Brittany Cavallaro discusses her poems in the Spring 2025 issue of Colorado Review, working in multiple genres, and more with managing editor Izzy Martens.
Brittany Cavallaro is the author of the poetry collections GIRL-KING and UNHISTORICAL (University of Akron Press). Individual poems have appeared in American Poetry Review, Yale Review, Southern Review, and elsewhere. Cavallaro is also the New York Times bestselling author of novels for young adults. She teaches creative writing at Interlochen.
Izzy Martens: I felt really drawn to your two poems, “Heartless” and “We Had Fun in the Dark,” and I think that’s partly because they feel so human to me. Both of them feel very situated in the human experience. Tell us a little bit about how you think about situating your poetry and the intention behind those choices.
Brittany Cavallaro: For the first ten years after my MFA, when I was writing my first two collections of poems, I was really interested in the surreal and the metaphorical. I was interested in imagined landscapes. I really loved, and still love, Donald Revell’s work, and was fascinated by writing poems that felt set in a kind of “no place” that could also be every place. Places that had a kind of dream logic. And I don’t think that’s something that I’ve entirely abandoned. Looking at these two poems, I think there is more than a little bit of dream logic here. But for me, at a certain point, I felt like my instinct to immediately go to that space when I was writing a poem was a kind of avoidance.
I’ve always had a pretty fraught relationship with the material of your life needing to be the material of your art. It feels a little tyrannical. Like, if I want to write a poem about Sherlock Holmes, then by golly, that’s what I’m going to do! But I also feel like there is a certain amount of hiding that goes into the desire to exist outside of the real, because, ultimately, what the surreal and what the “no place” are meant to do is to give us a better sense of the real. I didn’t want to be a poet who couldn’t do that, so I started challenging myself in the collections where these poems are featured to start with the domestic as the place where we are situated.
For me, the domestic is a place of discovery. The domestic is a place where much of the weird and the surreal springs from and so that was something I was thinking about with these poems.
IM: I feel like domesticity is a really interesting topic for the moment. And you said something that I want to carry forward, which is the initial instinct to shy away from the domestic. In both of these poems, we explored themes of what it means to watch and what it means to see. I picked out a few lines. In “Heartless,” we’ve got the lines “you do it loud, on a stage and “I’m watching it from miles away through binoculars.” Then, in “We Had Fun in the Dark,” we have the lines “Could I call it misdirection if I couldn’t see?” and “Why, the bride was asking, were my flood lights always on?” It felt like this sense of seeing versus being seen was being explored, but also what we shine light on versus, maybe, what’s in the dark. Were you thinking about these themes?
BC: I love that reading, that’s really smart. I think that both of these poems are dealing with a certain kind of denial, where you find that you can avoid looking directly at certain relationships or situations in your emotional life until you are watching someone else watch your situation. I think that that’s a pretty common experience. In “We Had Fun in the Dark,” we have the next door wedding, so we have this idea of one marriage held up against another marriage. Also, the vantage point of someone who can look over the fence at you, and who has certain ideas about what’s happening, literally and metaphorically, in your house versus what’s happening in theirs.
In “Heartless,” it’s certainly about seeing and being seen, but it has more to do with the idea of acting, and the idea of seeing yourself cast into a role.
I think about this intense life-changing conversation I had with someone. I was doing the dishes and all I could think about was the fact that I was doing the dishes; I was watching myself do the dishes. I was talking to a friend about it later, and he was like, “Oh, you were totally in an indie movie doing the dishes.” It’s that moment when you feel like you have been cantilevered into an existing narrative, like, “How can I get off this stage? I would love to get off this stage.” That feeling. I think both of these poems are really interested in the idea of culpability. I think they have to do with truth, more than anything.
IM: It’s so wonderful to be able to hear your insights and perspectives on these two pieces. These two poems explore relationships. How would you guide a reader to think about how relationships inform not only how we see ourselves but also our art and our experience of being in the world?
BC: One thing I come back to a lot in my writing is the idea of privacy. What “private” means and the negotiations that you have to make as a writer when it comes to privacy. At all times I am giving things away that I don’t mean to give away, even if I’m trying to actively avoid a subject, just because of the nature of what I do, because I’m a writer.
I think understanding our relationships has to come from applying other pieces of art back to ourselves. I find that when I am looking to understand something it often needs to come through the presentation of someone else’s experience. We think of the lyric poem, and I forgot who said this, but there’s this idea of the lyric poem as the voice overheard or the voice in the next room–something that wasn’t meant to be overheard and yet is there for us to overhear. I really think that’s where our true understanding of relationships comes from: from “overhearing” the conversations that were too private or too intense for us to overhear.
IM: Yeah, absolutely. My genre of study is nonfiction, and so we talk a lot about exploring on the page and trying to make sense of your own experience through the act of writing. How sometimes you don’t even know what you’re trying to say until you get it onto the page, and that’s another way to reflect your life back to you.
BC: Yeah, absolutely. Yeah.
IM: So, on the topic of genre, I understand that in addition to your work as a poet, you’re also a fiction writer. I’m curious about the ways in which you approach your different genres. Do they require different headspaces? Do you toggle back and forth?
BC: It’s interesting, because the sad reality of the world is that no one is really waiting with bated breath for your next poem. Whereas in fiction, I’m sometimes in a situation where contracts have been signed and people are waiting! (Obviously I know I’m overlooking situations where people do, in fact, need to produce poetry to somebody else’s demand, but in my experience, it’s been that way.) But poetry is very much something that I do because I have the impulse to. Poetry makes nothing happen, and so that’s why I think I love it more than anything else in the world. For me, it’s sort of the purest form of expression.
It’s also interesting: I can tell just by rereading these poems that I was not actively writing fiction while I was writing them. When I’m writing fiction, my poetry gets so much less narrative. It’s sort of like all of my narrative impulse is taken up in writing fiction, and when I come to poetry I’m desperate for something else. I’m someone who loves narrative and when I’m not actively writing fiction my poems tend to be more interested in story.
IM: That’s really fascinating. I mean, it’s amazing to me that you can look at those poems and catch that headspace.
BC: Yeah you have to just laugh at yourself when you’re looking over the last few weeks of work and you’re like, “I was eating a lot of Starbursts because Starbursts are all over the place in my poems” or “Oh, I wasn’t writing fiction because these poems are just short stories.”
IM: Totally. Is there anything else that you want to tell our audience about your work in general? What’s exciting you at the moment? What are your interests right now?
BC: Yeah, you know, one of the most interesting poetry projects I’ve worked on recently was at the end of last year. I put together a list of 50 contemporary poets on the best poems that they read the year before. I was trying to kind of create an anthology of sorts. The caveat was that the poems that were chosen had to be available online and behind a paywall. This was maybe the most interesting thing that had happened to me in a long time because suddenly I had all of these people who I really admired and respected being like, “Here’s a poet that you haven’t heard of” and “You absolutely have to go read this.” It reminds me of when you pick up a really wonderful issue of a literary magazine–all hits, no misses, all the way through. Putting together that article showed me that there are so many corners of the poetry world that are invisible to us unless somebody else can point us in those directions.
IM: I love that. It’s an important call for us all to continue to look for those unheard voices. I’m interested in those moments in your writing life when you hit a block or a challenge. What do you personally do to move past that? Or, how do you think about the life of a writer in general?
BC: For me, a lot of writer’s block comes from a combination of feeling like a fraud and feeling bored with myself and what I have to say. Those are two really difficult headspaces. Commonly, people will tell you that you have to go out and experience new things, read new things. All of these things are true, but when you’re sitting down trying to make an essay work or a poem work you can’t exactly be like, “Today I will go to Six Flags so that I have something to write about.” So it has to be a mentality shift. I mean, the advice I’m about to give is advice that I’ve gotten, and I don’t think it’s revelatory, but it’s something I’ve started doing in the last few years. I have a note on my phone and whenever I see an image or a weird piece of phrasing or writing or something out in the world that feels like it has potential, I will jot it down without context. When I’m having a really bad writing day, I do an exercise where I pull that up. I don’t understand the significance of the notes anymore, which is fun, right? They’ve become defamiliarized in that way. I try to take as many of those notes as possible and fit them into the thing that I am working on, because they’re all things that I found energizing at some point. It’s sort of like a “break glass in case of emergency.” I wrote an abecedarian last year where I just cleared the house of everything in the note and writing it was the most fun I’d had in a long time.
I think just making sure that you are building in little “feel safes” for yourself. I think about “Good Brittany.” Like, “What is Good Brittany doing out in the world to make ‘Sad Brittany’s’ life easier.” And Good Brittany is out there thinking about the really weird lawn ornaments the dentist down the street puts out during Halloween every year and making a note about it.
IM: I love that. I love that because it’s a reminder that writing can be fun.
BC: It needs to be. There needs to be pleasure in it. There needs to be delight. I feel like I only read to be delighted, and you can be delighted in challenging ways. I think there’s probably a lot more to be said about how delight and pleasure can be applied to really difficult things, because I think that they can. I think if you are not having fun on the page, your reader can immediately tell.
IM: Yeah, even in the two poems we looked at today, the subject matter could be considered heavier or more serious, but I think you do see those moments of delight. You know, you’ve got the vodka martini and the Swiss Roll and all of those things that spark a reminder to the reader that there’s hard stuff in the world, but there’s also a lot of joy. There’s also . . .
BC: Swiss Rolls.
IM: There’s also Swiss Rolls.
Izzy Martens is a first-year MFA candidate in nonfiction. She is the co-author of the book Holding Space: A Guide to Mindful Facilitation. Her essays have been published in The Tiger Moth Review and The Metaworker, among others. She is the Managing Editor of Colorado Review.