My name’s Savannah Brown. I’m an American poet living in London. I continue trying to write something good.

Terrible digital overwhelm! Irrational fears made rational! The illusion of connection! Over-access to others’ private worlds!

Oh, god. I don’t think it’s just affected our perception but has actually changed the nature of the private moments themselves. A partner’s entire past lies waiting for you to analyse. Whether or not you text with capital letters says something about your personality. TikTok pop psychologists tell me that a good relationship should never make you feel anxious while next to them a cartoon man feverishly collects all the coins from a subway tunnel. It’s fucking insane. So much of intimacy is based in communication so of course things feel different when the way we actually communicate has been upended. And all of this is presented to you in a perpetual slideshow seemingly created for the exclusive purpose of highlighting your own insecurities. Like, no wonder we’re lonely. No wonder the punchline to every joke is that we all want to die.

Well, they all said something I’d wanted to say but in a more articulate way than I could. I’ve been thinking about Jenny Holzer’s “it is in your self-interest to find a way to be very tender” since high school. I was a really sensitive kid and it resonated.

They are equally important, absolutely, and just as real as each other. That dichotomy in my writing started as this almost apologetic thing of like, it’s ridiculous I’m making such a big deal out of this small betrayal or insecurity or whatever when as we speak some cosmic anomaly is tearing through spacetime on its way to destroy us. But it’s all the same thing, the relative chaos of different realities. When I started writing Closer I was very in love and my emotions were genuinely unmanageable. I felt an over-awareness of everything, not from a place of wisdom but neuroticism. Total delusion. Was engaging perpetual self-sabotage. Whee! I spent most of the time writing the collection being very afraid of many things: humiliation, being tricked, unreciprocated vulnerability. Sometimes you can have a breakdown or write a book and I wrote this.

I guess it’s a joke itself that someone so afraid of vulnerability decided to express themselves through an infamously sincere and mockable medium. But no, more than anything poetry has had a profound effect on my life and I think it’s very important, of course. And I take a lot of pleasure in seeing how people respond to what I make. One of my favourite moments as a reader is when an unexpected and profound turn of phrase or idea hits me between the eyes. You can’t get this feeling from your own writing, naturally. So it’s really special to me when somebody mentions they’ve had that experience with something I’ve written. There’s a Franz Wright poem that begins “One of the few pleasures of writing is the thought of one’s book in the hands of a kind-hearted intelligent person somewhere. I can’t remember what the others are right now.”

There’s that great bit in Dead Poets Society where Robin Williams huddles up all his lads and is like, listen, this is English class, but really it’s about beauty, it’s about seduction, it’s about love, it’s about life, this is what consciousness is. It’s all language. I love writing because it’s so solitary and singular and the clearest view into somebody’s head. I find that inspires a real empathy and awareness of other worlds. But really when I said that I didn’t mean it in like a literature will prevail way. It was more selfish than that: I will not die by making sure I’ve said what I want to. There was a record of me here and this was as clear as I could make it. I’m afraid of being misunderstood.

More and more I think vision is kind of sacred. I like when expression is totally undiluted. Also, a lot of advice is not super useful. I’m not talking about editing, which is invaluable, but advice, which is just people saying things. Or it’s something they would have done differently instead of something that makes a poem objectively better. People say “I wouldn’t have done that” and you’re like, yeah, exactly. Honestly with that title, I thought, I’m writing ostensibly for people like me. And if I read that for the first time I would have thought it was funny. Becoming successful young and untraditionally led to a real sense of falsity and lack of confidence in my early twenties and now I’m sort of just pushing ahead and seeing what sticks.

You did! So great! I loved watching people responding to the poems in real time. An ex who inspired a lot of the poems was at the same night you were, and a mutual friend said he spent the whole show digging his fingernails into a wooden beam. What fun!

It’s like when you stick your finger in your boyfriend’s mouth before he finishes yawning, but the yawn is a laugh and the finger is all my sentimentality. Humour makes sincerity more palatable. Hera Lindsay Bird does this so well.

Doomsday came about from a real disillusionment with traditional publishing and a desire to provide a platform for young writers who would have found it difficult to convince other houses of their project’s marketability. It’s been a really fun project. We’re getting ready to announce a pamphlet series coming out this year.

I’m always working on another collection. Moving slightly away from the confessional side of things I think. I’m getting bored of myself.