Settling into Poetry with Rickey Laurentiis

Written by: Dalton Primeaux (@djprimeaux)

Poetry is powerful. The poem is central to the human experience. The art of the written word, with no real set definition, is limitless in its magic. Truly, even before written language, there was poetry. Prayers, rituals, oral history, epic mythology, songs that mourn loved ones – all are precursors to the modern poem.

Art by Sharon Shapiro

A poem’s rhythmic and aesthetic properties aim to illustrate complex feelings. The musical qualities may be pleasing to the ear and its condensed language may be aesthetically pleasing. However, typically, these elements are used to evoke deep emotional responses and challenge the reader’s imagination.

In school poetry is presented as a Rubik’s Cube, it’s purpose to be solved. The art of the written word is then no longer art, it’s a puzzle. Not only is there more to poetry, but this approach can make a reader feel they are deciphering some elite language. You feel condescended to by the words.

Instead, a poem is more like a soak in a warm bath – the reader is to sit inside it and feel it. It’s okay to brace yourself, and it’s okay to fear the heat when you see the steam. Nevertheless, once you settle in, you feel more comfortable. Because all a poem asks of us is to think and to feel.

As we soaked our legs in a proverbial jacuzzi that is her erotic poetry, Rickey Laurentiis explored what about poetry scares so many people, and the best way for a poetry newbie to acclimate.

“Poems bring us into contact with language we haven't met before. And that can be an alarming experience,” said Laurentiis, trans American poet whose latest book, Death of the First Idea, was longlisted by the National Book Award and a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award as well as a nominee for the NAACP Image Award.

“It can be an experience that's also humbling. And it can also be dark, too, because you may not be able to express in the moment, in the language yet, what you feel.

“I think poems come up to that point as close as you can and then run away. I think a lot of Americans, a lot of people that I know, just aren't used to encountering that feeling. Hearing that voice, if you will. And that could be for a complex of reasons, I would say. But it's not necessarily the poem's fault.

“The poem can get us there.”

Laurentiis’s Death of the First Idea has been described as a mythic, lyric, decade-in-the-making new collection of masterful poems that probe the meanings of transformation and re-creation, a new classic about gender and love.

Her previous book, Boy with Thorn, was the winner of the Cave Canem Poetry Prize and the Levis Reading Prize, and a finalist for the Kate Tufts Discovery Award, the Thom Gunn Award for Gay Poetry and a Lambda Literary Award.

Her poems have also appeared in The New Yorker, Boston Review, Feminist Studies, The Kenyon Review, The Los Angeles Review of Books Quarterly, New Republic, The New York Times, and Poetry.

Shortly before this conversation, Rickey Laurentiis announced her acceptance of the 2026 Guggenheim Fellowship. The Guggenheim Foundation offers fellowships to exceptional individuals in pursuit of scholarship in any field of knowledge and creation in any art form under the freest possible conditions.

“I think that poems want us to have as many intelligences as we can.” Laurentiis said. Not just intellectual intelligence, but also emotional intelligence. She explained. Sometimes poetry can be such a reflective mirror that it shocks us, it scares us, it is very emotional.

“And it can do that for several different reasons. Some of it might be to write a Mary Oliver poem, but some of it might be also ‘Satan Says’ by Sharon Olds. […] or Cruelty by Ai.

“I think that Americans would be helped and encouraged by poems. If they recognize for a moment something fraught in them individually. And be willing to believe that it can be repaired. And it can't be improved.”

So, what is the first step?

Where does a person begin that internal conversation with themselves?

“I think the first step has to do with silence,” said Laurentiis. The poetry newbie should allow that first second or so of silence to give them a moment. It gets quicker as you practice, Laurentiis assured the apprehensive reader.

“If it was music, really sit in the rest. Sit in the gap for just a second. It’s not harmful,” said Laurentiis. “In English, we can gather ourselves in those spaces in between.”

However, this is also like screaming at someone to be self-aware. It's hard for a person to do that, no amount of emotionally charged language will get them there. It's maybe not even the goal. What poems want from us may be valid, but what is asked from us is not easy. That isn’t lost on Laurentiis.

“You don't want to say, please go run into the silence either. Because out of the silence is the answer, you know? It's however you're going to feel about what you just read, whatever you're going to think, whatever you come to know.”

When one first opens Death of the First Idea, the reader is introduced to powerful epigraphs, the final being a quote from the Gospel of Matthew.

“If your foot causes you to stumble, cut it off.”

It kind of punches you in the face. It stuns you, it begs for a reflective moment, to stand in the silence. But this quote is also a perfect bridge from where her last book left off:

     He shut the thorn up in his foot, and told his foot

Walk.

“I picked it because I thought it was a reference back to Boy with Thorn. And the radical revisions one must make, one must do. One will do, as if it is his weird fate.

“You know, you just have to surrender to that. I thought that quote was kind of sassy, because it just says, chop it off.”

To peel back the curtain a bit and allow a reader more comfort in their literary exploration, Laurentiis shared a candid look at her craft using a poem from the book as an example.

The poem “Terrotica” is a lyric poem that explores gender, spirituality, and selfhood. It is one of two poems from Death of the First Idea that was published in the LARB Quarterly no. 46: “Alien.”

The title, a portmanteau or a collision of "terror" and "erotica," captures both the pain of alienation and the reclamation of physical pleasure and identity. This makes “Terrotica” a great representation of the book’s ethos.

“I think it's involved with the whole question the book picks up, which is, can we change? What are the costs of change? You know, what happens then to whom in a transition? Those questions,” said Laurentiis.

It is also an illustration of the gentler manner of Death of the First Idea when compared to Boy with Thorn.

“I think the book is softer than Boy with Thorn. I think “Terrotica” [is] one of the later, last poems that I wrote for the book, so it's more indicative of where my style went on the other side.

“Because as much as this is a book about ecstasy and the ecstatic, it's also a static book that is obsessed with its topic. Hopefully for good. It attempts to do both those things at once.”

With this poem, Laurentiis confronts society's strict idea of gender. The poem opens with, "You think that Gender is true," challenging this idea of fixed genders.

In the second line of the poem the word “Function” appears — capitalised and italicised:

Other than grammar, the Function of Gender is treatment:

It is a wonderful example of a poet’s meaningful stylistic choice.

“It just occurred to me that a clean definition of genders, its own ontology, its own being,” said Laurentiis. “What is it, what it is not — I'm not going to be able to offer that. But I do know it has a function. I do know that in very clear ways it has a function in society, in many ways. And so, the word is kind of quasi literal. It's not like it's a mathematical function, but that's where it begins.”

And once the reader emerges from the waters of “Terrotica” they may have a sense that maybe, just maybe, a person’s inner essence and their most authentic self is more central to a person's true purpose.

After our quick dip, Laurentiis shared this via email:

“I recognize the book takes a risk: in being so indulgent, to be moored within the bay of seemingly just myself and to do it within a mythos of language. But have you noticed I’m not the only one? Is it even always myself? But every day the President is prepared to nail, not by itself, Transness to the wood of its wicked cross, of which we who are Queer are told we wished this upon ourselves as if who we are is the problem we chose for ourselves, as if who we are must be eradicated and not the injustice that it meets once born. The book’s self-absorption obsesses a subjectivity, an identity, currently under real attack in our country, and elsewhere. 

“This risk was deliberate, at least I had it in my mind: a risk in which I wagered, since few else has, since few others have hardly believe them; since, if on any day we’re privy to hear about something Trans, and added to that is something Black, if we even care, it is usually some report of its cruelest denials: reports of murder, of being missing, or another discrimination. So why not write a book that doesn’t feed into that? That sits with a shining face? That takes the opposite stance, of blaring its topic, because it has to? feels compelled to?  because its self-interestedness is something more than vain? because it’s political? it can save, because it claims, life?

“And because to live at all is to live out loud, as Whitman did, singing itself to a hard rhythm. I wanted to pick up that song. If we are not used to this anymore or used to it in this way, through this moody age of change, of A.I., Gaza, war; if we cannot bear this song given its particular singer; if we won’t see ourselves represented anymore anyone, not just someone who’s your mirror, never mind she’s your neighbor, then we are already in the wrong, guilty of something far more cold & insidious, dangerous, heavy, it would close you from your very heart, it would harden you, not to be a heart strung among others, not to know you can sing yourself, or sing yourself, and the book’s adamance only lets one know this.

“But time will tell; maybe a book can only try. How long can you, yes, you take its loud song of the human—however trans—person, and why come? how so? If we are ever toiled to hear it or wrestle with it, then we have forgotten something which poetry means to remind us, urgently, even if poetry cannot say—how do we ever say—anything, formally, informatively even, and in that direct way. But poetry is not direct but gets closer than that; it wants you to remember. Recall we all know the epiphany poetry’s just told you but still insisted you hear its rhyme.”