Interview with Vaughn M. Watson on going out & being normal — June 20, 2025
Vaughn M. Watson is a New York-based writer, poet, and performer. He has been published in The Common, Tilted House, and Tahoma Literary Review, among other literary journals. His work has also been nominated for the Pushcart Prize. His debut collection, going out & being normal, was the runner-up for the 2025 Press 53 Award for Poetry.
Catherine Fletcher:I’m excited about your debut collection, going out & being normal. Congratulations, Vaughn! I love your book’s title, especially the “being normal” part. In the preface, you mention that these poems were “born of my own anxiety” in the aftermath of the COVID pandemic. Tell us about the book’s origin.
Vaughn M. Watson:Thank you, Catherine! The title, as you pointed out, came out of the anxieties we all felt during the pandemic and continue to feel since the COVID-19 vaccinations ushered in the “end” of the pandemic. We were asked to carry on as normal, as if nothing ever happened. And now, we continue to do so, as the world descends even further into chaos.
After more than a decade of avoiding poetry, I first started writing it again during that weird part of the pandemic when we couldn’t go to offices or restaurants but were, for some reason, allowed to go to gyms. I began writing about the changes I was seeing—people watching videos without using headphones, for example—and ended up with a shorter collection of poems about our relationships with health and our bodies. Eventually, that collection gave way to this one, which extended those observations to a post-quarantine, “reintegrated” society.
My undergraduate degree was in sociology, and I feel that I always write with a sociological eye. Writing helps me process the world around me. And poetry helps me process the world in a way that feels less direct, less academic than prose does.
Fletcher: You were avoiding poetry—why? And was this the writing of poetry or reading it as well?
Watson: The funny thing is that I didn’t even realize I was even avoiding it. I just sort of forgot about poetry while I explored other genres. Looking back, I guess I can think of it as taking a break from the intensity of poetry. I’m a weird writer in that I mostly read for information. You’re more likely to find me reading non-fiction than anything else.
Fletcher: The world of going out & being normal is primarily urban. Many of the poems take place in New York. That said, the speaker tends to encounter boundaries and borders within his home city as well as abroad, in particular China. He also falls into moments of weird intimacy. How did you use the framing of “incident reports” and “notes on” to address the redefinition of space and the spaces between people post-COVID?
Watson: The precautions we all took during the pandemic asked us to reassess our understanding of shared space, public health, and even the rules of basic social interaction. I think this reassessment of social intimacy is directly connected with the question at the center of the collection: what is a return to normal when it seems that we are all too comfortable with the current, lonely state of the world?
The section “incident reports” opens the collection and invites the reader into a world of fucked-up intimacy. The opening poem, “first love,” introduces the speaker, who ponders whether a past lover’s accusations against him are valid. This, I believe, sets the tone for the other poems in the section, all of which highlight a sense of isolation even when the speaker is not physically alone. “culture shock,” for example, ends with the speaker feeling completely disconnected from the romantic connections going on around him at a lively party in Rio de Janeiro.
“notes on,” the fourth section, similarly begins with self-reflection in “notes on narcissism.” The subsequent poems highlight the speaker’s wrestling with the many meanings of intimacy. “notes on holding a bouquet of flowers on the D train” has the speaker asking if someone will hold him:
Meanwhile, “notes on avoidant attachment” has the speaker wondering if he’s “some kind of monster / born of childhood trauma.” I wanted the reader to experience the speaker’s constant wavering between extremes as he reckons with what it is he actually wants.
Fletcher: One of your poems which affected me most was “mother in her skin,” which begins:
this dyke on the train has a tattoo that reads Hey honey, it’s Mom. I love you. See you soon in a cursive like a permission slip’s signature
Please share your thoughts about this poem and how it connects to the overall work.
Watson: I started writing “mother in her skin” on the train almost as soon as I noticed the tattoo—somewhere between 59th and W 4th Streets. It was powerful to me that this woman had immortalized her mother in this tattoo. She had invited her fellow subway riders to partake in her own grief.
Later, as I edited it, I had Shakespeare’s Sonnet XVIII in my head, specifically the haunting last lines “so long as men can live and eyes can see / so long lives this and this gives life to thee.” In a previous draft, I even directly quoted it at the end of the poem.
I lost my mother when I was quite young. I was just five when she suddenly passed, so my conception of her comes from very hazy early memories, photographs, and oral history. It was a unique sort of trauma to lose a mother, someone that everyone else had. Now that I’m older, I have several friends that have lost a parent. I can’t help but feel their pain is even deeper because knowing someone and losing them is so much harder than losing the thought, the idea of someone. “mother in her skin” seeks to bridge that gap in my own understanding of loss. In many ways, it’s the most empathetic poem in the collection. It’s a longing for the society we should be aiming for, not the one we live in.
Whenever I read that poem aloud, I have to fight back tears. It’s dedicated to anyone who has experienced the pain of losing a mother.
Fletcher: Beautiful. Thanks so much for sharing that.
I noticed that both Chinese culture and the Mandarin language have a significant presence in this collection, including two poems written in Mandarin. Describe your relationship with Chinese culture and what it was like writing in your second language.
Watson: I spent about a third of my twenties in mainland China. My time there was in some ways isolating, but in many ways it was liberating. Now that I’m in my mid-thirties, I’m just beginning to process what it was that drew me to China originally and the many life lessons I learned during my time there.
The Chinese language itself is fascinating to me. I studied Chinese formally in college and have continued to self-study since then, but there’s still so much I don’t understand. I sometimes encounter a newspaper headline or a chengyu (one of thousands of four-character idiomatic expressions) that is inscrutable even though I can read every single character—
Fletcher: That’s head-wrecking!
Watson: Yeah, it’s a very disorienting experience to be able to sound something out, to know what each of the individual characters mean, but to not be able to derive any real meaning.
I wanted to capture that experience with the two Chinese poems in the collection. “Poem of surnames and transliterations” forces the reader to engage with a block of meaningless Chinese text and invites them to match each character with the transliterated pinyin. “Poem of China” was surprisingly easy to write but difficult to edit and even more difficult to translate. When I ran the Chinese version of the poem past a Chinese poet, Chris Toh, she advised me to divide the poem into verses instead of its original prose poem form. In her opinion, the block of text didn’t immediately read as a poem. When I followed this advice, it morphed into something else entirely.
I also knew that I wanted that second poem to sit in translation with itself. I took liberties in my translation, obscuring some details and avoiding some that seemed untranslatable. Only the bilingual reader will be able to detect these subtle differences.
Fletcher: Among the most characteristic features, in my opinion, of recent Vaughn M. Watson poems are wry humor and a sense of play. You can be amusingly self-deprecating, as in “Soir Blue_Edward Hopper_(1914)”:
sometimes I’m a clown sometimes I’m a prostitute either way, people keep staring at me
beneath Chinese lanterns ashing a cigarette I look into the distance and so want you to think I’m French
Or you revel in absurd situations, like “man with a mission,” which explores the responses of an uneasy crowd in a New York venue to members of a Japanese band, each in “the oversized head of a furry, gray wolf.”
In Italo Calvino’s 1985 lecture “Lightness,” he spoke of the writer’s need to move humanity into a different space when we seemed condemned to heaviness. Considering an image to represent the next millennium—the one in which we now live—Calvino chose: “the sudden nimble leap of the poet/philosopher who lifts himself against the weight of the world, proving that all his gravity contains the secret of lightness, while what many believe to be the life force of the times—loud and aggressive, roaring and rumbling—belongs to the realm of death, like a graveyard of rusted automobiles.”
What are your thoughts on lightness and/or humor in your own work and in contemporary poetry?
Watson: I love this quotation. “Proving that all his gravity contains the secret of lightness” resonates with me, as humor has always been a coping mechanism for me in light of the heaviness of the world. For the past few years, I’ve been studying and performing improv theater at the People’s Improv Theater in Midtown Manhattan. I started doing it to get myself out of my head, but I’ve continued because I find the serious study of comedic performance so fascinating. I’ve learned that humor is about finding and exploiting patterns and about finding the unexpected in the mundane. Funny enough, poetry is also rooted in these two things.
One of my favorite contemporary poets, Hera Lindsay Bird, demonstrates this so well in her poem “If you are an Ancient Egyptian pharaoh.” She uses the phrase “If you are…, then…” to set us up with a recognizable pattern and unexpected outcomes. For example, “if you are a catapult, / I am the medieval knight / you are catapulting.” These humorous images lull us into a false sense of security that’s then broken when the speaker discusses the fallout when the “you” disappears and the speaker contemplates a life without them.
Comedy helps me, as a poet, engage the reader, but it also helps moments land. One of my improv teachers, Kimberly Alu, always encourages us to allow for a moment of vulnerability that lets “the game” (a comedic bit) rest before hammering it in for a final time. “out for a walk,” a poem in the “going out and being normal” section of the collection, ends with the speaker stepping in a pile of dog shit. This brief moment of humor provides a break before the heartbreak of the final poem of the section, “W 4th street,” in which the speaker embodies someone else’s trauma and tells himself: “all you need to do is leave / this station and catch your bated breath.”
Fletcher: When I first met you, you were writing fiction. You talked earlier about how the conditions of the pandemic led you to turn to poetry. I’m curious, what’s the relationship to the prose poems in going out & being normal and your earlier short stories?
Watson: Even when writing prose, I devote a great deal (maybe too much) attention to the sonic qualities of each sentence. My approach to writing is to edit and edit and edit at the sentence level until the phrasing sounds correct to my ears. It’s a painstaking process, but I find it’s gotten easier now that I’ve allowed myself some grace to free write and have stopped myself from editing at the sentence level until I have enough down on the page.
When I started writing poetry again, the prose poem felt like the best medium for my approach to writing. The form allows me to craft from the sentence level up and then play with punctuation and line breaks to manipulate the sonic quality of each verse and stanza. Many of the poems in this collection are based on true stories. I think that’s the connection the reader might pick up on from my earlier work, especially my creative nonfiction. I love a good narrative, and the prose poem invites the reader to witness a narrative unfold and, on subsequent reads, reflect on what makes that narrative worth telling.
Fletcher:Whether prose poems or lineated poems, the forms your verse takes are largely your own creation. Talk a bit about your use of white space, your refusal to justify the margins of a prose poem, your fondness for brackets and underscores, or any other device you enjoy using.
Watson: I view form, white space, and punctuation as tools to help guide the reader. To me, the most exciting part of editing poetry is structuring the poem in a way that’s legible to any reader, regardless of their experience with poetry. Our jobs as poets are to guide the reader through the poem, in a way that bridges the reader’s own voice with the speaker’s voice. White space and awkward line breaks help facilitate that process by interrupting a reader’s automated reading process. I love to use forms of punctuation like brackets and em-dashes and underscores to change up the pacing and also as references to other genres of text. It draws the reader’s attention and can also alter their understanding of certain writing conventions.
Fletcher: You are a singer as well as a writer. How do these two components of your creative process affect one another, if at all?
Watson: I study bel canto and work a lot with art song in particular. Classical singers work closely with text, interpreting and phrasing lyrics through the lens of a composer’s musical ideas and style. I think singing helps a lot with anticipating how a reader will interact with a poem. In thinking about how a poem is received or performed, I often think about how the reader will embody the speaker’s voice. How will they pause, which words will they emphasize? Will they laugh at this line or will they take a moment to breathe?
As a singer, I also think a lot about rhythm, especially when singing in English. English is an outlier in its status as a stress-timed language. We have to think about not only meaning but appropriate word stress. I try to take this approach when editing a poem, making sure that what is said is not only legible but phrased in a natural and mellifluous way.
Fletcher: Thanks for taking the time to speak with me. In closing, what’s providing you with inspiration these days?
Watson: Thanks, Catherine! You know you’re working with a fantastic interviewer when you find yourself learning more about your own work and process! I’m at work on a new chapbook and have been finding a lot of joy in writing and editing a very different set of poems. Some other work that’s been inspiring me lately are Shakespeare’s sonnets, Fauré’s art songs (especially “Claire de Lune” and “En Sourdine”), and the writings of Anthony Giddens.
