Nicholas Ravniker is a Midwest-based poet whose work grows out of lifelong dedication to language, sound, and thought. Writing poetry since his early teens, he is known for an experimental approach that resists fixed meanings and embraces ambiguity, invention, and formal play. Influenced by music, avant-garde literary traditions, and strong local arts communities, Ravniker treats poetry as a daily practice rather than a product, one rooted in attention, difficulty, and curiosity. With six published poetry books and extensive work in education, collaboration, and community arts, he continues to explore poetry as a space where thinking deeply and living attentively meet.
Irodili: You’re an avid poet who has published a lot of poetry. What motivated you to begin writing poetry? Did you start this journey at a young age?
Nicholas Ravniker: The first poem I remember writing was about a flower that lost a fight. I was in 7th grade, so probably around 11 or 12 years old.. I wish I still had that poem. Like many poets, I think, there are a lot of drafts of poems I eve written over the years that I never make it back to revising — and many of them I couldn’t find if I wanted.
I don’t know if I have a particular motivation for writing poetry. I would say that poetry has intrinsic value, even if writing and reading poems does do a few things for us. I mean, sure, poetry can give us insight into other people’s and cultures’ experiences, it can help promote literacy and creativity that can be beneficial in other ways, and it provides a means of self-expression and communication that’s cathartic and improves our self-awareness and ability to communicate with others. Which probably sounds weird to people who have a hard time “getting” the kind of poetry I write.
But even if poetry didn’t do those things for me, I would find value in it. The process of marking words on paper, typing and revising is very enjoyable to me.
I’d add that the practice or discipline of writing poems also comes — like everything else does — at a cost. I notice that most conversations or experiences I have, there are parts of my awareness where I’m just focused on images or sounds or ideas in a very abstract sense. I’ll be very present to the granular details of what’s happening but that makes it difficult to stay involved on a practical level with the actual people or tasks Im engaged with.
Irodili: Where are you from? Do you come from the UK, because you look like one?
Nicholas Ravniker: I didn’t know Brits had a look! I can’t pick them out of a lineup, anyway.
Some of my ancestry comes from Slovenia, Scotland, Holland, Poland and Germany. I’ve never met my biological father, but from what I know, he was adopted. My step-father’s family was primarily Slovenian and Sicilian.
I grew up mostly between Chicago and Milwaukee in Waukegan, IL, and Kenosha, WI. I lived in Chicago for about 5 years during my undergraduate studies at Columbia College Chicago and Malcolm X College. During grad school and since I’ve also found Boulder, CO, and New Orleans, LA, to feel like home at times, though I never stay as long as I want. Now I live in Racine, WI, about 10 miles from where I graduated high school, and we have a great arts community here — and being close to both Chicago and Milwaukee gives us a lot of exposure to the arts scenes in those cities as well.
Irodili: How often do you write poetry? Do you have any unpublished poems, and do you have a goal to publish them in a collection?
Nicholas Ravniker: Because I try to write poems every day, far more of my work remains unpublished, which I think is par for the course. For a long time, I tried to follow Ted Berrigan’s advice to write 3 poems everyday, even if they were horrible. Sometimes the best way to meet that goal is to set out and write a bad poem. But I’ve got plastic totes full of random pages and notebooks of poems from as far back as 2000 that I have yet to revise.
I’m currently still working on editing a collection of poems called Polish Octaves, which is a poetic form I invented that uses only the letters of an 8-letter word to write an 8 line poem, where each line has either 8 letters, 8 syllables or 8 words. I have more than 100 currently, but I haven’t been able get the manuscript to where I want it.
I also just have a pretty wide variety of styles that I adopt when I’m writing, and a few different methods I use. A lot of the time, a collection of poems only comes together long after I’ve written a piece and stuff it away in a folder or notebook for a decade. Then I can come back to it, read with fresh eyes, and see what’s worth preserving and what else emerges for me.
Irodili: What was your inspiration? Who inspired you to begin writing poetry, and were there any great poets you followed online or whose poems you read the most?
There’s who I read and who I know, and those two overlap some.
When I was younger, my influences were mostly musicians. I got really into the music of the Smashing Pumpkins, Pearl Jam. Because I got into the Doors and Bob Dylan, I was then familiarized with Williams Blake and Dylan Thomas and Baudelaire and Rimbaud, as well as the Beats — Ginsberg, Kerouac, Corso, DiPrima. I started my college undergrad studies at Columbia College Chicago with Paul Hoover, Tony Trigilio, Sharon Darrow, and David Trinidad. That familiarized me with the broader Western tradition from antiquity. This was just after Hoover’s Postmodern American anthology came out from Norton. I became more and more interested in Surrealism, Dada, Russian Futurism and Zaum, as well as Oulipo, the New York School, the L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E poets and Flarf.
I also came up in the Chicago scene around the same time that Dan Sullivan was hosting Urban Sandbox at the Ice Factory, Idris Goodwin was beginning his playwriting career, and there In One Ear open mic was at the Heartland Cafe. The Weeds open mic hosted by Gregorio Gomez was still going on. Thax Douglas and then Chuck Stebelton and then Larry Sawyer curated a reading series and open mic at Myopic Books. I would be attending these open mics with my friends and fellow poets like David Arenas, Armand Capanna II, and Ivan Ramos. I’d also have long , frequent conversations with Ryan Kulefsky about poetry and philosophy and language.
And as I moved back to Wisconsin, I found that I missed that community. But I was lucky to connect with a community of other writers and musicians and artists here over the years, with various performance series and open mics at different venues over the years. I married and then divorced the poet and musician Carly-Anne Coda, and my second wife Bitzy Coats is also a writer. And our community in Kenosha and Racine includes a lot of talent: Nick Demske, David Hanes, Dan Nielsen, Nick Ramsey, Kelsey Marie Harris, Jay Mollerskov. Thomas Carr, Sandy Christensen, Mary Skillings, Joseph Engel, esteban Colón, Nico Moore, and Haven Wells.
And then in our orbit we’ve also got these Milwaukee poets: Dasha Hamilton-Kelly, Darlin’ Nikki Jansen, Mario The Poet, Kenyatta the Lyrical Lioness, Prince Daniel Wyche, Tim Kloss. Chuck Goldman is another Milwaukee poet whose work I’ve really enjoyed getting to read. And we make an effort to stay plugged in to Vito Carli’s first Saturday series at Tangible Books in Chicago’s Bridgeport neighborhood.
There really are too many influences to mention. I haven’t really touched on a number of other poets from undergrad and graduate school who influenced me, and I’ve only skimmed the surface with contemporaries.
Irodili: Apart from poetry, are you a practicing journalist? From my mini investigation about you, I saw what you post and how you critique and point out what’s absolutely wrong in government.
Nicholas Ravniker: I used to write as a freelance journalist, mainly for Southern Lakes newspapers. I also wrote and copy edited for the Kenosha News, before that paper was bought by Lee Publications.
I don’t currently work as a journalist in any capacity. My various criticisms of local, state and national government are just the rantings and ravings and ramblings of a disgruntled citizen.
I was a college professor for a while, teaching at Gateway Technical College, Carthage College, and UW-Parkside. I also repaired bathtubs for a little while.
I’ve been working on a series of short plays lately, as well as some longer form narrative ideas that I haven’t figured out the proper form for.
Irodili: Have you received any awards for your poems as an iconic and great poet?
Nicholas Ravniker: Wow, “iconic” and “great” — that’s high praise. I did receive the Robert Creeley scholarship award for writing at Naropa University, where I earned a Master of Fine Arts degree.
I also served from July through December of 2023 as a writer in residence for the City of Racine, on behalf of the ArtRoot organization.
Other than that, no, my poetry hasn’t been recognized or awarded in any official capacity.
Irodili: From what I’ve noticed, you seem to have a rare natural ability to create unique poems. Have you formed any specific style of poetry in the past, and how is it making waves in the world of art?
Nicholas Ravniker: I appreciate that compliment. I don’t think any of my work is “making waves,” but it’s out there.
I mentioned the Polish Octave poetic form earlier. A few of those poems have seen publication in I also tried my hand at writing poems that only used 4-letter words — four words per line, four lines per stanza. I published two of those on 1913: A Journal Of Forms, but otherwise they remain in my folders.
I’ve mostly submitted work to smaller literary journals with a limited circulation or reach.
Irodili: Did you inherit your talent from anyone in your family? Does your father write poems, or does any of them?
Nicholas Ravniker: I don’t know how talented I am, though I am obsessive. Maybe those two things are related.
But there aren’t any members of my family to my knowledge who write poetry. I have a cousin who was an English scholar, but I’m not aware of anyone else who writes poems.
My step-father — who I’ve always just referred to as my dad — shared his boyhood live of comic books and sports with me. Growing up I wasn’t particularly into team sports, but I did definitely get into comics. And I think comics continue to play a role in my relationship with literature.
Irodili: In this poem:
if you scream
a woman’s name,
as a monarch
ascends
from dandelion
to milkweed,
paradise
scribbles itself away
What does this imply in the real sense? I’ve never seen this style of poetry before, but I’m wondering if it’s your new style of writing poems. Is it?
Nicholas Ravniker: I don’t know if this is a new style. I feel like it carries forward a variety of influences.
I rarely set out with an idea of what I want a poem to say. Instead, it’s more interesting to me if I use different techniques (ex: collage, cut-up, translation, chance operations, found poems) to see what a poem has to say. I don’t think any of that is new — they’re all tactics I’ve accumulated from other sources. But the poems that come out of that process are usually more interesting than anything I’d come up with on my own.
Obviously there’s a privilege I have as the author to modify and change and select what comes up. But for me, writing is a kind of curation process, where I’m trying to coax out and/or identify ideas or thoughts or sound combinations that feel true and worth saying. That process and the meaning of feeling truth and value requires much more time to explore, so I don’t feel like I’m capable of saying more about it here.
As far as what it means or implies, everyone is free to draw their own conclusions, but I have a few takes on it. And part of me hesitates to try paraphrasing the thing, because collectively they work together to say something else when you actually experience the way their ambiguities give rise to simultaneous meanings. I’m hesitant to impose my own interpretation, and I’m also wary of readers confusing my interpretation of what I’ve (in some sense) written with my intentions in writing it.
But I also recognize that people who are confused by the poem or skeptical of poetry that isn’t fairly literal or traditional could take that as an evasive cop-out, and there’s part of me that really wants to stand up against Plato’s challenge to the poets to defend their art and secure a place in the community — which is maybe a central theme of my writing, including this piece.
So that’s a long introduction to say this poem on the surface and most plainly deals with aBut it also laments how on the process of speaking or expressing in general is an impulse to pass the time by writing or drawing paradise into and/or out of existence. And scribbles can seem quite meaningless on the surface and difficult to discern. But the same is true of a shout or yell or scream. And we often take the author or artist as being the agent or subject who does the scribbling, but this poem creates a unity or equivalence in the conditions of the reader (“you”) screaming a woman’s name and paradise scribbling itself. So there’s a spiritual nonduality at play, where perfection both invokes itself and palimpsests or obscures itself.
There are any number of intentions or motives that could compel someone to invoke “a woman’s name.” Whether it’s out of anger or fear or lust in any particular kind of context, the poem is pretty transparent about leaving the particular motives or reasons for the scream unsaid. And so the reader is either invited or forced to do the introspective and imaginative work of conjuring a particular woman.
So there’s a frame sentence structure: “if you … [then] paradise …” You, the reader or addressee screaming the name of a woman (which could also be understood as an analog to the poet invoking the generic “you” ) are connected not necessarily causally but conditionally with paradise scribbling itself.
So what’s going on between the terms of these conditions? Theres another metamorphosis at play, which by virtue of the “as” is presented as a simile/analogy or happening simultaneously. Superficially, it’s an image of a butterfly going from dandelion to milkweed. Dandelions, at least here in Wisconsin, bloom in early Spring, they’re one of the first sources of food for pollinators. And milkweed doesn’t bloom until later in the season, even into the summer, and it serves as one of the later food sources for butterflies and bees and wasps.
And these kinds of pollinator plants that are native to my geography are treated as weeds by the popular or mainstream culture that sees a lawn as necessarily a place of order dominated by grass — as invasive and somehow detrimental. People here in the US go to great length using chemicals to kill off the dandelions in their yards. When in fact, those very plants they call weeds can help fix the soil and provide ongoing food for pollinators to keep a garden thriving. Of course, the word monarch also carries its association with the ruler of a realm — a king or queen. So there’s a kind of political tension or commentary at play, because this political order is one in which monarchy ascends, as an heir does to a throne. But in this case from one food source to another. A king ascending seems to me also am obviously echo of the Christ figure ascending from earth to heaven, from one “kingdom” to “another.”
And that itself undermines the idea of the monarch as all-powerful or self sufficient, and it highlights the temporary nature of kingdoms or rulerships — and maybe then also points to the idea of a paradise or utopia, as a place that’s at best temporary or imaginary or nonexistent. And so the screaming of the woman’s name seems coextensive with the monarch’s ascension, which is also co-extensive in some sense with paradise scribbling itself away. There’s a troubling, then, in this poem of that idea of paradise. How do we yearn for perfection? Should we? Does our pursuit of these desires or our expression of these terms, our very use of labels itself — somehow function as a self-fulfilling prophecy? How does it negate or bring about both our intensions? How are the consequences of our intentions and expressions unforeseen?
I learned from my friend Matthew Coté, who is a philosopher of religion, that Aquinas would call all of these metaphors analogies of improper proportion. So, in some sense I think all this analogy appears as pandemonium.
Irodili: How many poetry books have you published so far since you began writing?
Nicholas Ravniker: I have published six books of my own poems, which are all available on Amazon: Imaginary Friends, Three Dirty Sunsets, Paranoise, Funky Tacos, How’s Things and Dawn Pantomimes.
I also collaborated with Ivan Ramos and David Arenas to bring poetry workshops into Chicago Public Schools, and I led workshops with Woodland Pattern’s summer youth poetry camp. Ivan and I also developed the Poetry Movement’s anthology, Shoulders Gathered By Water, which explores the themes of movement and travel in the Chicago-Milwaukee corridor. We developed that project while we were writing and performing a collaborative poem called Heartbreak Street, which we published as a chapbook in 2023.
I’ve also published the work of Ryan Phillip Kulefsky and Steve Timm through a small press I ran called Bathroom Reading Materials, and I’ve run small press publications over the years including Paper Knives, which featured video interviews with poets.
More recently, I worked with the City of Racine’s transportation department and our local arts council to put poetry on the city buses.
Irodili: When someone asks you for your favorite style of poetry, do you feel the question misses something essential?
Instead of choosing one, how do you experience poetry as a range, where different styles offer different pleasures, insights, or moments of recognition?
What do you find yourself appreciating across styles, rather than within just one?
Nicholas Ravniker: That feels like asking me my favorite color or song or food. I guess there are people who can nail those things down and choose one. But I can’t do that. I’d be oversimplifying and misconstruing my own experience, which seems dishonest to me.
I can find enjoyment in some aspect of pretty much any style of poetry. And I think different style have different elements that I enjoy.
Irodili: What advice do you have for other poets who find it difficult to write great poems, even though many are not born with a natural gift for it? Or do you think this natural gift can be cultivated?
Nicholas Ravniker: I don’t know if I’m in a position to tell anyone how to write great poems or how to do so without difficulty. If anything I’ve written measures anywhere near “great” — an can’t say if it does — then it’s been very difficult for me to do that. Now that said, I think there’s a false dichotomy between things coming naturally or being difficult.
Struggle is part of nature. Now, can one have an instinct for certain things? Sure. But even instinct requires effort to be effective. It’s instinctive or reflexive for some lizards to lose their limbs if they’re attacked. It’s natural for a bee to lose its stinger. It doesn’t make those processes not difficult, though.
I think part of the reason I write the way I do — which some people consider to be difficult to read or difficult to understand— is because I think a lot about a variety of topics from a variety of different perspectives. And people will often criticize those of us who expend a lot of energy in thought by saying that we overthink.
And I’m not trying to suggest that there’s no such thing, conceptually. I mean, sure, there’s a point where so much forethought is enough to understand or cope with a situation or come to a decision.
But also: you don’t know what that threshold is unless you critically examine it. This is similar to people who say philosophy is a waste of time: they have a philosophy to back that assertion up.
I’d rather risk thinking too much than not think enough. I’m not trying to be difficult, it just comes naturally. And because of that, I put the “overt” in “overthinking.”
Summary
Irodili: Nicholas Ravniker is a poet driven by obsession, curiosity, and love of language rather than fame or fixed meaning. Writing since early adolescence, he works daily across many styles, embracing experimentation, invented forms, and difficulty as part of the art. Influenced by music, avant-garde poetry, and vibrant Midwest literary communities, his work explores ambiguity, impermanence, politics, ecology, and spirituality. With six poetry books published and decades of unpublished work, Ravniker sees poetry not as a single style or message, but as an ongoing practice of attention, thinking deeply, and letting language discover what it wants to say.
About The Author
What a beautiful interview. I thoroughly enjoyed reading it and finding more about Nicolas and Irodili. Wow too. It was most interesting observing the wonderful way you both used language to create.