Upon entry, The Hierophant hears two patrons state, there’s nothing in here, which may or may not be true, depending upon one’s position, what is seen, unseen. The question of visibility, what is worthy of recognition, what’s hidden. One’s proximity to, or distance from, the length of a foot, a lead pipe, copper wire, two shadows triangulate between sanded cedar blocks. If it sounds boring, it may be. What if I asked you to draw me a map, and made it mine? Am I a thief? What are the measurements of ownership if everything is stripped to millimeter, access to any and all information outside the numerical, denied. What if you are forced to draw your own conclusions, your only clues a pencil-thin sequence descending a sheet of white, a library of one-liners filed in metal cabinets. A whiteout room singing sterility, galleries cloaked in opacity.
in obscurity.
Poem copyright 2026 by Krista Franklin. All rights reserved.
Study to show thyself intuition exists, iridescent orb, the third eye crown jewel between of bull’s horns. A closed mouth nestles the sacred on the bed of the tongue. Listen, the whisper that bellows beneath the conscious self, in the shadow grows the seed of god shifting in you. To tune the ear is to sit at the altar of silence, hush the chatter of the mind’s preschool, soothe the fretful heart in the blue waves of regret.
Poem copyright 2026 by Krista Franklin. All rights reserved.
If you have never missed rude banter, witty tête-á-tête with the man who part-made you. If you cannot recall cooling his death bed brow, standing near his ashes, watching him grasp at his life with tales, with vinyl, messages scribbled in blue BIC pen on their worn sleeves, you do not know this. What it means to have a staring match with God. That the body is a trick, a black tophat with a false bottom, a white rabbit somewhere in-between. You do not know the tricks played, the spades, payday loans, debts and disappointments. You cannot imagine sifting through the debris, the deadend documents of unpaid bills and mysterious correspondence, plastic bags tied in plastic bags tied in plastic bags tied in plastic bags, like some strange Russian Dolls Tucked beneath the bed. A sealed manila envelope with some porn inside. This is not yours, if you have not screamed at your sister, into a pillow, averted your eyes from the catheter cascading from his white sheet, walked down the hall from his hospice room in a sticky rage so thick, wanting it to be done. You are not ruined enough for this.
Poem copyright 2026 by Krista Franklin. All rights reserved.
“History, especially in certain places, is not a dead thing. It is a wonderful, almost holy experience.” —Kasi Lemmons.
“Big Bang,” 2011 (Krista Franklin 14)
“You imagined this archive to be quiet, didn’t you? Shelves lined with labeled boxes and black-and-white documents, stolen artifacts carefully organized, records of the past neatly ordered alphabetically. Maybe a little dust here and there, gathering beneath iron shelves left undisturbed.
But that is not what you will find here. Forget what you were conditioned to expect.”
In Too Much Midnight, Krista Franklin transforms her artistic vision into something disruptive; it comes alive. In this poetic universe, the archive is haunted, fragmented, and infused with living bodies within a single body. These figures appear not as quiet, stable forms but as pieces, ghostly silhouettes, mythic figures, and collaged forms of remembered presences, reflecting the artist in her multiple spirit forms. As you move through this archive, the boundaries of perception will dissolve, revealing this body of work as an invitation into the metaphysical, a transformation of self that urges us to perceive the archive in its spiritual form. The archive was never intended to be a static space or mere record; rather, it is a dynamic realm where the body remembers, resists, and reimagines history.
Too Much Midnight functions as an entire spiritual body, where the synthesis of collage and poetry grants the artist access to a portal of radical imagination and ancestral connection. Through surreal imagery and layered language, Franklin constructs an archive composed not of official records but of memory, history, and imagination. In this space, the body serves as both a site of preservation and disruption, carrying the weight of personal grief and collective trauma, particularly the experiences of Black bodies that have often been erased or distorted within traditional archives. The resilient Black body is a central thread that runs through Franklin’s poems. Nevertheless, beyond the body, there is a call. Franklin invites us to partake in a ritual of remembrance. Your body, her body, his body, their body— the body reappears, shape-shifts, and speaks.
Before you enter the archive, you must know:
This is spiritual. This is political. This is the way of the artist.
Draw near, look, listen.
The Metaphysical Body
When you open this collection, the revelation will become clear— the physical self transcends mere flesh; it serves as a vessel for history, an elaborate archive within itself. Within the cellular memory of Black bodies, spiritual moments surface, deep internal recollections that challenge the forces that have long been in charge of documenting history. Contrary to the uniform image typically projected by imperial regimes, the relationship between power and knowledge was [and is] far more fragmented and inconsistent in practice (Reid and Paisley 2). There are often thwarted sentences, tampered artifacts, and millions of hidden pieces. But in Franklin’s world, bodies speak where objects and documents fail. It is in this gap between official record and living memory that Franklin steps, inviting us to an astral plane:
“Give me the night, you beasts hissing over the face of this dead woman, I climb into your eyes, looking. To those who would sleep through the wounds they inflict on others, I offer pain to help them awaken, Ju-Ju, Tom-Toms & the magic of a talking burning bush. I am the queen of slight of hand, wandering the forest of motives, armed with horoscopes, cosmic encounters, and an X-Acto knife. My right eye is a projector flickering Hottentot & Huey Newton…” (15).
This section of the first stanza of “Manifesto, or Ars Poetica” serves as the beginning of the collection’s first invocation. The poem is a clear declaration of intention, conjured through three sacred stanzas that read as a spell cast on the “Killing Floor.” It introduces the sacred cycle of creation, preservation, and destruction that will unfold throughout the collection. The artist takes on the role of builder of worlds, the maker of rules, and wielder of magic. From the very outset, Franklin takes on the artistic duty of dismantling misrepresentations and erased histories to reconstruct a new world from the omitted stories. The spell maintains a torrent of declarative sentences that mimic the cadence of a chant or freestyle, embodying the breathless urgency of oral performance and the continuity of Black cultural inheritance. What makes this poem particularly compelling is the way it anchors the cosmological in the personal. When Franklin writes, “my right eye is a projector flickering Hottentot and Huey Newton,” she positions her own body within centuries of Black performance and pain. “Hottentot” is a derogatory term used to refer to Sara Baartman, a Khoi woman, who was often sexualized throughout history, even posthumously. Her skeleton was on display until the late 1970s, with her brain and genitals also stored in the Musée de l’Homme Naturelle (Lyons 327). The allusion to Baartman in “Manifesto, or Ars Poetica” draws our attention to the historical spectacle of Black bodies. Black bodies have been placed on display as objects of curiosity or racial spectacles that have been stripped of agency and made to perform for the (white, male, colonial, etc.) gaze. However, Franklin immediately disrupts the historical narrative pattern by referencing Huey Newton, a co-founder of the Black Panther Party. While the projector highlights the history of fetishized and dehumanized bodies, Newton’s presence interrupts this projection, revealing that, beyond the shadow of objectification, a spirit of resistance persists.
Say their names…
The deliberate invocation of historical figures is crucial to the practice of remembrance; it simultaneously serves as both a tribute and an act of resistance. Though the past is steeped in pain, a lingering defiance endures, and it is this defiance that fuels the poem’s central demand. When the persona demands that the night be given to her, she is claiming the darkness as a site of power rather than fear, for it is in this time of day that she accesses the portal where the past comes alive, where she can cut through historical fluff with her creative weapon: the X-acto knife. It is through this image of the knife that Franklin makes explicit what her work has been building toward. “The Ars Poetica” half of the title is a pointer to the poet’s role as an artist and her significance in what Sadiya Hartman calls critical fabulation: the practice of utilizing the existing archive, often marked by violence and dehumanization, while simultaneously challenging its authority and its omissions through the creative imagination (11). Art, Franklin suggests, is how we tell “the impossible” stories. Furthermore, that is how she invites us into her spiritual practice of entering an archive of tumultuous histories. Not as passive readers but as participants in the ritual. Not as consumers of pain, but as witnesses to reclamation through the metaphysical.
The Medicalized Body
“If you are silent about your pain, they’ll kill you and say that you enjoyed it.” — Zora Neale Hurston.
After “G/gnosis II Discipline” (for Ruth Ellen Kocher), 2009, (Franklin 40
Anarcha Betsy Lucy
Their names sit at the threshold like ghosts waiting to be let in. Anarcha, Betsy, and Lucy are three women whose bodies were cut into, without consent and without anesthesia, in the name of medical progress (Cronin 8). Their pain became the foundation of modern gynecology, and their silence was never theirs to keep. This is where the story begins. However, for the Black woman writing today, the story does not stay in the past. It lives on in the body. The personal becomes the spiritual; those ancestral cells become your cells. Cellular memory holds what the voice might leave unspoken.
In the work of humanizing the dehumanized, Franklin draws on her own flesh to tell the stories of others. In her interview with Amy Danzer from New City Lit, she traces this lineage back to her first book, Under the Knife, which emerged from her experience with uterine fibroids and the silence of the women before her. She explained that her mother and sisters refused to share their stories, leaving her imagination to complete the gaps. The book itself bears this idea with the red stitching that runs through its pages; a visual echo of bodies cut and repaired signaling a raw and intimate approach to medical narrative. Later, in the interview section of Too Much Midnight, Franklin reflects on how her family has always been written into her work (95). This interplay between the personal and the ancestral pulses through Too Much Midnight, especially in its first section, where bodily memory takes hold. Her body becomes the body of the women in her lineage, channeling their untold stories. But the poems also suggest something deeper: a history of trauma encoded in DNA. In “Fifty Percent of Women Have Them,” the fibroids are removed, yet the scar remains on the skin, a permanent inscription, a witness. “She draws the line/ where she’ll cut me open/ like a cardboard box” (43). A cut is a portal into the body and into the history of the women in her lineage and all the women on whom the history of medicine was built.
To be opened is to be made vulnerable, but it is also to be exposed as a site of meaning. The incision does not just reveal tissue; it reveals a legacy. This legacy becomes the focus of the “Extrapolating Motherhood” section, where Franklin turns explicitly to the historical treatment of Black bodies marked by unethical experimentation, invasive procedures, and a medical establishment that viewed Black women as subjects rather than patients. It is in this section that the poem “Lucidity (Ars poetica #1)” appears, opening with the phrase “let’s close her up” (47). The line presents the female body as an object, a door the surgeon can enter and exit at will, capturing the unsettling reality of a woman undergoing surgery while remaining consciously aware of the invasion. The poem pulls into focus the complex and often violent relationship between Black female bodies and the medical field, a relationship that (as the poem suggests) did not begin in the operating room but in the examination tents. The Black female body has long been viewed as a threshold for suffering. Black women have been labeled “superbodies,” a term reflecting how white society and medical professionals have perceived and treated them, particularly during bondage, as beings capable of enduring extraordinary pain (Owens 109). The historical imbalances surrounding J. Marion Sims, often called the father of modern gynecology, highlight a significant oversight: the lack of acknowledgment for the Black women who were integral to his research. This point is illustrated in his own memoir, where he reflects, “That was before the days of anesthetics…the poor girl, on her knees, bore the operation with great heroism and bravery” (Sims 4). In this context, the Black female body is depicted as a formidable super force that is subjected to the advancement of medicine through pain.
If “Lucidity” presents the body as a closed door, “Probe” examines what happens when that door is forced open. The word “probe” serves as both a medical tool and a synonym for examination, establishing a historical connection between contemporary medicine and the experiences of the enslaved. The poem is divided into three sections. It begins with “i. The Office,” continues with “ii. The Observation” in the middle and concludes with “iii. The Diagnosis.” In the central stanza, the poem critiques modern medicine by exposing how the Black body is treated as a subject of surveillance and scrutiny under clinical hegemony:
“ii. The Observation
Latex is a language of orifices and appendages, snapping tongue of the biohazard, a probing way of touching, without. Doctors and lovers both speak it, safe inside its sterility, reaching themselves in the closet of you, the places you house the most intimate.” (45)
Here, there is a clear contrast between lover and doctor, violence and gentleness, intimacy, and invasion. Both figures enter, but only one claims ownership of the interior. The lover seeks connection through making love with care; the doctor seeks knowledge by examining the body. However, in the history of medicine based on experimentation on Black bodies, the two have often been indistinguishable; the body probed has been studied and entered without regard for personhood. But the poem reminds us that “plastic can’t protect us/ from that…”(45). In this context, “plastic” symbolizes advanced technology and sterile practices that fail to address the underlying history of harm. Furthermore, it suggests that medicine becomes hazardous when the intent behind medical procedures is driven by cruel curiosity rather than genuine care.
Anarcha, Betsy, Lucy. Their names are no longer just ghosts at the threshold. In Franklin’s work, they are given bodies again. Her body. Moreover, in that cellular memory, they speak.
Say their names…
The Muse Body
“With my eyes turned to the past, I walk backwards into the future.” — Yohji Yamamoto
“I Let My Tape Rock,” 2012 (Franklin 60)
The past is heavy, but Black people have always been creative. The “Heavy Rotation” section makes clear that, after all the pain and trauma, the Black body remains her own muse, a portal to her creativity. Too Much Midnight presents art as a spiritual practice conducive to healing work that the artist must undertake to transform turmoil into cathartic release. After the title page of this section, you will land on the 2012 piece “I Let My Tape Rock,” which invokes transatlantic time, Biggie’s era, and Franklin, the future. A popped cassette spills its coily reel from the plastic frame. Just beneath it, the opening lines from The Notorious B.I.G.’s “Juicy” appear in highlighted caps: “I LET MY TAPE ROCK / TIL MY TAPE POPPED.” The blue surrounding it becomes the ocean where millions of bodies sank, a marker of the tumultuous past of Black bodies during the Transatlantic Slave Trade. But the tape and the lyrics complicate that darkness. The popped tape becomes a metonym for Black cultural resilience, a cycle of rebirth: from a history where bodies sank into the enveloping blue, to a future where Black creativity keeps popping back. In Franklin’s hands, the boundaries between rap, poetry, and collage dissolve as she merges the past and present to reveal the multitude of her creative process. This merging continues in the poem that follows, “Invocation Wünderbar,” a contemporary litany whose repetitive chants create a ritualistic effect:
“Come muse, come nouns, come verbs, come Epson, come books and ex- slaves with one eye seered shut for trying to read. Come reading, come hours, come paper and pages, come hours, come paper and pages, come vision, come paintbrush, scissors, glue, old book. Come Kahlo, come Jean-Michel, come Andy, come Walker, come studio, piles of National Geographics, clipped things, feathers, ripped signs, old art, come smoke” (61).
In this poem, Franklin calls on the spirit of creativity and the spirits of fellow artist-travelers who worked between identities to build art from the fragments of history. Their presence in her invocation signals that this creative act is not solitary; it is a conversation with those who have also transformed pain into something lasting. Something that heals. “Invocation Wünderbar” is a litany of breathing and releasing, a spiritual reckoning. The repetition of “come” is an invitation to an ongoing process— a celebration of creative making, a continuous (r)evolution. It traces the lineage of mandated silences through anti-literacy laws to an era of brilliant writers and artists. But the poem “History: as Written by the Victors” reminds us that “time is not a line, it is a series of concentric circles” (82). Time, in essence, is a cyclical structure that permits healing through its creative processes. It is in this vein that Franklin, the artist and container of magic, begins gathering the broken clippings of Black history and modern life, which becomes a form of metabolizing trauma from the body through presence and creation.
If the body is an archive, then creativity becomes the act of activating what the body holds. Bodies hold memory, rhythm, pain, and resilience. We are all artists-magicians. We are creative in the way we still survive despite life’s turmoil. In the final section and the last poem of the collection, “Call,” Franklin invites her readers to a collective healing practice. She reminds us that imagination can produce scripts for the “Death Machine,” which churns out the destructive narratives we have been forced to ingest, but it can also serve as a tool for knowledge and repair. “Call” is more than simply a call to action. Rather, it serves as a connecting loop to the opening manifesto, which challenges us to embrace new possibilities through a ritual of remembrance in our artistic practices. But to activate this process, “we must think about Black flesh, Black optics, and ways of producing enfleshed work…” (Sharpe 21). In other words, this collective creative work requires a refusal to repeat the archive’s violence. It is a spiritual work that requires us to revisit the past with care as we tell the stories of those who came before us. For communal healing of collective trauma, you must “Grab the hand of the person next to you and make a break for it. French kiss the idea of Humanity” (89). This is the conjuring of a world where our breath is the only border. This is the alchemy of survival, the weight of the haunting—a reminder that the archive is never finished with you.
Works Cited
Cronin, Monica. “Anarcha, Betsey, Lucy, and the Women Whose Names Were Not Recorded: The Legacy of J. Marion Sims.” Anaesthesia and Intensive Care, vol. 48, no. 3_suppl, Nov. 2020, pp. 6–13.
Danzer, Amy. “Stitched Together: Krista Franklin Discusses Under the Knife.” Newcity Lit, 1 Jan. 2019, lit.newcity.com/2019/01/01/stitched-together-krista-franklin-discusses-under-the-knife/.
Franklin, Krista. Too Much Midnight. Haymarket Books, 2020.
Hartman, Saidiya. “Venus in Two Acts.” Small Axe: A Caribbean Journal of Criticism, vol. 12, no. 2, June 2008, pp. 1–14.
Lyons, Andrew P. “The Two Lives of Sara Baartman: Gender, Race, Politics and the Historiography of Mis/Representation.” Anthropologica, vol. 60, no. 1, 2018, pp. 327–46.
Owens, Deirdre Cooper. “Historical Black Superbodies and the Medical Gaze.” Medical Bondage: Race, Gender, and the Origins of American Gynecology, University of Georgia Press, 2017, pp. 104–23.
Reid, Kirsty, and Fiona Paisley. Sources and Methods in Histories of Colonialism. Routledge, 2017.
Sharpe, Christina. In the Wake: On Blackness and Being. Duke University Press, 2016.
Sims, James Marion. The Story of My Life. D. Appleton, 1884.
Nikema Bell is a Jamaican creative and scholar whose work bridges art and literature. She earned a Bachelor of Arts in Literatures in English with a minor in Creative Writing from the University of the West Indies in 2022, where she received the Peepal Tree Prize and the Departmental Award. Recently, she completed her Master of Arts in English at James Madison University, with a focus on Caribbean and postcolonial literature. Her writing has appeared in Banyan Review, where she was recognized as a finalist for the 2025 Banyan Poetry Prize, the collaborative chapbook Worlds Within and Without, and County Lines Journal, among others. Currently, Nikema serves as the Special Projects Coordinator at the Furious Flower Poetry Center, where she is dedicated to supporting programs that celebrate and highlight Black poetic traditions.
a transcription of the poem read on the home pageof this issue
Krista Franklin reads “Lucidity (ars poetica #1)”
by Krista Franklin
“Let’s close her up,” says, surgeon, Dr. No Name, masked under lights, white, hands wet with blood, rich and worrisome.
Listen as the belly bubbles in its new arrangement; organs elbow each other like professionals in a crowded elevator. Try to create space and flow in an atmosphere of darkness, (and) invasive procedures.
*
The blood on his hands is mine. The organs mine, all named, though I only know a couple, and never their rightful place like my mother, who never just breaks bones but fibulas, tibias, the proper names of things trapped in the vice of her mind.
My mind is on the surgeon’s tray, the scalpel, the bounty carved from me.
Poem copyright 2026 by Krista Franklin. All rights reserved.
Look around: language is everywhere, but doing different things, manifesting in different ways. In the spirit of Krista Franklin’s work, this prompt invites you to construct a poem by collaging language from at least three disparate sources. For example, how might you pull the language of an ad, an instruction manual, and a ballot into conversation? The constitution, an overheard conversation, and a grocery bill? What delicious frictions or unanticipated connections might you (and only you) create?
As a poet and visual artist, Krista Franklin invites those who encounter her work to consider the world not as a given to abide by, but as given to us to alchemize through our own unique minds and bodies, and through which we can imagine and manifest alternative possibilities of being—perhaps more just, perhaps more loving, perhaps more fun, perhaps kinder, perhaps softer or sturdier. Perhaps free. Her work is physical and deeply embodied—acutely alert to the heft and matter of the body, the material reality of place and personhood, but also steeped in spirituality and presence always deeply aware of the otherwheres in the here. One might call it soul. Whether collaging images through words or visual material, she returns the familiar to us as fantastic. She upends the ordinary— the patterns and practices to which we have been habituated – and invites us to do the same. The world rendered through her eyes is both potent and empowering.
Another word to describe Franklin’s work is “full.” Her poetry collection, Too Much Midnight, throbs with color, is heavy with intellection (there are 4 introductions and an interview) and, of course, there are the poems—a veritable cornucopia to feast upon. This richness is not mere opulence, but rather a poetics that positions itself in opposition to the stereotypical discourses of scarcity and struggle that often overshadow Black narratives. This is full-figured defiance of paucity of mind, body, image or mood. This is the full Blackness of the universes—both internal and external—claimed for the self and the community. We, like these poems and in these poems, are defined by magnitude, abundance, and depth. Franklin’s 2018 artist book, Under the Knife operates under a similar logic of heft. Its 280 letter-pressed and hand-stitched pages hold the fullness of generations. Expressed in lyric, prose, artifact, photographs, images, documents, and more, Under the Knife is a brimming archive of existence in which no thing is extraneous. Even the forgotten, the erased, and the silenced take up their space in the body of this work as it spills forth the memories, stories, experiences, held in the body—particularly Black, female bodies.
Franklin’s is clear-eyed, yet hopeful work. In the poem, “Call,” which closes her poetry collection, Too Much Midnight, Franklin writes: “Here’s a mirror, look behind you, beyond you. Here’s a portal. Jump through it. Make magic, follow the breadcrumbs, the north star, the scary crackle of tree branches just ahead in the dark. Take the darkness into your fists and smash it on the warm stones of daylight. Make daylight. no more caskets for us to all crawl into. No more remixed autopsy recitations, not more black masked mammies, no more brown bodies on your cooling boards and studio floors no more satirical snark crafted to suffocate, no more grabbed bodies, no more public/ private intellectual masturbating no more twentieth century icons as dead talking head to justify injustice.” A call out, a call in, and a wakeup call all at once, the poem asks us to do better. To be better. To imagine better. It points us to the abundance of the world available to us, and the power we have to transform with and through it.
Krista came to Harrisonburg as the guest of the Furious Flower Reading Series, and as a presenter in the Boundless Bound symposium held in Oct 2025 here at James Madison University. We were pleased to host her for an interview for The Fight & The Fiddle. What follows is a lightly edited transcript of our conversation.
Welcome to the Fight and the Fiddle, to Furious Flower, to James Madison University, to Harrisonburg, Virginia. Welcome. We are so happy to have you here! I want to talk to you about your journey as an artist, as a writer. We were in Cave Canem in 2004. In a group with Patricia Smith. And when I think back to all the ways that I’ve learned about writing and learned about living as a writer, and you’ve been doing it in multiple disciplines! I’d love to hear about that journey.
It’s a little hard for me to track sometimes, I think because I’m a person who very much lives day to day. I very rarely think about the time that it’s taken me to get to certain things. I think that I was very interested in keeping those two parts of my life separate: I was making visual art at the same time that I was writing, but a lot of people didn’t realize that I was doing both things. There would be some folks who knew me as a writer, and some people who knew me as a visual artist. Where I am right now in my career, is really trying to bring those two things together. I always said that my two disciplines are segregationists. They’re not gonna be segregated from each other anymore. They don’t like each other, but I’ve tried over the past, I would say, five to 10 years, to try to start to bring some of those things into focus together, even though oftentimes they’re not directly communicating with each other. When I’m thinking about the writing, I’m not necessarily thinking about the work that’s visually engaging. So, the track to get to where I am now is somewhat loosey goosey, and doesn’t really have straight lines—a lot of swirls, no straight lines. But a series of beautiful relationships have been formed—relationships with people, relationships with organizations, relationships with curators, relationships with other poets, like you, and just allowing the flow of creativity and the flow of being an artist in every way that that possibly means to stay open to that. So it’s been a long and weird, winding road, but a lot of it has taken place in Chicago. So I would say that, if anything, Chicago is the place where I was able to do that multitude of things and still maintain some sense of strength.
You’re in a space that is so rich in poets, Patricia Smith, Gwendolyn Brooks, Angela Jackson… And you’re also from Ohio, and that place birthed some geniuses, too. Those are two really interesting legacies of place, and I’m curious if they have any impact or influence on your work.
Absolutely. I would say that they both have an incredible impact on me and my work. When I lived in Ohio when I was younger, I often thought about Morrison being from here, but often thought about Rita Dove being from there. I also would think about the period of time that Nikki Giovanni was there as well. And it really gave me a blueprint. Their existence made me believe that it’s possible to be a Black woman and to write for your life, for your living. They really established for me the possibility that I could be the thing that I dreamed of being, and that there have been people who had done it before who were also from the same area and became very successful at a high level. Conceptually, in the writing, they were operating on a super high level, and it just gave me something to shoot for — the stars.
Right after one of my years at Cave Canem, I moved to Chicago on a whim. It wasn’t a thought-out plan. It was very impromptu. Let’s call it “intuitive.” Intuitive is a great word. And when I got there, the doors just flew open, especially with the poets. The poets were so giving, so generous, so sweet. They just immediately embraced me and gave me jobs, allowed me to meet students that they were working with. And it changed my life. It was there also that even though I had been making visual art in Ohio before I got to Chicago, I was doing it when I had writer’s block, so I wasn’t really making visual art all the time. I was making it when I felt like I couldn’t write and the words were escaping me. When I got to Chicago, it became more of a ritual practice about making work, or making collages, primarily, and also drawings and paintings. And it was the poets who encouraged me to start to show the work. They would see it in my apartment, hanging on the walls, and were very curious about them— “Who made this?” “Who made this?” “Where’d it come from?” And then when I would reveal it was me, they asked “Well, why aren’t you showing it in galleries? Why aren’t you putting this in the world as something that you do?” It took me a while to come to grips with that as a possibility, but when I finally did, it was the right move. But it was really about learning how to balance those things.
Chicago as a geographical location has been so formative for me, not only because of all of the heavy hitters that are from there, and all of the rich Black history of that location, but really the rich history in general. They have this reputation that I like to brag about—that it’s the last bastion of American freedom. And I feel that those are where the fighters are. Those are the folks who believe in people’s human rights. Those are the people who believe in the possibility of a world where we can have an equitable future where we can live alongside one another and be neighbors and be kind to one another. It just gave me a different landscape in my imagination, a possibility of how to live my life. And I’m getting a little misty, even thinking about it. I owe great debt to that city, a great debt.
I love the idea of the city structuring your internal landscape—the landscape of the city building that internal landscape. And I love that’s what’s in the city, because sometimes folks outside of Chicago don’t understand that reputation…
Oh, it has a terrible reputation outside of that area.
But its internal reputation is about justice and freedom and possibility, and I feel that it is so evident in the poems! There is a movement in the poems to be 1) imaginative. I love the surprising things that encounter each other in a Krista Franklin poem. And also that there is 2) a concern with social justice. And so, I want to ask you to talk about art in relation to those pillars of social justice, equity, freedom, etc. What’s the role of art? What’s your role as an artist?
That’s a tough one right now for me. I feel that I’m at an age where I am really interested in the notion of art for art’s sake, and I never would have said that 10, 15 years ago. That wouldn’t have ever come out of my mind, or out of my mouth. I feel that it is important for us as artists and as writers to follow our spirits around whatever it is that we feel is compelling us. And sometimes those things are very intense—notions around social justice, notions around equity, notions around our liberation as a people, as a country. And then sometimes those things are about what I would call the mundane—the everyday encounter, the beautiful moment of looking at a sky and being transfixed by a cloud, or being swept away by birds and butterflies and the things that we attribute to children, really. We don’t really think about adults being caught up in the whimsy of life. And because we live in a society right now that is so intense and so challenging on so many fronts, we have to still find those moments and those opportunities of whimsy and play. I feel that the role for me as an artist is to continue to tap into those things that make me, Krista Franklin, on a fundamental level, those things that people would maybe not even consider to be very interesting things about me, about my life, about what I find to be beautiful, what I find to be compelling, etc. My notions around beauty are pretty complex. Sometimes to me, the grotesque is beautiful, horror is beautiful; I have a semi-twisted notion of beauty. It’s more expansive than just what we think of as pretty. Not pretty, but it’s compelling. So, what is compelling us? Where are our spirits at? What is our role in our own personal lives as well as our larger lives? Our public lives? What do we need to be talking about? How do we need to be connecting with one another? And sometimes those things are very small, mundane things. We get our coffee at the same place. We hang out at the same bookstore. These very small moments that have great impact on connection.
Thank you for that. And I love that idea of connection. This might seem like a weird jump, but I feel that collage is a segue from connection. Collage is one of your primary media, but in the poems, collage is a poetics. Can you talk to me about collaging as poetics and artistic practice.
Why collage? I feel like my brain is…now we have these words. We didn’t have these words years ago. But we have these words now that describe people whose minds work in interesting and original ways. And I think that I may be one of those people. I think everybody is, too. I really do think that a lot of people’s brains work differently, and we don’t allow ourselves the opportunities to be open about that. I think that we live in a world that wants us to conform. And when we have these options of conformity, then everybody wants to fit into these little boxes and articulate their lives in these very simplistic terms. But my brain is pretty far reaching, and it does some interesting things, especially because my interests are so varied. I can read X-Men comic books and watch Marvel stuff all day. I can also be over here reading a Toni Morrison novel. And then also be over here listening to Duran, Duran. All of these things that are happening don’t feel connected, but they are because I am the connector. I’m the connector between these things. I found collage to be the most reasonable way for me to piece those disparate elements together. I like to talk about my grandmother as well, in fueling my notions around collage, because she was a quilter, and watching her take fragments of things and piecing them together really triggered something in my brain that I wasn’t even able to articulate at that time, but it helped me to figure out that you can take fragments… that you can disassemble something and put something back together in a new way, and that being a revolutionary act, an act that helps you to see things in a new way, see things in a position and from a vantage point that is not the first vantage point that you thought of. When you put two ideas together that are not necessarily connected, the collisions that happen between those things can generate some really interesting stuff.
I was thinking of this quote “art is thinking and labor” that is attributed to one Krista Franklin. I’d love to hear about your actual practice. What does that labor and thinking look like in the making of the things?
I just had an interesting conversation with one of my students last week about this very thing. I was trying to have them understand that “being in the studio” means a lot of things. It doesn’t necessarily mean that I am painting, or I am working on a sketch, or I am storyboarding my next film. You could be in studio time when you’re daydreaming. You could be in studio time when you’re driving your car to go pick up your groceries because your brain is still producing things. I remember, and I know you have stories like this too, where I’m washing my hands or washing the dishes, poems would start to come up, lines would start to come up. It’s doing these very ordinary chores around the house that generates, fuels even, the genius of your work. So it’s about allowing studio time to just be anything.
Now, because I don’t have a traditional studio anymore, because of the relocation from Chicago back to Dayton, Ohio, I have learned to, once again, use my bed as my studio space. So, I could be reading a book, I could be writing a couple of lines down that are compelling to me, I could be doing some small watercolors in a sketchbook—whatever idea my brain cooks up on that day. And sometimes it’s nothing; sometimes it’s not about the production. It’s about resting. I think that all artists, all writers, need to have that space where they’re not doing anything at all, sometimes for long stretches of time. We live in this world where we are supposed to be generating something all the time, we’re supposed to be producing something all the time, like machines. But we’re not machines. We’re human beings, living in these bodies that are fragile. These bodies that are fragile, these bodies that have an expiration date to them. They’re finite. And so, we have to take that time to use the studio of the mind, to rest.
Labor is art. I love that quote because it really marks a specific time and period of my life, where a lot of things that I said in public, at that time, especially, tended to be fueled by hostility, my anger, my rage. I wanted people, at that time, to understand that art is a very serious thing. People think it’s so whimsical. The Bohemian artists, the starving artists, right? But we’re working—this is work. We have to do research, like everybody else does. We have to read the books, buy the materials. This is an investment. It’s not just this frivolous thing where, Oh! The Muse jumps down! Now, I do believe in muses, but it’s not just about the muse jumping down and then suddenly I’m overwhelmed with this poem. It’s a labor. It’s a craft. And it takes skill. It takes time to refine it, to master it, and it’s not something that comes down on you. But sometimes it comes down on you.
You mentioned the body—the fragile, finite body. But embodiment—the body—is such a robust part of the work you do, both visually and in the poems. Also, I feel like there is such a surreality there. So I’m curious about that tension between embodiment, the irrefutable fact of the body, and all these sideways possibilities that are the opposite of real, factual, material present things in the work.
The corporeal world has always been something that has intrigued me for a very long period of time in my life. I think part of that has to do with health crises—really seeing the body as a space where anything could happen, and a lot of times those things that happen aren’t wonderful. As women in particular. And this is not to say that other bodies are not equally as mysterious, equally as magical, but there’s always something that’s happening with your body when you’re a woman. From the time you hit puberty, it’s on. It’s all the way on. It’s like all of this metamorphosis that’s happening. Possibility is a great word because things begin to shift and change so rapidly that your brain can barely keep up with it. And so then, because there’s that gap between the logical mind and what’s happening with your physical being, there’s all of this space of possibility, what is really happening here, that liminal space is a mystery space. It’s an empty space. And so you’re forced to try to make sense of the thing. And the ways that we make sense of the thing may not always be in a logical way. We jump to fast conclusions about things. We race to WebMD. We try to self-diagnose. We’re doing all of these things that lend themselves towards the preposterous, towards the fantastic, towards the horrific. And in that little space of life where the body is trying to catch up, where the mind is trying to catch up to the body, there’s all of this space of wonder and horror. And so, having gone through different health crises and watching people in our families—we watch people in our families go through different health crises as well. My mother struggled with cancer twice. My father had cancer at one point. My mother and father had heart conditions. My father died of a heart condition. So there’s always something that’s happening around our body, around the physical space of the body. And so it’s been an obsession over my life of writing through the fear, the anxiety, the reality of what it is of not being respected or heard at the medical facilities. There’s this legendary dismissiveness, especially that Black women face, when we go into the doctor. And so, I try to use my writing, in particular, as a space to process and sometimes visual art as well. There are kinds of misshapen body things that are happening in the collages. But there’s things that happen where we have to grapple with that. So I use the body to do that.
When I was trying to think of what acts as a hinge between the written word and visual art, the idea of the image comes to mind. You work very much in both spaces and work with creating those sensory image details. So, talk to me about your relationship to the image.
I think that if I were being super honest with myself, I would say that I am a spiritual photographer; I am constantly looking at things and making images in my head. Also, images surface, either in lucid dreaming as well as dreaming. There’s always this notion of looking at something and I’m trying to make sense of what I’m looking at, or I’m trying to capture what I’m looking at. I think that gaze is the throughline through all of my work. It’s me observing, which is why I like to use scientific motifs as well in the work, because I’m investigating, I’m looking, I’m observing, I’m holding something under the microscope. I’m taking something apart, I’m dissecting it, even with lucidity. It’s about me being a surgeon in the writing. Me taking things apart and taking and looking at them very carefully. I think that is something that goes through all of my practices, this notion of the images.
I was very interested in the Imagist poets back in the day. I was very interested in poetry that felt very visceral to me, that felt corporeal. It had to have a resonance of physicality, too. Which is why I also think even some of my poems and my writings and even some of my visual work that hints towards violence, or aftermath or carnage, is me trying to tap into some sense of viscerality—the images that I feel arrest us. That stop us in our tracks. I’m interested in generating images that are arresting. Whether they be arresting because they’re beautiful, or arresting because they’re strange or hypnotic or weird in some way. I’m interested in doing that in the writing as well as visual work. So it’s the visuality, the sensual world, the senses, the sixth sense. And all of them are very important to me in the way that I want to articulate my being.
So the other part of that plurality, spirituality, and surreality is this idea of the sixth sense, the mystery. And I also think it’s such a foundational part of the work. I feel like that emanates through. Is it part of your practice as well? How do you materialize that into language and/or into the collage and the visual art space?
That’s the challenge, isn’t it? I’m trying to figure it out. In my childhood, I was deeply in the church, because my mother and my grandmother and my aunts were all church-going women. The churches that they went to walked the line between Baptist and Pentecostal, so there were a lot of fantastic things that were happening— people were speaking in tongues, people were getting slain by the Spirit. This was something that was so pedestrian that I would literally bring friends to the church to just watch them react to what was happening in the church. To watch people go through phases of euphoria, of ecstasy. To have these bodily reactions… these visceral reactions to something that was unseen. All of a sudden, somebody who’s standing next to you is jumping up and down but there’s nothing that happened. Nobody told them to do that. Something was in the room that could not be identified that was making that happen. So that’s always been a part of the way that I moved through the world—that there’s always a seen world and an unseen world, and those unseen things, those unseen forces, those unseen beings do affect what happens in the physical world. And vice versa. So I am constantly about the business in my writing of trying to work through and articulate what that means and what that looks like: How does it show up? What are the images of that? How can I show through writing, or even through an image, or a photograph, or a picture, or a collage, or a painting, this unseen and seen world operating around one another? And for me, it’s gone now beyond religion and into a more cosmologically-based thinking, that’s what I think about the world. It doesn’t have anything to do with a dogma. This is what I know to be true because I’ve lived it. There are things that are happening that we can’t articulate, define, understand. They’re mysterious, they’re cultish. And how do I — as a thinker, as a writer, as a being, as somebody who believes in all of this — how do I write through that, and make that legible for people who may or may not believe in such things?
If you could be workshopped by or workshop with five writers — past or present — whose eyes would you want on your work and why? Who would you want to be in a conversation with?
That’s interesting. That was a great question. Who would I want? Past, present? Visual artist or poet? I’m saying Hannah Höch, Jimi Hendrix, Douglas Kearney, maybe Romare Bearden, and this person who looms large in my imagination, who was a traveling preacher, who used to come to my mother’s church, brother Fred O’Dell. He was the first medium that I ever encountered. So those are my people.Most of them are gone. Is that crazy?
It is not at all! I want to ask you about editing as a process. I don’t know how you begin to edit a collage. But I know creation is one practice, and editing is another, so what are some of your editing practices?
I love editing. It’s actually my favorite part of writing. The hard part is getting the words down there. The shaping of the words is what really excites me, removing words, putting new words in. I do a lot of looking at synonyms. I’m trying to expand and get as close as possible to what it is that I’m trying to say, to be as incisive as possible. I’m going to look at this line; I’m going to begin to move words around. I’m going to begin to maybe move a line to the bottom or to the top. That process of rearrangement and reorganizing and taking things out is very exciting. I love it, and it does mimic the collage too. The cutting things away, the getting the scalpel and really working things out. I think in collage, it shows up as the way I don’t glue down anything until the end. Sometimes I’ll trick myself by gluing things down to make it permanent, and then I’ve got to work around it. But for the most part, there’s a lot of rearranging that’s happening. There’s cutting, and then there’s reorganizing, reorganizing, reorganizing, and then deciding that this is the formation. This is the organization that it should be in. So I think it is a process. It’s the process of writing. It’s the process of making something that’s the exciting part for me. The final outcome is okay. But I’m more interested in how long it took me to do that, how many times I had to think through something to get it to that final space.
What have you inherited and what have you had to invent?
First of all, can I say I love these questions! What have I inherited? I feel like spiritual understanding is an inheritance of mine. Family inheritance. I feel like I have inherited notions around time travel and notions around the body. What have I invented? I don’t think I’ve invented anything, strangely enough, because I am really of the mindset that there’s nothing new under the sun. So even though it may appear as innovation or as invention, I feel like there has been somebody else who’s done this, but maybe we just don’t know who they are, or maybe not in the way that you’re doing it.
But you have a fingerprint.
Of course, exactly, I’m inheriting and then taking that inheritance and rearranging it in a particular way that feels like it might be new or original. But really…I’m constantly looking at old stuff, old archives, old paintings, or collages. When I look at the work of somebody like Romare Bearden, I think it’s unbeatable, it’s unmatched. There’s nothing that I could do that would match that. And this is a person who was making that in the 1930s, 1940s, ‘50s. When you think about that, I’m simply using these tools, the inheritance of how to see something, how to rearrange something, how to think through something, and then reorganizing it in my 21st Century moment. I want to think longer about that question, though, in terms of inheritance, because I feel like it is something that I write about a lot, too, and I don’t often think about inheritance as a good thing all the time. So, I’m gonna spend some time thinking deeper about that.
You definitely, unquestionably, write from a space of Blackness. What I love in reading the work and seeing the visual art is that it is always such a full space. It’s a space of abundance, almost excess. There’s a decadence to your language and your collage. Things are always spilling out of themselves. They refuse containment. There’s a sense of abundance. I’m curious about the “extra” or “too much” — that’s what we say now — so talk to me about that Black fullness that you inhabit and portray so beautifully.
In graduate school, my cohort used to call it “muchness.” Muchness. We talk about “muchness” all the time. How did I come to that? I think it may just be the way I think my brain works. It’s so packed full of things and ideas and images and pictures, and music that it does spill over. There is this spill. And I’m also interested in moving things outside of the boundaries of what we are accustomed to seeing. It’s like you have a piece of paper, and the collage may spill outside of the margins, because that’s how the world is. It’s uncontainable. You could try your best to make things as orderly as possible, sometimes to your peril, because you’re gonna be sitting there being very upset when you realize that you cannot control it.
There’s also this notion of Blackness as an infinite space, Blackness as an idea that holds and contains almost everything, or everything, and then things that we don’t even know. When you think about even the simple idea of going into a dark room and you don’t know what’s in that room. You can’t see what’s in that room, but your brain is immediately going to start to imagine what’s in the room. That fullness of understanding Blackness as a space where anything could happen: any possibility of joy, any possibility of magic, any possibility of horror, any possibility of love, of romance, any possibility can happen inside of the Black space. And so I think about our people, that we are uncontainable. We have been moved through so many places in the globe, both by force and by love, that we want to go somewhere else. We need to go somewhere else. We’re so rich. I’m saying it’s so extraordinary for me, so extraordinarily beautiful, almost breathtakingly beautiful. I’m getting emotional just thinking about it. The capacity of our beauty, and not just physical beauty — although that’s incredible and true. I’m talking about the beauty of our spirits, that we can be welcoming to people who are not welcoming, that we can forgive people who have done awful things, and our capacity for gloriousness. I want to keep going to that well. That’s the bottomless well for me. And I want to just keep going back there. Because whenever I go back into that well and pull something up from it, it’s always new. It’s always fresh. It’s always something that I never knew before. Whether I think, “I’m gonna go to a different island. I’m gonna go to a different location, geographically.” That newness of Blackness completely excites me. It stimulates me. It makes me so excited to think about how I will never know all of the ways that we exist in the world. And that’s a glorious thing. It’s miraculous. It is. It’s a bottomless well.
I’m thinking about you saying, “I invent nothing.” Because you say that, we see how it’s ancestral, there’s a whole old newness.
And it is that old newness because we re-encounter it, so it feels like it’s original. But it’s something that’s existed for millennia, right? But we’re now having this moment with it that feels very new and original.
One of my favorite words is “alchemy.” I’m thinking about the ways in which we make it new, how it alchemizes in us and in our context for and in ourselves. That’s the part that makes it into something new. How do we alchemize experience, trauma, history, relationships? The big things. Love is love, but we alchemize that uniquely in all of our spaces. Thank you, that was a beautiful response. I said two more questions. Now it’s two more. Tell me one thing about passing it on as a teacher, as an instructor, as a mentor for other artists and writers, what are some of the guardrails or instructions for moving forward that you try to give those folks here who are just getting started on the journey?
To listen to themselves and not other people because I think a lot of times we are so conditioned to follow instructions. Some of us don’t by nature, but I think that there’s always this energy around people who are artists and writers to find a mentor, find somebody who can help them to get to where they want to go. And that’s all well and good, but I think that if you don’t first connect with your own internal voice, you won’t be able to do anything interesting. And so I think one of the things that I try to do, especially now with the young people that I have the pleasure of working with, and the honor of working with, and learning from as well as alongside, is to follow their gut, follow their intuition and listen to that inner voice around their making, around the way that they move through the world, around with whom they engage with and interact with. I think it’s very important to help people to understand that you do have a guiding voice inside of you, and that it’s quiet and it can’t be heard over the din of all the other voices outside. You have to get still, and you have to spend that private time and that quiet time to refine your ear, to listen to that inner voice. That’s one thing I’m trying to encourage the young people that I have the pleasure of working with right now to do.
Another thing is to try to research. Research is so critical because of this world that we live in—this social media world where we’re constantly inundated with all of these ideas, images, other people’s stuff, other people’s baggage, other people’s life. Getting outside of that, how do you find that originality, that’s your thing, and make sure that you’re not replicating what somebody else has already done. I always joke around and say that I’m replicating things that have already been done but the people that I’m replicating are dead. They’re not on this planet any longer. They’re not in this dimension. If I’m replicating that, I’m thinking about history. That’s a whole research project. I have to go to the library for that. That’s not going to be easily accessible to me in the internet world. It could be, but I’m going to have to do a little bit deeper digging to understand what was motivating them; why they were making this work; how they were making that work; why they were writing those poems at that time; what they were living through at that time; how were their lives influencing what they were thinking about at that time. To be more thoughtful about the ways that we’re engaging with our making practices and our writing practices.
And I want to take a minute in between these questions just to say to you, Lauren, how influential you have been for me as a writer. I know that you probably do not know this. Your series, years ago when we were in CC [Cave Canem], when you were diving into Trinidadian folklore, and you opened up for me an entire world that I had no knowledge of through these gorgeous poems, and it really triggered in me a deepening around my pan-Africanist leanings towards learning more about other cultural Blacknesses, and spaces that I had not yet been introduced to. It opened up a whole other world for me, and it also really sharpened my eye and my ear around that other work that I was doing that we talked about earlier, around the spiritual world business, the magical world business. What does that look like when we’re Black people? Morrison has also given us that gift in a lot of her work, too. We have always encountered something supernatural in her work and having that moment in time with you really opened up a door, a portal for me that is still giving. So thank you for that. Thank you for your work and the work that you do for us as poets as well. It’s very meaningful, and we are very, very grateful for you.
Oh, my goodness, thank you! All right, back to you. What’s next Krista? What’s brewing in Krista-land?
I am really thinking about how it’s really, really, really beautiful to be here at James Madison University, and working with Furious Flower this week, and being invited to participate in this incredible symposium. The Boundless Book Symposium and Art Book Fair has been really beautiful for me at this time because I have been thinking a lot about publication, about books in a non-traditional sense, which is something that I think about a lot anyway. It’s not new that I’m thinking about this, but I am thinking right now about how my future projects going to manifest. When I’m thinking about the book and about the writings that I’m doing, which are not necessarily poetry too much these days—I would just call them writings, lyric essays… whatever you want to call them, it doesn’t matter the writings—but thinking about the ways that these writings can show up in the world when we’re talking about zines and we’re talking about artist books, and we’re talking about these other more ephemeral-based tactile experiences that have to do with writing. That’s where I’m at right now, I’m really meditating on how the next phase of the writing looks.
Part of what is bringing you here is this Boundless Book Fair, which is celebrating these non-traditional forms of book-making and print. And one of my questions was what is the definition of a book? It sounds like that is exactly what you’re thinking about right now. What does it mean to make a book?
What is a book? That’s something that I’m constantly asking myself: what is a book? Why does it have to be in this form—these traditional forms that we’re accustomed to? What are the possibilities? Another one of our favorite words, what are the possibilities of the book? It’s exciting.
Lauren K. Alleyne is Editor-in-Chief of The Fight & The Fiddle, Executive Director of the Furious Flower Poetry Center, and Professor of English at James Madison University. She is the author of Difficult Fruit (Peepal Tree Press, 2014), Honeyfish (New Issues Press April 2019 & Peepal Tree Press, July 2019), and co-editor of Furious Flower: Seeding the Future of African American Poetry (Northwestern University Press, 2020).
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:
“Talking to the Bones”
Of the nine Akan beads in the entire cemetery, eight yellow beads were around a two-month old’s neck.
Again. It’s a story of water: its body/our bodies. That baby’s jewelry an omen drifting across the ocean. Every white cap a stitch in what would turn out to be that child’s last, gasping fabric
So small, seems, she was buried in a wig box. But she was laid to rest with an elder.
Thank goodness her infant coffin tucked in a grown man’s grave. Grandfather and grandchild? Niece? Uncle?
(Boneyarn 50)
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.
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.
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.
[A body left to rot is a message and a metropolis:
Caesar’s head was ablaze, a March 18th, his thoughts: Ft. George; Caesar’s pate was Wednesday the harbor viewed from a hill, chapel bells, a lull of wood, gunpowder that could’ve blown but the Fort burned down because of a plumber’s soldering iron.
Caesar’s tongue was a soon quench, a Captain’s house near the Long Bridge, a March 25th the faulty chimney’s fault
Caesar’s shoulder was a warehouse by a dockside owned by Van Zant; Caesar’s shoulder had a haystack, was a deal board near the East River, Caesar’s shoulders were three fires three Wednesdays in a row, was an April 1st to the ground burned and a little fishy, was what would another Wednesday have in store: pinned on a corncob pipe.
Caesar’s kidney was a cow stable at the Fly Market, dusk on April 4th; Caesar’s kidney was alarming, a Lane of Maidens where roofs were palms and smoke never got out of hand or haystack; Caesar’s kidney was getting suspicious. Was proof. Of the fact. That fear. Shares three letters. With fire.
Caesar’s spleen was nearby and soon thereafter, a cry of fire before old smokes cleared; Caesar’s spleen was a flicker, a loft where slaves slept; Caesar’s spleen was soon extinguished and Thomas’ place. Was arson—as African art]
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 temporarilystop, 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.
“Talking to the Bones”
What of your face? A bullet is blunt as a comet
Your wrist? Witness my resistance
How so? The wrist twisted is a cracked cloud under my skin
Who put the ball beneath your rib? A musket seeking flesh that only wanted freedom
Who buried you above an old man’s bones? The shallower the grave, the less gristle between here and heaven
But why only a right rib cage? What we leave the Earth when we leave the Earth is not ours to say
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.
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.
a transcription of the poem read on the home pageof this issue
David Mills reads “Chimney Sweep Apprentice”
by David Mills
I’m what happens when a house breathes out; sore, black breath in a New York throat. Trapped caterpillar. What they think of me—owners of these homes and white master who hires me out
to black master sweep. Elbows, ankles knees up zigzag chimneys: squeeze of heat and dusk. Soot, head to toe: dirt thick as a shirt. Palms facin’ out; stomach up against and empty. My days a brick
wide and a brick and a half long: I could die here. But brush above my head I chuck soot; chip tar wit’ a scraper; black rain, pepperin’ my neck, hot rim of my eyes. Filth to the sides of flues,
mazes sticky with poison, hearth to cap damper. Started prenticin’ when I was six. Now Eighteen Flesh leathery. Ankles swelled to black apples. Growin’:
a stunt. Can’t say which is better: cramped heat or winter’s chill. My cry—Soot-O, Weep, Weep!— on the street or pinched in the flue. My life up in nothin’ but smoke.
Poem copyright 2019 by David Mills. All rights reserved.
![in this sea
of questions
that
quested
to understand
me. [struck out]
I am
buried
in an alphabet
of answers,
half-
cocked and still
drunk
from the nights
before.
An ocean of A's
work overtime
trying
to tow
me
from
the wreckage
of
an overactive imagination [struck out] myself.
One should say
the names](https://i0.wp.com/fightandfiddle.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/04/Mourners-Corner-Pic_Page_2-edited.jpg?resize=800%2C1037&ssl=1)
![of the angels who try
to save
them -
so I say, April [italicized]
Angela [italicized]
Andres [italicized], a season
of tulips erupt
like tiny
insurrectionists
in the grave
of gray
matter, the smoky
haze
aftermath
of
wildfires
decades
away -
let me make
it plain:
every
day
I dream
of cracking
this
body
open
like a melon
against
pave-
ment](https://i0.wp.com/fightandfiddle.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/04/Mourners-Corner-Pic_Page_3-edited-2.jpg?resize=800%2C1038&ssl=1)
![There.
wiping
his forehead
with a wet
rag,
impotent
Against Death,
heeding
his warning
to throw [italicized]
water [italicized]
on Blackbeard [italicized]
and get out [italicized]
of the way, [italicized]
not knowing
there was nowhere
I could run
to escape
the end of this
story.
Once,
in an audience,
on the heels
of my 53rd
year, a woman
from my hometown
asked:](https://i0.wp.com/fightandfiddle.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/04/Mourners-Corner-Pic_Page_5-edited-1.jpg?resize=800%2C1035&ssl=1)
![what does it feel like [italicized]
to be an elder? [italicized]
I spun
into a tower
of babel
but should have said:
you [italicized]
tell me. [italicized]
You are still [italicized]
trying to crawl [italicized]
from the carcass [italicized]
of our dead [italicized]
city, [italicized]
back [italicized]
again [italicized]
in the [italicized]
bedroom [italicized]
of your eighth year. [italicized]
I am still
a daughter
kissing the
forehead
of a man no longer here, try-
ing
not to weep
into
his smooth brow.
What the fuck
do I know](https://i0.wp.com/fightandfiddle.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/04/Mourners-Corner-Pic_Page_6-edited.jpg?resize=800%2C1038&ssl=1)
