#TheWhiskeyShot: Poet Spotlight (Wave 2) – Perry Gasteiger

Perry Gasteiger doesn’t believe in poetic formula. For them, writing is a kind of weather, sometimes still, sometimes wild, always shifting. Their poems don’t declare; they unfold. “At the beginning of my writing journey,” they say, “it felt like I was trying to say everything with a piece… a smorgasbord of words and philosophy.” But over time, that instinct has been refined into a slow, patient precision. “I’ve begun to learn to scale down the focus of a piece… to connect big ideas, feelings, and points of connection to single moments.” It’s not about saying less. It’s about saying right.

This shift came with a simple but transformative habit: starting a document titled To Be Rehomed. In it, Perry stashes the lines, phrases, and images they love but can’t yet use. It’s a poet’s foster home, somewhere for beautiful strays. “It’s made me feel a lot freer to cut the fat,” they explain. “I have a place to keep those bits until I find them a place that does them justice.” It’s a small act of trust in the long game, and a rejection of panic editing. Those fragments, like seeds, might just be waiting for the right soil.

Every poem demands its own path. There’s no one process—just a toolkit of questions, hunches, and emotional cues. Sometimes it starts with an idea. Sometimes a single, sticky image. Perry asks: Why is this still scratching at my brain? They hold it up to the light, pair it with unexpected metaphors, shift the framing. And only then do they begin to explore. “Writing a poem is a process of exploration,” they say. “Quite often the process of writing asks you to examine an idea and work your own way through it.” First drafts are messy, curious, necessary. After that comes the deep cut: paring down, reshaping, clearing out 50 commas and asking the poem what it’s really trying to say.

Their influences are literary, environmental, and spiritual. The work of Rossetti, Barrett Browning, Wordsworth, and Eliot form the poetic foundation, but it’s the wildness of Northern Ontario that haunts their imagination. “The natural landscape… juxtaposed with the declining industrial mining city of Sudbury, my hometown.” It’s in that tension, between decay and wilderness, control and chaos, that Gasteiger finds much of their voice. The natural world isn’t just backdrop; it’s inheritance.

Lately, though, poetry has been sleeping. And that’s okay. “Inspiration has been difficult for me to come by recently,” Perry admits. But they’ve reframed creativity, not as output, but as process. “Creativity is not about what you make but the process of making it.” They’ve turned to music, co-writing silly songs with a friend. They’ve gone back to drawing. “I know I will return to poetry some day, and soon no doubt, but for now I have tucked it in to sleep.”

When the words are flowing, they could write anywhere. But their dream spot? “Picnic tables in a park on a clear, bright summer day.” That kind of natural context, the breeze, the sun, the presence of other lives, helps loosen the internal tangle. “I like being outdoors and/or in a cafe with other people,” they say. “It helps to remind me that my story is not the only one I am writing to connect with.”

Poetry, for Perry Gasteiger, isn’t confession or performance, it’s clarity. A way of seeing the self from outside the self. “I began writing poetry again during a massive depressive episode,” they share. “It helped me to connect with the world again… to look at my pain from beyond it.” Even now, that’s the quiet engine behind their work, a desire to understand the inner world through communication, not in spite of it.

Perry’s published work includes Bruising Bone: life in bloom (2023), a collaborative art and poetry project with Rebecca Payne released through Fifth Wheel Press, and the forthcoming anthology out.skirts, co-edited with Romina Ramos. Their work sits at the edge of personal and political, tactile and ethereal, always asking, never assuming.

Right now, Perry’s poetry is in a pause. But it isn’t gone. It’s resting. Rewilding. Waiting for the next fragment to spark, and for the next poem to show them where it needs to go.