Natasha Rao
Natasha Rao is a poet and educator from New Jersey. Her debut poetry collection, Latitude, won the 2021 APR/Honickman First Book Prize and is forthcoming in September 2021.
She holds a BA from Brown University and an MFA from NYU, where she was a Goldwater Fellow. Natasha has received support from Bread Loaf, the Martha’s Vineyard Institute of Creative Writing, and the Vermont Studio Center. Her work appears or is forthcoming in The American Poetry Review, Poetry Northwest, The Yale Review, Narrative, and elsewhere, and she was a finalist in Narrative’s 30 Below Contest.
She is a managing editor of American Chordata and lives in Brooklyn. Most recently, (April 2021), Natasha was named a 2021 Gregory Djanikian Scholar in Poetry by Adroit Journal. Update: In September, Natasha was named a 2021 Ruth Lilly & Dorothy Sargent Rosenberg Poetry Fellow. Follow her on Instagram and Twitter.
Whenever we came across one of Natasha Rao’s poems, there were always lines and moments that stayed with us. Like so many others who are familiar with her poetry, we are taken by her intelligent use of language, and imagery to conjure a sense of story. We are thrilled to present her interview.
RHR: Whose name do you invoke at your shrine to poetry?
Natasha Rao: So many names! Bhanu Kapil, Ada Limón, Anne Carson, Robert Hass, Sharon Olds, Marie Howe, Rita Dove, Jane Hirshfield, and W.S. Merwin, to name a few.
RHR: Tell us about your writing process.
Natasha Rao: My process can be generalized as a perpetual state of note-taking followed by a concentrated period of building. I’m habitually jotting down things that strike me (phrases, thoughts, dreams, memories) in the Notes app on my phone. I try to read as much as I can, as well, and transcribe compelling lines and ideas. These phone notes have become almost reflexive and happen reliably every day. The other, rarer type of note-taking occurs when the muse/spirit/inspiration takes over. In those moments when it feels as though the pen is moving of its own accord, I write long blocks of prose by hand in a notebook. I can tell retroactively when I wrote something under one of these spells because my handwriting becomes a frenzied, looping cursive, rather than my standard narrow print. Once I feel I no longer have anything else to say, I type everything I’ve written into a long, running Word doc and label the entry with the date and which notebook it came from, with a heading like “blue notebook” or “spiral bound sketchbook”—a small gesture toward organization in an otherwise rather chaotic system. This accumulation of material is the precursor to the actual poem-making.
I like to write most of a poem in one sitting and am not able to step away from the page until at least the general scaffolding is laid out, so I usually plan to “write a poem” on a day when I have a solid block of free time. I prefer to write in the daylight, so I try to start early if I can. Once I’m set up and sufficiently caffeinated, I open my Notes app and the Word doc of transcribed prose, then comb through both to gather lines that resonate.
What follows is a lot of rearranging, pacing, and reading aloud to myself. Often it feels like puzzle-solving to think, for example, how can I connect this image of salmon with this idea about vulnerability? I love the aha moments when a phrase finally fits where it was meant to be. Once I feel committed to the movement within the poem and the music that is starting to come from inside of it, I step back, at which point it is usually quite late at night, and I fall asleep thinking about the poem. I’ll return to it the next day or a couple of days later to tinker with line breaks and word choice, and usually, my very last step is to choose a title.
RHR: Does an idea for a poem haunt you or do you hunt for an idea?
Natasha Rao: I am definitely in the camp of the haunted. It’s like the Baader-Meinhoff phenomenon, where once I’ve made a connection to something I’ll see it everywhere. I might suddenly remember that years ago, my brother and I used to build small paper houses and fill them with ladybugs. Soon after, I’ll overhear someone saying the word ladybug, then I’ll notice ladybugs on an episode of TV, a ladybug will appear in my kitchen, I’ll encounter someone with a ladybug tattoo, and I’ll know my brain is telling me to write a poem about ladybugs. I looked back at some old poems to properly answer this question and am actually surprised how easy it is to remember the exact line or image that haunted the poem into being.
That’s not to say I’ve never hunted for an idea. If I simply waited around for a subject to rattle inside my mind, I would probably write very few poems. In those cases, where I need or want to write a poem but don’t have an obsession thrumming inside me, I usually turn to formal rigor as a way of reaching an idea. I took a class with Anne Carson during my MFA program in which she described formal constraints as a way “to avoid being a slave to the muse,” and I’ve taken that to heart.
RHR: What is most satisfying about writing (and finishing) a poem?
Natasha Rao: The reminder that I have an endless capacity to surprise myself. One joy of writing poems is to be beheld thinking, and I love the way a finished poem can become a kind of record of an idea’s evolution. I never know where the poem will lead, and I cherish that moment of reading a final draft and feeling bewildered at where I’ve ended up, at what the poem knew all along and was trying to guide me toward. It’s like deciding to go on a walk, setting off down a random path, and eventually reaching the summit of a very tall mountain. You’re sweating and exhausted but then you see a view that you never expected, and you think to yourself, wow, how did I somehow take all the right twists and turns to end up in this beautiful place? Which is to say, there’s a kind of magic in following poetry’s compass.
RHR: Should writers keep or discard their old notebooks over the years?
Natasha Rao: Absolutely keep! Aside from all the potential material within them, I also think old notebooks can be wonderful physical objects to have, like artifacts from previous lives. I was a different version of myself when I wrote exclusively with a fountain pen in a hardbound journal, and another version when I drew in the margins of a composition book. Revisiting old notebooks is a way to reconnect to those former selves and is much more intimate than, say, looking at old photographs. Maybe I’m an extreme example, but I’ve saved all my notebooks from as far back as childhood. I like to think that each notebook is a piece in a larger narrative, and saving a lifetime of written words might someday create a whole more eloquent than its parts.
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Read Natasha Rao’s poem, “Old Growth,” originally published in Narrative (July 2020).
OLD GROWTH
Today I want to be free of this salt-streaked season,
backward crossovers into years before: airy
afternoons licking the wooden spoon, pouring soft blades
of grass from a shoe, all ways of saying I miss
my mother. I wish I could remember the gentle lilt
of my brother’s early voice. Instead I hear clearly
the dripping of a basalt fountain. What gets saved—
My father fed my sick goldfish a frozen pea and it lived
for another six years. Outside, pears swathed in socks
ripened, protected from birds. Those bulbous
multicolored days, I felt safe before I knew
the word for it. But how to fossilize a feeling, sustain it
in amber? I keep dreaming in reverse until I reach
a quiet expanse of forest. The dragonflies are large
and prehistoric. Mother watches from a distance
as I move wildly, without fear.