by Molly Nortman
ALL Review: How did you get your start writing poetry? What’s your origin story?
Rodlyn-mae Banting: I feel like I've just been writing it my whole life. I turned to writing at a really young age, and it was just self-expression. I kind of hid or coded my own experiences into fiction. I was exposed to creative writing in school and always gravitated toward it. I remember winning my first poetry award in the eighth grade from the public library, and that was one of those pivotal moments where I thought, ‘I really like this.’ It helped me channel different ideas and different emotions, and I just kept writing from there.
AR: What were your early influences, and what’s influencing you lately?
RB: Early on, I was influenced by the classic Mary Oliver, and I do return to her every now and then when I'm feeling kind of low and just need something to mull over or, like, a bite-sized poem. These days, in terms of poetry, I love Ada Limón. I love Donika Kelly. Li-Young Lee is also one of those really great inspirations for me. I love how he meditates on intimate and quiet moments. Those are the big influences for me.
AR: How has your experience in the Gender and Women’s Studies field impacted your poetry?
RB: I think it actually has a bit of an antagonistic relationship with my poetry. I consider myself a love poet, or have considered myself a love poet in the past. And that's something that I always think isn't important or feminist enough, so I think sometimes my scholarly pursuits contrast with what I channel into my poetry. But I also think scholars like bell hooks and Audre Lorde would say that love is so central to the feminist movement. Wanting things to be better and to improve our relationships with each other is so central to that, so in a roundabout way I could consider my poetry as a feminist pursuit. I think sometimes the political part of my brain and the poetic part of my brain don't necessarily mesh. I definitely have pursued projects in the past that speak directly to political situations or ideas that I'm exploring through poetry, but that's not something I necessarily gravitate towards in the everyday.
AR: You do other writing work outside of poetry—freelance, Jezebel, etc.—how does this work inform/influence your poetry writing process, and vice versa?
RB: I would say that in the past they’ve been particularly separate. That's one of the things I find joy in, having those different challenges and different creative approaches where I can exercise different parts of my brain. But something that I've been realizing recently is at Jezebel we definitely provide that feminist perspective on the news, but also a lot of the time it's cheeky, and it pokes a little bit of fun at things. I've been trying to channel that kind of humor in my poetry recently. I consider myself to be a very sad, very serious poet, but I've been trying to have more of an element of play in the voice that I use in poetry.
AR: What does a good writing day look like for you?
RB: It’s really about having the time to clear my head in order to write. I had Filipino American creative writer Grace Talusan as an instructor. She has this ritual of taking 5 or 10 minutes every morning to write down everything that you're thinking about, all the anxieties you have that you don't want to carry into that writing practice, just getting it all out there before starting. That's really important for me, finding that quiet and being able to put my mind in a place to handle those emotions with creative energy. Lately, I don't find a lot of that time, but I'm really cherishing those moments of solitude, even if it's just my thirty-minute commute on the subway, taking that time to meditate and then maybe jot something down in the Notes app, or on a Google doc, or something like that. It comes in bits and pieces right now, but finding that quiet is really central to a good writing day for me.
AR: What is your writing process like? How do you begin? How do you know when a poem is finished?
RB: That's something that I've always grappled with. When do you really know if the poem is over? Does it want to stay in that structure? Could it be something else? Are there two different poems that are trying to be written at the same time? Do these belong together? In the past, I've definitely written in a more instinctual way, as catharsis. Especially in periods of heartbreak, I'll open a Google doc and just go for it. Recently though, being at a more stable point in my life, there's a lot of just mulling over ideas and maybe jotting a few things down, starting a verse or two, and then coming back to it as the ideas ebb and flow.
AR: Do you have a favorite poem that you’ve written, or one you’re particularly proud of?
RB: I wrote a poem on the morning of my twenty-fourth birthday. I was in Madison, and just really in love with life, and really grateful for the community that I’d built there. The weather was beautiful, and the lakes were beautiful. I think the official title is “Postcard to a Lover Never Sent.” I was telling this person in the poem about the life I had built for myself and the beauty in that. I think in many ways it is a love letter, a love poem, to Madison. So that’s probably one of my favorites as of late.
AR: What are you working on now?
RB: I’m kind of in the middle of a bunch of different projects. I am working on a collection of essays looking at white femininity and my relationship to it, being outside of it and what it looks like existing in spaces where that is so central. And then I'm also working on some essays relating to family trauma and these spaces in which intimacy is supposed to be present and what gets created, what takes up space, in the absence of that. And then some poems here and there. I’ve been interrogating a lot of these ideas. I actually just relocated to New York from Madison, and I'm from here originally, so I'm thinking a lot about these ideas of homecoming and cultural constructions around homecoming, and what the reality of it looks like for better or worse.
AR: What is bringing you joy right now? Where do you find hope?
RB: I’m in this period of transition, so it’s kind of hard to find the space to quiet down, but I have been turning a lot to my writing, and other people's writing, for that joy. Because so much of my work is critiquing things, I don't have a lot of time to just consume things for pleasure. Fiction is something I'm really unfamiliar with creating wise, and I also don't get to read it a lot. So I've been reading Happy Hour, which is a novel by Marlowe Granados just because I want something fun and entertaining. This is also my first time living near my family in seven years, so it's been nice to just spend time with them on the weekends, really relishing what I'm calling my ‘state school era’ where I’m just home every weekend.
AR: Is there anything else you’d like to add?
RB: Just that Madison was really formative to a lot of my writing. I had a really tender group of Filipino American writers there who really pushed me, and it was great to be in community with them. We read together at Room of One’s Own last year in October for Filipino American History Month. There’s such a great art community in Madison, and I’m grateful to have been a part of it and to continue to be a part of it, hopefully, in some tangential ways. I’m really excited to come back and see everyone.
