Inside the Mind of Isaiah Holloway: P.S & Signature

An interview conducted, written, edited, and transcribed by Faye Allego. 

Cover Concept for 'P.S & Signature' by Isaiah Holloway

It has been two years since I last fell into the mind lair of Isaiah Holloway through his poetry collections. Over the years, Holloway has managed to release three poetry collections: Soulmate Volume I, Soulmate: Volume II, and Eighteen, all of which invite his readers to his first-hand experiences of coming-of-age, the power and detriment of masculinity, and of course, love. Now, with his fourth upcoming release titled P.S. & Signature, I sat down with this poet and discussed his writing process as well as entering the depths of new thematic sequences in his writing: the theme of solitude amalgamated with heartbreak. 

P.S. & Signature is out for digital paid release only on June 1st. In his Instagram post that announces this new release, he writes: 

“I haven’t published written work since 2022. that was the last time I remember writing effortlessly, and with ease. everything that followed that year consumed me from the inside out - instantaneously, my new life brought overwhelming experiences I couldn’t articulate on paper. I did not know anything about the people or things I thought I knew. what to say or do, how to feel. I had always somehow turned to the literature part of myself, in writing, to guide me in figuring it out, but this time, I just didn’t, and I felt entirely on my own because of it. a small part of me did believe that the words would somehow find their way back to me with unforced time, maybe as I grew older - I did not imagine that they would come rushing back to me in a completely different direction and sequence.

the last few months of my life have at times felt like isolation in a room with 4 metal walls, and writing became the only escape of a porthole I could see out of for light and familiar stories. I see these stories so vibrantly visual in my mind, and I hear every word with a melody, carefully crafted as a song derived from intentional lyricism. these poems are conceptually bonded to songwriting.

words became more natural when I wrote with music attached, and very important artists to me and their releases in music greatly informed my writing process. though i view this project as genre-less, I hear alternative and country instrumentals present in poems like “6 Foot Something”. In each of these carefully curated and selected poems, there is so much of me in a way that I have not previously shared.

I simply began to write poems and songs, as one - and somehow that has become this new passion project I would like to share:

“P.S. & Signature” - my new poetry book releasing June 1st. available online as a paid release.

p.s. I hope you luv it.” 

– Isaiah Holloway on Instagram (@zayakahlil)

Isaiah Holloway, photo courtesy of Faye Allego.

In this interview, now transcribed for you to read, I asked Isaiah questions split into three categories, the first being his beginner experiences in writing, followed by questions regarding his current writing style in his upcoming release, and the final set being his thoughts on releasing his most personal collection and the art of being perceived. 

FAYE ALLEGO(INTERVIEWER)

OK, Isaiah! That Instagram caption was everything! First things first, how do you feel about this release? 

ISAIAH HOLLOWAY

I feel unexpectedly grateful for the responses I’ve received so far in my announcement,  I wrote this in private and now that it’s out, and that it’s actualizing, it feels very surreal. 

INTERVIEWER

So, poetry. Why use poetry as your medium of expressing your intimate experiences as opposed to using your decades-long career in dance as a mode of storytelling? 

ISAIAH HOLLOWAY

I always say that dance is my therapy. There are things that have found me, that I don’t think I have found; Dance has always found me and not the other way around. I can say the same for writing, I never had to find the writer in me because it has always found me first. My mom is a teacher and a writer, so it feels passed down and it fits me so well. There are certain thoughts that I don’t want to say, so I use dance as an expression of those thoughts. Dance is performance, it’s training, it’s a lifestyle, and it’s not just my job, it’s who I am. There’s a part of me that loves making and creating. Like, you can create and make and dance as like a choreographer, a dance captain, or a movement coach. That being said, with poetry, with writing specifically, it’s so nice to be in control of the process from start to finish. I love turning short stories in my life into poems, taking photos to visually demonstrate the artistry of the poem, editing, and the entire process is what makes this my medium. Dance fulfills me physically, and writing fulfills me mentally. 

INTERVIEWER

How do you develop your poems? Do they come to you in an instant, do they start as a feeling, a stanza, or does the whole thing come to you in one piece?

ISAIAH HOLLOWAY

It depends on the poem. It depends on where I am and how I’m feeling. Yes, a lot to do with it comes with emotions and when I don’t feel right about something that’s not right or out of place, that’s something I have to write about because I won't feel it that way again, but sometimes words and phrases just come to me and often it just finds me. I write from a feeling or words that someone says or when I’m having a conversation with someone and it’s specific words they say; I create and craft stories from that. 

INTERVIEWER

Currently, you have three poetry books out which means you are familiar with the world of poetry, compiling your own concepts, and self-publishing. What made you decide to stick to the DIY route of self-publishing?

ISAIAH HOLLOWAY

The process of creating is so much more fulfilling than the product itself! I love creating things. I need to make something or else I go crazy. It’s so fun and such an enjoyable experience because when it’s out to the world, I know that I made that, and I produced that, all of the photos I took were by me, and all of the words I wrote were words that I wrote alone and the people that like it, like my words that I made. It’s not about the product it’s about the process of making it that is so enjoyable and I prefer the DIY route because I prefer to learn what I like and what I don’t like. It’s also not that I don’t have taste and do not want to collaborate with other people because I have, and it was amazing and didn’t feel like an idea of mine had to be sacrificed or lost. But with DIY-ing myself, I don’t have to compromise my poetry. 

Isaiah Holloway, photo courtesy of Faye Allego.

INTERVIEWER

What inspired you to make this poetry book have concepts similar to an album rollout to singers and songwriters? 

ISAIAH HOLLOWAY

When I decided that it [the poetry collection] was going to be released similarly to the way an artist would release an album rollout, I just wrote, wrote, and wrote. Then I was like, “I can actually release this, I have enough to release” and my thought process was like “If no one reads this, I still want to release it.” I thought back to something I have not done before, what’s something that’s going to stand out? Because I haven’t released poetry since 2022 and to me and the artists I look up to, when they return, when they come back to music, they always come back to some sort of new era of reinvention and a display that there is tangible perspective that so much time has passed since they last wrote. I wanted there to be a differentiation between my last poetry book, Eighteen, and my new writing era with P.S. & Signature. There was also just so much musical influence on writing my new poetry book. I love vinyl records and I recall the time I was living in the UK, before even writing P.S. & Signature, I was still writing and I had this concept for an art collection called “Nineteen Vinyl Records” and it was going to be 19 graphic designs that I produced; It never actualized because it felt forced and that’s what lead me to P.S. & Signature because it didn’t feel forced. So when I had my poems written I thought it would be nice to incorporate the concept of vinyl records labeled as each of my favorite poems from this collection because that’s how I hear them as well as associating colours and all those fun little details that I do correlate these concepts with when I decide that I was going to publish. 

Isaiah Holloway (pictured in both photos), photos courtesy of Faye Allego.

INTERVIEWER

Themes of heartbreak, solitude, and longing are everpresent in the poems P.S. and Signature, Winner, and 6 Foot Something. These three poems bleed through other poems, how did you decide to make these collections of poems cohesive compared to the varying themes in your first two poetry books, Soulmate Vol. 1 and 2?

ISAIAH HOLLOWAY

I think I matured. The short answer is I matured as a writer. I don’t think I matured as a person any more than I did differently if that makes sense. I had just written over 30 poems, and when I decided I wanted to publish, I wanted it to be a cohesive collection that showed I had matured and was about something that was not obvious but so recognisable and had a theme and an influence. That’s when I started hand-picking around 35-40 poems of what looked similar, what sounded similar, and also what felt similar; what emotions I was taking and writing 3 or 4 poems about and using those and making a collection. There were poems that were called one thing and then changed the title because it didn’t fit the aesthetic of what I wanted to achieve and there was one poem in the opening, titled P.S. & Signature, that was originally called “there are so many things”, but then I didn’t like how that was the opening “track”, I didn’t like how that was what the reader was introduced to so that then became the same name of the poetry book. I wanted my return to not read like how it was read before. I didn’t want my audience to read this as “Okay, he’s writing something he doesn’t know about” or “he’s writing about a fantasy world” whereas it’s obvious that the tone in this collection is a lot more cohesive and there are concepts and there’s stories and you really see my maturity as a writer, I would really hope you do. 

INTERVIEWER

What makes your vinyl variant poems' Hardest Part, Coastline, and 6 Foot Something stand out compared to the rest?

ISAIAH HOLLOWAY

Oh my goodness! Well, these are for one, my personal favorites simply because the drafted version is so close to the published version and how it's so raw and the only one I experimented a lot with was 6 foot something. there were so many directions I wanted to take like a dinner party and my ex walks in with their brand new 6-foot something. Like that was a concept that I wanted to experiment with but it ended up being more of a country-esque aesthetic and tone. These poems stand out because I remember everywhere I was when I wrote these poems but I remember the feeling of when I finished writing the hardest part, how I took my hands away from my laptop and was just like “Woah.” for me it to react to what I wrote and pull a whole Demi Lovato in Camp Rock moment saying “She’s really good!” I was just really impressed with how different it reads from anything I've ever written before, if you go back and read the second poem of each of my previous poetry books, they’re short. And this one is long and complex but it doesn’t appear complex on the surface and there’s so much detail in all of these. Hardest Part I love because I had that woah reaction, Coastline I just love because I almost called the poetry collection Coastline, and Six Foot Something I love because there’s a strong country influence or at least it reads a bit like a country song to me. 

INTERVIEWER

Your voice and style of poetry are very diaristic and almost like Absolem from Alice In Wonderland. how did you develop this and do you feel as though you've found and are going to stick to this writing style?? 

ISAIAH HOLLOWAY

Again, I’ve matured. That’s why I’ve written in the introduction of my release that I knew that the words would come to me eventually, maybe as I grew older they’ll come to me and I really wanted to emphasize that I thought that when I grew up I’ll be a better writer because I’ll have matured. Once I started writing in this selective and intentional style of writing I knew that I was going to stick with that and I knew that once I had written about 10 really good publishable poems, I would start writing in that similar style so that everything I wrote I could be able to say “I like this more” and put it in the collection and not have to change it because it sounded repetitive. There were so many poems that were just obvious that didn't fit because you could tell that they read differently they had rhyme and were written like poems whereas some of these I feel like were written like songs and they read as songs there's always a hook or bridge or line break. 

Isaiah Holloway, photo courtesy of Faye Allego.

INTERVIEWER

So there’s this amalgamation of elements to songwriting and elements of poetry that you mix to be appropriate in your writing. Seeing this dichotomy between these two styles of writing being blended makes me ask: What were your biggest challenges writing this collection? 

ISAIAH HOLLOWAY

I think two of my biggest challenges were: 1) Is this too personal to share? And 2) I could stop writing because I did it before, where I didn’t write for a long, long time. And I thought to myself, maybe it’ll come back to me when I’m older, I’ll decide one day that I’ll write. The challenges were if it was too personal and if this could cause writer’s block and never get to do it again until I’m older. 

INTERVIEWER

What are your favorite poetic devices and language features to use in your writing? How do decide on the form and structure of a poem? 

ISAIAH HOLLOWAY

I love this. One of the biggest aspects of my writing that I wanted to differentiate from before and my new writing process now is eradicating all lowercase letters because when I wrote before in lowercase letters it was very reminiscent of the time and just how I speak colloquially with my friends and it felt more personable and easy to write in. I wrote how I would write to my real friends and that was real to me. With this one, it feels more adult. Somehow writing with capitalization by breaking up each line and starting each line with a capital letter gives a caesura effect of reading each line as its own sentence. I think Coastline is the only poem that ends with a period because it was a full thought that I had written and I wrote that in my notes and straight into the book without editing. 

INTERVIEWER

What did a day in the life as a dancer and poet look like for you? how did you fit in the room for creativity and mastering your skill in writing?

ISAIAH HOLLOWAY

I am a professional dancer so during this time I was in a full-time job working as a professional dancer. I would wake up and often times there would be a rehearsal in the morning and then I would go to lunch since there was a dedicated time for it. If you missed it, you wouldn’t get to eat until dinner, after a show, so time management was key. I would fall asleep after lunch to get enough energy for the show or sometimes just lay in bed. That’s when I’d write, whenever I lay in bed, I had the gift of time. Another time where I’d write is when I’d be at the gym after a show and I am ALWAYS in the gym after a show. Always. I’d also write in the middle of the night too. 

INTERVIEWER

All of these poems were born out of isolation and personal experiences, how do you handle the feelings of releasing a collection of poetry that is so personal to you for readers to perceive and interpret with their own experiences?

ISAIAH HOLLOWAY

A part of me hopes that people just don’t read it because it is so personal or that they aren’t interested enough in buying modern-day poetry because it is always just so personal, which is why I used the strategy of an album rollout so that it is perceived the way an audience perceives a songwriter’s lyricism. The takeaway that I said about the process of creating is so much more fulfilling than the product is that I’ve already gotten what I needed from the process; that’s why I don’t want people to read it to interpret it about my own life. I’m still writing and it’s already healed me and helped me make sense of what I was going through at the time so the writing process for P.S. & Signature feels complete, there’s nothing left to say. It’s yours to do whatever you want with it once I’ve published it. 

INTERVIEWER

What advice can you give to someone wanting to write and publish poetry? 

ISAIAH HOLLOWAY

Write without the intention that you’re going to publish. You have to write for yourself, there’s nothing wrong with writing for an audience because they’re your audience but when you write like someone is going to read it, it skews your true perspective a lot. It becomes a lot less poet-centred. A person looking to write and publish poetry should write with time. Time is so… when you write with time, you don’t rush anything. You don’t rush ideas, you don’t rush concepts, you don’t rush your writing style. Once you write with time then you have liberty to publish whatever you want, however you want. 

INTERVIEWER

This poetry book takes album rollout concepts like the vinyl edits you displayed on your Instagram, and typically artists and songwriters take a hiatus before releasing their next album and so on. That being said, when can readers expect to delve into your vault of poems again? 

ISAIAH HOLLOWAY

Mmm… Sooner than expected. All that to say, P.S. & Signature is all that I wanted to say, it’s done. There is something special about taking the route of a deluxe edition because this poetry collection is tied to an album rollout concept, and artists release what they want to release for a reason! I hope that soon enough, people love reading P.S. & Signature enough to want to read more. 

INTERVIEWER 

So as my final question, I want to revamp my second question that talks about your beginnings as a dancer and how you chose poetry as your medium of storytelling. That question is: do you plan on combining dance with poetry one day?

ISAIAH HOLLOWAY

Yes. Yes, I do.  I can’t say more, but I do. 

 [END.]

This interview was conducted in person on May 27, 2024. 

Isaiah Holloway’s poetry book, P.S. & Signature, is out on June 1st as a digital paid release. 

Follow him on Instagram @ZayaKahlil