Spleen is a poetry collective of desire founded by two queer women, Carmen Cornue and Donna Morton. Inspired by old Hollywood glamor, Baudelaire, and performance, the duo released a collaborative chapbook Forbidden Flowers a year ago in October 2023. I had the great honor of releasing the chapbook with Voice Lux Press and witnessing their exciting tour of readings across the country, bringing iconic poets together in San Francisco, Pittsburgh, Baltimore, and New York. Meeting them for an intimate reading in Rose Temple’s back room before hiking through the Seattle rain to the carnival-themed bar, Unicorn, was earth-shattering for me!

The chapbook is in its second printing with copies available from Voice Lux Press.

Now, a year later, I’m thrilled to catch up with Carmen and Donna to reflect on Forbidden Flowers. This interview was conducted over video chat and edited for clarity.

Joe: So y’all have known each other since 2011 and Spleen was founded in 2015 – What’s the origin story? A little birdy said something about Spring in Prospect Park. I’m dying to hear more! How did you decide to create this collective and what drives you to create together? What does Spleen embody and what are your goals as a collective?

Carmen: We met in 2011; we were co-workers. We were both working at an auction house in Manhattan and there was a really immediate connection and chemistry between us. We were joking about things all the time at work. We had to sit in these galleries and help people out, but we would always walk around and talk about our favorite pieces of art. We’d also play games and say, “Oh, I'm this painting”, “I'm this piece of sculpture”, “I'm this mask” and so on. Through Donna, I got to meet so many of her close friends who became mine and we're all still really close to this day. So, yeah, I feel like it was a very fateful meeting. 

About four years after that, in the Spring of 2015, we were in Prospect Park as I was living near there. We had talked about maybe doing some kind of writing project together. We both wrote, we both were poets, but I was very private and never shared my poetry with anybody. I felt comfortable with Donna and I think it organically grew from there. We talked about sharing work and writing together. We also came up with these characters that we were inhabiting. I can let Donna fill in the blanks on that. But yeah, that's where it started. 

Donna: That was also a time we were visiting a lot of cemeteries, a lot of graveyards, so that's sort of embedded into the formation. We were having a lot of fun fantasizing about other personas, other lives. We even called ourselves doctors at the time, which is funny because I didn't take science seriously in school, but I like to pretend that I'm a scientist or even a gynecologist!

Mostly I think Spleen is about celebrating our friendship. It's a love that needs to be emphasized more widely rather than romantic love. Spleen is also a fantasy escape that gives us agency in ways we don't have in reality.

Joe: We featured a poem by each of you from Forbidden Flowers in Hobart this month – Carmen’s “The Conformist” and Donna’s “Mademoiselle, 1966”.  Would you like to share a bit about these pieces?

Carmen: In general, my writing process varies. Sometimes I find inspiration immediately in the moment and can write a whole poem on the spot, but that's kind of rare. I've definitely written a lot of poems or parts of poems while watching films. So “The Conformist” is like that – the spark came from the Bertolucci film The Conformist. I thought its themes were really interesting and I’m always grappling with the idea of conformity and fantasy. I think a lot of Spleen is about creating a fantasy through which to live when modern life makes it difficult to do so.

That's an aspect of the poem that especially comes through towards the end where it's these two women dancing and they're kind of courting and seducing each other. Then one woman asks, “Can beauty save us?” and it’s basically a plea. She wants to be reassured that we can survive off beauty and fantasy alone. Then the speaker of the poem says yes to comfort her but the following line, and the last line of the poem, is: “I've performed intricate lies to clear old debts but I still owe someone something.” In reality, the speaker isn't even sure if that's possible herself but she’ll play the part and comfort this woman she’s seducing. Sometimes the act of living feels like paying off karmic debts when really what you want is this fantasy. So the poem is about that dichotomy.

Donna:  My poem “Mademoiselle, 1966” is based on a movie that came out that year. Mademoiselle is a stunning film starring Jeanne Moreau; she plays a school teacher who is secretly sociopathic and pyromaniacal. The screenplay is by Jean Genet and Marguerite Duras.

It's interesting to see this dichotomy of what Moreau’s character shows the world versus what she does privately, acting on destructive impulses to create control with chaos. After a day of teaching, she ritualistically puts on these gloves before committing her crimes. My favorite scene is between her and another character, a woodcutter in the wilderness. The birds and bugs are making noises as they kiss. It feels animalistic, deep into the natural world.

The last line in my poem is “She is never quenched and has no interest in being so.” I enjoy seeing a woman on film (and in my poetry) who is flawed, strange and eccentric, and not fulfilling what society expects of her, yet she has these little tricks up her sleeve.

Joe: I love how there's these connecting themes between your poems. Even in the ones that aren't next to each other, there's this undercurrent. The chapbook itself is formatted like a script, complete with a setting in a French Riviera salon and the unveiling of Carmen and Donna drinking martinis and sporting velvet masks before each poem alternates between you two. 

Carmen’s “Saboteur, Take One” and Donna’s “Saboteur, Take Two” come to mind as prime examples of how your poems converse. How does this poetic conversation occur? What kinds of collaborations or experiments have you enacted together?

Carmen: So the saboteur poems are an example of us giving a prompt to one another. It was inspired by RuPaul's Drag Race. There is an episode where the queens are asked to walk the runway as their inner saboteur, this inner figure that's causing their undoing, which I think is a fascinating and very psychologically probing challenge. Then Donna and I were talking about it, and I asked, “What if you or your poem were walking down the runway?” There is something inherently theatrical in Spleen and how we do our readings as well. The “Saboteur” poems tap into that. Drag is definitely a big influence. So that was an actual prompt based on something very concrete that we watched together.

Everything else has been, I'd say, pretty organic. Occasionally we do give each other prompts, but it's sort of rare. We have monthly meetings where we chat for hours about stuff we're reading, watching, and writing about. We share drafts with each other regularly. I just think there's this creative and psychic enmeshing that has happened, so we just end up influencing each other. But also, part of the reason I think we gravitated to one another in the first place is because we share a lot of the same influences and our writing has similar themes. It just felt very natural. 

Donna: A lot of our conversations show up in the work. Our work is a response to the realities happening in our lives and we deal with them in the world we've created.

We collaborated on a podcast a while back and we wrote a short story centered around our poems, putting these characters together in a Parisian cemetery. And that was a lot of fun because we got to play around with voices and write in a different form. Most of our poems we read aloud individually, but this time we got to write a story together, and read that with our poetry on Beyond the Screams podcast.

Joe: So you did mention a little bit about location with the cemetery in Paris being a part of the story for the podcast. That's something that is of interest to me and how I related to your work.

When I was typesetting the book, I lounged poolside at the Ace Hotel in Palm Springs during the August heat – it felt really appropriate! What are some locations that speak to your poetry and how does that operate?

Carmen: Donna and I went on this great writing retreat to Joshua Tree in 2022. That trip inspired Donna’s “Little Devil” and some other poems and writing we’ve done together. So we have taken some little trips together and we lived in New York together for years. But I would say overall, the two places for me that come up the most are Paris and California.

I briefly lived in Paris and I studied French literature in school. My education was pretty bilingual in nature, with a lot of my coursework fully in French. Probably the biggest impact on me and my writing has been 19th-century and early 20th-century French poetry. We read a lot of French writers and hearing what they have to say about Paris inspires me a lot, and that’s true for both of us. I think one of the first writers we ever talked about together as a seminal influence was Georges Bataille. Definitely Baudelaire is a huge influence for us and I studied him extensively in school. He still feels very modern to me and really pushed boundaries, writing about having sex in cemeteries and passing out in opium dens. You gotta love the French! 

The other place is definitely California. I was born in San Francisco and my family moved to LA when I was six and we would do road trips around the state. We would do little trips to the desert, which I do now as an adult. Being in the desert is really inspiring and nostalgic for me. There's something purifying about it. The landscape is just really stunning and otherworldly. 

Donna: France is a huge inspiration. French culture in general, definitely 19th, 20th-century poets walking around Paris and the romantic flâneur lifestyle. It's something that we've always been really interested in. 

A lot of times in my poetry, the poem becomes the place. Maybe I've been there before, but the active place is the poem. I do a lot of that in “Letter to Calgon, Spring of 1986” set in Montparnasse Cemetery. I went with a friend to see all these influential artists and writers like Baudelaire and Serge Gainsbourg. Simone de Beauvoir is there. Marguerite Duras is there, I think. We love a French cemetery.

And we love the sparkle and fantasy of old Hollywood. I have some poems about Texas, about my time living in Austin that are trying to come out. I think they're going to be in the same vein as “Little Devil”.

New York is a huge undercurrent in some of the poems that I've written and continue to write. A lot of those experiences happened with Carmen. We wrote some of these poems when we were in New York together or visiting each other in California or Texas. So, yeah, I think place is a huge part of our poetry for sure. 

Carmen: I did want to piggyback off your New York comments. It's very central to us, but yeah, it's interesting that even though my parents are both New Yorkers and I have these really heavy connections to New York – I lived there for almost a decade – I don't write poems about New York. I'm trying to kind of unpack why that is, but I have been writing a lot of short fiction about New York. I think a lot of that is because New York is this very psychologically dense place for me. My experience there is so layered and there's so much history. For whatever reason, it's easier to access that through short fiction rather than poetry. New York does feel like this place that is very much the site of my greatest joys and also my greatest traumas.

Joe: Yes, New York is really something. My family is from Queens. So, artist Emily May created the iconic design of hands lifting martini glasses that defined the chapbook’s aesthetic. It’s on the cover and between sections in the book. We made stickers of it. It even inspired a special manicure Donna got for AWP! What does the image symbolize to you and how does it tie in with Spleen?

Carmen: I loved what Alex Jovanovich wrote in one of the blurbs for Forbidden Flowers, “Here's to the ladies who lurch, raising their cracked glasses in dark celebration of the freshest hell to date, 2023.” 

It's a symbol of celebration, hedonism, and fantasy in the midst of so much turmoil and chaos. That's how I see it. There's something glamorous about that kind of old Hollywood aesthetic. In our poems, we sometimes talk about having a cocktail, having a martini. I always put negronis in my poems and tell people it’s my favorite drink. When you come to a reading you know what to order for me at the bar afterwards! 

Donna: I mention whiskey in “Saboteur, Take Two” – that’s my liquor choice.

We were very lucky to have Emily's beautiful print as our book cover. It feels very communal, like toasting our accomplishments, the life we're experiencing in spite of chaos, in spite of the horrors of reality. Celebrating friendship is a huge part of it. It's very playful; in spite of the horrible things we have to deal with, we're still going to have a cocktail.

It was really fun to get the flowers and the little martini glass as a manicure. When I was at AWP this year so many people commented on it which became the perfect entry into “Well, I'm celebrating this new chapbook that was just published last year.” It actually worked as marketing. I never expected that. So yeah, I just love the aesthetic and vibe that Emily brought and how that became the perfect cover. And it's just fun, really. Like, cheers!

Joe: You also had this incredible opportunity to travel around the country, hitting up New York, Pittsburgh, Baltimore, San Francisco, and Seattle on a book tour where you got to connect with so many people.  What are some of your favorite memories from that time?

Carmen: That was a special time. Our reading in New York was really special because that's where Spleen was founded. We read at Molasses Books, which is an amazing bookstore and cafe in Bushwick. Matt, the owner, is incredible. A lot of our old-time New York friends were there. We got to read with two great writers, Whitney Platt and Sarah Hassan. It felt a bit like a homecoming. 

Another really fun memory – I mean, I have so many great memories of this tour – but the other really fun memory was driving from Pittsburgh to Baltimore. It started snowing and I made this Dad Rock spotify playlist called “Road Dawg”. 

Donna: It was on the fly! I was driving and she was playing Spotify.

Carmen: Yep! It had all the classics; The Band, James Taylor, The Mamas and the Papas. It was so atmospheric with the snow and the oldies. We drove south and got barbecue at this antique mall in Western Maryland. It felt like something out of a Kerouac book; two poets on the open road having adventures and seeing these little forgotten corners of the old Rust Belt. 

Donna: Oh yeah, the Rust Belt tour was on lock.

Carmen: Those are two of my favorite memories, but really every single reading, every single day of it was very special. 

Donna: Whenever we found out that Voice Lux was publishing us, I said, “We gotta go on a book tour.” Basically, we hit up places where we could stay with friends. It was really special to come to SF as well, it's one of my favorite cities.

We had a melding of friends. There were a lot of Carmen’s San Francisco friends that I hadn't met before. And then there were Pennsylvania friends that she hadn't met before in Pittsburgh when we read at the Poetry Lounge. So that really felt special because there were these worlds colliding that we didn't always get to because she's in San Francisco and I was in Texas, and now I’m in Pennsylvania. I really liked the new friend groups being forged.

I got to show Carmen where I grew up in PA and the whole Rust Belt. Baltimore was a lot of fun because it was the last stop or the last waltz. We watched The Band’s The Last Waltz during our last night in Baltimore to symbolize the end of the tour.

Obviously throughout the whole tour we were watching tons of movies. 

Carmen: Actually, I have a Letterboxd and I have a list on there, the Forbidden Flowers book tour playlist. When we were in San Francisco, we went to a John Carpenter double feature at the Castro. We also watched the best of the ‘90s, lots of erotic thrillers and rom-coms! We watched Sleepless in Seattle in Seattle, you know. We had it all planned out and it was a lot of fun.

Donna: 10 out of 10. Would I do it again? Yes. Yes, I would. We need Spleen on tour. We gotta find the next reason to go on tour.

Joe: I love that you started bringing up the movies with the movie playlist that you made on the tour. You also created a movie playlist of films that came on a postcard with each copy of Forbidden Flowers.

What are two movies that you feel are special influences on your work in Forbidden Flowers? And then what's one movie or two movies that are influencing you right now? What movies are speaking to you now?

Carmen: Two movies that are really central to understanding Forbidden Flowers are also two of my all time favorite films. The first is Bram Stoker's Dracula with Winona Ryder, Gary Oldman, and Keanu Reeves. It's a perfect encapsulation of Spleen. It’s heavy in ornament. It's horny. It's very theatrical. There's so much craft that went into the film that you don't see so much anymore in these very green screen heavy Hollywood productions. The costumes are incredible. The sets are lush and beautiful. That's very appealing to me. It's also probably one of the films I've watched more than any other film. I probably first watched it when I was eight or nine and that really explains a lot about me! I don't even know how many times I’ve seen it, maybe a hundred times, if not more. 

The other film that inspired me is Valley of the Dolls. The Jacqueline Susann novel is great and a huge influence as well. It's really dishy, like a beach read. A lot of the characters are stand-ins for real life stars like Dean Martin and Judy Garland. But it's also a really interesting testament to women's lives in mid-20th century Los Angeles and New York. 

It's also quite queer! The character played by Sharon Tate, Jennifer North, is this tragic show girl who has a whole relationship with a woman when she's living in Europe. The character was inspired by Carole Landis, a popular blonde bombshell that JacqueIine Susann had a relationship with when they were working the Broadway circuit in the 40s. It's progressive in certain ways and in others it really isn’t at all. The language is definitely pretty dated, but it's a fascinating document. Just the way they talk about their three martini lunches is fantastical in a way that's very appealing to me. 

Donna: Celine and Julie Go Boating is on the movie playlist for Forbidden Flowers, and I really think it encapsulates Spleen's energy of celebrating friendship, escaping reality through fantasy, and theatrics. It's almost like a cabaret. There's cosplay; there's time traveling. That movie is really, really essential to the playfulness of Spleen. I suggest seeing it if you can. We were lucky enough to see it in theaters. I think we saw it at Film Forum.

I'm obsessed with Isabelle Huppert, so The Piano Teacher is an obvious choice. She is mommy, and an icon, very talented. There's so much happening in that movie and it calls back to my interest in Mademoiselle, where there's this fallible woman character who is a teacher and has this secret deviance. And there's a lot of visceral imagery, bodily imagery. It's very French-feeling. Huppert’s character doesn't fit in with society. She bucks society and conformity, which is a huge inspiration and theme of my poetry. 

Carmen: Switching to what we’re watching currently; I would say my favorite cinematic genre is film noir. I'm always, always watching those films. I've watched a few this year that have really spoken to me. One's called Born to Kill. It’s just insanely dark and horny and I love that it’s set in San Francisco.

I also have been going through a psycho biddy journey and watched Whatever Happened to Baby Jane with Joan Crawford and Bette Davis – probably the two greatest stars of the classic era. The film is about Hollywood as an industry – the fantasy of it – but also how grotesque and horrifying it is. It's essentially a horror film. That made a huge impact on me when I saw it for the first time a few months ago. It's one of those movies that's so storied and legendary and I was almost reluctant to watch it because I knew it would make such an impact on me. I save movies like that because I know I'm gonna be reeling from it for weeks. That's exactly what happened but in a good way!

The other one, which I've also been saving for years and finally watched recently, is David Cronenberg’s Crash. Immediately after I watched it I texted Donna, “Have you seen this movie!?” I was lucky to see it in a packed theater in San Francisco. It’s a fascinating movie about sexual deviance and how people turn to that in modern life. We all feel detached from one another and people are hungry for something that feels real, but they can take it to an incredible extreme, which is definitely what's happening in the movie. I love any creative testament to obsession and escapism. Anything that presents characters lost in fantasies to feel alive, but then those obsessions become their complete undoing and kill them. Sometimes death was the fantasy all along.

Donna: I saw Long Legs twice in theaters, the second time on my birthday, and I do not regret it one bit. I appreciated so many elements of that film because it is such a callback to Silence of the Lambs in a lot of ways. I'm a sucker for a newbie FBI investigator going about solving a crime! I'm definitely in love with characters that don't conform and I feel like that is a huge theme in that movie.

Another one that really stood out to me when I saw it in theaters was Love Lies Bleeding. I enjoyed that there were some elements in that movie that really surprised me. I am glad that there are some films debuting in America without a moral or reason or special thing you're supposed to get. There's so many queer movies that end really, really badly. But there is a lot of joy and human behavior that is just really compelling in that film.

Two films that haunt me all the time are the Silence of the Lambs and Alien. I watch Alien whenever I want to feel good, feel strong, like kickass Sigourney Weaver. And then Silence of the Lambs, I mean, need I say anything else? Buffalo Bill's house was shot in the Pittsburgh area. I need to go and scope that out. Yeah, so horror. Carmen mentions noir as something that she watches a lot of, and I would say I definitely watch quite a bit of horror. 

Joe: Who are some poets and writers you admire greatly? What poetry has had the biggest influence on you?

Carmen: Coming from a French literature background, there are a lot of French writers: Bataille, Baudelaire, Apollinaire, Duras, Genet. Joe gave me a beautiful Apollinaire collection when I was in Seattle. 

Some of the first writers that ever turned me on to poetry were the confessional poets of the ‘60s and I started reading them in my preteens. I think this is very common for millions, especially young people growing up in the United States, but reading Anne Sexton and Sylvia Plath for the first time was seminal for me. Their work really opened up my mind to what poetry could do or be about. And it was poetry from a different perspective, so that had a big impact on me. 

I really, really admire Pasolini; he was a film director and poet who was also very involved in leftist and queer politics. Because of all of that, he's always been a touchstone figure for me. There are plenty of contemporary poets whose work I love as well: Gabrielle Bates, Chelsey Minnis, Aria Aber.

Donna: Poetry has always been my thing. It's always been something that's turned me on. When I was at the New School, I studied a lot of School of New York poets. So I can imagine that that has some influence on me, but it's not necessarily what I read all the time.

Diane Wakoski is a huge influence on my work. Joe also gifted me a collection of her poetry, which was very sweet, thank you. Diane has a huge array of work that extracts the joys and horror of the world and puts it in plain language, almost conversationally. And then there's this sort of worship of California that is very beautiful and it’s her ultimate landscape. But then she also does a lot of interesting metaphysical poetry, poetry about gambling, which is an influence for Spleen. We really love the movie Bay of Angels, also starring Jeanne Moreau. Which, you know, they're in Monaco, they're gambling. It's a theme that we enjoy. So I would definitely say Diane. May Swenson, too. Those two are surprisingly hard to find in bookstores. 

But in terms of contemporary poets that I'm really into right now, I read Diane Seuss's latest Modern Poetry. That was amazing. It solidified the importance of being a poet to me, and that your poetry education doesn't have to be from an MFA. Diane talks a lot about that or not being able to connect in the academic world. Another contemporary poet I've fallen in love with recently is Nikki Wallschlaeger. I read Crawlspace. It was stunning and has inspired me to get her book Waterbaby. And of course, we can't forget CAConrad, the icon, the legend. 

Joe: I loved hearing about your influences, some of which I knew, some of which I had gathered, but especially the modern ones. I just read a book by Chelsey Minnis, so I definitely saw the parallels with Carmen’s work. It was a joy to be reminded of your poetry while reading a book. I was like, yay! And of course, CAConrad is an icon. I haven't read Modern Poetry.

This brings us to the final question! What's next? You guys have accomplished so much. You've been working together, collaborating, and celebrating friendship for so many years. You have this chapbook that you've been able to put out into the world. You've been able to tour behind it and bring it to so many people. What's next for Spleen? What are some things that you all want to do? And then what is next independently for each of you?

Carmen: For Spleen; after we did the book tour around the U.S., I went to Europe for about a month. I was seeing family and traveling and met with some incredible writers and translators. We're currently shopping the French and Finnish versions of Forbidden Flowers. I'm really excited to see what comes of those. 

Another thing we've talked about, but haven't made any concrete plans towards, is working on an anthology of poems about desire. We could bring in our friends and people we admire and have a poetic anthology about desire and passion in this modern world. I think people would really dig that. 

In my own writing, I've actually done a little bit more with short fiction than I have with poetry. But I am still writing poems regularly. Writing poems always feels really organic and natural to me, so I think it'll always be something I do even as I expand more into fiction.

Donna: Forbidden Flowers is on Goodreads. That’s an exciting new thing for us. We would love for folks to come and review us.

We're still rocking and rolling, talking pretty much every month and it's nice because you have somebody on your side who's also rooting for you, and wants you to write and continue doing what you're doing. We're both very independent individuals and we work so well together. It's nice to have that support. 

I have all these stories that are trying to come out of me and they are in different locations and phases of my life. Growing up in Pennsylvania and in its rural, natural landscape. Grief and loss. And then also living my twenties in New York was quite an escapade. I know I have more stories in there. I have more poetry in there. And I have plenty to write about my five years in Austin. So those will be coming out of me. They’re already in my notes app.