by Gbenga Adesina, PhD
Rickey Laurentis is one of the twenty first’s century’s significant poets. Her second book of poems, Death of the First Idea published exactly ten years after her compelling first book, Boy with Thorn selected by Terrance Hayes for the Cave Canem Prize is a study in longevity and transformation. The sentences move with a sculptural intelligence in a private formal logic devised, it seems, primarily for the poet’s own pleasure. This pleasure is anchored in a musical discipline that centers the spiritual practice of multiplicity. The poet’s mind is planetary in scale and the stars that orbit her mind’s planet are made of the magma of references, convergences, and influences. The spiritual map of this poet in spatial terms extend from New Orleans to New York and in temporal terms from 21st century’s America to Antiquity’s Rome. This multiplicity of eloquences and ancestries brings to mind what the poet and scholar, Fred Moten in his theory trilogy “Consent Not To Be A Single Being” described as the refusal of Blackness as the “name that has been given to the social field and social life of an illicit alternative capacity to desire.” This refusal of “social death” though Laurentis does not burnish the bruises inflicted by her would be assassins, fills the poems with an electric undercurrent, a kinetic edge, and the alchemical symmetry that makes language a profound ancestral force.
Closely linked to the discipline of multiplicity in this poet’s vision is longevity as an architectural device extending from one book to the next across ten years. In this poet’s body of work, we glimpse the longevity of inquiry, longevity of attention, longevity of concern, and revision as a portal of/to longevity. What does it mean to revise a self? What does it mean to revise a soul? This question haunts this book. Ultimately this is a text written under the insignia of transformation. In the ten years in which Laurentis worked on this book she went through a profound spiritual transformation and in some ways so did America and the world. This book then is a spiritual memoir of that transformation.
Consider for the instance the poem, Mundane Song from Death of the First Idea (2025)
You go outside and the Trees don’t know You’re Black. The lilacs will chatter & break
Themselves real bloom, real boon, whatever,
No matter your gender. You matter. You, ‘Cross a Natural life, is who You is & makes
briefest material, so you matter.
How we are Added unto, Candleheart, & taken from.
It matters. Your Afro may start matted now be combed to touch
The sky. Come up from the ground looking extra,
Extra fly, child, You include the Sky. You gape. You open
Your Blue mouth, and such the vulnerable universe falls out.
(Death of the First Idea 21)
The child in this poem who is as large and full of depth as an ancestor and as fragile as a new born includes the “Sky” and from her mouth “the vulnerable universe” abides. She exists as Ricky Laurentis poems do in the context of the world’s calculus of brutality, yet she’s celestial. Above Laurentis’ universe of poems, transformed ancestors hover. They belong both to the past and the future. They belong to us. Rickey Laurentis was recently at James Madison University for a reading from her book, Death of the First Idea. She visited the Furious Flower Poetry Center and spoke to Dr. Gbenga Adesina the Furious Flower Fellow in Black Global and Diaspora Poetry. The interview has been edited for clarity and length.
My name is Gbenga Adesina, and this is the Furious Flower Poetry Center, the nation’s first academic center dedicated to Black poetry. At Furious Flower, we understand that poetry, especially Black poetry, is a form of a long memory. It’s a form of legacy. It’s intergenerational and intercontinental, and it continues to be a rich resource in this country and beyond. Today’s a particularly beautiful day, because for this Furious Flower interview, I have one of the most gifted poets of our time. A poet that’s important to me personally, the great Rickey Laurentiis; Rickey, how are you doing today?
I’m good, I’m doing really well.
Awesome. This book you have written, Death of the First Idea. It’s singular in its brilliance, in its eloquence. It’s also a book that contains multitudes: multitudes of voices, multitudes of gazes, multitudes of sounds, multitudes of self, multitudes of interiorities. And I’m so excited for us to talk about it. But I want to start with poems. I would like you to read “One Country” from Boy with Thorn and then “Improvising on an Early Theme” from your new book, Death of the First Idea.
“One Country” from Boy with Thorn, my first book:
I want to be released from it.
I want its impulses stunned to lead.
This body. Its breath.
Let it. Let the whole pageant
end. If my body had a river in it
I would drain it. If by the river
was a city, let a storm shock and drown it.
If in the city was a boy made sick
from his body, the freak passions of it,
let him come out—his brown skin
lifting as a shell. Let it. Let all
his limbs pop and unhinge. First
his penis, its quick flight, as if a comet.
The eight fingers next, then thumbs,
then tongue, till every star is on the floor,
dismissed, each pointing in its own
direction, each another door
to the one country where his body is
loved and made for.
Now from the new book, “Improvising on an Early Theme (Or, One Country)”
—age 26
I wanted to be released from it.
I wanted its impulses stunned to lead
That body. Its breath.
Let it. Let the whole pageant
end. If my body had a river in it
I did drain it. If by the river
was a city, let a storm shock & drowned it.
When in the city was a boy made sick
from his body, the freak passions of it,
I letted it him out–his brown skin,
lifting two shells. Let it. Let all
his limbs be popped and unhinged. First
their penis, its quick flight is of a comet,
The eight fingers next, then thumbs,
then tongue, till every star is on the floor
dismissed, each pointing in its own
direction, each became a door
to the one country where Her body is
loved and made for.
their penis, its quick flight is of a comet,
That is so beautiful, Rickey. These poems from your two books written published a decade apart got me thinking about the idea of longevity: longevity of attention, longevity of concern, longevity of revision, even longevity of return. When I was reading this new book and I saw that poem, I remember thinking, “Why does this feel like déjà vu? I know this poem. I know the sound.” Then I quickly doubled back to Boy with Thorn on my shelf and it turns out that you were revisiting the poem from your book of ten years ago in your new book. It made me think, in some ways, a poet is never really done with a poem. Sometimes poems consist of versions of our past, but also versions of our future, and I just wanted you to talk about that sort of longevity.
So, Death of the First Idea, the second book, it’s exploring transformation and also trans identity. And almost as soon as I recognized myself as trans and recognized I would be writing this book, I was hungry to go look for antecedents in history all the way back to antiquity for people who look like me. And funny enough, one of those antecedents was my very own book. And it’s funny because when I first wrote “One Country,” I had no idea yet about the transformative process I would go through, and it’s very humbling to be able to go back to your own poems and see how your poems anticipate you. And so, the longevity that you heard was both accidental but also decided upon when I was revising the book in the later stages of it. And so it’s just interesting to see that poetry, however one conceives of it, does live on a mystic plane where it will speak to the future as much as it speaks to the past.
How delightful, Rickey, and that leads me to one of the things I love so much about this book and your poetry in general: the multiplicity of references, convergences, influences, homages, but also rebuttals. You have Walt Whitman, but you also have the Greek odes and the Greek figures. You have the Lady Chablis, you have Wallace Stevens, but you also have Nicki Minaj and Beyonce. Talk to us. How do you cultivate this practice of multiple references?
Well, maybe I’ll read just the first part of my notes that frames this. I wrote that “an ancient source for trans forebearers might — since the stable notions of identity, qua race, gender and sexuality are largely modern fixations — always disappoint, yet antecedents, epicene mass, twice borns, two spirits of the twins, and I think about the Yoruba twins there, do exist in both mortal and divine, tolerated and policed, positive and negative forms, a whole stratosphere of existence.” Here we recall Pliny’s words, “There are beings that unite the two sexes. We call them hermaphrodites. They used to be called androgynous, and they were looked upon as monsters. Today, they delight in the delights of libertinaety, which is to say the delights of a future next liberated world.” So as I said, it was very particular and very specific to this project to look for antecedents. But my practice of having just a bunch of stuff in my head, a bunch of references, just comes out of my own obsessions. It comes out of my wish, my always wish and always happiness of being in a Wiki rabbit hole, going on Wikipedia, and following the line of some research, and I don’t think it’s necessarily unique to me. I think if we could cut open everyone’s head and look inside their brain, I think you would find a similar universe of various references. The job of a writer, or maybe more a poet, is to link those images in new and interesting ways. And so, I wanted the notes, but also with the poems, to let that be clear from the beginning, that I am the process. I am the consequence of many collisions, and I’m happy with that and it also gives me permission to even change some more, maybe not as radically or as directly as I have now, but it gives me permission to constantly be in a study with myself and with the world, its future and its past.
It’s so beautiful. And I love what you said about your mind at work, because it reminds me of your sentences. You think of the sentence as an architectural device, as a sculpted thing, as a dance of the writer’s mind at work. You are one of the most intentional writers I know, not just poets, when it comes to sentences. Your sentences always feel Keatsian to me, the eloquence, the elevation, and I would like you to just talk to me about the process, about the secret life of the sentences you write?
It’s so nice to hear that because I am in love with the English sentence. I find it so elastic. You can make her long, make her short. Because I did study Latin and Italian and some other languages, and so I have an idea of how grammar works in different places. I find that in English, the fact that we have a subject-verb-object order that is mandated in English, it actually gives you a lot of room to do some sculptural work. And because it gives you a core structure to work with, you can play with it. So, I am interested in poems, how the sentences cascade across the line, and how each line might deliver a certain meaning, but across the entire sentence, it comes to mean this other thing. And that’s a work of transformation in itself. I’m really excited by that opportunity. I was a Catholic school student, and it comes out of language arts classes where we had to diagram sentences and I was the nerdy kid who enjoyed that. It’s still present in my work to this day.
Do you write long hand, do you go to the computer? How do sentences come to you?
I definitely write long hand. I love writing, the physical sensation of manuscript writing is still important to me, because if I want to remember something, I’ll take a notebook and just write it down, even knowing I may never return back to that notebook, just the act of writing it down will help be mnemonic to my memory. But I also use my phone. I also use computers. A lot of this book was written on my phone. So, a lot of the sentences had to be shaped by the width or the size of the screen. I went back and forth between longhand and “tech hand” to create this book. And the sentences are the reflection of that engagement.
If you could think of a specific poem, how does a poem happen for Ricky Laurentiis? This is for young poets, who are thinking of poems as these impossible enigmas?
How does it start? It could start from anything, a turn of a phrase, seeing a bird do something weird in the sky, a type of weather on that day, or a feeling, anger, wonder. It can come from any place, but what’s important is to catch it. I grew up in New Orleans, and we have butterflies, dragonflies. We didn’t have fireflies, but it’s like trying to catch one of those. When you see it, it’s beautiful, and you suddenly want to try to catch the butterfly, and you have to be very patient, slow and then quick to get it. And that’s my process. When a poem is coming, I’m slow to it, but I get to the writing because I don’t want to forget it. Then once I’m in the flow of it, I get quicker and quicker and quicker. And that’s fun. That translates to my life as pleasure.
I love it. And to follow up on that, do your poems come fully formed? Do you have to work them out? Do they take days, hours, weeks, months or years?
Some do, like the first poem in Death of the First Idea, a poem called “Steal Away,” took 10 years to write. I remember the first line “not to the boy, not quite to his body, but to his boundaries.” That line came to me on the very day that Michael Jackson died, which was about 10 years ago. I was at Cave Canem and we were being bused to a center so that we could hear Natasha Tretheway read and I didn’t know what the words meant. I didn’t know what this line meant; lines would come to me, or ideas. And what’s exciting about it is to see where they go, where it takes me. So, they don’t come fully formed. If they did come fully formed, it would be less exciting, because then I would just be a scribe. I would just be a recorder of something. It’s the engagement and figuring it out that becomes again, as I said, pleasure.
The first line came to you 10 years ago. You wrote it down. How did it become a whole poem?
Well, I stayed with it. I kept coming back. I love the poetic line. I craft out a small form of my own, for example, the end lines of those poems, they all rhyme, and I’m snake-like in my writing, I write a line and then I’ll go to the end of the line and try to press upon that last word to get me to the next word and the next word. And, by press upon, I mean looking up its etymology, looking up its definition, thinking about what I meant, and then I let that push me on to the next line. And that’s the process. So sometimes that takes just six lines, that’s the poem, and sometimes it’s 600 lines.
Because you mentioned “etymology” and “form,” I’m thinking of going in two directions. I’m going to go in the direction of etymology first and then we’ll circle back to form. I love the eloquence of your poetry. The elevation is very Keatsian, and very Shakespearean. There are lines like the ones from the first poem “Steal Away”: “not to the boy, not even quite to his body, but to its boundary, I say you are what is wrong, now fall” — that Keatsian rhythm. But in the same book, there are places where you introduce us to other eloquences, demonstrating to us that eloquence is multiple.
There are multiple kinds of eloquences. English is my mother’s language, she speaks English. She taught it to me. And as a Black American, I feel a little bit weird saying that, but it was through the writing of this book that I came to realize that I really do love how I speak. I really do love the language that I inherited, and there’s eloquence to be found all the way from Shakespeare and Keats, as you keep reminding us, to the present day, to pop and hip hop and things like that. I’m just so intrigued by how English works itself out in the air across the world, apparently. And it’s exciting to hear the different accents that can come out. And it’s a really elastic and imperial language. It’s both of those things at once. And so as a poet, I feel one of my duties, one of my roles is to engage the language as itself as we receive it, but also to test it and — I like this idea of sculpting — sculpt it into different places and see the length of it, what it can do. And again, I have in my mind some other languages and that’s exciting to me. I think “They can do this in German. We can’t do this in English. We can’t do this in Italian.” That’s the nerd in me coming out.
I love it. And returning to form, I’m thinking of that poem, “2019”. There’s this line I like so much that says “it’s a tragedy. No, it’s a sonnet.” Tragedy not as a sad sequence, but as a gesture toward the epic form. It got me thinking about a thread that connects both of your books, Boy With Thorn and Death of the First Idea, a private architecture of forms, this invention of private forms almost purely for your own illumination and pleasure.
I want to talk to you about how you approach the poetic form.
I love that you said “private form” because I’m someone who is interested in formality and formalism. But I’m not necessarily interested in people needing to know that. I don’t need you to know that this is a sonnet, even a failed sonnet, for you to read this poem or to hopefully enjoy this poem. So, they’re private, because they’re generative exercises, for me. They help me not to start the poem, but continue the poem, and then once that’s done, I’m satisfied just to have created the poem. But I was interested in form, in the sense that I wanted to not create new forms, but I wanted to investigate why we were so obsessed with some forms, per se, the sonnet in American poetry for instance. Everyone’s writing the sonnet. So, I thought, “Okay, what would these poems look like if I pushed them towards the 14-line kind of sonnet?” And what I found out is that they couldn’t be contained within that type of structure. So, I had to let it go in a certain way. But also maintain what did work on the sonnet in these cases, maintain it, but also be willing to let it go for the sake of the poem, so that you don’t just write a sonnet, you wrote a poem. That was important.
I’m sure we’re going to circle back to this idea of form and formality in language and poetry, but also in gender and society’s gaze. And in how the society conceives of art, especially the performance of Black art. To start, I was thinking you could read the poem “2019” which I think speaks to a lot of these ideas.
2019:
I could string him back up the tree, if you’d like.
Return his skin’s meaning to an easy distance, coal dust, blaze
And Willie Brown him. You
Love how the blood muddies the original,
The way it makes a stage of my speechifying, this leeching
Capital from his dying,
Like an activist. I know
I’m not supposed to sing
Of his ringing
Penetrability, some hole I open impose
On the form—but all I see is bullets, bullets discerning him,
As years ago it was rope.
I could pull it tighter, finger each bullet deeper,
If you’d like, an inch rougher,
Far enough to where becomes that second heat, erotic.
I could use the erotic,
If you’d like,
So ungarish, baring not too frank
A mood, subtle so you need it.— Funny
How some dark will move illicit if you close your eyes,
The way, say, my black
Pleasure is named too explicit for a page, but this menace
I put in it is not.
I could yank and knot
The rope, if you’d like, him like a strange fragment
In them trees,
And the word “again” spelled out about his neck
Would be the rope’s predicate till let wild, patterned and
Fierce his moan.
It is a tragedy. No. It is a sonnet, how I know
Already how he ends,
But I could make him
Her, if you’d like, regender them till merely
Canvas for your “empathy,”
Soup for my mouth. Still, if I could but just get
This blunt,
Burnt lynched body up
From on
Out the pocket behind my eye
All trees could be themselves again, all sound.
Beautiful. Thank you, Rickey. I’m thinking of what Toni Morrison, echoing the great James Baldwin, said about a white man being always at your shoulder telling you how to write. I can almost picture a puppet figure on your shoulder, telling you, “write this way, write that way.” I love the subversion of this poem in that context. I thought it was a preemptive strike. Instead of the little puppet on your shoulder talking to you, you’re the one talking to the little puppet, sarcastically asking “Is this what you want?”
I wrote it a little bit angry, and I wrote it after — I won’t name the institution — but there was a poetry institution that asked me to submit a poem, and I submitted a poem that was erotic. And they said, we can’t publish this because we publish for students. And I thought, “Okay, so you can’t publish about pleasure, but I know what you will publish.” And then I wrote the poem. So in some ways, I was directly speaking back to that white critic, and I guess I forgot that part, but that’s fun. You’ve been mentioning some names. There are people, like Queen Elizabeth the first, who are in my mind as a voice. And I’m of the mindset to be critical of those voices inside our head, but also to use them. Maybe as a consequence of colonialism as well, I feel that I have the right to take whatever I want and use it and hopefully use it productively towards challenging colonialism. So I just feel very comfortable taking and putting it into a poem.
I’m also thinking that one of your projects in this book, in this poem, was this interrogation of the western psyche, of the American psyche, of this obsession with Black genius that happened simultaneously with Black violence.
It’s interesting. There’s one poem called “Disappointment” early in the book that basically says, “Aren’t you upset with the repeal of my genius?” Because the distance between Boy with Thorn and Death of the First Idea is 10 years, and I transformed, America transformed in those 10 years. And it seems to me, the notion of genius has also made me transform, because there is a Black genius, but it’s been violently put out of the world, and that violence has been here for centuries, and it’s constantly, always revising itself and changing itself as to be successful in its aims, which is to silence, which is to stamp out, Black genius. But I’m also thinking about genius in Antiquity’s idea of it, which was that genius was a personal God that you had in your mind, or you had a genius of the house, a genius of the city, a genius of the mind. And that genius, that personal God, could be corrupted, could be enlightened, or what have you. I’m not one to say that I’m a genius, but I’m interested in sharing the well. I think that’s what genius is. It’s like a well of water that we all go to and we take up the water that we need, and then we go home, and we drink it. And so, I have to be honest, whenever I feel it, when I’m writing and I think “Oh, here it comes! Oh, God!” I just try to get out of the way and let it happen.
That is beautiful Rickey, because you mentioned genius in the popular sense, but also genius in Antiquity’s sense of gods and presences. It reminds me of a poem of yours in this book that began with a line “my sadness is intelligent,” I remember reading that poem and sadness did not feel like sorrow. It felt like a presence, like a muse almost. Your books and poems are always populated by voices. In very courageous ways, you’ve written about mental health: “my sadness is intelligent.” It seems to me as if there are voices, some pleasant, some otherwise, but you are a poet who is always learning how to sculpt something with those voices and I’m thinking about the young poets out there who are trying to figure out the complex voices in their head.
Thank you for what you said. During the 10 years between books, I had some troubles with my mental health that led me to some institutions and psychiatric places, and I mention that to say that literal voices were a part of my literal process during that time. That’s no longer the case, but I think my training as a poet taught me that — you brought up Keats, and I want to bring up his notion of negative capability — where you’re able to be capable and possible even in the absence of knowing entirely or rationally or certainly what’s going on. And I’m so grateful for that lesson, because I wouldn’t have made it if I didn’t have that notion that you can still be capable within the crazy, within the voices. And so, really writing some of these poems got me out of that. There was a time when I was actually catatonic and I couldn’t speak. My mind was so skipped that I couldn’t speak, I couldn’t chew. And all of this came out of the violence that was put upon my person because I’m trans; I had a lot of violence and attacks against me, and so my mind couldn’t take it, and it cracked up. Going crazy is such an interesting moment, because you are aware of it, but you can’t get your brain to work right. But I stopped myself and said, “Wait, you’re a writer” I remember saying “I’m a writer,” and I thought, “if I write, I can get myself back.” And that’s why I’m still so attracted to writing by hand, because something about it — and I would press this to anyone who’s watching, anyone who’s seen this — is that it’s just important to have that kind of ritual with yourself, any ritual with yourself, because it maintains who you are, whether it be brushing your teeth and looking at yourself in the mirror and saying, “I’m a beautiful person today,” or writing your poems back into yourself. It’s so important, because at any moment, there are pressures and forces that are hoping to take and snatch you away. And so that’s what writing was for me, keeping myself.
I love that your art form is a way of fighting back against this “snatching” and violences against your body and soul. It reminds me of the Nigerian legend, Fela Kuti, who made great insurgent music when the Nigerian government was a dictatorship. They came against him and arrested him and did all kinds of terrible things to him. And yet, when he was released, he talked about how terrible jail and torture were, but there was defiance to him until he started talking about his music. He talked about how he had been in the middle of recording a new album when he went to jail, and by the time he came back, they had given it to some mediocre mixer, and it was while talking about this that anger and pain finally crept into his voice because his music is how he preserves himself and “keeps himself” to go back to your brilliant phrasing. I also love what you said about being capable through chaos.
I’m always thinking of what Toni Morrison said about James Baldwin during her eulogy at his funeral, she said, “You’re an artist, after all, and in this culture, true artistry is forbidden. A career is forbidden. They want the commercial ease, they want what is familiar, but you’re an artist.” Reading your book after all these years reminded me that in capitalism, we’re expected to produce all the time. There was a 10-year gap between your first book and this new one. As poets, silence is not the opposite of language, and even in stillness we are still working. Silence is not an absence of motion. In what we do, absence does not mean that there’s no transformation. And I just wanted you to talk to us about those 10 years of stillness for you.
I think it’s important. I mean, there’s such pressure put upon us. You mentioned the capitalist imperative to produce, but also in the academic sense. We find ourselves in the academic space now, there’s also pressure from the tenure track to produce. And there are worse things in the world than being told to create, but it’s also important, I think, to take time, to take a rest. If we think about music, music would be ridiculous if there was no silence, right? It would be noise. It wouldn’t be comprehendible. And so it seemed important to me, early on, to let myself rest. I didn’t have the intention of necessarily waiting 10 years to the date, because my editor did that. The first book was published on September 9, 2015 and then the second book was published on September 9, 2025. 10 years to date. But I think that time “away” wherein I wasn’t really away, I was still a poet, and I thank you for reminding me of this. But that time away did two things, at least. It gave me time to really sit down and say, “What is it I’m interested in as an artist?” And how can I come to the page and be as vulnerable and honest as I was in the first book, but also show my growth? So, it did some things personally for me, but I also think it did allow people to miss me. We live in such a world where social media over-produces our presence, in a sense, and it’s a certain kind of presence where it looks like “Oh! She’s doing well,” “Oh, he’s doing great!” But if it was true that I had fans from the first book, I wanted them to want me again, to wait for me. You know, a girl wants to be wanted. So here I am.
I love it. We are going to circle back and talk more about transitions and transformations, in the world, in the South, and how that manifested as transformation and transition in your language. But before that, one of the things I loved most about this book is how you are a scholar of masculinity. You have a really good epistemic angle from which to really observe masculinity and its discontent. At least, that was my experience reading the book. People say all kinds of things about masculinity, and sometimes they don’t even know much about it.
Do you really think that? I like that. I’m attracted to masculinity, not toxic masculinity. But it’s interesting to think of myself as a scholar of masculinity.
You were interrogating its limitations, its boundaries, its loneliness, but also its opportunities. How it could be re-imagined. It could be made to flourish, if people were just more imaginative. That was what I felt while reading your book.
One thing I learned during this process is how people have come to think about gender. In America at least, I remember growing up with this notion of the opposite sex, which, if you think about it today, you hear less and less. But there was this notion that there are opposites as opposed to compliments, as opposed to juxtaposed next to each other, the idea that everything is opposite was always jarring to me. In the 90s, there was this notion that men are from Mars, and women are from Venus. But in fact, we’re all from Earth. We’re in the same species so therefore things can happen. It’s not like we’re different species. I can understand if we were different species. If one really was from Venus, one really was from Mars, but we’re all from Earth. We need to let the elasticity and flexibility of gender and its programs be allowed. So I’m glad to know that you read the book still as an investigation or critique of masculinity, as much as it is a book about arriving at a femininity.
I love that. I was hoping you could read one of your poems about the spectrum of gender, the strata, as you called it, I believe.
Boy Coming Out Gay Going Far to Lady Way to Queer
I confess the Trans is dangerous. It leans provocation
On the teeth of the mind: an idea, to kill all other ideas? like Category,
Order, Line? Suppose the Problem of the Century still
be the Color Line since the Problem is, increasingly, the line?
I walk my far lyric to self. Was I gay or trans, when? Will
I Rickey or Key? The Danger be if Trans willingly tear up and confuse all
Surfaces, & neat embankments and leveéd cities sufficiently
keeping one hood from another, what else? If you Look
at me liking what you See— are you Gay? Fag? Distinctions Bi? What am I going toward once a Boy-going-gay (never Man) coming forth to Lady,
(few deny) for Queer’s umbrella (gained) for Dreamed
Queen (all gained) to What else? Tho if I be Queer should Women who snarl
Love at me be lesbian, are Men who throw want at me straight? Carl,
I was gay my whole twenties & do I miss it but I miss the staying gay
after tongues kiss, that little Bottom Shame glossed in that name, Bottom.
Now Gay to Queer Miss to Dream to Trans*, all nice. Tho trans will suffice.
Beautiful, Rickey, thank you. I just have a few more questions for you. This has already been a very enriching conversation. I’m excited for young poets who are going to come across this material and be deeply ennobled. I used to watch some of these videos myself, long before I came close to any of this. It’s such an archival treasure to be able to do this. I wanted to return to transformation and transitions: what has transitioned in your relationship or your approach to language and poetry in relation to the transitions and transformations you were figuring out in your own life, and also the transitions and transformations in America.
That’s a big question. I don’t know if I have an answer ready or prepared. What I can say is that the book is the consequence of a transformation, of having happened, and it tracks those transformations. I wasn’t aware at the time, so it’s also a book about coming into awareness. Which is like coming up for air as you’ve been swimming, and it really feels that way, because when you’re swimming, you’re in the water, but you can’t think actively about the water. You’re not a fish. But when you come up for air, suddenly you realize “I was in water, and I used to breathe.” And so it seems like that, and that seems related to even how America has switched, because 2015 was a turning point in the world in some ways. And since then, Trump has been president. Biden has been president. Trump is president again. So we have transformation, but we also have reversals and returns. All of that is a part of what’s happening in the book. And I’m still learning the book, right? This book, and so many of the poems, surprised me in terms of what they are doing with poems. And I had to learn just to trust it like it is, to trust and ride my craft. I am a poet, I am studied. I have my chops, so that even if a poem is working in a way that is different from other American poems, it’s still worthy of being read. It might actually be useful towards pushing poetry to a new place, a new frontier. And so that’s what I would say about those sorts of transformations and transitions. And it’s similar to transitioning in your body. I tell people all the time, I’m still the same person. I have the same face, but she’s changed. It’s so humbling and weird to be trans in that way, because you see yourself and you think, “Wait, I’m still the same but also different.” And it teaches you that even those contradictions can be in the same space and the same body in the same form.
Origin comes before transformations, yes? How did you become a poet?
I fell into it, happenstance. My mother parented from a distance. So, she allowed me to come home and structure my own time. So I would come home and I would play in the garden. I would play in the yard. I would climb a tree. And we had a gothic house — I grew up in New Orleans — and I would go up to the second floor, and we had a sunroom, which was my little laboratory-study. I would constantly rearrange the furniture and look at the globe and — I didn’t know it — but I was becoming a poet then, because I was learning how to structure my time. And I am not proud of this, but I remember one time I flooded an ant hill when I was a young child. I kept pouring water over it, and then all the ants left in this long line and climbed the tree, and I started writing a poem about that recently. It was through curiosity and exploration that I became a poet. And I was always interested in writing, because I was always interested in reading. My grandfather, who I also grew up with, was reading me the comics, and I was just so impressed by the stories and the fantasies of it all, and I wanted to do that. So, the collision of all these things became poetry in my life. My mother gave me, around sixth or seventh grade, a book called Cotton Candy on a Rainy Day by Nikki Giovanni. I had already realized that I wanted to write books, but that’s when I realized, “Oh, you can write books of poems!” I didn’t know that. And from then, it was game on. So I’ve been writing since I’ve been reading, which has been at least since I was five years old. So I’ve been in this game for a long time. And I would tell young poets to give yourself patience, because there’s no need necessarily to be published tomorrow or even today. Give yourself patience. Give yourself time. Enjoy the young poet. Enjoy that role. Because it does switch and that’s something that happened between these two books. I feel like the second book might be one of the hardest books you write, because you’re aware of your audience. You’re aware that people will be reading you, and that changes your relationship to the poem, as opposed to the first book, where you’re writing those poems, even before you realize that it will be a book. And so all of that is involved in the process, but to sum it up, it was just simple curiosity — and I will say this— in my boyhood, in my young boyhood that led me to this place where I am now.
And what kind of education has shaped your emergence and practice? After that Catholic high school what college did you go to? And how did you make the choice of the MFA you went to? What great teachers did you study with?
I’m someone who grew into school. I always did well in school. I enjoyed it, but I came out of the womb ready to be an adult. I remember distinctly sitting down at school, looking around thinking, “I can’t believe I’m here. I got to wait 10 more years. I have to wait 15 more years before I can live.” I don’t know if I lived another life, and then came back here from before. But I went to Catholic schools through my natal period, and then I went to Sarah Lawrence College, which is a small liberal arts college in the Northeast. And Katrina was in between. It happened my junior year, so it was a lot of shell shock, a lot of culture shock, but it was useful. And then by the time grad school came around, I ended up applying to 10 schools. I got into seven or eight of them, and I’m fortunate enough to have gotten into my first choice, which was Wash U. Because the great poet Carl Phillips who was very important to me, was teaching there. And Mary Jo Bang was teaching there. It was a small, fully funded program and I just knew it was right. I trust myself. I just knew that that was the school I needed to go to. By the time I got to WashU, I was aware of the world. But coming from New Orleans, I had never heard of Sarah Lawrence. I had never heard of liberal arts colleges. But I was ready to go that far. I must have been surprised by the winter, but I was ready because I was, frankly, bored by New Orleans. And it wasn’t until I left, that I realized “Wait, New Orleans is the place to stay.” And so that’s why I would really encourage people to take trips, to travel, to live in other places, so that you can come to value where you came from in a particular way.
I love it. Apart from Carl Phillips and Mary Jo Bang, were there some other teachers and influences?
I mentioned Natasha Trethewey. I remember I met her at Cave Canem, and we met on the dance floor because Beyonce came on, and we both love Beyonce, and we just started dancing. And that moment stays in my mind, because she had already won the Pulitzer and it was just great to realize that she’s just a regular person. I am a humble, grounded person, but I’m also aware of my talent and my skill, and so, it can be hard to think, “Yeah, I am talented, but I just want to dance, y’all, and have a drink.” So it was nice to dance with her. Cave Canem particularly, was very pivotal. I think of it as the start of my professional career. I was 20 years old when I got into my first retreat, and I had a host of influences and mentors, one of which was Terrence Hayes, who picked my book for the Cave Canem prize. Claudia Rankine was there. My last year there we had all the top hitters: Carl Phillips, Natasha Trethewey, Terrence Hayes, Claudia Rankine, Toi Derricotte, and Cornelius Edie. And that’s enough. As a young poet, that’s all you need.
I love that. I’m circling back to what you said about ritual, writing by hand, and doing something that is yours in a world that tries to take everything from you. Is there a routine or ritual you would recommend for young poets who are trying to find their voice?
Well, let me go back to say when I was that child and structuring my time, a part of my play time would be what I call make-believe, make-magic or play-pretend. They were three different things, when you play with your toys, you make them believe. When you make magic, you’re doing tricks and stuff like that. But play-pretend was when I would pretend to be the Power Rangers in my mind, and I would always play two parts at the same time. I would play the girl part and the boy part, and they would always fall in love, and they would always kiss. And so all of that was really important to me in terms of stretching and creating my imagination. To this day, I still have a really strong imagination, which I guess came back to bite me with the voices. But it’s a very strong ability. So I would say, for young poets, to really cultivate your imagination and really allow for that to blossom by participating in other arts. Even if you know that you want to be a writer, sign up for painting, sign up for acting, sign up for music. And I did. I played in the band. I went to tennis camps. I was a junior zookeeper. All those things will come back tenfold to help you in your career or your life as a writer. You have to have things you’re interested in. You have to have questions in your mind in order to write and have a readership that wants to hear what you wrote.
And in terms of transformations, how should a young poet pursue that? In your own process, what did you bury or cut off so that you could make room for a more alive and astonishing resurrection of the self. I love when you quoted Christ in your epigraph, saying “If your foot causes you to stumble, cut it off.” I just love it…
If you really read the Bible, Jesus is cool. If an attractive woman comes across and causes you to lust, gouge out your eyes. You hear him say, don’t put pressure on the women, pluck your eyes out.
So, what did you cut off so that you could see clearly? What did you bury for a greater resurrection in that journey between the first and second book in terms of craft?
What did I bury? That’s a good question. So definitely, the first answer is thinking about the first idea of oneself that you bury. But also, I guess it could be applied to one’s idea of craft. And I guess one thing I buried was the notion of a cute, tight poem, a poem that ties up in a bow at the end. Those poems are like mentioning the red dragon that flew in the sky, and by the end, the red dragon comes back. And it just occurred to me that it was a trick, that’s a ploy, and I wondered if there was another way to end the poem. Boy with Thorn I think kind of works because each poem ending is grand, and I’m not going to give that up. But I also wanted to get towards the softer endings that feel like they are “not.” We’re not done yet. I mentioned early on that this is the illuminative way through part two of a trilogy. And I wasn’t aware that I was writing a trilogy when I was writing Boy with Thorn. When I say trilogy, I think of it in terms of Dante and The Divine Comedy. So if Boy with Thorn is my Inferno, then this is my Purgatorio and so I wanted to write poems that felt finished, but also felt undone, to propel the reader to what will be the third book where we get to Paradiso.
I love that because maturity is being at home with unfinishedness. I would like you to read to our wonderful readers out there, “Mundane Song.”
Mundane Song
You go outside and the Trees don’t know You’re Black. The lilacs will chatter & break Themselves real bloom, real boon, whatever,
No matter your gender. You matter. You, ‘Cross a Natural life, is who You is & makes briefest material, so you matter.
How we are Added unto, Candleheart, & taken from.
It matters. Your Afro may start matted now be combed to touch
The sky. Come up from the ground looking extra,
Extra fly, child, You include the Sky. You gape. You open
Your Blue mouth, and such the vulnerable universe falls out.
What a joy. Rickey, thank you. You matter. We do matter “extra fly child, until the sky”
That’s Kanye West, I put the credit in.
I’m reading lines from your poem, “Extra fly child, until the sky…your blue mouth and such. The vulnerable universe falls out.” In such a book that is in some ways a record of difficulty and hardship, it’s also a book of tenderness and vulnerability and such love for the world. I love the poem where you say, “I love this world. I love this world.” Can you close us out by talking about how you came to insist on the world, how you came to insist on beauty?
I do believe in beauty, and I don’t want to use beauty as a crutch, but I don’t want to forget beauty and its powerful effect on the world. You know beauty has many different consequences, but one of them is simply awe, and one of them is simply to be humbled in its presence. And I feel like it is something we’re speaking from Furious Flower that is particular to Black poetry, like we are still interested in beauty, perhaps because as Black persons across the world, we have been shunned away from the notion that we are beautiful and we create beautiful things. So I’m still hooked on the idea that beauty matters in the world, and we need to allow it to manifest itself in all its forms. There’s not just one way to be beautiful, but multiple. And so that’s what I’m here to remind us all the time.
Yes, beautiful. Thank you so much.
Read more in this issue: Critical Essay | Poems | Writing Prompt
Gbenga Adesina is a Nigerian scholar, poet and essayist. He received his PhD from Florida State University, and his MFA from New York University, where he was a Goldwater Fellow. His debut collection of poetry, Death Does Not End at the Sea, won theAnisfield-Wolf book award, Ras Shumaker/Prairie Schooner prize, and was longlisted for the 2025 National Book Award. His poem, A People’s History of 1998, was included in the 2025 Best American Poetry anthology, and his chapbook, Painter of Water was published as part of the New-Generation African Poets series from Akashic Books. Adesina has received fellowships and support from Poets House, New York, the Fine Arts Work Center and the Norman Mailer Center, and he was the 2019–20 Olive B. O’Connor Fellow at Colgate University. He has been published in Paris Review, Harvard Review, Guernica, Narrative, New York Times, and elsewhere. He served as the inaugural Postdoctoral Fellow in Global Black and Diasporic Poetry at Furious Flower Poetry Center at James Madison University.