by Gbenga Adesina, PhD

Writing of David Mills’ latest book, Boneyarn (The Ashland Poetry Press 2021), Alan Shapiro, Pulitzer Prize finalist, wrote “Mill combines a novelist’s love of character with a poet’s pitch-perfect ear for idiom and eye for unforgettable detail. The imagination at work in this remarkable book is humane, unflinching, erudite, and utterly moving.” Shapiro continued, “In its wide range of styles and voices—its empathy and outrage—Boneyarn—is a profoundly American work that enlightens and chastens, laments and affirms, or finds in lamentation a complicated form of affirmation. A marvelous achievement.” At the heart of Mills’ reparative project is a perplexing question: what does it mean to write across 300 years of a silence that festers? How do you make a song out of a muteness imposed on history by power?

The poet tackle these questions in a series of interwoven epics around New York’s African Burial Ground—America’s oldest and largest slavery cemetery where over 15,000 unmanned enslaved and free Blacks, indentured whites and Native Americans were interred between 1712-1795.The poet, it seems to us as the readers, imagines himself as a hand stretching across the cobwebbed vaults of archival and archeological ruins of history, searching, picking bones with precision, dusting those bones, brushing them off, assembling them, trying to reconfigure the humans they were so that they might be imbued with voices to tell us their story. Sometimes we feel the poet singing to the bones, cradling them, whispering to them, soothing their wounds. Or inversely, you might imagine the poet as an ear, a vessel unto which dead ancestors and the ghosts of history array their mouths and lend their music so it might reach us and strengthen us to be more discerning investigators of history’s palimpsest and moral trapdoors.

The strength of this project though is that Mills understands that humans seldom go through history with the heightened awareness that they are going through history. Our lives move forward in episodes of the quotidian, in symmetry of daily labors and struggles, in the rhythm of birth and death, and in navigation of friendships, intimate relationships and family attachments. Mills situates the lives he investigates within this crucible, showing us that they were cherished family members, infants who were cradled with affection, friends who played pranks and laughed out loud. The effect is that it’s not ghosts that emerge, but humans. Humans under the cruel yoke of history, yes, but humans with their humanity stubbornly preserved. Consider this poem from Boneyarn:

A wave of melancholy rushes over us on encountering this poem. We are in the presence of something sacred, a child frozen in time by death. A child who is also an ancestor. But there is a complex brightness even in this dark vault of history. What are the yellow beads glistening from the bottom of the grave? Who buried the child with jewelry as if to say here lies something precious? This brightness transcends the material and lends itself to the relational. The ghost child was buried in the arms of an elder as if to say even in death we are never without kin, even in death and history’s narrow boxes the elders are always watching over us.

David Mills was recently at James Madison University for a reading from his book, Boneyarn. He visited the Furious Flower Poetry Center and spoke to Gbenga Adesina, the Furious Flower Postdoctoral Fellow in Global Black and Diasporic Poetry. The interview has been edited for clarity and length.

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Welcome to the Furious Flower Poetry Center at James Madison University, the nation’s first academic center in the United States dedicated to the study of Black poetry. We are delighted to welcome David Mills, a poet whose work has such depth and scale and is full of diasporic resonances. David, how are you today? 

I’m okay. How are you?

I’m awesome. We enjoyed your reading last night and we just want to capture some of that transformative reading for the archive and for posterity. I would love it if you can begin with a reading of a poem called “The Chimney Sweep Apprentice” from your book, Boneyarn.

This piece is called “Chimney Sweep Apprentice.” These were enslaved Negro boys who worked as chimney sweep apprentices. A chimney sweep would be the adult male like Dick Van Dyke in the movie Mary Poppins. They had an adult male, enslaved man who was called a Black Master Sweep, who would be the equivalent of the Dick Van Dyke character. They were always boys. It was rigid divisions of labor in colonial New York. So, they were always boys between five and 18 years old, because the chimneys and the flues were a brick wide and a brick and a half long so you couldn’t be that old or that large. The flutes in a chimney don’t go straight up and down, they are contorted. And so imagine these boys having to contort their bodies — and I didn’t say this last night, some of them died in the flues because they would get stuck. There’s the phrase “light a fire under him.” That comes from the fact that some of the boys would only go into the very beginning of the entrance, and so another boy would look and see that the boy who was supposed to go up and clean had not done so would tell the Master Sweep, and he would light a torch under their feet so don’t use that phrase “light a fire under him” lightly. The boys would only wear the equivalent of basically a pamper and what they called a Sweep cap. I will just share some linguistic things. A “cap damper” is a covering on a chimney to keep precipitation out. They did the work. They would start around the winter holidays, and they would go out at three and four in the morning, and they would exclaim “Soot! Oh! ‘Weep, ‘Weep!” And that would indicate to the colonial settlers, white colonial settlers, that the boys were available to do the work, they would be let into whatever house. And you could be going from the kind of wintry weather we had yesterday or the day before, and maybe way colder, to over 100 degrees temperature being in the flute within minutes. 

“Chimney Sweep Apprentice“

Beautiful. Thank you. Thank you so much, David. That was compelling. And can you just talk to us about the historical context of the work this poem is a part of and your book, Boneyarn.

So, this cemetery was extant, open from 1712 to 1795; it’s a six-acre space. Manhattan, or New York in the colonial era, was only from the Battery, which is the southern tip (you’re looking out at the water up to Chambers Street). The “Negro burial ground,” as it was called back then (if they were being polite), started at Chambers as the southern boundary. The northern boundary was Duane Street. The eastern side (it’s not called that now) was/is Center Street and the western boundary was Broadway. There’s a church, and this is a landmark church in lower Manhattan called Trinity Church, where they allowed free and some enslaved Negroes to worship, but when they opened their cemetery, they wouldn’t allow those Negroes, whether free or enslaved, to bury their loved ones in Trinity. So that’s one of the reasons they believe the Negro burial ground was started.

How did you come to the work? 

Oh, right, right. Well, let me also say this, there are 15,000 bodies there. It’s in the seven-acre expanse. 90 to 95% are enslaved Africans. Maybe two or 3% are free Negroes. And then something of interest to some, there are some Native Americans who were also enslaved, the Lenape, but there’s also some white British Revolutionary War soldiers buried in there because they died during the war, and they didn’t have a proper place to be buried. So how did I come to the work? I also, as mentioned, work as an actor. I do a show of Langston Hughes and Dr King. I did both of those shows at the museum or monument on 290 Broadway, which is part of the National Park Service. And my curious mind, I just was writing some scribbly drafts, didn’t necessarily have a definitive sense of a book project, and I applied for a grant, which I won, and I mentioned this last night, and I will write 200 pages of drafts to start something, and then winnow it down and revise 20 pages to do a final presentation. I did that final presentation, and then a mentor-colleague, Tim Siebles, who actually lives here in Virginia, I told him I was having these auditory dreams where I was hearing these disembodied voices. And I said, “I think it has something to do with that project.” And he said, “Be still and listen. The ancestors want you to tell their story.” So, I started sleeping with a spiral notebook next to me, writing down some of those seemingly disconnected or disjunct lines, comments. They were just conversational — just maybe one thing in a dream, or one line or something.— and there are probably about 10 of those lines that are actually in the book that I brought in from the “oneiric” or dream space. So, that’s the beginnings of the project.

It seems to me that you’d found yourself in this very interesting junction of history where you hear people, you hear ancestors that are very much alive to you —

Certainly, in the dream state, yes.

— but absent from historical archives. So how did you navigate this crushing silence of history?

There are six books that I read, then I went to the Schomburg Library, and then the actual burial ground— both the museum part and the monument that’s outside — there are seven mounds. There are 15,000 bodies, but they exhumed 419 and so they’re approximately 60 bodies under each mound. And I literally would sometimes just sit there and see what they were saying. 

One of the things I love so much about your poems is what I call “the drama of the body”— the epic of the body. It seemed that your craft intention had been to find a way to not allow heavy historical details to burden the poem. Your desire, which I can relate to, it seems was to find a way to make a song out of history. And one way to do that is to situate the poems in the body. So, you write compellingly about the body— the mouth, the neck, the wrists. My question for you is: How does the body work in these poems that you’ve so wonderfully crafted out of silence, and how did it come to you that the body was going to be a bridge to materiality and specificity which make these poems and ancestors come alive? 

I think sometimes it’s also about some of my own anxieties about my own body that can work themselves into poems that I’ve written that touch on that in the contemporary and personal sense; but, in doing all this research, I’m looking at bones. I’m reading these stories of the guy being broken on the wheel. So, how else do I engage that? That is the body, and it’s a violation in the most fundamental sense. The greatest — how can I put it? — level of integrity that we have in a material sense, in our experience as humans, is our body, and that there’s a constant violation that occurs in these historical moments. For me, it would be almost sacrilege not to have used that as an organizing principle. As I’m moving through the long poem I read, “The Body Is a Metropolis,” I was trying to figure out — not that that was the only thing that informed the poem — the book by Jill Lepore, New York Burning. It’s over 300 pages about these 12 fires. So, I thought, I really want to write about this — how do I do it? And so, I used the body parts of the two leaders as an organizing principle to delineate each fire. “Caesar’s tongue was a soon quench at the deal at the Long House.” So even there, which I could have just written about the fire, I use body parts as vehicles to explore, and then exploring what I consider the horror. I try to bring in things about the physical body of the persona that I’m writing about, and the nature of the research, there were so many horrific things that happened to these ancestors’ bodies that I feel like it would almost be delusional not to, in some way, really make that the grounding for some or many of the poems.

Beautiful. I think this is a good opportunity to have you read a section of “The Body is a Metropolis,” if you don’t mind. 

In the poem “The Body Is a Metropolis,” there was an enslaved Black man named Caesar who was accused of arson. He had a group called the Geneva Club Negroes, and basically they and a white gentleman named John Hughson, who owned, at that time, what they would call a “tippling house” (what we now would know as a bar), were accused of arson. So, this is me writing about six of the 12 fires using Caesar’s body parts, because I do it again with Hewson’s body parts for the other six.

Thank you for that marvelous poem. I love your embodiment of the poem, your performance of it. One of the things that I think happens in your work is this thing where you utilize what I call “the ancestors’ time” in the present tense: you’re reading this poem about Caesar’s head and Caesar’s mouth, but it feels like your mouth. It feels like my mouth. So, I wanted to talk very briefly about this historical continuum. Talk to us about how the body is this historical continuum in your poem and your performance.

Well, I think, as I said before, one of the things that we all have in common as humans is we do have this vehicle that we use to move through time and space. At least in this understanding of things, and because of what happened to those Black bodies, and then, of course, what continues to happen to Black bodies (I literally heard on the radio earlier, and I have a poem about her, it was talking about Sonia Massey, who was killed in Illinois. I think they’ve gotten some settlement, which, to me is always a devil’s bargain. And here was this, relatively speaking, slight, small woman, and this very large white man (the police), and he could have said, “Hey, relax,” because she had a (hot) pot, right? (the incident was inside her house/her kitchen). And she actually put it down before he shot her. So, what was the reason?). So that, regrettably, and maybe it’s an awful or inexact word, but that motif of violations of the Black body continues. I believe maybe that’s getting at what you mean by continuum.

One of the things I find compelling about your book Boneyarn, is that in this book about this historical horror, there are also poems about Phyllis Wheatley, about Jupiter Hammon, pioneering Black poets, almost as if to say, “We’ve always made language, and we continue to make the brilliant work of language, in spite of that horror.” I want to hear you talk a little bit about this creative and spiritual work of language happening simultaneously beside this historical horror.

Yeah, it was also a release valve. I was saying when we were off-camera that I’m thinking about tone as I’m organizing a collection, but what was the impetus or precipitating thing for that, is, “I am a poet.” The first poet who was published was Lucy Terry; there was a poem she wrote that didn’t get published until after she died, and after that both Wheatley and Hammon were published. Hammon was enslaved in Long Island, and I’m from New York City, and so I thought, “Wow, I gotta honor this gentleman, and the fact that he’s the beginnings of our lineage in terms of being published in the United States.” So that’s really what the impetus was for that. And then one of Hammon’s poems is called “An Address to Phyllis Wheatley,” and though she was not enslaved in New York, the fact that he reached out to her… And you might appreciate this, Hammon was a very religious Christian man, and so was Wheatley. And so, there was also that connection between the two of them. So, Wheatley is there because of Hammon writing a poem to her, and then Hammon, and both, in a sense, but Hammon initially was me identifying with my beginnings as published writers. As a person of color, it [writing/reading] was a crime. You could be whipped. You could have limbs broken. So even, I think, even today, it’s an enactment of something that, so to speak, your body could have been violated for it in various ways. And so, it was a honorific to both, but the portal was, “Oh, the first Negro,” and he might have been the first Negro to publish anything, and it was a broadside, it wasn’t a book. Phyllis Wheatley is the first Negro to publish a book in any genre and of any gender. How could I not, even though he wasn’t in New York City, he was still in this area that we associate with New York, how could I not bring him into this project? So that’s the germination of that.

Beautiful. Speaking of beginnings, David, how did you become a poet?

I think I said last night at the reading, “I think these things call you,” I’m also an actor and I mentioned I still have the first — it’s a red, deep red — spiral notebook where I wrote my first poem that wasn’t your teacher saying, “Make a Mother’s Day card, or make an Easter card.” I was reading Robert Frost’s “Stopping by Woods on Snowy Evening,” and the last line: “… miles to go before I sleep,” and then I flipped that over and started with an opening line of “… miles to go before I wake.” It was a really overcast day outside of my window in Co-op City in the Bronx, and it looked apocalyptic, like the world was going to end, so I wrote this apocalyptic poem. I think that was the beginning, if you would. But certainly, at that time, I wasn’t conscious of it. Obviously, you hear stories of poets who, when they were in high school, they say, “This is what I know I’m going to do.” It wasn’t a conscious moment of “this is what I’m going to do” at that point, but, I was always writing— always. And I still have tons of spiral notebooks going back to pre-teens moving forward, because I still always [hand]write a first draft of any poem, unless, for whatever reasons, I’m in some space where I can’t find paper.

I always write a first draft on paper. Always. I didn’t know it till a few years ago, but I used to think that why I did it, and it’s still part of it, was the sacred act of writing on paper. But a few years ago, I found that when I’m working with students and even adults, I will say to them that when you type on a computer, you are using eight neural pathways. These are the things that get information through the brain. But when you hand write, you use 80,000 neural pathways. So that is having an immense impact on memory, on cognition, and the connection between the mind and body. I know it might be a little more difficult with long form writing essays, but I still think you can do it. Especially if you’re writing poems or short stories. And I literally will go around in the room if I’m doing a workshop, and I’ll really say, “Can you please?” [mimics writing by hand]. Obviously, I’m not a regular teacher, and 90% of time, the computer’s there, I say “For this hour that I’m here or whatever, please write on paper.” And for me, initially, in my formative time as a poet, for me, it was a sacred gesture but now I know that it’s very much connected with our brains, cognition and memory. So, you’re doing yourself a great service by writing on paper.

I want to ask you about stamina as a creative impulse, as a creative necessity, you mentioned writing a poem as a child. You mentioned filling all those journals with poems, and I’m asking this because young people watch our channel, and they’re thinking about a calling or a vocation as a poet. Did you go to school to study poetry? Was it a straight pathway always leading you towards this life? Were there detours? If so, how did you navigate them? From writing in your journal, from writing little poems after Robert Frost, you wrote the first book, you’ve now written four books— great books. This is a lifetime’s work. How have you persevered? How have you been preserved?

I double majored in college, and one of them was economics and math, the other was religious studies in philosophy, and I had a friend in college who said, “Oh, you’re taking care of this life and the afterlife.”[Laughs.] When I was in high school, my mentor was a lawyer. My thought was, because I’m good at math, I was going to go to college, get an engineering degree, then go to law school and become a patent lawyer. I didn’t complete — I minored in math, but I didn’t go completely into the engineering thing. I worked summers on Wall Street, thought then I’d be an investment banker, and from doing that, I said, “This just doesn’t sit well with my soul.” My last semester in college, I applied to a creative writing program. And even then, I’ll be honest, I said, “I’m doing this because I’m going to go back to New York” because I’m also an actor, and I actually play piano. So I said, “Oh, I’m just using that as a… legitimizing of my life so I can explore all of it.” I was serious about the poetry, but I also thought, “I’m going to be a big time actor; I’m going to be a singer-songwriter.” The poetry also, but it was initially legitimizing my existence for a few years to be in this creative writing program.

There’s regrettably — or maybe not regrettably — there’s a business to poetry, and I didn’t really have a sense of how to navigate or even know what it was. I would write and so that’s what I kept doing. I would get these teaching-artist jobs, both through acting and teaching poetry with kids, and still, I was not really in the business side, or focused in terms of publishing. I would do readings, but it was more just me writing… I remember when I lived in Langston Hughes’ house, I had a Dellwood milk crate, a sienna-colored Dellwood milk crate, that I would fill with printed out copies of poems, and it was completely full. This was outside of my spiral notebooks with these drafts [of poems]. And I remember one night looking at it, I thought, “Where’s this going? Is it going to be milk crates full of printed out poems and spiral notebooks?” And even still, I was finding my way. It wasn’t always… In my acknowledgments I speak of my grandmother on my father’s side — she was from Jamaica. I remember sitting at her table not long before she died; we would sit there — I would sit on the right side, near the door, and she would sit on the left side, and we wouldn’t face each other.  And she said, [Mills imitates his grandmother’s Jamaican accent] “D, I had dream.” (She would have dreams that were prophetic.) And she says, “I dreamt there’s a poet in the family who’s going to be famous, and I thought it was Chester.” (Chester is an older cousin of mine.) And she said, “No, it’s you. Keep writing.” And at the time … [Mills pauses to suppress tears] I didn’t have anything published. I said, “Grandma, you’re seeing something that ain’t …” and I even remember — I didn’t get like I am now, but I remember joking with her, and I said, “Yeah, Grandma, that’s going to be as likely as having a Black president.” And 10 years later! That was around the time my first book came out. So that was an interesting thing that she said. And I don’t know about “great poet,” but I’m making my way… I’m making my way.

You are doing such a significant project of spiritual reparations. And I love the sense of these intimate ancestors as in grandmothers and even historical ancestors, as in those bones speaking for us and leading us on. Your work gives us courage, yes, to not be afraid of history, to not be afraid of the imprisonment of silence, to believe that we can break down those doors, those barricades that have been built around our histories, which leads me to the next question. On one hand, we have this historical horror; on the other hand, you have this notion of care, like what you described with your grandma, in the specific case of the African Burial Ground. Now I’m thinking of 1991 excavation— the government wanted to build a plaza on what had been an ancestral burial ground and in the process of digging and trying to do things, they encountered these bones. Of course, they wanted to just seal it off again, but civil society leaders, poets, community members, clergy people started to protest—that’s the voice of ancestors. One of the things I found compelling as I read and engage with that history— and I know you would go into deeper details into that—was how some of those bones were excavated and sent to Howard. And then they prepared those bodies for a return, for a right of return, to be reinterred at the monument. And we know historically that it was a crime for these African and African Americans—enslaved people— to gather, to bury their dead. They had to do it in the cover of darkness at night. They would meet in the middle of the night, in some of the fragments of history we read to do this burial. We know that even in death, there was segregation.

The burial ground is a complete manifestation of that segregation.

Oh Yes. And so, I’m thinking of this right of return. You know that it happened post-1991, in which these coffins were carved and brought from Ghana, I believe, and those coffins were wrapped in Kente cloths and these ancestral bones traveled all the way from Washington, DC, back to New York. The contemporary offspring of these ancestors were lining the streets and welcoming them and singing to them; I wanted you to talk about this ritual of care on our own end, and how it contrasts with the history of violence.

So, it was 1991, allegedly, right? And I like to think of it as a devil’s bargain, because what they were trying to build— they built it. The Ted Weiss Federal Building is there, and this is actually the US government that did this. It’s the General Services Administration, the GSA. So, what was stopped was the four-story plaza that you’re referring to. So, the major structure is still there or was erected. The bones were initially taken to one of the city universities, Lehman College, before going to Howard, and they were put in the basement. And so, then Howard, or some folks of color at the time, David Dinkins, was the first, well, he was still the first, but the only Black mayor that New York had had, and so he was alerted. And I like to be fair and tell the whole story. The first news story about it was done on Fox five, which is run by Rupert Murdoch. But I like to be balanced. They were brought down to Howard in ’93 after being in the basement at Lehman College. And they weren’t doing anything with them, it was almost like storing old papers that you don’t look at. But after the revolt and the conspiracy I spoke of, the colonial white settlers would not allow us to bury at night, so we had to bury during the day. It was against the cultural thing. Culturally in certain West African cultures, the burials are at night. And there was an imposition legally as well. And then they also circumscribed the number of people [who could attend these burials] it could be no more than 12. And I’ll say this, the Kente wasn’t actually put on the bodies. It was put on the tops of the coffin. They were made out of mahogany in Ghana. I believe it was 2003 … yes, and so what they did was they wrapped the actual bones in shrouds. And here’s something that I found very troubling, because we can even take this beyond this exhuming or discovery in 1991 by the GSA as they’re building the TED Weiss building, and was hoping to build a plaza, you can go to the New York library. There’s a thing called the Marshak plan. I might be mispronouncing his last name, but it was basically a map of New York from the 18th century. And on that map, there’s a clear marking of the Negro burial ground. So these folks, because you have to research to see, not even if it’s cemeteries, but things that are around wherever you’re going to be doing any construction. So, the 90% likelihood that even before the 1991 discovery when they were first thinking about building the structure and the plaza that they had looked at and knew that there were bones there. So, it goes even further than that. Let me bullet point, because I know there were other things you were putting in the question, but I might have … so 2003 the coffins … 2006 or -07, the coffins are brought there, there’s a ceremony, and they open the monument that’s outside. So, there’s a monument outside where the six burial or seven burial mounds with 60 bodies each in there. Then the museum opened in 2010 and what was intense was that it’s a government agency that’s doing this desecration. George Bush the first had to basically do the equivalent of an executive order to get them only to temporarily stop, not even completely, this is the President, and they didn’t listen to the President. And then there was a rest of that, Gus Savage, who was a congress person. He’s from Illinois, a brother, and he said, “You can’t do this.” He was over one of the subcommittees or committees on buildings, I don’t remember the exact term, and they’re pushing back against him, but eventually they do make, as I say, the devil’s bargain, where they say, “Okay, we’ll stop, or we won’t build the plaza, but we’re still going to build a Ted Weiss federal building.” It’s a federal building, right? And it is over bodies. It is still over bodies, so the plaza would have covered almost all the area, but you still have a federal building sitting on top of enslaved bodies, and inside that building is where the museum is. So, it’s like, “Let me give you a little —” and I’m glad it’s there, but “Let me give you this little bone.” The building is probably 40 stories, and you got a modest sized museum on the first floor. So that’s the progression. I don’t know if I answered all the questions.

I suppose one of the final questions I want to ask you is the ongoing work of spiritual reparations like this: how do you see this work progressing? How do we continue to try to honor these ancestors? Sure? How do we continue to try to bring them back to life through poetry, but also through monuments, which are always a point of debate in these works?

So, I got a grant last year. I’m now working. I used to say that Boneyarn was the first book of poems about slavery in New York City. Now I say slavery in Manhattan because I’m working on a book about slavery in the Bronx where I grew up. And I was even worried when I won the grant that I was going to be recreating Boneyarn, but in a different geographic space. But there’s a whole other thing, because the Bronx was part of Westchester in the colonial period, it was much more agrarian because Manhattan was only a mile wide, mile and a half long, and so this blew my mind, because most people don’t even know there was slavery in the north. New York has the oldest and largest slave cemetery in the United States of America. Until slavery ended in New York in 1827, and it was still gradual, there were still people who were in a domestic servitude division. New York was second only to Charleston, South Carolina in terms of per capita enslaved population in a city. Charleston was the largest slaving port in the United States of America. So, think about this: New York was second only to the largest slaving port in the whole country in terms of a city setting, not total, but that’s still mind blowing. Most people don’t even know there was slavery. So, then the thing about the Bronx that is, for me, another mind-blowing factoid, is the Bronx was the breadbasket. Bronx/Westchester was the breadbasket for all 13 colonies. Wheat production was insane up there. Who would think this? Virginia, Jefferson, wheat. It was the Bronx, Westchester, and — you’re not West Indian, but in Jamaica, my father, where he comes from, they have a phrase, “your provisions,” which is referring to your food. Where does that phrase come from? New York, Westchester, the Bronx would send what they call “provisions” for the enslaved to eat, because they were the breadbasket for the 13 Colonies, they also provided most of the food for the enslaved in the Caribbean. 

And I have a series of poems; two of the people, they weren’t enslaved in Queens, but they lived there some of their adult life: Millie Tunnell, Victoria Earle Matthews, who was part of the early settlement movement, was a journalist, and then there was — so I have a triptych manuscript about Millie Tunnell from the eastern shore of Virginia; Victoria Matthews from Georgia came up to New York, lived in Queens; and then Martha Peterson, who actually was enslaved in Queens, but by the time she was four years old, slavery ended, and she was part of the first free Black community. So, I have a book or a manuscript about the three of them, so it’s also dealing with slavery in Queens, certainly with Martha’s story. So, I have managed three of the five boroughs — well the Bronx one is still in process, but I think I’ll have a chapbook out about that within a year, but I’m working on those two.

Beautiful. We can’t wait. I’m going to ask you to read a poem “Talking to the Bones.”

Okay, so this is very interesting, because this was the first poem where when I told you about hearing the voices in my sleep, this was the first one where I got lines from my sleep state. This is about a woman who was about 27 years old, and she had blunt force trauma to her skull, and she had a musket ball in her — I’m now trying to remember which — I believe it was the right rib cage. And so, they believe she was shot by a white colonial settler, and then her wrist was torqued, trying to create a narrative that maybe she fought off the person, or might have been getting the best of him or her. The person did something to her wrist, and then, for this person to best her, they then shot her. But the last three lines literally came to me in the dream state, and I included them in the poem, as is. 

The poem is a dialogue. There are probably about 12 of these in here, so it’s like a temporary interlocutor, temporary interviewer, and then the spirit, or the bones of the deceased are responding.

So those last three lines came to me verbatim in the dream state. And just two more things: so, when they exhumed her, the only thing that was left of her torso was her right rib cage. And then I forgot to mention that her body was buried above a man’s body. They did DNA stuff thinking the way we do it [shared burial space] with family, the wife and husband, maybe they’re above or whatever, grandmother and son, but they did DNA, and they weren’t related. So, this was a question of space. You’ve got to fit them in where you can.

Beautiful. I have a craft question for you. We were listening to Mahalia Jackson (off camera), and even just now, the way you were reading the poems, there’s always a sense of the musical, a voice. And I wanted to ask about the role of music in your work. 

Literally, I’ll agonize over a word. And it can be semantic, or it can be sonic. So, when we listen to music, play music, you read it, it’s notes, it’s notation. I think of poetry as notation that has denotation — so it’s music that has meaning. But you have to also be thinking about the musicality of your meaning. When you think about translation, the negotiation is sound and sense, because sometimes you can have a word in the other language that makes more sense but doesn’t capture the sound, and then maybe the translator will choose a word that doesn’t exactly mean the same thing but has a sonic corollary, if you would. And so that to me, almost, you can apply to just writing in your own language, because Lorca said “Poetry is a foreign language in its own language,” right? After I’ve revised the poem for a while, I will read it into a voice recoder and listen, and it might not be about what I was going for, the image or structure, but if I’m hearing something that feels off musically, I might say, “Okay, I gotta go back.” And it can be definite article to indefinite article or definite article to a monosyllabic noun, I will agonize over those things. I hear them. Do you know what I mean? I’m at the point where hearing a poet read without ever having read their work on the page, I have a very good sense of how good the poem will be on the page from hearing them read and that has something to do with the music.

How has your acting career informed, inflected your poetry, and perhaps also, how has your poetry inflected your acting?

So … and it’s interesting, because there was this whole period going back into the ‘90s, when I was getting my first master’s in creative writing, the whole slam poetry thing exploded. I have no problems with it; I think it’s its own mode. And poetry started out as an oral form— the Griots in West Africa, playing the Kora, were the poets, and they sang the poems. And the reason we have rhyme is it’s a mnemonic device because they didn’t write it down. The troubadours in southern France, western France, and Italy sang the poems, and they used rhyme to remember, because they could go on for over an hour singing histories of clans, histories of neighborhoods, regions. So, poetry’s roots are in song and orality; The Iliad was an oral thing. One of the definitions in the Oxford English Dictionary is “song” when you look up poetry. So, in a sense, hip hop and rap, whatever you think of it, are going back to the beginnings of what poetry is — spoken word.

I remember the first time I saw Patricia Smith read, there was a white woman sitting in front of me, and she said, “Oh, she’s a great performer,” like, “great kind of performer.” I had read at that point, three of her [Smith’s] books, and there was a part of me that recoiled because I was putting it in this box of, “Oh, she doesn’t think she’s a good writer. She thinks she’s all this emoting,” right? And Smith is an incredible performer of her work, but you read that on the page, and she’s killing it! But then I said, “I get it, because she’s so good at how she delivers, you can think that that’s all that’s happening if you haven’t read her work.” So, how do I put this — in about two months, someone’s having me come do a reading, but they’re also like, “I want you to help the kids with performing.” I don’t say no, but I do say, “I hope you’re not thinking that I’m investing all this time and work on performance.” I spend many, many, many, many, many more hours on what’s happening on that piece of paper.” Because I’ve studied as an actor, what then happens is… like with that poem with the billowing laundry, I didn’t initially do that the first time I read the poem — maybe it was the 10th time, or whatever, and something goes, “Oh, that could be this gesture.” It’ll be an organic thing. And then I will read poems into a vocoder and I’ll be mindful of what we in acting call “down-reads, up-reads, massaging, ways of billboarding” — the way you’re saying words. So I bring that to bear, but I am spending… 2% of the total energy that I’m investing in the poem on the rendering of it, if that makes sense. I’m a Shakespearean actor. I’ve studied acting, so some of that’s just going to be in there, but that’s definitely 2% of it. If you’re measuring hours worked on a given poem, 2% of it is “Okay, what’s a gesture? What’s the vocal thing I could do at a certain point?” up-read, down-read, massaging, slowing down for emphasis, different voices like how I just did the interlocutors, my voice, and then the woman responding, I give it a higher pitch to differentiate. But that’s overall 15 minutes of thinking about those sorts of things, whereas I might have spent 20 hours working on the poem.

Finally, there’s a young poet out there who is very interested in history and who’s wondering, how do I make a poem? How do I make a song out of history? Do you have one or two pieces of craft advice on how one might approach such a significant task?

Just be open to it. Poetry is about compression and soul. And I’ll be honest, a lot of the non-fiction work, the history work that I read, it’s slogging, man. They’re not writing to be lyrical, and so it can be deadening. I’m reading these archeological, anthropological texts, and they’re great for the information, but they’re not talking to your heart in the way that you communicate with the world. So, I also say, give yourself time to be removed from when you’re burying yourself in the information. And what I do when I’m reading those things, is I’m looking for moments that seem to me to say “poetry.” So, I could be reading a 300-page book, and maybe there’s 20 moments, or it could be one sentence that is like, “Okay, that feels like it’s poetry there” that I can open out. And then I want to say “I’ve got to take some imaginative license.” But then the other thing, the two things that I try to do very consciously, is think about material culture of the period and the diction. So sometimes that’s a way for me to enter: “Okay, I’ve read these antiseptic, anthropological, historical, archeological texts.” Then I’m looking up food of the time and [the diction]. There’s a poem I didn’t read, an example of looking up the diction. I mentioned [in that poem] a cancer within the scrotal area, and I said, “Is there some slangy way from the 18th century that they refer to a man’s private parts?” I found the word “gingumbob” and I didn’t just say “scrotum,” which I could have. But those sorts of things can be interesting anchors that could be portals into going deeper into the particular poems. Think of how to, as Emily Dickinson said, “Tell it slant,” right? Don’t come straight at it. And she’s writing lyric, so how do you go, “Okay, here’s this fact. How do I tell it in the slant?” In the excerpt you had me read, the slant is: there were these 12 fires. So, I could have just written, okay, here’s this poem. And I’m just talking about the fires. Telling it slant was, let me use a body part to say this is this fire. So, trying to think of ways where it isn’t dead on, that it isn’t just a history lesson. You know what I mean? Because the historians are writing those books. I want to figure out another way so that maybe somebody who doesn’t have the patience to read a 300-page book can think, “Okay, maybe I could read this two-page poem.”

Thank you so much, David. For our young poets out there, David is saying be vigilant and alert to moments of poetry in the archive, the imagination is key. Pay attention to the cultural materials, details and diction of that time. Tell it slant. It’s not history you’re replicating, you’re trying to make a poem and a song out of history. Thank you so much. David, this has been wonderful.

Thank you, can I just say one last thing? Sharon Olds — and this doesn’t apply just to poetry — she said, referring to poetry, “We lie to tell the truth.” And so, it’s not about the fact in the poem, it’s about the emotional truth and that’s almost that continuum thing you’re talking about, because all of us have emotions, so we can identify when something resonates emotionally.

Yes, yes, to go into historical archives as a human being in search of emotional truths. I’ll hold this close. Thank you, David, thank you. 

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

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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 the 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 is the inaugural Postdoctoral Fellow in Global Black and Diasporic Poetry at Furious Flower Poetry Center at James Madison University.