by L. Renée

Sudanese-American poet Safia Elhillo visited James Madison University in October of 2023. L. Renée, then-Assistant Director of Furious Flower Poetry Center, interviewed Elhillo on behalf of TheFight & The Fiddle. What follows is a transcription of their conversation, which has been lightly edited for clarity and consistency.

We’re so happy to have you here at JMU and Furious Flower, and here in Harrisonburg, and to host you. Thank you so much for joining our space.

Thank you so much for having me. 

Of course. I wanted to start at the beginning with you the way, way, way, way back beginning of your writing journey. I wondered if you could share when you first began to cultivate your knowing of your senses. When you realize that you were reaching toward making meaning in language, where in your journey was that?

You know, I feel like that actually didn’t come until after I’d internally made the decision that I wanted to be a poet. I didn’t decide I wanted to be a poet because I was good at poetry, that took a while. I’d written some poetry for school here and there. Because I didn’t want to keep any kind of diary or journal at home that could be read and be incriminating, I would kind of be writing these little poems, but it wasn’t with any eye toward craft or being read or anything like that. And then when I was maybe 16 years old, I started going to the open mic at Busboys and Poets in DC, back when it was just the one on Tuesday nights. I saw all these poets, and they just seemed like the world’s most interesting people. And they also all seemed to know each other, which was very appealing to me. Up until that point, I think my only ideas around belonging had to do with stuff that I didn’t choose for myself like I belong to a Sudanese diasporic community, I belong to my family, whatever. But it was very clear that these people had chosen each other based on something other than that, and I really badly wanted to be chosen as well. They would all kind of sit together, they would go out to eat after the open mic. And I was like, How do I get to hang out with these people? And I was like, Okay, I’ve gotta go write some poems. So I went home, and I wrote a bunch of poems, and I just kept showing up to the open mic until eventually I wore them down, and they would let me sit with them. 

But also, because I was a child, and my mom is a Sudanese woman, and it was a school night, She’d be like, “You want to go where? On a Tuesday night? To an open mic? Never heard of it, what’s that?” (laughter). So finally, she was like, “Okay, you can go to the open mic, but the whole family is coming with you.” And so it would be my mom, my cousin, a couple of my aunt, sometimes my grandparents, whoever was in town, and it was a lot of us. At first, it took us a few weeks to get in because we would show up and Derrick Weston Brown used to work the door of Busboys and Poets so he would see us every week, it would be me and fifteen relatives, and he’d be like, You have to come earlier if you want all of these people to get in. Because we would show up right before the doors open to be like, Ten tickets, please. So eventually, we got the hang of it and would show up early and my whole family would just line up in the front row and be like, Okay, you’re gonna read a poem. What’s it about? And so after that initial impulse to just be a poet, whatever that meant, just from exposure to hearing other people read their poems [I] started to pick up… I don’t know that I had necessarily the language to name them as craft elements or things like that. But I would hear someone do something and be like, I want to know, I want to do that, I want to be able to do that. And so I would go home and be like, Okay, this person had written a poem with like, a really extended extended metaphor. How do I do that? And that was kind of my early craft education, I guess. So it was external. I don’t think it came from any internal impulse towards language necessarily, that kind of filled in after the fact.

So you’re knowing really emerged in community with the poets that you were encountering at Busboys and Poets, but also with your whole tribe coming out and supporting your work, and also seeing what this poetry world was all about. How did they respond to that?

You know, all these years later, I’m still not entirely sure. They’re pretty good about letting me do my thing, and not wanting to talk about it extensively afterwards. But also, there are a couple roles. They were there in their capacity as chaperones. And also to make sure that I wasn’t saying anything wild in front of strangers, or spilling too much family business. So as long as I didn’t do any of that. And pretty early on, I was like, I’m just gonna write the vaguest poems possible, these joints could be about anything, no one will ever know. And so they were like, Okay, this is her weird new hobby. Doesn’t seem to be saying anything offensive, so there’s nothing to be discussed. 

One of the things you talked about was bringing your Sudanese family to these open mics. And I’m really interested in the way that you use both English and Arabic in your writing. I’m curious if you could kind of talk about the duality of language in that way. The reaching toward particular words in Arabic versus English and how you make those decisions in your work.

So that also didn’t start happening right away when I was writing. I had a fairly standard Diasporic upbringing, where we spoke Arabic in the house, and in other Sudanese Diaspora spaces, and then I spoke English everywhere else. And so as far as I was concerned, these poetry spaces fit under the category of everywhere else. But especially because the thing I was so craving in those poetry spaces was that kind of belonging and intimacy, but there was a formality that I associated with spaces in which I had to speak entirely in English. But also, there’s a formality I still associate with spaces where I have to speak entirely in Arabic. So even early on for me, the language of my true intimacy of the people that I felt knew me best was this hybrid language where the word comes out in whatever language it occurs to me in. My two childhood best friends are also Sudanese diaspora kids, the way I’d speak to them, to my cousins, to my brother, to my mom, is the most fluent I feel anywhere. I feel like my real personality only exists in those spaces, like my true sense of humor–I’m really only funny in those spaces. And so to not have access to the language in which I conducted intimacy, in this space where I so badly wanted intimacy, there was a tension there for a while, but I didn’t know to want it at first. 

And then I remember, this was in early, early days of YouTube, I remember seeing a clip of the poet Suheir Hammad, reading a poem called Daddy’s Song. And the thing is, that poem is basically entirely in English, except towards the very end, it must be the last line or something, I don’t think I’ve ever seen it on the page. She says, “That’s my song to Baba. And one day, I’m going to sing it for you in a poem.” And just that one word, I was like, you can do that? Because it wasn’t that she was switching into whole stanzas in Arabic. It was just one word, right in the middle of a sentence, she didn’t even take a breath before or after, it was just like it was part of the sentence. It was part of the language she was speaking in. I felt like my head was about to explode. I was like, you can just… do that? And so I committed myself to the work of doing that. Because again… it’s my hope, at least for a reader that does not speak all my languages, my hope is that if I’m speaking to someone like they speak all of my languages, my hope is that it creates a weather of intimacy in the work where even if you don’t know exactly what I’m saying, the gesture of intimacy translates. Or even if it doesn’t translate, then maybe someone, maybe a reader, can feel like they’re eavesdropping on a conversation between me and someone I’m intimate with. I felt so much permission in hearing that poem. And again, it’s literally one word in a whole poem. And I would rewind to re-listen to that last line over and over and over and feel it hit me in the same way. And so the entirety of what I’m trying to do in my poems comes from that one moment in that one poem. 

That is so wild how poetry can be a space that does that. I remember for me, being a Black Appalachian person, when I first heard dialect in Langston Hughes’s work, I thought, Wow, this is how my family talks at home. And this is not the way that we talk when we’re in the world, we use proper English. And so that’s just so beautiful that you saw someone that made you think, Okay, I have permission to do this. And speaking of permission to do things, I wanted to talk about your first collection, which I have here, The January Children. That’s such a beautiful cover. 

Thank you, my friend did that cover, a Sudanese-Spanish artist named Dar Al Naim.

It’s absolutely beautiful. And for me, when I was encountering this work at first, I was so stunned at the breadth of the work. How, for a first collection, your speaker is navigating displacement, and place, colonial occupation of Sudan, probing history, and also thinking about the tensions that rest there. And you do this with thinking about Arab-ness, and African-ness, with the lyric, as well as with real clear-eyed diction. And I was just curious, because you’re holding so much in this work, how did you approach that? How did you approach thinking about the history, the culture, the language, the family history? How did you hold all of these things in one collection as you were doing the writing? And then I guess the second part of that question is, how did that then influence the editing of what we actually see today?

So the collection, before I even knew what it was about in a macro sense, it started off as a series of poems I was writing… I guess, it’s funny to say for fun because they’re not fun poems… But for fun, about an address to the dead Egyptian popstar, Abdel Halim Hafez, and I didn’t know at first why I was so obsessed. I thought it was just nostalgia, I guess. He’s one of the Golden Age Arabic language musicians I grew up listening to and I was living truly by myself for the first time in my life, no roommates, no family, no nothing. And I thought that I was just reaching for all of the familiar things from my upbringing to just help me feel more situated in my new living space to help me feel less lonely. But it could have been… he was not the only musician I grew up listening to, it could’ve been anybody. But the thing that I didn’t realize as a child when I was hearing the music, I think when I was revisiting it with my adult ear and eye and vocabulary, is I found it really radical and special. That the songs are addressed to a figure, he refers to as a “asmarani,” which is a term of endearment in Arabic for a brown-skinned or dark-skinned person. And this was maybe the only time in my life I had heard someone in an Arabic language space specifying the darker girl as the object of desire. And so I was like, well obviously, he’s talking about me, I’m the asmarani. And so I thought I was going to be writing a bunch of cute little love poems between the asmarani and the singer. But what it ended up being is Abdel Halim Hafez became the sort of avatar for the part of the world that I was addressing. And so I was able to personify a whole region, a whole set of cultures, a whole set of languages, concentrate that down into the figure of a man, and in addressing him, in talking about him, I actually am talking about all of that. So in being like, Wow, thank you for specifying the darker girl. I’m talking about the fact that that usually doesn’t happen because of global anti-Blackness, because of Arab supremacy, because of all of that. But if I had decided to go into the poem being like, I’m going to write about global anti-Blackness and Arab supremacy, who knows what that poem would look like? What’s the container for something like that? And so I think I was able to build up into the larger thought by finding a very small way in and be like, I’m just writing about a person, but the person is never just a person.

Oh, that’s so interesting. I was going to ask you about why you chose him, particularly…

Because I love him. (Laughs.)

I mean, we love to write poems about people we love. But it’s interesting to me that that was the place where you started as opposed to mama or grandma or someone closer to the speaker’s actual environment, that kind of reaching outward was a way of being able to reach inward and outward again. That’s tremendous. So then, how did you approach editing this book?

So I, for better or worse, was enrolled in an MFA program when I started writing these poems. And so they were being looked at fairly consistently. But a lot of the part I left out when I was talking about kind of the origin of this project is I felt very frustrated about the way my work was being read up until that point. I felt like it was being read as a work of anthropology rather than creative writing, or poetry, or anything that had kind of a craft element to it. And so I wanted to make my work as illegible as possible in those spaces. And so I was like, Okay, I’m doubling down on the untranslated chunks of Arabic in here. And I’m going to address a whole suite of poems to a figure that I imagine y’all have never heard of. And that’s how I’m going to make a safe space for myself in here. I was so wary of using any kind of language or imagery that would confirm any of the assumptions. So I was like, okay, no sands, no desert, no river Nile, if I can help it, none of that stuff, no pyramids. But I was like, Okay, but what are my image systems? I don’t know if I’ve ever seen an apple tree. So what am I going to write about, not about, but what is my vocabulary of images here when I feel like so much is blocked off for me in the name of defiance? And so I was like, Okay, this is a way I think to really double down on really addressing who I’m talking to. Because most of the people from the part of the world I’m talking about definitely know who Abdel Halim Hafez is, he’s like the Arabic-speaking world’s like Frank Sinatra. And so I was like, Okay, so this is not like I’m going deeply internal [or] I’m only writing poems that make sense to me. 

As evidenced by the fact that I became a poet because I want to hang out with poets, I’m really mostly talking to other people when I’m writing a poem. And so feeling this isolated and feeling like I didn’t want to talk to the people that were immediately around me in my work reoriented me and it made me face in a different direction that ultimately was really helpful and productive for my work and my body of work. Where now, I’m not interested in taking an outward-facing position when talking about my people, my culture, and my image systems, any of that. So I was like, Okay, I’m gonna write these poems like the person who’s reading it already knows exactly who Abdel Halim Hafez is. So at no point in the poem am I going to be like, Abdel Halim Hafez was an Egyptian pop star who died in the 1960s. I’m just going to first name last time him and my true intended reader is going to be like, “Oh, yes, of course,” in the same way that I imagined if an American poet were to be like “Frank Sinatra,” the intended reader would be like, “Yes, totally. I understand all of the images and ideas and the scope of what is being contained just in those two words.” Abdel Halim Hafez is shorthand for everything I need and my intended reader will pick up on that shorthand, and everyone else, I hope there’s enough craft in the poem that there’s something there for that reader anyway. But that wasn’t allowed to be my primary concern at the time. 

I love that. I love that you created a constraint that really helped you lean into, as you said, double down on your authentic self and your identity without a concern of necessarily legibility, but also trusting that the reader, whether they knew this figure or not, has access to Google and can learn and open their worlds up a little bit larger. I think we always get asked these questions about, “Who are you writing for? What’s your audience?” And sometimes that can be hard to articulate in language because you’re writing for an audience of, if even if it’s of yourself, of one. That’s enough, that’s enough. I love that. I love that. I really love that so much. 

You also have talked… about identity. I know in previous interviews, you’ve talked about Sudanese identity and Arab-ness and Africanness as well. And cultural traditions that impacted Sudanese people and language that impacted Sudanese people. And I wondered, that kind of tension of thinking about how you write about space and place with room for joy and bounty, but also contradiction. And also being able to have moments of a critical eye, how do you balance that? How do you balance the tenderness and the fraughtness of place and space, particularly when colonialism is involved?

Yeah. Again, the most helpful thing for me when I’m doing my work is to identify and remember exactly who I’m talking to the whole time, and also write to that person as if they’re going to be reading me in good faith, because I think the moment I let any sort of anxiety about being misread enter, then the whole thing is in collapse. I’m not gonna write anything ever. So I have to trust that at least the reader I’m imagining in my head feels me and trusts me, and is not going to try and poke holes in what I’m saying. And so I can be vulnerable, and I can be open instead of being on the defensive and trying to be like a diplomat instead of a poet. But there are moments, especially in conversations I’ve had to have in less private spaces around identity and race and the complication of my terminology for my identity. That’s where all of my disclaimers come into the picture in the way [they] wouldn’t in a poem, which is why in the poems it’s maybe not addressed as head-on, it’s talked about in slant or in microcosm or something.

Whereas if it’s an essay or a talk or a speech or something, I have to be like, I am not speaking for all Sudanese people, I am speaking for myself. Because also, there are as many individual Sudanese experiences as there are individual Sudanese people. Some Sudanese people do identify as Arab, and that’s none of my business for real. And the fact that I don’t, I don’t think should be used to invalidate someone else’s choice of language. And so that’s when I have to imagine all of the potential rebuttals and be like, I am only making ‘I statements,’ I am not here on behalf of all Sudanese people everywhere, so then there’s more anxiety there about being misunderstood or being misread. But it feels important to have a record of that clarification when it comes to myself and my work. Because one of the historical big chips on my shoulder is that I feel like my work, especially because of the way it incorporates the Arabic language and references and imagery and cultural allusion from the Arabic-speaking world, what ends up happening is that for years I felt like my work was being celebrated and welcomed into spaces where my body was not celebrated and welcome, which made my body feel like an interruption or an intrusion or something, and I don’t like that feeling. 

And so, it felt important to reassign my body and the facts of my body to my work and to be like, It actually is very painful to have my work removed from the fact of my body and be celebrated as the work of an Arab poet, when every time I, in my body, have been in primarily Arab spaces I have been made to feel other. I have been made aware of the Blackness of my body in those spaces. And so I was like, Okay, if my body is an other in this space, so too are my poems. You can’t have one without the other. So even though it is maybe not necessarily my MO to be speaking publicly about my business in a way that’s not directly related to a poem, this felt important to do, because it felt like something was being taken from me. And the longer I kept quiet about it, the easier I was making it to just be like, Here is an uncomplicated reading of an Arab poet’s poems. Even though I don’t think I’ve arrived anymore at any sort of answer, I wanted to loudly take up space with my questions and with my curiosities. And so, every time and in any space where my work could just kind of mindlessly be read as an Arab poet’s work, I have to then pull up with my little speech or disclaimer to be like, I do not identify as Arab, I identify as a Black person from the Arabic speaking world or an arabophone Black person or an arabophone African or what have you. There’s not really a cute term that I have arrived at yet. But I feel the need to… I don’t even know what to call it… but to just trouble the reading a little bit, because otherwise, it feels like my work is being taken away from me. And I don’t like that.

Wow, as you were speaking, I was getting chills thinking about the body and the work and how you’re saying, you can’t take one away from the other. I think about how that relates to writing about family for you, of the flesh that made us flesh. And I’m curious if you had this sense, or if you’ve ever had this sense of, especially thinking about how you started with all your family coming to the poetry open mics, if what your journey has been about kind of getting it right, or the sense of doing us justice. And how you square that with the fact that the poetic truth is not always the factual truth, sometimes very rarely the factual truth, or even how other people see the truth. So how do you wrestle with those elements about how to write about your beloved, your people, your community? Especially if this is in ways that maybe they won’t be so proud of.

I have some rules for myself because I would like to be invited back to dinner. The rule is that I am not allowed to break anyone else’s news in a poem. If it’s not a story that’s common knowledge, even within the family, if it’s not something that’s openly talked about, I can’t write about it. And even if I am writing about someone else in my family in a poem, the speaker is always myself. And so I always have to be a part of the story or it has to be in a way that relates back to me. So I’m not just like, here’s something that happened to my grandmother, full stop, that’s the poem. I have to find a way to make it about myself so that ultimately I am the one that’s in the hot seat. I don’t want to put another person in the hot seat, because they never asked for a poet in the family. And so I can put my autobiographical ‘I’ through things that I… [that] it would be cruel to put another person through in a poem. And so I try to maintain that boundary where if my mother shows up in a poem, it’s mostly because I’m trying to make a larger point about something that has to do… that I’m working out about myself, if my grandmother appears in the poem, it’s because of something I’m trying to work out about myself. Because otherwise, I think, if I were to write about just them, as them with no kind of connecting point back to a point I’m trying to make about myself, I think that would come from the assumption that they’re not capable of telling the story themselves, and in their own words, and they are thoroughly capable. So I don’t want to scoop them either. I don’t want to be the first voice in which that story appears in public because that feels disrespectful, it feels not fair. If it’s not my story, it’s not my story. And I think that’s the criteria through which I have to process things before they show up in a poem, which also means there’s a lot that I’m not allowed to write about. And that just is what it is. Sometimes, especially after my first book came out, and the family was like, “Okay, we have… someone in our midst is publishing.” So things have changed a little. So they’d be in the middle of telling me an incredibly juicy story, and before like the reveal or the punchline, they look me dead in the eye and be like, “You’re not allowed to write about this.” And then would finish the story. So the rules are pretty clear. Everyone is involved in the rulemaking, and it just is what it is, you can’t catch them all.

I love that you have your own code of ethics because I think anyone who writes about family has to figure that out for themselves. And as you said, you still want to be invited back out to dinner. And so trying to negotiate what that looks like… I know some poets I’ve met say they give their family a look at a draft of a poem, or when the book, before it goes to press, when it’s finally written, it’s like, Alright, is there any cancellations here that I need[to make]? I need you to veto before we get to this place. There’s some people who don’t do that at all. But I think anytime we’re thinking about our beloveds and our community, having a sense of respect, and also ways that we can look ourselves in the mirror are really important and very helpful for people who did this kind of writing. So thank you, for me, and many other me’s who have this question. You’re talking a little bit about family and I had read, and I don’t know if this is accurate, so correct me if I’m wrong, but I had read that you had a maternal grandfather or grandparent, who also was a poet of the spoken tradition, the oral tradition.

So my maternal grandfather, who just passed away a few months ago, was a poet and was a writer of his poems. And right before he passed away, he had been kind of working on a hybrid memoir thing for years and it came out… I went to Sudan… I think it was May of last year, May of 2022, for the release of the book, and so it’s kind of just his own autobiography, but also, my grandfather was older than the independent state of the Sudan. He was 26 years old when the country gained independence. So there’s also a lot of history built in there just because that happened to be a part of his life and a part of his business… and then his own poems, but he also was a great student of poetry. And so there would be poems that he had memorized as a child that he still knew by heart. And a lot of those show up in the book as well. My grandfather had dementia towards the end of his life. But what was fascinating is he would not remember who the people in the room were, and would still have the poems memorized. And when I was there last year, which was also the last time I spent any time with him before he passed, for most of the time, he had no idea who I was, but was like a perfect gentleman about it, would not let on that he didn’t know who I was, but would just kind of ask little leading questions and be like, “Remind me your mother’s name again.” [laughter] But I was looking through his book with him, and it was hot off the press, and I was looking at it with him, and was reading one of his poems to him. And I mispronounced one of the words and he corrected me. So he just still knew the poem. He wasn’t even looking at it with me, he just was listening to me read and anywhere I mispronounced a word, or if I took a pause where he didn’t intend the pause to be taken, he would remember and correct me. So he very much was a writer of his work, but his sisters… my understanding is that they didn’t have… his older sister in particular… who didn’t have just kind of the same access to literacy as children that he was afforded, were also poets, but in more of a spoken oral tradition, where they would compose the poems and recite them to each other and memorize them. And that was kind of where the poems were housed.

Yeah, maybe that was also part of it. Because I thought I’d read something about your grandfather having this kind of recall of an oral tradition, and also other folks in your family. And I was just curious if that might have impacted your move to the stage at all because you had this in your atmosphere at all growing up, if you did, or how that might have impacted how you approach kind of stage poetry versus page poetry. If any of the family members you had around you kind of gave you any inspiration in that way.

It is the great plot twist of my life that I have ever been on a stage. Especially as a young person, I was painfully, painfully shy, could not speak to a stranger. And one of the first few times I went to Busboys… this is before my family started pulling up with me… this was the very first time one of my friends had invited me and I didn’t know what we were going to. She and I had both been writing poems and had been sharing them with each other. And she signed me up to read the open mic, and I was like, Are you trying to kill me? [laughter] But there was kind of the split-second moment where I was like, I could pretend I did not hear them call my name, or I could just get up and do it. I don’t really know any of the people in this room. And I think I was so swept up in the feeling of being in a new space and being in one of the first rooms in my life where I felt like I didn’t know anyone in there. And so I was like, Okay, why not? And I did it. And it’s not that it went super well, I thought I was gonna pass out. But I think in my mind, up until that point, I was like, if I ever do any public speaking, I will die. And I did some public speaking, and I did not die. And so it helps kind of resolve that myth for myself. And then, pretty early on into my time as a poet, I joined the DC Youth Slam team, which again, I did not know what a slam team was, I did not know what a poetry slam was. I thought I was going to a youth open mic. And it was tryouts for the team. And so I made the team, I was not entirely sure what that entailed. And a lot of… especially that particular era of… I don’t know what it was like in adult slam, but for Youth Slam, at least, it was a moment of like, very performance-heavy, highly choreographed… there were movements that people had to memorize, things like that. And I was deeply in awe of them. And it was also like, I can’t do that. Either I’m moving my body or I’m saying my lines. It’s like trying to pat your head and rub your stomach at the same time. [laughter] I couldn’t do it especially because I still was kind of shaky about being on stage. And I was assigned to work with the poet Sage Morgan-Hubbard… it is one of the great fortunes of my life that I got to work with Sage that early. Because I remember being told as a young person a few months into performing, “You don’t have to do all that if you don’t want to, you could just stand at the microphone, like set your feet so you feel sturdy speak from your diaphragm and just talk, you don’t have to do anything else.” And so finding a way to make the performance aspect compatible with the things I already knew how to do. I was like, Okay, I know how to stand very still. I, for the most part offstage know how to like, speak clearly if I need to. And she also gave me permission to take my time setting myself up where I didn’t have to say anything until I felt ready to speak. So I would, especially early on, would take a really long time up at the mic dead silence until I felt ready to talk. And even just having those little micro tips, like if you kind of put your feet in a wider stance so that if someone wanted to tackle you, they couldn’t. And if you speak from your diaphragm instead of up here from your throat, you won’t run out of breath while you’re speaking. Those two things are kind of just like the main components of performance that I’ve had my whole life. I never learned how to do anything else, I still can’t do no choreography. [Laughs.]

But it kind of… my poetry world and my poetry life, it took me years to connect it to the poets that I came from, it didn’t occur to me, because it just seemed like the fact that I was writing primarily in English, that I was in spaces where there were no other Sudanese people. So I did not put two and two together for ages. And then when I got older, I was like, That’s wild, my grandpa’s a poet, why did he never talk about it? And he was very proud of the fact that I was a poet, but it’s not like I was showing him my work necessarily. And he also comes from a very kind of classical, formal Arabic language, poetic tradition, where there’s meter, there’s rhyme, it’s very strict. And so I would show with my loosey-goosey unrhymed poem, and he’d be like, “Okay if you say so.” [laughter] But the moment where we did connect over that… he really took it upon himself to teach me by having me memorize some of his favorite poems by other poets in Arabic, a lot of them are also in classical, difficult Arabic. And there’s just a series of sounds is the way I memorized them. But that was kind of he was like, “Okay, you are the next poet in the family, you can’t be out here not knowing the way you don’t know, please learn these poems so that you can say with your chest that you’re a poet in front of my friends.” So we would have a little party to trick whenever he had friends over, he called me over, and we would recite a poem together. And it was very cute… This idea that I had very early on about wanting to write poetry in order to be a poet. I had my grandfather identified as a poet, and I saw him as a poet, even if we weren’t really engaging with each other’s work. It just was like… he’s like, “This is what I identify as.” And I was like, Okay, totally me too. And it didn’t need any other proof other than that’s what we said we were to each other.

Oh, I love that. I love that that was in your family, that there was the written tradition, the oral tradition, which you continue to this day. And I’m curious about that, how you make those decisions about, is this a poem for to be heard, or this is a poem to be seen. Particularly I was thinking about borders and the finite space that we have in a book. But one of the things I love so much about your work is the way that I feel like you’ve pushed the limits of that space with the use of caesura and white space, and really thinking about breath and absence. Particularly I was thinking about in this lovely one, Girls That Never Die, your series of taxonomy poems. And so I wondered if the page is a border, how do we push against it? Where does whitespace and silence… that doesn’t lack… silence not to be confused, misconstrued as emptiness–where does that figure out into the equation?

Well, first of all, abolish borders. [laughter] My kind of coming of age as a poet was at the height of that page versus stage discourse that people love to have. And it was always kind of racist and incredibly boring. And it is not interesting or productive or generative for me, or any of the poets that I knew. Because I think the way it was talked about at the time is to praise someone, especially in the slam spaces that I was growing up in, to focus the praise of someone’s work on their performance was to imply that they were a less rigorous writer. And that there were the ‘real writers,’ and then there were the good performers who had a physical intelligence or something, which is just [sound of disgust]. And I hate it, it’s so boring, it’s so not interesting. So, in my work… when I’m composing a poem, it’s usually silently, it’s usually in my head. And then very early on into the editing process, I will read the poem out loud to myself, because the first poetry I ever did was spoken word poetry. And so my ear is much smarter and older than my eye. And so I can still hear things before I can catch them just by reading them silently. And so it still really helps me edit my work to be like, Okay, I haven’t taken a breath in 15 seconds, this needs some air or these letters don’t feel good clustered together, this alliteration feels silly instead of doing what I needed to do. And because of that, all of my poems, even if they’re not the ones that I always choose to read when I’m doing a reading, all of my poems are intended to have a life both on the page and out loud, they’re constructed for that. And even with the caesura, with the whitespace, with all of the visual elements that are happening on the page, my hope is that that works as sort of sheet music so that someone who’s reading the poem, when I’m not there in the room to tell you how I intend for it to be read, can still approximate the sounds I’m trying to make with the poem just by how it’s being laid out. So I’m like, Okay, so caesura… I remember, I feel like it might have been, it was one of my first years at Cave Canem and I think I was in a workshop with Tim Seibles, who described the caesura as hesitation, which I really loved. So I don’t think of it as silence in a large way, I don’t think of it as a hard stop, I don’t even think of it as a pause. I just think of it as a hesitation, which I think just softens the poem in general. And I think it makes a poem feel, to me more intimate, and especially the poems that are entirely in lowercase and use caesura instead of conventional punctuation. The kind of weather I’m hoping to create in those poems is that these are thoughts as I am having them. These are not declamations. In Girls That Never Die, that is when I started to punctuate and capitalize my poems for the first time and that was because a lot of the stuff that I was saying… it would have been too easy to try and say quietly because it’s difficult and a little embarrassing. And so I wanted to challenge myself to say it with my chest, hence the capital letters and the punctuation because I needed that crispness. And I needed not to give a reader any reason to look away from what I was saying, to be like, “Oh, well, I don’t know how to read this.” I’m like, No, it is conventionally capitalized and punctuated. So there’s no reason to not sit down and hear what I’m trying to say to you. But just as that was kind of an intentional sonic choice, tonal choice, the caesura, the lowercase letters, that’s also an intentional tonal choice where it just quiets down the whole thing.

Yeah, yeah. Well, let’s get into this one [gestures to Girls That Never Die]. I was stunned when I first opened the book and I saw the Ol’ Dirty Bastard epigraph.

That’s where the title comes from!

[playfully] I said, No, she did not, no she did not do this! [Laughs.] And then it was reminding me of the first book, thinking about music and the impact of a musician and all of these things. And so I was just curious, why ODB? Was the song, “Ghetto Supastar,” a jumping-off point for you? Did it come later, if you’re kind of comparing and contrasting these texts? Tell me a little more about it.

I have always loved Ol’ Dirty Bastard. I remember, as an undergrad writing a suite of poems similar to… ODB was like my first Abdel Halim Hafez, that was the first muse to which I was writing a series of poems. But with “Ghetto Supastar” it just was like one of the big songs that was out when I was growing up. I love that song. And I remember just miss hearing the lyric and ODB verse for years, where he’s like, “I’m hanging out, partying with girls, that never die.” And so I heard, “I’m hanging out partying with girls that never die.” And I’m like, Wow, he’s just partying with these immortal women. Beautiful, radical, stunning. And for years, I just went off of that I was like, I need to call something Girls That Never Die because that never happens, the girls always die. Only to find out years later that I wasn’t putting the linebreak where the linebreak needed to go, which is, “I’m hanging out partying with girls,” pause, period, comma, whatever, “That never died.” [laughter] But at that point, the seed was planted. And so for years before this was a book, before this was anything… I was in the midst of writing The January Children and I had this lyric circling in my head. And I was like, I should use… especially because titles are pretty difficult for me in general. So once I have a title, I hold on to that thing for dear life. So I was like, I’m gonna call something Girls That Never Die. It doesn’t fit in this book that I’m making right now. So I need to make a note of it. And so at first, one of the first poems that I wrote after finishing The January Children was a poem called “Girls That Never Die,” which is one of the gajillion poems under that title in the book. And when it was done, I was like, Oh, I’m not finished. I’m not done with this title yet. And so I was like, Okay, is it a series of poems called Girls That Never Die? Is it a long poem? I thought it was gonna be a book-length poem for a long time. And then I was like, this is the title of a book. And so I need to make sure I don’t use it up anywhere else because this is the title of a book that I will write at some point. So this is the first time in my life where I had the title of the book before I knew anything about the book.

Wow. Well, in the book you write about girlhood, you write about the femme body more explicitly and really thinking about shame and desire, violence against women and girls. And I just was curious about what led you to these particular themes, really going to the body as a site of desire, also as a site of generational trauma? And how you also incorporate… so that’s kind of like question one, why the body? But then you do this cool thing of having odes and elegies. You have also, as I said, generational trauma, but also magical realism. So we’re encountering a kind of expansiveness around the body and girlhood and womanhood. And so I just wanted to also ask how you made those choices as well.

So most of the subject matter in this book, up until the writing of this book, were fit under the category of things I was not allowed to write about. Because so much of how I had been, I don’t know, like trained and socialized was not to call any attention to my body and I kind of was socialized with the understanding that the only way for my girl body to be safe in the world was for it to be invisible because the second it was under observation, it was in danger. And so, The January Children was all smoke and mirrors to be like, look over there, I’m just a set of eyes and I’m your disembodied speaker, but look over there at these other people. And I was ready to spend the rest of my poetry writing life being like, look over there, I’m just the camera. I don’t know how to trace the chronology of this, but it was maybe sometime after The January Children had come out. And all of a sudden, I was having just a very difficult time on the internet. And I wasn’t even doing anything, I was not even a particularly spicy or innovative or interesting internet presence. I just was existing on the internet, as most people of my generation tend to do. And would just be getting the most horrible, disgusting, rancid, DMs usually from men. And I was like, okay, so this thing that I was taught that if I would just be the quietest, least offensive, purest, best-behaved, most invisible version of myself, then no one would ever hate me, and no one would ever wish to do me harm. It turns out, that’s not true! So if anyway, no matter what I do, the fact of my existing makes some people hate me and wish to do me harm, then I might as well do whatever it is I want to do! The idea of this being some kind of purity Olympics is fake, and it’s made up. And so I was like, for these bums, I’m gonna not write poems about my body. So some rando won’t be like, “How dare you be immodest and put a poem in a body.” I’m like, get out of my inbox! We are strangers to each other. And so I was like, I’m making these huge, huge decisions about my life and my work based on the imagined opinion of men I literally don’t know personally. How annoying, how frustrating.

And so a lot of these poems were written at first out of anger, out of anger which I think was the… if we’re thinking about Russian nesting dolls, the big doll is anger. And inside that doll is grief, is mourning, because I just was in mourning for all of the years of my life that I wasted trying to just like fit myself and contort myself into this idea of an acceptable woman, an acceptable Muslim woman, an acceptable Black woman, an acceptable Sudanese woman, that doesn’t exist, there’s no such thing, it’s made up. It is an idea that is made up and it’s made up by men. So why waste my time in that way, when I could just write the poems that I want to write. And you think about the poems in this book, they’re not even that spicy; they’re not even controversial. So I was like, This is what I was trying to withhold and censor? Because at first, I was like, I’m gonna write some controversial poems. Like, they’re really not–really not doing what I thought they were gonna do. [Laughs.] But I think that goes to show how insidious it was, and how much I was like, I need to silence even something that might be considered or misread as being inappropriate or immodest, or whatever. It’s like, enough is enough. And I think it helped to have this container, this idea of the girls that never die, because that kind of… that’s often what’s used as the governing tactic to make the femme body fall in line and stay small, and whatever, is the threat of death, the fear of death. And so I was like, Okay, if in this world, the girls don’t die, what could happen? And so it was just a really helpful and I guess, healing, imagining to get to do to be like, Okay, what if they can’t kill me? Well, what would I do? What would I write about? 

Did you feel freer? 

Oh, yeah. I loved it. I had a nice time. I mean, well, okay. Yes and no. Because a lot of these poems, I wrote them quietly by myself for years. The latter half of that being during the pandemic. And so I was like, I feel free. I love it. I publish it. And then the book came out, and it was kind of right when everything reopened. And so I was reading those poems out loud for the first time. And then I was like, What did I do? This is my actual business that I’m reading to these strangers! [laughter] But at the time when it was just me at the desk on my computer, I was like, freedom finally, without thinking about the long-term commitment I was making. 

Well, one of the things I really love about this book and your other work is your use of anaphora. And really thinking about how anaphora can be used, in some poems I feel as a kind of litany, in other poems, I feel as a kind of refusal or redefinition of the word that is repeated. And in your poem, “A Rumor,” which I love in this book, I’m just gonna read a little portion of this. You repeat this word, ‘say,’ and you repeat the word ‘touch.’

“And say I was touched, say everywhere the world enters me, leaves behind a wound, say because I love shame. I am ashamed to have been hurt, say the aching makes a low hum. At the base of my remaining life, say my disgrace becomes my obsession, say I roam for days, at its borders, touch it to my tongue.” 

And when I read that last line, it just hit me. and I often when I read poems that hit me I throw my book. [Laughs.] And I wondered if you could speak to that poem, or just poems in general, how you kind of thought about the crafting of anaphora in this poem? If you think about it as a kind of portal, if you think about it as a liminal space between where you’ve been and where you’re going. I just was stunned by that in this poem: what’s your relationship with anaphora?

I love repetition. So it’s why I reach for anaphora a lot, it’s why the ghazal is a form I return to often, it’s why I’m eternally trying to figure out the sestina to no avail. [laughter] I just think there’s something so spell-like in the act of repetition, and I love kind of trying to push repetition to as far as I can take it because I feel like, you repeat something enough and you can create a trance state almost. And that’s what I’m always trying to nudge myself toward in the poem is to be like, how can this feel like a spell? How can this create a trance? How can this create a portal? One of the reasons that I love the act of repetition in a poem is because repetition is about change, it’s not about doing the same thing over and over. It’s not… it’s impossible for it to be the same thing every time. And so I love the ways in which you can look at the exact arrangement of letters, and then it shows up again, and because of what happened since then, it is a completely different word, and it has a completely different vibe, or tone, or weather to it, and then do it again and do it again. It’s like a button I love to press because I’m like, How can… in what ways is it different than it was last time and I can just keep pressing on that button for all eternity, I never get bored of it. Maybe sometimes to the detriment of my reader, but I’m not bored of this word yet. 

No, not to the detriment of this reader. [Laughs.]

But it really, it feels incantatory and that is a gesture that I just have always been interested in as a poet. Especially in “A Rumor,” in that poem, I especially in the thick of working on this project, the rumor is also kind of one of the tools weaponized towards this project of purity or modesty or being like an acceptable femme person in some way. And so I was like, what would a poem in the form of a rumor look like? And I don’t think this is quite executed, that I don’t know that I think of this as being a poem in the form of a rumor, but I wanted to flip the the act of rumor making on its head and invite the rumor to be like… to tell my reader, my listener, say this about me, say all this stuff about me, say I love shame, instead of sitting back and waiting for someone else to arrive to that conclusion about me. 

Okay, you know that scene in the movie Eight Mile, where, I think it’s like the final battle or something. And Eminem’s character, I don’t remember what he’s called now… Instead of waiting for his opponent to say all of this embarrassing stuff about him and his family, he says it himself. Unfortunately, that scene made too big an impact on me because I was like if I say it first, no one can say it about me. I think that was kind of the impulse behind this poem. I think that’s kind of what the speaker is trying to seize back, to be like, “Okay, say these things about me. But say them in my words, say it the way I have them phrased.” Which just felt like a very, again, hilarious word use in this context, but a really fun exercise. 

And situating that too alongside “Ode to the Gossips,” which is a fav as well, just what does that mean to be able to talk about someone, be able to create narratives about someone that didn’t take that power back in this kind of a text? 

You’ve obviously written great collections of poetry. But you also have novels in verse. So I have the latest, Home Is Not a Country. I’m excited to get into this more. And I know that you have Bright Red Fruit coming out in February of 2024. And so I was just curious about… So we’ve got… we’ve had our performative time, we’ve had our collection of poetry time, now we have a novel in verse, YA, you’re just expanding, expanding, expanding, and I love it. I’m curious if you found any kind of overlaps in writing a novel in verse versus a collection, or if there are major differences when it came to building a world on a page and characters.

So it just so happened, this wasn’t by accident, but both of the novels in verse were written, either during or in the direct aftermath of one of my poetry collections. And so Home Is Not a Country is kind of thematically just like the aftershocks of The January Children. Because I had just finished writing that book and still hadn’t quite completed the exorcism, I guess. I had like two more things to say. And then Bright Red Fruit I think of as being kind of a companion piece to Girls That Never Die, which, again, was not intentional, but really I can only have my brain in one place at a time. And if I’m thinking about a set of themes, that’s just what I’m thinking about for five, six years at a time. And so the themes didn’t really involve a lot of decision-making on my part, because I was like, here’s what I’m thinking about. So whatever form it takes, this is just what I’m on right now. But I never thought that I would write fiction. I never studied fiction. I don’t know, because I was like a youth slam poet, I found the one thing that I was good at as a teenager and did not look left or right after that. So I just have what I’m working on… is I just have a real aversion to doing stuff that I’m not already good at, which can make for a kind of uninteresting life, I am told. [laughter] So I was approached with the invitation to write a novel for young people. And at first, I was like, thank you so much. I’m a poet, haven’t you heard? And it’s so funny because I’m out here being like, abolish genre! Abolish borders! And then I was like, Excuse me? How dare you ask me to write a novel when I’m a poet, when there is a firm line between those two things! [laughter] And I kind of had to be coaxed into it, to arrive at the understanding that it was more or less the same tools I already was using in my poetry. Especially because one of my favorite books, which is Anne Carson’s Autobiography of Red, I did not know what a novel in verse was. So I was like, this is a project book. This is a collection of poems with recurring characters, and that has a narrative arc. Cool. I did not know you could do that in a collection of poems. So when I was writing The January Children, I thought I was writing like my version of Autobiography of Red because it was a character, the characters recur. It’s kind of set in a world. So I was like, did it. Wrote my version of Autobiography of Red.

And then I was talking to someone around the time where I was like, can you imagine, I was asked to write a novel! And this is the person who ended up becoming my publisher, Chris Myers. But he was like, “Okay if you don’t want to, you don’t have to. Anyway, what are some of your favorite books?” And I launch into talking about Autobiography of Red and he lets me finish. And then he was like, “Cool, you know, that’s a novel, right?” And I was like, Don’t talk to me like that. [laughter] What do you mean? And he was like, “It’s a novel in verse.” And so because fiction and plot and narrative storytelling was going to be new to me, knowing that I would have my existing formal tools while I explored these like unknown spaces made me feel like I had enough training wheels on to be like, Okay, so all I have to do is just make up a story about someone who’s not me instead of it being my actual business for once. Amazing. 

Home Is Not a Country kind of… I wrote it during that period of overlap between just having come off The January Children and starting to think about Girls That Never Die. But Girls That Never Die, really, it took forever to crack open, there’s just so many bad drafts of that book in my computer that will never see the light of day. But I couldn’t find my way into it. But because the new tool that I had in this was my real autobiographical eye and body and life and business. I just at the time of thinking about Home Is Not a Country, I was sick and tired of my own self and my own life. And so I was like, Cool, I get to spend time in a project where the ‘I’ is not me, Safia, thank God, sick of her. Need to spend time as someone else. And so to get to just make stuff up for the first time in my life. Because there’s also in poetry, there’s kind of, at least in the spaces that I came up in, there’s kind of this responsibility to tell the truth as much as possible. And you can’t say something happened to you if it didn’t happen to you for the most part. And there’s a kind of measure, like a metric of authenticity. And with this I was like, I could just make it up. I could give this character a name that’s not my name and populate the world with a bunch of people I’ve never met. Amazing, what a treat. So I set it in a version of the world that I am familiar with, because I was like, also, these are just the image systems that I have access to. But I was like, This is so not me. And I am so glad. And so I had a really good time just resetting my brain, spending time in the mind and the life and the story of someone who’s not myself. So by the time I was done with that and came back to Girls That Never Die, I was like, hey, my real life it’s been a long time.

That’s amazing. That’s amazing. You have had such an arrange of work that you’ve done. And then also the fourth beautiful cover that I have here, this Mizna cover, the SWANA Takeover for issue 23.2 that you edited. So we have a YA novel in verse, we have poetry collections, we have editor. What was that experience, using that muscle of putting something so important like a Black SWANA takeover of Mizna and giving a platform for poets who have these multiple identity space to explore just them for Mizna? What was that like for you?

So the great thing about this being a Black SWANA takeover issue is that it was a whole team. It was never just me at any point. So everyone, from the person doing the copy edits to the person doing the layout design, was a Black person. And so I don’t know… it helps the project feel thorough like I wasn’t just being installed as like a Black figurehead to be like, “Okay, we checked off the Black thing.” So it also I think made me feel more comfortable inviting Black SWANA people into the space because I was like, it’s reinforced, there’s Black people everywhere. So it’s like, there’s nothing to worry about. We can just talk to each other here. But it was… a lot of my dear friends ended up being on this takeover team. So it was just a really fun collaborative process to get to just hang out with a bunch of smart, interesting people [that] I love to get to make this celebratory space because I think it felt really important… because this is Mizna’s first Black SWANA takeover issue specifically, it’s not the first time they’ve published Black SWANA people obviously, but the first time it was kind of curated with an eye toward this identity. I did not want it to be like all about racism, I didn’t want to take away to be like, “Wow, it’s so hard to be a Black person, woe is me.” Because that is not my experience of being a Black person. So especially in gathering spaces, it’s fun, it’s celebratory, it’s funny, it’s interesting, it’s intimate. And I think to have the focus… obviously, there’s discussion of racism in there, because that is part of the experience as well. But it’s a single thread instead of being the whole thing. And I felt like… especially because this issue… I was approached to guest edit this issue in 2020, right after George Floyd was killed, and so I was like, I understand that it would be very easy in this moment to make this issue about anti-Blackness, instead of about Blackness. 

But that feels kind of counter to the whole thing I’m trying to do in my work in general, which, that would feel outward-facing, Black people know about racism, I don’t have to explain it. From the position of this issue to face outward and be like, I’m here to tell you about anti-Blackness and how difficult it is, who am I talking to? I’m not facing inward to my community if I’m talking like that, I’m speaking to someone else. And that’s not work I’m particularly interested in doing. And so I was like, Okay, what new possibilities are available if we pretend no one else is here if we gather and face inward and just talk as if we are the only people in the room? What kind of fun, interesting, experimental, funny, tragic, strange work can be collected in that space without also the pressure of feeling like this has to be a dispatch on Blackness, from the Black community, to explain what it is to be Black, especially a community as specific as the Black SWANA community, it also would have been very easy to turn this issue into proof of existence, to be like, I know you all don’t think there are Black people in Southwest Asia and North Africa. But there are, let me tell you about them. Like no… how sad, how boring to take up a whole issue to prove that we exist, because we know that we exist, But so rarely do we get together under this specific umbrella and the specific invitation that I didn’t want to waste the gathering space on doing something as boring as proving that we exist, or explaining what our deal is, and how we got there, and why we are the way we are? That’s not… I don’t care. The only audience for that is people who don’t already think we exist or people who don’t already believe that there are Black people in that part of the world and who have been there for a long time. So it just was… early on in working with the team to kind of identify what we did want and what we didn’t want, it was helpful to be like, “Okay, these are all of the easy ways that… these are kind of ways to easily answer the question we know is being posed when someone encounters this issue. Here’s how to reject them and ask more interesting questions and create a more interesting, gathering space.” So it was really fun to get to…

It’s beautiful. 

I love all the poems in here. I love all the art. 

Yeah, the art. In this conversation we’ve gone through a range of things that you’ve done on the page professionally. But with my last couple of questions, I wanted to also get a sense of what are you doing in between, like when you’re not writing, when you are not editing, when you’re not putting novels in verse together. What keeps you grounded in the living? What does your meanwhile look like?

I also think it might be helpful for the world to make it clear that because of just the way that publishing timelines work, I didn’t write these books just back to back. Most of my life is the meanwhile, I spend most of my day and life not writing. A lot of these I kind of write seasonally and in kind of concentrated bursts. So I recently in the past few years have started doing like 30-30s with a friend maybe like once a year, but usually though those would be the 30 poems I write that year. And most of the rest of the time. I don’t know, I’m chilling. I’m looking for a hobby. Yeah, I would love to have a real hobby. Because the thing that was my hobby as a child is now my job. So, what else can I do for fun that is not tied up with my self-worth? But yeah, I don’t know, I read a lot, I take naps, I go for walks, I hang out with friends, I host a lot, I cook, I look at fashion magazines. I don’t know what I do…

What’s your favorite thing to cook? 

So I understand that the world has a prejudice against okra. I have encountered… most of these people have a very casual relationship to okra because it’s also used as the thickening agent in most of our stews and stuff. So that kind of like the slime doesn’t bother me, but I know it bothers a lot of people. And so my agenda these days has been making stewed okra called bamia, which is eaten in Sudan, but also in the region in general, and trying to convince people to give it a try. We had a party for my husband’s birthday a couple of weeks ago, and I made two big pots of food. One was a stew chicken. There’s a big pot of rice, and then the okra I just labeled as veggie so that people would approach it with an open mind. But it’s not slimy. So I was like, if you’re worried that it’s slimy, it’s not. So what’s your next argument against it? It’s delicious. So I am making a lot of bamia these days to try and spread the good word about okra. 

That is hilarious. Okra ambassador. That might be another project for you. [laughter] Wow, that is amazing. And you talked a little bit about writing in bursts. So you’re spending most of your time doing the living. But when you are writing when you’re in that burst of energy, are there particular kinds of rituals that you have doing that? Are there ways that help you go to the blank page or exercises you make for yourself or anything that kind of helps get you into that rhythm?

So over the years, what I’ve learned about myself is that for me… what we call writer’s block is just fear of writing a bad poem. And so I will often when I sit down to a blank page have to just be like, Write the bad version, like it’s not the end of the world. Because also, a lot of the times when I’m not writing, it’s not because I don’t want to write– I usually want to write I just kind of don’t. But I am often… and this kind of resets every time… I am afraid to sit down with a blank page when I feel like I don’t already have an idea. But here’s the thing, I’ve never had an idea for a poem, none of my existing poems are written because I was like, I have an idea for a poem. A lot of the personality of the poem emerges as I’m writing it, as I’m editing it. So this lie I tell myself that all my poems have gotten written because I had an idea is just… I don’t know how to get that out of my head. But I have to kind of relearn each time that the only way to make a poem is to make it. I can’t formulate the whole thing in my head, and then just sit down and have it emerge fully formed, maybe some lucky people work that way. But that’s never been my experience. A poem is made of words. So I have to sit down and one word at a time coax that thing out. But there are also a lot of tools and systems that I have in place for myself now. Especially because I feel like it takes so much to get myself to sit down to write that once I’m there, I don’t want to be hesitating and hemming and hawing and being like, Maybe I should just go watch TV instead. So once I’m sitting down, I’m like, Okay, if I don’t immediately find an entry point, here are some here’s a checklist of things I can do. 

Usually, the first thing I will do is reread a poem or a book or something that I already love, and it will get me re-excited about poetry and will make me feel like I’m getting to do the most fun thing in the world because I am. And then sometimes, that’s all it takes and I’m in. If that doesn’t work, I have a document on my computer called ‘Words I like,’ and it’s just a long list of words I like. And sometimes I can pick a couple out and give myself the exercise of writing a line or a stanza or something using a couple of those words. And sometimes that will get the ball rolling. If that doesn’t work, I will go through a poem by someone else that I really love, and go through it line by line and boil each line down to what it’s doing in the most basic way possible. So like, line one: Something about the speaker’s emotional state; line two: observation about the world outside; line three: something that happened at an earlier point in time… and just make myself literally a line-by-line list of prompts, and then go and just fulfill those prompts line by line by line. And then sometimes it just takes a stanza of that and then something kicks into place, then I can just write the rest of the poem unassisted. But that’s part of the reason I have so many ‘after’ poems is because a lot of times, someone else’s poem will be the ghost behind the poem that I’ve written. And then, what else… there’s usually like 1000 stupid little tricks, I have… I really have to trick myself into writing a lot of the time. And again, it’s not because I don’t want to, but it’s because there’s the thing I want to do and then the thing that’s keeping me from doing the thing I want to do, and so the tricks are to distract that thing that’s stopping me. So, yeah, they’re a bunch of little things. Sometimes I’ll set myself a formal assignment. It’s also why I write so many ghazals–it’s one of the only forms that I just know off the top of my head, I don’t have to look at a diagram of a sestina to remember. So sometimes it’ll just be like, Okay, pick a word from the ‘words I like’ list, write a ghazal using that word as the end word. See what happens. And a lot of those first drafts go nowhere. But it’s also… most of my poems get made in revision anyway, there are no true first drafts of mine anywhere in the world if I can help it, because they’re not great. But it’s so much easier for me to extract the poem, I’m trying to write from an existing draft, instead of trying to pull it out of thin air. Once I have material on the page, I can work with the material. But what is just a blank page, there’s nothing to work with there. I just have to imagine onto it. It’s kind of… my brain doesn’t work that way.

Well, we love the way that your brain works as readers of your work. And so my last question for you, is really, what do you hope readers take away from the breadth of your work, the body of your work? I always think about the ending of a poem and trying to figure out, okay, is this the soft closing of the door? Is this the gymnast dismount, I landed that? Is this a provocation? How do I want to leave emotionally a reader with at the end of a poem, but with a body of work as extensive as yours? What do you want people to take away from that?

I’ve never actually thought about this. I think my hope is that my body of work, even though I know I’m working with a lot of recurring themes, my hope is that if you read the book in order, you see movement, you see something shifting or expanding or growing because also I’ve grown up with these books. I started writing The January Children when I was an undergrad, and I was in my early 20s. And now I’m in my early 30s. So this is 10 years of published work. I started writing and performing poetry when I was a teenager. So this is 15, 16 years of work at this point. So my hope is that something is changing. You know what I mean? And I hope it’s traceable. I hope my growing up is traceable. And I hope as I learn that learning is evident in the poems. Yeah, and I hope that in the way that so many of the poets whose work I love gave me permission when I was new and unsure and waiting for someone to invite me in. I hope someone will read my work and see an invitation in it and see permission in it, hopefully.

Well, thank you for accepting our invitation to be here, Safia Elhillo. We are so, so, so delighted that you got to spend time with us here at James Madison University and Furious Flower and in Harrisonburg. And we are really grateful that you had that initial moment to set out on that stage, 16-year-old self, and be brave and realize the power of your own voice and your own language and that it can reach people, that energy transference that happens that created all of this as a possibility. So, thank you so much. 

Read more in this issue: Critical Essay | Poems | Writing Prompt

---