Nico Demers meditates on family, love, and the body in his newest poetry book “Belly”

AUGUST 25TH 2023 | by EMMA SCHOORS

Raised by the shores of San Diego, Demers’ wrestling journey ended where his writing journey began. “I needed a place to put that emotional toll that I underwent from cutting weight and basically trying to survive while also being 15, 16, 17, and competing at this really high level,” he says. “I quit wrestling, I dropped all my college offers, I did all of that because I was done. I couldn’t stand it.” A mimication assignment on Rudy Francisco’s ‘My Honest Poem’ introduced him to the world of creative writing, and for five years since, he’s been enamored. “I felt like I had a pipeline straight to the page,” he says. “It was this strange thing where suddenly I realized I had this knack for it. Not just a knack for the writing part, but I really love to perform.”

Performing has kept him in the eye of tens of thousands on TikTok, where he delivers “raw-spirited prose style” poetry with a smile. Some are dedicated to his songstress partner Quinnie, while others reflect on eating disorders, the body, interpersonal relationships and faith. “My books are always an ode to that divine thing that’s working,” Demers says. “It’s this undercurrent. Everything in my life is a river, and it’s constantly moving through me.”

Demers’ next release is loosely set to be a brave jump to fiction. Until then, we had the chance to sit down with the artist to speak about spirituality, his profound love for the word God, and a little Brian Eno to boot.

RAMBLE: I want to start at the beginning, and get a feel for how you entered the writing world. Are there any other writers in your family? Were you really into English class as a kid or something?

Nico: It’s a funny thing. I was pretty late to the game, I’d say. I grew up with a Kerouac enthusiast of a dad, huge on literature. Really enjoyed Steinback and Keruoac, all the misogynistic writers of our era. My sister was a voracious reader, but I was the oddball. I was the black wolf of the family. I picked it up late, and I wrestled through all of high school, so I didn’t have much time for my academic passions. It wasn’t until my senior year of high school. I had just transferred back from a very dedicated all boys Catholic school… not all boys, it’s both. But I wrestled for all of high school, which was quite the event. It was a canon event in my life. I transferred out of that school because I underwent some really terrible experiences through that sport, and I kind of needed a place to put that emotional toll that I underwent from cutting weight and basically trying to survive while also being 15, 16, 17, and competing at this really high level, so I transferred back to my old school. 

I quit wrestling, I dropped all my college offers, I did all of that because I was done. I couldn’t stand it. Then I entered this class called Writer’s Workshop, and there is a teacher named Darren Samakosky. Writer’s Workshop was basically a spoken word poetry class, and I really had no idea what I was getting into. I just wanted to take the easiest English class possible because I was so done with having a hard time in high school. All of a sudden, I was given my first assignment to write an honest poem, and it was a mimication of Rudy Francisco’s honest poem, which is this really huge spoken word poet. All of a sudden these metaphors just started falling out of me. I was full of these similes and all these words, and I didn’t really understand what place they came from, but I felt like I had a pipeline straight to the page, so I started writing, and I realized I loved it so much. My dad and sister always really loved to write, and I guess I always really loved to write, but I kept it so quiet because my thing was always wrestling and I was more of the athlete. 

It was this strange thing where suddenly I realized I had this knack for it. Not just a knack for the writing part, but I really love to perform. I’ve always been that person who likes to get up in front of the class. Samakosky introduces me to spoken word poetry, and I’m kind of shot out of this literary canon, and I’m just like, ‘Oh my god.’ I start picking up tons of poetry books and all these novels, and I just become completely obsessed. In the past five years now, I’ve taken it and flown with it.

RAMBLE: I was wondering how you got into the spoken word part, because that’s nerve wracking for a lot of people. I’ve never been able to do that. An element of it for you is performing?

Nico: For sure. I don’t think anything should be written unless you could speak it honestly first. I think that’s where I get my more raw-spirited prose style. I’ve started to drift into more rigid form and stuff like that, got really obsessed with sonnets and sestinas and guzzles and whatnot. But aside from that, I kind of try to break that whole literary guideline we’re given in the beginning of our lives. I think spoken word is the best way to do it too, because through these oral traditions, I think it really just makes your writing better if you speak it first. I’ll write a poem, and when I write the line, I’ll say it before I write the line. I say it out loud so then I could feel the way I wanna write, if I want to add words or whatever. I think spoken word should be a huge aspect to everyone’s writing, because it has been for me, you know? 

RAMBLE: It’s much more confrontational. It forces you to deal with your own words, and the way you feel about things. You’re right. If you can’t say it out loud, do you really mean it?

Nico: Exactly.

RAMBLE: You’ve mentioned Bukowski, Mary Oliver, Ocean Vuong, Sylvia Plath, all the classics in your videos. Is there a book or author that you’ve been hooked on recently?

Nico: Let me think. Yeah, I’ve been really obsessed with this poet, she’s actually the Poet Laureate of the United States right now. Her name’s Ada Limón.

RAMBLE: I’m obsessed with her too. 

Nico: I am absolutely obsessed with her. God, she’s incredible. I just read The Hurting Kind, and I just read Sharks in the Rivers, and I read Bright Dead Things, and I just cannot get enough. I’m hoping to God that there’s more to read because she is just an absolute master of words. It’s ridiculous. 

RAMBLE: I’m literally sitting next to my copy of Bright Dead Things, so I understand what you mean. What do you think makes a great poetry book? Like you said, there’s guidelines we’re given at the beginning. Certain things are understandable because we have to understand each other linguistically, language wise, but beyond that it’s such a personal thing. What do you look for in the poetry that you read?

Nico: To make a good poetry book, for me, it’s always just an anthology of every part of our lives. So how you see Mary Oliver’s Devotions being this anthology of all of her poetry books over the years, I feel like in a very condensed version of that. I always like to write over the course of a year, and then I go back into those things and I edit them and I rip through them and I tear my teeth into ‘em. Belly, my latest book, is broken down into three parts. It’s broken down into a love section, into this familial belly-full section, and the last one’s gonna be this eating body section. I think what makes it good is you get this full emotional spectrum of the writer. Like in Ada Limón’s The Hurting Kind, we get a lot of stuff involving the emotional connection human to human, and the emotional connection human to nature, and then the emotional connection to God in general. I really enjoy when you get this big broad band of things. Some books talk about only one thing. I think maybe my next book will be strictly on the male body and eating disorders and whatnot. But through that, I still want to give the full emotional spectrum.

RAMBLE: Have you found reading to be helpful in your process of writing? I’ve found the more of other people’s work I read, the more words my brain has access to at any given time, but there’s some writers who don’t want any trace of other people’s material subconsciously influencing theirs. Do you read a lot when you’re writing, or do you try to avoid that so it’s plainly coming from you?

Nico: Yeah, I read like crazy. I think good artists write, and great artists steal. I think that’s a famous line [laughs]. A lot of times when I’m writing a longer piece that I really care about, I have, like, five books next to me. I’ll read a few poems here and there, from this one and from that one and from that book. Eventually I get these big clouds of ways to conduct my sentence. I learned this thing from Samakosky, my high school English teacher. In Rudy Francisco’s honest poem, I learned this mimication process. It doesn’t make you steal, but it helps you get your own thoughts down. He starts his poem with, ‘I’m 5’6, I’m 180 pounds, I like giving big hugs,’ or whatever. So I start my poem with, ‘I’m 5’5, I’m 120 pounds,’ and then I write my metaphor, my poetic line there. I don’t even necessarily use that, but because I had that framework, I got that last line out, which really helps me. I’ll take that line and do something else with it. Reading is a huge part in, I think, making anyone’s writing better. My girlfriend, she weirdly likes to have no trace, but she’s more of a songwriter. She has no trace of things, but I guess it’s the music that subconsciously always bleeds into your work, whether you like it or not. 

RAMBLE: That’s interesting. I usually interview musicians, and they usually don’t like to listen to things when they’re writing, so that makes total sense. I think it’s easier to have it bleed into your work. Do you ever get writer’s block? Is that a thing for you, or is it always flowing?

Nico: Constantly. I may appear prolific online, but I definitely have my droughts, no doubt. Weirdly enough, though, something that cures my drought the most is putting on a strictly ambient, musical, no lyrics album. So I’ll play Brian Eno or I’ll play Dylan Henner. These are ambient artists where it’s just basically overlays of birds and samples and stuff. It really gets me to relax and let all this artistic jargon come out of me, which is really helpful, weirdly enough. I don’t know how most poets function, but I love listening. It helps me so much. I put on just one album, and it goes on forever, and it’s eternal and I can just write. It helps me like crazy. So yes, I get writer’s block, but my way to cure it is by…

RAMBLE: Brian Eno.

Nico: Yeah! Or listening to an album like that that can just get me to ponder things. I don’t know why, but it works so well.

RAMBLE: I’ll have to try that. I listen to regular albums, but it makes sense that instrumentals would be more helpful. Onto your newest book, Belly. How did you decide on the cover image and the title?

Nico: I was raised Catholic. My upbringing was definitely rooted in faith, and now that I’ve kind of branched off from Catholicism, I still find myself coming back to a lot of the core values in it, like gratitude and loving something above. I’d say I’m more of a Catholic Buddhist now. The story behind this photo is I had my first communion in a few weeks, and my mom wanted photos for it because she was gonna throw a little first communion party. So my mom wakes me and my sister up at literally the crack of dawn, and she’s like, ‘Alright, we’re going to the beach.’ It’s fucking freezing cold. I’m like, ‘I don’t wanna fucking do this,’ but I get on my little suit. I don’t know how old I am in this, I’ve gotta be like seven or something. It’s the funniest shit, because my mom’s so corny. You can see my sister in the background holding up this cross. It’s freezing cold in the fog on the beach, and then there’s me in my little suit. 

From a poetic standpoint it makes so much sense for my book, because literally the first poem of this book is, ‘I wanna nail my hands to your hips like they’re a cross,’ and it’s surrounding this idea that I’m religiously in love, and it goes on throughout the entire book, there’s this motif. I’d say I write with a lot of biblical notes in it. There’s always the reference to God and the cross and all these different things like that. So this photo holds a lot of emotional weight for me, because it was a very strange part of my life. While it’s also kind of hilarious, it also has this eerie emotional summation where it’s like, this is a time when my parents were getting divorced, which I write a lot about in this book. This was a time when I was understanding faith. Even though I’m not necessarily Catholic at all, it definitely has been a thing in my life. It just made sense because it was such a pivotal point in my life. I thought it’d be perfect. 

RAMBLE: You have this slideshow on TikTok and it’s a bunch of poems from the book, and it says, ‘Are you religiously in love? Read these.’ [In] one of the poems, ‘Sacred,’ there’s a line that reads, ‘I promise to make this bed a church, one where God weeps from simply watching us,’ which is one of my favorite lines in the book. I think it’s so brilliant.

Nico: Oh my god.

RAMBLE: I wanted to ask you about that, because it’s a bit of a double entendre. There’s the purest spiritual sense where love, sex, devotion, and religion all come from the same energetic place, and tapping into any of those things is cause for celebration. Then there’s the convoluted modern religious lens, through which God weeps in disapproval. How did you settle upon, like you said, faith/religion? Why was that an important thing to talk about?

Nico: I think it was just such a huge aspect of my life. My grandma’s always shoved Catholicism down our throats. Maybe not in a negative way, because I’m thankful for it now, but I go through my periods of hating God and loving God. Through all of that, I still have this profound love for the word God. Not for God, but for the word God. Because I am definitely very spiritual. I think it’s kind of hard to ignore these divine encounters we have in our life. Just in the fact that I’m talking to you right now about my poetry, because I’ve manifested myself to be this writer, and for some reason it’s worked. I think my books are always an ode to that divine thing that’s working. 

It’s like this undercurrent. Everything in my life is a river, and it’s constantly moving through me. God’s constantly pushing through me. God’s constantly beneath, God’s constantly above. It’s always this idea that you’re surrounded by this spiritual, lightful aura, and I think that’s a really big reason why I ended my book with, ‘Without a body, there was no more suffering. He looked just like God.’ That line means the world to me. I had this idea that maybe it’s not the Catholic God, but if we are all created by some higher being, then we ourselves are these fragments of God. Being these fragments of God, it’s like we are our own gods, and we are all these walking gods. Whether it be Catholicism or Buddhism or whatever, it’s just really important to all my writing because I was raised with it, because I can feel it, and because I honestly need it at times when I’m not doing well or when I am doing really well.

RAMBLE: Another one of my favorite poems in it is called ‘Cape,’ and the last lines read: ‘He hopes for the same ‘sweet dreams’ that he just promised before kissing us goodnight.’ You write something in the same vein about your mother, and how we see our parents as these omniscient beings when we’re young, as these infallible people. At some point the veil is broken, and we realize they’re just as scared as we are. Why did you choose family as another concept for this book?

Nico: God, it was a very fucking weird year for me. My dad’s flaws were held to the damn light. I swear to God, I considered my father a hero for basically my entire life, and I never understood so many reasons why certain things were happening. Suddenly, I was kind of hit with a bullet in the side of my neck. That’s what it felt like. I became painfully aware of my father’s missteps and his fuckups and places where he went wrong. For a long time before that, I realized it with my mom. Because I think I was aware of these things from a very young age. In both of them, this year has been me scrutinizing every piece of their personality. I’m just like, ‘Who the fuck are you?’ I have these conversations with my parents, and I’m late to the bloom. I mean, I’m 21 years old, and most kids figure out by like 15, and they hate their parents. But I’ve had the strongest, most beautiful, most best friend-like relationship with my dad and with my mom as well, up until these past few years where I suddenly became so aware, and I think it was almost like a public service announcement. 

I wanted to write about it in hopes that people would read it and reach out to me and be like, ‘Listen, I’ve gone through the exact same thing.’ That’s what I was looking for. I was looking for this camaraderieship. Just like you said, and I’m sure you’ve felt the same with your parents where it’s like, I love my dad. I love my mom. They are just humans, whether I can forgive them or not. That is the truth. Yes, they’re doing the best they can, and yes, they’ve really fucked up in places, but in the end, they are my parents, so I have to love them. But I’m still honestly in that process of forgiving and understanding and figuring out who these people who raised me are. That was a massive part. I honestly wanted this part of the book to be bigger, but I realized so many people like the love poems, and I had to make it a little bit more about that. Maybe in the next book there’ll be more.

RAMBLE: What’s the most important life lesson writing has taught you?

Nico: Oh man, let’s think. God, it’s done a lot of things for me, but I think it comes back to that point I made earlier about something that’s so cathartic. I can really just empty myself. Obviously through my writing I talk so much about the body, and that’s why my book is named Belly, because everything centers around these bodies that we wear. Writing has largely taught me that at the forefront of my mind is constantly my body, whether as a spiritual thing or as a painful thing or as a beautiful thing or as a burden. Writing has taught me that I definitely have some things to work through regarding my main point in all my work, which is the body. Like I said, you’ve really gotta find that place where you can let things release. This is massive for me because before wrestling and all these horrible experiences, I definitely bottled things up. When I found writing, I kind of let my shoulders down and let things be because I was writing. I also learned that writing, most importantly, reminds you of the human experience. I think everybody has this main theme of their writing, and the theme is constantly changing as you grow older, but obviously you understand yourself so much better through it. That’s a massive thing it’s taught me.

RAMBLE: You were talking about people’s reactions to your writing, and the resonance that comes with it. Where does your creative satisfaction come from? Does it come from the process of getting these experiences down, or from hearing people’s reactions to them?

Nico: It’d have to be an accumulation of both. I can’t lie and say that it’s always been for myself. I’ve definitely fallen in the trap of writing for other people, which was a terrible point in my TikTok career where I was just pumping out all these shit poems because I knew people would react to them well. But now I’m coming back to a place where it’s fully for me. My satisfaction comes from, and I think every writer can agree, you know when you’ve written some good shit. You’re like, ‘Oh, fuck. That’s a good one.’ I get really satisfied when I’ve finally fully crafted a poem. I’d say my satisfaction comes from myself writing a good piece, but I’d be lying if I said I don’t like the affirmation from people who read my work. It blows my mind still that I’m even doing this interview, that anyone would want to hear what I have to say. That alone is so special, and I’m eternally grateful for it. It’s definitely a huge part. I really enjoy that people love my work. It’s so crazy to me.

RAMBLE: You were talking about how people love your love poems, and in a way you are still writing for somebody else when you write a love poem, because it’s this gift.

Nico: Absolutely, yeah.

RAMBLE: How has that helped your relationship, and you as a person? Why do you write about love?

Nico: For a while I couldn’t write shit about love. I couldn’t stand love poems, and if they were love poems, that meant they were hate poems because the love that I was receiving was hate. But now I’ve fallen in love. About a year ago I fell so in love. I don’t know if you know the artist Quinnie?

RAMBLE: I totally do, and I didn’t put two and two together, and then I was like, ‘She sings touch tank!’ I love that song. I know that’s the most basic thing to say.

Nico: Yes, that’s my girlfriend! We’re both writers, and I think it’s just both of our ways [of] how we express our love to each other through that medium of writing. It just felt easy to write about her, and it’s definitely helped the relationship, that’s for damn sure, because I think anybody loves to receive a love poem. When she sends me one, I get all giddy and I kick my feet. It’s so awesome. It’s this weird thing… I have this theory where I hate when someone writes a book believing they’re the chosen one. Where they’re writing these prophetic things where it’s like, ‘I feel as if I know and I’m wise and I know all these things about life,’ where I can’t say that I don’t do that, but my way of humanizing it and not putting myself above the people who read my work is making it about myself. So if I’m writing about God and him witnessing our love, I’m not gonna write as if I am God, or I’m not gonna write the word ‘we.’ Instead I’m gonna write the word ‘I,’ where I wanna make it about myself, but then people can put themselves in my shoes. 

It’s hard to write a love poem without being like, ‘My love is so much greater than the other people’s relationships around me,’ which isn’t what I want at all. I want everybody to be able to be in my shoes, because I’m no better than anybody else. I have my flaws and I have ugly points of love and good points of love. That’s a really important thing in writing about love. I write about love because I’m in love. When I’m not in love, which my hope will be never, I won’t write about love, and I’ll write about something else.

RAMBLE: Is there anything in the works you want to shout out? Places people can find you, things you want to promote?

Nico: Hopefully, and I’m praying my next book won’t be a poetry book. Instead it’ll be an actual fully-formed novel. I wanna get into fiction.

RAMBLE: That’s a cool pivot to make.

Nico: Yeah, it’s tough. Look out for that, and hopefully I’ll have some readings through the winter, because I think poetry readings are made for the winter.

Purchase “Belly” and connect with Nico below.

Amazon: https://www.amazon.com/Belly-Nico-Demers/dp/B0BT733BWW

Bucknife Books: https://bucknifebooks.com/ols/products/belly-signed

Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/bucknife_/

Tik Tok: https://www.tiktok.com/@bucknife__

Listen to the conversation on Youtube: