In Retrospect: An Interview with Rickey Laurentiis, Author of Death of the First Idea
“In Retrospect” is our interview series which asks renowned poets to look back over their poems and collections, mapping out their poetic processes. From their early writing to their most recent collection, we’re looking to hear about core poems and fascinations which have shaped their body of work. In this interview, we had the tremendous honor of hearing from Rickey Laurentiis, whose 2025 collection Death of the First Idea was long-listed for the National Book Award. Laurentiis’ poems in her new collection ride the frequency of the spiritual and the erotic through the metaphorical deaths and births of her life’s continual transitions, and the process of their making is detailed below.
Frontier Poetry: What was the first poem, published or unpublished, that you remember writing? What aspect of it do you look back at and appreciate the most?
Rickey Laurentiis: I can’t recall the poem or exactly where, but I do remember that pristine, new & accomplished feeling flooded me upon recognition of my first published poem. I must’ve been around seventeen or so, still in high school, far far from where I’d eventually arrive today, & beaming with the notice someone—outside of my own, freak mind; some relatives—someone would be my audience. Of course, none of this came to me exactly in these words or sentiments, but the genie of that memory lay in that acknowledgment. It wouldn’t be until some years still later, when in college, that I’d begin seriously pursuing writing as a trade.
FP: If there is a poem you could identify as either the launch point, catalyst, or axle your first collection of poetry spins around, which poem would that be? What did the process of writing that poem entail?
RL: I think my first collection hinges well on its opening and closing poems, both of which excavate some important psychic and/or historical capital in my mind. Boy with Thorn, my first collection, was in many respects a purgation: a means of writing thru my stubborn shame, as with my body as with my own relationship to American history & then-some. In both respects, the contemplation turns toward the injurious or violent. Such is the case in “Conditions for a Southern Gothic,” which functions as a preamble of terms for the book, but does so while quietly incorporating the history of the German Coast Uprising in 1811—a slave rebellion that moved with deliberate action & yet concluded with so many of the rebels’ decapitated heads displayed arrogantly on pikes down the New Orleans’ levee. I’m from that city, from that history, & also of the mindset which ends the poem: to turn some of our critiques back on the Divine Maker who is said to have created us; ergo, did he also sanction that very oppression & violence? And if the human is prone to such activity, is it our only motive or can we introduce others? Can we improve?
FP: What lessons did writing and publishing your first collection of poetry teach you that you applied to the process of creating your second collection?
RL: The processes for writing both books are so different—and the contexts for which I write them, as well—as to almost press doubt on my authorship. Yet, of course, I wrote it and am now responsible to it. It’s a position that, now that I’m aware I have some modicum of audience, if not that I enjoy one of considerable privilege, frankly terrified me mute for the better part of four years. And that proved nearly fatal. Finally, the writing returned to me, what was at that very second going was a former notion of myself; it was the author I was prior to transitioning. So, both books chronicle an unfolding story—I hijack & remix the notion of a ‘Divine Comedy,’ where the third installment comes next—a story about who I am, why & with what relationship to the World & its histories.
FP: Tell us about your latest published collection of poetry. Could you briefly map out its evolution from a starting point to the final draft?
RL: Death of the First Idea, my second book, wants you to take that title, of course, figuratively. Death in the book is very much as the Old Folks back home might call it, Coming Home. Or it is only another phase of “passing” or “passage.” Or it is a re-articulation of who I am and, since I am freeborn & with claim to my body, prepare to be, versus that first iteration of my identity. To do this, I had to breakthru—literally, and push into a sort of “slick” sentence that nearly ran away from itself in its telling. That’s to say, I had to arrive at a prosody & thru a (many millennia long!) history that didn’t “come out” as much as “emerge” in so keeping with the themes of transition in the book but in the sense that, say, lightning emerges. Lightning is its own emergency, but also its own devotion: the book, as well, contemplates the Soul & its consequence of (wanted) change & (unwanted) trauma. I don’t dive directly into that literal brutality, tho; it keeps to the back of things, like a daimon.
FP: What running themes or fascinations do you identify throughout your poetry, from your earliest poems to your most recent ones?
RL: I still identify the erotic in my work, and it’s arriving a bit more frankly these days. Spicier. I pivoted away, except in just brief moments, from a survey of violence in history—consumed, as it were, with its opposite: a manifest future, a becoming. But, not for nothing, did you know this? The word ‘fascinate’ derives from the Latin, ‘fascinus,’ which to keep it short was an apotropaic device—an effigy or other object intended to ward off evil. The ‘evil eye’ is another. The ‘fascinum’ was the embodiment of the (divine) phallus, an often (in Rome’s heyday) would be worn as an amulet or necklace by the superstitious. Which is all to say that what ‘fascinates’ us, in a distant sense, is the erect; concerns the erotic.
FP: Finally, as you are writing currently (or simply thinking, which is where writing starts), what is something—an idea, social issue, piece of art, song, etc.—that you are obsessed with?
RL: These days all my days turn my mind to the Genius, or the Profundity & Source from which—with pages of holy texts devoted to it—we can claim descent. Whether that story’s coming out of Yoruba or Syria, 15th-century Naples or either Thebes; whether it concerns the Ethiopian ‘Table of the Sun,’ or follows Ianna’s bold sashay in—and eventually out—of Hell, or is Jesus’s three-day sojourn there following the Crucifixion as reported by Creed, or, in fact, seeks yet for Nothing—but a Buddha-field: these obsessions change accordingly. But I follow the flame, the enthusiasm, rapt as much by the insight as the text qua text themselves. In many regards, those hymns, elegies, divine formulae & other proto-to-the-poem all served as muses & informed the newer work.
