A Brief Interview with Tara Yarlagadda

I can't think of a way of phrasing this without sounding trite, but there is so much happening in the world all of the time and you seem better than anyone I know at really zeroing in on what is important and having a good understanding of the issues that affect us on an individual, local and global scale. How do you strike that balance and has that been a process for you to figure out over the years?

A friend asked me last year how I stay informed without getting overwhelmed. I tried to seem like I had it all figured out and gave her a tidy answer, but I don’t, really. I look at my personal inbox most days and still feel a deep sense of overwhelm. There’s that famously memed line by the poet Mary Oliver: “How will you spend your one precious life?” And the realty of it is I’m spending way too much of my precious life checking emails to stay informed.

The best piece of advice I would give to myself and to anyone else is to first pick:

• one local news source (LA Local, LA Taco, and LAist are some great ones in LA)

• one issue-specific magazine or news source or credible influencer/organization (the topic should be whatever you care most about like the environment, the Supreme Court, women’s rights etc) 

• one source with a global emphasis (like the BBC, Reuters, The Guardian)

And second: sign up for the newsletters for each of those three sources.

If you’re overwhelmed by social media and the inbox like I am most days, at the very least, pay attention to the emails you get from these three sources and delete everything else, and you’ll be more informed and less burned out from the news than most people (probably).

I'm so excited for you to share your poetry at the series Friday! How did you become interested in writing poetry and are there any particular poets that you think readers should check out?

So I’ve been an on-off reader of poetry for a long time —I did my English thesis in high school of Robert Frost’s collected works of poetry — but apart from working one poem about going to the dentist in a grade school writing club, I never pursued it until last January, when the LA fires happened. I wrote my poem the first night when the fire in Altadena started raging, and for months afterward, the poems just flowed out of me like some cathartic sea. I don’t know if I would have fallen so hard for poetry if I hadn’t desperately needed it as an outlet to channel my emotions in a way I couldn’t with other forms of writing. 

Some poets I’d recommend:

• Rita Dove, particularly her poem “Parsley” about the persecution of Haitian worked in the Dominic Republic in the twentieth century 

• Andrea Gibson’s works, particularly the books Take Me With You and Lord of the Butterflies (their works are a fierce depiction of queer love in its myriad forms)

• Thousand Star Hotel by Bai Phi (meditations on fatherhood and racism in America)

• A Responsibility to Awe by Rebecca Elson (about admiring the stars in the skies so we can better appreciate our time here on Earth)

• Startlement by Ada Limón (poetry on climate change from the former US Poet Laureate)

Valentine’s Day is a few weeks away. Do you have a favorite romantic comedy?

I can’t pick just one! Maybe a three-way tie between Ten Things I Hate About You, Serendipity and When Harry Met Sally…