Alyse Knorr discusses reverence, video games, and her newest poetry collection, Wolf Tours, with associate editor Erin Peters.
Alyse Knorr is an associate professor of English at Regis University and co-editor of Switchback Books. She is the author of the poetry collections Wolf Tours (2024); Ardor (2023), a Lambda Literary Award finalist; Mega-City Redux (2017); Copper Mother (2016); and Annotated Glass (2013). She also authored the video game history books GoldenEye (2022) and Super Mario Bros. 3 (2016) and four poetry chapbooks. Her work has appeared in The New Republic, POETRY Magazine, Alaska Quarterly Review, Denver Quarterly, and The Georgia Review, among others. She received her MFA from George Mason University.
Erin Peters: Your most recent poetry collection, Wolf Tours, is labeled as ecopoetry. I’m hoping you might speak a bit about your relationship to the genre of ecopoetics. Why does this genre feel important to you, and are there other poets writing within the genre who have inspired you?
Alyse Knorr: For a long time, I didn’t really consider myself an ecopoet. I write about people—connections, relationships, and emotions—and I didn’t think that had anything to do with nature or the natural world. Then I wrote my last book, Ardor, and it was all poems about becoming a mother, getting married, and being a teacher. It was all people-focused, but nature played heavily into the poems because I wrote them during COVID, when I was spending a lot of time out in my backyard noticing all the beautiful, tiny things you might not normally pay attention to. When I started to realize that ecopoetics can be much bigger than just descriptive poetics, I became interested in poets who use ecopoetry to make statements, ask questions, and grieve.
My newest book, Wolf Tours, is about a sentient pack of wolves who run an ecotourism company in the American Southwest. The book was inspired by a trip I took with my wife. We were driving south on the highway through Colorado, and we saw a big billboard that said “Wolf Tours.” We started joking with each other about whether it meant tours of wolves or wolves leading the tour, and then that inside joke became the whole idea for my project. This road trip with the woman I love created a world where wolves are running an ecotourism company.
I suppose that for a long time I thought nature poetry had to always be reverent. But now I’ve been exploring ways that it can be funny, sarcastic, or satirical. I’m very interested in human engagement with the land and with nature. So, in Wolf Tours, I was thinking about ecotourism and the ways that we commodify experiences in nature, and then what kinds of meaning we look to those experiences to provide us with.
EP: I’m really interested in what you just said about how you originally thought that ecopoetry had to be reverent. In Wolf Tours, there’s such an intentional balance between reverence and satire. I’m curious to know how you created that balance in this collection, but also how it plays into your writing more generally. How do you know where to draw the line between these two modes, and how are they in conversation with each other in your work?
AK: Since 2016, I’ve been working at Regis University, which is a Jesuit Catholic school. One of the things I’ve learned about Catholicism, because I’m not Catholic myself, is about the sacramental worldview—the idea that anything can be made sacred. You can find the sacredness, the holiness, the beauty in anything—you can feel reverent about anything. In poetry, we often express that reverence in the form of the ode. On the day that I teach odes to my Intro to Literature students, we read Pablo Neruda’s “Ode to My Socks,” Marcus Jackson’s “Ode to Kool-Aid,” Camisha L. Jones’s “Ode to My Hearing Aids,” and lots of Ross Gay. Then I have my students write an ode to an everyday object that you wouldn’t usually feel reverent about. The point is that reverence is something we can choose to feel. It’s not something that has to strike us dead like the capital R “Romantic” sublime feeling. We can choose to put our minds into a reverent mode, and then the irreverent becomes yet another way of engaging with the reverent.
I recently wrote a history book about GoldenEye 007, a 1997 first-person shooter video game where you play as James Bond. The game is a classic in the video game world—it’s one of the foundational first-person shooters that created a lot of the tropes and mechanisms that you see in contemporary first-person shooter games. My research revealed that what made GoldenEye such a cult classic was not just how smooth the controls were, how innovative the heads-up display was, or how cutting-edge the AI was—it was the game’s silliness and the humor. One of the things that’s really funny in the game is that when you shoot anything, it blows up. Everything explodes—even if it shouldn’t; for instance, if you shoot at a chair long enough, it’ll explode. The exploding chairs are part of the game’s Roger Moore-era Bond campiness of exaggeration and silliness.
I think that human beings are at our most vulnerable, authentic, adorable, and beautiful when we’re being silly. It takes a lot of courage and vulnerability to be silly. To engage in writing about ecogrief for our dying planet through humor or irreverence, as I do at times in Wolf Tours, might at first sound incompatible—but for me, there’s something deeply sacred in the irreverent. I think about how I engage with my children, for instance; I have a 5-year-old, and she feels most loved by me when I’m joking and being silly with her. Silliness and messiness is where we see our humanity.
EP: I love that answer. When you started talking about GoldenEye 007 being one of the first first-person shooters, I was expecting you to say that people were drawn to it because of that first-person point of view. So, it’s interesting that your research revealed that the humor is why people were so drawn to it.
AK: I interviewed the guys who made this game—a team of ten British men who made this game when they were in their early 20s—and for most of them, this was the first game they ever worked on. They had this delightful naivete when they started working on the game—they didn’t know what they were and weren’t “allowed” to do. That kind of beginner’s brain is what we all hope for when we’re crafting things. We want that sense of possibility and risk-taking before we learn the “rules.” Of course, we also want the wisdom of being settled with the craft and having the gut instinct of knowing what to do on the page. But what interested me about GoldenEye’s developers was that none of them had ever handled a gun. They were making a first-person shooter video game about guns when they had never handled a gun before. They had a book full of pictures of guns that they looked at to draw the guns on the screen, and they watched old John Woo and Al Pacino action movies to listen to how the guns sound. There was this kind of incredible innocence around the fact they were making a violent game, but what they were focusing on the most was having fun and being silly. I think that undercuts some of the scary violence in a beautiful way that reminds us that, in today’s day and age, a lot of first-person shooters—most, I would venture to say—are very grim and macho. They’re gross, dark, and violent, implying to the player that they have to be a badass warrior who kills as many people as possible. That masculinist attitude toward guns and violence is dangerous. But the team who created GoldenEye 007 was doing something much more playful and satirical. Similarly, when I write in poetry or prose, I try hard to keep my sense of humor, even if it’s not meant to be a funny poem. I try to always keep a sense of play with everything I do.
EP: Absolutely, and that sense of play resonates in your poetry. In addition to your work as a poet, you’ve authored two video game history books, one about GoldenEye 007, which you mentioned, and then one about Super Mario Bros. 3. I’m wondering how you would describe the way your research and writing for those books impacts your work as a poet. I’m especially interested in how your research on GoldenEye 007 might have informed your poems “Bang” and “Instead of a Gun,” which were both published in our Summer 2024 issue.
AK: When I was an undergrad, I was studying for bachelor’s degrees in two different fields—journalism and creative writing—and they felt so distinct. There were very few opportunities for me to bring them together, and so even now, when I’m doing my video game history, I’m using journalistic and documentary techniques; while when I’m writing poems, I’m writing poems and I’m entirely in artist mode, without a lot of methodological crossover. But of course, when I think more deeply about it, I see that for me, video games and writing are actually quite united because they’re both things I love so much. I love playing video games, and I love reading and writing.
My love for video games started with the game Super Mario Bros. 3, which my dad taught me how to play when I was four years old. I fell in love with the game because I loved my dad so much, and the game was one of our bonds. At this same age, my parents were also teaching me how to read and draw, so games and art were all tied up together. My dad would draw cartoons with me, and then I’d see cartoons on the screen, in the game. I was obsessed with reading stories about princesses and knights, and then in Super Mario Bros. 3, I got to save a princess. So games, poetry, and art are all interconnected by my sense of being with people I love and doing things I love with narrative.
And again, the notion of play is really important to my writing process. I always start my poems from prompts. I can’t start with a blank page. In my creative writing classrooms, I also use a ton of prompts. And a prompt is just a game—a set of constraints—in the same way that early video game developers were constrained by how much memory they had to work with on the cartridge or on the disc. Both video game code and poetry are written in lines. They’re both about concision, and they’re both about play and creativity. So I see a lot in common between the use of prompts as play and the and the use of games.
The second connection for me between video games and writing is in world-building. I’ve always been a poet of longer projects because I’m really interested in sustained narrative. My first three books were all sustained book-length narratives about characters and settings that I invented. And that’s a huge part of video games—whether it’s the massive worlds in a lot of role-playing games (RPGs) or even just the Mushroom Kingdom in the Mario series. The escape of putting on someone else’s identity and playing as them in a first-person video game or RPG is very similar to the feeling of putting on someone else’s identity in first-person persona poems. In Wolf Tours, I get to think about and perceive the world through the eyes of a lonely, brokenhearted lesbian wolf named Rodney, who doesn’t speak any human language. That gives me a new perspective that’s just as fun as pretending to be James Bond and saving the world in GoldenEye 007.
And finally, since you mentioned the poems in the Colorado Review, I do think that after writing GoldenEye 007, I was thinking a lot about guns. But of course, you can’t live in America right now—and you certainly can’t live in America and be a parent—and not think a lot about guns. Part of me fundamentally wanted to understand guns better when I wrote this book. I did a lot of research into the history of violence in video games. I had my friend Derek take me out to the shooting range, and I shot some guns that were very similar to the ones used in GoldenEye 007 just to see what that felt like in real life compared to in the game. Guns are always on my mind, and poetry is a way to explore and process any extremely intense feeling.
EP: Yeah, absolutely. I’m really drawn to what you said about world-building. I had seen that some of your previous collections were similar to Wolf Tours in that they contained a sustained narrative. I’m wondering what draws you toward the sustained narrative, rather than individual poems in your collections?
AK: In my earliest years learning poetry, I was taught to write individual polished poems that could be dumped into an anthology and shine totally on their own, like little jewels. I struggled with the fact that this approach meant that every single new poem I wrote had to have this momentous beginning and this gut-wrenching conclusion. When I was in graduate school, I took a class on poetic sequences with Eric Pankey, and it changed my life because it introduced me to novels in verse. When I read Autobiography of Red by Anne Carson, I thought, wait, you’re allowed to do this? You’re allowed to tell a story with characters and narrative like a novel? It blew my mind. I remember Eric saying that novelists have it easy because they get to invent a world, and then the whole time they’re working on that project, they keep coming back to that same world that’s waiting for them. For poets, every time you write a new poem, you have to invent the world again. I realized it feels much more natural for me to create a universe and then create individual poems that constellate that universe. It helps me when I’m writing a collection to see where the narrative gaps are, so I know what poem I need to write next. I can give in to obsessions or motifs that keep coming up over and over. I love operating in longer forms.
EP: When I have this opportunity to talk to a poet, I’m always interested in motivations and inspirations. You seem to have an abundance of both given the work you are doing in poetry, podcasting, publishing, teaching and more. What sustains your work as a poet, and what projects are you currently working on—poetry and otherwise?
AK: There are two main things. The first is love. I’ve always thought of myself as a love poet. I sometimes feel like there is so much love within my body that I cannot possibly contain it all–I have to put it down somewhere. I have to sing it. I have to write it. I have to say it. I have to move it outside of myself and share it. There’s also a documentary element to this. As a parent, I want to preserve some part of my daughter at the age of acquiring language for the first time, and I want to preserve the moment of being in the hospital holding my son hours after he was born. Poetry gives us a place to do that.
The second thing that sustains me is curiosity. I think best through poetry. Poetry is my native language. A lot of times, when I’m writing a poem, I’m doing it to see how I feel about something or to process something. It always feels more natural to do this in verse. I’m also very curious about different genres, disciplines, and media, so I’m lucky I work at a school that allows me the space to pursue multiple interests. I’ve presented at conferences on very diverse topics like rhetoric, women’s studies, and religion. I love to explore many different areas because each one offers an opportunity to see the world through a new lens.
For instance, I’m currently working on my first novel, and the most fascinating thing for me has been learning about pacing and the ways that we’re asking our readers to participate in the act of reading. All the advice you get when you’re writing a novel is that you have to get the reader obsessed—get them turning pages so that they can’t put your book down. But when I’m writing poems, my goal is to make them put the book down. My goal is to stop the reader in their tracks, or at least to make them slow down and think. It’s the exact opposite goal, and I’m having so much fun thinking about this new type of reader engagement.
EP: I never really considered the difference of pacing between the novel form and working in the poetic form. I can see how that would be even more relevant to your work because you write in sustained narratives even in your poetry collections.
AK: I can see myself operating as a poet while writing the novel. Maybe all novelists feel this way, but my biggest frustration is that I can’t see it all at once. When I write a poem, I can print it out and look at it all in one place. The novel is so unwieldy; there are so many pages you can’t just look at it all at once. I’m trying to find ways to storyboard it all out and make it digestible to me. Scrivener software really helps with that. But I’m thinking very much like a poet, wondering, is every chapter break like a line break, or a stanza a break? I’ve really been thinking hard about what a chapter is, and I’ve been asking all my fiction friends questions about how to open and close a chapter. It’s been fascinating to learn about.
EP: Thanks for sharing more about the projects you have going on right now! It’s also great to hear about what sustains you as a poet. It’s lovely to consider how love and curiosity fuel your work.
AK: I’ve talked about this elsewhere, but having kids is huge for that because they’re little curiosity machines. Their entire purpose when they’re tiny is to be curious, and to learn, and to figure out everything, including language. And my job is to figure out language, too. So I Look at my kids and learn from them—I especially to remember the pure joys of language. Every time my son learns a new word, it’s like this little gem that he’s picked up. He just learned the word “eat,” and knowing that word allows him to communicate one of his most pressing goals and desires, which is something adults take for granted. Poets are supposed to be the ones who remind us about the material preciousness of each and every word, but babies are still way better at it.
Erin Peters is an MFA student in poetry at Colorado State University, where she serves as an associate editor for Colorado Review. Her writing is interested in the connections between desert environments and the human body.