Author and teacher Jennifer Perrine has been writing poetry since their college days. Every few years, when they have a hundred or so poems, they sit down with them and look for “the connective tissue” in which themes and ideas emerge. From this, Perrine selects 50 to 60 for a collection. The first, The Body Is No Machine, was published in 2007 and included two dozen poems that had been published previously. 

Since then, three more volumes have come into the world: In the Human Zoo in 2011, No Confession, No Mass in 2015, and Again in 2020. The latter began as a project of writing a poem a day for the first hundred days of Trump 1.0. A new collection due out this year, Beautiful Outlaw, may be pre-ordered from Kelsey Street Press, a publisher based in Berkeley, Calif., that was founded in 1974 to publish work by women who had been marginalized from the publishing world.

If you’re in Yamhill County, you can get a preview when Perrine visits Thursday, April 10, for a reading at the McMinnville Public Library. The event begins at 6 p.m. and is free and open to the public. 

Beautiful Outlaw was the 2023 winner of Kelsey Street’s QTBIPOC Prize, which is awarded to QTBIPOC-identified feminist writers and poets. The poetry witnesses “the devastating effects of violence during a time of genocide and mass incarceration and requires us to consider our own complicity,” according to Ching-In Chen, the author who judged entries for 2023.

Born in New Jersey, Perrine studied religion, culture, and creative arts at Susquehanna University and earned their MA in English from Bucknell University, and a PhD in English from Florida State University. Perrine is a two-time recipient of Arts and Culture Diversity and Inclusion Awards from the Asian American Journalists Association whose work has been published widely in both print and online literary journals as well as anthologies that include Essential Queer Voices of U.S. Poetry (Green Linden Press, 2024) and Cascadia Field Guide: Art, Ecology, Poetry (Mountaineers Books, 2023).

A Portland resident, Perrine cohosts the Incite: Queer Writers Read series at Literary Arts. They work as the equity and racial justice program manager with Metro’s Parks and Nature Department in Portland and teach writing for classes oriented to students, people who are incarcerated, military veterans and their families, health care workers, and LGBTQIA+ groups.

The following interview was conducted by email and has been edited for length and clarity.

How did you first encounter poetry as a reader?

Perrine: I remember my mother writing poetry when I was a child. As far as I know, she never showed her poems to anyone but me. At 9 or 10, I was too young to understand the complexities of love and longing and loss that she was writing about. But I do think sharing them helped me realize that writing poetry was a thing people did, if not for publication, then for making sense of the world and ourselves, or for healing, or catharsis. I don’t remember reading contemporary poetry until I was in college.

Tell us about the transition from reading it to writing it.

I remember an assignment when I was a junior in high school. We’d just read The Scarlet Letter, and our teacher gave us the option of writing either an essay or a poem in response to the book. I wrote a poem from the perspective of Pearl, Hester Prynne’s daughter, because she doesn’t get much of a voice in the book. I discovered that persona poems could be a tool for writing about experiences of my own that otherwise would have felt too vulnerable. I really began writing poetry in earnest when I was in college.

You read widely, so I’m curious to hear how you’d describe what poetry does that is unique or singular, what the literary form can do that others do not?

I’d be over-generalizing if I said poetry does something that no other literary forms can do. But I turn to poetry when I need a formal container to unlock something that I don’t quite know how to say yet. Whether that container is a rhyme scheme or syllabics or acrostic poetic, form invites me to use language in a way that I’m unlikely to do when I write prose. Language becomes a little more surprising, wondrous, mysterious, which helps me write about the parts of life that are so sublime or ridiculous or traumatic that words would otherwise fail me.

Is formalism in poetry important to you?

Form is one of the reasons I love writing. I credit Sonia Sanchez, one of my grad school professors, who assigned us to write poems only in received forms or ones that we invented for a whole semester. Before that, I imagined that formalism was conservative, preserving something stuffy from a bygone era, but her own examples and others helped me understand that form wasn’t about being obedient to a set of rules, but about finding tools to help us more precisely name whatever feels unnameable.

Do you think younger poets rely too heavily on free verse?

I don’t know that younger poets are averse to form. Some of my favorite classes I’ve taught have been through Writers in the Schools, where high school students have been excited and enthusiastic about form. And even when young (or old!) poets write free verse, they’re usually doing so with careful attention to lineation, internal rhyme, and repeated words or phrases, which are all formal elements. Form may call less attention to itself in free verse, but it’s still there, luring us in.

In terms of topics, your first collection, The Body Is No Machine, really starts at what amounts to ground zero for all of us, a natural starting point: the body we live in. What issues, concerns, or questions did you have that led to those poems?

I felt pretty alienated from science when I was growing up, but in my 20s, when I was writing that book, I was learning about the myriad ways that the history of science is riddled with human biases that produced “facts” about race, sex, and gender that were later disproved. The Body Is No Machine isn’t necessarily about those misconceptions — although some poems, like Ex Ovo Omnia do address them directly — but the book is definitely informed by scientific language, by wonder at how bodies are simultaneously sites of beauty and gore, and by questions about whether and how we can know the truth of our bodies and of other bodies.

What’s been the biggest change in the publishing ecosystem since you published that first collection in 2007?

When I was writing that book, I was sending out poems in fat manila envelopes, with little self-addressed stamped envelopes tucked inside so they could send me back responses (aka rejections). I learned about recently published books mostly through word of mouth or through devoutly buying the new titles from publishers I trusted, and those were the same venues where I sent my own work for publication.

So much publishing happens online now, which sometimes means quicker responses. I haven’t self-published, but there are so many options for this, not only through print-on-demand books but also through posting to social media or websites. It’s also generally easier and cheaper now for editors to keep online journals up and running than to produce print issues. It feels easier to get what I’ve made into the world, but harder to find writing I connect with in that sea of publications.

In all your collections, the poems frequently are in first-person but reference a plural: You talk about what “we” saw or experienced, or “our” something, etc. Who is the “we” that you have in mind?

In most of the books, “we” definitely changes from poem to poem. Sometimes it’s a very intimate “we,” speaking of and about a relationship with a beloved. Often, it’s referencing a community that’s been marginalized in some way by dominant culture — and that “we” is a way to connect some personal grief or fear or celebration or resistance to a collective experience. It’s a reminder that I’m not alone in my experience and an invitation that hopefully helps other members of that community also feel less alone and brings people outside of that community momentarily inside, so that they can get a glimpse from this perspective.

Again is the outlier. The “we” in that book is often referencing America as a whole, wrestling with the ways American identity is so bound up with a collective silence or indifference about the ways that our country visits violence on people.

Tell us about your latest collection, Beautiful Outlaw. Clearly, guns have been on your mind.

If I were going to sum the inspiration up in a word, it would be “grief.” Part of that grief is about how mass shootings have become something that we in America have accepted as just part of our culture. I started writing about guns after I moved to Oregon in 2016 and realized how much pride there is around gun culture here. Guns were always a part of my life. My grandfather was a hunter, I’d had a partner who was a military veteran, and I’d had loved ones who’d experienced intimate partner violence that involved guns. Some of the poems connect these personal relationships to broader gun culture and gun violence.

But the grief also focuses on other losses. Many poems mourn the death of my mother, the end of a decade-long relationship, and my inability to have biological children. And there are also parts of the book that address collective grief, like the loss of community and connection we experienced in the pandemic, and the loss of safety wrought by racism, heterosexism, and transphobia.

In your teaching, you’ve said that your primary goal is to help students “build relationships with our inner wisdom.” How should writers and artists tap inner wisdom in a time where there’s such a tremendous amount of noise?

By inner wisdom, I suppose I mean “body wisdom.” So much of what we give our attention to is a way to escape or distract ourselves from bodily experiences. Which makes sense — having a body can be incredibly uncomfortable, painful even. Sometimes that’s the pain of injury or illness or stress or exhaustion. For many of us, it’s also the pain of having a femme body, a trans body, a Black or brown body, and/or a disabled body in a world that is so often hostile to those bodies.

There are lots of practices that can help us turn back to our bodies, and many of the ones I love best — birding, forest bathing, meditation, yoga, walks around my neighborhood — are ones that help me connect with my senses and/or my breath. Writing itself is also a practice of bringing myself back to my body. I cannot be distracted or dissociated from my body and still write something that feels meaningful to me. I need my senses to create imagery. I need my breath to help me understand where caesuras, line breaks, and stanza breaks want to be.

You’ve touched elsewhere on the relationship between writing and healing. If it’s not too personal, can you tell us how that’s worked in your own experience?

I often don’t really know exactly how I’m thinking or feeling about something until I’ve written about it. In fact, if I know exactly how to talk about an experience or something I’ve witnessed in the world, I won’t bother to write about it, because there’s no joy of discovery there. But that process of feeling my way through language, especially in poetry, where there’s such focus on precision, helps me to name what I couldn’t before. That in itself doesn’t necessarily heal, but there is that concept in psychiatry, “Name it to tame it,” where being able to recognize an emotion and put it into language also helps you self-regulate so that you can stay with that emotion and inquire about what it’s telling you, instead of trying to force it away.

That relationship strikes me as particularly important, given that millions of Americans belong to communities that are now being subjected to next-level trauma, which raises questions about the importance of art at a time of political reaction.

It’s wild, and heartening, how much I’ve witnessed people turn to art these last few months. I’ve seen folks gathering to make art together, to feel more connection and find avenues to political solidarity, even if the art they’re making isn’t overtly political. I’ve also seen more people make art to distribute for free, to raise awareness, to be a source of hope when so many people are exhausted and discouraged.

Art has so much possibility. It’s our companion when we feel isolated or afraid, it draws attention to and mocks oppressive systems that might otherwise appear “normal” or acceptable, and it helps us imagine the future that we long for. No matter how much any authoritarian attempts to quash art, it’s still going to thrive because creativity and play are such survival mechanisms. And art forms that are language-based? No special equipment is required.

Last question: What are three artistic works you’d like to give a shout-out to?

I’ll go rogue and start with 41 artists: the Justseeds Artists’ Cooperative. I have so many of their prints in my home, many depicting birds, as part of calls for solidarity with political and social movements. They are beautiful and vibrant and keep me motivated to stay engaged even on the grimmest days. 

I’ll also recommend Orville Peck’s album, Stampede, which is also a collective effort. The songs are collaborations with other artists — some of them ones who paved the way for him, like Willie Nelson or Elton John, and others who aren’t such household names. The whole album is playful, soulful, and draws on lots of different musical traditions and genres. It’s very much the kind of album to play first thing in the morning to get your day off on the right track.

And I’ll go with a film I just saw: Sing Sing. It’s a powerful antidote to the ways our culture writes off incarcerated people, both through the film’s narrative and through its ensemble cast of actors, who were formerly incarcerated. Every member of the cast and crew received the same daily salary in exchange for equity in the project, essentially making everyone a creative partner instead of just an employee.

Writing can feel like such a solitary act, but these have helped me reflect on how I’m part of a creative community and reimagine how I collaborate with, honor, uplift, and materially support other artists.

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The McMinnville Public Library holds its Poetry Night at 6 p.m. the second Thursday of the month. Poets scheduled through October include Gary Lark (May 8), participants from Paper Gardens (June 12), David Goodrum (July 10), Laura Lehew (Aug. 14), Catherine McGuire (Sept. 11), and Paulann Petersen (Oct. 9).