part of it is that sex is already a subject that we kind of forget, because it’s everywhere, but sex was something you weren’t supposed to write about. And when you add that to queerness, it’s like extra taboo and persecuted. So I think that speaks to why it’s important as subject matter. It’s also a marker of identity. When I was in grad school, we had some professors who were like, “Oh, you younger generation just love to write about identity.” And they said that they never did that. And it was like, okay, well, just because you were white, male, and hetero doesn’t mean you weren’t writing about identity. But you thought you were the default, you thought you were speaking for the universal. Like, there’s other more interesting things than that. So I think that’s why I keep returning to desire and identity.
But I did make an effort in this book to not just be about the person, like to be looking outside of myself and towards the world. And still always have queer as a kind of lens. I wanted to use my perspective to say something about the world. Otherwise I think you end up with a poetry book that isn’t urgent. You’re not writing what anybody needs to hear. Not to say that my book is full of anything people need to hear. But it’s trying to be. You know, I do try to be relevant. I used to think you had to aim for a timelessness, but then I realized that how you get the universal is really with the hyperspecific. So it’s my moment that will make it timeless. If it’s of a time or place, that’s what gets it there.
And when you ask me about the context, as well, it gets me thinking of questions of lineage. Poets that I feel like I’m in conversation with include Diane Seuss, Jericho Brown, and sam sax. They’re all writing about desire, too. I talked about this in another interview, but Diane Seuss is writing about life history and turning it into a mythology. Unearthing the artifacts of our lives and the people we’ve known. Creating a whole image system through a song or an epic poem. That’s what I keep coming back to.
JA: Speaking of this related question, who do you surround yourself with when you are working? Who’s your kin? What books are on your desk?
AD: Yeah, I was taking that kind of literally and thinking about who I was with when I was writing this book, and what came to mind was the writers I was with in graduate school, who informed my thinking and my conversations. Also my teachers, and the writers I mentioned, who I always trust when I open their books. Anyone writing about queer desire. I was on the road for about a month when I was finishing the book, and that affected me as well.
JA: I’ve asked you this before, but what’s next for you? What are you working on?
AD: I’m already working on another book. The two ideas that are going into it are “house” and “party.” So right now it’s just house/party. Houses were on my mind because I bought a house during the pandemic, and for context, my father built the house I grew up in. So the physical structure of the house was like an extension of the family and our identities and stuff. And now I’ve circled to the point where I’m older than my father was when he built that house, and I wanted a house, and now I have one, and it immediately became complicated. It’s the American dream and all that. But it’s sort of like I look up and down the street, and everybody has a lawn, and everybody takes their garbage out on Monday morning, and it was complicated for me. I have to question that. So I’m writing poems about the symbolic meaning of that. And in the same way, house is connected to the pandemic, so if you had a house, your house suddenly became your world, and your memories of going to parties were suddenly all you had.
And parties suddenly got really complicated during the pandemic, too, right? So I started thinking about all the parties I’d ever been to—wedding parties, drinking parties, all kinds of gatherings. I started making a list of every party I’d ever been to. Kind of a fun exercise.
JA: I’ve been to a lot of parties.
AD: Yeah, you know, it’s like the most basic social gathering. People meet their partners there, people meet their friends there. You go to a party to get with someone there. There’s a lot of overlap with queer desire and with just the world we live in with the pandemic. And now suddenly it’s over, and you can go to parties again, but you have to be really cautious and vigilant, and maybe wear a mask like a physical barrier between you and other people. So what is that? What does it mean? And this is what I want to explore, that parties are gone the way we remember them. I mean, maybe they’re back now. But queer spaces are disappearing. I read this essay in The New Yorker, which talks about the loss of queer spaces, as a bigger societal trend—I’ll have to look it up for you. This is something I want to explore.
So yeah, those are the two things I want to explore, and the book will develop a persona, similar to [kiss+release], but I’m exploring persona in a different way. And this persona will be in third person. So I’m trying to do a few things at once.
Anthony DiPietro is a gay Rhode Island (USA) native whose career has been in community- based organizations and arts administration. He earned a creative writing MFA at Stony Brook University, where he also taught courses and planned and diversified arts programming. He now serves as associate director of Rose Art Museum in Waltham, Massachusetts. A graduate of Brown University with honors in creative writing, his poems and essays have appeared in numerous reviews and anthologies. His first chapbook, And Walk Through, a series of poems composed on a typewriter during the pandemic lockdowns, is now available from Seven Kitchens Press, and his full-length poetry collection, kiss & release, will appear from Unsolicited Press in 2024. His website is www.AnthonyWriter.com.
Joanna Acevedo (she/they) is a writer, educator, and editor from New York City. She was nominated for a Pushcart in 2021 for her poem “self portrait if the girl is on fire” and is the author of four books and chapbooks, including Unsaid Things (Flexible Press, 2021), List of Demands (Bottlecap Press, 2022), and Outtakes (WTAW Press, forthcoming 2023). Her work can be found across the web and in print, including or forthcoming in Jelly Bucket, Hobart, and The Adroit Journal. She is a Guest Editor at Frontier Poetry, The Masters Review, and CRAFT, and a regular contributor to The Masters Review blog, in addition to running interviews at Fauxmoir and The Great Lakes Review. As well as being a Goldwater Fellow at NYU, she was a Hospitalfield 2022 Interdisciplinary Resident. She received her MFA in Fiction from New York University in 2021, teaches writing, interviewing and communication skills for both nonprofits and corporations, and is supported by Creatives Rebuild New York: Guaranteed Income For Artists.