This is week three of Poets of the Week! You can see my first article with Sarah Frances Moran and Charlie de Courcy here and my second article with Jonathan Brown and Amir Safi here.
This week, I bring you exclusive interviews with Ashlee Haze, the poet that inspired a visit from Missy Elliott, and Seth Marlin, former author of an acclaimed Iraq war blog. They open up this week about their origins and their ice cream flavors!
Q: Where are you from originally and where do you live now?
Ashlee Haze:Chicago, originally, now living at Atlanta.
Seth Marlin:I grew up in Port Austin, MI and now live in Spokane, WA.
Q: What is the best poem you think you’ve ever written?
Ashlee Haze:“Lazarus” which is a poem about life after my father’s death.
Seth Marlin:I think my favorite poem would have to be “snow,” originally featured in Issue 18 of RiverLit and later in my debut chapbook,Shred. I’ve always been interested in folklore and myth, particularly the ways in which we use those forms to internalize certain cultural values. More often than not, the values in question aren’t always great ones to hold unexamined, and the Snow-White myth in particular, with how it depicts women and girls, is no exception. I was much more interested in taking the premise at face value – the bodyguard of a newly-installed queen, tasked with dispatching the nine-year-old heir to a dead political rival. He of course struggles with the moral implications of his orders, and she of course is completely oblivious to his mission, because, after all, she’s a KID. I like the idea that she’s playing at bandits out in the forest, talking about one day marrying a prince, and he’s wrestling with the kinds of atrocities we justify in service to god and country. Ultimately, of course, we know that man’s decision – he spares her – but it’s not for the reasons typically given in the story. Rather, as he puts it, it’s because “what we tell our little girls / is happily ever after / when what we should be telling them / is run.” Though it isn’t directly related to my Iraq experiences, it is nevertheless informed a great deal by that period.
Q: If you were a flavor of ice cream, what flavor would you be and why?
Ashlee Haze:Chocolate with almonds or something crunchy. My grandmother always called me chocolate, but I can never be just plain.
Seth Marlin:Cookies and Cream. Simple and not too sweet and just a little bit dark. More is not always better.
Q: Do you have a favorite word? If so, what is it?
Ashlee Haze:“Better” because it is both present and future (I am better--I will get better) and “aphrodisiac” (it just sounds cool!).
Seth Marlin:My favorite word would have to be “tenesmus.” It’s the medical term for the feeling of having to poop.
Q: Who do you most admire in the world?
Ashlee Haze:My mother.
Seth Marlin:There’s an old retired schoolteacher in my hometown ––kind of a hippie earth-mother type, taught me early on that the creative impulse does more good in the world than anything one can accomplish with fists or a gun. When I was growing up, she was always just Mrs. Mayes, but as years have gone and she became a sort of grandmother-figure, she’s slowly graduated to Jane. She was my first living example of the good that feminism does in the world, and why we need it. Whenever I get something published in print, she still gets the first contributor copy.
Q: Who is your favorite musical artist? What is your favorite song?
Ashlee Haze:Jill Scott! But my favorite song in the world is “As” by Stevie Wonder.
Seth Marlin:My favorite band would have to be Queens of the Stone Age –– good crunchy desert-rock, technically complex and performed by a rotating cast of some of the industry’s greatest session musicians. Favorite track would be “Give the Mule What He Wants” – it takes me to my Boise days, back to being a recently separated vet just returning to college. It’s a song about refining one’s hustle, about doing the work one has to build the life, the love that one wants. As the song says, “Be the mule that you’ve gotta be.”
Q: What is one thing you would like the world to know about you and your poetry?
Ashlee Haze:In the words of Beyoncè “I ain’t sorry!” I am unapologetic in how I show up in the world, and my poems reflect that.
Seth Marlin:I think that at its best, speech can be violence and should be violence –– against unquestioned mores, against oppressive systems. Learning and speech historically have been acts of resistance, going all the way back to the myths of Genesis, when a woman first dared a man to question why he wasn’t allowed certain types of knowledge. In a world so otherwise shaped by bombs and bullets, we often forget that its words that launch those bombs, fire those bullets. And it can be words that stop them.
Next week: Dan Simpson and Zeke Russell
