Tawanda Mulalu, the author of Please make me pretty, I don’t want to die (Princeton 2022), was born in Botswana at the tail end of the last century. This sense of a thing at the end, but also at the beginning in a simultaneous and sinuous tapestry defines Tawanda Mulalu’s work. The poems in his book are set across the four seasons of a year and thus full of oscillations between beginnings and endings, deaths and aliveness, burials and resurrections.

In his poetry, a staggered musical procession is sustained, always, by a tender and eloquent voice that dreams in images. We, as the readers, feel as if we are inside the private mind of a film maker whose tool for image making is the primacy of language. Language here mostly functions as intelligent velocity. The words and sentences move, they twirl, they leap, they run across lines and loops, jagged, electric and electrifying with their nimble melancholy and brilliant leaps. Weaving through halls of tone, mood, and anaphoras, they never land or stay still for long, something perpetually in mid motion, something heading and rushing somewhere but with the intention to never arrive. A panther photographed in flight.

It quickly becomes clear then that Mulalu’s project is a desire to arrest and staple to the page the strange electric music of the mind. How to score and render legible the Brownian motion and sweet, strange physics, the brilliant weirdness and dizzyingly ferocious yet sometimes tender ledger of leaps and associations, and noises our mind make in the context of our crisis of modernity, racism, divided selves, overwhelm, and mutilated history.

Poetry as an unending hum and whirl of the interior, a sing-song cache of arias and elegies and incantations inflected by hip-hop and sieved through early Sylvia Plath. This poet is always hearing voices and is always weaving those voices into prayers.

Consider this poem from Please make me pretty, I don’t want to die:

Prayer

And finally, this devastating film-like half of the poem, “Clarity:”

In these poems, we hear a cinematic inner monologue, an intimate letter addressed from one human interior to the other in a desperate search for connection. The poems have the quality of a story though their narrative heft derives not from linearity or plot but from the cumulative power of emotional nakedness. The grammar of this intimate letter, if you listen closely, is a flash of images conjured inside an alert mind. In fact some of the most poignant poems in the collection belong to a sequence called Film Studies, an ekphrastic study the poet conducts of images he glimpses in the world as well as images he glimpses inside himself. Voices and images collide until you can no longer distinguish one from the other. Images are musical. Voices float and flash like a film reel.The multiplicities of harmony in a young poet’s mind as he navigates the world. Tawanda Mulalu was recently at James Madison University for a reading from his book, Please Make Me Pretty, I don’t Want To Die. He visited Furious Flower and spoke to Gbenga Adesina (PhD), the Furious Flower Postdoctoral Fellow in Global Black and Diasporic Poetry at James Madison University’s Harrison Hall studio. The interview has been edited for clarity and length.

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Welcome to the Furious Flower Poetry Center’s Fight & The Fiddle Interview. The goal is to engage with your poetry at an intimate level of discourse. We’re just so excited to have you. This is a gorgeous, unbelievably perfect, and excellent book. I was hoping you would start us off in an atmosphere of invocation by reading a poem. 

For sure. And thank you so much, Gbenga and Furious Flower for having me. I’m very excited to be visiting a poetry center dedicated to Black poetry in America. The poem that I will read is called “Prayer.” There are several series of poems called “prayer” in the book and this is the closest we get to a title poem in the book insofar as the title of the book comes from this poem. 

Prayer 

Thank you, Tawanda. I was stunned by the title of this book: Please make me pretty, I don’t want to die as if beauty is the opposite of death, a very interesting binary. I was hoping you could talk to me about the thinking that led to the title and perhaps your poetics as it relates to beauty and death. 

Sure. To be honest with you, the title came from a line in the poem. But that line itself was written in the space of the poem. You know, when you’re into the vibe or feeling of writing, a sentence or phrase can come up, and I’m not even particularly sure where the particular phrase came from. When I do an after-the-fact reasoning of it;  when I’ve been going on tour or when I’ve been applying to stuff and writing about what the poems in the book are doing, I think I came to the realization that the title came from a sense of wanting to beautify Blackness, despite the devastation and omnipresence of Black Death, especially in America, though the omnipresence of Black Death is everywhere in the world, in a world of global anti-Blackness. I remember the very first time I watched the movie, Moonlight, directed by Barry Jenkins, and having this very strange realization of “oh, I didn’t know I could look like this” in how beatific the cinematography in that movie made Black faces. And it’s so strange to me, because I grew up in Botswana. Pretty much everybody there was Black, but I went to an international school. There were people from all over, but the media that I was presented with was imported from the west and so on. So, when I watched Moonlight, it was a complete shock to the system. So, in the meditative space of this poem, I don’t know — I was studying at Harvard; it was my undergraduate years when I wrote this. It was towards the end of my first poetry workshop, and I was beginning to get into that mode of the usual seasonal depression that Boston gives and realizing how out of place I was once again, and wanting to feel real, wanting to feel alive. And I suppose that’s how the phrase came to me, from a place of despair, but also wanting to approach that kind of beatific Blackness that I’d seen depicted in stuff like Moonlight. 

 I want to talk about some of your influences because you brought up poetry workshops, the question of education, and what that means for your poems, but also cinematic influences as a way to talk about the concept of gaze in this book. I’m glad you mentioned Moonlight, because even from the cover page and the cover art, it was clear to me that this is a project about “gaze” in some ways.  For me, growing up in Nigeria, where everybody looks like me, in certain ways, one of the huge realizations I discovered in the US was that all my life I had been looked at with tenderness. A kind of tenderness that I took for granted. Then to suddenly be in a space where some people, not everybody, but some people, sometimes people who don’t know you, in those first years especially, on the street, on the train, sometimes look at you with the opposite of tenderness. And it was a strange rupture because all my life I had been looked at with kindness. So how does gaze play a role in this cinematic project of yours? In these poems, you are always looking at things, or at least the persona in these poems is always looking and perceiving themselves as being looked at. What role does gaze play in your poetics as well as the process of putting together the poems that form this book? 

 Let’s start with the cover image. It is a painting called Frenzy of Exaltations by a polish painter, Władysław Podkowiński (1893). The reason I ended up choosing it as a cover for the book is if you go to the Wikipedia page for Sylvia Plath’s poem “Ariel,” this is the painting that appears (Harper and Row, 1965). And so that poem, “Ariel,” is ostensibly about Sylvia Plath, or the speaker of the poem, riding a horse into sunrise, but really it’s a poem — I read it as poem about suicidal ideation, and I read that poem for the first time, maybe somewhere between 14 and 17 in Botswana, digging around for books in my grandparents’ basement and so on, and encountering this picture of Plath and this like slim anthology of American writers and so on. And I had this dark fascination with the poem. But I realized, really, only later, when I was in the college in the US, this poem has a startling, strange kind of horrifying line where she says, “Nigger-eye / Berries cast dark / Hooks— / Black sweet blood mouthfuls” (Plath, Ariel). And suddenly, this poem that I really loved, which I regarded as — up until that point, or even still — my favorite poem ever, took me or took my Blackness and used it as a vehicle for its own aesthetic description and in quite a violent, dehumanizing way. And so, a lot of this book is working against/with Plath’s poetics, since she’s my favorite poet, and thinking about my education, my poetic education, being so westernized, how do I come to grips with my own sense of Black self given those influences? So, in that sense, I was forced into thinking about gaze because of the reasons that you brought up, because you move and you are regarded differently. I remember when I was growing up — Botswana is right next to South Africa, sometimes you do school trips that would go to South Africa, and I realized how wrong the air could be when I would go to certain restaurants or whatever, you know, and I was very, anywhere between like 11 and 14. And just realizing how–not everybody, but certain Afrikaner people looked at me, and no one looked at me like that in Botswana, not even really the Afrikaner people (in Botswana) looked at me like that.  

And these were strangers? 

Yes. And they looked at you, either in a way that regarded you as a potential vector for violence or looks filled with hate or disgust or terror. And I was a child, right? And so, when I came here (US) for my last year of high school and college, every once in a while, I would get a flash of those looks that I’d received, you know, in post-apartheid South Africa. So, I guess I was forced into thinking that way (about gaze) because I wasn’t regarded, at a base level, with tenderness in the way that you described. I’ve also had a long-abiding interest in cinema as well. So that prompted for the original — and this is a terrible original title — terrible, pretentious, original title of this book was Film Studies. I was in a workshop, and someone said, “why don’t you just call it please make me pretty.” They said, “We love this line, let’s put it on a shirt, and we can sell shirts that have this phrase: ‘please make me pretty.’” And then they were like, “Oh, cool. Well, why don’t you just make that the title?” And I was like, “oh, actually, I should.” 

 It’s a blessing. 

It’s a big blessing. But for the Film Studies thing, you know, there’s several poems — there’s a sequence of poems in the book called “film studies,” three film studies poems, and part of that was my initial fascination with cinema. But also, at the time that I started writing the book, I was dating someone who is an aspiring filmmaker, or was in undergrad, and so there was some tension there, because I do remember this particular experience where she was making the short film for a class of hers, a short documentary film. She asked me to be the subject of it. I thought it was just going to be a very straightforward interview, but then it ended up being a lot of these questions about my Blackness and my Africanness and so on, which would have been fine, I think, in the space of the privacy of an intimate relationship, but in terms of having the camera on me, it did something, and it reactivated a lot of that tension of feeling, of a feeling seen  in a way that I didn’t subscribe to, seen in a dehumanizing way. And, you know, for her part, I don’t think she was intentional or anything like that, and we talked about it and so on, but it’s that flash of it. And I realized that it could come from anywhere.  

Violence is violence, intention or not.  

It was very strange and dispiriting. And so, a lot of the poems in the book are not necessarily about that experience, but they also talk about the relationship with this person and the dynamics of interracial relationships and so on. It’s not the entire project of the book, but it’s something that I started reflecting towards the end of that relationship and after, and how that situation became a sort of synecdoche for my entire racial experience in America at large.  

You mentioned Plath and it got me thinking about one of the most interesting things about this book, which is the tapestry of influences. The leaps across cultures, languages, and continents. You begin, for instance, with a poem that referenced “Song of Lawino”(East African Publishing House, 1966) by the marvelous Ugandan poet Okot p’Bitek. Some of the early poems mentioned Achebe and Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o, these giants of postcolonial subjectivities. And then right next to them in your book we’re encounter Plath and I’m like, “What’s going on here?!” (And I say this with delight).  So, talk to us about this beautiful multiplicity of influences and leaps that were guiding this project. 

Sure, I think part of that is just an educational background thing. And so far, as you know, in high school, I studied under a kind of version of the British system. Botswana was colonized by the British and so on. And so I took IGCSE English, and they tried to be pretty reasonable in terms of having a lot of post-colonial writers and so on. But the strange thing that happened is that I was growing up in Botswana, and no one had actually taught me Chinua Achebe.  

I really only read Things Fall Apart (Heinemann, 1958) because I had this friend; her name is Abile Modesi, also a poet and writer. She passed away when I was in form three, so that’s like grade nine or 10. And she had told me to go read this book. And actually, my (first) contact with Song of Lawino is after she passed away, her mother did this really beautiful thing where she invited her friends to her house to take, to carry with us things that she had, so like, things like books and shirts. And so, the copy of Song of Lawino that I got was Abile’s copy of Song of Lawino. And so, I owe a lot of my experiences of African literature to her. In fact, the chapbook that preceded this book is dedicated to Abile. But yeah, at least that’s where the Song of Lawino comes from, from Abile, with regards to the Achebe and Ngũgĩ. I talked about going to my grandparents’ — I would go to my grandparents’ place on school breaks, which is a very common experience in Botswana. You go to your home village, you go to your grandparents, you go to your aunts and uncles, so on during winter breaks. And so I went to my grandparents on my mother’s side, and at some point you get really bored and whatever, so I started like exploring — it wasn’t actually a basement — but it was a separate room that was filled with all the stuff that my mother and her sisters and brothers, the books that they had when they were in university. They went to the University of Botswana I think like late 70s, early 80s, right at the height I think of African post-colonial literature as a thing. The Heinemann African writers’ series was being published in earnest. So, I discovered those books. That’s where I picked up Devil on the Cross by Ngũgĩ for the first time and my brain exploded (Heinemann, 1980).            I didn’t know anyone could write something like this, you know. And I’d always been reading, but here I am, like, probably, what? 16? 17?,  and my brain is being exploded by realizing this entire time, growing up in an African country, I wasn’t reading these things that looked like me. Partially, that’s because I went to an international school with an orientation towards having us be culturally equipped to go to schools abroad and so on. And many of my friends in public schools in Botswana had actually read Achebe, but I didn’t have that experience. So that’s how I got to Achebe and Ngũgĩ. As for Plath, I had long been fascinated with her because I had encountered her also in those stacks of books from my parents’ education, and their parents’ education, and so on. But when I came to the States, I started reading more and more 20th Century American poets and took classes on them, and all of those, like really, were ingrained in my consciousness. I mean, at first I thought my interest in 20th century American poetry was just because my mind was colonized and so on. But I think actually, I’m genuinely intellectually interested in it, aesthetically interested in it. I think there’s something pretty warm and chatty that happened in 20th century American poetry in particular. I think how it can go from being breathlessly philosophical and intellectual to just, like, casual speech is something that astounds me. And so, I wanted to do something like that, where I wanted to write poems that had that same kind of, like, casual interior replication of the actions of the mind, and also could be chatty with the reader and conversational, but also address serious subjects and themes. I’m thinking of people like Robert Lowell, people like Berryman. I don’t think T.S. Eliot gets a reputation for being chatty, but I think The Wasteland (The Criterion, 1922) is extremely chatty, right? And so,I wanted to do stuff like that. And I also remember Robert Hayden and his poem “Middle Passage” in particular as this large, you know, like modernist, Black modernist poetic project is something that I wanted to try. So those influences that appear in the book are mostly just stuff I loved, stuff that I loved that spoke to me, that refused to get out of my brain, and they were from everywhere, in particular, Black African poetry, African American poetry, and, you know, yeah, white 20th Century American poets like Plath in particular. 

Beautiful. I wanted to talk to you about sound and rhythm and repetition as a strategy of musicality in your work, and perhaps there’s some sort of connection between that and Clifton Gachagua’s marvelous book, the Madman at Kilifi (University of Nebraska Press, 2014), you know, in this way that repetition can be a strategy of music and tenderness.  

Yeah, and I mean, Clifton is such a huge influence on me, and I got him to blurb the book. His is one of the blurbs, which was such an amazing thing for me to have not just another African writer blurb my book, which is, of course, important to me, but Clifton in particular, because his work is so strange. He is such a weird poet.  

The music, the drama of it 

And for me, you know, at some point when you — and I won’t claim that I’ve read a lot of poetry — but at some point, if you’ve read enough poetry, you start to see the moves and so on; you run the risk of being bored. Not with Clifton. Clifton is one of the strangest poets I’ve ever encountered, you know. And I also wanted to try being strange, because I thought, well, the brain is strange, the mind says strange things all the time, if I want to write poems that really get at the sense of what being a person is like and tracking the actions of thought then this is the poet I should emulate. And you know, he just has such startling lines, like, I think, one of the last lines of this poem, something like “at a rooftop in a Bucha,” he has this last line, which is like “at night, I bled marigold from my anus,” or something, you know, just lines that you would not, couldn’t possibly believe would be true, yeah, and they still had this, like a standing emotional resonance. That particular poem is investigating something interesting about how men talk to each other about sexual conquests and so on, and for him to have this, like very interesting admission as a speaker about what I view is, what I’m reading is, like this potentially homoerotic fascination and so on, also startling to me. Anyway, Clifton, yes, huge influence. I remember, for one of the assignments I had to do for — I took a class with Jorie Graham — and she made us read a poem a week and to type up about like three to five poems that we liked from that book. Clifton’s Madman at Kilifi was one of the books I picked. And the idea was to really have that in our unconscious by like, really tapping into it, by replicating the lines. And we were supposed to type it up such that we get the line lengths right, and we try to get a deep sense of that. The other thing I would say with music and repetition is I’ve — I think it’s two things. One, I used to be a rapper, like, very briefly, and I also did spoken-word stuff when I was in high school. I think a lot of it is my failed rapper energy, like resurging, like “okay, I’m not gonna be a mixtape, dude; that’s just not gonna happen; this is what we’re gonna do instead.” And also, I really like classical music. And so, you know, symphony is that, like, play with a theme in one movement and twist and turn of that theme, like repeated, but make a difference, like each time. You know, I think the book has references to, like, Wagner and Schubert and Brahms, yes, and some I didn’t; I wasn’t able to shoehorn my favorite, which is Beethoven, in there. But yeah, I wanted to have poems that replicated the feeling of listening to music, and I still want to be able to do that like right now. I’m experimenting with trying to write these poems that are like that, have ridiculous titles, like, “piano concerto,” I haven’t really done stuff like that, but I want to replicate that immense feeling, what it feels like to listen to a piece of classical music. I mean, for one thing, poems, lyric poems, come from music, literal, lyrical complement to music. So, I wanted to be in historical continuity with that origin of poetry — did the best that I could. 

I love it. And it sort of gets to what I wanted to talk to you about next which is the poetics of mind activity. You’ve talked about it quite a bit: (you said) you wanted to write poems that replicate the energy, the kinetics, the wonder, motions, and the movements of the mind, which, by its very nature, is musical. The poems are weird because the human mind is weird. It’s full of strange associations. Now, a craft question (and this is for young writers who might be watching this), how do you try to do that on the page? For you, is it deliberate, or do you just go the page and play around and see what happens? Do you architect it? Do you have a structure? What does drafting a poem that replicates the brilliant weirdness of the mind look like practically for you? 

So, I’ll be honest and tell you what literally happened with this (book). I wrote it in a fairly, like, you know, a fairly intense depressive period. So, a lot of it was just whatever my brain was spitting out. In particular, for the prose poems, I would say you have to edit after the fact so you notice the patterns of the mind that are naturally appearing in states of deep emotional distress, and you work with them, you see what is some associative energy that isn’t doing anything thematically interesting. It’s just literally like brain vomit. And you also see some stuff that, I do want to keep these motifs that I’ve been running through, and I want to play with them. So that one version of things is, I think letting your unconscious mind wander in concordance with the emotion, your emotional self, whether you’re happy, you’re sad or whatever, and being willing to succumb to that on the page and just let it happen, at least for drafting. (Then) editing, you need, to edit, you need to edit. But sometimes I did have, I did architect it a little. And I’m certainly trying to architect more in my current writing practice, you know, for example, the poem, “Poetry in America,” the big prose poem, that’s a penultimate poem of the book; when I get to the place where I list the state names, right? That wasn’t — that was the thing I wanted to, I wanted the poem to end there, like towards that direction. That was something I think I’d written the first couple of lines and I knew I wanted to get there right, and I wanted to have this poem called “Poetry in America” both as like this, like, snarky, like, I’m going to make my statement on what American poetry is. It’s just Black, Diasporic, African and so on. And run up against some of the poets that I love and so on. But I also wanted to be kind of literal about that, and I thought “hey, it’s a kind of music in listing the state names.” Actually, it’s funny, I was told by some American — my professors and friends — that they have these songs where they memorize state names in elementary school and it reminded them of that; (so) maybe in watching, like, American media that was in the back of my head, probably not. But in terms of the architecting of that poem, particularly, I had an editor, Cal Bedient, he’s the editor of Lana Turner journal, great poetry magazine. And I also, you know, admired him so much that I asked for a blurb from him. So, when I sent him these poems, he had taken the two aria poems and “Poetry in America” to be published. He was like, “you don’t list all the state names, list all the state names of shores,” because what I was really addressing was, was this, this notion of being carried from one place to another, in particular in a violent way, in terms of the legacy of slavery in this country, but also in terms of, like, that strange feeling that I get when I do walk towards the shore of feeling this boundary between the world that I’m in and this other world, you know. And I also think that feeling feels especially salient when you’re Black. I think it’s impossible to avoid thinking about it whenever you see a large body of water. It also felt weirdly, ironically salient for me in that I was born in a landlocked country. So, I didn’t (grow up) seeing these huge bodies. So when, when Cal said, “Yeah, just list the states with shores.” I was like, “Oh, my God, why didn’t I think of that?” I think that’s, I think one of the things that’s helpful is having intelligent editors you trust, because even if you have some intentionality with how you’ve structured something, someone else is going to see something, and they might have a more brilliant organizing principle for how the poem should work. But you know, to summarize, I would say, be honest with some of the unconscious energy in your mind. Have some ideas of how you want to layer some things you know, like, at some point I wanted to write a bunch of poems called “Prayer,” because I wanted that feeling of writing something that felt like the prayers I had growing up Catholic. I’m no longer Catholic, of course, but I wanted something that felt like that, because for me, many good poems feel like prayers. An organizing principle for a poem can be something as simple as a title, or it can be — sometimes I would write these fake sonnets. They weren’t strictly metered or anything like that. They didn’t have rhyme schemes, but it is a kind of organizing principle, and having that can help not just constrain your mind, but at least give you something, a form to pour it into, so it doesn’t just feel random, you know?  

I love that. And it leads to my question about your poetics of sequencing. We know writing and editing are authorial activities, but sequencing is a marvelous authorial subjectivity as well. Put together the same poems in a book in a different way, and it’s a completely different book. I sense a musical procession in your book. Whereas (in individual poems) you were interested in strange associations, but there’s a method in the way you put the poems together. There’s a procession-like quality. One thing I’ve always found helpful with that is musical albums, especially the well-put-together ones. They feel seamless. A book of poems, I’ve always thought should feel like one long song. One long song with different notes, different waves, but one long, unified song. In your book, I noticed two kinds of trajectory. There’s the trajectory of feelings, or perhaps oscillation of feelings between being sorrowful but also finding some sort of elation or tenderness. But more importantly, because of the seasons, there was an oscillation or trajectory from death to aliveness and from burial to resurrection, you know. Was it even intentional? What’s your strategy, your poetics of putting together poems to form a book? 

At first, when I was putting the book together, I tried to more or less put it in order of composition, to get the sense of narrative arcing, the fallout from that relationship [with the film student]. But also, when I started teaching the kids — I was a third-grade teacher assistant for a year when I finished the book, at least finished the final first draft. And so, as time went along, more and more poems became about these children. I wanted to give that feeling of meeting them and encountering them and learning them and so on. And also, you know, like the typical —dramedy-like arc of like, boy meets girl, great end, blah, blah, blah. So, then I sent the draft to my friend, a fiction writer, her name is Sabrina Lee, and she was like, “I’m not actually seeing a narrative here, there’s no story here,” which makes sense, because the poems weren’t initially written as a story. They were moments of individual feeling or seeing a particular image and not being able to let the image go. But she did say this, Sabrina said, “I am noticing a lot about seasons,” and so I decided to just put it in four sections each with a season associated. And it ended up working out because I had approximately the same number of poems for each season, and I tried to rejigger it. For some odd reason, and it might be the music thing, I wanted an equal number of poems in each season, right? So, there’s, I believe, 12 poems for each season. And I ended up landing on 12 for a very, very ridiculous reason, in that, I mean, there were approximately that amount, like 10 ish, 10 to 13 in each but I was like, “Well, I want it to be some kind of four number.” You know, like four/four is common time in music and it’s also like, what you rap to. I couldn’t get 16 per each section; I didn’t have enough poems. It’s like, okay, we can do 12, 12 is interesting enough, and like, three/four is what signature associates with — like there’s a kind of danci-ness to that. So, yeah, I settled on 12 poems per section. I wanted an equal number of sections. And I still think you more or less get the arc of encountering the children over time, (though) I don’t think the summer section has any poems that involve the kids. But even structuring something by seasons is also a pretty classical organizing principle. 

I mean, there’s famous — with all these four seasons — pieces of music as well, which I had in the back of my mind, like, after the fact of putting the seasons, that made me happy. I was like, “yes, cool, now we have a referent; the referent matches up, so we can do this now.” 

I think in terms of structuring, you know, sending it to a friend is always helpful. Like, you always make your own attempt when you see if that attempt actually is concordant with a reader’s reality, seeing how they feel, and then re-realizing other ways that you can rejigger the material, I think, is a way of going about it. But also, like, this is kind of miserable to do, but it’s — I tried it, and I think it helps. At some point I read all the poems in order repeatedly and like, sometimes my brain would like, be like, “No, this poem can’t be next” like it would just sound not like — it would just sound not like this should be the next thing, like I hit the wrong chord or whatever, right? And so, I just did that again and again until I could more or less go through. 

And it felt seamless 

Yeah, and my brain wouldn’t be irritated either. 

I taught we might also talk about what it means to be an African poet in a world of multiplicity of influences. How to be African, in your case, with Beethoven and Achebe, Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o and Plath. How do you navigate that? It’s pretty straightforward to me, but for the archives and records, work it out for us.  

Forgive this long preamble I’m gonna make, I hope it’ll make — I promise it’ll make sense. In very literalistic terms, you know, being born Black, being born African, is, like, kind of, like, historically arbitrary in the sense that you could be born anywhere, at any given time or whatever, right? And so I’ve always thought about race and culture as arbitrary in the sense of like, well, I could have been like a French poet or a Palestinian poet or whatever. That could have still been my interiority of consciousness. What doesn’t feel arbitrary to me is the fact of my family. I — even though it might be, like, literally like, philosophically true, the fact that, you know, my certain, my family position, is arbitrary and so on — I don’t want to use that word to describe my relationship with my sister, who this book is dedicated to. I wouldn’t want to say me being my mother and father’s son is arbitrary. So, part of it is literally this intense, personal, psychological, whatever you want to call it, need, desire to honor the fact of my birth, to honor the people around them. And that’s principally what being an African poet means to me. Now, in a larger sense, in a literary tradition sense, and this is also quite important to me, just not with the same immediacy, is that I want to feel in continuity and community with writers who, as far as I’m concerned, saved my life in a serious way, in that I was able to affirm my Blackness in a spiritually serious way because of people like Ngũgĩ, like Achebe, like Robert Hayden and so on, right? And you know, even though I love, like, 20th Century American poets, whatever, like, intellectually, for me, being part of a particular literary continuity with my people is extremely important, regardless of the multiplicity of influences. And I think this multiplicity of influences informs how I get to be in continuity with my people. I think, you know, you see the same thing in Clifton. Clifton has wild references from all over. And I also think of this in terms of, you know, like, a continued Pan-African project, you know, rap has been influential to me in terms of affirming my Blackness, American rap music, you know, I’ve never been to Compton, you know, but Kendrick does things for me, you know. I don’t know what it’s like to have been born and lived in Chicago, but Kanye has done so many things for me. No Name has done so many, you know. Earl Sweatshirt has also done lots of things for me, and I did not grow up in the same situation. I mean, his father is a famous African poet: Keorapetse Kgositsile, right? Yeah, but I think of all of us and being in a large community of global Blackness, for one thing, our political concerns are similar, even though we have, you know, intra African African American political fights. But our political projects are very similar, and we need each other to get the kind of political freedom that we want. But I also think in terms of, I think we need each other in terms of writing our literature, you know, and I want to be a part of that. It matters to me to be a part of that, regardless of how many white American poets I read or like German classical music I’m into, whatever, it’s very important.  

Love it. Let’s circle back then (if you don’t mind) and talk about the redeeming project of your book in terms of the gaze. I believe the book thinks of gaze not just as violence, there’s also a lot of tenderness. There’s this particular poem I love about the persona in the poem. He experiences this minor bike accident and that leads him to meditate on once seeing a Black kid, one of his students, out in the street just having fun and riding a bike.  Just a little Black boy riding a bike. (And that’s worthy of the subjectivity and attention of poetry). 

Yeah.  In biographical terms, quite literally, at some point when I was teaching the third graders, I just fell in love with them, and so I started being happier. You know, when I first fell into the job, and I fell into a job, I was supposed to work a different job right after graduation. I was supposed to go into corporate finance, because I interned at this hedge fund and I had gone — I was supposed to start this right after graduation, but then the pandemic happened, and so they contacted me and said, like, “hey, sorry, fam, we need to move your job offer down a year, like, no one has time to teach you; we’re trying to keep the firm afloat, blah, blah, blah.” And so, I ended up teaching these kids. It was not what I was intended to do. It’s what I needed to keep my visa. And you know, at first, you’re on Zoom, and it was weird. And then we got in person, and, you know, I just started listening to the kids, and they were just such real people. Kids can’t lie, or at least they can’t lie well, they lie so badly that you get this immense access to, like, inner reality, like immediately. And that was fascinating to me. I mean, I studied psychology in undergrad, so I — it was almost like being in this big developmental psychology study. But also, the kids were so sincere, I felt like they loved me for me, you know? You know, if I didn’t show up to school, a kid would be unhappy, like if I was sick, like they would actually miss me, and I would miss them. And so, I wanted to end with that feeling of, yeah, what you said, hope, because there was a sense of renewal. You know, I couldn’t go home during the pandemic, partially because embassies were shut down, but I also didn’t want to risk all sorts of immigration stuff and so on. And the idea that I could be a person in this country through these kids was — it felt impossible, but it became real. It became very real. I was regarded with the kind of tenderness that I hadn’t been previously regarded with during my time here, a real tenderness. And I wanted to end with that in a sense, well, not to be hokey, but they did make me feel pretty. They did make me feel beautiful, not in, like, a little, like, aesthetic way, but in, like, a soul way. Yeah, you know, and, and that’s why I ended with that poem, the clarity poem, the one that you mentioned about the encountering one of the kids on the bike and so on, because that was a way of having a gaze with, you know, the kids would look at me a certain way, and then the kids would look at — I would look at them a certain way, a gaze that really felt humanizing. And in this case, it was very important in that the kid that I mentioned, Mahid, is also Black. His parents are also from the continent, right? And having that association, because, you know, I was a kid once, and I, you know, you wonder when you move here, what would have been like if I was born here? Or what would it be like if I had kids here and so on? And you see how the parents of the Black kids, they are so excited to have a Black teacher, so excited to have a — if they’re boys — they’re so excited to have a Black male teacher, because the lack of those role models is so stark. So, I wanted to end with this feeling of “we can be in continuity with each other; we can thrive; we can be beautiful together.” 

I’m deeply moved. And in this atmosphere and gaze of tenderness, I thought we should end this with you reading the poem “Clarity”.  

But first of all, thank you. Thank you to Furious Flower. Thank you, especially, I was so excited when I heard you’d be interviewing me. I’m a big admirer of your work and you know, you’re one of the people who have helped me come up and to be here with you at Furious Flower is a dream. So, thank you. 

Thank you so much. This has been wonderful. 

Yeah, so this poem is called “Clarity.” It’s the last poem in the collection, so I’ll just go ahead and read it and well, one last thing is that the collection begins in summer and ends in spring. Spring, of course, being a season of renewal and hope, but also it is the last word of — Plath’s original manuscript for “Ariel” ends with the word “spring.” So I thought there was a nice association there, too. But this poem is called “Clarity,” and it’s for one of the students that I taught at Morse Elementary School in Cambridge, Massachusetts.  

Clarity 

Thank you 

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

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Gbenga Adesina is a Nigerian scholar, poet and essayist. He received his PhD from Florida State University, and his MFA from New York University, where he was a Goldwater Fellow. His debut collection of poetry, Death Does Not End at the Sea, won the Ras Shumaker/Prairie Schooner prize, and was longlisted for the 2025 National Book Award. His poem, A People’s History of 1998, was included in the 2025 Best American Poetry anthology, and his chapbook, Painter of Water was published as part of the New-Generation African Poets series from Akashic Books. Adesina has received fellowships and support from Poets House, New York, the Fine Arts Work Center and the Norman Mailer Center, and he was the 2019–20 Olive B. O’Connor Fellow at Colgate University. He has been published in Paris Review, Harvard Review, Guernica, Narrative, New York Times, and elsewhere. He is the inaugural Postdoctoral Fellow in Global Black and Diasporic Poetry at Furious Flower Poetry Center at James Madison University. 

by Lauren K. Alleyne

In Evie Shockley’s hands, language simmers, sings, and shines. Playful and instructive, improvisational and finely crafted, historical and astutely prescient, Shockley’s poems spark the best frictions that words and their meanings have to offer, igniting insight, inspiration and, even in their most poignant moments, delight. In their citation for the Poetry Society of America’s Shelly Memorial Award, which Shockley received in 2023, judges Mary Jo Bang and Monica Youn wrote:
Evie Shockley’s work is imbued with a particular kind of tenderness, for the world
and for the self in the world. It’s a savvy tenderness wedded to a type of vigilance
that continually tracks the lines of the political and the personal, documenting where
they meet and where they later separate again. There is, as well, a keen recognition
of how prosody can heighten the reader’s awareness of the fact that what is in front
of them on the page has been curated so that the complexity of the presentation will
echo the complexity of the human actions that make up the moral universe of the poem.

The “moral universe” of Shockley’s poems is undergirded by a transparent and unapologetic concern with justice (and its rampant opposite). Every poetic tool is deployed in service of both revealing and resisting endemic systemic and historical harms, particularly those activated around race and gender, enacting the “savvy tenderness” that Bang and Youn identify. At the same time, it is a universe that is made both hopeful and capacious by Shockley’s insistence on beauty, joy and possibility.

In “where you are planted,” for example, Shockley uses the enchanting form of the ghazal to bring “southern trees” into visibility by using the phrase as the radif (the repeated phrase at the end of each couplet). Given the history of “southern trees” in the United States, the words bring with them a shadow of the ominous; however, using the form’s requirement of autonomous stanzas, Shockley instead invokes humor (“he’s as high as a georgia pine, my father’d say, half laughing”); beauty (“crape myrtle bouquets burst / open on sturdy branches of skin-smooth bar”); gratitude (“southern heat makes us grateful for southern trees”); and a sense of ownership (“frankly, my dear, that’s a magnolia … amazed how little a northern girl knows about southern trees.”). These positive images, constructed with deft attention to visual, sonic and tactile language, create warm associations that work to foreground Black belonging and rootedness — healing the relationship between southern Black history and the landscape upon and within which it occurs. The poem’s final stanza, however, returns to the historical images of “southern trees” through a reference to the image of lynched Black bodies as the “fruit” of said trees, as inscribed in popular consciousness by Billie Holiday’s song, “Strange Fruit”:

i’ve never forgotten the charred bitter fruit of holiday’s poplars, nor will i :
it’s part of what makes me evie : i grew up in the shadow of southern trees.

Shockley uses the penultimate line to bring the full weight of white supremacist cruelty into the poem, demonstrating how the brutality of that history simultaneously informs, but does not entirely define the speaker’s past (“I’ve never forgotten”), present (“it’s part of what makes me”), and future (“nor will I”). The ghazal’s formal demand for a signature couplet (the “mahkta”), which must include the poet’s name, makes the poem’s political undertones deeply personal and links the intimacy crafted throughout the poem to the larger systems of history and culture. “evie,” too, is a fruit of “southern trees,” but more importantly she is both maker and keeper of their significance, her living name claiming the complexity of her legacy.

As the judge for the 2023 Furious Flower Poetry Prize, Shockley came to JMU’s campus and in addition to reading with the winner and honorable mention, she sat for this interview for The Fight & The Fiddle. What follows is a version of that conversation that has been edited for clarity.

Thank you, Evie. Welcome to Furious Flower and to the Fight and the Fiddle. It’s just so wonderful to have you here!

Such a pleasure to be in your company and in this beautiful space.

I want to know where your first poetic moment was, the moment when you felt in your power as a poet, that moment where you felt like, this is the thing.

Wow. In my power. I feel like that is a different question than we often get asked. The “origin” question I kind of have an answer to. I remember a couple of moments that might speak to your question. One is when I was in graduate school at Duke, which was not when I began writing poetry, because I was a creative writing undergraduate major, but almost ten years later, when I was in grad school. I got a chance to take a couple of workshops with Lucille Clifton who visited our campus to my great fortune while I was there. There was a moment when she read a poem that I had turned in for workshop and she said, ‘Evie, girl, you are a poet.’ Well, that certainly felt like an anointing, and I took that to my heart. So that’s one moment I remember, but I don’t know if it speaks to the full aspect of your question about feeling in your power.

I don’t know if I have a specific moment, but I can tell you it would have been at a reading. What I love is sharing my works, reading and having that exchange — my voice moving the air and reaching people in their bodies and coming back. It would be in one of those spaces where I would feel the energy coming back to me in a way that was magnified and allowed me to know that something I had written spoke to people and generated something.

You are here as our 2023 judge [for the Furious Flower Poetry Prize]. When you read a poem, what are the things that move you and what are the things that draw or compel you to a poem?

Oh, wow. Many things! I’m a very promiscuous reader, if you will. I am drawn to some poems because of their word play. Also, their ability to not necessarily make my mind, not knot up, but follow a knot in a way that allows me to untangle something. I love a poem that has me looking up things. I feel like I’ve learned so much in my life from reading, and I go to literature to be pushed and unfolded. That’s something that moves me in a poem. Sound, even if it’s the imagined sound in my head when I’m reading on the page. I have one of those inner voices, so I’m literally hearing the sounds as they unfold, and I love a poet who seems to be in control and aware of how the sonic qualities of their words — not just their semantic meaning — carry meaning. I love poetry that kind of immerses me in an experience that draws me in to where, maybe I forget that I’m reading, but that makes me understand the reading to be a kind of participation in a cultural experience itself. I love a poem that makes me think just as much as I love a poem that makes me feel.

I have a question about your own poetry. Experimentation is one of the words that is so often used to describe the work that you do. I’m interested in your relationship to experiment and how that term sits with you. Is it one that you embrace, challenge, or wrestle with?

Yeah, it is a term that I have a little push and pull with. When I was a newer writer and still trying to figure out what my aesthetics were, I was really interested in poets whose work was called experimental. That’s part of the poems of the “poems that make me think” category. I struggled with what I felt to be the racialization of that term, the way that it was applied much more readily to white poets than poets of color and Black poets. I struggled with the way it was used to valorize that kind of poetry over some of the other kinds of poetry that I also value. The way that it seemed to suggest that experiment and thought is only cerebral and not embodied. Those kinds of things have always given me pause about the term, along with words like innovative and sometimes (although it has a more limited application), avant garde. It is one of those terms that serves as a shorthand, however imperfect, for an interest in the language itself — a lot of the materiality of language and how poems that really don’t try to make you lose yourself in it but make you feel yourself working with it … and having an object, a made thing, across from you or in your ear.

I’m curious about your fourth book and about how you see your own trajectory across the span of those four books. What feels still like quintessentially Evie? What feels different? What’s still surprising? What’s still challenging? And what feels like, Oh yeah, I’ve learned how to do this?

I mean, there’s something about this question that makes me want to run screaming. [Laughs.] I think I try not to analyze my work as consciously as that, in part because I spend so much time analyzing other people’s work, which I love doing. But I feel a kind of hesitation about … really dissecting what’s happening in my poetry because I feel that a lot of my process and a lot of the way that my poetry unfolds in the making is very intuitive, despite it being really interested in the language and somewhat conceptual and formal, and all of those things, and yet it’s just very intuitive. And so, there’s a way that I think I worry that if I finally understand or articulate what it is I think I’m doing that I will lose the ability to do that and have to figure out a way to do something else.

To back it away from the work and taking it back to the idea of practice … I just feel like over the course of writing, even though I haven’t written anything in a while, I feel like I’m less panicked about it because I’ve come to trust that I will write again … maybe backing the question away from the specificity of the work, and more to the career or practice.

Yes, that is a little less intimidating. [Laughs.] Yes, I do. I do feel like if I look at the way my writing has moved across these four books, I can identify at least a sense of calm about poetry. I’ve never felt like I will never write again, because it’s just too necessary and intrinsic. But I have worried and usually at the end of each book project, “what am I going to do next?” But I do have a trust that something will come. One of the things that I have come to understand that I am interested in in the way my work moves is that I am maybe something of an occasional poet. Not in the way that that term often means for people, especially not in the derogatory sense. People use the term “occasional poems” as a kind of put down; it is the idea that something you’ve been asked to do can’t be a full-throated expression of one’s own artistic voice or that kind of thing.

To go back to your own statement that you don’t write as much right now, it’s busyness, it’s life taking off. I often find myself making time to write because someone has asked for something — sometimes something specific, sometimes something not — but that call enables a response from me and I don’t fight that. I don’t have a problem answering that call. I think earlier I would have really panicked and felt like, What am I supposed to be doing? What do people want from me? Now I just go okay, this is what the scenario is. What is in me that speaks to that? And it always brings something forth. That is a really good feeling to kind of know that poetry is in me in a way that I can access. Not necessarily on demand, it doesn’t always happen today, but it’s so deeply a part of me that the reservoir is never dry.

You’re also a scholar. How does that part of you speak to the poet part? What’s their relationship? Part one, and then part two, as a scholar of Black poetry and Black writing, I’m interested in what you are seeing at the moment. What are the things that are exciting to you about this moment in Black poetry?

The poet and the scholar are the same person. I have struggled with different ways of articulating the relationship over the years, and I’ve just come to understand — or maybe arrived at a place — maybe they weren’t always, but I’ve arrived at a place where they’re the same person. I’m maybe flexing different muscles more prominently in one case versus the other. But the ways that I have come to know other people’s poetry is by trying to research it in a way that will allow me to talk about it as a part of a tradition or talk about its aesthetics as a kind of a cultural phenomenon or what connects different poets. That mindset in approaching other people’s poetry unlocks ideas for me. It allows me to come to the page conscious of the tradition in a way that I don’t think is different from poets who read the tradition as poets. I don’t know what it’s like not doing that mindset. In fact, if I could say that when I was an undergrad and really studying poetry, without studying poetry to write, without having as much of a sense of the specifically the African American tradition, I don’t think I understood what poetry was. My undergrad poetry — no one will ever see it — it was horrendous. It was lacking something, and I think it’s by approaching my writing as someone who has a tradition, feels … I don’t know if ownership is the word I want to use … embedded in and embraced by a tradition, multiple traditions even — that puts me in my power as I write.

And what’s exciting to you?

Oh, that’s right. So, we’re in a moment where I think we, for once, or finally … (in terms of my life as a poet), we’re not talking about camps and schools and divisions and how to un-divide them. The remnants of those ways of thinking are definitely still with us, but I think younger poets coming in are not feeling as tethered to or oppressed by those ideas of what kind of poet are you? What you have to do to be that kind of poet? People slam and then spit out a book, they write a book and then they blow you away at the mic. That’s always been a kind of fluidity within African American poetry, but I think it was happening in tension with what was going on in American poetry more broadly. These young poets, they’re just not even giving time to that. It’s like, I’m gonna do an erasure that when I read it aloud sounds like the blues.

Another division we love is the political and poetic — we’ve talked and talked and talked about it. Your work lives in that space, so how do you imagine wielding the poem at that intersection?

I’ve thought about this so much, because it is something that you felt like you had to respond to all the time over the years. For me, the political is my personal. I’m not someone who writes as much about family or, you know, I write about family, I write about love. I write about all the things, but I think what I’m trying to get at is that when I’m writing those poems, I’m often interested in what my individual experience means in a history and in a collective across space and across time. And for me, that is the political analysis. The sociopolitical, not just the political in a narrow, kind of legal or governmental framework. When I’m thinking about race, whether it’s the culture I grew up in or the ways that American racism has shaped the culture I grew up in. I don’t understand how people dissect those things, and so I just write into that failure to understand. Even more to the point I write about the fact that they are connected, and that the failure to connect them is what makes these problems and their relationship to our pleasures so difficult to manipulate, to change, because we want to see some changes.

I’m interested in your poetic ancestry. What are the claimed, the unclaimed, and the unknown ancestors? Like, who do we not know that you’re talking about, that’s in your lineage? We want to talk about the ones we love, but I want to know about all of them!

We love [Gwendolyn] Brooks, [Lucille] Clifton. I mean, [Sonia] Sanchez. The ancestors can be among us. I’m thinking about who do I have a love-hate relationship with, in my poetry? I would say I’m writing like secretly with or alongside John Donne, that’s not somebody I name check. I name check Shakespeare a lot, but John Donne’s sonnets are in the back of my mind. He’s got so many memorable lines. And you know, he’s got some crazy gender politics in some of his poetry, but “Valediction: Forbidding Mourning” is embedded in my head, right? I think people know that I’m writing with Emily Dickinson. But I feel like the poet that I can name that, if I were asked, whose work does your work stand in opposition to? it would be [Ezra] Pound because I’m interested in the experimental. You can’t avoid his presence or his influence in the scholarship and the way that poets in that community understand themselves. But I’m really really not interested in what he’s doing. I’m really opposed to a lot of the things that he’s doing, and I would say if there’s some, probably unknown to myself, force against which I’m measuring or am pushing, Pound might be the one.

I don’t like [T.S.] Eliot, but I like the Eliot poems that I like. “The Wasteland” and “Prufrock” are just going to show up, as they do, in my books over and over again. Because it’s the voices that are in your head — sometimes it’s poems that you read as such a young poet. I studied “The Wasteland” in college. I read Emily Dickinson in college. [Philip] Larkin is a poet I’m probably writing against in certain ways. I memorized one of his poems. I can’t not know it; it is actually one I kind of like. Oh my god – they’re all coming to me now! Stevens! Oh, I do not like — I do not like [Wallace] Stevens. I do not like that cerebral-ness that tries to disembody itself.

What book do you return to? What are you currently reading? What is next in the to-be- read pile? 

What book do I return to? I mean, I think there are a lot of books in that category, but I’ll say one that’s in my heart right now, She Tries Her Tongue, Her Silence Softly Breaks, Nourbese Philip’s work. And that book in particular, not because it’s bigger than Zong!, but it’s been with me for so long there are just lines that are in my bloodstream and informing everything I do. I don’t get to give Nourbese love as much as I’d like to. What am I currently reading? In a very literal sense, I’m about to kind of reread Marwa Helal’s book, Ante body, because I’m teaching it on Wednesday. But, asterisk, I teach the books that I want to spend time with. That’s her second collection. She’s one among the many younger poets (by which I mean everybody younger than me) whose work challenges and reinvigorates me.

And in the “to read” pile?

I read poetry a lot during the year because I’m working in it. When I think of my summer reading, it’s gonna be a novel. I’m gonna jump into N.K. Jemisin’s The World We Make, or Victor Lavalle’s new novel, Lone Women. I know that there are books of poetry in my summer reading pile, but right now, I just need a novelistic palette cleanser.

I am thinking about poetic communities, and I feel like you’ve been a part of many. I wondered if you would share some of those communities, some of their impacts, and just your relationship with them. How have they helped you or challenged you?

Poetry communities, poetic communities, are my lifeblood. If there’s anything that I don’t like about this moment in my writing life, it’s that finding time to be in community like that is harder and harder. Obviously Furious Flower creates/has created, especially in these ten-year magnificent gatherings, has manifested the larger community that you know you’re a part of, but you don’t always get to fellowship with. I’m really grateful for what it meant for me to be at the 2004 and the 2014 conferences [and the 2024 conference], to feel that larger body. Cave Canem. I don’t know who I would be as a poet without Cave Canem, simply because at the moment that I was ready to think seriously about writing, Toi and Cornelius opened that door, and so those two things were simultaneous for me, and so I have no experience other than that undergraduate period that we will leave behind. I don’t have any experience of a writing life without Cave Canem. Poets at the End of Horizon (Poets at the End of the World), a little collective that I’m in with Ama Codjoe, Donika Kelly, Lyrae Van Clief-Stefanon, and Nicole Sealey. Five of us gathered together around the idea of following in Gwendolyn Brooks’ and Lucille Clifton’s, June Jordan’s footsteps in making manifest the connections between poetry and activism, the work that poetry does in the world and the work that you can do with a platform as a poet and the work that you can do with the attention or even the funds that poetry can gather. We’ve done fundraisers, we’ve done readings together and then we donate the funds. For a long time, we had to take a hiatus while one of us was out of the country, but our practice has been to meet monthly, virtually because a lot of this was during the pandemic. But that connection with like-minded people who could understand where you are in your life, but also how where you are in your life impacts your ability to write, shapes what you might write, who can who can read between the lines, and hear between the words … that’s just another more recent example. And there’s so many other kinds of communities in between.

I’m curious about teaching since you teach in various capacities. What do you encounter in the classroom around ideas of poetry and how do you navigate those ideas? Regardless of the setting, what’s the thing that you’re trying to bring your students to or give to your students?

Oh, wow, that’s a great question. I think about teaching a lot. If there’s anything that runs through all the kinds of teaching, I want to be the conduit for something that they will love. It doesn’t matter what because when you find what you love, it’s the gateway to everything else. In my signature Black poetry course that I teach as literature at Rutgers, I am always trying to think through my syllabus, how can I bring people from different regions of the country, people who use form, people who use form in a way that you didn’t know was form, people who are busting out all over the page in a use of form that is about the destruction of constraint. Because different students are going to respond to different things.

When I think about representation on my syllabus, it’s not a matter of checking boxes. It’s about if there’s gonna be a student in my class who will understand that this is for them if there’s a queer poet; they’ll understand that this is for them if there’s a poet whose parents came from the Caribbean; they’ll understand this is for them if there’s a gender nonbinary person, and just all the categories. It’s a real pleasure for me to think in terms of curating an experience of the tradition that demonstrates that all of that is there — come in and dig around, find yourself. With writing students, it’s the same thing, but through poets to modes of writing that will unlock your sense of feeling in your power as a poet, right? It’s again a kind of bringing together different aesthetics and types of poetry, approaches to poetry – lyric poetry, very conceptual poetry, and everything in between, or everything else within that circle (I’m going to try to get out of the linear and into a more circular motion with my metaphors). If students can understand that for each poem that they want to write, there are multiple ways of going in and coming out, that’s what I’m interested in. What’s going to make eyes light up or hearts beat faster? And that’s not just in the realm of emotion. I think we underestimate how having an idea click is such a visceral experience.

We do like to act as though our minds aren’t in our heads, which is the top of our body.

Mmhmm. Try thinking when you’re hungry or cold.

What was your most transformative encounter with a poem — that moment when you lit up?

I would go to something like maybe Gwendolyn Brooks’ “Annie Allen.” To see what you can do with centering on a life like your own. Annie Allen’s life is like Gwendolyn Brooks’s life in many ways. That you can center your life and take the place of an Odysseus or an Aeneid in an epic context. You can see your life as larger than life. You can make art of the most basic, ordinary things, and show what is mind blowing about those details. I mean, Brooks has taught me so many things, but that’s a poem that I was just so intent on writing about, because it did all of that and it did it in a way that was formally just dazzling. That’s a poem that sort of represents all the possibilities at once that I value.

What’s the thing that poetry has most transformed for you?

I think poetry has transformed my politics in ways that I don’t often talk about. I think I came to poetry with a certain set of politics — racial, anti-racist politics, feminist politics, Black feminist politics in particular. And that Black feminist politics comes with investments in working against homophobia, working against the sort of wanton misuse, or instrumentalization, of the resources of the planet (even thinking of them as resources is the beginning of that problem). When I think about some of the politics that we think of as newer, more on the current horizon — around gender beyond feminism, and around some of the kinds of ways that liberation challenges even the notions that I came up with about what liberation would mean, it’s through poems and poets talking about their poetry that I have gained a lot of the insights that enabled me to go Oh, no, I don’t need to hold on to that. I am very grateful to a lot of poets out there.

I’m very grateful to you. Thank you so much for this amazing conversation.

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

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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).

Photo credit: Erica Cavanagh

by L. Renée

Jamaican-American poet Shara McCallum visited James Madison University in May of 2024. L. Renée, then-Assistant Director of Furious Flower Poetry Center, interviewed McCallum on behalf of The Fight & The Fiddle. What follows is a transcription of their conversation, which has been lightly edited for clarity and consistency.

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In your work, you can wrestle with history, identity and myths. Writers, prose writers especially, could spend hundreds of pages wrestling with this, but you do so in poems. I wanted to see if you could talk a little bit about why you think poems–this form, this economy of language–can hold those themes that are so full? 

I think there are two answers for me where this is concerned. One is that poetry is the oldest of all art forms in literature, but originally, its orality merged with song. So, in it, it contains all the threads of history, myth, storytelling, music; and I feel as if the lyric, the dramatic, the narrative—all those modes exist in a poem. I’m honoring that history of poetry and the tradition of the art. The other reason is, I’m sort of obsessed, as a poet, with silence, so I hear a lot of the weightiness of language, when I’m writing. The caesuras, those pauses, that syntax, sometimes create the line or creates the spacing on the page that you can also manipulate in a poem. I feel as if that silence, especially, is where the myths in the history that I’m concerned with come together. So as much as I’m interested in speaking to the silences in those stories that we have, the incomplete narratives of the past of people like you and I, I’m also interested in sounding that silence, allowing that to reverberate in the poem. 

I often think about that, the sentence as a sentence, right? Expectations that are brought to that and how we can use poetry in line breaks, and as you said, caesuras to disrupt expectation, or to make that turn that one might not expect otherwise.  

Right, and I feel as if in a poem, we’re working with both of those rhythms. Because we have the backdrop of the sentence that’s always going, right? And then we have the line, which is a measure on top of that measure. And I like that multiplicity of sound and disjuncture that you can create with enjambment in a poem, and sometimes you would go with the rhythm of the sentence, sometimes you move against it, you cut against the syntax. So, it is having multiple musics to work with in a poem that is interesting. 

Well, speaking of music, in 2017 at AWP I was walking through the exhibit hall, and I heard this voice, this sound, this beautiful music that led me to you. I have been a fan of your work ever since: the music, the assonance, the consonants, the rhythms, the resonances, that your work creates really draws me, as a poet who’s often led by sound first. In your own practice, when you come to a blank page, are you coming with sound, music, and maybe not even language before you come to the page? Are you coming to the page with an image? A narrative? How do you start? 

I would say voice is probably the way that I hear a poem. And it is often driven by patterns of sound that would create, then, a character of that voice on the page. But I think narrative comes late for me. It’s not that I’m not interested in storytelling, but I have a hard time telling a story in a very direct fashion. I think that that’s the lyric. That’s the sound of the speaker and the poem’s voice, often driving the point for me. And it’s a choice to make in revision, as a writer to move in certain ways when you when you have the distance from whatever you’ve drafted. But what I’m brought to the page by is a sense of someone speaking to me. I don’t usually know who they are. Usually, it’s a woman, sometimes, as in this book [No Ruined Stone], I’ve written in the voices of men. But I write the poem in a way to give habitation to that voice, to flesh it out, to hear it, follow it, and see where it wants to go. 

How have you trained your ear to listen? In this world with a cacophony of sound, of distraction, of news, of stuff? How do you tune in? 

Well, I’ve read a lot of poetry. I feel as if I put myself in the presence of other art that I love. And I’m then in conversation with those other poems. I’m a teacher, too, and whenever students bring poems, I’m often saying to them, I hear this other poem, I hear this other poem. And they may not have read these poems, yet—they often haven’t—but that’s how I hear the language of poetry. So yes, it’s voice driven, for sure for me, but it’s also the voice of poetry that I’m hearing, which is very different than how “Shara” speaks. I mean, my kids would beg to differ [Laughs.]. They teach me that my syntax can be very convoluted, it’s just very Jamaican to have this kind of syntax, I’ve come to understand and to talk long. We’re long speakers! But I do think it’s a combination of the reading I’ve done, the history I carry with me, the voices I’ve heard that aren’t in books, the voices I imagine. But filtered through the lens of what I hear is a poem. That’s a mixed metaphor, the lens, I’d say more to be the reception that I hear as a poem. 

I want to talk about the first book I happened to read of yours—Madwoman. And the speaker of this poem, “Exile” says: The trick is to remember // time is a fish / swimming through dark water.” In another poem of yours that I read “Dear Hours,” which appears in This Strange Land, that speaker references the kind of fleeting quality of time with the narrative of this daughter picking a zinnia. And these lines really made a mark: 

That movement, that shift of time, made me wonder, especially with your continual grappling with history, present, future—what is your relationship with time? Does it feel linear to you? Nonlinear? How were you able to hold the complexities of such a thing? 

That’s a good question, and thanks for reading the poem so carefully and connecting those; I’m thinking about those lines in tandem now. What I think is: I don’t really think I experienced time in linear fashion. I often have difficulty with this because when I’m in the present, I think I’m often pulled out of it into the past. And when I’m in the past, I often can hear the present as well. When I’m working in the past with memory, with archival histories—and this is true even of how I experienced the world as a person, I suspect—it’s that shifting focus, for me, that’s interesting. But the arrangement of language, and the storytelling impulse to make ourselves cohere in the present, is strong in me. And that is a desire to arrange these details in such a way as to create a kind of through-line of self. So, I think that’s where the narrative pull comes from me, is wanting to be a coherent person who moves through the world. But no, I don’t think I experience time that way. 

I suspected so! Speaking of time, we go way, way, way back in time in your newest work, No Ruined Stone, which enacts this speculative history of what might have happened if the poet Robert Burns had sailed from Scotland to Jamaica, as in some facts that you found out, to manage a slave plantation. In your author’s note, you leave us with this question that you said, ‘kept rattling you,’ in your mind over and over and over. “What would have happened, had he gone?” I was curious why that question arrested your attention and kept it for years in making this book. Why was that a thing that you could not let go? 

I tried to recount going back in time, which I tried to do in the author’s note a bit by describing the kind of fixation I ended up having on this subject. There are some obvious answers to this. I think one is that I’ve walked through the world my whole life carrying the surname, McCallum. It’s my father’s name; it’s a paternal name that I did not change when I got married. And my father’s father carried it, and he was a Black Jamaican. This is not something people guess when they look at me, and I’m aware of that. But I think there’s that thread in which I was troubled by the fact that this name, which is so obviously, of Scots origin, and my family’s inheritance of that name, on the patrilineal side. Where did that happen? It’s the question I think that’s true for a lot of Black people in the New World: “How do I come to possess this name?” That’s a European name; it is in some way implicated in slavery, whether you know it or not. If you’ve been here for a few centuries, or even just a few decades, actually, usually that’s the case, right? And so, I knew I was carrying that history in me, I knew it. But I think it collided with the story of Burns in a way that also inflected my own relationship to poetry, to the enlightenment, and even to histories of male genius. A lot of things were going on at that point, which is why it was so troubling for me.  

I had a vision of Burns that came from the poems, and I am not the kind of student of poetry that I increasingly see my students being. Which is to say, I work with so many more students of color in workshops than I ever was with when I was [myself] in workshops—the few that I was in as a literature student. I see so many beginnings in the present, and a plurality of voices in the present, that they have as their tradition. That was absolutely not my tradition starting out. I have worked for that tradition. But my tradition—and I’ve been clear about this with students and many times with people—was the British romantic. So early on, I loved an art that wouldn’t love me back.  I loved poems where (and I came to process this at some point) I wanted the poem without the person, because if I had to wrestle with the person who wrote the poem, I would feel so undone sometimes by that. That is also the history that made this question such a vexation for me. Then the whole history of the Enlightenment, as I said, the whole unfinished project of democracy, slavery, colonization, all those forces in the eighteenth century that so clearly for me are in the present. You know, that question you asked about not being able to hear time in linear fashion? That’s the problem, or is it the gift, I’m not sure if it’s a problem. If you can see those threads that are playing out still. 

I have chills thinking about that line, ‘loving some something that doesn’t love you back,’ and how to wrestle with that love of language and what poetry opens up from a time and a space where people who look like us were not represented. 

There are no histories of us in the archives. There’s very, very few, like a name here or there, but so few. 

That made me wonder about inhabiting this voice of Burns, using his diction, troubling it. In some ways, it felt like to me like, stepping into someone else’s skin, and moving about with it and having that inclination to go No, no, no, no, that doesn’t feel right. This feels right, and doing that with this kind of character. That is complicated. How did you move through that? 

My practice is to read a lot as a poet anyway, but with this book, I read everything Burns wrote. I went back and reread it and really sat with the prose, too, as the poems, to be able to imbibe his language, his syntax. Not to make it imitative mimicry or parodic, which was not my attempt. But to have enough of it in there that I was taking in that syntax, so I could write in a voice that felt distinct from my poetic voice. I knew his history; I knew his backstory and his biography. But I think this also surprises people with Burns. For example, Isabella, who’s in the second half of the book. Everybody just immediately says, Okay, she’s an avatar for Shara. Clearly, she is, though there are some differences that are significant. But I joke with people well, you know, I’m also a poet, why are you not doing that [making the character an avatar] with Burns? What people are failing to see is that there can be other layers that you can create character in, both drawing from your own personal experience, but also from the experience of people I have loved close to me. My father and my grandfather, in different ways, were absent, or people who were complicated figures. I love them, and they were instrumental in the person I am, but there were gaps in how they weren’t fully cited. The women in front of them—we were all this family of women—I can see the ways in which they couldn’t quite, as a consequence of patriarchy, could not completely see the people in front of them. It surprises people to know that I might have borrowed from these people in my life and created this character out of his history, me, and language. Principally too, I’ve watched many male friends, even who are poets, and what the pressure of genius does to destroy them in a way. So, I think it’s so many things that are interesting, and how a character develops that you can see after the fact. The practice, though, was principally to read, and to know as much as I could know.  

There’s another question in this for me, which is the ethical question of doing something like this. I think I wrestled with that, with what right did I have to take a figure like Burns, who is important to Scottish identity, when I am not Scottish. I don’t claim to be by carrying that surname, I am Jamaican. I had to come to the place where I felt like this was also my inheritance, because the Scots came here, and this is why I carry this name. So, I am not claiming Burns for all of Scotland in any way. If they want to admit some part of my Burns into their history, I would be grateful, because I think it would complicate their own narratives, but that’s not my right or role. I’m writing this as a mixed-race Black Jamaican woman who looks white. That is my vantage point. So, this is my Burns, you know. So, I think that’s also a question when you’re dealing with dramatic monologue based on real people. History, myth, these men sometimes were larger than life. There’s to me always the ethical question that you have to ask too, not just what would have happened if he’d gone, which is a narrative question, but the why of this book. “Why, Shar, do you need it to be Burns?” 

You’re using this language of inheritance, which kept hitting me over and over. I wondered, what you feel like—and this can be related to this work, or in general—your inheritance is as a Jamaican-born poet, who has also lived in Maryland, and Indiana, and in all these spaces. How do you carry inheritance? In tangible ways and intangible ways? 

Well, it’s a rocky inheritance, as I’m looking down at the stones on the book [cover] and thinking There’s my answer, the truest answer. You know, I like humor a lot, because I come from a line of women who use it to survive whatever pains you. My grandmother always says, “Yeah, if you don’t laugh, you’ll cry,” so I think this is my answer. In the best of worlds, I feel invited to many parties. In the worst, I get invited to none. And that’s inheritance. I have to wrestle with both of those. Why I want so desperately to belong is the profound question of my life and my work. But I do, except that I’ve wanted more than anything to be claimed, by the people who I claim. And sometimes that happens, and other times it doesn’t. I’m fifty now, so I’m less completely undone by it, but it’s still there in me. And I don’t know why. If I want to psychoanalyze myself, I could offer up what might be obvious, which is I migrated as a child, my father died a couple of days later, my mother didn’t come with us—lots of ruptures that I’ve written into and about for a long time, I can see that. But it might also just be temperamental. Poets and artists tend to have things that we’re fixated on, obsessed by. I’m the kind of writer that works with those things. And I do walk around the world doing other things, besides thinking all of this, but it does occupy quite a bit of my thoughts. 

I was also interested in this use of persona to probe a lesser-known history, which you talked about in your author’s note, thinking about the voices of people who are not reflected in the archive. I wondered if you might speak a little bit about this practice and craft choice of persona, what that opened up for you, and allowed for you in the making of this work. 

So, for example: Nancy. She is the enslaved African woman who has one monologue, but I think she’s the formidable force across the entirety of the book. She is a presence felt throughout Burns’s section, and Isabella’s. She came to me because I went to Jamaica, and you know I’m from Jamaica, but I have to say to people that just as I went to study Scottish history and went to the archives, I didn’t trust that just being Jamaican meant I was an expert in eighteenth-century plantation slavery and the history of it in Jamaica. So, I went to the archive in Kingston to look for maps of the plantation so I could really re-envision that space, and I came across a bill of sale, which I had never held before. I knew what it was, but I actually had to leave and go on onto the streets in Kingston after seeing it because I was completely a mess. I think it’s the way the individual pierces us so differently than how history often allows us a kind of distance. The abstraction of numbers, the way in which we recount the past, even sometimes the language we use that’s so depersonalized from the experiences, but the artifacts on which that history is built? They are tangible, personal experiences of the past. I thought about the girl child named at the age of nine, and I thought about her, and I thought about her mother, and I thought: she’s in this book now. It’s just that moment for me which was the birth of Nancy. That’s the best I can explain for “Why the persona?” It’s because it’s the form I’ve written in instinctively, as a poet, for a long time. But also, a monologue is a provocation to speak, and often you have a very clear point of address. That intimacy of voice personalizes what otherwise people reject. People often still are like “I don’t want to hear about slavery, I don’t want to hear about this.” But I’m like, “Imagine a nine-year-old child taken from her mother, going across this horrible, torturous—” I don’t even have the language for the experience of the Middle Passage that’s adequate “—Now, imagine that, hear her speak.” I think that we will get through some of the defenses that we all put up, because the history is so horrific that we don’t want to engage. 

I’m curious about what your hope for the book was, as a part of that. Are you hoping to engage people on the level of learning about something new that they didn’t know historically, or on a level of having a deeper level of connectedness and empathy? What were you hoping came out of this work? 

It’s a book of poems, so my hope is always pretty low for readers, to be honest with you! I do realize that I have that hope, but I would say first and foremost, I wrote this because I needed to reckon with this history myself. I was avoiding the most obvious subject I’ve only written about—constantly—at the margins. I could see I’ve done it, but while masking myself more clearly, as the mermaid. That history of passing, of miscegenation…it involves rape, and it involves sexual violence, and it’s difficult for me to write about that. I’ve done it, though. I could point to the book I’ve written and say, “I’ve done it,” but Isabella was a sustained attempt to address that history, but also in me. I don’t know if that really answers the question you’ve asked, but I do think that’s partly what I would say. 

That’s even more significant, I think, that it’s the hope that was, in some ways, for you. 

But always as a byproduct of that, you have hope that others who might read this would engage and be willing to engage. There’s always that hope, too, so I’m not trying to deny that. I mean, otherwise, why bother publishing, right? So, it’s illogical to pretend you don’t hope for readers as a writer because we always do, but the first line of entry, in all honesty for me, is grappling with it. What I find I cannot look at is what I always seem to have to look at. Finding ways, as a poet, to do that has been a struggle, but it’s a beautiful one, and you hope other people feel so inclined to join you in that if they read the book and do not look away. And I hope for that. 

I wanted to talk about some of the practical elements of writing a book about so much research and archival work. It’s easy when you’re researching to go down a complete rabbit hole and dig yourself back up to making. I’m curious, how did you know “I have enough,” “I can stop,” “I can write,” “I need to look back at this.” How did you do it? 

Well, your former teacher, Adrian [Matejka] is a friend. The Big Smoke is such an amazing book, [Last on His Feet], with the history of Jack Johnson and how he brings it back, and now he has the graphic novel too. I could name any number of poets, but I’m a big fan of Adrian and his work, and we both know him, I would just say that I had many models. This is a little different because each book is different, but I’m indebted to Lucille Clifton[’s poem], “At the Walnut Grove Plantation in South Carolina.” I didn’t know it at the time, but when I was reading—through all the decades I was reading—it’s particularly Black poets whose need to recount these histories is greater. We see these absences readily, we feel them, and we want to be part of the project of history. So, in a way, I’m joining in that chorus of voices. I don’t want to single my work out because I recognize my debt and that I’m part of a tradition, Elizabeth Alexander’s “The Venus Hottentot,” Natasha Trethewey’s Bellocq’s Ophelia. Too many people have gone before for me to not least allude to or directly mention the fact that there’s a body of work I’m writing into. How I worked with research was different than each of these writers, but I think the basis of it is that underpinning that we need to see ourselves present in a history that would have it be otherwise. 

I only write anything that feels like I need to write it. That’s a litmus test for me, as a writer. If I don’t need to write it, I don’t like to write it—I won’t probably. Even when I’m given assignments, I have to find the need, if I’m commissioned. I was commissioned to write a poem for a project in the UK that’s looking at the Transatlantic Trade and enslaved Africans from the perspective of the UK experience, which resulted in an anthology of poems that accompany to this art exhibition that was launched last fall throughout the UK. I was asked as one of the Caribbean writers to contribute a poem, and I had to find my way into that through need. I ended up writing a monologue that was another monologue in my mind in Nancy’s voice about speaking to her mother. In this book, she speaks to her granddaughter Isabella, for whom she has played the role of a mother because her mother dies in childbirth, but this is Nancy’s poem, speaking to her mother, who she lost. So, I think that’s how I do it. Even when I’m given an assignment, and I wanted to honor that, I find a way in through saying, “What is my unfinished business? How can I make of this something that feels essential and organic? 

I was thinking about the fact that you have been an educator for quite a while, you know, teaching students at Penn State, also the low-residency program. How have your students influenced your writing journey? 

It’s been 28 years that I’ve been teaching workshops, now, and I started, as many of us do when I was studying for my MFA degree, and in my PhD, I kept teaching them. I’ve taught in numerous settings, both inside universities and outside in the US and outside the US. The common denominator for me is I love poetry. When I’m in conversation with students, I’m reminded of that love. Nowhere else in my life has anybody asked me to have this conversation. The rest of my life, how I live, is compartmentalized, and I play other roles as we all do, right? Most of the time, in my house, I’m a wife and a mother, a sister, a friend, and an auntie. These kinds of social roles are very meaningful for me, they’re grounding roles; but as a poet, to be able to have a conversation with you right now, or to be able to have conversations with my students on a regular basis about the line? That’s nerdy stuff that nobody really cares about, you know, so I feel it’s this exchange that renews my love of the arts. I also really, really like to be useful, so as much as my students will allow me to be, I want to share what I know. I think that’s an honest way to approach teaching. So much of the movement toward always empowering student voices is extraordinary because it creates conversations, it creates potential for students to explore and learn and feel confident in their own learning.  

But I always say to them, this is two ways. Because I’m not going to pretend that I don’t also want to share something with you that is a contributor to your development as a poet, I won’t pretend that. That feels dishonest. So, in other words, I like the Socratic method as a teacher, but only to a point. I also I think I’m very Jamaican and I’m like, “actually I know something, so this is the time. Take out your notebooks, this is the time now to listen and write. Here’s what I’m going to say to you, and I want you to think about this; here’s a question I want you to be thinking about.” So, I think it’s also because of that desire to share the journey of my own learning, that there’s an avenue and an opportunity to share that. It’s both of those. What my students give is their enthusiasm and energy, and there is nothing so beautiful as seeing somebody discover that they can do something that they didn’t think they could do. It’s beautiful to me to be in the presence of that and be a participant enabling that. And then I get to share these nerdy conversations and say, “I love to talk about the line, you want to hear?” 

Well, I will share that you empowered me as your student in 2021 at the Kenyan Writers Workshop. One of the reasons I took that workshop with you was because I heard for the first time those years ago at AWP Jamaican Patois in a poem, and I’m someone who is grappling with the language of Black Appalachians and trying to hold what I know, what I hear, while also understanding that there’s stereotype attached to this language and not trying to make a caricature of people that I know and love. I felt empowered by you in that workshop to lean into a poem’s language and voice. I heard it, and I was so worried about doing that because I did not want to reinscribe any kind of harm. So, I wondered if you could talk about that, especially coming from a Jamaican tradition of language and musicality that is also tied up with the colonial project. How do you gain the confidence to write exactly what you wanted to write exactly how you heard it, or if you worried at all about being understood? How did you navigate that? 

I think that there are so many great, great comments that you’re already making about this that I want to just add to those. So, the worry wasn’t driving me, it was the desire to write the voices I could hear, all of them I grew up hearing. I don’t think that in my twenties, the first time I wrote in Patois, it came whole to me like that. So, it wasn’t so much a conscious thought at that moment. I will, again, name names. Miss Lou, Louise Bennett, the Jamaican writer, actor, an amazing presence in Jamaican culture. I grew up also hearing Miss Lou’s stories and about Anancy, and her retellings, and her poems. It felt a part of my inheritance, when I was a young writer, looking for ways to bridge these different influences and worlds. You know, I want the British Romantic tradition, I want the Jamaican tradition, I want the African American tradition, just to name some. I want all of it in me and in my poetry. And so, I’ve tried to bring those voices in. And I know your work, L., and I think you’re doing it beautifully. I hope that the worry will lessen. I understand that that’s a good place to begin from, and I don’t know why I just had such bravado or something. I think it sounds weird to say, but because the voice is what I hear, and I write the poem. “Calypso” came almost whole to me like that, her story in that voice, in that modernized Jamaican setting I had transplanted her into. I don’t know exactly, but I’m sure Miss Lou was an influence, I’m sure of that. I name her because I know she gave me a kind of literary, cultural grounding. I also think it’s just the idea that you write what you need to write and what you hear, that was driving me. 

It’s interesting to think about the oral history component tied up in that, listening to people telling stories, picking up language, pacing, syntax and diction from that oral tradition. 

And I know this book has no real moments of Jamaican Patois, I mean, there’s a few inflections that I can hear, but you know, I was working with Scots in this book. So, I think it’s also a sort of keen interest in the various registers of English and language that I have. Early on, I wrote a poem in my second book, I think, that is also with some Spanish because my mother is Venezuelan. I don’t have firsthand access to the language, it’s always my secondhand, very poor Spanish I speak very baby Spanish. But I think it’s that interest to bring the fullness of the registers of language that you have access to as a poet into your poems. 

I’m curious since at this point, you’ve written six books, you’ve directed at an amazing center for poetry, you’ve been an educator, you’ve had your work, translated in many languages, work set to music—you’ve done all these things while still pouring back into community. Do you even think of what’s next? What is the thing that you want to do or would love to try or have a curiosity about that hasn’t happened yet? Where do you go from here? 

Well, I think I’ll continue to deepen the things that I have done. But you know, I would love the experience of working with a composer and being part of the piece that was performed, that was just extraordinary. It opens me up to the idea of even further collaboration, because normally as a poet I write in solitude. I think that’s going to continue to be my principal practice, but I liked that idea, to talk about community, the way in which it’s orchestrated quite differently. When you’re in a musical setting and performance, you’re working with a conductor, you’re working with a composer, the chorus, it’s collaborative, it’s in the moment, right? The poem on the page is fixed, and then when you give a reading, that’s a similar performance. So, I think that’s interesting to me to continue to do. Translation is the area that I would like to move into more specifically, I need to improve Spanish to do so in my mind. I’ve done a few poems already from Spanish to English, but I’m always feeling it’s not sufficient. I’ve translated for a project. Alicia Ostriker wanted everyone to translate the poem at the base of the Statue of Liberty into other languages as part of a pushback against Trump’s anti-immigration policy, and I translated it into Patois, which is the first time I’ve ever tried anything like that. I’ve never attempted it; I just don’t do that. But I found that these experiences, limited as they were, have inspired me to think about that as another way to give back to the tradition of poetry and other poets in a different context than I have so far. I practice principally as a teacher, sometimes as an editor. I guest edited with Malika Booker, an anthology in the UK of African American, Caribbean, Black British women and women identifying poets. That kind of work exposes me, enlarges me—exposes me to other writers and thereby enlarges me. So, I suppose that’s what translation can further to, and I’d like to practice more of it. What I need to do is find a time when my children are grown, because my vision is to go and spend time in Latin America where I’m forced to speak Spanish again. When I’m forced, it’s amazing that I can remember it, but otherwise, I don’t speak it and haven’t for decades. I need that to be part of the practice, I think, because I’d like my ear to guide me as a poet. 

You’re thinking about part of your practice as immersing yourself in a space, a place, and a culture, so what else do you do, or what else enriches your practice, beyond just the reading? What other things do you do when you’re writing, or do you have any rituals or things you go to, to stay with it? 

I try not to make too many prescriptions, because my life otherwise would enable me never to write, so I just don’t have a lot of rituals. What I do know is I prefer to write in complete solitude. But I grew up in a big family in a small house. I didn’t have my own bedroom until I went to university, so I’m accustomed to sharing space and being alone inside of that. So, I’m also capable of sitting in the middle of everything and tuning everyone out. But I think that’s the only other thing I require. I don’t really have a lot of these kinds of practices. I prefer to write by hand, but when push came to shove, much of this book I changed the practice based on travel—I wrote it on a laptop. I think I don’t want to be so precious personally, about anything, because I would worry, given the other things that I do in the day and in my life, that I would never write if I set up a certain set of parameters that are ideal. 

And I think, again to go back to Burns, the model that we have of artists as the male genius. We need to reckon with that directly, and I’ve spoken about that for a long time. Not just because it excludes the possibility of women being geniuses, I don’t care about that term that much. And I think it’s fraught for me; I don’t like it. It’s not that I’m fighting for the label for women, it’s more so that it’s predicated on this very exclusionary idea of how one practices as an artist that denies caretaking. I am a person who caretakes. I care for my students, I care for my family, it is a part of what I consider valuable in the world, even if it doesn’t result in a poem. I want both of those to coexist, and I dislike the narratives that often are hard for women to follow. So, I want there to be another way and I have models. Lucille Clifton talked about writing her poems when she was in the kitchen, Eavan Boland the Irish poet was a mother of two girls. I had the great fortune of loving both their works and then meeting them. I look for models of people I want to be when I grow up, and I think, as poets and as women, we need those even more. 

I’m grateful to have had your presence here at Furious Flower, here at JMU, but more specifically, of being able to show the capacity of what one can do when they lean into their knowing and what can open up not just for the writer, but for the reader. I am so deeply indebted to you for your light. 

Thank you, and same for yours. 

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

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L. Renée is a poet, nonfiction writer, scholar, educator, and collector of stories. A descendant
of proud Black Appalachians who labored in West Virginia coal towns and Virginia tobacco fields, she was selected by the National Association of Black Storytellers as the winner of the 2023 Black Appalachian Storyteller’s Fellowship representing the Commonwealth of Virginia. Her work has been widely published, and has been awarded several prizes, including the international 2022 Rattle Poetry Prize, Appalachian Review’s 2020 Denny C. Plattner Award, among others. She has earned fellowships from Cave Canem, The Watering Hole, and the dots between, and has been supported by the Barbara Deming Memorial Fund, Inc., Oak Spring Garden Foundation, and The Peter Bullough Foundation for the Arts, among others. L. Renée holds an MFA in Creative Writing from Indiana University, and an MS in Journalism from Columbia University. She also previously served as the Assistant Director of Furious Flower Poetry at James Madison University.

by Lauren K. Alleyne 

Mahogany L. Browne is a poet of the people. From her work as the host of the renowned Nuyorican Friday Night slam, to her work with public-facing poetry spaces like the Bowery Poetry Club, Urban Word, to her recent position as the inaugural poet-in-residence at the Lincoln Center, she has literally and figuratively made space for a plurality of voices in the poetry world. In particular, Black voices and voices of color.  

Within Browne’s own poems, too, the collective is both ever-present and essential. In This is the Honey, published in Poetry in 2021, for example, Browne celebrates a communal “we” that leans in immediately to include the reader as part of the collective. Thusly swept into the poem, “we lean forward” and succumb to a collective music that references but decenters struggle and lifts up collective joy. Labor and voice metonymized as ‘hands and throats” create “a jubilee of a people dreaming wildly / despite the dirt.”  The poem posits the transformative nature of art that “births change” invoking a collective dance—both joy and movement—that “holds our names!” In another nod to collective history, the poem brings in generations—“grandparents,” “sons,” daughters, children—that form a “familial tree / Rooted in miraculous possibilities / & alive.” 

At the same time, Browne’s poems are deeply rooted in the way that communal experiences of Blackness, of womanhood, of Americanness bring their collective heft to bear upon the individual. Her poem “The 19th Amendment & My Mama” is a masterclass, demonstrating the porosity of the “I” as it holds the mother’s history alongside its own, as well as the weight of the current political moment in which everything they share (womanness, Blackness, an urge to forget) and everything between them (addiction, illness, distance), is held in the same thrall. 

Deftly weaving the individual narrative of the contemporary I, the mother’s history and  invoking the historical women suffragettes “Ida & Susan & Lucretia & Elizabeth Cady” Browne knits a collective in the poem that can help face the “the pain / of a world breaking its own heart.”  

Ultimately, Browne’s poetics and praxis are grounded in the urgent knowledge that individual and collective (well)being are intertwined, and that in that nexus lies the truest possibility of liberation. 

In March of 2024, Mahogany L. Browne visited the Furious Flower Poetry Center, and spoke to Lauren K. Alleyne, the Executive Director of Furious Flower. The interview, transcribed below, has been edited for clarity and length.

Welcome to JMU, welcome to The Fight & The Fiddle. This is the journal of the Furious Flower Poetry Center, and we focus on one amazing Black poet every quarter. And so, this is you, Mo.

It’s me! What an honor. Thank you.

Absolutely. I want to start with finding out what was your gateway poem, what was the thing that sparked you and set you onto this poetry life?

I would have to say my gateway poem was fourth grade, James Weldon Johnson’s “The Creation.” I memorized it for an oratory competition–I did it fourth and fifth grade, the same poem. The first year, I think we were in second place. The second year we won. But obviously I had time to rehearse, but that was my first realization, like, Oh, this is magic. This is something. It was leading into high school, and I was then introduced to the Renaissance. And you know, all of those poets, Maya Angelou, Langston Hughes; I was introduced to the writing, and then we were asked to recreate a classic. The classic was Dante’s Inferno, but we were to do it with a contemporary voice. I didn’t know it then, but it was a found poem. I’m finding poetry that already exists. And I thought, N.W.A., they were poets, and they felt like they were talking about Dante’s Inferno in their raps. That was my merge, and my AP Lit professor said “Absolutely not. If you don’t turn in another paper with a different source, you will flunk,” because she did not deem N.W.A poetry. And so I quit. I quit looking at poetry. I stopped believing in it. I just let it go for about five years. And so, the next time I came back to it, I was a mother. My daughter was born when I was twenty-one, and poetry was the one place that I found my voice again, like I couldn’t finish all of the stories that I was trying to write. I was into journalism, but poetry was that, you know, it’s an amuse-bouche. It’s a moment that you get to just write down and let that moment live so that you can breathe easier. And that’s when I return to it.

That that leaving of poetry sort of that comes from folks having ideas about what poems are, what they aren’t, what they should and shouldn’t be. How do you navigate? How do you define the poem?

I think it changes, right? Because who I was 10 years ago and what I thought poetry was then has absolutely been more refined and sharpened. I still believe it is the people’s voice. It is the observer’s eye. It is the love song to the moment, and it is about self-expression. So teaching [students] through New York City school systems for fifteen years, I went in looking like people that grew up with them or were raising them or lived in their neighborhoods, so it was easier for them to hear me challenge them, rather than feel berated when I said, “No, no, it’s not about if it’s a poem or not. It’s about are you telling the truth or not?” And that that was the nucleus for me: if I just had a place to tell the truth for my own self, that would be the poem. And I think that that has remained the one consistent thing to me about what a poem is. But a poem can be many things. A poem can exist in breath. A poem can exist in food. You know, we were driving here, and every sentence driving with this woman [Lauren], every sentence out of her breath, [out of] her mouth is poetic, right? And I live like that, but it’s a rarity that you see it reflected. So, it was very welcoming and warming, but also a reminder that we are living poetry.

What are the biggest challenges to teaching poetry for you, and what are the strategies you found across all of these spaces to bring students into poetry? What are some of the ways that you do you encounter that, and what are some of the ways you’d get across

I think the most difficult classrooms have always been the classrooms where the poetry was the punishment. That’s the hardest one. You know, they’re like, [sarcastically] “Oh, here she comes, the poet, great!” And it doesn’t matter how many Hip Hop lyrics you know, it doesn’t matter how cool your kicks is. If it’s a punishment, you treat it as such. So that is the hardest space to try and introduce poetry to young people. And I’ve taught everywhere from senior citizen homes to group homes for teenage pregnant mothers, to alternative prison programs, to prison, to middle school, kindergarten, and the one thing I realized is poetry is most magical when there is no judgment attached. The reason why they don’t want to, is the same reason that I stopped. Someone told them somewhere in their lifetime that what they were doing wasn’t enough. If I come and say all bets are off, there is no judgment here. I usually say the only bad poem you can write is the one with the blank page. Don’t give me no blank page. I’m not sitting up here for twenty minutes having a discussion. We’re not doing that, right? I’m not here to lecture you. I’m here to grow with you. And if you don’t see that as an opportunity to grow together, cool beans, but that’s the wackiness. I think you are amazing. Whatever you do, whatever you write, we will make it a poem. We will find the poetry in it. But if you give me a blank page, you didn’t even try, right? And so that’s when it’s bad for me. And that has been literally the equalizer for every room. I come in super honest, as transparent as possible, and as me as possible, and just say, “Let’s find a way into a poem.” Sometimes they say, “I don’t like poetry, and I get it,” so I ask, “Well, have you ever written a Facebook status, a tweet, a love letter? Have you written a song? Oh, you don’t like songs? Sure. Sure, sure. Did you write an angry email? Pull that out.” And that’s when they realized, “Oh, because it’s just language, right?” The poetry is the language, and we can find the moments in the language where poetry can exist, and we can extrapolate that and flesh it out and see what grows.

Your work is very socially engaged. You said that poetry is the people’s voice, and that’s a duality folks love to talk about, social politics, poetry. But my question to you is not really about that as a duality; I’m interested in your own poetics of social engagement. How would you define or describe what it means to come to the page with that “people’s voice,” with that socially engaged lens? And how does it impact your practice? How does it shape your practice? How is it the practice?

I remember there was an argument years ago in the poetry universe, where it was like, Poetry shouldn’t be political! It should be yours! I don’t have that right. I don’t have that privilege. When I walk outside, I am a Black woman, and all the things that come with being a Black woman in this United States of Amerikkka is constantly charged with the politic—one of survival, one of oppression and one of historical background that I know that there has been fighting done already. I can just look back at June Jordan, Audre Lorde, Amiri Baraka, Sonia Sanchez, Nikki Giovanni. I can look back at Mary Evans, Maya Angelou. I can look back and say, “What happened? Okay, this has already been said, because you’re trying to gaslight me.” I don’t have the privilege of splitting hairs and saying my poems are just about this, because even the way I look at nature is politically charged, even the way I look at love is politically charged. I don’t know if my man is coming home because he is a Black man, right? That is a fear that I have to grapple with every breath, every minute. I try to be cognizant of it and not play myself, not pretend it’s not a thing. I’ve been to like beautiful natured settings, Hedgebrook in Washington, amazing residency by women, for women. And even the lumber that you put into your fireplace is cut by women–it’s a beautiful concept–but even that is political and blessed be the fruit that I get to sit there in, the bounty of these women fighting against what has been told to us as place and gender norm, and push back against it. Even in my nature spaces, a woman made it possible, and then all the history of why that is absolutely the most amazing, breathtaking thing.

I went to a great residency in Wyoming. Super, super amazing Ucross space, and I was followed by someone from an adjoining town to my front driveway, and [they] just watched. That was political, right? Because why are you following me and terrifying me? And the directors knew it. The director was like, “No, no, you come stay closer with us. We’re gonna figure out what’s going on.” Political! And I’m here to write poems. I just went to the grocery store to get some fruit because when you write, you’re like, I just need the thing so I don’t think about the things that I need, and then you become obsessed with what you don’t have, rather than just focus on writing. Even then, a moment where I’m just supposed to be focused on writing—I was finishing my first book, my first fiction—and I couldn’t even take one page and get it done, because I was grappling with, you know, the racism and the fear of, are you okay? and what does this mean for me? And like, Damn, why don’t I get to just write? And the poems happened, but that story that I thought I was there to write, did not. So, I’m constantly having a tug of war with the politics, because my actual body, is a politic.

I want to go to this idea of communities and residencies, since you’ve been in those spaces. I want to hear about the role of community in your practice. We always think writing is so solitary, but we also know that it’s also made in community. So, talk about the impact and of community.

I feel like I’m a communal artist, for sure. My best work, I realized, was coming out of the breeding space of Cave Canem a week-long intensive workshop where I get to meet fifty other poets, and I get to work with these esteemed poets in practice. No matter where I go, if there isn’t that opportunity to tap in with another artist or a community member—because like I said, I feel like poetry is everywhere—and because I’m a communal poet, I need to make sure the work that I’m doing resonates beyond this vessel. We can get very myopic, and that’s great for whoever can practice it that way, but I don’t move that way. I don’t live that way. Everything I do, I’m thinking about how it’s going to translate, how it’s going to transfer information, and will it be okay when it gets to the other side? Will I be misconstrued? Will I be misunderstood? And that’s my only hope. So, working with other artists and working alongside other voices is extremely important to me, because it keeps me out of the comfort of the vacuum. You know that small space of just other poets and we say things and we love it, but if you go into the community, they’re like, “What are you saying, what does that mean?” And that’s one of the takeaways that I give to students is “This poem is great. That’s awesome. You wrote a poem that looks good on paper, but so what? What does it mean? What is it going to do?” And if you say, “Well, it’s going to save me, because I got it off my chest,” cool beans, but can I get this same kind of salvation when I read that? Because if I don’t find the salvation that you thought you were putting on that page, who is this poem for? And if they say “For me!” then [I say] leave it in your journal, baby. Because if it’s the poem, how do we how do we have access to it? How do we learn from it. How do we have a discussion with it? And if it is just the art piece that you want to be witnessed and you don’t want to talk about, I’m certain there’s a space for that. I don’t know where it is, and I definitely am not trying to visit.

I think the biggest leap in our humanity is when we are grappling with the hardest questions, the hardest moments of life, but together, like in conversation, and if you’re having the conversation solo dolo, I’m sure that’s great. Plenty of artists are just making the art that they want to make for them, but that’s just not my ministry. That’s not my path.

What’s been your most unexpected teacher? What or who in this poetry life?

I think it’s a toss-up between the internet and shame. Them some hard teachers right there! The Internet never lets you forget. It’s quick to cut you down and cancel you. It’s also a beautiful space to build you up. I just think the internet is, you know, one of those tools where you get to see the larger world close up. So it really is just a lens. And shame, in that, what we allow ourselves to write–and when we’re able to talk about why we wrote it, or why we couldn’t write it, I think those two are equally hard professors for me. I’m writing my first full-length, Red Bone, which was nominated for the NAACP [Image Awards]. It was founded by the shame of me losing contact with my mother, who is a recovering addict, and my father, who’s been a victim of the incarceration system all of my life. Not being able to say, “he’s been in prison all my life,” not being able to say “she suffered from drug addiction.” What does that mean about me? If these are my parents, what do you think about me? And then interviewing my mom about the love that she had for my father, because I never saw it, and I knew that the way I was behaving in the world was a response to what I didn’t see. That broke open the shell of shame for me, because it was no longer a me versus them, or me trying to make people think better of me despite what I thought of these humans who made me suffer;they both suffered from the hands of inequity and oppression. And like any survivor, you do what it takes to keep the self alive, even if the soul is not being fed. So, to be in prison all of my life, he’s institutionalized by nature of being a Black man in America. Even having conversations with different journalists, they were like, “Well, what did he do?” And I said: “He was Black. He was a man. He was poor. That’s what he did.” He did that and then succumbed to the practice of trying not to be Black, and poor, and addicted. Those were what was really key for me, using that page to lessen the blows and also humanize my parents. Find forgiveness for them and what I thought they did wrong. Kids be thinking it up! I thought I knew, and then I did these interviews, and I was like, Oh, you just did your best. And even now, when I make a mistake, I’ll say, “I’m sorry, I did my best.”And that’s so hard, because it’s not just an apology, but it’s an acceptance of grace. I’m not showing up the way that I normally would, or I wish I could, and I hope you can see that I tried. I’ll do better if given the chance.

You have other jobs besides poetry, a couple. You’re an ED of a media literacy org, you founded Diverse Lit. You say they’re informed by your work as a writer as well, and so I would love to hear about these other worlds you inhabit and how they intersect with or influence your intention with your writing.

I’m the former ED of Just Media, which is a media literacy campaign/initiative looking at the ways in which we use storytelling through film, media, and art to talk about incarceration and the criminal legal system and the impact of that. Which is very much tied to the shame that I was holding in respect to my father being incarcerated. I took on that job after finishing my book-length poem, “I Remember Death by its Proximity to What I Love,” which is all about the impact of incarceration on the women and children who are left behind. So that’s how it informed me—a lot of the research that goes into making sure these films have discussion guides, and they’re happening not just in the same sector where the punishment is happening, but in film making, in cultural centers, in community centers, in churches. How do you disseminate that information? So that’s how it informed that.

I’m also the poet in residence at Lincoln Center, and that’s all about curating, which is very much tied to the work that I started at Nuyorican. I was there for thirteen or fourteen years, coaching, curating, hosting the poetry program, the Friday night slam, and it was time to just move on. Because, like all things you know, you can outgrow a space, you can outgrow the vision. And moving on just to work on my own work. And I missed curating. So, when the Lincoln Center programming department reached out to me, it was like, oh, that’s what I miss! I love writing. I love being able to write and just work on my writing, because fourteen years of my life was dedicated to other people’s art, their careers, their movement, reference letters for them to get into school, getting them into school, babysitting–I’ve done it all, because I believe that that is what real community is. It is not just “I’ll look at your poem,” it’s “I’ll take care of your heart and your path.” And I didn’t have that sense it wasn’t reciprocal, because in that space, no one saw me as someone in need. They only saw me as someone they needed something from. And Lincoln Center became a great bridge for me, because it’s both me bringing folks who have never been able to perform at this amazing space; me bringing community who have never felt welcome; and me telling them what I need as an artist to continue. So, if that’s “Okay, Mo wants to work on a podcast? Let’s support that. Okay, Mo is doing a poetry festival? How can we support that?” This is no longer the digital panhandling, shaking the can. As nonprofits, it is a constant We need help. We need help. We need help. It doesn’t matter that the art is saving the people. It doesn’t matter what our opus is, that is not necessarily the concern. The reason that we are able to do that is because there’s somebody on the back end always asking for help. And to be that person that does both? It’s exhausting. As you know, it’s exhausting. When do you have time to eat, to dream, to build within? It’s very difficult. And I think that may be why I’m a communal artist as well, because I realized I couldn’t do that, so then my personhood became a part of that community, which I still love, which I still am really thankful for, because I found a path. I found a path that I can live with, that I can learn from, and that I’m not… depleted? I’m not depleted. I’m not! And when I need a break, I get to say, “Oh, I need a break.” I hosted almost twenty shows. I might have did too much, and I have someone looking out for me, saying, “I think you did too much. Let’s bring it down. You need a residency?” One of my residencies came from Lincoln Center, saying, “Do you need space to go work?” I’ve never had that. I’ve never had the place that I’m working look back and say, “You look like you’re doing too much, and that your art isn’t being taken care of. Your shine is different. Your glow is different. You look like you’re holding on. How can we help?” So, it was a great journey to find the balance. That’s the second job.

What else do I do? Black Girl Magic Ball. I’m the founder of Black Girl Magic Ball. Which is… exactly what I said. It started out as a book release party, but because I think community and I’m like, “I don’t just want to celebrate my book. I want to celebrate the Black women to make this possible.” And they’re everywhere. They’re doctors, they’re actors, they’re activists, they’re dancers, choreographers, producers. We’re now in our seventh year. This year [2024] we celebrate Hope Boykin; Olayemi Olurin, the lawyer and activist; Amanda Seales, the poet, artist and activist; Toi Derricotte, founder of Cave Canem; and Fred[erick] T. Joseph as an ally. It’s our second year giving an ally award to someone who’s out in the world, because I wanted to do that, I had to look outside too, and I didn’t want to focus on the outside, but just say thank you, because it’s not alone that we make this work happen. And Dr Bettina Love. It’s really a great opportunity to keep loving us, you know, keeping us in the center. And when I say “us,” I mean Black women.

And finally Woke Baby Book Fair. It’s also one of those initiatives that came from my book being released. I wasn’t really interested in just having a release party and reading books and buying books for kids, but other diverse titles. Where are those? Let’s have them all together. And as a kid who grew up with the Scholastic Book Fair and I could not afford said books, you remember them? It was comparable to the Sears Christmas Guide, you know, where you just look at the book of what you want. That was with books, though. And so, this is a nod at that, with a very specific focus on diverse stories. We’ve had everyone from Jason Reynolds come and read, Dhonielle Clayton, José Olivarez, so we mix in the poets with the children lit authors. And it’s just been really magical.

I’m interested, because you’ve written for multiple ages, what’s it like to translate? What do you think is fundamental to like these different levels of audience?

It actually was harder than I anticipated. I had no idea. Starting as a poet, writing and teaching, I was doing my own work and just being in younger audience spaces. But then Jason Reynolds said, “You should think about YA,” and I was like, “Absolutely not. I curse too much. It’s not going to work. I see them cringe when I’m on stage, what do you think they’re going to do when that book is in the library? No, it’s not going to work.” And he said, “I think you’re wrong. Just try it.” And lo and behold, he was right. And I love it! Because the things that I wish I had access to, I’m now giving the young people access to. So Woke Baby exists very much in the vein with like Honey, I Love and I Love My Hair!, and I just love those books. I just wanted a book that could sit amongst the greats and have our young-Black-people faces on the cover too.

And just thinking about just the idea that this baby is so woke, so revolutionary, right? Because newborns really are the first revolutionaries. They don’t care! I don’t care what you’re talking about. “I’m hungry.” “I need to be changed.” “I need you to shut up.” Like, “I will shut this party down,” right? And I thought that’s so funny, this baby’s woke already. And in the filters of how you learn to be an adult in the world is what changes it. But look at them yelling for what they want. Look at them reaching for what is theirs. Look at them! So that was the Woke Baby and then Woke happened as a companion and bigger sibling book. It is an anthology of poems that I created alongside Elizabeth Acevedo and Olivia Gatwood. The idea was just to have poems that were the building blocks of what it means to be a global citizen. So, looking at allyship, looking at protest and resourcefulness, looking at volunteering, what it means to be woke, and putting all of those into language that’s accessible for twelve years old and younger–which I found was probably the hardest thing. I can go out into the world and say “heartbreak is like two buildings crashing and falling down in my chest,” and historically, the adults who were alive or aware enough to remember 9/11, happening can use that moment; they can tie it right to it on their own, without me saying it. Whereas young people are like “What’s that mean? What is racism?” How do I say racism in twelve-year-old? Racism is someone deciding that who you are, by how you look, is not worth a smile, is not worth a hug, is not worth a hello. And they’re like, “Ah, got it.” So, I did have to peel back those layers to figure out what we’re actually trying to say, because we are so shrouded in the beauty of language that we’re actually running away from the heat of the truth.

I’m also curious about the genre shifts between poetry and fiction. What’s that like? as somebody who does not fiction?

Yeah, it’s a lot of words, it’s actually more lonely than poetry, which is why I think I’ve had such a hard time as of late. I’m doing it with deep breaths, prayer, coffee (sometimes whiskey), but it’s hard. I love the workshop space, and again, that communal space pushes me to engage with an audience that is already here. Whereas the fiction? I had to build a world, and I built it, and it’s wild, it’s beautiful, but it was really difficult. My first YA novel in verse? Never have I ever, all right? And I did it, and then I turned that into a play that Steppenwolf auctioned and put up in Chicago, which was amazing and also not what I anticipated. But when they auctioned the book, they said, “We’ll get a playwright for you,” and I said, “No, I’ll do it.” Because not only do I want to know exactly what is being said for my characters, but I want to be a part of that learning, the making, and then I did a 10-episode treatment for a Netflix series. So, I’ve done every genre because poetry touches everything, and I’d rather be genre-bending than genre-fixed. My work can go everywhere. So that book-length poem is also because those sections that I wrote did not—could not—exist in the essays that I was writing. The novel in verse started out as a poem. That one poem about “me and Lily ain’t talking because ‘She must think she cute! Must think I ain’t!’” became “me and Lay Li ain’t talking, and this is the whole summer that happened.” So, I love it, and I’m willing to be a student to it. I think that that is my one blessing is that I’m not bound.

And finally, what’s next?

What’s today? [Laughs.] So, Chrome Valley, the last book that just came out, a book of poems that came out with Liveright Norton received the Patterson prize, which is my first award, eow! But we also created an album. So it is, right now, about to be dropped, April 19 [2024], and it is a blues jazz libretto. The poems from the book have been scored and turned into song. Alongside Sean Mason and these beautiful singers, bass players, drummers, I think we had a trumpet? It’s an orchestra. It’s an orchestra of “Hello, Hallelujah, Holla Back.” It’s so good. And not because it’s mine, but because it’s good. It pushes what we think about poetry. When I say poetry is everywhere, baby, I’m telling you that joint is so good. It’s so good, and it doesn’t… It scared me because I thought, Oh, people think I’m just making a Grammy album. I already tried to do that. I made an album with just poems and music before, and I loved the experience with Max Michael Jacob; it was the presentation, an experimental presentation of “I Remember Death by Its Proximity to What I Love,” but this is different as it’s been scored. We filmed the whole process. We made it vinyl. It’s properly dropping an album. So that is what’s next. I’m excited.

And I think what makes it possible for me to do so much is that I’m willing to collaborate. I’m not one of those artists who are like, “I have to do it all.” No, I have to do it, but I’m willing to learn. I can be an apprentice. And Sean Mason is a young, masterful genius. I watched him play the piano while me, him, and Maya Abney were in South Carolina, Gullah Geechee islands, doing a project. He just started playing on this keyboard, and we were in a museum, and the keyboard was breaking down, and I just thought, It’s not gonna work, and all of a sudden, he just started. It was like a juke joint came alive. And I thought, I want him to see my poems. I want to see what he thinks about them. And that’s how these opportunities grow, because I’m willing to say, “I wrote this poem. Can you respond with your art?” “I wrote this poem. How do I turn it into a play?” “I wrote this poem. Can we make a film out of this?” And I just want that one poem to continue rippling. Our poetry is everywhere. What if we took it everywhere? Then no one can tell us no. Unbound poetry.

On that expansive, possibility-filled note, thank you so much for talking with me. Thank you for being here with me.

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

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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).

Photo credit: Erica Cavanagh

by Gbenga Adesina, PhD

Writing in the Chicago Review of Books, Michael Pittard described how in Shane McCrae’s book of poems, Sometimes I Never Suffered (FSG, 2020), the poet artfully invents an “adopted Black son of Jefferson Davis (to ask) the reader cutting questions about how society and American Christianity construct notions of Heaven (to speak) with raw emotion and power.” The idea of heaven haunts the poetry of Shane McCrae, not heaven as in paradisal afterlife, but heaven as a continuum of historical time, a human fable forged through the brutal calculus of segregated grace and worthiness. But McCrae’s heaven is also about a kind of linguistic, narrative, and metaphysical freedom. He constructs an heaven or the conceit of an heaven where finally freed from a muteness imposed upon them by historians, invisible, marginal, but no less significant figures emerge and speak to us in a sparse, fragmentary, incantatory dialects of ghosts, “hastily assembled angels,” and saints. McCrae’s heaven lends them ancestral girth, gravity, and an elevated perch, and from that perch, they offer their testaments as witnesses of our ongoing history, but from outside time. He imbues the ghosts with private history, the nuance of character, and individuation. Sometimes, in his poetry, hell is not the opposite, but the extension of this heaven. His language is at once glass shard-sharp, simple but incantatory and piercing, circular, and musical with an economy that is intimate, though not confessional. No one doubts that it’s the poet speaking in these poems, but he speaks with different registers and cadences from within the inner lives of these multiple poetic personas and thus create an haunting orchestra of ghosts, a polyvocal afterlife.

Consider this excerpt from, “Jim Limber on the Gates of Heaven” from Sometimes I Never Suffered: 

In this poem, we hear a syntax that surges forward and backward through fractured phrases. Kinetic images double and circle back on each other. Meaning is arrived at through the seam and symmetry of music. “The gates aint gates……it’s dreams”. You hear wonder, a familiar awe, and revelation in the voice of the the poem’s speaker. And a desire to explicate the nature of this heaven they have encountered to the reader, to parse their memory (the sting of the bad part and the benediction of the good part), and comprehend how the passage of time works outside timelessness which is the central promise of heaven. McCrae’s poems are however not only situated in ethereal spaces, they are grounded in historical reality as well. In such poems, he excavates his family history, the contours of his childhood, his grandparents and parents, the nature of love, and the trauma of abandonment. His work demonstrates the breath, depth and marvelous range of Black poetics in 21st century United States, a poetics that embrace the historical as well as the metaphysical.  

Shane McCrae was recently at James Madison University for a reading from his latest book, a memoir, Pulling the Chariot of the Sun: A Memoir of a Kidnapping. He visited Furious Flower and spoke to Gbenga Adesina, the inaugural Mellon Foundation Postdoctoral Fellow in Global Black and Diasporic Poetry at James Madison University’s Harrison Hall studio. The interview has been edited for clarity and length.

It seems to me that your project is this marriage of deep spiritual yearning to a kind of faithfulness to the dignity of everyday speech, ordinary speech. I want you to talk to me about influence as it relates to your spiritual pursuits, but also as it relates to your faithfulness to ordinary speech in your poetry. 

Well, so at least with regard to religious things, the influence that goes into that is always going to be long and complicated. I think, I made my religious conversion when I was about—I guess it was about 19 years old? And it was a sort of indefinite conversion. It was a conversion from a really fierce atheism to a belief in God, but it wasn’t within any particular context, although the conversion itself happened at a Benedictine monastery. And it took another 10 years before I was baptized. I was baptized Episcopalian, and that’s still my church, so I suppose religious influences have been largely a lot of theology. Rowan Williams has been really important to me as a theological thinker, and just reading the Bible and going to church.  

With regard to language you know, I’ve never really thought about what I was doing as having a particular concern for everyday speech—although I have thought about using everyday speech and poems a lot. We’re always sort of unaware of what we’re doing, I think, to a large extent—trying to figure out the voice for the poem itself, whatever voice works best in that particular poem, and for a long time, that was a voice that was very closely tied to everyday speech. And I suppose it still is. But in the more recent stuff I’ve been trying […] to some extent complicate that somewhat, although where the complication occurs, tends to be at the level of syntax, etc. 

Yes, yes. Speaking of syntax, repetition seems almost holy to you. 

Sure [Chuckles]. And I like that you frame it that way, because that makes it sound a lot more noble than what it has to do with it has to do with [Laughs.].  I mean, I’ve always liked repetition, but never really thought about it. Influences that I hadn’t mentioned: a lot of music, particularly My Bloody Valentine. I like the use of repetition in that music. I like that figures repeat over and over and over again, beyond the boundaries at which one might think the repetition should stop or fade away. So, I’ve always been very interested in repetition, musically, and when I started writing the poems that went into my first book, in the style that I still work in, I decided to incorporate that into the work.  

And here’s where the lack of nobility comes in. It was partly to do with my love for that sort of thing, but also partly to do with I had become convinced that I was going to write formal poetry. And so, I didn’t want to write formal poetry that would require the kinds of awkward syntactical inversions, or grammatical structures that poets used to incorporate in order to make the meter or the rhyme of a poem work. And so, I thought, well, I still need some sort of technique that essentially allows me to cheat, because I’m not always going to be able to get the thing I want to say to match the meter precisely without, you know, fudging some edges. 

And so, repetition allows for that, you know, my particular syntax allows for me to make the meter and the form work in such a way that presumably, it’s not noticeable to the reader, that part of what I’m doing is trying to make the meter and the form work with repetitions, et cetera. 

Awesome. And I think that I should ask you to talk a little bit about meter, and if there’s a connection between meter and your spiritual pursuit. Can you talk a little bit about meter, and spirituality, meter and worship, meter and prayer… 

I mean, that’s really a good question. I don’t really think about it most times [Laughs.]. I am very interested in literary technique, and so that’s what I’m thinking about all the time. When I’m thinking about God and my particular religious beliefs, I’m usually not thinking about poetry.  I’m sort of haunted by TS Eliot’s remark, to the effect that to think of the Bible as literature, you do so on the grave of Christianity or whatever [Laughs.].  It’s not that I don’t recognize the close association, but I tend to keep them separate. When I’m thinking about poetry, when I’m thinking about meter, I’m thinking much more about the tradition of English poetry or a tradition of English poetry, rather than thinking about things to do with my religious practice.  

One more question along that line is about how various the kind of interior spaces that you explore are. I love the series of poems of a hastily assembled Angel, and I love that those poems were happening inside the interiority of this angel—there are flaws, there are fears inside this angel—I was deeply moved by them. And I thought I might ask you about how you use this interiority of God and of humans and angels and animals. How does that work? 

I don’t know. I mean, some interiorities, like the interiority of God, I don’t think I can really write about, but I can pretend I can do angels, because they’re described in various ways that make them both beyond human, with regard to their powers, but also beneath human with regard to the ontological, the ultimate relationship between humans, God, and angels. And there’s also a lot of texts, particularly Milton, that suggest that angels have an intuitive interiority, that’s complicated enough. Usually what I do is—it’s a little simplistic, I suppose, or there’s no way to describe it that doesn’t make it sound simplistic, but—I try to imagine what I know about whatever the being from whom I’m speaking, imagine what their circumstances would be, to the extent that I can do that, and just write as if I lived according to those circumstances. To some extent, it’s all “one is speaking from the self,” but you try to alter the self as much as you can. 

I’d like to ask you about what I might call “stamina.” I’m interested in what you might call it, but I’ll call it stamina. The preface to Sometimes I never Suffered captures that. It says: “Sometimes I Never Suffered concludes ‘A Fire in Every World,’ a poem begun with ‘Purgatory/A Son and a Father of Sons’ from In the Language of my Captor,” a previous book of yours, “and continues with ‘The Hell Poem’” from another book, The Gilded Auction Block.  “The whole of Sometimes I Never Suffered is the third part of this poem, but as is the case with the other two parts, it can be read on its own.”  So, this is a poem across three books, if I’m not mistaken. How did you keep going with this one poem? Was the poem following you and refusing to let you go? To me it just felt like incredible stamina, and long memory in a world of short memory. How do you maintain that kind of stamina—across projects, across books?  

I would have never thought about it that way.  But you just—at least I just—write a lot, and I tend not to think about extension in that way. The thing that I’ve been working on now is the extension of “The Hell Poem” itself.  Because of the three parts, it’s pretty much a straightforward narrative poem.  I’ve extended it from about 40 pages—a little bit less—to a little bit over 100 pages of the same narrative that’s just continued from the end of the whole poem to the end of the whole thing. And that was a piece where I was thinking about the whole thing sort of continuously over… I think I first wrote “The Hell Poem” maybe in 2014, and I just maybe finished the extended version of it and in 2023, and so to some extent, I was thinking about it for about nine years, but at times with more intensity.  Because I wanted to make it a sort of traditional straightforward narrative, there were things I had to keep in mind, you know, what had the characters done? I had to excise one part that I had written earlier that I cannot include, because it doesn’t make sense with regard to the narrative, the chronology. And how writing a lot comes into that is that if on a particular day I don’t write more of whatever extended thing I’m working on, there are other things I can write. And so, it’s not as if it’s haunting me all that time.  I give my attention to the other thing.  And when I want to return to the larger project, when I’m in a particular mood to write that kind of poem or whatever, then I’ll go back to it. It’s not a thing that I feel like I have to stick with doing every day to the exclusion of other things.  

This is a question I’m asking on behalf of young poets everywhere who would see this: Shane, how did you become a poet?  

Well, [chuckles] I’m still trying. But how it started, I was in high school, I was 15. I know the day it was October 25, 1990, which John Berryman’s birthday, and it was the anniversary of the death of Chaucer, and it’s one other literary thing, but I can’t remember what. But that was the day that I started writing. And I had seen this movie was Charlie Sheen’s first starring vehicle, but the name of it is escaping me at the moment. And at one point, a character in the movie starts reading Sylvia Plath’s “Lady Lazarus,” the “dying is an art like everything else I do it exceptionally well,” and, you know, I had been an extremely, extremely poor student—very, very, very bad [Laughs.]. I was a good student up until the sixth grade. And then I couldn’t cope with moving and I just gave up on school starting around, you know, being in the sixth grade, seventh grade, I just stopped paying any attention doing any of the work having any interest in it.  

So, when I encountered this, this was my first trip through 10th grade (I took another one subsequently) and I had no interest in anything at the time other than skateboarding, and I certainly didn’t care about books except for in a very, very abstract way. I had liked reading Shel Silverstein, and Encyclopedia Brown books when I was a kid, but I didn’t really read at all, at this point. So, I heard the lines from “Lady Lazarus” and it just sort of… there’s that famous description by Emily Dickinson about how she knew she had read a poem when she felt like a shock have gone through her … and I… yeah, it just did something to me. It lined up with my worldview. I was very goth at the time. And I had never heard poetry like that! I had tried to write one poem, maybe a couple of weeks before that, so this is evidence that it was in my mind, I guess, to some extent, but it was rather more I want to use that poem. I wanted to give it to somebody. It started, “Roses are red, violets are blue,” and the reason it started that way was not because I was being ironic. It started that way because I thought that’s how poems started. I didn’t know anything about them [Laughs.]. And so, when I heard this Sylvia Plath thing it was so far away from my sense of what poetry was. And so that day, I wrote eight poems. I kept at it. I stopped for a little while when I moved again, but returned to it. By the time I was 16, I was convinced that I wanted to be a poet. Other than skateboarding, I hadn’t been interested in anything and I was so interested in this thing. I guess that’s how it happened.  

Talk to us about the pursuit of knowledge: you begin with the epiphany, but then you go seek the knowledge, you go seek the teachers. Talk to us about your private education, some of the institutions you went to in search of teachers.  

Sure. Initially, I didn’t know what to do. I went to the school library, I grabbed a few sort of random books of poetry: Linda Pastan’s selected poems, PM/AM, I think it was called; this book by a poet named Celestine Frost called An Inhuman Rival. I read a few biographies of poets. And it wasn’t until I was going to college… I dropped out of high school when I was 18, and as I indicated earlier, I was convinced I wanted to be a poet. I didn’t know how to go about it; I knew poets had something to do with school, in a broad sense, about learning, but not how to do it, because I hadn’t done it actively since seventh grade. It wasn’t until I was 21, I think, that I decided to go to college, and because nobody in my immediate family, nobody that I really knew had gone to college, I didn’t know anything about it. By this time, I had been poor for a good time, pretty isolated in general, and didn’t have anybody to talk to about poetry. And so not knowing anything about college, my assumption was that everybody at college had read everything, they knew everything. I felt I had to prepare to go to college. And so, I started.  

I had been doing poetry long enough to have a broad sense of what a canon of English literature might be, and, you know, had a sense that it probably started with Homer and I just sort of read the major things from Homer up, and tried to read as much of particularly English poetry as I could trying to get ready for college. I read The Faerie Queene and I read The Complete Shakespeare.  I used to walk around with a big Bevington Shakespeare just reading it as I was going from place to place, and I felt like I had to know all of that because otherwise I wouldn’t. I was going to community college because I never took the SATs, but a community college would let me in. I thought I had to know all of that to go to community college, even to begin to try to learn stuff. The school that I ended up going to was Chemeketa Community College, which was in Salem, Oregon, then, briefly, I was at the University of Oregon, but I transferred from there to Linfield College, which is where I got my BA. I got a degree in creative writing. I studied most closely with a poet named Lex Runciman and he was really important to me. And from there, I went to Iowa, the Writers’ Workshop to get my MFA. And I worked with Cole Swensen and James Galvin and Robert Hass and Emily Wilson. They’re all wonderful poets.  

And from there, realizing that I wasn’t going to get a job when I graduated because I, at that point, didn’t really know anything about getting a job teaching. I’d gone straight from undergrad to Iowa, then I went to law school straight from Iowa, to Harvard, and there I was, I think, getting out of a creative writing degree plan which was really helpful for me because I had taken a lot of creative writing workshops when I was at Harvard, but having that not be everything I was doing in school, it helped me break up my focus a little bit. And that was a time where it felt like I learned a lot? You know, I wonder if it’s a little arrogant to say I learned a lot, but it felt like I learned a lot. I worked with Jorie Graham really closely.  She was and is fantastic. I think everybody should be reading her poetry all the time. She was really kind and helpful to me. That was where I started writing the poems that ended up being in my first book. After I got my JD, I didn’t go to school for a year, then I went back to the University of Iowa, and ended up getting a master’s in English literature: that was the last graduate degree I got. But yeah, those were the institutions I worked at. Those were the people I worked with.  

I want to go back a little bit to some of your artistic materials now, especially in relation to biblical narrative. I was reading those sequences where you sit with these characters from all over the country in heaven, and sometimes I’m laughing, then I’m dead serious. I was just trying to understand, how did you arrive at this marvelous thinking?  

I think that the way that poetry works is however it starts.  The beginning of a poem always feels a little miraculous; however it starts, you’ve got a little engine going, and you just follow that engine, wherever it wants to go. You let the poem reveal itself as you’re working—one of the great things about having a sequence or a series is maybe a better word for it. When I was writing, Sometimes I Never Suffered and I was dealing with thinking about heaven as, you know, a location, and location works a lot like a form. If I’ve got a location and I’ve got circumstances, I know where I’m going to be once the poem has started, and so I can work within those circumstances. Having those, having that bit of confinement, ends up generating a lot of freedom. Within those parameters, one feels as if one can say anything.   

I felt like in order to make this sequence work, because I was dealing with a character—Jim Limber, who essentially disappears from history as a child, there are a few traces after, but I kind of had to imagine his death, and I have no authority over anything to do with Jim Limber at any point. So, I thought that the only way to honestly do it, or at least the way that worked for me was to imagine having some—I think I believe in a multiverse? But this was before… I mean, it wasn’t before Marvel movies, but I wasn’t thinking about Marvel, it was before that became a thing. [laughter] But, having some belief in a multiverse.  I thought that a logical extension of that would be that there would be a multi-heaven. And so technically, every Jim Liber speaking in that book is a different one, from a different life, in a different heaven. And that gave me a lot of freedom to say a lot of different things, imagining certain base circumstances. And so having set up those parameters—the multi-heaven—knowing a bit about this person’s life, but not really knowing anything after their childhood, it’s just like, when I was talking about imagining the interiority of an angel, you have certain rules according to which you operate and you imagine, forward from those rules. 

Beautiful. Thank you, Shane. Thank you. I want you to read—speaking about angels and interiority—I wanted you to read this poem that cracks me up so much… but fills me with a kind of horror too, called “The Hastily Assembled Angel Considers the Lives of Dogs and of People.” 

Great, thank you. This was I think this was the second “Hastily Assembled Angel” poem I wrote [clears throat].  

The Hastily Assembled Angel Considers the Lives of Dogs and of People.  

The hastily assembled angel wanders
And has wandered through centuries of cities
And countries and millennia of cities
And countries and of women and of men there’s

No hurry now though he was hurriedly  
Once brought to being and bears the scars of that 
Though slowly in the Earth though slowly he  
Eventually began to wonder what  
The hurry had been for and if he could  
Have been a better angel or have done  
Better the job he did if once  
They’d made him the other angels had allowed  

Him to meet God for he has been uncertain  
As people are uncertain, he has nev- 
er been as certain as dogs are who sniff  
The wind that moves the curtain and see behind the curtain

I want to ask you about your relationship to time. Because in your poems, it seems as if you’re always sidestepping time, that you refuse to treat it, and I mean I may be wrong in this, but it’s almost as if you refuse to accept that 1000 years ago is so vastly different from now, you know? You treat history as this one long room of interlinked rooms…

Well, human history isn’t all that long. Particularly with regard to recorded history and history of which we can have any real sense; that’s a pretty short stretch of time. And, you know when I first fell in love with poetry was with Sylvia Plath, etc., but when I first found a body of poetry that I really loved, it was through this book called The Silver Poets of the 16th Century, it was an Everyman Library book, and it had like, Walter Raleigh, etc. And it you know… it was these poets from, like, 400 years prior, and I just really, really love that stuff; it really electrified me, you know… as the Plath-head. And since I spent so much of my time thinking about that time period, and fell in love with medieval poetry and 17th century poetry, that was where my head was for a long time. And that’s, you know, 400-500 or so, [maybe] 600 years previously. And so, if the thing that I’m trying to make today has roots—of which I’m very conscious—its primary roots are in, you know, a time period 400-500 years ago, but then, you know, other roots are thousands of years ago, then it’s hard to think of history… it’s hard to think of something that happened in the mid-19th century as very long ago. One way to think about it is, you know, the [2024] presidential candidates, both of whom are 80 or about, if you think about it, and consider the age of America, they have been alive for a third of the time that America has existed. It’s 240 years old. They’re eighty years old. So, history is not, it’s just not that long.  

I want you to talk to us—and hopefully to the young poets who may be watching this— about… not so much just crossing genres, but finding expression in a different genre. The kind of poetry you write is crystal. Everything is distilled into one sentence; a lifetime can be contained in the sentence. But the whole point of memoir is to spell it out and dance for, like, ten chapters. So how did you manage that?  

I did end up thinking of the memoir as just a very large form. When I was putting together a proposal for the book and thinking about how long it should be, and I didn’t know anything about prose, really. I thought 250 pages made sense. And if you look at the text itself, count the pages, it is 250 pages. And the reason it is 250 pages is I calculate—I used Google to calculate how many words go into 250 pages and 60,000 words. So, when we did the proposal, I said it’s gonna be 60,000 words long. And then I figured out how many days—how many words I would have to write per day to get to 60,000 words, I wrote that many words a day, when I got to 60,000 words, that was the end of the book, you know. But the thing about that is, it wasn’t arbitrary! I could see 60,000 in the distance, and I knew how much time I had to get there, and so had to write my way to that end. And so, it helped a lot, I think, thinking of it as a very, very large form. But because I’m not using meter or rhyme, I’m not using a pre-established form, the only way that I could really make it make sense to me, was just word count.  

And what I was writing, I think the subject matter is, to some extent, I suppose, inherently dramatic. And another thing I found extremely useful was not really thinking about the subject matter—even though the subject matter would insist upon making its presence known in my life—my chief concern was the language itself. My chief concern was trying to make it sound as good as I could make it sound, trying to make it minimally acceptable to me. I don’t delude myself into thinking that I have some special prose-writing skill. But I did want to write prose that would sound like my own prose. I did want a voice that could modulate from a bunch of different registers, sometimes be very straightforward, sometimes be oblique and cover a lot of space between those two points. And so yeah, I think, just because I didn’t have again, the form to rely on having a sense of how long it could be, or should be or was going to be, and thinking about the language itself. Those were useful in helping me make a transition from the kind of poetry I write to the kind of prose that I wanted to write. 

You said something about the subject matter being a little dramatic, but I know that you don’t mean dramatic like a soap opera, you mean drama, as in containing tragedy, or comedy or a deep vault of feelings… In your poems, which I’ve read for years, the emotion of that drama is always there. But the demand of poetry, the kind of poetry you write, says that it doesn’t have to bubble up to the surface in comprehensible ways. I can read, I can just read these beautiful, crystalline, 12 lines, and the emotion of the drama will enter me, and I don’t need the details of this narrative. But in memoir, I mean, there is no way around that… So, I wanted you to talk about handling, similarly, traumatic subject matter, in poetry form and in prose form, in terms of clarity. 

Well, with poetry, I feel like a lot of what one is doing is opening up spaces for readers to fill in. You’re giving them a certain shape, I suppose. And you’re even giving them details that point in certain directions. But hopefully, you’re not closing off too many options. I think what a successful poem does is it is never finally resolvable. You can read a poem, fall in love with it, read it again—over and over again—over the course of a decade, and still find new things in it, find new ways of thinking about it. Because a poem is a machine for making thinking, but maybe more specifically, a machine for making sort of speculation, a machine for opening up space. What happens in prose, I think, and again, I’m no expert—I don’t know anything about prose—but it feels like it opens up spaces, but then the prose writer has an obligation to fill in those spaces. Whereas, as I said, the poet leaves those spaces for the reader to fill in. And so… being aware that I had… that it wasn’t going to work. I mean, I could write the same thing in poetry, but where it’s 250 pages in prose, in poetry that would be a fifth of that… less? I mean, 50 pages is really long, I don’t know that I would need that much space to do it [Laughs.]. Maybe you could do it in a couple pages. And so, your prose reader doesn’t come to a prose book for that; there’s a degree of information they want, along with, hopefully, a language-based aesthetic experience.  

And, again, I was focusing on the language, because that’s where my particular concern is, but I didn’t want the reader to ever feel like they just had utterly no idea what was going on. The sentences were often enough complicated in a way that I think a reader could get lost in them; and to some extent, I wanted to make it possible for a reader to get lost in them. But I didn’t want a reader to ever be irrevocably lost—to get lost and just say, “I cannot do this text at all.” And having that in mind, I’m sure that there are some readers who have felt that way about it, that they can’t get to wherever it is that they’re going, but I tried to make it understandable. I tried to ground it in lived details. I tried to honor what I believe, [or] how I believe memory works. You know, I tried to acknowledge the many things that I didn’t remember. One notices if they read it, you know, that there’s very, very little dialogue. And that’s because I don’t pretend to remember conversations very well. You know, the ones that are in there are ones I did remember, but you know, how many conversations from one’s childhood does one remember clearly enough to honestly represent them? So yeah. 

I thought I might ask you to read this wonderful poem, called “Having Been Raised by My Kidnappers I Consider the Gift of Life, or A Gift from a Thief,” where some of that magical way you do this thing comes to the fore. 

Thank you. Yeah, I wrote a series of poems about this. And this was one of the first ones. 

“Having Been Raised by My Kidnappers I Consider the Gift of Life, or A Gift from a Thief” 

A gift that disappears as it is given  
A gift from whom whenever they give you anything,  
You have to ask them where they got it from 
A gift that disappears and takes you with it 

A gift for which you will not be forgiven 
Whether you give it or receive it when  
My mother’s parents kidnapped me my grand-
mother said I would see my father  

Again in a few days and the big wheel he  
Had given me the gift  
She gave me then and then for thirteen years 
I didn’t you must close your eyes for the gift 
After you open it it’s stolen but it wasn’t stolen  
For you no one will give you who you are 

Thank you. Talk to me about this poem, because for the longest time, it just deeply moved me. 

Thank you. Well, I was trying to figure out, I think, when I wrote it, how am I going to write about having been kidnapped? It was… having been kidnapped, I guess, it’s something that you’re—not I guess that I was kidnapped, but the second part [Laughs.] I guess—it’s something that I guess… one is aware of one’s whole life, sort of. But I was raised by the people who kidnapped me. And it’s a kind of dual consciousness where you’re living your everyday life, and you don’t really think about it. And it wasn’t until I was in my mid-40s that I really realized or really thought about it — I didn’t even use the word before. But not until hearing my father describe it, realizing that I had been taken, did I realize what it meant. And when that happened, I thought that I really had to figure out how to write about it. And when I was writing that poem, you know, there’s some poems that you write, and they happen very quickly. And you feel satisfied with them, again, fairly quickly; some poems that you write, they take forever and forever, and that one was one that just seemed to take forever, to get it to a space where I felt okay with it.  

But I think that there are ways in which the poem structurally follows my efforts to figure out what it means to be kidnapped. That’s why it’s repetitive in a particular way. I think that it is because I’m sort of exploring what that means. And it’s not — because it’s a thing that one sort of, or at least I, sort of realized, over the course of my adult life, but then the full weight of it, I didn’t really realize until I was, again, mid-40s. It’s something that… I knew was a big thing? But also, something that I didn’t have the language for yet, or the way of thinking to access it or recognize its bigness. So, the poem is trying to figure out how to do that.  

Who are the poets who help you do what you do? I guess I’m asking about influences now. Are they always changing? 

I think they are always changing. And…that’s good and bad, maybe. Because when you’re taking in different influences, and you’re finding what you’re doing itself is changing, you can see what you had done before kind of receding, and you don’t want to let it go. So, who I am lately, I’ve been really heavily influenced by mid-century American poets—Robert Lowell, and those folks—and then poets who have taken their own work, partly out of that work, like Geoffrey Hill and so on. But also, I’ve always been thinking about Jorie Graham, I always think about Jorie. And most recently, I’ve been thinking about Susan Howe a lot. Those are poets — Howe and Graham especially — who have been with me for a really, really long time. And lately I’ve been trying, I think, to figure out how exactly to make their influence fit in with these mid-century poets and [Geoffrey] Hill, that have been on my mind a lot for some years.  

And who helps me? Music is important to me. And I think it has a big influence on what I’m trying to do. Contemporary composers like Michael Hirsch and Steve Elcock. Near-contemporary composers like Gloria Coates and George Walker, both of whom died pretty recently. Walker especially; he’s the first Black classical composer to win a Pulitzer Prize and it happened much later than one might think. I think it was the mid-90s that it happened. His work is wonderful, and it’s still not as recognized as it should be. His music is on my mind a lot, but maybe in the past week or so, I’ve been thinking about Gloria Coates a lot too. I would say that those poets and the music I listen to have been the folks and things that have gotten me trying to work in whatever way it is that I’m trying to work now.  

For a young poet who feels that they are living in a constrained world, and feel as if they have no teachers, that they don’t know how to navigate their way forward, what is your advice? 

I know that feeling and I think it can feel like it’s a bad thing. You can feel like there’s nobody to guide me through whatever it is that I’m trying to do. But I could not be more grateful that in large measure, I had to guide myself—at least at the beginning, you know. I met some teachers in high school who were really important to me, I met teachers at community college who were really important to me. But a lot of what I did was really reading from book to book, you know? I’d read one book, it would refer to some other book and I’d read the other book— and just reading my way across, again, a canon that I was discovering and constructing as one’s encounters with the cannon usually are. I guess I would say, what resulted from that is the kind of poetry — for good or ill — that I write, which is a kind of poetry where I’m trying to incorporate the English tradition that I understand, so that I’m trying to bring everything from. As I said, Raleigh and Spenser were huge for me at the beginning, relatively early on, but also I really love like Susan Howe, and I really love Jorie Graham. I’m trying to make a poetry that incorporates all of that. And one would think that they’re fairly far away, but I think it’s possible to put it all together—and I’ve always been trying to put all that stuff together. And I think that if I had found particular teachers who had pretty strident views, as people in the world of poetry and in all arts tend to do, they might have encouraged me to go in one direction and discouraged me from going in a different one. And so, I’m very grateful that I’ve been able to choose them all. So, I would say, as discouraging as that can feel, it’s also a great gift. And that means that the choice is entirely up to you. And, you know, libraries are full of books. And all you have to do is… really all you have to do this is gonna sound like I’m simplifying things. [Laughs.] Really, all you have to do is grab one. Go to the poetry section and grab a book. I know that sounds too simple, but I’ll tell you what. When I was first starting to try to figure out how to read, I got this book, and it was about the image of Native Americans in the minds of Spenser, Montaigne, and Shakespeare. The book was a remaindered book; I got it at an outlet mall. It just seemed interesting. I started reading and I thought, oh, I am not equipped for this. I need to read Spenser in Montaigne and Shakespeare. So… I read everything by Spenser and Montaigne and Shakespeare, which was huge! Those texts are so foundational in a lot of ways. But that’s, you know, for lack of a better term, that’s “providence,” I suppose. You use a book to get you to the next book, and you don’t need anybody to do that for you. I just went to an outlet mall, I just grabbed that book, it pointed to other books, I got those books, you know, and all those books point to other books. You can do this all, you can totally do it yourself. 

One more question on behalf of the young people: any connection between skating and poetry? 

Yeah, you know, there was this tweet the other day, and I think it’s by a prose writer, and he was wondering, like, “why are there no skaters who are poets?” And I’m like what are you talking about? I mean, I’m one. That doesn’t mean… like why would he have heard of me? [Laughs.] But nonetheless, because he phrased it in this way that made it seem like there was somehow some sort of necessary disconnect, I thought, well, no. But, I guess there’s a way in which it’s sort of hard for me to think about the connection, because these are both things that I started young—skateboarding when I was 12; and I started writing poetry when I was 15. And so, I was really young, when I started doing both of these things. And I did, in a weird way… think of them as almost opposite pursuits. When I was skateboarding, I was out using my body, and it’s pretty good to not think that hard if you can manage it. When I was writing poetry, I was thinking… TS Eliot said this thing that “poetry is not an expression of emotion, it’s an escape from emotion.” And people are like, oh, he’s a robot, he doesn’t have any feelings. That’s not what that means at all. It means that when you’re making the thing, you’re not caught up in those feelings. You’re allowing your mind to roam, and the feelings will express themselves, but not by a conscious effort on your part. A conscious effort on your part will disable the poem or disarm it. And so, I tended to think of those two things as separate, even though they’re actually… fairly similar insofar as you’re trying to let things happen without forcing things to happen. I think that skateboarding is a sport that’s very expressive; it’s not determined by rules so much as it’s determined by—to some extent—trends. And I still follow those trends! I’m still aware, broadly speaking, of what’s going on. Poetry kind of happens the same way, where a lot of what you see in poetry is determined by what the trend at the time is. That’s not how it should be. You [should] make your own thing. But it is very similar in that. 

I’m going to ask you to read one more poem to us. Thank you so much, Shane. This has been wonderful. This is “Jim Limber on the Peace Which Passeth all Understanding.” 

Thank you. So, you know how, when you’re writing a poem, you always — I mean, I always— worry.  This was the one that I worried sounded too much like Louise Glück. In retrospect, I don’t think it really sounds anything like Louise,  but when I was writing, I was like, oh, this is this is a Louise Glück one. She’s so important to my thinking about poetry.  

“Jim Limber on the Peace Which Passeth all Understanding.” 

First thing I saw that heartened me in Heaven  
Was a dead field first thing beyond the gates 
I might have thought if I had seen when I  
Was still alive a field in such a state 
I might have wondered whether it had ever  
Been cultivated whether Negroes had  
Worked it and if I had I might have wondered  
How many died before it got so bad 
How many Negroes did it take for the field  
To die the deaths of Negroes being the life  
And death of the Earth I might have asked the dirt 
I might have asked the limp brown grass but there was noth- 
ing human in the field I had never seen that  
Before death with no people in it 

Thank you. How wonderful—that was great!  

Thank you, thank you so much! 

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

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Gbenga Adesina is a Nigerian poet and essayist. He received his MFA from New York University, where he was a Goldwater Fellow and was mentored by Yusef Komunyakaa. His chapbook Painter of Water was published as part of the New-Generation African Poets series from Akashic Books, and his poem “Across the Sea: A Sequence” won the 2020 Narrative Prize. 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, where he taught a poetry class called Song of the Human. He has been published in Paris Review, Harvard Review, Guernica, Narrative, New York Times, and elsewhere. He is the inaugural Mellon Foundation Postdoctoral Fellow in Global Black and Diasporic Poetry at Furious Flower Poetry Center at James Madison University. 

by Lauren K. Alleyne

“I like to speak to my audience unencumbered,” Samatha Thornhill declares in the interview below, and that sentiment presents as an underlying poetics of her work. Thornhill’s poems are direct and vulnerable, speaking to readers with disarming frankness. In her poem, “Most Beautiful Accident: A Single Parent’s Ode,” for example, the poet addresses both readers and the poem’s implied audience—the poet’s son—saying:

So when you finally ask me
why is my daddy a faraway star? I’ll say
beloved, you were his most beautiful accident.

While the child’s imagined question is a gorgeous metaphor, his father a “faraway star,” the poet’s answer and admission is unadorned, and the description of the child as the father’s “most beautiful accident,” is stark and honest to the child in question and readers both.

Thornhill’s poems are also musically crafted, offering sensory engagement that offers audiences yet another “unencumbered” means of entry. As a poet with a long history in the oral tradition of spoken word performances, Thornhill utilizes figurative language, the apparatuses of repetition and rhyme to create immediacy and tangibility for readers sonically—through the ear. For example, in “House of the Rising,” she welcomes a newborn into “this crash landing life,” describing birth as the infant arriving thus:

Head first
into a temple of gloves
hair wet and tangled

The baby’s “battle cry / joins the symphony” of life and of the poem’s music of consonance and assonance. She also utilizes the structure and rhythms of form—ghazals, villanelles, sonnets and more—to produce her hallmark musicality.

The Caribbean, her home country of Trinidad and Tobago in particular, is present in Thornhill’s work—subject and song. She often writes in the language of the land of her formative years, creating another layer of music, and yet another way to unveil herself authentically to her readers and listeners. In performance, her accent roots the poems, and on the page, her use of Trinidadian diction and syntax makes the poem feel like a conversation with the reader.

Samantha visited Furious Flower in March of 2023, and sat for this conversation, which has been lightly edited for clarity.

Welcome back to JMU, to Furious Flower, to Harrisonburg! I’m so excited to have you, our former Poet in Residence. 

Yes! It feels like quite the homecoming, the luscious fields and the beautiful campus and the flowers in bloom. It’s very beautiful to be back this spring. 

So, The Fight and The Fiddle is the Furious Flower journal where we feature one poet every quarter with some work and an essay. And so, introducing you to an audience, I would love you to tell them about your journey to poetry. 

So, it actually started with an English assignment from my sixth-grade teacher. She asked us to write a poem about Christmas. And I was a fresh-faced immigrant from Trinidad. And as anyone who has been to Trinidad knows, Trini Christmases are special. There are things that you eat and drink during a Trinidadian Christmas that you will not find very easily in an American Christmas. So when I was asked to write this poem about Christmas, it was of special significance to me because there was this nostalgia, there was this missing, there was this being uprooted quite suddenly from my homeland and being transplanted into this unknown territory and feeling alienated and being called an alien, because of my status. I’m a residential alien, so, it’s the way in which you’re identified that changes from being a “native” to an “alien”. I would say that that assignment from my teacher brought me closer to home and that it gave me the opportunity to go in a time machine and travel back through the sensory experience of Christmas in Trinidad, that feeling of home. And I fell in love with poetry from that moment because I looked at the blank page and recognized myself in it: that I could fill it with anything, that it could be my mirror, it was something very holy. In hat seemingly mundane Christmas assignment. 

I feel like so many of us wind up going back to some sort of teacher moments, that moment of introduction to poem. What was your most magical experience with a poem? 

In middle school, I was very much influenced by Shel Silverstein type of poetry, which was like rhyming couplets, or interlocking rhyme schemes. A little bit of meter, ghost of a meter. But I remember when I first took Mr. Zucker’s class in ninth grade, and he really taught me… he helped me to break out of the rhyme and really taught me the art of free verse–which is like composing this line by this breath– and that whole concept of the short line versus the long line. I remembered when it clicked for me, that tool of enjambment, what it really means to break that line and the tool that that is and I remember I wrote my first real, best, [poem]… with that free will decision of enjambments. It was a poem about flying, and I just remember how different of an energy that poem had in comparison to all the other poems I’d written beforehand, and it was through this mentorship. 

Tell me more about some of your other poetry mentors. Who are some folks that have helped you grow your craft along the way in those different stages? 

Oh, well, who came along at just the right time? [Laughs.] Though this professor is not a poet, she was my English professor at Florida State University. Her name is Dr. Chanta Haywood. And she taught African American literature, she taught critical literary theory, and I feel like she was integral to my thinking, like the way in which I thought and allowed my thoughts to move through what I was reading, and I feel like that actually, really developed me as a poet. And she also, along with my 10th grade teacher Miss Rice, who was a white feminist and absolutely loved Black literature. And so, she plunged me into the African American literary tradition at… this is when I was 15 or so. So, she gave… I fell in love with Zora Neale Hurston and James Baldwin and Ralph Ellison, and if it had not have been for Miss Rice, if not for her, it would have been you know, One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest. So, between Miss Rice and then Dr. Haywood, who really… she really taught a lot of antebellum literature of the enslaved. And I feel like there’s was a particular permission in being invited into the African American literary tradition as a tradition… as a Caribbean poet that felt displaced and was looking for where I fit, looking for where my voice is going to be valued, and where it will align. And I feel like falling in love with the African American literary tradition informed my poetry greatly. Then I went to University of Virginia and met Rita Dove, who really mentored me in terms of… there’s certain things that she says about the life beyond the MFA, and that was really insightful for me, and it wasn’t things that you would expect. She would say things like, “keep everything,” talking about your archives. She would say things like “write everything,” meaning don’t limit yourself to any genre. And she always encouraged me to have a habit, like a hobby outside of writing poetry, and she just has this laser beam eye for craft that I hope I was able to get a little bit of. 

I’m curious about, just your process of crafting a poem. How does a Samantha poem happen? Like what are the steps, what are the things you apply, how does the poem move for you?  

I’m looking at this book and when I read through this book for any reading, each poem is like my baby, just like my sons, each poem comes into the world a different way. There’s one way in which something has to happen, which is the insemination process. And that is the idea, that is the image, that is the word, that is the question, that is the what is the thing I’m feeling but I have no word for? Whatever that spark is, that’s the insemination process, where something wants to be something. I don’t know if it’s a poem yet, because I write in other genres. I might need to vomit on the page in a journal entry. It might be an essay one day; it could be a children’s book. Because I have the write everything, unity, consciousness, paradigm around writing, I don’t always know right away what this is, but then there comes a moment when I know that this wants to be a poem. It’s a particular energy of mystery that I find the poem incites and invites; it’s literally something that I’m trying to figure out. What is this image? What is the taste of this word? Why must I explore this?  

And so, at that point, I go where the river takes me. I usually write my work longhand. I do my revisions on my computer, but I love the transmission of just pen and paper. And that process can get kind of gnarly, as many poets know. Some poems slip out ever so effortlessly as if they just been waiting in the dark to be attended to and they had already written themselves, and then others are a real wrestle, a real struggle. With even the form, how you want it to look, how it’s supposed to feel, how it’s supposed to sound, all those decisions, it just ends up taking a really long time, sometimes weeks, where you’re just [writing] draft after draft after draft. I’m a drafter. Any of my poems that I might share have been written at least 15 times. It’s just draft after draft after draft—every word needs to sing. And even after draft after draft, I got this book back and there are many things I would change. [Laughs.] I was like, damn it, damn it, so it never ends. There’s a door that closes that sighs closed in a poem when you know this is the ending. This is all it wants to say. Then even after it says all it wants to say, there’s still the revision process. And I feel like that never ends. I remember Yusef Komunyakaa saying something like that–the poem never ends. And I didn’t understand what he meant by that. It was at Cave Canem one year, he said that: “The poem never ends.” And I remember Rita telling me, “You just have to give them the manuscript, Samantha, there comes a time where you’re just never gonna get it. You just sometimes, you just have to hand it over into the world. And it’s never going to be just so.” So, I think about what these elder poets have been saying, and it really is an organism that continues to revise itself, just like the human being. It’s just that this is the archive of… the latest version known to the world. And I find myself reading these poems and still revising them. So, my process never ends. [Laughs.] It’s maddening and delightful. 

I want to hear about the process of making the book. I always tell people I write poems, not books. And I feel as though the assembly into book is its own whole craft. So, share a little bit about that process.  

I have a funny path as a poet in that I’m considered pretty seasoned, but it’s [The Animated Universe] my debut book. These poems have been published. They’ve been published for 20 years in different anthologies, and I do write poems and not books, I actually really subscribe to that. I wrote poems and this is 20 years of poems, written from some disparate places in my life, different spaces, different evolutions, different experimentations and it came time to assemble it. Over time, I’d been creating manuscripts and sending to the Cave Canem Prize. The poems were definitely already in conversation with each other as a body for some time in the manuscript format. First, it’s the dissertation. And then you go through life, and you retain some of the poems in the dissertation that you feel, this still represents me. And you carve away many… it’s literally my selected poems in a debut piece. These are my favorite poems that I feel made it through the cesspool of poems. And so, the process of making the book, it was a hot mess in the sense that the title changed like four times. Every time the title changed, it had a kind of different identity. But I will say that when The Animated Universe came about as a title, it did something. Once I had the title, it was like the way I felt when I was about to name my children, like this is their names. I don’t know why I know this, but these are the names of my children, and this is how The Animated Universe felt. And so, I started to look at the poems through that lens of animation, like what is this animated universe? This is a phrase that I use several times in the book. And it really speaks to the ways in which… it really is a nod to the odes that I’ve written over time.  

I fell in love with the ode as a mode of meditation–almost like a medicine for my life, to be able to elevate the mundane to be able to look at these sacred objects that we ignore every day that we take for granted every day. The way Pablo Neruda looked at the world through the lens of love, the onion on the ground, the potato, the hummingbird. I call him my Baby Daddy of Poetry because without Pablo Neruda’s poems, so many of mine wouldn’t exist. When he really meditated on the tomato or on the black panther, in that cage that he saw in Vietnam in the middle of the street, it becomes animated, the Black Panther was definitely animated. But when you think about inanimate objects, he animates the inanimate with his attention. And with his images. You don’t just see an onion or you see a bird… he compares the onion to “a fairy godmother wrapped in delicate paper.” He calls it a “star of the poor”—this is an onion! [Laughs.] So imbuing it with all the universe–this is where I feel like I pulled a page from his playbook with my poems–and seeing the animation in the inanimate and seeing the consciousness and recognizing and honoring the consciousness in everything that exists. I feel like my poems really carry that energy. A lot of them are meditations on everyday things, and I find that when I was able to see my poems in that umbrella, in that context, I feel like everything came together very naturally.

When I gave them to my editor, Kwame Dawes, I thought that he was going to come back (I heard that he’s like a beast with ordering, like, that’s his thang!). So I handed it to him with absolutely full humility in that regard, like I probably don’t have it right, like this is what I did… I don’t know if he was on the road or what, but he hardly touched the order. He said the order was just fine. I was shocked! So that part was easy. But there were some poems that he wanted taken out. And then I found poems in my archives that I wanted to add, and he was really delighted by that, but it was a process all up until it went to print. It was poring over every single word. It was maddening. And, [Laughs.] this is what we have. It’s perfectly imperfect. 

For me the ode is also an opportunity to find gratitude, to celebrate the difficult and I feel as though the odes in your book do that as well. I’m curious about if that resonates for you and if there’s anything you’d like to share about that other function of ode.

That does resonate for me because I also feel that [Federico García] Lorca was onto something with Duende. When I started learning about him, I was fascinated by this idea of a shadow element, to even the most buoyant pieces (and his pieces weren’t buoyant). [Laughs.] But I think that’s life. I think that it’s a performance of light and shadow. I feel as poets we’re either bringing something in the dark to the light or shining the light on something hidden. So whichever angle you’re trying to approach it, that’s what we’re doing. We’re merging shadow and light, and so I wanted to do that in a conscious way with these odes. Mine, I think, are a little more shadowy, but he has this ode to the suit for instance. In “Ode to My Suit,” he’s in love with the suit, but there’s a shadow of, I can get shot in this suit; this poem ends up being about mortality, and not about so much the suit. The suit represents oneness, and mortality. And so, I always appreciate the shadows that Neruda might have in his work, and I decided to really examine that in my life. At first, I was writing like odes… but I actually really, even when I look at my “Ode to Chalk,” which I thought was a sunny ode, there’s a hint of an elegy in there because my dead grandmother was a schoolteacher and chalk was a very resonant image in my life. So, I can’t think of chalk without thinking of her. There’s a shadow–the less discussed conversations. In “Ode to an Apron,” I grapple with ideas of domesticity and femininity. There’s “Ode to Gentrification,” where I really struggle with my position in a discussion that’s easy to say, “Oh, look at those gentrifiers,” but when you are one, [Laughs.] it’s a different discussion. And so, I’ve used the ode as an opportunity to meditate on the light and shadow dance of the abstractions, as well as the objects that inform my life. 

You had a whole trajectory as Lady Griot / Samantha Raheem and I feel like performance is still so much a part of your poetics. Could you talk about that relationship–the performance, the embodiment, the poetry? 

I’ve come to really collapse my ideas of performance strangely enough, in the sense that I’ve actually come to see the writing of poetry as a performance of my interiority. So even the act of writing is performance. The act of performance is a part of the writing process, because every time I put a word in the air, I put poems in the air, I’m still revising, as we talked about earlier, so my ideas of creation and performance have become collapsed. I’ve come a long way with that because I have this sort of fissure in my psyche that comes from leaving my homeland from a young age and moving to another place. So, I have a hybrid personality. I have the ability to code switch and vacillate between worlds. I’ve traveled all over the world and I’m like a chameleon that stands out! [Laughs.] And so similarly, with my identity as a poet, that same thing happened where I started out with Mr. Zucker with the line and with the breath and keeping my poems very private and on the page and not sharing them with anybody, except for people that wanted to read them; I wasn’t reading them out loud. And then falling in love with spoken word at Florida State University and seeing the ways in which the words made music in the air between the poet and the audience, and the interplay with the audience, and the immediacy of that connection. I was attracted to that. And then I created two separate works. I’m studying at Florida State University with Barbara Hamby, David Kirby, James Kimbrough, applying to University of Virginia, getting my poems workshopped, and then I’m ripping stages from Jacksonville to Tallahassee, hustling CDs out of a trunk of my car, and having a full-blown spoken word career. That was Samantha Raheem. That was Lady Griot. This was the storyteller in me.  I had this split poetic identity.

When I went to University of Virginia, it kind of crystallized; I felt like that whole “stage versus page” discussion, debacle—I don’t know what to call it—I felt like I wanted to find a way to fuse… and maybe they never would… I was fine with there being poems that just existed perfectly on the stage and in a CD somewhere, and then poems that I would eventually publish. I found myself trying to find the happy medium, like this is a poem I can slam and publish in the Paris Review? [Laughs.] Did I accomplish that? Maybe. I slammed some poems that I published in… other magazines [Laughs.]. I got kind of close! There are poems that… they didn’t score high in slams, and they didn’t get widely published, but they reached a middle ground. I felt like I didn’t want to have a dual identity… but it still happens. I’m in a place where I’m at peace with a body of work from Lady Griot. These are all poems that are off-book. These are poems that rhyme. These are poems that sound like hip hop. These are poems that are my 20s. I went to South Africa in December, and rocked those poems like they were new. It was incredible. And then I have this venture of reading poems from The Animated Universe that I don’t necessarily have memorized, which is highly uncomfortable for me. I like being able to talk to my audience unencumbered. The work it takes to get there is still to come with this book where I can say this book to an audience. That’s my goal. 

These are sensual, embodied, delicious, poems. And you talked about breath just now, you’re talking about voice… I’m curious what’s the role of the body in your poetics. 

Sometimes the body tells me when it’s time to write. Sometimes it’s like this swirling in my sacral chakra that’s like bitch sit down [Laughs]. Oh, sorry [Laughs.]. There’s this time when “Ode to an Apron” came to me. I opened my closet and saw this apron on the way out to… I had something to do. And I opened my closet door and saw my apron swinging. And I remember that I’d shoved it in there so many months ago. I sat down and it was like, this [gestures] was like sit down, I sat down and wrote that poem and didn’t end up going to where I needed to go. I sat at the table and wrote that “Ode to an Apron.” And then I showed it to Aracelis [Girmay] she was like, “That was like a battle ode to an apron.” I was like, “that poem was meant to be.” So sometimes the body lets me know when it’s time to create, especially in this region [gestures], and then also, when I get an idea, my head starts to tingle, and it’s like this unicorn dust will come over me and say go be a unicorn on the page! And so, my body tells me, and that’s one thing. The breath is another because as I’m writing there’s something very different, and Yusef Komunyakaa talks about this, that’s so inherently different about writing with the pen and paper. So, there’s like the physical activity of that. And then I also as I write, I’m reading out loud. So that’s how I lay my breath down. That’s what I know where the line wants the breaks. It’s an oral experience. The literary experience is an oral experience for me.  

I’m so grateful to my first creative writing professor for so many things — but one of the things was I remember he said, “real writers type” [Laughs]. And I was like, well, I’m a real writer! I want to be legit! And so I can’t think until I’m on a computer because that’s how I trained myself from the very, very beginning. So I’m always fascinated by the handwriting people– I can’t figure out my line this way! [Laughs.]  

It’s a deliberate mess. It just is. You don’t know! It makes the process more messy. It does. And when you have that screen, and you can just delete. It sanitizes the process and it sanitizes the archive in a way that I don’t champion for me. I want my shit messy. Like the way when Kevin Young talked about Lucille Clifton’s archives, like when the suite of poems, the ones which were transmitted messages from spirit. She was a channel and they were channeled through her automatic writing. And he said “Those archives are wild! It’s her handwriting, but crazy looking, and it’s jagged. It’s like coming off the page!” And I was like, I would give anything to see those archives one day. So, there’s something really delicious to me about that. 

When you go back to your archive, what delights you, what surprises you, what mortifies you? What do you find? I know you just had a recent re-engagement with your archives. So, I’m curious: when you go back, what’s there? 

I retrieved my archives from storage after three years and I shipped my archives from the United States to Trinidad where I live now. I started writing in a journal at age 12, and I have them all up until now, so, it’s 60-something volumes of just my tomfoolery. [Laughs.] Because the way my journals roll, the journal is where I go… my journals are my home girl. One day Carolyn Forché, and I were talking about museums buying your archives if you’re dead, and she was like, “I’m burning my shit!” [Laughs.] And you know what? I’m in a place where I’m like, Have it, world, after I die. Y’all can talk about me later. I’m very real in my journals. It’s like my dirt, that’s where I release all my dirt. That’s where I’m silly. That’s where I’m…it’s like everything. It’s like the everything of the everything.  

The journals were the biggest gift. I have drafts of poems. I have my poems from middle school. I have pictures with all of you. I have letters that I’ve written with other poets over time–Krista Franklin, Rita Dove, people that I have verbal correspondences with because writing letters is extremely important to me. And so, I have incredible things, but what felt like the greatest gift to me was the thought of my 12-year-old self starting to write in a journal with the foresight that I would want to read it later. She was right. And she brings me back to myself because life is like a dream in that I forget so much of what I’ve experienced. And I put it in those books. I pressed my life into those books, not knowing how much it would mean to me later. I just knew I was doing something extraordinary, which is just pen and paper. And so, I forget a lot of things, and my journals bring me back to myself and it feels like a soul retrieval. And that’s what’s felt delightful. That’s what’s made me cringe. That’s what’s made me giggle. It’s all, everything contained in those sagas that I had the wherewithal at age 12 to start to embark on.  

As somebody who journals never [Laughs.] with no patience for sitting down and writing. I’m like, I already lived it. We don’t need to do that again. 

Yes, I’m amazed. I’m honestly amazed by when you say the time… it took so much… it’s such an investment of my time, emotional energy, paper, ink, storage, moving it from place to place. Having a place. People looked at me like… I was paying several hundred dollars a month to keep these safe, all of these archives. And people who aren’t writers didn’t understand it–Why don’t you just toss it or why don’t you just…? And it’s like no, this means something to me because Rita Dove told me to keep everything [Laughs]. 

What’s some of the worst writing advice or not suited for you writing advice that you’ve received? 

That the word “McDonald’s” shouldn’t be in a poem [Laughs]. That bothered me! 

The word “McDonald’s” shouldn’t be in a poem…? 

Yeah, poems shouldn’t carry words like “McDonald’s.” I received that advice from an older MFA student. So, it wasn’t even like a professor but it’s like an older student in the MFA program and he’s been around the block a little bit… From a musical standpoint, “McDonald’s” isn’t that compelling. I get it. Sonically “McDonald’s,” blah. But what it represents… it’s a tool in the toolbox. I think every word, everything is a tool in the toolbox. I was coming to language like anything’s anything, and then there are these restrictions– the ‘don’t dos.’ And so, “McDonald’s” represented that to me. I feel like I came across that many times, people’s do’s and don’ts. And when I became a teacher I was very conscious of that. What I told my students to do and don’t, I found myself navigating that quite a bit. I didn’t want to be that person [Laughs.].  

You mentioned being a teacher, and I’m always curious about the poets who teach. What are the things you try to give to your students? What are the things you finally have to break your students away from? What are some of your teaching tips and tricks? 

The first poem in this book that I read, “The Animated Universe,” bloomed out of a creative writing class seminar that I was teaching at the City School of the Arts. I was an artist in residence. I was teaching sixth, seventh, and eighth graders and that was a “What If?” assignment. A lot of my assignments and a lot of my curriculum ideas are actually very simple. I try to empower students with how simple it is to begin a poem. So, I imbue them with the tools that I believe that once they finish taking my class, they will carry with them for the rest of their lives– “I could always write a ‘What If’ poem, I can always write an ‘I Am,’ just to say how I’m feeling.” I give them… I have these sorts of tried-and-true lesson plans, I’m like a jukebox of lesson plans at this point. I’ve been teaching New York City youth since 2004, 2005. I taught senior citizens; I taught the Juilliard actors. A lot of the poems in this book came out of teaching writing workshops, and taking my own medicine, so you will see “I Am” poems, you’ll see extended metaphors… I think this book could actually be its own curriculum because it was born out of the curriculum, the medicine that I was giving to my students.  

I’m very big on fusing the tools of the craft with the spiritual function of poetry, of what it really means to express yourself in this way, to communicate with yourself in this way. I use it as a tool of self-awareness because I feel like in my work with the actors in particular, and it really funneled, [and] trickled down to my work with the young people. As a teacher, what is actually my objective of using this craft and being an ambassador of this craft that has informed my life? Miss Warren in sixth grade enticed me to write a poem about Christmas, and it changed my life. And so, when I was given this job to teach in a middle school, which was terrifying, [Laughs.] and they were terrified of me, it turned out, it’s like wow, I am that person now. I have that opportunity to pass that baton in a real way. I am not just an English teacher, I am a poet in the world living this life. And I can go into these classrooms and tell these students what’s possible when they develop a strong relationship to language, to life through language. And I tell them that when you have that you will be able to walk into any room and feel very un-fuck-withable. Because you’re rooted in something, you’re anchored in something, which is your awareness and your emotional truth, and all of this is what I feel we move closer to when we do this monastic craft called poetry. That’s what I tried to help them to understand–that this is a spiritual activity that feeds your soul. I’ve heard someone say poetry is the language of the soul. Absolutely. It brings you in touch with yourself and then here are the tools to do that. 

Oh, that’s a gift.  

It’s a gift to me too. 

So, what are you working on currently? What’s ahead for you as a writer? Goals, desires, dreams, or stuff that’s just in progress. 

So… Rita Dove told me to write everything. Okay, I wrote some children’s books, I wrote different kinds of children’s books, picture books. I’ve written early reader books, I’ve written novels. Now I have my poetry book, check! Now I’m going to pivot to nonfiction [Laughs]. I’m working the grid! So, I’m excited to say I’ve gone back to work on a project with the late, great Nipsey Hussle. I started working on a book project with him some nine years ago, when he was like 24, and I was… how old was I? Like, 27. We were like 20-year-olds, and I was in New York City at the time. He passed on, as we know, and I still have the manuscript that he and I were working on. It’s basically a conversation between the two of us; it’s like an interdimensional dialogue. Because what I’m working on now is basically returning to that interview, and like reinserting myself into it. His part is already done, so, I’m working on my part, and I have some nonfiction projects that I’m really excited about that are coming down the pipeline, but I’ll keep those in the shadows for now.  

Well, this was just lovely. And thank you for being here! 

Thank you so much for having me!

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

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Photo Credit: Erica Cavanagh

by L. Renée

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

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

Thank you so much for having me. 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Because I love him. (Laughs.)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

That’s where the title comes from!

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

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

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

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

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

Did you feel freer? 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

It’s beautiful. 

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

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

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

What’s your favorite thing to cook? 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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by Lauren K. Alleyne 

Erica Hunt’s poetry operates within a critical and illuminating paradox. In it, language and time are both bedrock and evanescent—slippery and uncontainable even as they are essential and foundational. In the poems, time collapses, expands, spirals, contracts bringing history into tomorrow and evaporating the present into a formerly- (and formally-)imagined future. Alongside this shifting time, or perhaps within its shifting, language both emerges and is formed. The shifting of these axes—of what we generally hold to be constants—makes for a creative disorientation, which is to say readers are nudged out of the familiar, rehearsed orders of chronology and grammar, and discover the fissures through which change might enter.

In particular, it is Hunt’s hallmark use of wordplay and repetition that serves to shake loose tired logics, opening within those same logics, an elsewhere born of the language itself. Her poem, “Proof,” provides an example of this revelatory wor(l)dplay:

Proof that we live in a broken world, and a broken world is unlivable.

Proof that the carrot turns into the stick and vice versa. Proof that
that seems normal, self-sufficient.

Proof that we sometimes destroy things that are broken and can’t be
fixed and sometimes fix things because to live with them broken is
unthinkable.

Proof that we switch roles, sometimes to destroy things that are
broken and can’t be fixed and sometimes to live with things that are
broken because to fix them would be unthinkable.

Proof that we learn to live with the unthinkable.
(Jump the Clock, 73)

Sentence after sentence, the poem orchestrates dissonance: the repeated “proof” seems to offer concreteness, carrying with it the air of irrefutability. At the same time, as the poem progresses, following its own line of iron-clad “proof,” the logic unravels, revealing its core horror—“we learn to live with the unthinkable.” The discomfort of the implications of such a logic ruptures the very complacency that would allow it to register as true, as the line’s declaration makes one wonder what manner of “unthinkable” things we have “learn[ed] to live with.” (Genocide? War? Poverty?) Suddenly the reader is thinking about the formerly-unthinkable, unmooring the whole idea of “unthinkability” from its solidity, its status as both given and acceptable. The rupture generated by the activity of thought through the activation of language in the poem opens a possible space where one might choose (or at the very least desire) not, in fact, to live with the unthinkable. A space where change might enter.

In addition to revealing oppressive logics, Hunt’s poems argue for a vigorous restructuring if not complete dispensation of language that does not move us toward liberation. She urges us to reject “words, recognizably impaled, plates of gummy platitude” (“This is no time for nail biting,”) and instead to “Invent the language as if each inflection / belonged to you instead of containing you…” (“The Order of the Story,”)

Erica Hunt was the 2020 judge for the Furious Flower Poetry Prize. She visited the JMU campus in June of 2022, and we talked about poetry, language and what it means to wrestle with their roles in the world. This is an edited version of that conversation.

Thank you so much. I am so excited, Erica, to be having a conversation with you about poetry and all things poems. Welcome to JMU, The Fight & The Fiddle, and Furious Flower! I have a ton of questions. I want to start with just asking about your arrival to the space of poetry. What brought you here? What was your journey to this craft and to this practice?

I would say that, like many writers, I was a big reader, and from an early age, as soon as I could read, I consumed all the books that I possibly could in the children’s section of the library. So at first, I thought of myself as a storyteller. Later, I was a teenager when I started writing poetry. And I didn’t have many models. I remember I had a fourth-grade teacher who gave me Paul Laurence Dunbar, Joggin’ Erlong. I understood this is poetry because you could hear the music of it. Also, the dialect poetry was very puzzling to me. I just didn’t know what to make of it. And remember this 1965 or something, so it took me a while to appreciate what she saw in me. Later on as a teenager, I started writing poetry without too many models. But I would say that my early models were LeRoi Jones, who I saw early in high school, Amiri Baraka, Sonia Sanchez, Allen Ginsburg. In all three of those people, I would say, poetry was connected to a political and social commitment. But being a practical sort, as I was raised to be, that kind of, “take the test, do the test, and get your promotion!” Whatever. You know, civil servants really stressed that. I did not think I was a poet. And I thought, “Oh, I love language. Let me study linguistics, philosophy of language…” Not practical much, but somehow more promised–more legitimate! Isn’t that interesting? So poetry kind of crept up on me and in a way that was expression, but also about language, the wonder of what our language can do, and what it does to us, and to our thinking.

I love that answer. And I love the idea of both wonder and expansion. I know you’re often referred to as an experimental poet. And I’m interested in what you think about that term and how you inhabit or reject or reshape or own that term. Because I think so much of what I sense as experimental is your testing of those wonders and limits of language. Tell me about that. 

I think it’s interesting the way that that term finally is beginning to have less of this kind of elitist approach, as if there was only one way to be experimental. In fact, I would say that people, when you sit down and you don’t quite know what you’re going to write, you are in some ways testing something. You’re testing your experience with the language, against the language, in the language. Can it be adequate? And what I’m so interested in this idea of experiment, is there’s so much of our experience, especially Black people and people of color’s experience, which has not been put into literature, yet. Language is so much about our psyche; it’s a social phenomena, we use it to connect and communicate, but there’s also parts, there are territories, within ourselves and within our interactions that are not yet expressed in language or in literature. And then how does that become part of the experimental project? And the project is to begin to mine and excavate these levels of experience and feeling and spirituality and stillness.

Quietude.

Right, right. Quietudes that aren’t quite fully manifest in language. And so, we got lots to do. And experiment is one way to go about it.

I love so much of this, because I feel when I read your work, there’s so much a sense of a mind at work. A mind sort of exploring its own contours. But at the same time, there’s an awareness, like in the poem you just read, of the reader of the other, of the audience. And then I also think of this idea that also is in your work of the poem being part of an even larger conversation. So talk to me about that tension between the quietude and the stillness in the individual mind, and the audience, the intimacy of that. And then that larger conversation, that expansion that I feel is so packed into the work.

That’s good. It’s really astute. There’s lots of conversations, I always say that poems occur in layers. And one of the things that gives us a feeling of Wow, that was a great experience here, reading this poem, is that we can return to it and discover these other layers. We haven’t exhausted the possibilities of the poem. I say to students that if you get to the bottom of it, you read the top line and you go to the bottom and you think you got it all and you’re ready to put it down, then that poem is not very successful. A poem is supposed to make you go, “How did we get here? What was that journey? Let me go back up and read that again.” Not because it’s bad. It might be because of ambiguity, but because there are layers that have been worked into that tapestry, into the framework of the poem.

I’m an introvert, and some of it is sort of internal reflection, but we’re always in conversation. And language is a social phenomenon. We’re talking to other poets, we’re talking to other parts of literature. In my poems, I have a kind of social commentary voice. I’m reminding that we share a common destiny, that we’re connected. We can act like we’re all individuals, or as [Margaret] Thatcher said, “there is no society, only individuals.” We can act like that, but that’s not the case. And that even in our internal reflections, we are powerfully constructed by the society we grow up in. That we live in. Not grow up in, live in.

So, thinking of this social commentary and a larger conversation, we are in a tumultuous place in America and in the world right now. And what do you see as the role of the poets, of language in all of this? What’s our work as practitioners of language?

Yeah, that’s a good question. I ask that question all the time. And I think there’s a particular urgency to that now. Poetry does a couple of things. First of all, one of the things is, it asks us to slow down and read. To not skim, not just go by something. And it pays a particular kind of attention to language and that’s a really helpful thing. The other thing is that we are among the many practitioners of the imagination, of the poetic. Poetics– poesis— I would recall for people means to make things. And so we are making things, and we’re making things and testing things. And some of them are just trifles. But some of them are important pathways of thinking. And those pathways of thinking provide us possible routes for moving past, moving through, untangling–undoing the knots that challenge us right now, and that sometimes limit our lives. So poetry is how we do a kind of speculation, and as I like to say, a rehearsal, for a life that we do want. The life we are trying to move to, that we think, “Oh, I’ll thrive there. Our people will thrive there.”

Our planet might thrive there.

Our planet might thrive there. 

The way that you’re speaking, it seems like language is a technology of thinking, and I’m curious about how and if technology— or that thinking of language as a technology—how does that play with the experimentation or the form of your work?

I think I’m open to it. I don’t think technology plays that much of a role, but yes, language is a technology of thinking. Language helps to give our thoughts a sort of shape and form. It’s the clothing of thought. I think somebody says that, “language is the clothing of thought.” It’s sort of like, Oh, that’s what that thought is, I didn’t know it before I wrote it down. I wrote it down and then it becomes clarified. You see its beauties and its flaws and its limits. You see whether or not you’re being grandiose. (Laughs.) Or maybe that’s such a modest observation, maybe that’s all I can say in this line.

Language is “as if…” “what if…” and then finish the thought. That kind of rehearsal. Or “yes, and…” or “this is my experience, and…” or assert [that] “this is my experience. Yes, and…” And to finish that sentence as a way, as an engine for going through a poem.

As summoning also, right? Because the “as if,” calls forth something else that may or may not have been pre-formed.

I’m thinking about your whole other career as a community organizer, and a grant maker, and fundraiser and I was reading about some amazing projects you did over the years. How is that work distinct from or in conversation or congruence with your work as a writer?

I feel like that it’s so interesting. I poured so much of myself into those years. It was a privilege to have people tell me about their lives. I really saw other people’s lives. During that time, I traveled extensively through the South, where I had not been. And I would say maybe I’d spend 30 to 40 days a year visiting organizers and communities who were not in the news or anything like that, but were really making change at the community level. And so, it was really a great honor to support that kind of movement work. I understood something about Black people’s resilience. I’d seen and I had my own examples, of course, in my family and in New York City, but entering communities and seeing where governments were not for them, didn’t work for them, so communities made their own, were able to, nevertheless, make change– everything from school systems and making it better for the kids, to asserting voting rights, electing people who represented them. These are important pieces that actually make it so that I can’t let go of the idea that change is possible. We make change. There is a level of heroism that is right there; that often people know how to solve their problems. They have the solutions they need… it’s like how do you help people? And not go, “oh, you know, well, we know better, we’re gonna find it–” No. I really believe in that bottom up change.

How does it influence my poetry? It made me want to sample, to really tell stories, let other voices through. I’m very interested in that– how do you make a chorus, a choir, in a poem? And to not get so hypnotized? You can get hyper-focused on the enemy– the establishment, the newspapers, the government, certain lies that get told over and over again. And as a poet, you feel particularly sensitive to when the Supreme Court goes on and says, “Oh, your law about guns in this state that y’all voted on… nuh uh… By the way, abortion and reproductive freedom, that’s something we’re gonna give to the state for you to vote on.” So they can put contradictory decisions out in one week. You can get focused on, “How dare they? How could they?” Or you can decide: what are the voices that need to be heard that have a wisdom and express the what if?

There’s a woman, her name is Ruby Sales. Ruby is in her late 70s, maybe early 80s now, and she was an early pioneer of the civil rights movement. She was part of that march over the Edmund Pettus Bridge. When they were gathering, and she was a teenager, the local white people in Selma came with a gun and tried to threaten them, not to march across the bridge. And somebody came in that evening, a white man with a gun, and pointed a gun at her and cocked it. And this white Episcopalian priest, who was visiting from Boston, stepped in front of the gun and got shot and was killed. And it stayed with her. It stayed with her and it changed her life. She became a tireless advocate, tireless worker, for human rights. Human rights, they say civil, but it’s human rights. And she’s quite something, someone I’ve been privileged to meet, she is quite something. And it’s both her spiritual transformation and her political transformation, her intellectual transformation, into someone who’s just ferocious about these things and points out the way that these things– that kind of hatred, that kind of supremacist thinking, is with us now. Destroys us. Takes life all the time, and it’s completely hypocritical. It stands in our way of getting free. It’s a powerful story, she tells these powerful stories, she’s a powerful woman. And those voices… Those voices. And she shows up, other people show up, as voices in the work.

I’m so interested in the lyric and our traditional understanding of that lyric “I,” that singular expression, the eruption from the self. I do think of your work as lyric, but I also recognize these other voices in there. And so how do you think about holding those together? That idea of the lyric self and accommodating the other voices?

I’m very influenced by this idea of collage. Because the collage allows you to have both– to sample from all these different kinds of language sources, including oneself. Collages, we think of it as sort of a European technique, but of course it’s a technique which has many roots in many cultures. I’m very influenced by visual art. There’s this way that you think about any culture that has a sculptural form, a sculptural practice, where there’s synoptic views. So you can look… say you’re looking at a figure, the subject in the sculpture– think of a piece of African sculpture, say, you’re looking at a mask. You’re also looking at the mask in time. It’s usually being worn in motion. In time, it’s facing different directions; there are different inflections. It’s the dynamism. So that our voices, the lyric voice, is not a stable, constant voice. It depends on which time and which gesture and which direction that voice may be facing, who it’s addressing: it’s not always the same. We change when we address different people. Similarly, we’re not always in charge of our voices. Sometimes this voice comes, you go, “Who the hell is this?” It’s because we are socialized. And so those voices aren’t always completely under our control. So, the lyric voice is interesting the way that it is so multiform, malleable. And then when I say choir, it’s like, there could be a Ruby Sales, there could be Erica at 10, there could be some of my reactivity to some newspaper headline, it could be the newspaper headline–all of those things.

I’m so interested, too, in orality as, I think, a huge component of your work. It’s just a joy, and also a whole experience, to hear you read. Can you tell me a little bit about how that enacts or how it plays out in your poetics?

I’ve become very attentive, attuned to performance. The performance of a poem, and you can do anything. You can invite intimacy, even in a large room, by the way you read the poem, and you can get people excited. And you can also highlight lines for people so that they hear–even if other lines kind of go by them, they’ll remember one or two, and that will give them the sense of the whole. Because I’m paying attention, I’m picking up things from singers, jazz singers. Jeanne Lee, I mentioned in a recent essay, Jeanne Lee was an improvisational jazz singer, she passed. But she had a whole range of vocal techniques, but I’ve been listening to a lot of Sheila Jordan and Carmen McRae. And I love Diana Reeves. I love the way that, yeah they’re telling a story, but they’re giving a feeling. You stop focusing on the words and you realize you’re focusing on the way their voice moves. And, “Oh, you were really harmed there.” Or, “Oh, you’re really in love!” And that can be conveyed through a voice, I love listening to that stuff and trying to understand how to join more closely how sound is an aspect of meaning.

We’ve talked about visual arts, we’ve talked about music, and at one point, you thought you were going to be a music writer. How do all of these arts, visual art, other arts, impact and influence on your work?

I learned so much about composition. Like, how do you compose? So you have all these parts, you have all these little art parts. You have a great line. “Oh, that’s a great line. Oh, what a word!” We’re collecting, right? We’re collecting lines. We’re collecting some thoughts, you have this thought, “Boy, that’s a funny thought.” I have this whole thing about when will Black women own ourselves—self-possession. That’s like my little joke. My double entendre. So, I’m always collecting little puns or things like that. And then what do you do with the parts? I’ve learned a lot from listening to music composition, how there’s the head. There’s the tune, and then there’s elaboration and improvisation, and then it goes back to the head. And then you try to end not on the [thud] but you end up, right? You end with an open question. 

Just think of a gesture. There’s that. In the visual arts, it’s also about how parts, colors and blocks of color and planes are put together. I love to sit there and just kind of look at the way that things are made. Poesis: how was this made? And trying to imagine myself in the position of that maker. Having to make judgments about where all of these wonderful parts I’ve been collecting ought to go.

With the understanding that there’s an entire pantheon of poets and writers you could choose from, who’s currently energizing you as a writer and just as a human?

Yes, currently energizing me. Well, I’m in a book club. And we’re reading Looking for Lorraine by Imani Perry. Imani Perry got this really interesting way of writing biography. She puts herself in it. Increasingly I’m interested in that, how do you write about a subject and don’t pretend you’re not there?

There’s this way that, sort of like this passive voice writing about something, a topic, like Lorraine Hansberry about whom we care about deeply. I’m interested in the ways that writers, right now, are signaling, “I’m invested in this.” 

I’m interested in Saidiya Hartman’s Wayward Lives. And because, again, of the way the imagination and the subjectivity is not denied, but rather embraced, and actually provides us a way deeper into subject matter. And for that reason, of course, I adore John Keene’s Counternarratives. Though, he’s circumspect; he reframes, but he’s on the periphery of the stories in Counternarratives, wonderful work. In terms of poets, I would say that I’m really interested in Tonya Foster’s writing, she writes about place, and about language, and about culture in a way that’s like it’s a moving collage of things, but also driven by the ear. I’ve taught a lot Diana Khoi Nguyen’s Ghost Of, which is a really interesting book, formally inventive, that commemorates her brother who passed and does that through some straight-ahead text, but she also cuts his shape out of each of the stanzas because he’s missing. It’s something he had done just before he died. He cut himself out of all of the family pictures. So she used that as the template for a beautiful work of mourning. So it’s an embodied, it’s like, the body is missing. The body is missed in the text. Very moving. One other person, Akilah Oliver, of course, who is also not with us, but we’re still taking on her work and taking on the implications of it. Oh, and Renee Gladman! We have to talk about Renee. Renee Gladman, who is writing these architectures, which are both a handwritten kind of text where she goes up and down, and it’s really like a scribble page. And then the text which accompanies it, which is these various scenes of place, of a person walking through urban streets and the kind of maze and rumination that if you’re taking a good walk, you allow yourself to do. So those are really also very interesting to me.

And thinking of your own writing, what do you wrestle with, and what delights you in your own creative practice?

This is a great question, because I can get going on this one. Right now, I’m working on something which returns me to early wellsprings of just places where I connected around literature and language. So I’m thinking a lot about storytelling, which is something I am trying to teach myself to do. I tell stories pretty well, orally, but this is a different thing. I’m thinking, how do you put out stories which are not conventional narratives? They are, you know, poetic narratives. So I’m exploring that right now. And I’m finding all these forums. My theme for this is Scheherazade, our woman storyteller who, just to re-tell the story briefly– the frame story. It’s a Persian collection of stories that has been added to, but the frame story is Scheherazade has to tell a story every night to keep the Caliph, or as I call him, The Boss, from this kind of obsessive, murderous idea that women are not faithful. So he would sleep with a virgin, or new woman, and then in the morning, because of the potential unfaithfulness, he would have her executed. So Scheherazade is there saying, “Look, let me tell you a story.” And she starts to tell him a story and tells him a story. And the Caliph, The Boss, looks up and says, “Oh, it’s morning. I’m so into the story. What happens next?” And she says, “Well, you’re going to have to wait till next time–tomorrow evening. This evening.” And she does this, right, then that’s the story, One Thousand and One Nights. So, I’ve been thinking about what is it to tell a narrative, even a poetic narrative, or especially a poetic narrative, as if your life depended on it? What are the stakes? It’s a version of your first question. What are the stakes of literature? What is it that will… rouse us out of this terrible sleepwalk off a cliff as a society and/or hopelessness– the, kind of, collapse into hopelessness? What are the stories we tell ourselves, even as poetic as, especially as poetic narratives, that help us to keep working and moving forward?

That’s what I’m wrestling with. It’s a big chunk.

Tell us about your most recent book Jump the Clock, which is new and selected. You talked about going back to earlier wellsprings and that made me think of that process, what is that like? Tell us about the book.

Sure! I went back and I said, “I’m just gonna choose poems I like!” They got bigger and bigger, I actually you get to see that many of the poems are poems I still like, I mean, a lot of the poems from previous books are there. And then I went back and looked at poems that didn’t make it into the earlier books. And I put them in, you know. I liked them well enough, or I worked on them some more. I saw my evolution, no one is a static being. 

We’re constantly changing. And I see myself moving from a kind of, a little bit disembodied, into a more formal way like the correspondence theory with these letters. That was really this playful, formal section into more kinds of… freer. I got freer. To play. That’s the best and that people like to read them and have spoken to me about them. And this is over the years, I could say, “okay, yeah, I guess that’s…” And also of course, it’s always interesting, when people come up to you and say, “this poem really spoke to me, this is what it means to me.” And you go, “Okay!” I love that. I just love that it can have a voice that is not always completely centered in the particularities of how it was composed, but really has this–

They joined a choir. 

That’s right. They joined the choir and the work has been completed by the reader. It’s really, really lovely.

Well, that seems an excellent stopping place given that we started with “Dear Reader.” Thank you so much!

You’re welcome. What a pleasure. Thank you.

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

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Lauren K. Alleyne is Editor-in-Chief of The Fight & The Fiddle, Executive Director of the Furious Flower Poetry Center, and Professor of English at James Madison University. She is the author of two collections of poetry, Difficult Fruit (2014) and Honeyfish (2019), the chapbook (Un)Becoming Gretel (2022), as well as co-editor of Furious Flower: Seeding the Future of African American Poetry (2020). Her poetry has appeared in numerous publications including the New York Times, The Atlantic, Ms. Muse, Tin House, and The Caribbean Writer, among others. Recent honors include a 2021 nomination for a US Artist Award, a 2020 NAACP Image Award nomination for Outstanding Poetry, the longlist for the 2020 Bocas Prize for Caribbean Literature, and the shortlist for the 2020 Library of Virginia Literary Awards. In 2021, she was awarded an Outstanding Faculty Award from the State Council for Higher Education in Virginia, and a JMU Agency Star award.

Photo credit: Erica Cavanagh

by Lauren K. Alleyne 

In describing the poetry of Mervyn Taylor, Nobel Laureate and fellow Caribbean poet, Derek Walcott, pointed to the “quiet quality” and the subtlety of his voice.” Any reader of Taylor’s work would have to agree. The poems are quietly wise, quietly funny, quietly devastating. His is a poetry that invites the reader to lean in and listen to the stories it has to tell; and like the best stories, its meaning is both in the spoken and the silences. Consider this excerpt from “Corona City,” in News of the Living: Corona Poems:

                        Your buildings stand tall and empty,
wind blowing through windows,
down corridors into deserted rooms.

In your parks where couples used to
sprawl, waiting for musicians to play,
ducks and geese fill the rotundas, not

a jogger or black boys who once stood
accused, rounding any of the bends.

Here, Taylor describes and embodies the ghostly presence of the city, evoking the absence of “normal” life and mourning its quiet aftermath. However, attention to the poem also reveals a critique of “before” as an imperfect, differently unsafe space in which “black boys” are “accused,” thus challenging the nostalgia the poem itself evokes.

Images are Taylor’s trademark, creating a poetry of gesture and portraiture both. His work diligently enacts its poetic, word-building labor, bringing readers with him to verandahs and beaches, kitchens and bedrooms, Brooklyn and Trinidad. Taylor’s keenly-crafted lines make us admire or mourn people we have met for the first time in his poems. In Taylor’s work, we experience the poem as an exercise in openness and empathy. The poems also stage both the extraordinary flashes that punctuate ordinary life, as well as the heroic nature of our ordinary existences. Whether showing the determined care of a 71-year-old cousin hoisting his 91-year-old mother on his back to bathe her (“Both Blind”); or the transformative desperation of a woman frustrated with the lockdown who pounds on her window screaming “virus be gone!” (“Signs of the Pandemic”); or the poet’s granddaughter about to win her big race, “her braid behind her like a bird in the current of air” (A Blur), Taylor bridges the mythic and the quotidian through his quietly attentive, but keenly calibrated language.

Mervyn Taylor visited Furious Flower, and spoke with Executive Director, Lauren K. Alleyne at James Madison’s Harrison Hall studio. The interview has been edited for clarity and concision.

Welcome to Harrisonburg, James Madison University, and Furious Flower! Tell me a little bit about your history, yourself, and how you wound up being in Brooklyn, and that journey from Trinidad to Brooklyn, New York.

Well, it started out with a love of just writing from my school days, always scribbling some little story or something. And my big dream was for the short story or the novel. But then, just a quick jump from working at the Treasury in Trinidad to coming away to Howard University. I landed at Howard just when the Black Power movement was in full bloom, Stokely [Carmichael] had just left, so the campus was just right for poetry. And the language of the Black Power movement was poetry. I didn’t throw away my love for the novel or the short story, but I started fooling around with some really awful poetry.

I had really good influences. I had classes with Sterling Brown, the old folktale master, and just watching him and his life as a poet unfold during the time of that revolution. A lot of the young students involved in the Black Power movement didn’t understand that Sterling was one of the forerunners in terms of that whole piece of action. He was caught between these young students rebelling, who didn’t even want to come to class, and the sort of middle class conservative people who ran the school. But Sterling Brown really gave me something–he made you understand that poetry could be easy. I don’t mean easy in the sense of throw away, but I mean easy in the sense of you could come to it naturally. I remember the first line he gave: “You can’t hardly tell how far a frog can jump when you see him sitting on his big broad rump.” That stayed in my head for some reason. And Sterling had a habit of taking students to his house, we’d spend the whole night talking and he’d wake his wife, Daisy, at four in the morning and say, “Could you get some tea for the boys?” I didn’t know professors could be like that. Maybe it was the poet in him.

And also, I had a class with a guy named John Lavelle, who taught a class in Walt Whitman. I don’t know if it was the class in Whitman itself, or an experience that I had during that period. His wife passed away during the course and I remember the story being told of him going home and trying to open his door and she had collapsed just inside. What amazed me was that the very next day, he came to class. And I couldn’t believe that a man could have an experience like that, and come to class the next day to teach poetry. And I said, it must be something about poetry that can make you do that. So I think that’s where I first started pushing this thing with the poems.

I got to New York after that, thinking that I would get some kind of writing job somewhere. And I asked someone, “I really want to get into a writing workshop or something.” And the person said, “Why don’t you call Nikki?” Nikki Giovanni. I said “Just call Nikki Giovanni? How do you do that?” And the person said, “No, here, I’ll give you the contact, just call her.” I said, “I don’t think she–” “Just call.” And I called, and she said, “Well, you know, John Killens has a workshop at Columbia every Tuesday night. Not just students enroll, but anybody can come.” And so I started going to John Killens’ workshop, and that’s where I met a lot of people, for example, Wesley Brown, who now writes plays and novels. And we ended up from there branching off and going to–Sonia Sanchez had her workshop at County Library. On any given Tuesday night, about 75 people in a workshop. Many marriages came out of that workshop.

Seriously! A lot of people got married! But Wesley and I went there until after a while we said, “This is too big to handle, we need something smaller.” And out of that relationship grew a group that I became part of called Bud Jones poets, which included a fabulous poet Fatisha who could recite all her long three-page poems by heart. And who insisted “no applause, please, until the end.” She brought in a guy named Dennis Reed, who was only 18 at the time, but who was writing these incredible poems, about maybe five or six of us.

And what happened is that Wesley Brown was a really committed young man. And so when they were drafting people to go to Vietnam, he said, no, he was not going and when they asked him to step out, he said the only army he would join would be an army for Black people. And that led to him being sentenced to four years at Lewisburg Penitentiary. It made us closer. We at Bud Jones spent that whole four years doing fundraising, doing readings, just to get some money to buy records for him–in those days you had records–and books. We would go visit him up in Lewisburg. Because [Wesley Brown] was not part of the group anymore–Doc Long, Doughtry Long, became one of our members during that period. And it really put us close together.

So this is how it went, and this is how I came along through poetry. I got a job working at a small publishing house, translating Russian math and science journals of all things, proofreading. But because of my relationship with John Killens’ workshop, there’s a guy named George Davis, a novelist, and George called me one day and he said, “You wanna teach?” And I said, “I’ve never taught before.” He said, “I’ve heard you in the workshop, you can teach! Come on.” And I went for an interview and the professor–I forget his name, but he said, “Come on, when can you start?” And I taught at Bronx Community College for seven years. And then something said, I need to go back to school. I need to get this Masters. I had a collection–not a lot, but I had some poems, so I’m thinking City College. The next thing you know, I got something in the mail, it was an application form for Colombia. To this day, I have no idea who sent it. I have a suspicion, but I have no idea. And I got this application and I said, “Well, maybe I’ll fill it out.” Of course, I can’t afford Colombia, but I filled it out anyway. And one summer night, I’ll never forget that, I was talking to some friends and the phone rings and it was somebody calling from Colombia and they said, “We’re just looking at your poems and we love them. Come on, you want to come or not?” I said, “Miss, I can’t afford it.” She said “We’re not asking if you can afford it, we are saying we have a space for you. We’ll work out the details later.” I said “Well, okay, sure!” You know, with no idea how I was gonna do this. So anyway, it worked out, they ended up giving me a part scholarship and I borrowed the rest of the money, which I paid off for 20 years. So that was my exposure to poetry on a graduate level. And bless them, because of Columbia, I got to study with people like Derek Walcott and Joseph Brodsky. [Amiri] Baraka came on, I remember. Jane Alexander. Good people. And Lucie Brock-Broido, we were classmates at the time. It was quite a hang!

It sounds like the community was so much a part of the process of being a writer for you. The illusion of writers, often, is this solitary creature pumping out words, but it sounds like you became a poet through working with others…

But of course, when you left them and went home, then that was the solitary time. Trying to get those words down on paper. But being part of the group means that you always have a sounding board. You have people who would say, “Well, that’s not really happening.” And to this day, I still kind of work like that, I have formed a kind of a relation with people up at Slapering Hol Press, Susana Case and these people. We put our work in front of each other all the time and say, “What do you think?” Even at this late stage in the game, we’re still bouncing stuff off of each other.

There’s always the “New York versus MFA” or “MFA versus no MFA,” debate, so I’m curious about the community and that informal but committed feedback, versus the Columbia, Ivy League formal feedback? What was the experience of both of those? How did they differ?

I think they kind of worked side by side. I met people at Columbia who were committed to the real discipline of it. On the outside of that, you had people for whom poetry was a kind of vehicle for the revolution. There was the poem that came out of just recital, just out of intuitive power. And then there was, “How are we going to shape this? Do we understand what makes this work? What is it that creates the sound that we’re looking for?” It can happen, but it’s like music. I was talking to Dennis yesterday, and he said for the longest while he played the saxophone. He said it was beautiful, just intuitive. He said that once he got to a certain level, he understood that you have to go back and learn something about what makes these chords work. What’s the structure? You have to understand something about structure.

I’m curious about just your process in general, how does moving to a poem emerge? A tickle, a jolt, a compulsion?

Sometimes a line will just come, where it’s just a simple line. I wrote a poem about leaving home again. The thing about going back home to Trinidad, another leaving, another leaving… and it begins, “The dogs are strangely silent tonight.” And it almost sounds cliché, it almost sounds like something you heard before. But I take a chance on it and I say well, “Let’s see where it will go and let it lead from there.” And I got away with it. Sometimes it’s a trick, right? Sometimes it’s just a word–a word can come–or an image, something you happen to see. For example, in my latest book, The Last Train, there is a poem called “Pack of Gum.” And I just noticed, it’s something you see and something that takes you back. I noticed that the policemen very often are chewing, and it took me back to a childhood memory with soldiers always giving out sticks of gum to the kids to show that they were well intentioned. But it also struck me as a kind of a way of always seeming calm. That even though you’re involved in bloodshed and all of that, you’re chewing gum means that everything is okay. I sort of connected all of that from childhood experience, watching war movies, with the idea of these policemen and what they were involved in and that chewing gum, it just seemed like an insult to the person that was being harmed or hurt, it didn’t seem right. So yeah, sometimes that’s how a poem comes.

Sometimes it comes with a dream and sometimes it comes from wishing. I remember one time I hadn’t written in a while and I kept trying and nothing was happening, one of those things. I remember basically saying — begging, saying a prayer. I said, “Give me a poem. Please, give me a poem.” And I thought about Rilke, because Rilke had that long drought, I think must have been about 10 or 12 years, and then he wrote the Duino Elegies, which begins with “Who among the archangels would hear if I cried out?” Not that I’m Rilke, but I remember praying like that one night, begging and waking up at four in the morning with a poem. It doesn’t happen often, but it’s happened often enough to make me kind of believe that it can work that way. I think the poem that I was wishing about was a poem called “The Wall” and something about people jogging. It just struck me that it was a strange habit of people that are always running, running, running. Not going anywhere! Just kind of running. Also, the experience of reading feeds into what you do. I remember it took me back to Steven Vincent Benét. He has a poem, and I have it on an LP, called “Notes to be Left in a Cornerstone.” And he says, “This is for you, who are to come.” He is writing a poem for people to read in the future. And he’s describing the days we live in now, and what happened to us. So he calls it “Notes to be Left in a Cornerstone.” Somebody in the ruin of this world, of our world, will find this poem, and it will tell them what happened during this time. And he talks about “the woman with the hair,”and how “they’re gone like tokens put into the… just gone.” This beautiful, beautiful poem. And I said maybe I’ll write a poem about this habit of running for people in the future to read and say, “Once we ran every day,” really writing it for a reader in the future.

Sometimes it’s complicated. My other big wish poem was, again, wanting a poem to come and saying, “Just give me one, give me one.” And I remember waking up at four o’clock–four o’clock seems to be the hour–waking up at four and saying, “Where should one start writing? If you don’t have a poem, why don’t you write from what you can see where you are?” I imagined myself at my window. I live on an intersection. A big intersection at Prospect Park and Parkside. So my windows face–one face here, one face there, it’s a three way thing. And I imagined myself, I thought, “What do you see from this window?” And it’s in one of those books you have there, No Back Door. It’s called “The Center of the World.” And it talks about from here, I can see all the people going down Flatbush Avenue into stores, the immigrants wearing too much clothes. And under the awning of The Green Grocer, the policeman from Long Island. And I talk about the nail shop where Koreans can give you the flag of any country you want. And that poem stretched out… what’s curious about that poem is I wrote it all on Post-its because I didn’t trust myself getting up from the bed to go over to the computer. So I pulled the drawer with some Post-its and I wrote that, scribbled that whole thing, almost in the dark really, on Post-its. So when I was done in the morning, I said, “Okay, let’s type that stuff up.”

I love the idea of writing where you’re from, and I feel like place has such a powerful presence in your work–Brooklyn, Flatbush, Bergen, Trinidad, the beach. Talk to me a little bit about that relationship to place.

Someone said once, I think it was Wesley, said, “Wherever you are, you’re on something–you’re not floating.” And sometimes I think if you think too much or overthink, you just have these ideas–it just seems like you’re spinning them out in the air. But you’ve got to be somewhere. You’re always somewhere. And even if you’re not there physically, at the moment, you remember being there, you remember being in that place. I think, too, about what Jean Toomer said in Cane, “When one is on the soil of one’s ancestors, almost anything can come to you.” And he’s talking here but the red clay of Georgia, which is where he was from. He says, “When you’re on that ground, anything can come to you.” It’s a little bit sentimental, but if you believe it enough, it will work.

When I was in Trinidad during the pandemic for a year and a half, and when people say, “You were locked down!” I didn’t consider myself locked down. I was just there. And it was good because I had been meaning to spend more time at home, but each year I’d go, and I’d spend maybe a month or two months, but this time I spent a year and a half. And it’s interesting that for a period of time, almost every day, I was writing something. And those poems eventually became The Corona Poems. And they kept coming. And I was literally sleeping in the same room where my father had passed away. And just being in the house, and feeling all of those things, I wrote–there’s a poem about my father that’s named “Country of Warm Snow.” All of that came to me and I think it had to do with being in Trinidad at the time and place.

I’m interested in this magical–I don’t know if you would call it a double life or a divided life– of being in both the US and Trinidad. Talk to me about that as an experience but also an aesthetic.

But remember that where I live in Brooklyn, I might as well be in Trinidad. But all the smells, everything on a Sunday, you walk through that part of Brooklyn, there’s just callaloo. It’s there, all the smells. I’ll give you an example. I have a friend, he’s since moved back to Trinidad. His nickname is “Snake,” I can’t even remember his Brooklyn name. But he worked at the airport. So he used to have to go to work very early in the morning. And his route to work took him right past my building. He knew exactly where I lived and he would come to that intersection. And he would put on the loudest Calypso. So I’m laying, at four o’clock every morning, I’d say “Here you go again!” And he’d turn it up real loud, and he knew what I liked. I’d say “Boy, this is better than home.” Just playing Calypso. And he’d say, “You hear me this morning?” 

I listen to the stories that people tell. And I try not to steal them but try to sculpt poems out of them. I remember him playing mass in Brooklyn, putting on costumes. And you know there’s a… not a legend, but there’s a fear in Trinidad–they tell people don’t play Egyptian mas. Don’t ever dress up in Egyptian costume. There’s sort of a curse that anybody who plays Egyptian mas, something happens. It happened to so many people after George Bailey played Relics of Egypt that people started believing that it’s a dangerous thing. But this same Snake played a pharaoh on Eastern Parkway in the carnival. And he told me the story about walking–Let’s say the Carnival is over at seven or eight o’clock. He walked until four in the morning and couldn’t find his house, and he lived right in the area. He said he kept walking and walking. He said he knew something was the matter when he passed, for about the sixth time, some guys playing dominos sitting there, like some Jamaican guys. And he said one of them said, “That man that just passed, the man is in trouble. The man in real trouble.” Because he had seen him walk by there so many times. He said he finally got home about four o’clock in the morning. And he lived right near Snyder, near the cemetery. And his wife said, “Where you been all night?” But he had on that Egyptian costume…

 So anyway, I’m tying all of this together to say that you pay attention to all the stories and you begin to create myth in the poem. Because myths came from someplace. We’re producing myth every day. I think that’s what happens in some of these poems. I begin to listen to them, almost as if they were not just ordinary stories, that ordinary people create myth and legend.

There’s an intimacy in all of your work that is almost a whisper sometimes, that you have to lean in for, At the same time, I feel like you also speak to big things, like the pandemic. I’m interested in how you, as the poet, think about that intimate private sense in relation to that larger social, political, or whatever you want to call it. How do you navigate or negotiate it?

The title poem in News of the Living is about a woman named Lita. And Lita, I’ve known her in Brooklyn for many, many years, and she’s one of those outstanding people who didn’t have much beyond a sixth grade or seventh grade education. But one of those immigrant people who come here and manage to, through some kind of magic, make things happen. She worked at the hospital as a maid. And she never earned a lot but she knew something about how to run a sousou; she knew something about how to take a dollar and stretch it, and so over the years, she was able to accumulate. Then she would buy goods, take home, sell some goods. She knew how to manage and make it work. Eventually, that woman ended up owning so much property. And she’s unassuming. But somehow, that’s heroic. That’s bright! She wasn’t a Wall Streeter or anything like that. But there are people who are doing marvelous, incredible things every day. And it may not be consistent, but there are moments in their lives… There’s a guy around the corner from me, a bunch of guys who hang out, some on drugs, some not on drugs, but they hang out, that’s their place. And somebody pointed him out one day and I said, “That guy, he’s the greatest six bass player in the steel band.” He used to play with Tokyo, one of the old steel bands in Trinidad, and I said, “He’s the greatest.” And each day I would go by and look at him and think, How could you have that and not be still playing? And I thought to ask him one day and he just shook his head. I mean, that’s part of the mystery. You never know what makes a person stop doing this or not do that. But you know that there was some glorious thing in there and it needs looking at! And if he won’t tell me, I’ll make it up. He won’t tell me the story, but I’ll try to make something that is as close as I can interpret that would let him know how much I admire his skill.

So anyway, I’m tying all of this together to say that you pay attention to all the stories and you begin to create myth in the poem. Because myths came from someplace. We’re producing myth every day. I think that’s what happens in some of these poems. I begin to listen to them, almost as if they were not just ordinary stories, that ordinary people create myth and legend.

You were a teacher for so long, talk to me a little bit about the teaching of poetry. What do you try to give your students?

That’s a good one. I’ll give you an example. I taught college and then I taught high school, and I taught at the toughest schools in Brooklyn. It used to be Eastern District High School in Williamsburg and they actually closed it down it was so bad. It was a huge school, and took up a whole block. And somebody had the bright idea to separate it into four small schools, one on each floor. I won’t bore you with the whole story of how I ended up there, but while I was teaching there, I was trying to do poetry with some of these young people and a bunch of tough kids. I’ll tell you how tough that school is, the lockers in the hallway were all soldered shut. The police soldered them shut because that’s where they used to keep the weapons.

But when I went there, it was a brand new start. There were two really bright young men. You ever notice, sometimes among all the kids, everybody here they were all children, you can usually find two or three youngsters who are thinking beyond their years, who have dreams of becoming helicopter pilots and stuff? Things that are beyond anything but that they are very serious about. And there were a couple of them I had there. I had one named Jonathan, and I’m teaching them this poetry stuff and they tell me, “Yeah, man, but–Jay Z.” Because a lot of the kids I had came out of the Marcy Projects. So these two boys, I’m trying to teach them this and they say, “Yeah, Mr. T, I know you like that stuff but have you ever listened to Jay Z?” I said, “Come on, man. We’re not talking rap stuff. We’re talking–” And they say, “No, no, no, no.” Jay Z has this thing about the boys today, the days they wear hard shoes. And they say, “What do you think that means?” Now they become the teacher. I say, “Hard shoes? You mean like to go to a wedding or something?” “No,” they said, “to a funeral.” I got new respect for these boys. Hard shoes. So the image is there. The whole thing, that’s the only time because all these kids just wear sneakers. They don’t wear anything else.

So these boys taught me this, that you can find that image that you want almost anywhere, and that they can pick up on it if it’s real, if you’ve got something solid.

I want to ask you about Carnival, because I know you’re a Carnival man. And masquerade is important to make costumes. Just fill that in for me as to the aesthetic of poetry.

That’s good. That’s a good one. I like art, first of all, just creating stuff, just making stuff happen. And I think when I was 14, that was my first foray into the world of mas. But I think it also had to do with community. There were some guys in the neighborhood, they say, “Come on, we got to do something.” Carnival was never about going to a whole lot of parties and all-inclusive [parties] and stuff. First of all, we wouldn’t spend that kind of money. Carnival was about a bunch of us in some little shack, just painting something or printing something. It was all just one solid effort. The only time we would go to some party was Carnival Sunday night at Belmont Intermediate school yard. And we wouldn’t pay to go in, we’d jump the wall. So that was part of a kind of creative thing. In New York, I think sticking with costumes was a way of holding on to Trinidad all the time. My good friend, Roy, we had a band that we played 25 years consecutively in the J’Ouvert in Brooklyn with 18 victories.

You produced the costumes for that band?

Yeah! And also, we managed to get people who understood what it meant to create something. So very often, with a band like that, you just tell so and so, “We’re doing Barbarian.” And you didn’t have to worry about that person because when that person show up… it’s there. It’s there. Yeah.

How does that translate to the poem? I feel like Carnival is the idea of masquerade, the idea of making for sure is in the poems. So I’m just curious if you think that there’s a correlation.

Well, let’s go back to the Derek Walcott poem. I think the title of the poem is “The Masked Man.” But Derek, in this poem, described himself, the poet, looking on at the Carnival. And he says, “Behind a lion’s mask, a bank clerk growls,” which is something, a bank clerk, he’s growling in there! But there’s a line later on in the poem when he says, “What happen, man? You can’t jump?” Somebody from in the Carnival asked Derek, “You write and write and write and scribing…What happened to you? You can’t jump?” and Derek says “Someone must squat down in the dust and write your poems.” In other words, [he says] I can’t do both. I elect to try to do both. Much to a lot of pain, sometimes. I think that’s part of it, trying to be in the mask, and to speak of it at the same time. And it’s not always easy. It’s not always an easy thing.

So you have seven books?

No, I have eight now. Eight and a chapbook and the CD. Yeah, myself and David Williams. A CD called “Road Clear.”

I’m curious about the learning over the course of what has been such a long career. You’ve been writing for such a long time: What have these books taught you? What has poetry taught you? What’s still fresh? What’s surprising? What’s comfortable?

I think if I look back, like for example, a book like The Goat. The Goat has moments in it, but a lot of it is almost flat and you know some of the poems in there like that. And I think there’s always more to be said, or there’s always more to revisit. There are some things you have tried to talk about. For example, I’ve been writing about my father for a long time. In The Goat, I think there are two poems about the conductor, the first book, actually. And I’m still writing about him in the Country of Warm Snow. And the idea for The Last Train comes from that. I don’t think he ever stopped.

Sportsmen, for example. They only have a few years and then they can’t do it anymore. The wonderful thing about poetry is that supposedly you will get better as you keep going. Hopefully, you’ll get better as you keep going. Somebody said it, that we don’t write for so much for awards as we write for the award of the poem, that if we find a line… one line next month can make me happy for the whole year. If the line comes, as it should, or if it’s correct, and you can know when it’s correct. If you get that, then you okay. And I think that’s what keeps me going.

What is the best writing advice you ever received that you would want to pass on?

Two things. I remember [Joseph] Brodsky saying this one day, “Take courses other than courses in poetry. Take a class in geography, a class in science or something, that way you have something to write about.” I remember Derek saying, “You won’t make a hit every time you sit down and write something. All of your poems that won’t be hits. Nobody gets a hit every time.” So what do you do when you don’t have a hit coming? What do musicians do when they don’t have hits? They practice scales. You sit down, you practice rhyming, practice whatever you need to do, but don’t constantly try to be a star. Because those poems will come if you keep at it. They find a way.

Thank you so much. This was just wonderful.

Great talking to you.

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

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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).

Photo credit: Erica Cavanagh

by Lauren K. Alleyne 

What is consistent across Kei Miller’s impressive body of work is his project of writing the Caribbean space—its landscapes, its people, its culture, its history—both honestly and lovingly. Sentence after sentence, line after line, novel after poem after essay, Miller both documents and creates a language that can hold the complexity of this palimpsest of a place; a language that is alive to the resonances of the Caribbean’s varied and multiple encounters, that deftly handles the apparently competing realities of its violence and joy, its past and its insistent present, its seen and unseen—all of it summoned, witnessed, revealed. In “The Understory” from the collection In Nearby Bushes, Miller connects the language and landscape demonstrating how the one emerges from the other with attention and careful listening:

the unplotted plot, the intriguing twist of vines,
the messy dialogue – just listen
how the leaves uh & ah & er nonstop. (8)

A global citizen, Miller not only writes the geospace of the Caribbean, but also brings his writer’s eye to the colonial spaces of Europe and Britain, to the continent of Africa, and to spaces throughout the global south, always seeking “the place beneath the place.” In his collection, An Anger that Moves, for example, Miller explores the space of the metropole, portraying, among the many impacts of colonialism on England, the way its new inhabitants transform the place. In “The only thing far away,” he writes:

…Walking through Peckham In London.
West Moss Road in Manchester,
you pass green and yellow shops
where tie-head women bargain over the price
of dasheen. And beside Jamaica is Spain
selling large yellow peppers, lemon to squeeze
onto chicken. Beside Spain is Pakistan, then Egypt,
Singapore, the world… (13)

The poems also consider the places within place: in Miller’s work, the body is a place; the mind is a place; history is a place; memory is a place; Zion is place, as is the unwieldy heart. He reminds readers again and again that place is an agreement of meaning, and that as the power to make, enforce, enact, or challenge these meanings shifts, so does the very idea of place itself. The long poem in Miller’s collection The Cartographer Tries to Map a Way to Zion, highlights this tension of place and power as the “Cartographer” seeks to use his European worldview to contain and civilize the resistant and rebellious Jamaican landscape—to “untangle the tangled” (17). The Cartographer is challenged throughout the book by a native “Rastaman” who rejects the Cartographer’s epistemology, saying “there are maps / and then again there are maps” (22), insisting that the geographies of history, experience and belief are also valid spaces from which to know and belong to a place.

Kei Miller was the judge of the 2020 Furious Flower poetry prize. While sheltering-in-place in the UK, in lieu of a campus reading, he read as part of our Facebook Live reading series. In 2022, Miller came to James Madison University where he conducted a workshop with students and sat for this interview. This is an edited version of our conversation.

Thank you. So first of all, welcome: to Harrisonburg, to JMU, to Furious Flower, and to The Fight & The Fiddle. I just want to start with a history of becoming “Kei the writer.” I would love to know: what were the things that brought you to this country of words?

Oh, wow. I think the answer to that is, you know, writers, we’re writers, right? So, we like to invent stories. And as I age, I keep on being suspicious of the origin story that I invent for myself. So, there are a couple of them. One of them is that I, like everyone, I have two grandfathers. One of them was a writer, the other one was a preacher. And I think that’s a weird combination of these two strains meeting in me, you know. But I never met one of those grandfathers, so. And the other one, you know, I knew him but…I don’t know if…that that was how I got into it—I know that’s my ancestry. I think a lot of it comes from church. Sitting in church in Jamaica, I think I was learning to be a writer. And again, this isn’t true, because I knew I wanted to write even before that, but I think a lot of the lessons I learned, I learned from that space. It was how the pastor would go up and he would oftentimes put—this is how I thought of it—he would put an unlikely verb to a dissonant noun, and so the noun begins to behave differently. And so, when the pastor says, “the mountains trembled,” because mountains don’t always tremble, or, “the moon bled,” all of a sudden, you make the noun—you energize something in the noun and the noun does something that it doesn’t usually do. And whenever that happens, the congregation always shivers. That is when Sister Sybil behind you goes “Hallelujah!” That’s the power of words. I don’t know if the pastor knew technically what he was doing, but I was always fascinated by those techniques. And so, I think I just sat down and I listened to these artists, people who were interested in not just words, but how words existed in a space with fellow humans. How do you put words into that atmosphere? To move something, to create something? How do you get Sister Sybil to shout, to be moved? That always intrigued me, but it intrigued me on the level of technique. I think that those pastors were some of the most sophisticated people with language. And I thought, By God! You don’t even know what you’re doing or how you’re doing it. But I wanted to take those lessons.

I’m curious about how that relationship to religion and faith carries or continues to carry, how it evolved. Can you talk a little bit about how that history of religiosity and faith still influences the behaviors and movements of the work?

Yeah. So, the end of that story is that I, when I was young—in the latter part of my teens going into my 20s—I was so involved in church and still in those spaces that I often got invited to give a sermon. Of course, I’d be like, yes, I know what I’m doing. And those experiences went really well…. and went too well. So oftentimes, at the end of me giving a sermon, you know, Sister Sybil, she would come up, and she’d say, “God was moving through you today,” and I’d say, “No, it’s the verbs.” I feel a bit of a fraud, because when you listen closely enough to the technique, you know how to do it. So, yes, you know how to create that atmosphere, you know how to create a certain kind of breaking. But this is the odd thing, even though I knew what it was—I knew how technique contributed to that—I have always believed in what the experience creates. Like, I deeply believe in words showing you, or exposing in you, a level of brokenness. And even while you experience the brokenness of who we are, being connected to something higher that says, “You’re still okay, it’s okay to be this person.” I believe in that. I believe in the power of words to both create, in a simultaneous moment, a breaking and a healing. And I’ve always looked for that, and I’ve always looked for poetry to create that. So, even though I stepped away from church because all of that whole process was wrapped up in a certain kind of dogma that I don’t think I believe in, those moments, I do believe in. I do believe in the breaking that happens in church; I do believe in those moments when the pastor created something, and everyone is weeping their eyes out, but they think, but in the middle of this, God loves me, in the middle of my failings, I am okay; In the middle of all of this mess we are just human, and we’re going to be okay. I think that is what I’m always after, in the middle of writing. And I think that comes from a religious upbringing, that I’m still trying to look for those experiences and recreate them in another way. Not necessarily in the way of Pentecost.

I’m thinking about performativity as one of the things that you are maybe critiquing or acknowledging, and I’m wondering about how one deals with that sense of uncertainty versus certainty, right? Because on the one hand, you’re saying part of what kind of rang untrue was that, feeling of I know what I’m doing and I know how to do it. And then the other part of it is the mystery of it all. And so, I’m wondering if you can think a little bit about how that works out on the page, that tension between knowing what the language can do, and yet some element of uncertainty to move it forward?

I agree with that. But I don’t know when that ends, or where that begins or where that ends. You can’t possibly know everything that’s happening in a poem. I think there is always a level where you have to be comfortable with that mystery, but I still think that comes with a level of technique. I still think there is an instinct that happens—that I don’t know what this image is going to do, but I know there’s power in it. I’m actually not bright enough to unpack everything, but I know there is a compression happening there. And I trust myself; I trust the technique enough to know that there is enough happening in there—there’s enough tension happening in that—that I’m gonna just put it there and leave it for people who are brighter than me to go, “This is all of how you could read it.” And so, that is the mystery for me: the mystery of not knowing everything that a poem can do, but you know enough to know what to do, to know how to put it in there.

I guess there’s always that fear that if you know too much, it is going to spoil the joys, and I never think that. I think the more you know, it opens up other kinds of mysteries. And it opens other kinds of tension, but you have to know enough to be able to unlock those mysteries. So never be afraid [that if] you know too much, it will steal the magic. It doesn’t. I am so big on—the word that I keep on coming back to— I am so big on knowing every kind of technique that you can use. I am. I’m a big fan of just being technically precise, with every movement in that poem. But I think it’s because it unlocks other mysteries.

When you were with our students here at JMU, you said that “the world is insufficiently defined.” Can you talk a little bit about that?

I think that’s a weird phrase that…that sits in me and sits in the middle of everything that I write. Yes, the world as we know it is insufficiently defined. I think that is at the heart of why I come to the page. Everything that you see, everything you look at, there is always a moment that it reveals itself as being more than you thought it was. And I just love that. And so, for me, it’s what I try to do when I write, but also, I guess it’s me thinking about all the points, all the works that move me deeply. And why did it move me? And I think it’s always because it does that. I keep on going back to well, you showed me something about this thing, about this feeling, about this object that I didn’t know before. And what makes me gasp is the truth of it, is the beautiful exposure. And I guess another thing, I want to do that. I want to be able to show you something that you thought you knew, and show you there’s a lot more here.

If I look back, even between novels and poetry and everything I’ve written, it’s oftentimes that that’s what I’m experiencing—it’s a duality. It’s the Rastaman and the cartographer, who have two very different ways of seeing the world. And both are right. It’s the Warner woman and the writer-man, who are struggling with what is the real story here. And they both have two different versions. I think oftentimes, in my work, I’m bringing together these two seemingly opposing worldviews, and each one of them is going, “but this is what it is.” But putting the two together, it’s not any one thing.

So, you mentioned genre. Can you tell me what makes you pick a genre? How do you decide what’s going to emerge, in what form? How do you see those forms connected, and how they’re very disparate in your engagement with them?

One of the things that I say—kind of facetiously, but it’s because, you know, when I go to conferences with writers from around the world, they always say, you know, you’re with a writer from Egypt and a writer from Syria. And it seems this dedication to single genres always feels like… well, to say it in the most polite way, is a thing that people from developed countries are doing.

It’s a very American, very British thing. This, “I am a this!” And if you come from the Caribbean or, you know, all these other places—Egypt, Syria, whatever—you just find writers who go, “We write what we need to write.” Because here is a landscape that is so… it needs so much writing, there is so much to write about it, that you just don’t have the luxury to say, “I am a ‘this.’ ” No, I am a writer and I’m going to write what needs to be written because my landscape, my culture, needs all of these things. And this is what I bring to this space, is words, and the shape of those words might be different. It might be what you call “genre.” But it’s the project—it’s the project of writing for this space that we belong to, that you have to wrestle with. And that wrestling with it in words looks different. And how the broader literary world makes sense of that is, “Oh, you’re working two different genres.” But I think I’m working on one project of trying to capture this landscape. And that might look different. But that’s one way of putting it; there are other ways.

In another sense, I think I came to different genres just by pure instinct. I have to think I am stricter now about those changes. In this world where everyone is interdisciplinary—you know, that’s just been that kind of buzzword for a while—I do completely believe that disciplines matter. But you have to be disciplined before you become an interdisciplinary writer. It matters what you’re writing. It does matter if you are writing a novel. It does matter if you are writing a poem. And you do have to understand the rules of that discipline or that genre that you’re working in. I don’t think I always did that.

This is why it comes back to me: it’s about how we fix the problems that we come across.

What happens then, if you’re writing a novel, is you come across a problem in the novel. And everything we write, it’s going to throw up problems to us. And when what we write throws up problems, our job as the writer is to fix it. Now, if you’re writing a novel, and you come to it with a toolkit of poetry to fix, it is not going to work. And you see the thing is, I used to do that, and I see poets doing that all the time. And what results is a beautiful, beautiful piece of writing. But those are not the problems; the problems of fiction are not the problems of poetry, the problems of fiction are character, pace, tension. Those simply are not the problems of poetry, you try to fix a novel with a toolkit of poetry, and again, it’s beautiful writing, but it didn’t change the pace. It didn’t change the character development. And so, you have a lot of beauty that doesn’t advance the novel in the way that a novel has to advance. So, I think Augustown [Miller’s own award-winning novel] is probably the first time that I had to be disciplined. I’d come across a problem, and I go, Leave it. At this moment, you have to be a novelist. When you’re just putting things on the page, you can be everything at the same time—you can use all the tricks of poetry, everything, to make it fuller and lusher; you use all of yourself. But when you have to fix that problem, at that moment, you have to be the thing you are doing. You have to be a novelist; and if I’m writing an essay and it has a problem, I have to be an essayist in that moment. So that’s a duality for me—be everything while you’re writing, but be the one thing while you’re editing.

I’m interested in that place where both of those concerns meet and the decision to not address the problems of the novel as a novelist, or to not engage the problems of poetry as a poet. Is there a space, or how do you think about that space where those breakages or undisciplined behaviors might pop up?

Yeah, I just think when it works, it works. But if we switch the lens…So, on one hand, I talk about the problems; the other way I look at it is what are the pleasures? And so, when I’m editing everything, what are the problems of this? How do I fix that problem? But I also think there’s a way when we are working between genres that you have to decide what are the pleasures that I want people to get from it? And if you’ve decided that, “Look, the pleasure from this novel is not going to be character development. I know that’s what you normally look for, but that’s not the pleasure I’m going to give.” If you know that and you say, “Well, the pleasure is simply that this is going to be a lyrical overflow,” and you’re fine with that, you know, I don’t have a problem with that.

If you had to make an altar to writers, who would be the patron saint of what and what candles would you have on there? Who would be in that space?

Dionne Brand. Dionne Brand is the God, the goddess. Yeah, Dionne Brand is number one. And I think it’s because, other than the fact that she also writes across so many genres and does it so well, I think it’s the wisdom. I just… I’ve never met— I mean, we speak by email, but I’ve never actually met Dionne in person. But I think it’s…there’s a kind of writing; Erna Brodber has this quality, too, I meet Erna all the time. I’ve stayed at Erna’s house. I’ve never told her that there’s this weird way in which she intimidates me. And it’s people who I think they are so wise, that they will know things about me that I don’t know about myself. And in their presence, I just feel strange because I think, What do you perceive about me? And you just know it, you know it as a fact, but you don’t need to tell me, you just think, he’ll grow and he’ll figure that out. [Laughs.] You know? That quality, you know, and even from afar, you know, people like Toni Morrison have that. People like Dionne Brand have that; people like Erna—it’s always Black women, right? So yes, Dionne Brand is up there; Erna Brodber is up there. Then there are all these poets who tend to be white American men, for some reason, like, like [Robert] Pinsky, and above all else, W.S. Merwin. You know, I’m probably the last person in that pantheon. So, we have the two Black women and two white men. And weirdly, Emily Dickinson.

I was not expecting that, okay.

Yeah. That is the influence that I’ve never… I don’t know if she really influences me because I can’t see her presence in my work. Oh, the other person I should have said from before, of course, is Lorna Goodison, who is all over my work. But my entry into poetry, the person who, if you were to say any Emily Dickinson poem, I could just tell it back to you. It lives inside me. I just know the work. I’ve looked at the work so often and I keep on coming back to it. I don’t feel the stamp of her, and I don’t think other people can feel the stamp of her in my work. But it’s there; it’s my entry point. So, she has to be there.

I’m interested in encounter, which is one of my favorite words, that is my running word right now, but I feel like that’s one of the things you write a lot about are these encounters of, like you were saying before, different worldviews or spaces and people in spaces and cultures, etc. And I’d love to know about a literary encounter that was significant to you.

Oddly, there’s an excerpt that I deleted out of Things I Have Withheld. I don’t know why, but it was me thinking through—It was an essay called, “In Praise of the Fat Black Woman & Volume.” And I was thinking about, probably living in Britain so long, this obsession with restraint, and what is elegant, and how I always wanted to resist that idea. I mean, we could talk about this at length, how those ideas about subtlety and elegance are always—I mean, it’s an obsession that grows in the 18th century—linked to the Black body. And it’s linked to being different from that body. And so, living in Britain, wanting to resist that, wanting to write poems that were just a little bit louder, a little more, kind of bodacious than you’d expect. I’ve always been interested that. And that is a weird tension in my work because, again, I’m so obsessed with technique. But, you know, living in the UK when I’d read a review of my work that talked about “just how elegant Kei’s work is,” I’d think, that’s not what I wanted… I’m coming to your question.

There is, in me, this wanting to master technique, and an understanding that my work would get praised because I understand it. And like, I do want my work to get better; I do want my work to be good. It means I have to embrace the aesthetics. But even as I embrace the aesthetics, I understand that that whole culture of naming something as “good” or something as “bad” is oftentimes linked to very racist ideas. And how do you wrestle with that? And somehow in the middle of that essay, just thinking about all of these ways in which Black writers deal with a question of volume and loudness and elegance, it made me think of one major literary encounter I had, which was going to the very first staging of [the Jamaica-based, international literary festival] Calabash, and Staceyann Chin went on the stage and read her work. And by the end, I was in tears, and everything about my writing changed. Everything. And I thought, how do I not acknowledge that? That how I write now has everything to do with that encounter. But you don’t hold up—I mean, in certain circles—you don’t hold up Staceyann Chin; you don’t hold up the slam poet as being so foundationally influential.

We have to go back and put her on the altar. [Laughs]

Right? Yeah. You’re right. It was such an important encounter. In that moment, it changed everything. And it changed how I read my poems, it changed—you know what it was? It was that I fell in love with writing, or a certain kind of writing by being in the church. And then I fell in love with reading all these words, and [they] never met. I’d never met a poet who would stand on the stage and own that stage, not apologizing, or not going up to the mic and having this attitude of I’m so sorry that you have to listen to my work, [which] you have with so many poets. And just to walk up unapologetically, I am about to put words into the atmosphere and I believe in them. And Staceyann Chin was the first person to do that. And so, it changed, it just went “these two things can come together.” And yet, it was a literary encounter and a literary influence, even though I think my work diverges so much.

I feel like if one were to do a poll of how many people’s lives were changed because of Staceyann Chin, it would not be a small number. It wouldn’t, it really wouldn’t. Because there’s again, the embodiment part, right? That has everything to do with the poem being—not lifting from the page, riding on the voice, but also emanating from the body.

Yes. And you know, I think there’s that thing, again, often with writers of color. You know, bringing church, again, in poetry, that I think what the Black writer is often after is—that happens in church as well, it’s the same thing as a hallelujah—it’s when you read something and the body naturally just goes “mmm.” And you live for that moment because you go: you are with me.

And Staceyann was the first one who just … you just heard it across the room. And here is this lesbian Jamaican poet, in the most—you know, 12 years ago, 13 years ago—it [Jamaica] is not a pleasant place [for queer folks]. And she just lives in her moment. And to hear that audience go “mmm.” It was moving.

And it’s that mystery thing, too, right? Where you realize that the words can circumvent logic and reason and that they can, in fact, speak to the body. Not only to the mind. Right, and so yes, that happens. Involuntary “mmm”‘s.

Speaking of the body, you’re a Carnival man. [Laughs.] I’m interested in how Carnival has impacted your aesthetic, your thinking about writing, your craft, or your practice. You were talking about discipline earlier and Carnival is about flinging discipline away!

Let’s just acknowledge that I come from Jamaica, so I don’t know Carnival like you, right?

And I am from Trinidad and I have done Carnival maybe twice, so we’re even.

[Laughs.] We’re even.

I don’t know how it impacts the work. I think it’s something that I’m just increasingly fascinated with. And for all kinds of reasons. Probably one of the reasons is, you know, I did Carnival the first time and it was, My God, this is so much fun! You know, the release, the abandon. So, I went back another year. And the third year I did it, I thought, God, there’s something in there that I didn’t see before. And then I became fascinated, like, how did I enjoy this for two years, and not see all of these layers? And then I think that was the kind of…something hit, and that just keeps on happening, the fourth and the fifth year, it was,… There is so much depth here. And so, suddenly understanding the history and blah, blah, blah. So, that’s one of the fascinations of seeing, kind of in Trinidad, and just the fact that it allows visitors to come and be a part of it and enjoy it, and you don’t have to know everything. And as you understand it more, of course, your sense of appreciation grows. But you just think, how did I enjoy it before without knowing all of this? That’s one level…

Sounds like a poem: sometimes we read the poem and you have no idea what’s going on, but you like it, and then, the fifth time, you go back and say, “Oh, wait a minute! This is an allusion to—oh, wait a minute, this is referring to…” and then you’re like, “Oh, wait!”

Right, W. S. Merwin’s “My Friends,” I keep on going back to. [It’s] probably a poem I fell in love with when I was 18 years old. I still don’t get it. But I read it, like, at least once every two months—it’s just always revealing more to me.

But the other thing with Carnival, I guess, has to do with queerness, and what it does in Jamaica. So, my other fascination with Carnival is that it operates differently in different countries. And it means, because I guess, again, this fascination with the body, what bodies are attracted to Carnival and how do those bodies add meaning to it? And does the meaning of Carnival change? So, Carnival in Jamaica is simply not what Carnival is in Trinidad. And people, you know, the purists, will say “But it’s not real Carnival.” But it is! I get it; it doesn’t have the same kind of depth. But yeah, I am fascinated by the meanings that occur in Jamaica, which has a lot to do with queerness and that expression. And so, yeah, seeing Carnival operating in different places—some with less depth, some with more depth. It’s always fun, but it’s what happens beneath the surface, and how those meanings grow year after year. Jamaica doesn’t have the same history as Trinidad, but I think one of the things I say in the essay is that history just needs years. It just needs the piling on of years to happen. And someone to document it. And I feel I want to do that; I want to document how the meaning of Carnival grows in Jamaica. And at the end of the day, even if it doesn’t have all of that—all of it or even if you’re not able to see those layers—it’s still fun! It’s still just wild. And you know, even in that, there’s so much meaning behind the “—this is about indiscipline.” You know? It’s not simply just abandon; there is the history of it is I reject your idea of what discipline should look like, you know? It’s so Rastafari! You know, the idea of dreadlocks. And I’ve heard Rastafarians say “Dread is dreadful,” and that was the meaning of it. My hair is supposed to look dreadful to your idea of what neatness ought to look like! I am wearing this style in opposition of all of those ideas.

Right. There’s defiance to it.

You know, I love being in Trinidad when, you know, when J’ouvert happens and everyone goes out on the road and the disdain and contempt with which people look on cars trying to pass and it’s this attitude of The road is mine!! Do you understand that?? Today is Carnival and the road belongs to me. Do not dare blow your horn now or try to get past me. [Laughs.] I’m not moving and I will jump up and wine down on your car! [Laughs.] There is so much meaning behind that claiming of space, claiming of the road, claiming of freedom. Yeah, there’s one way to call it indiscipline. But again, you know, because the Caribbean is so obsessed with the idea of discipline and who is disciplined and who is doing the disciplining. All of that has to do with slavery. And so, to claim a place of indiscipline, is to claim your freedom and your body.

Speaking of bodies—you’re a world traveler. But residence, right, is indefinitely in Jamaica, the UK, and now the US. And I’m curious, just from somebody who has had experience of being in those places and cultures, what are some of the distinctions that you’ve noticed in terms of being a body in one or the other of those places?

Oh, God. I mean, I think that’s actually an impossible answer. Because those distinctions are, I mean, well, on one hand, that’s the whole thing with Things I’ve Withheld. But there’s so many subtleties, right? And I guess it goes back to, I guess my idea in that book is that the meaning of the body always changes depending on the context. But the question assumes that there is one context in these places, and there isn’t.

And so even in England, depending on which space I am in, the meaning of my body changes in those spaces. And that’s true in Jamaica, as well. And that’s true in—I’m sure, I’m going to find that increasingly true—in the U.S. I’m kind of prepared for that ride of what does it mean to be a Black man here, you know. But what does it mean to be a Black man with a Caribbean accent? Or a Caribbean accent that many people read as British? Because I get that a lot in Miami… I mean, without saying anything they go, “Are you from England?” And what does that mean? I’m not sure yet. But I’m sure I’m treated slightly differently once they hear the accent and they make assumptions of where I’m from. And I actually don’t know how to unpack those meanings. But it will come.

You know, oddly, when I think about border crossing, the bodies that I’m even more interested in are not—it’s not usually my body. I guess one of my big fascinations with that is, oftentimes in the Caribbean, I’d hear people say about people who are light-skinned, or blah blah blah, when they come to America, they will discover that they are Black. I always resented that statement—or I mean, not resented it, because it has nothing to do with me—but fundamentally disagreed with it: When they come to America, they become Black; they weren’t Black before. Because, again, we know that race is socially constructed. And that race means differently in different places. So, this person just simply was not read as Black in their culture does not make them Black, they are not Black. They are something else, you know? And that is fascinating to me. It’s fascinating because I don’t move in and out of races, but I have friends who do. And because I’m so interested in ambiguity, I’m fascinated by those friends who can become something different racially. In America, the one drop rule works in a certain way. So, if you are biracial—I have problems with that term—but people who we call “biracial,” I think they identify as Black. That doesn’t happen in Jamaica. If you’re biracial, you identify as white. And that’s how the culture identifies you. So, you know, brown Jamaicans and white Jamaicans are one thing. And biracial people, they enjoy all the privileges of whiteness. So, you know, it’s hard when you come to a different logic to read it in the opposite way, because your culture didn’t teach you how to read it like that. So, it’s weird for someone to say that; almost like America has a copyright on what Blackness is. Every culture makes Blackness something else, so that’s what’s fascinating.

What’s next on the agenda for you? What are you working on?

K: Well, my [unit] head wrote to me, he said “Congratulations on Things I Have Withheld, that you have written your dozenth book,” and he wrote in parentheses “(I have never used that phrase before.)” [Laughs.] So, what is next? I feel another building. My editors are pushing it—time for the next novel. The Carnival book is there. I mean, I really want to think more expansively about that. I also know what the next book of poems is going to be. I haven’t really started to write it, but I actually know what it’s about.

Well, we’ll look forward to all of it! Thank you so much! This was a rich and wonderful conversation.

Thank you!                    

                                                                                

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

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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).

Photo credit: Erica Cavanagh