When Ashley D. Escobar’s Glib was announced as the 2024 Changes Book prize winner, selected by Eileen Myles, the thrill of recognizing her name eclipsed my own flicker of disappointment at not making the cut. I had been following her online for some time, drawn to her vibrant digital presence—a parade of funky fashion choices and city wanderings with friends.
Similarly, Escobar’s poetry is alive and kinetic in a way that defies easy categorization. In Glib, cheeky cultural references braid with tender, coming-of-age reflections, in a gestalt of contemporaneity that refuses to be pinned down. What follows is our conversation about glibness, girliness, and finding one’s voice across genres.
Stephanie Yue Duhem: Congratulations on the publication of GLIB! First of all, I’m fascinated by this title. In one poem, you write: “If I follow a glib statement with another / glib statement will it begin to make sense? / I remember I was seventeen for a year.” In general, these poems seem interested in the interaction between persona and interiority, especially in the coming-of-age process. Can you speak to how you see “glibness” in that context?
Ashley D. Escobar: Thank you! “Glib” comes from being called “glib” during undergrad at Bennington, whenever I made (slightly) ironic yet bold statements, so I thought it was the perfect word to tie all the poems together. I’m reclaiming it. Certain things I say just become canon with enough repetition even beyond inside jokes with friends. I used to put up posters around Bennington and Columbia that became iconic, leading people to take them for their own dorm room walls. Mary Ruefle loved my “Make Poetry Stupid Again” one so much that she sent me a beautiful typewritten letter apologizing for her mistake of not admitting me to her class on Chance: “[it] knocked me off my soles and made my day. I have color-xeroxed it and sent it to many poet-friends across the country, and even when I think of it it makes me happy inside.” I also had one that references “I Dream in Bisquick”: “I wonder what sperm whale tastes like.” I think a lot of people feel threatened by nonchalant irony, but GLIB is sincere. GLIB is about the “I’s” I employ. The “I’s” I destroy, dissect, control. I am flirty and irreverent. Deadpan and oblique.
Coming of age, I adopted many affects through all the books I read and songs I listened to, and a lot of these poems concern the many self-assertions and worlds I documented and created to keep existing. I found myself writing myself into existence. I am taking off the metaphorical Wayfarers (my Warby Parkers are transitional).
“Glibness” is making statements like “Walking in New York is like scrolling the internet” or “I’m at the foot / of everyone’s midlife crisis.” Asking “Is my Brandy Melville insured?” I call them “glib-isms.” There’s truth to them, but they’re also just so fun to say and repeat that they become these mantralike bits. But by the end of GLIB, I’ve let go of the bit.
In a related vein, I want to talk about glibness as it relates to girliness. I see a resonance between your internet persona and your poems, which reference “Dum Dum-stained lips,” “heart-shaped sandals,” and “Lolita hair ribbons.” On the one hand, these images project a youthful vulnerability—on the other hand, their glossiness (dare I say glibness?) renders them impenetrable. How do you personally navigate that tension? What appeals to you about girliness? Do you see any drawbacks?
I’ve always felt pretty fluid in terms of gender, but these images are more just details from my life. I can’t help but embrace cute things. The “I” throughout GLIB, despite a line in “The Sprawl (Visited) rejecting this, is if Holden Caulfield wore lavender. But that doesn’t necessarily mean pink (for the sake of this; I don’t subscribe to color binaries) just the same person in a different font—handwritten cursive with a curly “y.” I wouldn’t call it “girly,” just a grade-school sentiment not dissimilar to Wes Anderson in Moonrise Kingdom. Even Lucien Carr wore saddle shoes.
I’m a bit disheartened by the over commodification of “girlhood” on the internet as a method of rampant consumerism to sell ideas of “girl dinner,” “coquette,” “girl math,” etc. It’s definitely a coping mechanism to deal with aging and adulthood but there’s a difference between embracing femininity and denying yourself of agency. I was young writing these poems, and still am, but I hope to mature as my body of work expands.
However, the illusion of maturity and aging going hand in hand is strong. My editor Kyle made a remark that “Beachcomber” was one of the “most mature” poems in the book. I had to hold back a laugh, because it is one of the earliest poems in the book from when I was freshly 20 and stuck indoors during the pandemic. That was a period of lots of Baudelaire and unrequited longing. I think my later poems, especially post moving to New York, are more experimental and fun since I’m moving around rather than observing from an isolated distance. I love my editor, but I don’t think maturity is an upward graph but rather a circle. Sometimes I am disdained that I’m not Kerouac and that I am perceived as a woman under the male gaze, but other times, I love being a “Post Beat It Girl.” If you preserve your joie de vivre and creative tendencies, then your soul never truly ages.
During my time at Columbia, my female professor wrote a disheartening comment in my workshop critique that the “I” in my autobiographical work “clings to her youth and cultural references for identity/meaning/currency as she tries to evade or outrun the ever-encroaching adult world, a somewhat clumsy, lazy dilettante desperate to be seen as a coquette, as special, as unique, putting on various costumes and trying on personalities/styles/language so that she might get the attention/validation of any random man 10 years older than herself before the clock runs out…”
Let me just say he’s not a random man! He has a name, and he’s actually 15 years older than me. But seriously, what is life if not surrounded by everything that fills it with beauty and texture.
On top of being a poet, you’re also a filmmaker, and your poems are full of film references. I had the thought while I was reading GLIB that the poems themselves were “mumblecore,” a film genre you seem to appreciate. Can you explain how film might inspire your poetry? Do you ever watch a movie and just want to write about it? Are there formal or thematic qualities you adapt from one medium to the other?
I don’t necessarily write poems based on films. Although a few poems in GLIB nod to David Lynch; mainly because he’s been in the background of my life for so long growing up as an artist. I went to the Ruth Asawa High School of the Arts for film, before dropping out, but never felt obligated to include a poem in anything I made. I have used subtitles in a nontraditional way, adding a detached language rather than captioning what was being said or done. I like references to film that naturally come up in my life like the Adult World ones that were a running joke between my boyfriend Matt and me, but I would never analyze the plot of a film.
I listen to a lot of film soundtracks that instantly ground me in a certain mood. Gia Coppola’s Palo Alto has been on heavy rotation since I was 13. I’m someone who plays a particular song on repeat to really enter the vibes, and I do this a lot while working on a piece. Jack Kilmer’s “T.M.” comes to mind. Teenage ennui. I even made a soundtrack to GLIB with a song for every poem in the book.
I focus on image, and film has a lot of memorable and striking ones. I’m always trying to grasp that quality of texture that a moving image inherently has, and I feel satisfied when I can evoke it within my poetry.
So in addition to writing for the screen, it looks like you got your MFA in fiction from Columbia University. Can you talk about any differences in how you approach poetry, fiction, and screenwriting? What comes easily to you in each of those genres, and what do you struggle with? Do you ever go a long time writing in only one of those genres, or do you always mix it up?
Fiction is way different than poetry for me because it requires me to sit and down and focus on a certain scene or conversation for a while even though I have so many other ideas I want to get to. I usually have to carve out time for it, whereas poetry comes to me more naturally as I collect lines throughout my day. I’m usually happy with a poem right away and go through a couple of edits, but a poem rarely goes unfinished and untouched for months. Screenwriting is also natural once I have a vibe and idea in mind, but it also requires lots of late nights just spent writing. It depends on what kind of project I’m working on, but I never stop writing poetry. I can’t help it. I like playing director, writer, lead role, and cinematographer all by myself.
I’m trying to find an agent for the short story/essay collection I completed at Columbia called “Have a Pepsi, Disappear,” but the non-traditional nature of the fragmented structure has left a lot of interested agents confused on how to “market” it. I wish more agents were eager to lift experimental voices instead of being tied down to conventional plots and focusing on marketing and sales rather than literary progress. “Have a Pepsi, Disappear” is like if Eve Babitz meets Eileen Myles’ Chelsea Girls meets Gia Coppola’s adaptation of James Franco’s Palo Alto. It documents everything from dropping out of an arts high school in San Francisco to having GLIB be selected by Eileen Myles. I’ve also been working on an ongoing one-sentence “novel” that’s basically a book-length prose poem. It’s autobiographical but allows me to play with language and jump around through thought and time in a way that a straightforward novel wouldn’t allow me to.
This next question is related to your personal writing practice. Your poems are incredibly social—full of friends and revelry and wandering around the city. You also seem to be constantly involved in readings. How do you carve out time for your writing? Do you need to be alone to write, or can it be social for you? Do you prefer to write in the morning, afternoon, or nighttime?
I need to be alone to put together a poem, but the fragments I create along the way can be written anywhere and anytime—snippets I tweet, a line I jot down on my notes app or my notebook, a line I pull from an old unfinished work. I spend a lot of time with Matt writing in our notebooks wherever we are in a shared silence. I used to love writing at nighttime, especially during the pandemic and at Bennington, when I could just zone out to shoegaze and stare out my window. It’s way more chaotic in New York, so it’s nice to find time when I’m not out with friends to lock in at home. I typically edit during the day at a cafe or something where there’s more of an atmosphere than just in my room. I’ve become someone who treasures daylight, now that I’ve been away from the light in California for so long, so I try to use up as much of it as I can. I keep a food diary on Substack, where I also sometimes post essays, which holds me accountable to sit and share my thoughts every week.
In your bio, you reference being called a “literary angel.” What does that phrase mean to you? Does a literary angel have an obligation to others? Who do you think you or your work might have an obligation to? Also, do you yourself have a “literary angel”—the way therapists themselves have therapists?
It started as a term of endearment when I was working with Eva and Thurston Moore for Ecstatic Peace Library’s Algonquin Rock and Roll Round Table. There was an air of being a witty Dorothy Parker-esque figure running around the hotel but also as an angel who helped make sure everything was going as planned. I kept appearing places unexpected after that like an apparition, meeting and assisting other artists and poets that the title just stuck. I like “angel” over other equally irreverent titles such as “princess,” because like Wim Wenders’ Wings of Desire, I feel like I hover over, in, and out of places. I have never felt like I belonged in a certain scene or group of people. In New York, I volunteer at The Poetry Project but also attend certain events such as Greetings at Unnameable Books, whatever’s happening at Earth, or my boyfriend’s Easy Paradise open mic at KGB. From time to time, people will overlap, but I try to get a little bit of everything. Back in San Francisco, I feel most connected to the jangle-pop mod revival going on with bands such as The Umbrellas and Now that I’ve met hanging out at Vesuvio.
Which leads me to Kerouac who has been a “literary angel” figure to me since I was thirteen. Even though he never truly lived in San Francisco, he haunted it enough that I felt his presence through the fog. I write for him in a way. At least, he keeps me going.
Stephanie Yue Duhem is a poet and essayist in Austin, TX. Her debut poetry collection, CATACLYSM MOVES ME I REGRET TO SAY, will be published in June 2025 by House of Vlad press.
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