by Gbenga Adesina, PhD

Kevin Young described Sean Hill last’s book, Dangerous Goods (Milkweed Editions 2013) as “measuring the ‘distance between desires’ and the fear and possibilities of displacement…knowing well that the dark is an ocean for us all.” On the front cover of that collection, designed by Charles Rue Woods, we are presented with the tableau of a solitary wooden canoe on a sandy beach pockmarked, like history, with human footprints. The footprints march toward the edge of the ocean and disappear. The scene recurs a quiet desolation. A shipwreck. The lonely boat is a machine of ghosts. Or, on a closer look, we might see that this lonely boat, which, in the haze of twilight or dawn, crouches at the edge of the sea and sky, in fact, has the nervous energy of impending motion. The boat is on a precipice. If we look even closer, we might see that in the thin demarcation line that separates sea from sky, black sparrows like bent crucifixes or crooked arrows are rising into the sky. We might see that the paper skin of the pale blue sky on the cover is made of maps with names of great oceans and destinations faintly scrawled on them: “Western Ocean” “The Atlantic” “Gulf of Guinea” “North Sea.” Destinations and oceans the lonely boat is heading toward or returning from. This tension between shipwreck and levitation, between stasis and ascension is at the core of Sean Hill’s project. Writing of Dangerous Goods in The Rumpus, Wesley Rothman argues, “We see how personal histories, destinations of the past, echo in the destinations of now, how journeying is aimless and intentional. We learn how we might nomad forward, understanding our own histories, personal and collective.”

Consider this poem from Dangerous Goods:

Here we encounter diaristic entries, but in tercets with sparse punctuation which lend the lines musically chiseled syntax. Things begin as innocuously as possible—a family reunion on a boat cruise to the Bahamas: island bliss. The poet and his brother are below the deck sharing drinks. But history lurks around. For one, the boat’s name the “Atlantic” is electric with significations. We know but cannot fully know how many of our ancestors vanished in the Atlantic.

The poet remembers with a memory older than himself. His Black body on a boat is an echo. This energy of embodied echo within history triggered by geographies anchors this book, whether the poet is listening to Charles Mingus while sailing on the Caribbean Sea or visiting St Paul’s Cathedral in London (“I have brought voices with me”) or writing about Liberia (one hundred and fifty folks from central Georgia immigrated to Liberia under the auspices of the American Colonization Society in the nineteenth century). Some of these people were from Milledgeville, Georgia, Sean Hill’s hometown (and the subject of a profound historical meditation spanning six generations in his first book, Blood Ties & Brown  Liquor (University of Georgia Press, 2008)), or encounters at an open eatery in Cairo. The logic or illogic of history and the chimeric yet profoundly resonant spiritual link between Africans in the old world and their descendants in the new, run like a fierce river through the book, as does the blood-filled severance and passage that produced this fracture of the soul.

But there is another energy that powers the book. It’s more quiet, more subtle, and transcendental—the intimate ecological histories of place. It’s still history, sometimes even haunted, but it is a different form of history available only to those who profess kinship with the extra human sentience and presences of nature: lakes, rivers, trees, birds. Precise observation as a devotional practice unlocks these intimate histories in Sean Hill’s work—ibises and their crescent beaks, the curiosity of starlings, the intricate pathways caterpillars carve into the grooves of apple trees, silk nests of Africanized Bees, blue-gray kestrels with undulating crowns. Geographies are not only defined by pain and the trauma of history, they are also garlanded by nature’s glories. The poet is hungry for the world and asks us how far we might fly if we can retrieve our wings from history.

Sean Hill was recently at James Madison University for a reading from his book, Dangerous Goods. He visited Furious Flower and spoke to Gbenga Adesina, 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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This is the Furious Flower Poetry Center’s The Fight and The Fiddle interview. My name is Gbenga Adesina. I’m the Furious Flower Fellow in Global Black and Diasporic poetry. I have with me a brilliant poet, Sean Hill, who understands that there are certain historical truths that can only be excavated through the specificity of “place.” Sean, how are you today?  

I’m good. I’m better that I’m sitting here with you. 

There’s a brilliant thread that runs through your two poetry books: you’re able to take this panoramic view of history and distill it into a singular human action, moment, or event, so that that singular event or moment—that specific date or even slice of hours—contains the DNA of an entire history. For instance, distilled in the poem “The State House Aflame, 1833” is the long history of chattel slavery as a brutal form of capitalism, yet you situate it on a specific moment on the roof of a building in 1833. I love it. Talk to me about that process. How do you do that?

It’s what you say. Part of it is the language. I can ramble about this. I can talk about the process of getting to this poem in so many ways. But when you bring up capitalism and chattel slavery, these things share etymological roots with the word head, “caput,” right? Capital, chattel, cattle, all of that. It’s this idea, sort of a way of counting livestock. It counts the head, “caput.” And so with that poem, the words “capital” and “chattel” show up because of the kind of slavery that was developed here in America. Of course, slavery existed, and has existed for a very long time, in ancient times, all over human history, but in different forms. But the way it was developed here is very particular and is rooted in the construction of race that we are living with right now. Those are some of the things that are in the background as I’m thinking about the poem.

But also, I was doing research for this poem and one of the things I do is read history books and old newspapers and talk to people. The poem is the things I take in. And I’d been reading the history of my hometown by this historian, James Bonner, and he mentions this episode, so I went back to the newspapers because he preserved it in his record, I could go back into the newspapers and read the official account. Some of the language in the poem is borrowed from that newspaper article. And that process is part of the interrogation. There’s so much around the poem that is interrogating, archiving, right? Who preserves the record? And so when I’m talking about what’s happening with the state records and the state funds and the things are being moved to safety because of this fire, I have that consideration in my mind, and I hope that it comes across. And the thing with the borrowed language from the newspaper is it’s a form of public records. I don’t know that Sam’s family would remember that story, or how they would remember it, but I can say this is how it was recorded. And so we can interrogate that space.

Also for me, poetry—writing poems—is about being in conversation with other writers, and the form of that poem was developed by Afaa Michael Weaver, the Bop. It’s a very loose Bop, but I couldn’t have written this poem… honestly, I had this poem in me, I had the desire to write this poem for a very long time, and at some point I came across the Bop form and remembered the intricacies of the form. I finally realized it: “I think this poem is a Bop.”

One of the things that really moved me in that poem was the trope of the magical Negro, as if by this almost superhuman intervention the subject had elevated himself out of the indignity of enslavement. And his society did not deem it fit to consider that perhaps it was the whole system that was unjust and unimaginative, instead they thought of “buying” this singular person out and giving him his freedom in reward for his bravery.

Right! Yes, yes, yes, that!

You are going to find this interesting when we talk about your second book, Dangerous Goods, in a short while, which is about journeys and comparative histories of places, because the thread of the “magical alien” continues as well. For instance, one of the things that has happened a lot in France and some other nations that are grappling with the questions of how to treat immigrants (and it happens in the US as well), is that an immigrant does something spectacular and we think of them as an exemption rather the fruit of a communal tree. There was some sort of fire in France, and then an immigrant from Senegal or Gambia climbed the wall like a superman and saved a French child from the house—so the President invited him, said “Oh, what a wonderful thing you’ve done. We’ll make you a citizen.” This notion of singular exemptions as against the overhaul or re-imagination of the system as a whole—you captured it so brilliantly.

Exactly. It’s like pulling that person out of the flattened mass that we’ve created, right?

 I want to keep talking about history, but I also want to ask you, how did you become a poet?

I always feel like I need a better story than this. I was a lover of words and a reader as a kid. I read fantasy and science fiction, and those stories were the little things that drew me in. I also read about nature; these are the places my interests at that time were. And I thought “Oh, I’m gonna write stuff.” So, I would try to write stories, but as far as I could get was a vignette. That wasn’t very satisfying. I thought, “I don’t know how to write a story.” And then in college, a guy who lived in the dorms with me who wrote poems to his girlfriend said, “Maybe you should try to write a poem.” And I tried, and there was something about writing a piece that resolved — my first poem was about an owl that I had some intimate contact with. I thought, “I finally achieved something; I need to figure out how to do this better.” So, plot sort of evaded me, character development kind of evaded me, but I could write out of observation and contemplation. And that got me to writing poems.

Milledgeville, your hometown, how did it become a character in your poems? It seems like a lifelong character, almost a thread throughout multiple books.

Yes, that credit is due to the novelist Terry Jones. We were in a workshop together years and years ago, and I had been bringing poems about my father to the workshop. And she said, “I’m kind of tired of reading about your complicated relationship with your dad, fellow student to fellow student.” She said, “This isn’t really doing it for me, I’m sure you have a mom, grandmothers or something.” But I didn’t know how to write about them. I don’t have a complicated relationship with them. I needed to do research. I decided to interview my mom and grandma. What were their lives like? And one of them agreed to an interview, and we sat down, and I interviewed her and got to learn a bit about her. And that interview kind of transformed into these grandmother poems, which felt like the beginning of something. It felt like a sea change in my writing, an early exploration of form. I’d read sonnets and other formal things before, but I had never tried my hand at them. The role of the interviewer and researcher opened up some things for me. Those poems were published in Callaloo, my first major publication years ago—thank you, Charles Rowell, incredible editor, very generous person.

And I showed my grandma — I was very proud I got these poems published. And she was like, “I didn’t know, you were gonna do that, that they were gonna be in a magazine somewhere.” She’d been really happy to help me with my schoolwork, but she didn’t know that it was the sort of a rendering of a voice and that I might somehow share things that she just didn’t necessarily want out in the world. Though the poems were fictionalized, for her it still felt close enough. I knew I needed to respect her privacy. This ethical move for me as a writer opened up possibilities. I needed to invent characters; I’m going to move away from my grandmother and not be tied to her biography or lean too heavily on that.” So, I invented Silas Wright as a character, and let him explore Milledgeville, our hometown, that history, on a human scale, so that I could do the things we talked about earlier, and look at long histories with Milledgeville as a microcosm.

Oh, what a journey. Talk to us a little bit about Milledgeville as a place; this is a real place after all.

It is a real place. It’s my hometown. It is also the town that Flannery O’Connor called home. Her people are from there; her mother’s people are from there. She was born in Savannah but moved back to Milledgeville when she was young and grew up there in Georgia. So, it’s central Georgia, Piedmont, Milledgeville was the fourth capital of Georgia that was built on “ceded” Creek Muskogee land. There was a very calculated and determined governmental move to wrest native lands from native people. The colonial capital had been Savannah, Georgia. And after Savannah, it moved to Augusta, and then Lewisville, and then they sort of developed Milledgeville as a capital. I think there had been a fort there, a trading post for the Creek People.

I grew up there. The city was established in 1804. In the census records, I could find that my great-grandfather was born around there… he was born in 1856; his father was born in 1812, probably somewhere around that area. I can’t say farther back than that. I think what I could see from the census record indicated that his mother was from Virginia, which kind of also tracks the way economics and agriculture were shifting and where people were being moved from. His father was born in Georgia.

That’s just mind blowing to me, how you went from writing about your dad, who I think appears very minimally now in this book, to writing about your grandmother and wanting to do the ethical thing of protecting the people we love in our stories, you decided to shift to the larger biography of “place.” What role does “place,” occupy in your writing imagination? Why “place?”

It did sort of just happen. It wasn’t a deliberate decision on my part. Nature takes place in context; history takes place in context. I had been moving as an adult from place to place, and when I find myself in a different place, I’m interested in that place and those sorts of spaces, like, “What is the history of this place? The natural history? What are the creatures, the other beings that we share the space with?” And, so birds show up, and the fish, and all these things show up. What is the sort of the human story here?” The second book sort of explores this kind of moving around, but also northern Minnesota. When I showed up in northern Minnesota in May of 2003, I felt very conspicuous. There were not a lot of Black folks there. And having moved from Houston, Texas, going from Georgia to Houston to northern Minnesota, was really kind of — I experienced culture shock, a little, like “Oh, the look of this place is very different in so many ways.” And so, that is sort of how I understand “place.”

And then I sort of want to figure out, like, “Well, who was here?” When I was wandering around Bemidji one day (in northern Minnesota) I happened across a flyer for a lecture about a “Black Voyager”—and that’s a simplification of who this person was—but I was like, “Oh, there’s a Black Voyager here? Let me find out about this guy!” The lecture was a couple weeks out, but I couldn’t wait, I needed to find out. So I went directly to the Historical Society, and said I need to know whatever you have about this guy. They had a file on another Black guy, Charles Scrutchin, who was a lawyer, who moved there in 1898 or so, like, 100 years before I moved to Bemidji, this guy moved up there, and I was like, I’m just learning about him and getting a sense of, like, what his life was in this space and sort of how he ended up there, just sort of tracking his life to getting to Bemidji. If I remember correctly, his mother was from Georgia, his family ended up leaving the South after the Civil War and he was raised in Washington State. He ended up going to law school in Michigan, all of these things, and ended up settling in Minnesota—first in Minneapolis. Then the Black lawyers and race men in the cities were like, “You’re new, we’re glad you’re here, but this place is saturated, and we could actually use sort of an ambassador, someone out in Bemidji.” So, he took the train north to Bemidji and practiced law in Bemidji for 30 years and was part of some major cases, and it was through this that I ended up learning about a particular lynching. I think I’d heard about it, I’d seen some postcards, but I didn’t know he was attached to it. I discovered he had defended one of the men who had to stand trial after the lynching. Which, I guess, doesn’t quite answer your question about the place, except when I go to places, I’m looking for, you know, for stories.

It fits neatly into my next segue.  When I read Blood Ties and Brown Liquor it was very vertical to me. It was like digging, or an excavation, whereas Dangerous Goods feels very horizontal, and it struck me that there’s a sense in which this is a writer, or better still, a creative persona that history follows everywhere. In Dangerous Goods, the second book—and these books are like five years apart–there’s a quality of the Nomad. There’s a quality of some sort of spiritual exile, historical exile. There’s the quality of rootlessness that seems grounded in an original ruthlessness in history. Everywhere this character goes, he’s floating. There’s a quality of a flaneur, He goes everywhere but he seems unable to escape history. So, I wanted to talk to you about that, that sense of floating around in history, of moving from place to place, but also with a mind that is unable to escape noticing the histories of those places.

Oh, my goodness … I’m glad you noticed that, and that is sort of part of my way of being. I am interested in the histories of places. The same way I notice birds when I’m walking around, they will slow me down as does the history of a place. I gotta see, gotta look, because there’s a history of every place, and it’s a way for me to track who I am in a place and who I can be in a place. So, I’m always looking for legacies and forerunners. I love that you used the word “flaneur,” thank you. Yeah, that’s part of my creative being. When I sit down to write, I find myself coming to other places I have been to. I’m glad it’s appreciated. I don’t know if I have any other way of saying that. I’m writing what I need to write.

The book I’m working on now is a similar kind of activity in some ways, except I’m exploring the American West, because I spend a fair bit of time in the American West, and I was like, What is this place? When I was in the Upper Midwest, in Bemidji, I spent a lot of summers driving across the country to Southern California with my then-partner, just sort of being in that space and being encountered and encountering people in that space, thinking, Oh, I got to find out what’s going on here. There’s a poem that’s going to be in the book that comes out of research, and me trying to understand that space. It’s based on some historical readings. There’s seminal historical text of Black folk in the West called In Search of the Racial Frontier, by Quintard Taylor, and in it he mentions Black people who were brought to this little town in Washington — Rosalind, Washington — to break a strike. They didn’t really know they were being brought in to break a strike, these miners—Black miners—from across the South breaking a strike against a coalition of miners who’d immigrated from Europe. And there was tension. It was armed tension. I thought This is fascinating; I want to write about it.  I had the poem in me for a long time, but I couldn’t figure out my access, my entry into it. I even stopped in Rosalind to do research, and I was on the ground to see what was there. But it wasn’t until I was invited to a conversation about other beings, in one of those eco poetry conversations, and they asked if I could write about a particular woodpecker. I looked into it and found out that woodpecker is an indigenous endemic to the space where Rosalind was established. The range of the birds is where the town grew up. I thought Oh, I can write about that; I can write about both of these things. They came together. And so, this notion of the rootless traveler, the flaneur, traveling around the West and stopping in various places and histories, poking around, I had an opportunity to bring these multiple things together.

Beautiful. I want to talk about woodpeckers as a metaphor and through it dwell a bit more on rootlessness or perhaps flights. In your first book, Blood Ties and Brown Liquor, you were thinking in the tradition of Flannery O’Connor, William Faulkner—the lush, deep, complex sense of place. In your second book, Dangerous Goods, however, there’s a kind of outward spread—a voyage of sorts—not just within the South or the United Sates. The spread is international, going beyond the Americas and the western hemispheres in a way that reminds me of the spiritual quests of James Baldwin across nations and continents. He had run away from the United States because he could feel the limitations his country had invented for his soul. He fled to France. But in his essay, “Equal in Paris” about how he spent the Christmas of 1949 in jail for mistakenly taking a hotel bedsheet as a broke 24-year-old and how he had been mostly incarcerated with Algerians who were the underclass of that French society, he wrote, “I suddenly realized that you can’t run away from home, that history follows you.” (citation). I got that quality in your own writing in Dangerous Goods. I love that poem about being on a boat. I want you to dwell a little bit on how your continental and international travel influences your poetry. Why did you even start traveling internationally to begin with? That might be a door that tells us what’s going on.

I love Milledgeville. That’s where my family is. Most of my family’s still there. There’re some branches that are gone here and there, but mostly everyone, like the main trunk of the family, is in Milledgeville. And yet, when I was 18, I was like, There’s so much more I want to see. Part of that as a kid and as a young adult, was driven by my engagement with nature and other beings, right? I grew up watching these nature shows on TV and often, you know, they’re not about Milledgeville. I mean, I watched all of them, like all the stuff—nature shows and fishing shows. And the fishing shows were kind of local, in some ways, the south, southeast. You know, bass fishing. I was just fascinated by that. But then, there were these shows about the Australian outback. And for years I wanted—I have—a great desire to go to Australia. Or portrayals of Safari in Africa, the lions and gazelles etc. And so those places, some of them drew me—not the city, not the people. And then as an adult in college, I had the fortune of going to the University of Georgia, which had a robust, to me, at least, African languages program. I took Swahili, but there was also Yoruba and Ibo, Zulu. I thought I’d like to go to East Africa for the people now. So that’s when I finally got the opportunity. I ended up going to Kenya. And then it was like, Oh, while I’m here let’s go to Tanzania, Zanzibar; let’s go to Egypt. Let’s look … let’s experience people. I also went on a Safari. I thought I wasn’t going to go on Safari because at that point, that industry, and that way of viewing a very diverse continent of many peoples and many nations was kind of abhorrent to me. But then I was like, Okay, I can hold that feeling, and also, I should probably go on safari. I hold those experiences and just think about what they tell me about myself and the space I come from. One of the things I encountered when I was in East Africa, in Kenya, Tanzania, Zanzibar and also in Egypt, was people trying to place me in terms of origin.

You wrote about it in one of those poems.

And maybe that’s why I was aware that it might happen. Before going I had met this man at the library who said you look Sudanese or something. I thought, Okay? In Kenya, they said “Oh, you’re from Lamu.”

To place you in a localized origin?

Yes. “You look like you’re from Lamu.” And I went to Lamu, and the people there looked familiar to me, in a way, and one of them asked me, “When did it happen in your life?” Wherever I’ve been in Africa, people tell me, “You feel like you’re from a place where mixing has happened.” Along the coast of East Africa where Swahili culture grew out of, or in Egypt, it was like, “Oh, Aswani, you look like you’re from Aswan.” And you know, in Morocco, “You look like you’re from Southern Morocco.” Once, when I was in Lamu, this guy asked me, “So, when did it happen in your family?” And the “it” I understood to be a kind of racial history, the long history of racial mixing, because I wasn’t from there, but he’s like, “You look like us for a reason.” And I said, “I look like you because of American slavery. Chattel slavery in America.”

That is so deeply moving, Sean. Deeply moving. These journeys began as seeds of invitation. I loved how nature created a very multi-continental portal of connections for you. “I want to see the birds in Australia. I want to see the gazelles in Africa. I want to see the forest in Europe.” I also love that at some point; language becomes your door. I think there’s a quote in Dangerous Goods that says, “We don’t exist in places; we exist in language.” I love this notion that a love for a language felt like an invitation to be among the people who speak it. But I think what I’ve heard you say the most poignantly is “I want to throw myself against the backdrop of places so that I can see what I am.” You want to know who are my forebears in this place and what does that mean for my future?

And now to woodpeckers, because we’ve got to talk about woodpeckers. I mean, maybe not woodpeckers, but birds generally. One of the things I love the most in reading Dangerous Goods, is how you tell the long ecological history of a bird, an animal, a plant. I thought I might ask you to read the poem “Postcard to Eduardo.” which I love so much.

Beautiful. I love this poem so much. I love the quietness of it, the images of it, but also how you were able to archive a poignant ecological history. So, talk to me about birds, which you love so much and how you make them figurations of beauty and mystery in your poems.

Thank you for saying that. One of the things you said just now was about this world that we share with other creatures. It’s recognition that I’m sharing this space with non-human beings and taking note of them. And I don’t think I’m necessarily special in that, but it sometimes often feels like I’m the one who’s noticing the birds, and maybe that says something about my life and my focus, like I need to be focused on my life. I get too easily distracted, my wife might say. But for me, they’re in the poems because they are part of what I’m experiencing. And that particular poem is part of a series that I was working on that became part of the book, but most of those poems fell away. They were a kind of a self-assignment, because I found myself traveling a lot at a period of my life, and I was like, I need to make sure I’m still writing, and I know I’m going to be observing birds, noticing birds, and it came out in one particular poem that came out of observation, and I felt inspired to write to a poet friend of mine about seeing these birds, these common nighthawks. And I was like, Oh, that’s the thing I should keep doing, because it’s making me productive. And so, during that period of my life, whenever I saw a bird while I was traveling, I would write a poem while in transit for a friend.  And with this particular bird, you know, when I got to thinking about the barn, there was an interesting moment in my life when Eduardo Corral was looking up, if I remember this correctly, in the dictionary, “horse tags,” and he was reading the different names to me. And I thought “Yes, there is poetry in the names of these things.”

So that got me around to sort of entering into this poem. I was thinking about the ways in which we share this planet with other beings. I was recently at a conference and on a panel, and this question came in about nature and writing about nature, and the imposition that our writing might place on “him.” That was the pronoun that was used, and I pushed back against genderizing nature in any way. Because I feel like nature, you know, is this life force that manifests itself and expresses itself, and has done so for millennia, for eons, through several mass extinctions, and that we’re facing one now. What we need to be focusing on is how we can help each other and the beings around us survive a mass extinction that we might have set into motion, as opposed to, you know, dinosaurs having the bad luck of living on a planet that was struck by an asteroid, a meteorite.

The history of humans, the history of birds, the history of place and the history of animals and the history of objects all in a kind of dance, that’s how I perceive that poem. Speaking of history, I was going to talk to you about “Voices in St. Paul’s Cathedral.” I love that poem so much. Which specific Saint Paul Cathedral is this?

It’s the one in London. Do you want me to read it?

Yes.

Again, one of those poems I don’t read very often.

What a poem, Sean. I love this poem so much! There’s a way this poem is emblematic of what you do in your poems. You’re talking about London, but you’re also talking about Gorée Island on the coast of Dakar, Senegal, West Africa. We’re talking about St. Paul in London, but I’m hearing Jamestown here in Virginia. We’re talking about the 17th and 18th centuries, but the voices you hear are situated in the 21st century with you—the voice of your father and perhaps his father before him. It’s almost like a choir of ghosts. There’re multiple voices—voices of place, voices of time, voices of history. And I wanted to ask you how you’re able to exist in multiple times. Because sometimes one is reading your poem and it talks about you and your brother. In terms of temporality, that’s now. And then the next poem says “Milledgeville, 1912” And I think, “Oh we just traveled back a century just by opening a page?” How are you able to exist in your poems and perhaps inside yourself as a human being in the world in these multiple time frames? This practice of multiplicity and simultaneousness in time and space. How do you do that?

It’s resonances, right? There are things that strike frequencies that bounce off each other and suggest that they need to be sitting together, especially when I come to the page. When I began to write, I was in London on vacation visiting a friend, and I was traveling by myself. I was mostly in London by myself. I would visit someone who left the country. In this particular instance, I was going to St. Paul’s to do something touristy. Up in the dome, there’s this gallery that is circular, and the acoustics of it are such that if you sit on one side, you can whisper and it will travel around. And I didn’t have anyone with me, and so it was my turn to do that. I just sat there and did it myself. And the question that came to me to ask was, Can you hear me? At this point in my life, I think increasingly I do hear my father in my voice and think about the implications of that. But in that moment, I don’t think I’d experienced that before, and it was electric. And then that resonated for me, in a way, with a conversation I had with my seat mate on my first Trans-Atlantic flight. There was this Trinidadian man who was telling me stories, and one of the things he said at the end about smell lingering, and I was like, “Wow.” And so, as a poet, as an artist, when something has an effect on me, I feel like I have to take note of that, make note of that, and hopefully I can make something of it. That poem is the culmination of me working with all of these things that are me and others around me, thinking about the legacies, and histories surrounding me. At this point, I think it’s become a habit of being; I’m not sure I’m good at it, but I’m always thinking about these things, and I’m sometimes surprised when others aren’t.

Oh, it comes together beautifully, Sean. Thank you, and on that note, we’ll bring this wonderful conversation to an end. That was great. Thank you.

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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

As a poet and visual artist, Krista Franklin invites those who encounter her work to consider the world not as a given to abide by, but as given to us to alchemize through our own unique minds and bodies, and through which we can imagine and manifest alternative possibilities of being—perhaps more just, perhaps more loving, perhaps more fun, perhaps kinder, perhaps softer or sturdier. Perhaps free. Her work is physical and deeply embodied—acutely alert to the heft and matter of the body, the material reality of place and personhood, but also steeped in spirituality and presence always deeply aware of the otherwheres in the here. One might call it soul. Whether collaging images through words or visual material, she returns the familiar to us as fantastic. She upends the ordinary— the patterns and practices to which we have been habituated – and invites us to do the same. The world rendered through her eyes is both potent and empowering.

Another word to describe Franklin’s work is “full.” Her poetry collection, Too Much Midnight, throbs with color, is heavy with intellection (there are 4 introductions and an interview) and, of course, there are the poems—a veritable cornucopia to feast upon. This richness is not mere opulence, but rather a poetics that positions itself in opposition to the stereotypical discourses of scarcity and struggle that often overshadow Black narratives. This is full-figured defiance of paucity of mind, body, image or mood. This is the full Blackness of the universes—both internal and external—claimed for the self and the community. We, like these poems and in these poems, are defined by magnitude, abundance, and depth. Franklin’s 2018 artist book, Under the Knife operates under a similar logic of heft. Its 280 letter-pressed and hand-stitched pages hold the fullness of generations. Expressed in lyric, prose, artifact, photographs, images, documents, and more, Under the Knife is a brimming archive of existence in which no thing is extraneous. Even the forgotten, the erased, and the silenced take up their space in the body of this work as it spills forth the memories, stories, experiences, held in the body—particularly Black, female bodies.

Franklin’s is clear-eyed, yet hopeful work. In the poem, “Call,” which closes her poetry collection, Too Much Midnight, Franklin writes: “Here’s a mirror, look behind you, beyond you. Here’s a portal. Jump through it. Make magic, follow the breadcrumbs, the north star, the scary crackle of tree branches just ahead in the dark. Take the darkness into your fists and smash it on the warm stones of daylight. Make daylight. no more caskets for us to all crawl into. No more remixed autopsy recitations, not more black masked mammies, no more brown bodies on your cooling boards and studio floors no more satirical snark crafted to suffocate, no more grabbed bodies, no more public/ private intellectual masturbating no more twentieth century icons as dead talking head to justify injustice.” A call out, a call in, and a wakeup call all at once, the poem asks us to do better. To be better. To imagine better. It points us to the abundance of the world available to us, and the power we have to transform with and through it.

Krista came to Harrisonburg as the guest of the Furious Flower Reading Series, and as a presenter in the Boundless Bound symposium held in Oct 2025 here at James Madison University. We were pleased to host her for an interview for The Fight & The Fiddle. What follows is a lightly edited transcript of our conversation.

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Welcome to the Fight and the Fiddle, to Furious Flower, to James Madison University, to Harrisonburg, Virginia. Welcome. We are so happy to have you here! I want to talk to you about your journey as an artist, as a writer. We were in Cave Canem in 2004. In a group with Patricia Smith. And when I think back to all the ways that I’ve learned about writing and learned about living as a writer, and you’ve been doing it in multiple disciplines! I’d love to hear about that journey.

It’s a little hard for me to track sometimes, I think because I’m a person who very much lives day to day. I very rarely think about the time that it’s taken me to get to certain things. I think that I was very interested in keeping those two parts of my life separate: I was making visual art at the same time that I was writing, but a lot of people didn’t realize that I was doing both things. There would be some folks who knew me as a writer, and some people who knew me as a visual artist. Where I am right now in my career, is really trying to bring those two things together. I always said that my two disciplines are segregationists. They’re not gonna be segregated from each other anymore. They don’t like each other, but I’ve tried over the past, I would say, five to 10 years, to try to start to bring some of those things into focus together, even though oftentimes they’re not directly communicating with each other. When I’m thinking about the writing, I’m not necessarily thinking about the work that’s visually engaging. So, the track to get to where I am now is somewhat loosey goosey, and doesn’t really have straight lines—a lot of swirls, no straight lines. But a series of beautiful relationships have been formed—relationships with people, relationships with organizations, relationships with curators, relationships with other poets, like you, and just allowing the flow of creativity and the flow of being an artist in every way that that possibly means to stay open to that. So it’s been a long and weird, winding road, but a lot of it has taken place in Chicago. So I would say that, if anything, Chicago is the place where I was able to do that multitude of things and still maintain some sense of strength. 

You’re in a space that is so rich in poets, Patricia Smith, Gwendolyn Brooks, Angela Jackson… And you’re also from Ohio, and that place birthed some geniuses, too. Those are two really interesting legacies of place, and I’m curious if they have any impact or influence on your work.

Absolutely. I would say that they both have an incredible impact on me and my work. When I lived in Ohio when I was younger, I often thought about Morrison being from here, but often thought about Rita Dove being from there. I also would think about the period of time that Nikki Giovanni was there as well. And it really gave me a blueprint. Their existence made me believe that it’s possible to be a Black woman and to write for your life, for your living. They really established for me the possibility that I could be the thing that I dreamed of being, and that there have been people who had done it before who were also from the same area and became very successful at a high level. Conceptually, in the writing, they were operating on a super high level, and it just gave me something to shoot for — the stars. 

Right after one of my years at Cave Canem, I moved to Chicago on a whim. It wasn’t a thought-out plan. It was very impromptu. Let’s call it “intuitive.” Intuitive is a great word. And when I got there, the doors just flew open, especially with the poets. The poets were so giving, so generous, so sweet. They just immediately embraced me and gave me jobs, allowed me to meet students that they were working with. And it changed my life. It was there also that even though I had been making visual art in Ohio before I got to Chicago, I was doing it when I had writer’s block, so I wasn’t really making visual art all the time. I was making it when I felt like I couldn’t write and the words were escaping me. When I got to Chicago, it became more of a ritual practice about making work, or making collages, primarily, and also drawings and paintings. And it was the poets who encouraged me to start to show the work. They would see it in my apartment, hanging on the walls, and were very curious about them— “Who made this?” “Who made this?” “Where’d it come from?” And then when I would reveal it was me, they asked “Well, why aren’t you showing it in galleries? Why aren’t you putting this in the world as something that you do?” It took me a while to come to grips with that as a possibility, but when I finally did, it was the right move. But it was really about learning how to balance those things. 

Chicago as a geographical location has been so formative for me, not only because of all of the heavy hitters that are from there, and all of the rich Black history of that location, but really the rich history in general. They have this reputation that I like to brag about—that it’s the last bastion of American freedom. And I feel that those are where the fighters are. Those are the folks who believe in people’s human rights. Those are the people who believe in the possibility of a world where we can have an equitable future where we can live alongside one another and be neighbors and be kind to one another. It just gave me a different landscape in my imagination, a possibility of how to live my life. And I’m getting a little misty, even thinking about it. I owe great debt to that city, a great debt.

I love the idea of the city structuring your internal landscape—the landscape of the city building that internal landscape. And I love that’s what’s in the city, because sometimes folks outside of Chicago don’t understand that reputation… 

Oh, it has a terrible reputation outside of that area.

But its internal reputation is about justice and freedom and possibility, and I feel that it is so evident in the poems! There is a movement in the poems to be 1) imaginative. I love the surprising things that encounter each other in a Krista Franklin poem. And also that there is 2) a concern with social justice. And so, I want to ask you to talk about art in relation to those pillars of social justice, equity, freedom, etc. What’s the role of art? What’s your role as an artist?

That’s a tough one right now for me.  I feel that I’m at an age where I am really interested in the notion of art for art’s sake, and I never would have said that 10, 15 years ago. That wouldn’t have ever come out of my mind, or out of my mouth. I feel that it is important for us as artists and as writers to follow our spirits around whatever it is that we feel is compelling us. And sometimes those things are very intense—notions around social justice, notions around equity, notions around our liberation as a people, as a country. And then sometimes those things are about what I would call the mundane—the everyday encounter, the beautiful moment of looking at a sky and being transfixed by a cloud, or being swept away by birds and butterflies and the things that we attribute to children, really. We don’t really think about adults being caught up in the whimsy of life. And because we live in a society right now that is so intense and so challenging on so many fronts, we have to still find those moments and those opportunities of whimsy and play. I feel that the role for me as an artist is to continue to tap into those things that make me, Krista Franklin, on a fundamental level, those things that people would maybe not even consider to be very interesting things about me, about my life, about what I find to be beautiful, what I find to be compelling, etc. My notions around beauty are pretty complex. Sometimes to me, the grotesque is beautiful, horror is beautiful; I have a semi-twisted notion of beauty. It’s more expansive than just what we think of as pretty. Not pretty, but it’s compelling. So, what is compelling us? Where are our spirits at? What is our role in our own personal lives as well as our larger lives? Our public lives? What do we need to be talking about? How do we need to be connecting with one another? And sometimes those things are very small, mundane things. We get our coffee at the same place. We hang out at the same bookstore. These very small moments that have great impact on connection.

Thank you for that. And I love that idea of connection. This might seem like a weird jump, but I feel that collage is a segue from connection. Collage is one of your primary media, but in the poems, collage is a poetics. Can you talk to me about collaging as poetics and artistic practice.

Why collage? I feel like my brain is…now we have these words. We didn’t have these words years ago. But we have these words now that describe people whose minds work in interesting and original ways. And I think that I may be one of those people. I think everybody is, too. I really do think that a lot of people’s brains work differently, and we don’t allow ourselves the opportunities to be open about that. I think that we live in a world that wants us to conform. And when we have these options of conformity, then everybody wants to fit into these little boxes and articulate their lives in these very simplistic terms. But my brain is pretty far reaching, and it does some interesting things, especially because my interests are so varied. I can read X-Men comic books and watch Marvel stuff all day. I can also be over here reading a Toni Morrison novel. And then also be over here listening to Duran, Duran. All of these things that are happening don’t feel connected, but they are because I am the connector. I’m the connector between these things. I found collage to be the most reasonable way for me to piece those disparate elements together. I like to talk about my grandmother as well, in fueling my notions around collage, because she was a quilter, and watching her take fragments of things and piecing them together really triggered something in my brain that I wasn’t even able to articulate at that time, but it helped me to figure out that you can take fragments… that you can disassemble something and put something back together in a new way, and that being a revolutionary act, an act that helps you to see things in a new way, see things in a position and from a vantage point that is not the first vantage point that you thought of. When you put two ideas together that are not necessarily connected, the collisions that happen between those things can generate some really interesting stuff.

I was thinking of this quote “art is thinking and labor” that is attributed to one Krista Franklin. I’d love to hear about your actual practice. What does that labor and thinking look like in the making of the things?

I just had an interesting conversation with one of my students last week about this very thing. I was trying to have them understand that “being in the studio” means a lot of things. It doesn’t necessarily mean that I am painting, or I am working on a sketch, or I am storyboarding my next film. You could be in studio time when you’re daydreaming. You could be in studio time when you’re driving your car to go pick up your groceries because your brain is still producing things. I remember, and I know you have stories like this too, where I’m washing my hands or washing the dishes, poems would start to come up, lines would start to come up. It’s doing these very ordinary chores around the house that generates, fuels even, the genius of your work. So it’s about allowing studio time to just be anything. 

Now, because I don’t have a traditional studio anymore, because of the relocation from Chicago back to Dayton, Ohio, I have learned to, once again, use my bed as my studio space. So, I could be reading a book, I could be writing a couple of lines down that are compelling to me, I could be doing some small watercolors in a sketchbook—whatever idea my brain cooks up on that day. And sometimes it’s nothing; sometimes it’s not about the production. It’s about resting. I think that all artists, all writers, need to have that space where they’re not doing anything at all, sometimes for long stretches of time. We live in this world where we are supposed to be generating something all the time, we’re supposed to be producing something all the time, like machines. But we’re not machines. We’re human beings, living in these bodies that are fragile. These bodies that are fragile, these bodies that have an expiration date to them. They’re finite. And so, we have to take that time to use the studio of the mind, to rest. 

Labor is art. I love that quote because it really marks a specific time and period of my life, where a lot of things that I said in public, at that time, especially, tended to be fueled by hostility, my anger, my rage. I wanted people, at that time, to understand that art is a very serious thing. People think it’s so whimsical. The Bohemian artists, the starving artists, right? But we’re working—this is work. We have to do research, like everybody else does. We have to read the books, buy the materials. This is an investment. It’s not just this frivolous thing where, Oh! The Muse jumps down! Now, I do believe in muses, but it’s not just about the muse jumping down and then suddenly I’m overwhelmed with this poem. It’s a labor. It’s a craft. And it takes skill. It takes time to refine it, to master it, and it’s not something that comes down on you. But sometimes it comes down on you.

You mentioned the body—the fragile, finite body. But embodiment—the body—is such a robust part of the work you do, both visually and in the poems. Also, I feel like there is such a surreality there. So I’m curious about that tension between embodiment, the irrefutable fact of the body, and all these sideways possibilities that are the opposite of real, factual, material present things in the work.

The corporeal world has always been something that has intrigued me for a very long period of time in my life. I think part of that has to do with health crises—really seeing the body as a space where anything could happen, and a lot of times those things that happen aren’t wonderful. As women in particular. And this is not to say that other bodies are not equally as mysterious, equally as magical, but there’s always something that’s happening with your body when you’re a woman. From the time you hit puberty, it’s on. It’s all the way on. It’s like all of this metamorphosis that’s happening. Possibility is a great word because things begin to shift and change so rapidly that your brain can barely keep up with it. And so then, because there’s that gap between the logical mind and what’s happening with your physical being, there’s all of this space of possibility, what is really happening here, that liminal space is a mystery space. It’s an empty space. And so you’re forced to try to make sense of the thing. And the ways that we make sense of the thing may not always be in a logical way. We jump to fast conclusions about things. We race to WebMD. We try to self-diagnose. We’re doing all of these things that lend themselves towards the preposterous, towards the fantastic, towards the horrific. And in that little space of life where the body is trying to catch up, where the mind is trying to catch up to the body, there’s all of this space of wonder and horror. And so, having gone through different health crises and watching people in our families—we watch people in our families go through different health crises as well. My mother struggled with cancer twice. My father had cancer at one point. My mother and father had heart conditions. My father died of a heart condition. So there’s always something that’s happening around our body, around the physical space of the body. And so it’s been an obsession over my life of writing through the fear, the anxiety, the reality of what it is of not being respected or heard at the medical facilities. There’s this legendary dismissiveness, especially that Black women face, when we go into the doctor. And so, I try to use my writing, in particular, as a space to process and sometimes visual art as well. There are kinds of misshapen body things that are happening in the collages. But there’s things that happen where we have to grapple with that. So I use the body to do that.

When I was trying to think of what acts as a hinge between the written word and visual art, the idea of the image comes to mind. You work very much in both spaces and work with creating those sensory image details. So, talk to me about your relationship to the image. 

I think that if I were being super honest with myself, I would say that I am a spiritual photographer; I am constantly looking at things and making images in my head. Also, images surface, either in lucid dreaming as well as dreaming. There’s always this notion of looking at something and I’m trying to make sense of what I’m looking at, or I’m trying to capture what I’m looking at. I think that gaze is the throughline through all of my work. It’s me observing, which is why I like to use scientific motifs as well in the work, because I’m investigating, I’m looking, I’m observing, I’m holding something under the microscope. I’m taking something apart, I’m dissecting it, even with lucidity. It’s about me being a surgeon in the writing. Me taking things apart and taking and looking at them very carefully. I think that is something that goes through all of my practices, this notion of the images. 

I was very interested in the Imagist poets back in the day. I was very interested in poetry that felt very visceral to me, that felt corporeal. It had to have a resonance of physicality, too. Which is why I also think even some of my poems and my writings and even some of my visual work that hints towards violence, or aftermath or carnage, is me trying to tap into some sense of viscerality—the images that I feel arrest us. That stop us in our tracks. I’m interested in generating images that are arresting. Whether they be arresting because they’re beautiful, or arresting because they’re strange or hypnotic or weird in some way. I’m interested in doing that in the writing as well as visual work. So it’s the visuality, the sensual world, the senses, the sixth sense. And all of them are very important to me in the way that I want to articulate my being.

So the other part of that plurality, spirituality, and surreality is this idea of the sixth sense, the mystery. And I also think it’s such a foundational part of the work. I feel like that emanates through. Is it part of your practice as well? How do you materialize that into language and/or into the collage and the visual art space?

That’s the challenge, isn’t it? I’m trying to figure it out. In my childhood, I was deeply in the church, because my mother and my grandmother and my aunts were all church-going women. The churches that they went to walked the line between Baptist and Pentecostal, so there were a lot of fantastic things that were happening— people were speaking in tongues, people were getting slain by the Spirit. This was something that was so pedestrian that I would literally bring friends to the church to just watch them react to what was happening in the church. To watch people go through phases of euphoria, of ecstasy. To have these bodily reactions… these visceral reactions to something that was unseen. All of a sudden, somebody who’s standing next to you is jumping up and down but there’s nothing that happened. Nobody told them to do that. Something was in the room that could not be identified that was making that happen. So that’s always been a part of the way that I moved through the world—that there’s always a seen world and an unseen world, and those unseen things, those unseen forces, those unseen beings do affect what happens in the physical world. And vice versa. So I am constantly about the business in my writing of trying to work through and articulate what that means and what that looks like: How does it show up? What are the images of that? How can I show through writing, or even through an image, or a photograph, or a picture, or a collage, or a painting, this unseen and seen world operating around one another? And for me, it’s gone now beyond religion and into a more cosmologically-based thinking, that’s what I think about the world. It doesn’t have anything to do with a dogma. This is what I know to be true because I’ve lived it. There are things that are happening that we can’t articulate, define, understand. They’re mysterious, they’re cultish. And how do I — as a thinker, as a writer, as a being, as somebody who believes in all of this — how do I write through that, and make that legible for people who may or may not believe in such things?

If you could be workshopped by or workshop with five writers — past or present — whose eyes would you want on your work and why? Who would you want to be in a conversation with? 

That’s interesting. That was a great question. Who would I want? Past, present? Visual artist or poet? I’m saying Hannah Höch, Jimi Hendrix, Douglas Kearney, maybe Romare Bearden, and this person who looms large in my imagination, who was a traveling preacher, who used to come to my mother’s church, brother Fred O’Dell. He was the first medium that I ever encountered. So those are my people.Most of them are gone. Is that crazy? 

It is not at all! I want to ask you about editing as a process. I don’t know how you begin to edit a collage. But I know creation is one practice, and editing is another, so what are some of your editing practices? 

I love editing. It’s actually my favorite part of writing. The hard part is getting the words down there. The shaping of the words is what really excites me, removing words, putting new words in. I do a lot of looking at synonyms. I’m trying to expand and get as close as possible to what it is that I’m trying to say, to be as incisive as possible. I’m going to look at this line; I’m going to begin to move words around. I’m going to begin to maybe move a line to the bottom or to the top. That process of rearrangement and reorganizing and taking things out is very exciting. I love it, and it does mimic the collage too. The cutting things away, the getting the scalpel and really working things out. I think in collage, it shows up as the way I don’t glue down anything until the end. Sometimes I’ll trick myself by gluing things down to make it permanent, and then I’ve got to work around it. But for the most part, there’s a lot of rearranging that’s happening. There’s cutting, and then there’s reorganizing, reorganizing, reorganizing, and then deciding that this is the formation. This is the organization that it should be in. So I think it is a process. It’s the process of writing. It’s the process of making something that’s the exciting part for me. The final outcome is okay. But I’m more interested in how long it took me to do that, how many times I had to think through something to get it to that final space.

What have you inherited and what have you had to invent?

First of all, can I say I love these questions! What have I inherited? I feel like spiritual understanding is an inheritance of mine. Family inheritance. I feel like I have inherited notions around time travel and notions around the body. What have I invented? I don’t think I’ve invented anything, strangely enough, because I am really of the mindset that there’s nothing new under the sun. So even though it may appear as innovation or as invention, I feel like there has been somebody else who’s done this, but maybe we just don’t know who they are, or maybe not in the way that you’re doing it. 

But you have a fingerprint.

Of course, exactly, I’m inheriting and then taking that inheritance and rearranging it in a particular way that feels like it might be new or original. But really…I’m constantly looking at old stuff, old archives, old paintings, or collages. When I look at the work of somebody like Romare Bearden, I think it’s unbeatable, it’s unmatched. There’s nothing that I could do that would match that. And this is a person who was making that in the 1930s, 1940s, ‘50s. When you think about that, I’m simply using these tools, the inheritance of how to see something, how to rearrange something, how to think through something, and then reorganizing it in my 21st Century moment. I want to think longer about that question, though, in terms of inheritance, because I feel like it is something that I write about a lot, too, and I don’t often think about inheritance as a good thing all the time. So, I’m gonna spend some time thinking deeper about that.

You definitely, unquestionably, write from a space of Blackness. What I love in reading the work and seeing the visual art is that it is always such a full space. It’s a space of abundance, almost excess. There’s a decadence to your language and your collage. Things are always spilling out of themselves. They refuse containment. There’s a sense of abundance. I’m curious about the “extra” or “too much” — that’s what we say now — so talk to me about that Black fullness that you inhabit and portray so beautifully.

In graduate school, my cohort used to call it “muchness.” Muchness. We talk about “muchness” all the time. How did I come to that? I think it may just be the way I think my brain works. It’s so packed full of things and ideas and images and pictures, and music that it does spill over. There is this spill. And I’m also interested in moving things outside of the boundaries of what we are accustomed to seeing. It’s like you have a piece of paper, and the collage may spill outside of the margins, because that’s how the world is. It’s uncontainable. You could try your best to make things as orderly as possible, sometimes to your peril, because you’re gonna be sitting there being very upset when you realize that you cannot control it. 

There’s also this notion of Blackness as an infinite space, Blackness as an idea that holds and contains almost everything, or everything, and then things that we don’t even know. When you think about even the simple idea of going into a dark room and you don’t know what’s in that room. You can’t see what’s in that room, but your brain is immediately going to start to imagine what’s in the room. That fullness of understanding Blackness as a space where anything could happen: any possibility of joy, any possibility of magic, any possibility of horror, any possibility of love, of romance, any possibility can happen inside of the Black space. And so I think about our people, that we are uncontainable. We have been moved through so many places in the globe, both by force and by love, that we want to go somewhere else. We need to go somewhere else. We’re so rich. I’m saying it’s so extraordinary for me, so extraordinarily beautiful, almost breathtakingly beautiful. I’m getting emotional just thinking about it. The capacity of our beauty, and not just physical beauty — although that’s incredible and true. I’m talking about the beauty of our spirits, that we can be welcoming to people who are not welcoming, that we can forgive people who have done awful things, and our capacity for gloriousness. I want to keep going to that well. That’s the bottomless well for me. And I want to just keep going back there. Because whenever I go back into that well and pull something up from it, it’s always new. It’s always fresh. It’s always something that I never knew before. Whether I think, “I’m gonna go to a different island. I’m gonna go to a different location, geographically.” That newness of Blackness completely excites me. It stimulates me. It makes me so excited to think about how I will never know all of the ways that we exist in the world. And that’s a glorious thing. It’s miraculous. It is. It’s a bottomless well.

I’m thinking about you saying, “I invent nothing.” Because you say that, we see how it’s ancestral, there’s a whole old newness.

And it is that old newness because we re-encounter it, so it feels like it’s original. But it’s something that’s existed for millennia, right? But we’re now having this moment with it that feels very new and original.

One of my favorite words is “alchemy.” I’m thinking about the ways in which we make it new, how it alchemizes in us and in our context for and in ourselves. That’s the part that makes it into something new. How do we alchemize experience, trauma, history, relationships? The big things. Love is love, but we alchemize that uniquely in all of our spaces. Thank you, that was a beautiful response. I said two more questions. Now it’s two more. Tell me one thing about passing it on as a teacher, as an instructor, as a mentor for other artists and writers, what are some of the guardrails or instructions for moving forward that you try to give those folks here who are just getting started on the journey?

To listen to themselves and not other people because I think a lot of times we are so conditioned to follow instructions. Some of us don’t by nature, but I think that there’s always this energy around people who are artists and writers to find a mentor, find somebody who can help them to get to where they want to go. And that’s all well and good, but I think that if you don’t first connect with your own internal voice, you won’t be able to do anything interesting. And so I think one of the things that I try to do, especially now with the young people that I have the pleasure of working with, and the honor of working with, and learning from as well as alongside, is to follow their gut, follow their intuition and listen to that inner voice around their making, around the way that they move through the world, around with whom they engage with and interact with. I think it’s very important to help people to understand that you do have a guiding voice inside of you, and that it’s quiet and it can’t be heard over the din of all the other voices outside. You have to get still, and you have to spend that private time and that quiet time to refine your ear, to listen to that inner voice. That’s one thing I’m trying to encourage the young people that I have the pleasure of working with right now to do. 

Another thing is to try to research. Research is so critical because of this world that we live in—this social media world where we’re constantly inundated with all of these ideas, images, other people’s stuff, other people’s baggage, other people’s life. Getting outside of that, how do you find that originality, that’s your thing, and make sure that you’re not replicating what somebody else has already done. I always joke around and say that I’m replicating things that have already been done but the people that I’m replicating are dead. They’re not on this planet any longer. They’re not in this dimension. If I’m replicating that, I’m thinking about history. That’s a whole research project. I have to go to the library for that. That’s not going to be easily accessible to me in the internet world. It could be, but I’m going to have to do a little bit deeper digging to understand what was motivating them; why they were making this work; how they were making that work; why they were writing those poems at that time; what they were living through at that time; how were their lives influencing what they were thinking about at that time. To be more thoughtful about the ways that we’re engaging with our making practices and our writing practices.

And I want to take a minute in between these questions just to say to you, Lauren, how influential you have been for me as a writer. I know that you probably do not know this. Your series, years ago when we were in CC [Cave Canem], when you were diving into Trinidadian folklore, and you opened up for me an entire world that I had no knowledge of through these gorgeous poems, and it really triggered in me a deepening around my pan-Africanist leanings towards learning more about other cultural Blacknesses, and spaces that I had not yet been introduced to. It opened up a whole other world for me, and it also really sharpened my eye and my ear around that other work that I was doing that we talked about earlier, around the spiritual world business, the magical world business. What does that look like when we’re Black people? Morrison has also given us that gift in a lot of her work, too. We have always encountered something supernatural in her work and having that moment in time with you really opened up a door, a portal for me that is still giving. So thank you for that. Thank you for your work and the work that you do for us as poets as well. It’s very meaningful, and we are very, very grateful for you.

Oh, my goodness, thank you! All right, back to you. What’s next Krista? What’s brewing in Krista-land?

I am really thinking about how it’s really, really, really beautiful to be here at James Madison University, and working with Furious Flower this week, and being invited to participate in this incredible symposium. The Boundless Book Symposium and Art Book Fair has been really beautiful for me at this time because I have been thinking a lot about publication, about books in a non-traditional sense, which is something that I think about a lot anyway. It’s not new that I’m thinking about this, but I am thinking right now about how my future projects going to manifest. When I’m thinking about the book and about the writings that I’m doing, which are not necessarily poetry too much these days—I would just call them writings, lyric essays… whatever you want to call them, it doesn’t matter the writings—but thinking about the ways that these writings can show up in the world when we’re talking about zines and we’re talking about artist books, and we’re talking about these other more ephemeral-based tactile experiences that have to do with writing. That’s where I’m at right now, I’m really meditating on how the next phase of the writing looks.

Part of what is bringing you here is this Boundless Book Fair, which is celebrating these non-traditional forms of book-making and print. And one of my questions was what is the definition of a book? It sounds like that is exactly what you’re thinking about right now. What does it mean to make a book?

What is a book? That’s something that I’m constantly asking myself: what is a book? Why does it have to be in this form—these traditional forms that we’re accustomed to? What are the possibilities? Another one of our favorite words, what are the possibilities of the book? It’s exciting.

It is. Thank you so much for joining us, Krista.

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

by Gbenga Adesina, PhD

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

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

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

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

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

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

I’m okay. How are you?

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

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

“Chimney Sweep Apprentice“

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

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

How did you come to the work? 

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

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

Certainly, in the dream state, yes.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The burial ground is a complete manifestation of that segregation.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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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