by Lauren K. Alleyne
Erica Hunt’s poetry operates within a critical and illuminating paradox. In it, language and time are both bedrock and evanescent—slippery and uncontainable even as they are essential and foundational. In the poems, time collapses, expands, spirals, contracts bringing history into tomorrow and evaporating the present into a formerly- (and formally-)imagined future. Alongside this shifting time, or perhaps within its shifting, language both emerges and is formed. The shifting of these axes—of what we generally hold to be constants—makes for a creative disorientation, which is to say readers are nudged out of the familiar, rehearsed orders of chronology and grammar, and discover the fissures through which change might enter.
In particular, it is Hunt’s hallmark use of wordplay and repetition that serves to shake loose tired logics, opening within those same logics, an elsewhere born of the language itself. Her poem, “Proof,” provides an example of this revelatory wor(l)dplay:
Proof that we live in a broken world, and a broken world is unlivable.
Proof that the carrot turns into the stick and vice versa. Proof that
that seems normal, self-sufficient.
Proof that we sometimes destroy things that are broken and can’t be
fixed and sometimes fix things because to live with them broken is
unthinkable.
Proof that we switch roles, sometimes to destroy things that are
broken and can’t be fixed and sometimes to live with things that are
broken because to fix them would be unthinkable.
Proof that we learn to live with the unthinkable.
(Jump the Clock, 73)
Sentence after sentence, the poem orchestrates dissonance: the repeated “proof” seems to offer concreteness, carrying with it the air of irrefutability. At the same time, as the poem progresses, following its own line of iron-clad “proof,” the logic unravels, revealing its core horror—“we learn to live with the unthinkable.” The discomfort of the implications of such a logic ruptures the very complacency that would allow it to register as true, as the line’s declaration makes one wonder what manner of “unthinkable” things we have “learn[ed] to live with.” (Genocide? War? Poverty?) Suddenly the reader is thinking about the formerly-unthinkable, unmooring the whole idea of “unthinkability” from its solidity, its status as both given and acceptable. The rupture generated by the activity of thought through the activation of language in the poem opens a possible space where one might choose (or at the very least desire) not, in fact, to live with the unthinkable. A space where change might enter.
In addition to revealing oppressive logics, Hunt’s poems argue for a vigorous restructuring if not complete dispensation of language that does not move us toward liberation. She urges us to reject “words, recognizably impaled, plates of gummy platitude” (“This is no time for nail biting,”) and instead to “Invent the language as if each inflection / belonged to you instead of containing you…” (“The Order of the Story,”)
Erica Hunt was the 2020 judge for the Furious Flower Poetry Prize. She visited the JMU campus in June of 2022, and we talked about poetry, language and what it means to wrestle with their roles in the world. This is an edited version of that conversation.
Thank you so much. I am so excited, Erica, to be having a conversation with you about poetry and all things poems. Welcome to JMU, The Fight & The Fiddle, and Furious Flower! I have a ton of questions. I want to start with just asking about your arrival to the space of poetry. What brought you here? What was your journey to this craft and to this practice?
I would say that, like many writers, I was a big reader, and from an early age, as soon as I could read, I consumed all the books that I possibly could in the children’s section of the library. So at first, I thought of myself as a storyteller. Later, I was a teenager when I started writing poetry. And I didn’t have many models. I remember I had a fourth-grade teacher who gave me Paul Laurence Dunbar, Joggin’ Erlong. I understood this is poetry because you could hear the music of it. Also, the dialect poetry was very puzzling to me. I just didn’t know what to make of it. And remember this 1965 or something, so it took me a while to appreciate what she saw in me. Later on as a teenager, I started writing poetry without too many models. But I would say that my early models were LeRoi Jones, who I saw early in high school, Amiri Baraka, Sonia Sanchez, Allen Ginsburg. In all three of those people, I would say, poetry was connected to a political and social commitment. But being a practical sort, as I was raised to be, that kind of, “take the test, do the test, and get your promotion!” Whatever. You know, civil servants really stressed that. I did not think I was a poet. And I thought, “Oh, I love language. Let me study linguistics, philosophy of language…” Not practical much, but somehow more promised–more legitimate! Isn’t that interesting? So poetry kind of crept up on me and in a way that was expression, but also about language, the wonder of what our language can do, and what it does to us, and to our thinking.
I love that answer. And I love the idea of both wonder and expansion. I know you’re often referred to as an experimental poet. And I’m interested in what you think about that term and how you inhabit or reject or reshape or own that term. Because I think so much of what I sense as experimental is your testing of those wonders and limits of language. Tell me about that.
I think it’s interesting the way that that term finally is beginning to have less of this kind of elitist approach, as if there was only one way to be experimental. In fact, I would say that people, when you sit down and you don’t quite know what you’re going to write, you are in some ways testing something. You’re testing your experience with the language, against the language, in the language. Can it be adequate? And what I’m so interested in this idea of experiment, is there’s so much of our experience, especially Black people and people of color’s experience, which has not been put into literature, yet. Language is so much about our psyche; it’s a social phenomena, we use it to connect and communicate, but there’s also parts, there are territories, within ourselves and within our interactions that are not yet expressed in language or in literature. And then how does that become part of the experimental project? And the project is to begin to mine and excavate these levels of experience and feeling and spirituality and stillness.
Quietude.
Right, right. Quietudes that aren’t quite fully manifest in language. And so, we got lots to do. And experiment is one way to go about it.
I love so much of this, because I feel when I read your work, there’s so much a sense of a mind at work. A mind sort of exploring its own contours. But at the same time, there’s an awareness, like in the poem you just read, of the reader of the other, of the audience. And then I also think of this idea that also is in your work of the poem being part of an even larger conversation. So talk to me about that tension between the quietude and the stillness in the individual mind, and the audience, the intimacy of that. And then that larger conversation, that expansion that I feel is so packed into the work.
That’s good. It’s really astute. There’s lots of conversations, I always say that poems occur in layers. And one of the things that gives us a feeling of Wow, that was a great experience here, reading this poem, is that we can return to it and discover these other layers. We haven’t exhausted the possibilities of the poem. I say to students that if you get to the bottom of it, you read the top line and you go to the bottom and you think you got it all and you’re ready to put it down, then that poem is not very successful. A poem is supposed to make you go, “How did we get here? What was that journey? Let me go back up and read that again.” Not because it’s bad. It might be because of ambiguity, but because there are layers that have been worked into that tapestry, into the framework of the poem.
I’m an introvert, and some of it is sort of internal reflection, but we’re always in conversation. And language is a social phenomenon. We’re talking to other poets, we’re talking to other parts of literature. In my poems, I have a kind of social commentary voice. I’m reminding that we share a common destiny, that we’re connected. We can act like we’re all individuals, or as [Margaret] Thatcher said, “there is no society, only individuals.” We can act like that, but that’s not the case. And that even in our internal reflections, we are powerfully constructed by the society we grow up in. That we live in. Not grow up in, live in.
So, thinking of this social commentary and a larger conversation, we are in a tumultuous place in America and in the world right now. And what do you see as the role of the poets, of language in all of this? What’s our work as practitioners of language?
Yeah, that’s a good question. I ask that question all the time. And I think there’s a particular urgency to that now. Poetry does a couple of things. First of all, one of the things is, it asks us to slow down and read. To not skim, not just go by something. And it pays a particular kind of attention to language and that’s a really helpful thing. The other thing is that we are among the many practitioners of the imagination, of the poetic. Poetics– poesis— I would recall for people means to make things. And so we are making things, and we’re making things and testing things. And some of them are just trifles. But some of them are important pathways of thinking. And those pathways of thinking provide us possible routes for moving past, moving through, untangling–undoing the knots that challenge us right now, and that sometimes limit our lives. So poetry is how we do a kind of speculation, and as I like to say, a rehearsal, for a life that we do want. The life we are trying to move to, that we think, “Oh, I’ll thrive there. Our people will thrive there.”
Our planet might thrive there.
Our planet might thrive there.
The way that you’re speaking, it seems like language is a technology of thinking, and I’m curious about how and if technology— or that thinking of language as a technology—how does that play with the experimentation or the form of your work?
I think I’m open to it. I don’t think technology plays that much of a role, but yes, language is a technology of thinking. Language helps to give our thoughts a sort of shape and form. It’s the clothing of thought. I think somebody says that, “language is the clothing of thought.” It’s sort of like, Oh, that’s what that thought is, I didn’t know it before I wrote it down. I wrote it down and then it becomes clarified. You see its beauties and its flaws and its limits. You see whether or not you’re being grandiose. (Laughs.) Or maybe that’s such a modest observation, maybe that’s all I can say in this line.
Language is “as if…” “what if…” and then finish the thought. That kind of rehearsal. Or “yes, and…” or “this is my experience, and…” or assert [that] “this is my experience. Yes, and…” And to finish that sentence as a way, as an engine for going through a poem.
As summoning also, right? Because the “as if,” calls forth something else that may or may not have been pre-formed.
I’m thinking about your whole other career as a community organizer, and a grant maker, and fundraiser and I was reading about some amazing projects you did over the years. How is that work distinct from or in conversation or congruence with your work as a writer?
I feel like that it’s so interesting. I poured so much of myself into those years. It was a privilege to have people tell me about their lives. I really saw other people’s lives. During that time, I traveled extensively through the South, where I had not been. And I would say maybe I’d spend 30 to 40 days a year visiting organizers and communities who were not in the news or anything like that, but were really making change at the community level. And so, it was really a great honor to support that kind of movement work. I understood something about Black people’s resilience. I’d seen and I had my own examples, of course, in my family and in New York City, but entering communities and seeing where governments were not for them, didn’t work for them, so communities made their own, were able to, nevertheless, make change– everything from school systems and making it better for the kids, to asserting voting rights, electing people who represented them. These are important pieces that actually make it so that I can’t let go of the idea that change is possible. We make change. There is a level of heroism that is right there; that often people know how to solve their problems. They have the solutions they need… it’s like how do you help people? And not go, “oh, you know, well, we know better, we’re gonna find it–” No. I really believe in that bottom up change.
How does it influence my poetry? It made me want to sample, to really tell stories, let other voices through. I’m very interested in that– how do you make a chorus, a choir, in a poem? And to not get so hypnotized? You can get hyper-focused on the enemy– the establishment, the newspapers, the government, certain lies that get told over and over again. And as a poet, you feel particularly sensitive to when the Supreme Court goes on and says, “Oh, your law about guns in this state that y’all voted on… nuh uh… By the way, abortion and reproductive freedom, that’s something we’re gonna give to the state for you to vote on.” So they can put contradictory decisions out in one week. You can get focused on, “How dare they? How could they?” Or you can decide: what are the voices that need to be heard that have a wisdom and express the what if?
There’s a woman, her name is Ruby Sales. Ruby is in her late 70s, maybe early 80s now, and she was an early pioneer of the civil rights movement. She was part of that march over the Edmund Pettus Bridge. When they were gathering, and she was a teenager, the local white people in Selma came with a gun and tried to threaten them, not to march across the bridge. And somebody came in that evening, a white man with a gun, and pointed a gun at her and cocked it. And this white Episcopalian priest, who was visiting from Boston, stepped in front of the gun and got shot and was killed. And it stayed with her. It stayed with her and it changed her life. She became a tireless advocate, tireless worker, for human rights. Human rights, they say civil, but it’s human rights. And she’s quite something, someone I’ve been privileged to meet, she is quite something. And it’s both her spiritual transformation and her political transformation, her intellectual transformation, into someone who’s just ferocious about these things and points out the way that these things– that kind of hatred, that kind of supremacist thinking, is with us now. Destroys us. Takes life all the time, and it’s completely hypocritical. It stands in our way of getting free. It’s a powerful story, she tells these powerful stories, she’s a powerful woman. And those voices… Those voices. And she shows up, other people show up, as voices in the work.
I’m so interested in the lyric and our traditional understanding of that lyric “I,” that singular expression, the eruption from the self. I do think of your work as lyric, but I also recognize these other voices in there. And so how do you think about holding those together? That idea of the lyric self and accommodating the other voices?
I’m very influenced by this idea of collage. Because the collage allows you to have both– to sample from all these different kinds of language sources, including oneself. Collages, we think of it as sort of a European technique, but of course it’s a technique which has many roots in many cultures. I’m very influenced by visual art. There’s this way that you think about any culture that has a sculptural form, a sculptural practice, where there’s synoptic views. So you can look… say you’re looking at a figure, the subject in the sculpture– think of a piece of African sculpture, say, you’re looking at a mask. You’re also looking at the mask in time. It’s usually being worn in motion. In time, it’s facing different directions; there are different inflections. It’s the dynamism. So that our voices, the lyric voice, is not a stable, constant voice. It depends on which time and which gesture and which direction that voice may be facing, who it’s addressing: it’s not always the same. We change when we address different people. Similarly, we’re not always in charge of our voices. Sometimes this voice comes, you go, “Who the hell is this?” It’s because we are socialized. And so those voices aren’t always completely under our control. So, the lyric voice is interesting the way that it is so multiform, malleable. And then when I say choir, it’s like, there could be a Ruby Sales, there could be Erica at 10, there could be some of my reactivity to some newspaper headline, it could be the newspaper headline–all of those things.
I’m so interested, too, in orality as, I think, a huge component of your work. It’s just a joy, and also a whole experience, to hear you read. Can you tell me a little bit about how that enacts or how it plays out in your poetics?
I’ve become very attentive, attuned to performance. The performance of a poem, and you can do anything. You can invite intimacy, even in a large room, by the way you read the poem, and you can get people excited. And you can also highlight lines for people so that they hear–even if other lines kind of go by them, they’ll remember one or two, and that will give them the sense of the whole. Because I’m paying attention, I’m picking up things from singers, jazz singers. Jeanne Lee, I mentioned in a recent essay, Jeanne Lee was an improvisational jazz singer, she passed. But she had a whole range of vocal techniques, but I’ve been listening to a lot of Sheila Jordan and Carmen McRae. And I love Diana Reeves. I love the way that, yeah they’re telling a story, but they’re giving a feeling. You stop focusing on the words and you realize you’re focusing on the way their voice moves. And, “Oh, you were really harmed there.” Or, “Oh, you’re really in love!” And that can be conveyed through a voice, I love listening to that stuff and trying to understand how to join more closely how sound is an aspect of meaning.
We’ve talked about visual arts, we’ve talked about music, and at one point, you thought you were going to be a music writer. How do all of these arts, visual art, other arts, impact and influence on your work?
I learned so much about composition. Like, how do you compose? So you have all these parts, you have all these little art parts. You have a great line. “Oh, that’s a great line. Oh, what a word!” We’re collecting, right? We’re collecting lines. We’re collecting some thoughts, you have this thought, “Boy, that’s a funny thought.” I have this whole thing about when will Black women own ourselves—self-possession. That’s like my little joke. My double entendre. So, I’m always collecting little puns or things like that. And then what do you do with the parts? I’ve learned a lot from listening to music composition, how there’s the head. There’s the tune, and then there’s elaboration and improvisation, and then it goes back to the head. And then you try to end not on the [thud] but you end up, right? You end with an open question.
Just think of a gesture. There’s that. In the visual arts, it’s also about how parts, colors and blocks of color and planes are put together. I love to sit there and just kind of look at the way that things are made. Poesis: how was this made? And trying to imagine myself in the position of that maker. Having to make judgments about where all of these wonderful parts I’ve been collecting ought to go.
With the understanding that there’s an entire pantheon of poets and writers you could choose from, who’s currently energizing you as a writer and just as a human?
Yes, currently energizing me. Well, I’m in a book club. And we’re reading Looking for Lorraine by Imani Perry. Imani Perry got this really interesting way of writing biography. She puts herself in it. Increasingly I’m interested in that, how do you write about a subject and don’t pretend you’re not there?
There’s this way that, sort of like this passive voice writing about something, a topic, like Lorraine Hansberry about whom we care about deeply. I’m interested in the ways that writers, right now, are signaling, “I’m invested in this.”
I’m interested in Saidiya Hartman’s Wayward Lives. And because, again, of the way the imagination and the subjectivity is not denied, but rather embraced, and actually provides us a way deeper into subject matter. And for that reason, of course, I adore John Keene’s Counternarratives. Though, he’s circumspect; he reframes, but he’s on the periphery of the stories in Counternarratives, wonderful work. In terms of poets, I would say that I’m really interested in Tonya Foster’s writing, she writes about place, and about language, and about culture in a way that’s like it’s a moving collage of things, but also driven by the ear. I’ve taught a lot Diana Khoi Nguyen’s Ghost Of, which is a really interesting book, formally inventive, that commemorates her brother who passed and does that through some straight-ahead text, but she also cuts his shape out of each of the stanzas because he’s missing. It’s something he had done just before he died. He cut himself out of all of the family pictures. So she used that as the template for a beautiful work of mourning. So it’s an embodied, it’s like, the body is missing. The body is missed in the text. Very moving. One other person, Akilah Oliver, of course, who is also not with us, but we’re still taking on her work and taking on the implications of it. Oh, and Renee Gladman! We have to talk about Renee. Renee Gladman, who is writing these architectures, which are both a handwritten kind of text where she goes up and down, and it’s really like a scribble page. And then the text which accompanies it, which is these various scenes of place, of a person walking through urban streets and the kind of maze and rumination that if you’re taking a good walk, you allow yourself to do. So those are really also very interesting to me.
And thinking of your own writing, what do you wrestle with, and what delights you in your own creative practice?
This is a great question, because I can get going on this one. Right now, I’m working on something which returns me to early wellsprings of just places where I connected around literature and language. So I’m thinking a lot about storytelling, which is something I am trying to teach myself to do. I tell stories pretty well, orally, but this is a different thing. I’m thinking, how do you put out stories which are not conventional narratives? They are, you know, poetic narratives. So I’m exploring that right now. And I’m finding all these forums. My theme for this is Scheherazade, our woman storyteller who, just to re-tell the story briefly– the frame story. It’s a Persian collection of stories that has been added to, but the frame story is Scheherazade has to tell a story every night to keep the Caliph, or as I call him, The Boss, from this kind of obsessive, murderous idea that women are not faithful. So he would sleep with a virgin, or new woman, and then in the morning, because of the potential unfaithfulness, he would have her executed. So Scheherazade is there saying, “Look, let me tell you a story.” And she starts to tell him a story and tells him a story. And the Caliph, The Boss, looks up and says, “Oh, it’s morning. I’m so into the story. What happens next?” And she says, “Well, you’re going to have to wait till next time–tomorrow evening. This evening.” And she does this, right, then that’s the story, One Thousand and One Nights. So, I’ve been thinking about what is it to tell a narrative, even a poetic narrative, or especially a poetic narrative, as if your life depended on it? What are the stakes? It’s a version of your first question. What are the stakes of literature? What is it that will… rouse us out of this terrible sleepwalk off a cliff as a society and/or hopelessness– the, kind of, collapse into hopelessness? What are the stories we tell ourselves, even as poetic as, especially as poetic narratives, that help us to keep working and moving forward?
That’s what I’m wrestling with. It’s a big chunk.
Tell us about your most recent book Jump the Clock, which is new and selected. You talked about going back to earlier wellsprings and that made me think of that process, what is that like? Tell us about the book.
Sure! I went back and I said, “I’m just gonna choose poems I like!” They got bigger and bigger, I actually you get to see that many of the poems are poems I still like, I mean, a lot of the poems from previous books are there. And then I went back and looked at poems that didn’t make it into the earlier books. And I put them in, you know. I liked them well enough, or I worked on them some more. I saw my evolution, no one is a static being.
We’re constantly changing. And I see myself moving from a kind of, a little bit disembodied, into a more formal way like the correspondence theory with these letters. That was really this playful, formal section into more kinds of… freer. I got freer. To play. That’s the best and that people like to read them and have spoken to me about them. And this is over the years, I could say, “okay, yeah, I guess that’s…” And also of course, it’s always interesting, when people come up to you and say, “this poem really spoke to me, this is what it means to me.” And you go, “Okay!” I love that. I just love that it can have a voice that is not always completely centered in the particularities of how it was composed, but really has this–
They joined a choir.
That’s right. They joined the choir and the work has been completed by the reader. It’s really, really lovely.
Well, that seems an excellent stopping place given that we started with “Dear Reader.” Thank you so much!
You’re welcome. What a pleasure. Thank you.
Read more in this issue: Critical Essay | Poems | Writing Prompt
Lauren K. Alleyne is Editor-in-Chief of The Fight & The Fiddle, Executive Director of the Furious Flower Poetry Center, and Professor of English at James Madison University. She is the author of two collections of poetry, Difficult Fruit (2014) and Honeyfish (2019), the chapbook (Un)Becoming Gretel (2022), as well as co-editor of Furious Flower: Seeding the Future of African American Poetry (2020). Her poetry has appeared in numerous publications including the New York Times, The Atlantic, Ms. Muse, Tin House, and The Caribbean Writer, among others. Recent honors include a 2021 nomination for a US Artist Award, a 2020 NAACP Image Award nomination for Outstanding Poetry, the longlist for the 2020 Bocas Prize for Caribbean Literature, and the shortlist for the 2020 Library of Virginia Literary Awards. In 2021, she was awarded an Outstanding Faculty Award from the State Council for Higher Education in Virginia, and a JMU Agency Star award.
Photo credit: Erica Cavanagh