‘Hell Yeah!’ A Talk with Acclaimed Niagara Falls Poet Rachelle Toarmino

Rachelle Toarmino (Photo provided)

(EDITOR’S NOTE — Rachelle Toarmino is an award-winning poet from Niagara Falls whose latest book, ‘Hell Yeah’ — (which you can order HERE) — is a collection of poems published by Third Man Books. She is also the author of ‘That Ex’ (2020), as well as several chapbooks including ‘My Science,’ for which she won the 2024 Sixth Finch Chapbook Contest. Her work has appeared in The American Poetry Review, Bennington Review, Literary Hub, Poets.org, The Slowdown and Omnidawn, which awarded her the 2024 Single Poem Broadside Prize. The curator of the popular online press, Peach Mag, Rachelle was a featured panelist at Indie Author Day in 2024. She has also worked with the Just Buffalo Literacy Center as a teaching artist. 1120 Press writer Benjamin Joe recently spoke with Rachelle about her work, and we’re thrilled to bring you that conversation below. We’re thankful for her time. You can learn more about Rachelle and her poetry, and read excerpts from ‘Hell Yeah,’ at her website HERE.)

1120 PRESS: Thank you for taking the time to speak with us. Let’s start with your Hell Yeah, which is a follow-up to That Ex, an absolute gem of a book. Since That Ex, there's been a few chapbooks that you've also penned, but Hell Yeah is your second book of poetry. What makes it different from your chapbooks?

RACHELLE TOARMINO: All my chapbooks have been shorter experiments or serial poems in which I exhaust a technique until I’ve discovered something about language. That Ex and Hell Yeah are similar as books in that they collect these and other experiments, only instead of technique, the throughline is thematic: similar concerns and concepts explored or expressed through various procedures, forms, and situations. Outside the individual poems, the discovery of my books comes not from the application of a technique but from sequence, juxtaposition, and assembly.

1120: Could you briefly describe Hell Yeah? What influences this work that differs from That Ex?

RT: While writing the poems in That Ex, I was influenced by the Gurlesque and campy performances of femininity; the role of pop media in our constructions of love and loss; and the sense of intimacy that I experienced in the poems of Frank O’Hara, Alice Notley, Anne Carson, and others. The situations in Hell Yeah range much more widely than in That Ex. My interest narrowed to common and inherited speech, but my methods multiplied as I looked at that interest from a variety of angles: romance, family, friendship, enmity, work, social media, digital fora, creative community, artistic lineage, and other relationships.

The influences behind Hell Yeah are likewise various, with several guides behind each poem, but the book’s most consistent godparents include Jack Spicer and his poetics of correspondence; Emily Dickinson’s thesis-driven poems and their even levels of curiosity and awe; the experimentation, play, and love of languages and language itself in the work of Bernadette Mayer; the conviction and frankness of CAConrad’s poems; the concision and strangeness of Hoa Nguyen’s poems; and the bighearted life of the archive in the poems and projects of Peter Gizzi and Nick Sturm.

1120: The poem "Flowers, Poems, Flower Poems" seems to really collect a lot of fans and critical review. Tell us if we’re wrong, but it's almost a ballad to womanhood that seems to go beyond any biological definition. The idea that a woman knows, or women are like flowers from yourself, bears a lot of weight, if that is what you're saying at all. How can we treat women in our lives and as a part of society as a whole?

RT: It is not my intention for people to come to my poems to learn how to treat the women in their lives.

1120: Why write poetry? Is it a release or merely a function? Is there a love for it or are you like a cook who makes the best pancakes, but would really rather sleep in? How are you drawn, or driven, to creating what you create?

RT: I write poems when I have ideas or questions that take the shape of poems. I do love it. Beyond that, I don’t know, and I’m okay with not knowing. Poems don’t need to justify themselves.

1120: Your website mentions your education — an MFA in poetry from UMass Amherst. As an educator yourself, what value is there in learning poetry and what do you take from your education in poetry?

RT: I pursued an MFA in poetry to spend three years reading, writing, and thinking about poetry. I was interested in gaining a greater awareness of what poems can be and do, how the poets before me have shaped and changed the language, and how the poets around me are currently trying to. I do believe I am a more-skilled poet as a consequence of that education, but there are many ways to learn. You don’t need to go the MFA route, but you do need to find other ways to continue challenging yourself, which can be as simple as reading and experimenting more. Otherwise, you get bored. That’s what I tell my students: it’s the difference between a life of enjoying your thoughts and not.

1120: Thank you, again, for speaking with us. Last question: How many more poetry books will we be seeing from you?

RT: I’m following a few interests and don’t know yet which will become books, but I hope I write poetry for the rest of my life.