An Interview with Addy Perlman

Samantha Fu: Your chapbook is based on your experiences in Georgia, living in Southern America. Has writing this collection changed your relationship with/feelings about Georgia, and the south?

Addy Perlman: Yes and no. I still have some of the negative views that I left with, but I have learned to also evaluate the positives. I think time away from my home has also helped with how I view it, and writing this collection required me to reexamine how I had previously written and felt about my home and my experiences. I was given the prompt to write a positive poem to my home, and that poem is title “Dear Georgia.” This allowed me to open up and see what I appreciate and what I miss. The collection also asked me to change my viewpoint. Some of the newer poems focus on relationships cultivated there and experiences, such as being Jewish in a small Southern town, that I had not taken the time to truly process and reflect upon. The collection definitely helped me understand my home and myself even more.

As your classmate, I was able to witness the trajectory many of your poems took as you revised them throughout the semester, and in particular I noticed that a number of your poems appear in more compact forms for your final manuscript. Can you speak a little bit about that revision process? How do you make the decision of when and where to cut or add?

This class and the feedback I received really helped me with this. I think I was holding on to certain lines and phrases, and through the revision exercises we did in class, I realized I could trim a lot of the fat and still have what I wanted to say. Professor Malech suggested making folders for each poem to have several versions, and once I did that, it helped tremendously. I looked at each poem and chose an average of four lines that I felt summed up the core of the poem, and then I reconstructed from there. I decided not to have any loyalties to any lines, and this attitude helped me cut and even add.

Your chapbook is so rich in evocative detail—how do you do it? Where does it come from? Where do you find inspiration for your poetry?

Thank you! When you live in such a small town, it’s hard to not remember the details! When I came to Hopkins, I realized how different my experiences had been, and I started to really value the small moments.

I also think it is partly personality. I can’t summarize anything because I think every detail is important, so I might be a little inclined to provide several details in all my poems. Don’t want to leave anything out!

South Georgia has been a real source of inspiration. Having some distance from my town has allowed me to truly reflect on my experiences and on the town itself. Most of my inspiration comes from experiences, and writing has always been a way for me to figure out what’s going on in my head. My poetry comes from the questions I want to think about and hopefully ask others to consider.

One thing that stands out to me in your poems is the imagery of hunting & guns and the way that’s used in examination of relationships. How does violence figure into this chapbook and your poetry as a whole?

Growing up in South Georgia, I was always around guns and hunting. It was so normalized, and there is a desensitization to guns in my town because there is the mentality that “everyone has them.” I personally don’t like guns, and I have never been hunting. They are dangerous and violent, and I think seeing how engrained they are in Southern society has scared me. My poem “Champion” discusses sexual assault through a hunting metaphor, and I used that as a metaphor because in the South, hunting is a violence that is swept under the rug and is actually made into sport. In my experience sexual violence is not discussed in the South. It’s not even recognized, so I really wanted to talk about these different forms of violence and hopefully start some kind of conversation.

So many of your poems take on the second person point of view, a you that appears in many different contexts and personas as well. What are some of the reasons you like this POV, and are there any limitations or drawbacks that you find?

For some of my poems, the “you” allows me to say the things to people I’ve wanted to say but haven’t. I get a sense of relief and of closure, and some of the poems are about subjects or people I wish I could talk about or talk to but I can’t except through writing. The “you” also helps me work through questions and issues I’m thinking about. I feel like it makes it personal yet universal at the same time.

To steal a question from you: Do you have any plans for your collection post class? What are your other future writing plans?

I have no idea. I know I want to print a few copies for a personal archive, but I don’t have any plans for it yet. I would love to keep working on it and potentially make another version with new poems. I want to continue editing some of them, and hopefully, something will come of it one day.

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Addy Perlman is the author of the chapbook Toeing the Line. From South Georgia, Addy is graduating from Johns Hopkins in May 2021. She majored in Writing Seminars and Medicine, Science, & the Humanities. Her next stop is Los Angeles, and hopefully, there is more writing in her future.

Samantha Fu is the author of the chapbook 国家. They attended Johns Hopkins University and received their Bachelor of the Arts in Computer Science and Writing Seminars in 2021 and will be joining Bloomberg as a software engineer post-graduation.