Haunted By Mood: An Interview with Lisa Marie Basile

Advice from Lisa Marie Basile.

April is National Poetry Month. But what people tend to not see about this genre is its vastness. Its multiplicity. For this month, I’ll be interviewing poets who cross the borders of poetry in other forms of expression.

This week, I interviewed Lisa Marie Basile whose poetry book, Saint Of, was published this February through White Stag Publishing. I asked her about her process and more about what it means to be “haunted by mood.”

Taylor Nunez: What is your process for writing a poem?

Lisa Marie Basile: I have always tended to write within a concept, and usually toward a longer work that I intuitively know will be compiled together...so for me that means building a specific world for the poems to live in (like my new book, SAINT OF), and writing into it. I rarely will write a one-off poem outside of that world. So once I decide the mood, tone, place, language, and universe of a given to-be collection of poems, I fill my life with the energy of it — through cinema, music, place, mindset. Last summer, I came out of several years of "writer's block" (for lack of a better word), so lately I've been rediscovering my process. It seems to be that I keep my mind on the world itself I'm writing into, and surround myself with that energy. By nightfall, when I'm alone, in a candlelit environment (less stimulus, just me and my mind) usually something emerges.

TN: My next question is though, how do you know when a creative mood is worth pursuing? I find that for myself, I can't always go down a certain rabbit hole of emotion without stirring up something that isn't ready to be stirred.

LMB: This is the million-dollar question in some ways, isn't it? I wish I had a million-dollar answer. I suppose that the best thing is to have an abundance of ideas and to get instinctive with them. For me, it's a nagging intuition, a small voice that says, "This is ready for you" I follow. Last year, I found myself pulled to religious films and TV shows, like Evil, The Novitiate, Benedetta, Conclave, and Immaculate. It wasn't that I was writing about God, per se. Rather, their common themes drew me in—good versus evil, desire versus being sated, the carnal versus the divine, shame versus empowerment, reclamation versus punishment—along with the intersections of these binaries. I suppose, more than any passing idea or aesthetic interest I fell upon (there are many!), this is where my mind returned and where I put my attention. 

There's also the idea of something growing from the devotion itself. The more I honored the curiosity and impulse, the more I put attention to it, and the more output I was rewarded with. If what I got from it felt right and necessary—and I felt ready for it—I kept pursuing it. It's a feedback loop, I think.

I haven't always felt ready for a memoir, for example. I had the story. I had a sense of the form. I had the voice. But I wasn't ready for a long time. So when I sat down to write, something repelled me. I just didn't have the drive or self-trust that I do now. 

TN: How do you know when you’re done writing a poem?

LMB: The gut feels it but I often over-write, and over-explain out of fear for a potential future reader...and then I feel a dissonance and delete the overstuffed or bloated extras. I find that when a poem gives just enough but not too much is when it feels done. I like the ending feeling like a precipice sometimes—and I realize this isn't everyone's cup of tea.

TN: What are your other creative pursuits?

LMB: I'm working on a literary essays at my Substack and loving the freedom of just writing and sharing without submissions or rules or structure, a novella of auto-fiction, a larger memoir-in-vignettes of my time in foster care (just tinkering with the structure right now), and I'm about to co-host a writing group immersion experience in Sicily, with Radici Siciliane. There, we'll explore the themes of life & death that are inherent to Palermo and then write about them.

TN: Wow, talk about juggling many projects. How do you manage your time? What advice would you give to readers and fans about managing multiple projects at the same time?

LMB: I am a terrible time-keeper. I tend to write at night when I'm alone, but there's no set schedule or focus, and I'm prone to reckless bursts of creative energy. I think some of this comes with living with chronic health issues, and some of it is my personality. As I am coming out of a long period of writer's block, I am giving myself the permission to write a lot and write what comes bubbling up. 

There's a lot to be said for blocking out time for your projects, though. Maybe you write poetry on weeknights and spend every weekend afternoon on your prose project. But my best piece of advice would be to not let the idea of structure or the need to adhere to a schedule get in the way of what feels right at the time. Don't waste poetry impulse on prose just to check a box. But that's just me! There's a reason I gravitate toward the non-linear, less structured forms. They mimic my practice.   

TN: How does this pursuit impact your poetry?

LMB: There is feedback loop: Everything I write is poetic, has an inherent poetry to it, really. It's the way I express/see the world. I gravitate to the musical, lush, lyrical, so it is all informed by poetry. Perhaps prose will teach me be a bit more narrative in my actually poetry, which is something I don't find easy.

TN: What is the motivation behind your writing? What prompts you to pick up a pen—or to type it out?

LMB: I know it sounds amorphous, but obsession. I get obsessed, I get haunted, I become enamored with a mood, a feeling, a world, and I live inside of it until I have given the feeling a home. With SAINT OF, I had this nagging, absolutely relentless feeling that I needed to share the darkness and hunger and grief within me, because if I didn't. I gave those feelings a sort of sainthood, and they became part of the world of SAINT OF. It felt existential, like I'm on the precipice of 40 and if I don't confess it, I will explode.

TN: How does your creativity inform how you see the world? Specifically: does it engage with the current reality? If so, how? 

LMB: I don't ever write with an extremely clear take-home message. I don't sit and think, "how can this be woven into reality." But it is always is. The confessional, the personal, the interior are all inherently political. SAINT OF is largely about women's hunger, desire, limitations, subjugation—considering the women who came before me, and the worlds that tried to make them small. It's also a grappling with my time in foster care as a young girl, about the realities that came from that. These are all also issues we are all seeing play out in the world: Women's rights are being yanked from us. Our voices are made smaller. The foster care system will be burdened even further in coming years (and is already neglected). And poverty is deepened by those amassing and hoarding wealth. I believe we are always grappling with reality, politically and existentially, even if our words aren't explicitly saying so.

TN: What do you hope people will take away from your writing? 

LMB: That your traumas, fears, ugliness, and losses are beautiful, nuanced, complex and worthy of the poetic. That you can be dark and light at once. That you are allowed to be "too much," to have eroticism and divinity, cruelty and empathy, hope and ruin inside of you at once.

TN: Lastly: who/what are some of your creative muses? How do they influence your craft process for both poetry and your other creative pursuits?

LMB: I am repeatedly and forever praying at the altar of Marosa di Giorgio, Anaïs Nin, Marguerite Duras, Richard Siken, Andre Aciman, Cesar Vallejo, James Baldwin, Johannes Göransson. These writers, of both prose and poetry, all give me different sorts of permission. I just discovered the word of Yves Olade and am OBSESSED.

TN: Is there anything else you would like others to know?

LMB: Let your poetry sing. Don't be tempted toward disaffection and the overly polished. Let it be human and messy and weird and too much.

You can find more poetry by Lisa published here at Lover’s Eye Press. Stay tuned for another interview with poet/dancer Rita on the 28th. Thank you for reading. Choose love and peace y que te cuides