Editor-in-Chief Sean Cho A
I first met AJ White through his work. His poem “The Poem You Asked For” landed in the submission queue at Overheard, and I remember being struck by its vivid openness and leaps into memory. Readers of The Account may also remember AJ’s work from our Spring 2025 NaPoMo issue, where we had the opportunity to showcase two of his poems.
His debut collection, Blue Loop, won the National Poetry Series, selected by Chelsea Dingman for University of Georgia Press.
The collection navigates the luminous wreckage of addiction and its aftermath with a steadiness that never pretends clarity.
It does not matter what we will be,
only what we refuse to be. — “Blue Loop” (36 pg.)
The collection’s speaker is filled with hard-won wisdom, applying pressure to understanding the world’s logic while still grappling with how to inhabit it.
In late February 2026, AJ and I were in conversation discussing topics ranging from memory and time as literary architecture to the apostrophic “you” as both ethical responsibility and open door.
SCA: AJ! Thanks for doing this. We should probably give some background for the folks at home: since publishing your work, we’ve been digital pen pals. You’ve always said smart and insightful things, so I was interested in taking our conversation outside of a Gmail inbox and into the public sphere.
In an interview with rob mclennan, you mentioned spending a decade working on Blue Loop. I imagine you were a lot of different people during that time. I’m interested in hearing about how you were thinking about memory and time. I’m thinking about individual poems like “No More Stories, No More Meaning,” where we open on an image from the speaker’s childhood—a rabbit in their backyard—then move toward this striking image:
“I am thirty years old lying in sweat & vomit
in a motel in this hometown, stumbling down the street.” (14 pg.)
Yet we end with the revelation:
“after I forget this, after my sister forgets this, after my mother
& father forget this—will this still have happened to me” (14 pg.)
Readers experience a lot of temporal leaps. Memory and the act of remembering seem to hold a vital place in self-making for the speaker.
How did your own relationship to memory shift over that decade of writing, and how did that shape the way you structured these movements through time?
AW: What a brilliant and graceful question, Sean. And not even something we’ve really talked about before in all our conversations! I’m so glad to begin here.
This book—and my current, ongoing work—is more about time than anything else, I think. It’s been difficult to talk about, because my work is perhaps more obviously about other, neighboring concerns: addiction, recovery, loss, meditation, survival.
In the ten years in which the concerns of this book were taking shape, I was moving through different periods in my relationship to my addiction, alcoholism. I moved from what I would call pre-active addiction to active addiction to post-active addiction, which I would call recovery. Through these movements, what I recognized—and, more importantly, what I felt—was the impact of time on my life. Time had (and in many ways still has) a hold on me. I was making frequent, nearly incessant alterations, interruptions, to my plans and life out of different kinds of fears about time (i.e. boredom, anxiety, regret, dread, loss aversion, emptiness … I could go on).
When you are under the sway of any kind of addiction, you are always waiting. You are waiting to use again. You are waiting for the high to wear off and preempting and combatting that by using more. You are then, extraordinarily painfully, when you can’t physically use any more, waiting for the most acute withdrawal effects to subside. These can be deadly and require hospitalization for a heavy drinker. Then, when you are very actively trying to recover—through meetings, therapy, meditation, willpower (none of which worked, on their own, for me, through years of trying to get sober), you are waiting, waiting, waiting to become the person you are trying so hard to become.
After you enter recovery, you are still anxiously waiting, often: anticipating cravings, anticipating relapse. Time anxiety continues to dictate choices and the emotionality of those choices. You have to learn, as the book says, to distract, to delay. These are time maneuvers.
All that is to say: other poets have other obsessions, external powers, or bewilderments they write about. I know what has held my (involuntary) attention and intention for many years. It’s not what I consider a deity. It’s not another human or group of humans. It’s time, and thinking about time, and being anxious about the passage of time, that co-authors my feelings, actions, and subconscious.
I don’t prioritize structuring these thoughts. I don’t consciously structure much about those poems that feel very free-ranging in scope and time. I try to hold all moments together. I remember, I anticipate, I act in the moment. To move between moments in time does not feel like a plan for me. I suppose the side-effect of having time as an obsession is that you also kind of unlock it as a literary weapon. Because you are, anxiously, unstuck in time, you are also poetically unstuck and have ready access to memory and to future anticipatory occurrences: autonomy of movement across time.
SCA: I love this, AJ. I liked the repetition of “waiting” throughout your response here. Blue Loop seems to suggest the inevitability of waiting—waiting as a state of being rather than a means to an end.
In this waiting state, the speaker often finds himself in repetitive reflection: lines are repeated, then followed by new insights. For example, “Lots of theories now I love” is followed by
tomatoes like darkrooms
detonate from inside out
watch the sun’s arms pump
their nectar into flame. — “Blue Loop” (37 pg.)
and later, is followed by “The one where existence is / Transformative happenings” (“Cloud Absolves,” 71 pg.).
In an interview with BingUNews, you coined this as the “self-cento”—a riff on the cento in which lines from elsewhere in the collection return again on the page. It feels especially apt for a book so full of self-reflection.
How did you find yourself writing in this form? What did this repetition afford you in your work?
AW: I would call them self-centos, yes. Cento, from Latin, derives from a word for quilt or piecemeal garment. A cento is quite an old form, but a traditional cento’s poetic quilt, as you say, is made of small pieces of fabric from others’ work, whether they be lines from poems, songs, or other media.
There are lots of references to the work of others in this book, but the self-centos (the five poems titled “Blue Loop” that, together, constitute most of the book’s central section) are there because I was trying to quilt a present-day life together from pieces of both a former (unstable) and a future (stable) life. I wanted them to be right in the middle of the book so that roughly half the lines, at that point, are lines the reader has seen before, while half the lines are lines the reader can anticipate seeing again later in other, so-far-unknown contexts. This technique, honestly, goes back to time: it mirrors, for me, the way the past (longing) and the future (anxiety: or waiting, as you say) impinge equally upon the speaker’s wellness.
This is a version of a story I hear a lot about poets and the forms that make their books unique: I had one self-cento. It was a brand new thing. For a little while it was the book’s first poem. But I was getting feedback, both from others and from myself, that, like, no one knows what this is. It’s all alone, formally. So I wrote the other four self-centos, finally, the day before I submitted this book to its last round of prizes. I knew I had to get them done and in the book. I knew where I wanted them to go. So I printed the whole book out, I underlined and cut out with scissors every super-reactive line I could find, then I started arranging those lines into poems. The poems’ patterns (structure), while not identical, are similar. As a lot of poets and writers also know, when you’re on, you’re on. Especially working with your own favorite lines of your work. You know not only how they operate, but how they can operate.
I like that, in many instances like the one you quote, they show further possibilities of the same language. These poems are about you (the former partner, one subject of the speaker’s longing) in a later poem becomes, in a blue loop: these poems are about you: the past you cannot see clearly, & the future you cannot see through. Time, again, as a primary subject of the book.
SCA: That’s awesome, AJ. I liked how you brought your process into the physical world with the scissors and collage method. The whole process of using your own reactive line(s) to turn on the writing, or hit a type of flow state, feels like a good start to a writing prompt.
The end of your response brought me to another point I wanted to discuss: the “you” throughout your work. There are poems like “We Were Never Really Going to Get Away” where the “you” feels concretely legible to the reader:
we had been apart a few months
the last time I saw you I let you
know I had been sober 8 weeks
for the first time in 8 years you
said fantastic we had coffee you
said you look good where did
you get that shirt you said do
you want to get a drink you
said you know we were never
really going to get away
-“We Were Never Really Going to Get Away” (13 pg.)
But elsewhere, such as in “The Poem You Asked For,” the “you” is multifaceted: the former self, loved ones, maybe even a call to society at large. I’m thinking about moments in Blue Loop where the speaker and the “you” seem to operate as one, the speaker projecting onto the “you,” versus moments where the “you” carries different logics and intentions than the speaker.
I wondered how the “you operates” in both the writing and the writing process as a whole. I was thinking about the “you” vs. the speaker and how the two operated as one (the speaker projecting for the “you”) but how the “you” may operate with a different way of thinking as the speaker in the world of the collection.
AW: I love this question. I especially love the generosity (and wisdom) to ask about the “you” not just in the operation of the poem, but the operation of “you” in a poet’s writing process.
I think about the pronoun “you” in the context of verse poetics constantly. I clearly also think about it differently than many others, because while this question has come up, in many different forms, relatively often, it’s not a question I ask myself. The way poetry-creation works in my mind, it’s like asking a carpenter or a bricklayer why they use the same nail or the same mortar again and again. It’s the right nail; it’s the right mortar: it works.
I also try to describe it thusly: “you” is similar to “god” to me. In the context of literature, “god” is an allusion that describes, within one simple word, a very cogent relational situation that invokes power and knowledge discrepancies. “You” is an efficient, short pronoun that very cogently evokes a very wide, useful range of relational values in poetry: intimacy, direct address, familiarity, generosity, personhood, ongoingness. It also carries a kind of situational irony that I like for my work: the reader knows the “you” is not present, but the poet keeps addressing this “you” as if they, in some way, are. As a poet, you get the benefit of all these associations plus that tension simply by using the word.
Then, further, using “you” demands responsibility of the poet. As you say, the real “you” does have different logics, intentions, selfhood, and probably an entirely different take on events than does the speaker. I have to craft poems to a “you” that take into account the you’s perspective, even though that perspective is inaccessible to me. I like and need that responsibility.
Finally, as is always my intention in poems, rather than keeping readers out, “you” invites readers in. “You” is open. You know many “you”s. If a poet writes “my son,” “my husband,” “dear beloved,” it forecloses possibilities. No one reads a poem by Sappho, or by Emily Dickinson, or by Jean Valentine, and is, like, without knowing who these yous are, I can’t enter the poem. We can enter the poem more fully not knowing, or partially knowing. Poetry is about what we don’t know.
Most of the poems in question are iterations of apostrophic verse, also called, simply, apostrophe. Apostrophe is another ancient form in which someone or something dead or absent is addressed as if it or they is/are present. We don’t practice apostrophic verse so often these days as we do elegy, say, so it feels a little strained to us, perhaps. Or, as you say, the strain comes when the poet juxtaposes apostrophe with poems that use “you” less concretely and without signaling that shift. All my “you”s are apostrophic, though. The former self, the future self, the reader, the beloved, family members who have passed on, figures of authority: these “you”s are inaccessible. And yet, and yet. Using “you” brings them back and, usefully, often painfully, close.
SCA: Yeah, I love thinking about the “you” as both a responsibility for the poet and a doorway for the poem: very smart.
Okay, last question. I had a lot of different directions for this, but your responses throughout led me to think about your implementation of research. In a reading of “The Suscitation of God”, you mentioned your interest in Buddhist meditation guides. The title of the collection is named after an astronomy abnormality. Even in this interview alone, you’ve mentioned Latin roots and ancient forms. Clearly there’s a lot of pre-work work being done here before the pen hits the page.
How does research work its way into your writing process? And how did poetry become the “product” as opposed to other forms of writing.
AW: Research is life! My desire to know and—much more importantly, to understand—is insatiable. So much so that, in fact, I think it absolutely informed or contributed to my illness. If you are never satisfied in your immense lack of understanding of people and events, you may turn to unhealthy outlets to cope with that dissatisfaction or consider it a personal defect, if you are a consistently self-critical person.
And yet, I find practicing poetry so peaceful because intellectual knowledge must take a back seat, in poems. It must inform, shape, outline, but not be the vehicle of delivery. The vehicle of delivery, of course, must be an emotional experience that is also a bridge or network between poet, speaker, language, and reader.
Another poem in the book, “Letter of Six Intentions,” follows the Buddhist guru Tilopa’s seven-word, complete guide to how to live with intention, peace, and toward enlightenment (and toward a practice called Mahamudra—or the experience of mind-emptiness). It is:
1) Don’t Recall (don’t live in the past)
2) Don’t Imagine (don’t live anticipating the future)
3) Don’t Think (don’t live through intellectualization)
4) Don’t Examine (don’t analyze, like for cause and effect)
5) Don’t Control (seems obvious)
6) Rest (is obvious)
This teaching is very very difficult to practice! Most of my actions and reactions invoke, automatically, several discouraged tendencies at once. I love, of course, and find shelter in knowing that there is only one thing we are encouraged to do—we should all seek more rest.
Poetry, again, is a way of living, thinking, feeling, and practice that encourages and enables me, however, to live closer to these guidelines. I have always taken on intellectual information and formed and reformed paradigms very easily. That’s part, both, of who I am and of who I intend, daily, to be. But I also need balance. I need ways to live less connected to ideas and more connected to feelings and to emotional knowledge and wisdom, both mine and others’. Poetry helps me do that, because an increasingly intellectual poem is not an increasingly successful poem. A poem that feels ever more deeply, richly, originally, authentically: that is how our treasured art advances.
AJ White is a poet and educator from Georgia. AJ’s debut poetry collection, Blue Loop, was selected for the National Poetry Series by Chelsea Dingman and published by University of Georgia Press. AJ has won the Fugue Poetry Prize, The Willie Morris Award for Southern Poetry, and received support from the Sewanee Writers’ Conference. His poems have been published recently in The Account, Best New Poets, Blackbird, Overheard, West Trade Review, and elsewhere. AJ lives and teaches creative writing in New York.