INTERVIEW: Hollie Hardy (Lions Like Us)
Lions Like Us
Hollie Hardy
Red Light Lit
The Lion with a Soft Roar:
An Interview by Miah Jeffra
Hollie Hardy’s new poetry collection, Lions Like Us, is a love song. With a grateful nod towards nature, Hardy unpacks what it is like to love with a healthy sensibility. The collection is not one of naïve Hollywood-longing love, but of one couched in a body that has lived through tumult, that recognizes and even acknowledges the value of pain. That pain includes past loves lost, as well as the pain of social and cultural discord. Lions Like Us is a book of healing. Hardy’s bold, honest lyric is signature in all of her work, but this collection reveals something more tender, while more so observing outward than erupting from within. Perhaps we call this wisdom.
I met Hollie ten or so years ago out and about in the Bay literary scene, and I was instantly drawn to her. She is a dynamic personality, a hustler, hosting popular reading series like Saturday Night Special (which she still runs) and Flight of Poets, co-organizing the behemoth Beast Crawl Literary Festival—Oakland’s callback to San Francisco’s LitCrawl—and teaching workshops all over the Bay. She has moxie, intelligence, and can wear the hell out of a little black dress.
She has left the Bay, currently living in Austin, but continues to serve as a dedicated literary citizen and teacher, and her presence extends beyond mere region. Now, with her new book published by Jennifer Lewis’ San Francisco-based Red Light Lit Press, Hardy returns to her roots, a place that embraces her full-stop.
This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
Miah Jeffra: Your last book of poetry came out several years ago. Can you talk about the process of writing and publishing this collection?
Hollie Hardy: My first book, How to Take a Bullet, And Other Survival Poems came out ten years ago, on Punk Hostage Press, and it, too, was a long time in the making. I’m not usually a prolific poet, outside of the occasional 30-poems-in-30-days marathon. Sometimes I only write one new poem in a month, on theme for my long-running open mic reading series, Saturday Night Special.
I started writing my latest book, Lions Like Us, in 2017, when I fell for the book’s muse and love poems bloomed on every blank page, wildflowers and thistles. The collection unfurls its story of desire across distance and uncertainty, pandemic isolation, and Black Lives Matter protests, through urban nightscapes and backcountry hikes, from Oakland, to Portland, to Austin. By the time I got to Texas, I’d been working on the book for four years. It felt whole, but I continued to edit and submit for another two years before it found a home with Red Light Lit Press.
MJ: How have you changed as a poet since How to Take a Bullet came out? What influenced your growth as a poet most? What continues to influence your writing practice most?
HH: I wrote my first book in grad school, while I was still learning craft, reading the canon, informed by teachers, peers, workshops. I still love my fierce and funny first book, and I feel like it holds up, but in the last decade, I’ve continued to hone my skills and mature as a poet and as a person. I think my work has evolved to be more refined and crafted—more nuanced, layered, and complex. As a creative, I’m always trying to stretch, and grow.
I’m influenced by whatever is happening in my life and in the world, but also, always, by reading other living poets—Ocean Vuong, Natalie Diaz, Ada Limón, Kaveh Akbar, Donika Kelly, Chen Chen, Megan Fernandes, Richard Siken, Ilya Kaminsky—there are so many amazing poets to learn from!
Since the pandemic upended the world as we knew it, I’ve been teaching Contemporary Poetry Workshops privately online, so I’m always reading, researching, and creating new curriculum, discovering and falling in love with new poets, spending time with their work so I can teach it. In the process of close reading, I learn new techniques and deepen my own voice and practice, expanding my understanding of what’s possible in poetry.
MJ: What do you think makes a poem more nuanced, more complex? How do you witness that in your newer work? And what does that serve the reader?
HH: When I teach poetry workshops, I like to ask new classes what makes good poetry. The first things that come up are usually craft elements—imagery, metaphor, symbol, diction, rhythm, repetition, form, etc. But the next level reaches for subtler music, precision, epiphany, enjambment, surprise, layers of meaning that fit together like a puzzle.
The poems in Lions Like Us endeavor to hold and connect more than one idea or thread at a time, employing wordplay, double meanings, turns that reverse direction, stacked images or complex metaphors with symbolic, connotative, and literal layers.
I was a guest on the Parley Lit podcast last week, and we were discussing a metaphor in my poem, “Another Manhattan.” The lines read:
this cherry is not a metaphor
for loss
the way blood prefers to be inside the body
but rushes away at every opening
a kind of defeat by escaping
A well-known symbol of love, sex, fertility, and femininity, the cherry connotes juiciness, sexiness, pinup and mudflap girls, all the desire and longing embodied in this poem, and in the first section of the book, titled “This Cherry.” At the same time, the image invokes cultural clichés about virginity and purity. So the cherry metaphor/ not metaphor problematizes contradictions in societal expectations for women to be all these things at once, while also being shamed for their sexuality (the virgin-whore dichotomy). The cherry in the poem quietly nods to these ideas, rejecting the “popped cherry” image of virginity with its reductive label of “loss.”
Then the poem turns to blood. Connotatively, it could be blood on the sheets. This blood symbolizes sex and womanhood, but also life itself. When personified, blood too has desires, and sabotages them, like any human. Blood defeats by escaping the body. Here, “escape” takes on a dual meaning. In the final line, the loss metaphor returns as a literal loss of the speaker’s lover, whom she imagines “escaping” by moving away and breaking her heart, in the giddy infancy of their love affair.
This is just one possible way of thinking about a few lines, shared as an example of layers in a metaphor. I love subjectively unpacking other people’s poems, but I’m resistant to deconstructing my own work, at least publicly. I don’t want to impose my meanings. I feel like the role of the reader is to construct their own meaning, and I fear that if I share my intentions, it might limit deeper connections for the audience or demystify the work, rendering it too simple or too complex. I hope the poems in this collection will offer multiple interpretations and paths to understanding, so that readers can discover their own ways in.
MJ: Lions Like Us is much softer in its style, lyric and attitude than your previous collection. What do you believe is the reason for this?
HH: How to Take a Bullet is a collection of how-to poems, with titles appropriated from The Worst-Case Scenario Survival Handbook. I wrote the “survival poems” in the wake of my divorce, when I was trying to redefine myself, to figure out who I was and how to be an empowered single woman. Full of defiance and sharp teeth, I was a woman on a journey, in search of herself, finding herself everywhere. And the poems in that collection hold that edge.
By the time I wrote Lions Like Us, I had long since figured out who I was, and how to have healthy relationships. This collection of love poems is about being vulnerable and taking a chance on love—a book about leaning into risk instead of escaping danger. The didactic second person point of view of my first book gave way to the intimacy and confession of first person in my new book, laying the heart bare, instead of putting on a spiky armor. I think that context lends itself to the softer style of love poems.
MJ: Did you work to develop your voice, or did it hinge first on what you naturally enjoy? Do you consciously consider how much musicality, narrative, etc. you want in your poems?
HH: These are poems whose poem-ness is duende, integral to meaning. As an MFA poet and long-time poetry instructor, I have a sharply honed eye for craft elements—imagery, musicality, diction, form, the line—but a lot of shaping and refining comes in revision. I like to start by hand with ink on paper before moving to my computer to play with the raw material I’ve generated. In terms of story, I tend to prioritize beautiful language and sensory detail over a transparent or linear narrative. I read poetry that way too—first noticing great lines, or surprising turns, then circling back to unwrap meaning on subsequent reads. That said, regardless of a writing prompt or intention, my poems ultimately reveal something about myself (however metaphorical). I think all art is inherently autobiographical on some level, even when it’s fiction, because it’s filtered through the lens of the artist.
MJ: I heard your voice loud and clear in this collection. Just wondering: how did your years as an open mic host influence your poetry?
HH: I love reading my work to audiences! I’ve given hundreds of readings, and I do think that having an audience informs and helps shape my poetry. There are poets who write poems that only make sense on the page because they are quiet poems, or because they are doing something visual that doesn’t translate. Conversely, I have bought books by powerful spoken word poets, who blew me away in performance, but fell flat on the page. There’s nothing wrong with either of these ways of making art, but I want my work to do both whenever possible—to land with audiences and deliver something satisfying and intimate when read in private.
Because many of the poems in Lions Like Us first emerged as Saturday Night Special poems, that audience played an essential role in my creative process. My mom, too, is famously my first listener. I call her up and read her my brand-new drafts, and in that process, I can hear them better. She has two main feedback responses: “Oh, Hollie! That’s your best one yet!” and “Hmmm… hmmm,” which means, “That one’s not fully realized” or “I don’t understand that one yet.”
As an organizer, teacher, and host, I believe deeply in the collaborative community element of poetry, building voice together, reading and listening and clapping for each other, and I have worked hard to create and immerse myself in those kinds of supportive environments for writers.
MJ: You made a big move a few years ago— How has relocation and specifically place influenced your poems?
HH: I lived in the same rent-controlled apartment in Uptown Oakland for 25 years before moving to Austin with my partner. I loved Oakland—the food, the people, the culture, perfect weather for motorcycles, Lake Merritt, Whole Foods across the street, rock climbing, a vibrant and diverse literary community. And my rent was crazy cheap! So, I never planned to leave. I was content, yet change averse.
But my partner was over Oakland—its filth and crime, gentrification, noise, and general unaffordability. He saw (and heard, and smelled) everything I’d learned to filter out.
In the background of all the love poems, Lions Like Us grapples with the question of whether to leave Oakland behind and take a chance on someplace new, and whether love is worth that risk.
Meanwhile, the pandemic hit and the everyone’s worlds got smaller, more claustrophobic (except on “Trail Tuesdays,” when we went for long hikes that often inspired poems). In my poem “Repetition & Spectacle” I admit “I’ve been writing the same poem for years.” I felt like my work was becoming stagnant because the images in my creative well weren’t changing. Twenty-five years is a long time in one place. I thought perhaps moving would give me new experiences to write about, new lenses through which to apprehend the world. When my landlord decided to redevelop the entire block I lived on, it seemed like a sign: it was time to move on.
And so the landscape changed under the poems—from gritty urban images of Oakland to a quieter city, further from the center, where nights are dark enough to see stars.
MJ: Many of the poems in Lions Like Us, despite being love poems, are clearly informed by our current times (pandemic, social unrest, etc.). How important is it to you that the poet reflects contemporaneity? Is it important?
HH: I don’t think there’s one right way to be a poet, or that all poems must be politically motivated, even if poetry is inherently as political as it is autobiographical. But for me, contemporaneity holds the door for passion. My work often reflects the spark of its inception—details from the social, political, and urban milieu in which it was written—the constant backdrop of jackhammers in a gentrifying city, eerie emptiness during COVID lockdowns, urban blight due to unsolved housing crisis, graffiti and broken glass following protests, flowers on the trail. Love coexists with these realities, the way people still eat, sleep, and give birth amid the horrors of war.
MJ: Mary Oliver famously asked, “Tell me, what is it you plan to do with your one wild and precious life?” So, with that in mind, what is next for you? What are your present ambitions?
HH: Lions Like Us has been my primary focus for the last year. I’m excited to start a new project! Meanwhile, I will keep writing, hosting literary events, teaching classes, and creating writing prompts for my Praxis Poetry subscribers—but first I think I’d like to take a break, road trip to New Orleans with my love, hold hands in a haunted cemetery, eat warm beignets, drink absinthe, become a jazz singer. Or maybe I’ll look for a job that pays actual money!
