Reflections on Mortality and the Power of Words

What can prose writers learn from poets about language, line breaks, and punctuation? How can we help people engage with our work in different ways? Abi Pollokoff talks about her advice from poetry.

In the intro, how to reframe success as a writer [Ink in Your Veins]; How I Write Podcast with Dean Koontz; Direct selling [SelfPublishing Advice]; Successful Self-Publishing 4th Edition; ElevenReader publishing.

This episode is sponsored by Publisher Rocket, which will help you get your book in front of more Amazon readers so you can spend less time marketing and more time writing. I use Publisher Rocket for researching book titles, categories, and keywords — for new books and for updating my backlist. Check it out at www.PublisherRocket.com

This show is also supported by my Patrons. Join my Community at Patreon.com/thecreativepenn 

Abi Pollokoff is an award-winning poet, editor, and book artist. Her debut poetry collection is night myths • • before the body.

You can listen above or on your favorite podcast app or read the notes and links below. Here are the highlights and the full transcript is below. 

Show Notes

• What makes a good poem?
• Balancing academic and fun elements in poetry
• Judging poetry on its purpose and impact, rather than on personal tastes
• Relevance of poetry techniques in prose writing
• The significance of punctuation in both poetry and prose
• The importance of page layout in poetry
• Tips for performance and spoken word poetry
• Creating and marketing a poetry collection
• Commercial realities and opportunities for poets

Find out more about Abi at AbiPollokoff.com or on Instagram @AbiPollokoff.

Transcript of Interview with Abi Pollokoff

Joanna: Abi Pollokoff is an award-winning poet, editor, and book artist. Her debut poetry collection is night myths • • before the body. So welcome to the show, Abi.

Abi: Thank you so much, Jo. I'm so excited to be here.

Joanna: Yes. So lots to talk about today, but first up—

Tell us a bit more about you and how you got into writing poetry, as well as making it part of your job, as well as your passion.

Abi: In terms of how I got started, really, I started with books. I always loved reading, and reading is such a big part of living a literary life for me. I read poetry when I was young, you know, Dr Seuss, Shel Silverstein. So I found myself reading language and story that just had fun in it.

I had always loved creative writing assignments in school, and I connected with poems. I think when I really first found my way into my current understanding and relationship to poetry was in my last year of university.

I studied at Tulane University in New Orleans, and in my last year, I took a series of classes that coalesced all around the same time period of study. So I was taking a class on the French avant-garde movements of the first half of the 1900s. We were reading a lot of Dada and Surrealism.

At the same time, I was taking a poetry workshop from the poet Andy Stallings, and we used a primary course text that covered around the same time period. So I was immersed in this area of literature that was concerned with the possibilities of language, of language without self-censorship, of linguistic freedom.

It was a time when I really needed that permission to play and to explore and to trust myself. So I gave myself that permission, and it's transformed where I am today.

In terms of my job, I think I really believe deeply in the value of reciprocity. So I knew that if I wanted to have a book in the world one day to take up space on a shelf or in a mind, I wanted to be able to make space for other books to exist and for other writers to see their names in print.

I just wanted to give back into the community, as well as being a part of it.

Joanna: Oh, so much there. I'm really interested in this juxtaposition there of this academic side of poetry, and you studying it and studying literature. Then you also mentioned the word “fun,” which I thought was interesting, and also permission, and trying to get rid of that self-censorship.

I feel like poetry, in particular, has a real difficulty with academic snobbery around what is an acceptable poem. So I wondered, I mean, I know it's a matter of opinion, but—

What makes a good poem? How do you balance the academic side with the fun side and letting loose?

Abi: I'm so grateful for this question because I think you're right. I feel like for such a long time, Poetry with a capital P had very specific expectations and a very specific origin story. I don't think that an academic poem is the only kind of a good poem.

Of course, everyone's allowed to have taste and preference. One person might like chocolate ice cream and one person might like vanilla, and each flavor is equally valid.

For me, I believe —

A good poem is one that makes you feel something, full stop.

In your body, a good poem is one that comes alive off the page. So that can be a sonnet with the perfect volta, that turns, that twists just the perfect amount and it gives your knees a little quiver.

It can also be a five line meditation on Instagram that makes your heart stop just for a moment. Or a slam poem that just touches your pulse and makes it beat a little bit faster.

So I think, for me, that breaking out of an academic understanding of poetry is so important to acknowledge the diversity, the cultural diversity, and all of the different possibilities that make poetry beautiful and accessible and exciting for readers who themselves have varying tastes and preferences.

Joanna: How do you manage that as an editor, and kind of, like you said, making space for other writers?

It's very hard to be an editor, in general, but I would think with poetry, it would be even harder. Of course, like you said about taste, you're going to be reading a lot in your work that is not to your taste. I guess this is the thing—

How do you judge what makes a good poem if it's not to your taste?

Abi: That's a great question. I think if I were thinking of this from an editor's perspective, when I'm approaching a poem as an editor, for me, the goal is to see if the poem is accomplishing its goals, rather than my goals.

So I try to actually take my taste out of it and think, well, what is the poem trying to do? Is it trying to deliver an image? Is it trying to create a metaphor or play with a specific form? If it's part of a formal lineage, how is it accomplishing that?

Think about it from the goal of the poem and the reader's experience of the poem, rather than whether I like it or not, because like can be so subjective from person to person.

So if I'm looking at it as an editor, I'm thinking about, what is the poem itself trying to do? What is the poem trying to tell me, and is it successful? If we're playing with an image, does the image land in the ways that it needs to?

If you're playing with form, and you're breaking a form, what is the impact of that formal break? How does that change the meaning of the overall message of the poem? So if you're a reader out there who is trying to experience poetry, but maybe not sure of what to make of it, I would say almost take yourself out of the equation.

Certainly consider whether you like the language, whether you like how it feels, the rhythm, but also think about, well — 

What is the poem trying to do? What is the poem trying to tell me? See if that gives it the space to do that.

Joanna: I just want to mention that we can hear your lovely cat in the background with the little bell. So I just thought I'd point that out to the listeners. I'm a cat person, so totally understanding. I just wanted to point that out.

Abi: That little bell is a brand new cat to my home, and he is exploring today.

Joanna: I love it. It's a nice little backdrop. Well, let's talk about this because a lot of people—I mean, I wrote some poetry. I even had a poem published back in the day, but mainly in my younger years of angst.

Like you say, about university and those teenage years, lots of very bad poetry, but it did what it needed to do at the time. Now, I and most of the listeners, we write prose.

What elements from poetry can be useful for writers of fiction, nonfiction, memoir, all of that?

Abi: I love this question because I feel like prose and poetry are both playing with language. Whether you're writing fiction, or whether you're writing nonfiction, or whether you're writing poems, you're using language to communicate something.

Whether it's a story, or a feeling, or a moment, or a scene, those tools appear in all genres. So I would really think about, for prose readers and prose listeners who are out there but interested in what poetry can do, I think a really interesting tool that you might want to pay attention to or focus on is the line break.

The line break in a poem offers breath, and it gives breath and space and pivot.

It gives the opportunity for a change in a poem. So even if you're writing in a prose sentence, you too have moments where you can think about, what is this pause or this break doing?

So in prose, you can do that with commas, you can do that with em dashes. You can think about how one sentence pivots from one to the next, or how a paragraph evolves from one to the next.

In a poem, you have that too, it's just in a micro level.

So thinking about, how does the line break activate thought? How does punctuation activate thought and change what the reader is experiencing? You might be able to expand that onto the macro level in a prose piece and see if those tools can kind of go back and forth across the genres.

Joanna: Yes, line breaks are really interesting. Again, coming back to literature, I think older literature has a lot to answer for with huge, dense paragraphs with no line breaks, because I presume the cost of printing or whatever.

I feel like modern—I'm thinking particularly of James Patterson, who certainly won't be to everyone's taste—but it's the master of the line break.

Pretty much every sentence in his faster paced sections, every sentence is a new line break. It's a new paragraph, basically, for every line, and it moves you much faster through the text.

As a thriller writer, I pay more attention to that, but I certainly didn't know about that as a newer writer.

What are some of the other things from poetry that might be useful?

Abi: Yes, I think James Patterson is a great example of speed and digging into the line a little bit more. In poetry, you have long lines and short lines. So you might think, oh, a long line will give you an extended thought, it'll keep momentum.

I would actually say, from a poet perspective, that a short line will actually force the breath to break and give you a lot of speed. So I think there are some great parallels there between James Patterson moving from one sentence paragraph to the next, similar to a very short line moving to the next in a poem.

In terms of other tools, I would also say—to kind of drill into this even more and get even more micro with the line, and as an editor, this is also one of my favorite things to play with—but it's punctuation.

Punctuation is absolute magic in both poetry and prose.

It gives you the tools as a conductor to make your lines a symphony, to build that metaphor. You can use punctuation to your advantage to build speed, to build rhythm, to build drama.

In a poem or in a piece of prose, the intentionality with which you're using specific punctuation is going to give the reader a different experience. Think about how an em dash will cut off a thought. At its core, an interruption. Or how a semicolon will kind of give you this lulling legato way of connecting one line to the next in a description.

So maybe not in the first draft, but as you're revising a piece of prose, don't just think about the nuance of the words you're using, but think about how the punctuation is connecting your ideas and how changing it will develop a different texture to the piece that you're working on.

Joanna: I love that you're geeking out around punctuation.

Abi: Oh my gosh, the best!

Joanna: Which I think is hilarious, and it possibly shows you as an editor, more than anything else. I mean, there are some poets who have zero punctuation. They don't even use capital letters.

Abi: Oh, for sure.

Joanna: So there is freedom in that. The other thing I was going to mention is—and I find this very annoying because I use a lot of em dashes, always have—

There's this thing at the moment saying, if there are any dashes of any kind, M dashes etc, then it's clearly written by AI.

I don't know if you've seen this?

Abi: I haven't, but I also have big feelings about it.

Joanna: Yes, I have big feelings because I use them. I do work with some AI tools, but I'm like, no, that doesn't mean it's AI. I mean that is just something that we use.

I feel like the people who are maybe spreading that kind of thing—apparently, there's this whole thing on TikTok about dashes, if anyone's using a dash of any kind. I'm like, no, no, no. I think you just don't know enough about this.

Abi: Oh my gosh. Oh, so many feelings. I'm so glad you mentioned this. I find this so interesting that the internet is claiming em dashes as an AI signature.

I would also maybe push on that and say, while I don't know, of course, everything that has gone into training the language learning models that AI uses, but I know that there have been big conversations about how certain AI tools have mined literature for their uses of language.

Perhaps AI is using all these em dashes because humans have been doing it first, and thoroughly.

Joanna: Exactly.

Abi: So I think I disagree about this conversation on TikTok, but I'm not on TikTok, so I don't know what everyone is saying.

Joanna: I only reacted to it, a bit like you, because it's one of my favorite forms of punctuation, which, in itself, is kind of funny. I do want to ask you, so coming back to things like punctuation, line breaks, these things, to me, are part of the way words are laid out on a page.

So I do buy poetry books. Laying things out and using words in different ways, sometimes they're made into kind of sculptures on a page, right, in a poetry book. There's that. So maybe talk about that.

How important is page layout for poetry?

Abi: This is something that I think every poet will do differently, and so I don't think there's a right or a wrong answer here. I will say that I am definitely a poet who plays with the page and plays with space on the page.

If any readers out there are interested, you'll see this a lot in my book, where I'm using the page to capture different elements of the story. I think that space on the page is so important because it gives the reader breath, and it also gives the reader pause and silence.

In my thoughts, I'm a bit of a maximalist, but on the page, you have the opportunity to give the reader a moment of what's not there. To have a poem expanded in a way that makes the poem ask, and hopefully inspires the reader to ask, “Well, this is what's being said, but what is not being said?”

What is the expanse of the page, and the page's landscape, and the magnitude and difference between the quantity of words and the quantity of space, what is that doing for the overall argument of the poem?

For me, I like to use the page in different ways to indicate different speakers. So for me, placing a poem in one section of a page might help develop polyvocality, where I have multiple threads of conversations happening over the course of a project.

On the line, again, it's about breath. It's about space. It's about giving the poem room to breathe and to find its way into the thought as the reader is also reading their way into the thought as well.

Joanna: Yes, it is interesting. I will open poetry books, and I have quite a lot of poetry books, and I will open them, and sometimes I will be drawn to something shorter or something laid out in a way that attracts me even before I read the words. So I find that important as somebody who primarily reads poetry.

The other side of this is the power of spoken word. You mentioned slam poems earlier. I have been to a couple of slam nights, and that is completely different. Sometimes it's kind of more almost like rap kind of poetry.

It's certainly a lot of performance. It's just a completely different form of using your words. So what are your thoughts on that?

Does a poet who loves the words laid out on a page also do slam poetry, or are these different kinds of poets?

Abi: I would say yes and no.

I mean, there's certainly poets who are drawn to a more capital P Poetry, academic style that we were talking about. There are also poets who are really going to be invested in the performance and in the live experience of poetry.

I love that you've been to some slams and have explored that because I think for a long time, there's been a very strong division between what counts as “poetry” and how is slam a part of that.

For me, I think slam is an incredibly important part of the richness of the poetry landscape. I am not a slam poet, but I have been to many slams in the past, and I think they're incredible.

Slam poetry and performance poetry, in that sense, takes an entirely different kind of craft and structure to deliver feeling to a listener.

I think the translation of a performance piece onto the page is so difficult because of the rawness and the humanity and the performance of it. I think that there are some presses that actually do a really great job of bringing slam into the page, and the one that I'm thinking of most is Button Poetry.

They have a very great YouTube channel where they have many slam videos, and they are a great tool and resource for slam poets, and all poets, but they do a great job of bringing slam poets into book form.

Sometimes that takes revision, and sometimes that's just a matter of translating, but I think that it's all part of the experience of poetry.

Prose readers out there, you might be listening and say, “Every time I've encountered poetry, I don't get it. It's not for me. I don't see it. I don't understand it.” Maybe an experience in school made you not like it, which is, of course, very understandable.

Joanna: Very common.

Abi: So common, yes. Maybe it's just because you haven't found the right type of poetry. Slam might be the poetry that gets you.

Joanna: Yes, and I mean, I guess the word slam is a kind of more violent word. Then there's, as you say, performance poets. It's a continuum, right? I'm thinking of a British poet, Kae Tempest. I don't know if you've heard of her. She even does sort of epic, long epics.

Abi: Amazing.

Joanna: A lot of these performance poets memorize their work, it feels. So they're not really reading from the page. This is something that totally freaks me out, by the way, and I have barely ever read any of my work in public, even on a podcast. I find it extremely difficult. So as a poet yourself—

What are your tips for doing reading or performance?

Abi: So, I'm so excited to check out this writer that you mentioned, and hopefully our conversation will inspire you to share one of your poems on a future podcast. That would be a challenge—

Joanna: Very unlikely!

Abi: Something to think about, maybe for the future. It is difficult. I think so many writers are introverts. I'm an introvert, but I still have to get up there and talk to people.

Something that I love about reading poems out loud is that I feel like a poem, it exists on the page, but going back to what we were talking about earlier, about what makes a good poem, a poem comes alive in the body.

I think reading a poem out loud is a great tool for revision, so you can feel where you stumble when you're reading it out loud, or where your breath speeds up. Prose writers too, when you're revising a paragraph, read it out loud. See how it feels, see how it lives out in the air.

Then stepping in front of an audience and doing that is a whole other level. It's a whole other piece of the puzzle. I have maybe two ways of thinking about it.

The first is to give myself permission to take a deep breath and to just sink into the poem.

To not necessarily focus on the people who might be staring at me, but to think about the poem itself, its texture, and by diving deeper into the poem, letting it come out and reach an audience.

The other tool I have, very practically, is a tool that I have read about in terms of, if you're ever giving a job interview, this is helpful. I saw this happen on an episode of Grey's Anatomy, if anyone is a Grey's Anatomy water.

Joanna: I am. Yes.

Abi: Love it amazing. Okay, do you remember the episode where Amelia Shepherd was going to do the very intense brain surgery on another doctor, and she and her resident at the time did the super the Superman pose?

Joanna: Oh, the Superman pose. Yes, the strong pose.

Abi: Exactly. It's where you're standing, your feet are shoulder width apart, your hands are on your hips. You're looking up into the sky as if you're a superhero about to save a city.

It's actually scientifically proven that it gives you, I don't know if it's adrenaline or just subliminal confidence, but it's a tool that gives you the ability to back yourself.

So if you're giving a reading, or giving a performance, or going into a job interview, or preparing for a hard conversation, take five seconds to stand with your hands on your hips, or sit with very good posture, and take a couple of deep breaths, and then begin. This might not work for everybody, but sometimes it's helpful for me.

Joanna: Yes, and there's actually a talk on that, a TED talk. I think it's Amy Cuddy who did a talk on that, and it definitely sort of went around.

Again, I think for introverts, it's whatever helps you get started. I often find that I'm most nervous just before I go on stage, and still, as a professional speaker, I still get very nervous, get like a bad stomach and all of that kind of thing. I think it's also just a case of acknowledging this is just a human thing, but—

If we want to get our words out there, then it just has to be done.

Abi: Absolutely. It's human. Whether you are delivering a poem or having a conversation, nerves are human. If you weren't nervous, it's you wouldn't care, right? So I think it's a beautiful sign to be a little nervous.

Something that I was always told when I was young was to slow down because when I get nervous, I talk fast. So slow down, enunciate, give yourself a deep breath, and let yourself be human and be vulnerable. Say, “I'm nervous.” Right before we started talking, I said, “Jo, I'm a little nervous.”

So it's okay to be vulnerable. I think in today's world, vulnerability is a really beautiful tool for connecting with people. So let yourself be human, and don't force yourself to be someone that you're not.

Joanna: Yes. So let's get back to the collection. I'm thinking of doing a short story collection, so obviously a little bit different, but I was wondering about how did you choose the poems that went into the collection?

Did you come up with the theme and then write to it, or did the collection emerge from what you already had?

Abi: I'm so excited about your short story collection, so I definitely want to hear more about that.

For me, the collection, it started out kind of as a surprise, actually. I've been in a couple of writing groups for a few years now, and around the same time, two of my writing groups wanted to swap manuscripts instead of individual poems.

So everyone at the time had these projects that were clear projects, and I thought I just had some poems. I wasn't quite sure if they were anything, but I pulled them into a file, and I realized that I had 50 pages, which is on track for a full length book.

For poetry, you often need 48 to 60 pages as a minimum, and so I was in that ballpark. I used this opportunity to get feedback from my writing groups because a set of 50 pages isn't necessarily a “book”, but I was able to use these tools to identify the key themes at the heart of the project.

Then that set me down the path of writing and revising into the work that had already emerged. So for me, it kind of took my community to say, “No, this actually is on its way to being something. It has legs.”

Then once we were able to say, oh, well, I'm thinking about womanhood. I'm thinking about societal expectations. I'm thinking about self-actualization. Then I was able to go in and say, well, what are the holes in the story? Because even a poetry collection can have a narrative arc from poem to poem.

So what are the holes in the story? What images are popping up consistently that I might want to do a little bit more work with? From there, I was able to set on a path to revision into the book itself. So, for me, I kind of sidestepped my way in.

I'm curious for you, have you identified a theme first? Or are you just starting to look at a bigger set of short stories you've already been working on?

Joanna: Well, the main reason is because all of my short stories are in ebook and audio, and I really want to do a special print edition. A lot of us now use Kickstarter to do really gorgeous editions.

So I guess I'm more looking for a theme. I am thinking of writing a couple of extra ones that will be exclusive that are around the theme that has emerged.

What was really useful for me was to put all of them into NotebookLM—I don't if you've heard of Notebook LM, Google's notebook—and say, “What are the themes across these stories?” It was able to pull stuff out of my work that it's really hard to see in your own work.

Like you said, you had a community do it. I'm not very good at groups, to be honest.

Abi: That's fair. I mean, I think it takes sometimes extra eyes. It's always harder to edit yourself than it is to edit other people. It's harder to write marketing text for yourself than it is to write it for someone else, because when you're doing it for yourself—it sounds like you may have experienced this too—you're too close.

It's too personal to be able to say, what is this actually doing? What does this actually mean? So I love it. If you're not a person who writes with writing groups, which is, of course, a completely valid experience of being a writer, use the tools that are out there.

I think that AI can be a starting place for so many things.

I'm a pretty firm believer that it shouldn't necessarily be the ending place, but I think if you're using it to start and say, “Well, what are the themes that I'm I've naturally gravitated towards?” Use that as your 10,000 foot view.

Then you can go back in and say, oh, I see that happening here, but I want to expand it. Or I think this part of this theme is missing, so that's what I'm going to write my way into.

I think that's a great use of a tool that's becoming very widespread and accessible for many folks who might not have a built in writing community, or choose not to have a group of people to have that feedback from.

Joanna: It came up with some great titles as well. This is the other thing, right? Doing a title of a collection, you could just say, “Poems about womanhood,” like you said. I mean, that's just not good enough.

How did you come up with your title for the collection?

Abi: This was one of the last things that I found for my book. I went through many other titles before I landed on this one. What I did was, I actually wrote out on a piece of paper every single title of all of my poems, and I circled the words that came up and the themes that came up and the phrases.

So I kind of jigsaw puzzled my way into my book's title. So if anyone out there picks it up, which I hope you do, the title of my book is night myths • • before the body.

So my challenge or my puzzle will be, when you're diving into the book, where do you see these words popping up? Where do they come from? And how does that extraction into the book's title reflect back on the body of the book itself?

Joanna: Yes, titles are tough at the best of times. Although I would say, just to be clear, like with poetry books, especially, I couldn't tell you the title of most poetry books that I've bought from people.

One of my favorite poets is Ben Okri. He's Nigerian-British, and I couldn't tell you most of his book titles, but I remember his poems, and I know his name. So I think that's probably more useful, right?

People remember your name and they like your poetry.

Abi: Absolutely, and that you're remembering the poems. That's clear that it's a poem that stuck with you, and you know who wrote it. I hope if Ben's out here listening—

Joanna: Very unlikely.

Abi: You never know. That's beautiful because we're doing this work, and we're putting ourselves on the page, and the goal, the dream, is that our work impacts someone, and it resonates with them. It's the piece of writing that they needed to read that day for whatever reason, for whatever is going on in their lives.

It's clear that you read Ben's poem at a time when it just hit you, you needed it. I think that's the biggest gift of all.

So everybody is going to have a different mind, and you might be a person who has total photographic recall. You can see the book cover in your mind. You can see the book title. You might be able to read a poem once and memorize it. Many of us are not like that, and so if you can remember the poems and the writer, that's gold.

Joanna: Well, on that, as you were talking there, I was thinking about Ben Okri, and I've seen him read his poetry a number of times. The particular occasion was back in 1999 and I didn't know what to do with my life, and I heard him read some of his poems, and it really helped me make a change in my life.

It's interesting because I have all of his poetry books in print, but it was actually hearing him in person and listening to his voice that made it resonate. So I just wanted to say that to encourage people, which is—

You don't know how you impact people's lives when you put your poems out there.

Abi: That's beautiful. I love that. I love that it took, again, a human experience of being in a room and hearing a voice. I think that, of anything, is maybe the call to action of finding a reading in your local community. Maybe at the library folks are having a reading, or maybe at a bookstore.

I think right now, the literary community is in in such need of support. I would say, especially in the US, where it's important to go out and support your local businesses, to support your readers and your writers.

So go to a reading, even if you don't know the writers, because you never know what's going to impact you and how you're going to feel about it.

Joanna: Well, all of this is absolutely wonderful, and we obviously want people to write poetry for whatever reason, but I do have to tackle the sort of commercial side of it.

You work in the industry as a business as well. You work for a company, and you publish books, and people have to make money from books. Poets have to make money somehow, even though most of them don't make money from poetry, obviously, but some poets are doing absolutely incredibly well.

I think Rupi Kaur, one of the sort of original Insta poets, her Milk and Honey collection, it's everywhere. In the indie author community, we have Pierre Jeanty, who's been on this show. Haitian-American, sells on Shopify. Both of these are seven figure poets, which is just incredible. They make far more money than I do!

What is the commercial reality for most poets, and what are some ways that they can perhaps make some more income from their poetry?

Abi: This is a great question, and it's a hard one to answer because the commercial reality is not great. I would say that that Rupi and Pierre are incredible exceptions.

I love that their work has brought them commercial success and financial success because it's also brought more awareness and more attention into the poetry landscape.

Prose books are so visible and so prominent, and poetry is visible, but it's not quite as financially viable as prose. So it's just not a great money maker most of the time.

That said, I would say that there are some ways that you can engage with poetry and find a form of supplementing your income if that's something that is necessary for you. More and more journals are offering poets money for publishing poems, which is so important and beautiful.

So you might see a journal offering $50 for a poem, or $100. I'm not quite sure in the UK what that would translate into in terms of pounds, but I believe that there are some UK journals as well who say, “When we accept your poem, we'll offer you some financial remuneration.” That's on the poem level, the individual poem level.

Of course, when you're publishing a book, there are a couple of avenues. You may receive in advance, which is an upfront financial sum that then when you sell books, you kind of don't earn anything until you've made that money back.

Or royalties, which is where when somebody buys your book, a percentage of that goes back to you as the author.

Presses also have to balance their budgets, because the cost of paper has changed, the ink has changed, printing costs, the team for the press itself. So there's a very tight budget when it comes to the publishing landscape in general, and I would say, especially for poetry.

There's just less money exchanging hands, except in the case of maybe Rupi and Pierre, who have incredible breakthroughs, and they've done a lot, I think, to really change that landscape. They've made a big difference.

The best way to encourage presses to keep publishing and to be able to keep paying their authors is really to be buying books.

So if you're a writer out there, even if you're not making that money back by buying a book, buy the authors books because it lets the press keep going, and it lets the press continue to offer the funds to their writers. That's maybe the biggest tip, I would say.

I think we live in a really creative economy world right now. We have people having multiple side hustles, or being able to monetize so many different aspects of their writing.

Get creative. If you have an idea and you haven't seen it done, give it a try. I think there's so many ways that folks can change their financial picture.

I think Pierre using Shopify is a great example of that, and Rupi on Instagram. So many different ways of getting that visibility that then can translate into financial success.

Joanna: Yes, I guess it goes back to what you were saying at the beginning around the permission to play.

It has to be the permission to play with the possibilities of the business, as well as the possibilities of the art — 

because I guess we create also because we want to share that with the world.

We do have more opportunity than ever to put our work out there. I guess the final question for you is, with night myths, what are you doing to get your work out there? Obviously, you're pitching some podcasts, but you know—

What's your plan for marketing?

Abi: Oh, that's great. Here I am. I'm talking to you. Everybody is going to be different, and I would say, when it comes to marketing, whether it's a poetry book or a prose book, there are so many ways to do it.

There's no one right way because the right way is the way that's going to work best for you, for your network, for your community, for the energy that you have, and the time, So many writers have other day jobs, have maybe their parents, have other commitments that take time out of your day.

So what I would say is —

If you are thinking about marketing a book, think about what your strengths are and what your time is.

Follow that thread because there's never going to be an end date and nothing is ever going to be enough. So figure out what the right thing is for you, and then lean into that.

For me, I started by making a website so people know where to find me online. I think a website is a great place to start if you don't really know where to begin. It can be simple. It can have a photo of you, a short bio, if you've published anything, links to those, and ideally a contact email or form.

This way, it gives you kind of a literary home base on the internet. There are great tools like Squarespace or Wix that have templates that are really easy to replicate and personalize. So don't start off fancy, but give yourself a virtual presence and use that as your foundation to build.

So I started with my website, and I also have been thinking about a couple of different avenues that balance my skill set and then also my time. So I have been posting on Instagram. I would encourage poets to choose maybe one platform where they feel comfortable.

Social media can pose its own challenges, so it doesn't have to be one or the other. It can be Substack. It can be Bluesky. It doesn't have to be everything.

If you're not a big social media person, start with one and just start being visible, because that's going to be a way for people to get to know you as a writer, as a human. Especially if you're an introvert, putting yourself out there in a way that gives you a little bit of breathing room.

So start with social media, and if you're not comfortable talking about yourself, it's a great opportunity to shout out other people, to talk about what you're reading, who has an event that you're going to, what book have you read recently. By building a community of readers, you'll get people who are excited about your work.

So that is a tool that I've been leveraging. For me, as I shift into marketing my own book, I am working on setting up readings. So if there are any listeners in the US especially, I don't have any plans to come to the UK yet, but the future is bright.

So set up readings wherever you like to shop for books. In your local bookstore, go to them say, “Hey, I have a book coming out,” or, “I'm a poet, I'd love to be a part of an event.” That's a great way to very tangibly connect with people.

I'm also reaching out to the other networks of communities that I have. So, school affiliations, alumni groups, professional orgs.

I'm thinking about the ecosystem of like-minded people who might be interested in my work.

That could be practically, it could be thematically, those are great ways to talk about why you're doing what you're doing.

So with you, Jo, I was so excited to talk with you, because I love how you have this balance of writers talking about craft and also talking about the publishing arm and the business of being a writer.

I loved how that connected for me with my work as an editor, and working a lot with prose, actually, but writing poems on my own time. So I thought, thematically, I really wanted to speak with you. So thinking about what's out there in the world, doing research.

AI is a great tool for this too, actually. To be able to say, “Hey, AI, give me a list of 30 podcasts that are centered around feminism,” or whatever your themes are, and then reaching out.

The worst that can happen is they say no, and that's okay. It's a numbers game.

Joanna: It is a numbers game, except that when you pitched me, like you found things we had in common, and so your pitch was effective. So I would say to people, it's better to take those 30, then go and investigate those 30, have a listen, and then only pitch the five that actually resonate with you.

Every day now, I don't know what happened, but I guess a year or so ago, traditional publishing discovered podcasting. I get five to ten pitches a day now, from most of which are completely inappropriate.

Then I got your pitch, and I'd never heard of you, and I was like, this is perfect. I accepted you really quickly. I was like, yes, I want to talk about this. So a good pitch where you feel something in common with the host is so effective. I've really loved talking to you. So let's tell people—

Where can they find you and your book online?

Abi: Amazing. Thank you. This has been such a fun conversation, and I'm just so honored. As you said, we didn't know each other before this, so it was so beautiful to get to know you and your work, and I'm so appreciative of it. I've loved getting to really dive in and listen even more to your podcast.

As for me, I am findable on Instagram. It's going to be @AbiPollokoff, just my name. You can also, I would please encourage you to find my book out there in the world. It's called night myths • • before the body.

It's an eco-feminist look at womanhood, and the body, and self-empowerment. So I hope it will resonate. Find them from your local bookstore. If a book is too much, which, of course, I understand, you've got to balance your budget, please follow me on Instagram.

I also have some poems available on the web, which you can find on my website, which is AbiPollokoff.com.

Joanna: Brilliant. Well, thanks so much for your time, Abi. That was great.

Abi: Thank you so much, Jo. It's such an honor and a treat to be here and talk with you today.

The post Language, Line Breaks, And Punctuation. Poetry With Abi Pollokoff first appeared on The Creative Penn.