by Lauren K. Alleyne

Watching Dominique Christina perform poetry is a visceral and incredibly moving experience. Her voice thrums with history and ancestral weight, and her body is an exquisite vehicle for the poems that it emits. Blessedly, she is one of the poets for whom the experience of reading her work echoes that of seeing it enacted on stage: her language on the page is as effective a vessel for her essential work of witness, salvage and celebration — re-fleshing the bones, as she calls it — of Black, and oftentimes female, experiences. The image-engine of Christina’s work is a powerful one, fueled as it is on her incredible invocation of sensory detail that drives us through the difficult material of the poems . In “A Choir of Blackbirds,” she stands in witness of Marissa Alexander’s plight as a woman who tries to escape a brutal marriage:

Marissa met a man who
Killed her in fractions,
Parceled out her flesh
Like some maggot-ridden doll.

Every weekend he sawed her in half,
The incredible disappearing lady
Pummeled under his ordinary hands;
She put herself back together each morning.

The first quatrain unzips image by image, the slow, torturous murder of this Black woman’s spirit, the poem mimicking its content breaking her body line by line, the vehicle of the “maggot-ridden doll” as grotesque as the  “parceled out” flesh it is meant to describe. Even as the image renders her brutalized, “sawed … in half,” and victim of a horror so routine it is “ordinary,” Christina does not abandon Marissa to this broken and invisible identity; she names her “incredible,” bears witness, too, as the “pummeled” and “disappearing lady” does the extraordinary work of “put[ting] herself back together each morning” — a singular line of survival pushing back against everything that would end her.

There is no place Dominique Christina’s imagination will not go in service of her projects of recovery and justice. Her poem “Mothers of Murdered Sons” imagines the labor of each of the mothers of Emmett Till,  Trayvon Martin, and Michael Brown. The poem inhabits the womb, passes through the vaginal canal and blood-soaked thighs of Mamie Till, Sabrina Fulton, and Lezley McSpadden to bring their killed sons to us as we are never given them — soft, vulnerable and innocent, before they begin “breaking the world with their bleeding.”

Dominique read as a part of the Furious Flower poetry series in September of 2018, and in the studio we talked about her love of words and how poetry serves in the fight for justice. This is a portion of that conversation.

You’re an incredible performer and poet. I can’t forget that, at your reading at Furious Flower, a woman in the audience was so moved she actually fainted! When did you come to consciousness of your facility with and gift for language and performance?

Hmm. It’s a really good question. It’s a process for sure. I started writing in undergrad; that was 22 years ago, my senior year of undergrad. And I spent a good amount of time at the outset being confessional because there was finally this holding place for stories that I thought I would die with. But it was about probably 10 years after that when I altered my relationship with language. Because etymology is extraordinarily important to me. How a word gets born, what agenda it carries with it, what realities are created in order to agree with it matter to me very much, so once I started to have a more willful, tactical relationship with language and bridge the gap between thinking that I know what I’m saying and knowing that I know what I’m saying, the writing got better. My personhood got better. My politics got better. My parenting got better. Everything got better. I had more clarity; I had more tools in my toolbox; I had greater resources. I had greater psychology to throw at certain wounds that were old and festering — I mean, everything got bigger and much more vast after that.

But you know, page is different from stage, and so if you can master both, then you’ve really done something. You know, there are really remarkable writers who write really well, and they don’t perform well. There are people who perform really well, and they don’t write that well. And so I think probably for me it was 2012 at the Women of the World Poetry Slam competition when I first felt like I understood the weight of my presence in the room when I show up to read.

I want to go back to etymology because you mentioned that you talked in one of your TED Talks about that movement from being descendant of a slave to ascendant of a king. What are some of the words that that you feel expanded your personhood and purview?

Sure. So it’s really interesting. The things like “decide” and “choose,” which we use interchangeably in the lexicon because as native English speakers we have a very lazy use of the lexicon, but “decide” and “choose” are radically different from one another. And to grapple with that and understand that gives you a lot of power and a lot of agency. It certainly helped me be a better mother, when my teenagers would do something questionable. You know, I would ask, “Was that a decision or a choice?” Because, you know, a language reveals itself, and we know English is parented by languages that are older, so when you see this suffix “-cide” at the end of a word — you’ve seen that in other places, and the same thing is happening every time: suicide, genocide, homicide, fratricide, pesticide — something is being killed off. That’s the literal meaning when you have “-cide” at the end of a word. So in this instance, if I decide to stand here, I’ve killed off any opportunity to stand anywhere else. This is it. I’ve locked myself in. If I choose to stand here and it doesn’t work out, I can move, right? And sometimes it’s powerful and you have to make a decision. But for me, I have found that choices are much more vast and give more opportunity. So it’s words like that.

It’s things like, if we talk “prison industrial complex,” there’s a huge conversation about the difference between a “prisoner” and an “inmate.” Because a prisoner is someone [who has been confined], but an inmate is someone who has resigned themselves to confinement and [that] way of thinking about them and their lives. A prisoner wakes up every day and knows they should be liberated. So, when you listen to the news, and they talk about building a new prison, they can they say it holds X number of inmates, because the prison industrial complex can’t survive with prisoners. It has to have inmates; it has to have conquered people. It has to have people who have acquiesced to that story, right?

Lastly, I would just say things like “freedom” versus “liberty”: hugely different from one another. And those two words are often misunderstood and misused in African American contexts. “Freedom” is the most employed and most misused word, I think, in our lexicon. We have it in every song. It’s an all of the speeches, all the civil rights stuff. I mean, you can’t have a conversation about the civil rights movement without the invocation of the word “freedom.” In school, you learn that the civil rights movement was about “freedom.” And it wasn’t. Etymologically, when you look at “freedom” and “liberty,” you begin to have really, really urgent and necessary clarity, because “liberty” pertains to external circumstance. So things that restrict or prohibit your liberty are tangible things. A cell block, a roadblock, barbed wire, handcuffs: those things restrict your liberty, your ability to move the way you want to. Freedom is encoded in your DNA when you’re born; you have it with you always. You can’t give your freedom up. Your liberty can be compromised. But you know that because you found free folks on plantations, and you found free folks in prison. So there’s a very important conversation for me around those two things that really shifted my trajectory. We are constantly invoking a word and we don’t know what it means, and maybe that’s why it has always been so elusive.

So liberation, freedom, poetry: what’s their relationship?

Poetry is provocation. It’s a means to an end, I think. It’s the pronouncement of your name. It’s the affirmation and the reaffirmation of your freedom. And if you are permitted liberty, then you have the opportunity to go and utter those things wherever you choose. I think poetry is a radical act. I think the pronouncement of your being a free person is a radical act, especially if you have been set up to inherit a story that you’re conquered. Or that you come from conquered people, or that you’re supposed to exist in the margins. It’s a radical act just to declare yourself free. Poetry for me is what facilitates that conversation over and over again. I’m not trying to convince anybody of that, though. I don’t need to lobby. I don’t need to bring anyone into my way of understanding my personhood, my story, my existence and its legitimacy. I show up in the room. I take up space. I don’t apologize for taking up space. I’m not asking for a seat at the table. I’m already at the table, and I’m eating already, you know. But you have to travel the distance of those conversations, and for marginalized folk, oftentimes, it’s a subversive act.

You know, for us the acquisition of language oftentimes is almost traumatic, and so to go and claim it again, to reclaim it, to go back and fetch it, and to really have ownership of language and to understand that language can be a beacon and a bomb and a life preserver, or it can bring winter in, it can manacle you to a circumstance in a situation that won’t ever let you be your fullest and most holy self, right? So, there is a relationship between poetry and freedom, which is the same thing as saying poetry is the language that facilitates the pronouncement of your freedom.

I’m interested, too, in the relationship between poetry and activism. Talk to me a little bit more about how you think about that relationship.

“Activism.” The word tells you what it is. It is to activate you. If the act begins and ends with a hashtag, that’s not activism. That’s a gesture. And, look, a noble one — but it’s a gesture. You have to move beyond the pantomime of activism. Because activism is not convenient. It’s not something you can really do on your lunch break. It’s not, you know, like, “I got 30 minutes, so let me do my activism.” It’s not like that. It’s a life-altering thing. That choice that you make, to be engaged in a particular way, to rattle the cage, to inconvenience others, to interrupt space, to be deliberate about your Blackness or your otherness. That kind of activism is risk-taking behavior. I’m interested in that. So I don’t want to minimize, you know, Twitter, social media activism necessarily, but I want to invite folks into a conversation that that is just the jumping-off point. The means to begin to find coalition and support and to bring folks into your way of thinking about a thing and comparing ideas. But that is all that that is. If we don’t move beyond that, then it is just a gesture, right?

As a feminist writer, a women’s liberation writer, what are some of the things that you consciously try to impart to your children?

Be free. Insist. Exist. Resist. Be radically honest. Even if it terrifies you, do the thing that terrifies you. Interrogate choices that you make. Interrogate your relationships: do they show you where you’re whole or where you’re broken? Because that, for me is critical. For a long time my relationships showed me where I was broken. They were the evidence of old wounds. As I began to heal those wounds, those relationships could not stay. So that’s the invitation to my children, every interaction, every relationship you enter, even family, is that the evidence of the work you’re doing and how you’re healing? Or is it the evidence of what is still broken? What is still bleeding? I want them to be themselves. I want them to be fully expressed. I want them to be unapologetic. I want them to be deeply human. I want them to be empathetic. You know. I’m raising free folks. I’m raising folks who do not question their legitimacy or anyone else’s.

I wanted to touch on This Is Woman’s Work, because you mentioned the shadow, and it’s such an intriguing and inviting and rich book. How did it come to be, and what did writing it launch you toward?

So I’m a sort of manic in terms of writing. There was a woman who had been a publicist at a publishing house and who I had done a couple of events for, and she said, “I keep getting feedback from participants where they want to know more about your writing process. I think maybe you should try to write a book about that.” I wasn’t attracted to the idea, because I thought it sounded like a how-to manual. I don’t read how-to manuals, so I don’t know how to write one. And I sat with it and I sat with it, and I asked myself, “What language could I curate to help folks understand what the writing process is for me?”

Then I started thinking how, archetypically, there are all of these different points of entry. And for me, the wound has often been: I show up on Monday one way, if I show up on Tuesday as something else that gets shamed, it’s called immature or unstable or whatever, as opposed to “Look at how complicated you are!” Or “Go ahead! Look at how vast! Look at all those moving parts and how you’re willing to let them all have a dance!” So I wanted to heal that particular wound for myself. I’m all these women. I’m all of them at the same time, right? These are the women that I know, these are the women who raised me, these are the women that I am or that I was, or that I’m reaching for. And what is the creative process like when you’re the obedient woman versus when you’re the rebel? What does that look like? And again, always to interrogate: Is this a powerful place to stand for me? Is this the truest depiction of who I am right now at my core? And once I latched on to that, my brain went “Ah, you can talk about this archetypically,” and it was done in about 18 days. I didn’t eat. I didn’t sleep. I was manic about it, just writing it out, because it was coming. It was a flood, you know. And I also found that there were all of these women and these girls that I had known that I finally had the opportunity to bring into the space. And so that felt like really holy work to me. It just kept coming.

It reads like holy work.

Thank you.

Speaking of all the women you’ve known, you have poems to Rachel McKibbens and Mahogany Browne. Who are some other writers you feel are fellows in this work and are your community that you kind of pull on? And that can be present or ancestral.

Sure. Mahogany Browne and Rachel McKibbens: that’s my coven for sure. Jeanann Verlee is extraordinary. She just released her book prey, which is brutal and beautiful at the same time. Patricia Smith, Tyehimba Jess, Toni Morrison, Sandra Cisneros, Nikki Giovanni, Sonia Sanchez, Langston Hughes …

Edgar Allan Poe. I love him. I do. I love him, and I love the opportunity to convince other folks that they should love him. You know, because depending on how he was introduced to you, you’re like, “This has nothing to do with me. He’s not even speaking to me.” But I think he is! I think he’s permissioning us to reveal the parts of us that are the most unreconciled to say, “This is a thought that haunts me. Every day it has driven me mad; I’ll show it to you.” You know, I mean, I need that. I need permission for things like that. He gives me that.

That is the most convincing argument for Poe I have ever heard.

That’s how I experience him. His mania is a permission slip. You know, I’m siphoning through this well enough to show you all of my parts that are tattered and torn. I’m showing you the thing I cannot conquer.

Wow.

And I just I need that. I definitely appreciate the writers who — oh! Edwidge Danticat — I appreciate the writers who are ancestral, who are elegiac, who are confessional, who take risks, who offer you a bomb and a blessing. I appreciate the writers who do not have any intention of tying it up in a neat bow to make you feel better at the end. I appreciate writers who are not interested in being palatable to you. Writers who ask you to work as hard as they had to work to say it in the first place, because to me, that’s what Toni Morrison insists on. You cannot read her with the TV on. She wants you to drill down into the marrow of the work, and I appreciate that. I really do.

What’s your favorite thing and least favorite thing about writing poetry or writing in general?

I don’t have anything negative. I’m grateful. Truly, I’m really grateful, for myself and also for the folks who preceded me who did not have the opportunity. I give them as much room as they want with me. Say whatever they might need to say. It feels like witchcraft. It feels like conjure, which can be comforting and sometimes terrifying, and sometimes just really gut wrenching. But I’m always grateful for the writing process. I write every day, and I’ll die if I don’t: that’s how I feel. My relationship to writing is the same relationship that I have to eating and sleeping. I will die if I don’t do it. So I’m grateful for this craft because it makes my blood move.

What is the poet’s job in the world, as you see it?

The job description is complicated because for some poets, your job is to exhume the bodies. For some poets, your job is to bury the bodies. For some poets, your job is to crawl out of the grave yourself. For some poets, your job is to go back and rescue the little girl you were, the little boy you were. For some poets, the job is to name all of those unnamable souls that you borrow bone and blood from — just name them. For some poets, it’s an opportunity to talk to God. For some poets, it’s an opportunity to curse God. Yeah, it’s that it’s all of that.

You’ve referenced “bones” a lot; it’s really one of your words, you know, especially with the fleshing and refleshing. Tell me about that.

I know it. I was just at Kenyon College and I just said that. I said, “Let’s do a word bank. We’ll start writing, blah blah blah, and pay attention because your stream of consciousness stuff reveals you. You know, for me, there’s certain words that keep coming up — ” and the whole room was like, “Bones.” I know. I say “bones” all the time. It’s true. I’m going to keep interrogating this, but my right now answer is that as a kid, I spent so much time hiding and lying and shape shifting and performing a hologram that I was the skeleton in the closet. That’s how it felt to me. You know, I was the thing that you know, was locked in a damp basement. And so those skeletal fragments needed to be made whole and re-fleshed so that I could begin to speak that experience into the light and out of my body so that I can have my body. I think that’s what it is. I think I really do relate to my childhood and the experience of childhood as being almost a corpse. I’m some zombie figure. I’m animated. I’m pantomiming. But there are parts of me that are being murdered. You know there’s decomposition happening in front of you and you don’t see it. I think that’s why … I think that’s why. Yeah, that, and just there’s something even with elegy —  any time you are trying to talk about the dead, you know, the folks who left, somehow something connected to bones, blood, burial, comes up for me.

So that’s almost like a reflex word; do you have a favorite word?

Period? Just a favorite word?

You like them all, don’t you?

I do. I mean, I like language very much. I like playing with it, you know. Language is movement and action and activities. So I rarely say, “I’m speaking,” and say instead “I’m language-ing” this way. I think “interrogate” is a word I go to a lot, but that’s because it’s different from “I’m thinking about something.” It’s deeper than that: it requires forensics, you know, which is what I feel like I have to do a lot as a person and as a poet. Yeah, I like words.

You write a lot on private subjects. How do you negotiate what’s up for grabs in your own experience in life versus the other people in the story and their right to privacy?

Ain’t no right to privacy! So, yeah, so here we go. Ain’t no right to pri-va-cy. So, with the strict exception that, like, I’m not going to harm anyone, right? I’m not seeking to do that. There are certain poems I have written that I will not read in a room because it was a thing that happened. I was 12; there were two other girls in the room. They did not ask me to tell that story. But I also didn’t need their permission. I was there, too. It happened to me, too. So I’m saying what happened. I name that you were there. But I won’t read it out loud. You know, I won’t do that. But if I was there and I bore witness or it happened to me, it is mine. And at that point if you don’t want to be misread — and I’m not going to misrepresent you — if you don’t want to be represented negatively, you should have thought about that before you beat me up. So it’s that for me. I don’t —  I just can’t — I cannot care about that. Not now. Because, again, I did so much of that as a kid, managing other folks secrets for them to my detriment. I’m not doing that any more. At all. If you behaved badly, you messed up, because I have a long memory and a dope relationship with language and I’m gonna tell on you! I’mma tell on you a lot! You know, I’m telling on you over and over and over and over again until you are no longer — until the memory of you is no longer a noose around my neck, period. So confession for me is that, but also I practice it. It’s the one thing the Catholic Church got right — the practice, the business, of confession. Ritualizing that act. For me. That’s how I thought about it. I’m practicing telling the truth, the whole truth. I’m not Catholic, but I went to Catholic school K through 12. And I would 100 percent sneak in the confessional booth. 100 percent. 

I grew up Catholic and I have always avoided confession!

Nah, girl, I loved the confessional! I. Love. The. Confessional. I’m like, so I could come in here and just say whatever, and you can do nothing to me? Come on. Bless me, father. What do I say? Bless me, father. Okay. First of all, I loved it. I loved it. Because it was like, it was a holding place. You get to say all the things here. I’d say all the things. I didn’t care what he felt about it. I don’t care what prescriptive prayer he gave me after. I just needed to say it. “Thank you for coming. Thank you. God bless and good night.” That’s all I needed. So, you know, I can’t. I can’t be concerned about how somebody else feels. I’m not going to misrepresent anyone. But I will represent you 100 percent.

You’re from a family of educators. What do you try to impart to students in whatever little or long time you have with them?

Same thing, same as with parenting: get free. I just want to introduce you to your brilliance. If I’ve done that, we’re good. I don’t have to like you. I don’t have to understand you. You know, but if you’ve come in contact with your capacity, your ability and your brilliance and how necessary you are in this world, I feel like I’ve done my job. Get on out there and be somebody.

Tell me about Anarcha Speaks and what you’re working on now.

Anarcha Speaks is a book of poems that’re all persona poems, so my voice is not “my voice,” but it’s not third person omniscient narrator, which is why this one took the longest for me. Anarcha was an enslaved girl born into chattel slavery. She had a baby. The baby died. She suffered fistula tears in labor and delivery, and labor and delivery trauma in chattel slavery was prevalent. In her case it rendered her incontinent. And when that would happen, it would reduce their value. And oftentimes these young girls and women would then be sold off to chain gangs to be sex slaves. I found Anarcha by accident. She was an asterisk; she was a footnote, a means to talk about Dr. J. Marion Sims. And I felt uproariously about that, that this man, who we regard as the “father” of modern-day gynecology, perfected his technique between the legs of this girl who he experimented on more than 34 times without anesthesia. And there was no way she could be relegated to footnote now that I had come in contact with her. She deserved a reckoning. She deserved the opportunity to vocalize her full experience.

The more I read, the more digging I did. My mother really helped me. She’s really great with research and tracking somebody down in the census. And you get the sense that this girl just didn’t. She was so sturdy. She just didn’t know how to exit her body when someone else would have willed themselves out of the body. She just didn’t know how to exit the body. The doctor was fascinated by all that he had done to her and all that he was able to do to her because she should have died. She should have bled out. And it wasn’t happening. And so for me, that was a whole conversation about the commodification of our bodies. And in that idea, that antiquated, violent idea, that we have a different relationship to pain and suffering — that we don’t feel it the way other folk feel it. She needed to be in the light. I’m really honored to bring her into the light. The first half is all her as a lead up to the moment when Dr. J. Marion Sims buys her so that he can have her all to himself, and buys two other women that were also on the plantation, Betsy and Lucy, for the same reasons. And then the second half of the book is called “The Juxtaposition of Experience,” because it’s a volley between Anarcha and the doctor. So you’ll have a poem that says “Blood Misbehaves: How Anarcha sees the first surgery,” and then “Blood Misbehaves: How the doctor sees the first surgery.” It was difficult to write it, but I’m honored that she chose me, because that’s what it feels like.

What’s on the horizon?

I think the next one will be revisionist history where I’ll be looking at women that in the lexicon, quite literally, were written as ruined. And very much like Anarcha, giving them the opportunity to subvert that conversation. Women like Medusa. Women like Jezebel. Women like Tituba, who was the West Indian slave woman who was the first to be tried in the Salem witch trials. Those folks are gonna have the same opportunity to speak that Anarcha has. And then I think there’s another volume coming where the first half of the book is about Josephine Baker. And the second half of the book is about Frida Kahlo because they met and had a relationship in Paris. And I really am so attracted to that idea: I really think that’s fabulous to think about. So I want to also bring those into the room.

That sounds amazing. Thank you so much for the conversation.

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

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Lauren K. Alleyne is Editor-in-Chief of The Fight & The Fiddle, Assistant Director of the Furious Flower Poetry Center, and Associate Professor of English at James Madison University. She is the author of Difficult Fruit (Peepal Tree Press, 2014) and Honeyfish (New Issues Press  April 2019 & Peepal Tree Press, July 2019).

Photo credit: Erica Cavanagh

by Lauren K. Alleyne

In descriptions of Nate Marshall’s poems, “dynamic” appears again and again. From their performance on the page, to their lyric and authentic deployments of language, to the tonal shifts — now playful, now urgent — to their embedded and indisputable musicality, these poems are studies in movement. In his poem “in the land where whitefolk jog,” for example, the literal movement of the body is wonderfully depicted

he walk down the road
dark & abandoned
skullcap & scowl
quick stride & limp.
he mug & bump
the sound of fuck you up
in his headphones.

The short lines of the poem, the small pebble of the ampersand briefly tripping up the eye, the plethora of high-energy verbs driving the sentences all collude to keep this poem moving at full speed. But an even bigger jump is the one between the world of the title and the one in which we land in the poem; the “walk down the road” of the first line seems innocuous enough, juxtaposing the pace of the title’s “jog” with the “walk” of the poem’s subject. But that quickly changes by the second line, we realized that we’ve moved into a completely different space, one where how “he” moves is jagged and unsafe with its “scowl” and “bump.”

A few lines down the physical transforms again into a lyric space, muddying where the danger lies — in the real world or in memory — as the poem’s subject both “brace(s) / for everything” and realizes that there isn’t a threat, that the “key between fingers / is for locking & also entry.” The poem switches gears again on the heels of this epiphany and “enters a decade earlier” landing on a run of his own, vastly different than the “peach thigh & sunflower / shorts” and instead is rife with “the glitter / of exploded Wild Irish Roses.” The propulsion of the poem through time, geography and experience is both seamless and disconcerting, and Marshall’s use of language cleverly facilitates this movement.

What is the impetus for this movement? Poems like “hood woods” and “out south” depict the harshness and violence of the South Side neighborhood where they’re set, and the cycles of violence that churn within it — “each street day an unanswered prayer for peace.” Marshall’s poems posit that this constant motion against that cycle offers the only possibility out of it. Enter the motions of love, of intimacy and knowing: the counter cycles that both make friction with what’s there but make a portal for what might be. “Chicago high school love letter 156,” offers one such moment:

i would fight for you
like my shoes or my
boys or any excuse
for contact

The violence of the fight is co-opted as an opportunity for intimacy, is reconfigured as a claim for the value of loving touch. Creating these moments of shift and change is a result of the kinesis of Marshall’s poetry. Finally, Marshall’s work always nods to the traditions of African Americans. His poems reverb with echoes of the middle passage, fugitive escapes, the great migration, and more contemporary moves — to college, Black-owned spaces — to the worlds beyond the spaces meant to confine.

In 2017, Nate Marshall was a visiting poet in the Furious Flower reading series. We spoke about his beginnings in poetry, what it means to be in community, Chicago, and ampersands. This is an edited version of that conversation.

Tell me about your path to poetry.

Okay, so I came to poetry very young. I came to poetry in, like, I guess middle school, around like 12 and 13. I got interested when I saw the show Def Poetry Jam, and I was like, “This is cool!” At the end of one episode Amira Baraka did an excerpt from the poem, “Why is We Americans?” and I was just blown away. I did not know that you could do such a thing, that such a thing could exist in the world, right?

And so that was sort of rolling around in my head, and then I heard the hip hop song, “The Blast,” by Talib Kweli and DJ Hi-Tek, and that was sort of rolling around in my head, and I think it just got to a certain point where I was like, “Okay. I’m just gonna write and I’mma write poems and raps and whatever.” I never really expected much of it, but I think I had some good teachers that mentored me and that insisted that I continue.

Talk to me a little bit about Louder Than a Bomb. What was that experience like, and how does it fit into that narrative of poetry?

For sure. So Louder Than a Bomb is a youth poetry festival that happens in Chicago, and now a bunch of other places. And I came into that space in 2003; I was 13. I was very young and it was one of those sort of life-changing moments for me because I think I saw young people who were just a little bit older than me who were super engaged, super passionate, super intellectually stimulated and were doing art — art was at the center of their lives. And I think I just knew at that point like, “Yo this is — I don’t really understand this space, but this is like the coolest place I’ve ever been, and I want to stay in it for like as long as I can possibly stay in it.” (Laughs.) I was sort of in from there.

How do you see the role of community in poetry?

Yeah, that’s a good question. I mean … so, for me, so much, community has been very central to my poetic practice, so I don’t know if poetry for me exists without community. And certainly there’s a kind of solitary piece or solitary notion in the creation of poetry, but I think that’s true of community, right? Is it the nature of community that you, you know, go inside yourself and you sort of get it together and then you bring what you have to your people, right? And y’all are so in it together, right? I think that they — for me, they’ve all sort of existed simultaneously.

What are some other communities of poetry you find yourself in right now, and what kinds of things do you bring to them and do they bring to you?

 Of course Dark Noise, which is a collective that I’m a part of with Danez Smith, Fatimah Asghar, Jamila Woods, Aaron Sanders and Franny Choi — and that is a really exciting community. We’re all poets but work across many genres, work across many disciplines; we’re all young folks of color; we’re all born in the same year, which is not intentional but is like a thing that just happens to be true. And I think that for me it’s one of the spaces that feeds me the most, because not only are we professional allies and artistic allies but those are also some of my best friends. We take the notion of the workshop or the notion of the collaborative and apply it not only to the artistic work but also bring it to bear on our personal lives, on everything. That, for me is very fulfilling. That’s just one of many [communities], I think.

Poetry is my medium — poetry is the way that I process and the way that I communicate.

Okay, to go to the work a little bit: You dedicated Wild Hundreds to the victims of state-supported and -sanctioned black death, which to me is another gesture toward community. Tell me about that idea of community in relationship to Wild Hundreds.

So lemme sort of go back. When I think about the book, I think of when people ask me, “Well, what is this book about?” Ultimately for me it’s a very long answer to a question that I would get. I remember when I went to college in Nashville, Tennessee, and I would, you know, have that early conversation that you have when you meet people like, “Oh, hey! I’m Nate! I’m from da da da da. I am studying da da da da da,” right? And whenever I say, “Oh, I’m from the south side of Chicago,” people were always like, “Oh, my God! Oh! How did you make it out? Da da da da da da.” And that was always deeply frustrating for me, so in some ways the book is a long answer to that question.

Like I remember my sophomore year of high school, I was taking this Black masculinity class, and during the semester the class was happening, this video went viral of this young man, Derrion Albert, getting hit in a big fight, a big sort of melee after school, down from the local high school. He got hit with a two-by-four, and he died. And that was like one of the early moments in that narrative in this new contemporary narrative of Chicago as this ultraviolent place, specifically around Black folks. And, like, Arne Duncan or Barack Obama coming back to the city and being like “We’re gonna institute initiatives …” or … no one knows because these things never happened or they did and didn’t do anything, but anyway, that happened like four blocks from where I grew up. That was my neighborhood high school. I think that kid was like in my godsister’s homeroom, right?

So I felt very close to some of these things and some of these issues. And  poetry is my medium — poetry is the way that I process and the way that I communicate, so those are the issues that I find myself as a person deeply moved by. And so the work is gonna reflect that.

In so many ways, the book is a love poem to Chicago.

Yeah, yeah.

And you talk about other people’s definitions of Chicago. Tell me how do you define Chicago.

Ooooooo, how do I define Chicago?

Yup. What’s your Chi-town, Nate?

You know Chicago is … it’s like it is. I don’t even know! All right, Chicago is an incredibly beautiful, incredibly vibrant, deeply fucked-up place, you know? It’s like Chicago … the best way to describe it is that it’s like your uncle who you love, and who’s the most fun and will give you his old comic books, and, like, when he comes through it’s lit. But he also is an angry drunk who might get into a fight with your dad later at Thanksgiving. It’s that. It is equal parts heartwarming and heartbreaking. You know, a thing that causes you tremendous harm, and also will embrace you in no other way. And you know, I think it’s a city that is at its core deeply working class, deeply not pretentious, and I think that the art and the culture reflects that in a way that even artists find and sustain community. I think that it has a long history as a union town, and I think that you see that brought to bear across the culture.

So Chicago’s spawned some really awesome poets and artists like you said. I’m currently in love with Kerry James Marshall who’s doing some amazing work; there’s Gwendolyn Brooks, Patricia Smith, Carl Sandburg —  so many. Who are some of the poets you look up to, who inform your work? Who do you think you’re in conversation with now?

First off, my friends — all those folks I named in Dark Noise, but thinking historically of who are my building blocks … Certainly, Gwendolyn Brooks. I don’t know if there’s anyone more influential for me. You know, I’m just gonna rattle off a bunch of Chicago heads: Margaret Walker, Frank Marshall Davis, Margaret Burroughs, yeah, some of those folks. I mean A. Van Jordan, who’s one of my professors at Michigan and kind of one of my early favorite writers. Martín Espada. Sandra Cisneros — yes, Stealth Chicago Cisneros. (Laughs.)

You’re also a musician, so talk to me about the relationship between your music and music-making and your poetry, or just in general, and whether are there influences from that side that you think come to bear on the poems.

For sure! I mean, so I rap, right? And do a little bit of production. And I really came into both of those things — rapping and MC-ing and poetry — kind of at the same time. And in many ways in many of the same places, right? So when I think of the earliest places where I began to find communities around hip hop and around music, they were at poetry slams; they were at open mics. And I think that this is even coming back to the notion of a place like Chicago is like it’s a big city but it’s also like so small — it’s also like the smallest place — it’s a town in the purest sense. So if you’re an artist, you kind of run across all these things, and you fall over each other. There’s a really long history and a long tradition of the poets and the writers and the musicians in Chicago specifically being in conversation. I remember being in high school and being at open mics with the little annoying kid who would become Chance the Rapper and introducing him to my friend who would become Vic Mensa who is, like, opening for Jay-Z right now, and so, I mean, the connection for me is very… you know, I can’t really untwine them, right? And certainly, I think the way that I approach sound in a poem is shaped by having so many break beats just in my head. 

Speaking of break beats, you’re one of the editors of The BreakBeat Poets with Quraysh Lansana and Kevin Coval. Tell me a little bit about that project and how it came to be, but also what are some of the joys and challenges culling that work? 

That project was a very long process. Kevin initially had the idea and he’s a friend and a colleague and also was a mentor of mine, so around 2009 or 2010, he approached me and was like, “Yeah, so I’m thinking about this book, this anthology. You should help me edit this book — you should be like an assistant editor.” And I’m like, “Okay, cool.” I was an undergrad — I was, like, super young. So we began to put together some of the early language that would make up the call, make up just some of our thinking around, and we began to put together preliminary lists of some of the folks that we might ask. And then, he invited Quraysh into the project. It took about five years from that first conversation to a book. I mean, you know, the anthology process is one of the most frustrating things that I’ve ever experienced, but I also think, after the fact, like one of the more rewarding things I’ve ever been able to do artistically — to be able to bring together that collection of poets and that collection of work. You know, to lift up some of those voices and put them in conversation with each other and kind of begin to make a kind of aesthetic argument or articulation of the poetics that’s happening in a particular generation feels important.

Speaking of aesthetic and form, this book of yours messes a lot with form.

Yeah. (Laughs.)

The hip hop verse, the 16, if you will, with the 4-bar or 8-bar hooks, is the perhaps the most strict contemporary form that we have. That’s the most interesting form that’s been produced in the last 100 years…

There’re sonnets, ghazals, sestinas — I mean, I’m sure there’re forms I don’t even recognize as forms! So, what’s your relationship to form as a vehicle for producing a poem?

So very early on, I was always trying form and I think playing with it, right?  And once I went to college I think my relationship with form sort of got refined and challenged, right? My primary mentor at Vanderbilt was Mark Jarman, who’s great, and is a new formalist. When I took his intermediate poetry workshop, we did not get along.  He didn’t like me; I didn’t like him. It was bad, right? But in that class he was like, “I’m going to take you through all of the building blocks of classical English form. You will have this: you will have the sonnet; you will have blank verse; you will have the sestina,” whatever. “And you can hold all that.” And in some ways, some of the earliest poems in the book actually come out of that class. Because I think I felt almost alienated or stifled by form, so the way that I would kinda try to respond to that or kinda try to deal with it, was to write about the most familiar things I could think of. Like, okay, I have to write a sestina, which felt very weird and felt very awkward, so I’m gonna write about my homeboys who I know better than anybody. I’m gonna just get as familiar as possible and I think from doing that, and from that practice, I really began to find a home and see a home in form. And also begin to understand that you know, again, by virtue of music, that I had been writing in form the whole time. That the hip hop verse, the 16, if you will, with the 4-bar or 8-bar hooks, is the perhaps the most strict contemporary form that we have. That’s the most interesting form that’s been produced in the last 100 years, arguably, right? So then I began to connect these things and be, “Oh! Wait! The sonnet’s like just the verse’s big cousin and I been writing those for years. I’m good.”

That brings me to a question, too, about your teaching: Tell me what you try to give to your students — given that you know — Mark’s position, what do you try to give?

I think as a teacher I try to do a few things. I try to give them a diverse array of work and put that work in its own context. So, like, I don’t know that you can learn Black poetry without understanding something about Phillis Wheately, right? Or Jupiter Hammon. And also understanding Phillis Wheatley as a very young teenage girl, who basically did a doctoral defense in front of John Hancock and all the gentleman of stature in Massachusetts to prove that she had written her poems, right? I think that it’s important to understand that, because that shapes the kind of poem that she creates; that shapes the tone of the piece, the rhetorical moves that it’s gonna employ, right? So I try to do that as a rule. I’m interested in reading lists that are diverse, and that diversity is expressed in a number of ways. So urban poets and rural poets, poets across many racial identities, across many gender expressions and sexual identities, right? So, I think that for me is important.

And then, I’ve done this in a couple of classes. I started off with by showing them poets and critics and disagreeing with each other; so showing them Rita Dove and Helen Vendler’s public spat [around the Penguin anthology], not because I think it’s good gossip — I do enjoy tea, but not solely for the tea, right? — but because I think it’s important to show them that people of immense intellect can disagree deeply. And that that is actually at the core of an academic discourse. So you can like the poems that I put in front of you, or you can hate ’em; great! But do you know why? What I want to get to the heart of is the why — is to being able to articulate what your problem is with this thing, or why you love it, or why this is a thing worth championing? Worth celebrating?

 That makes me think back to what you’re talking about with the putting together the anthology, right? Because there’s something so authoritative about text that, you know, I think our students get books and are like, this is the book. And so, to see that people fought about what was to be in that book, you know, is definitely useful.

And I think that’s maybe ’cause I’m a child of hip hop, and I grew up actually rap battling. (Laughs.) But it’s like that mold makes sense to me, right? I remember in undergrad me and Mark had an independent study and basically it was the beginnings of The BreakBeat Poets. But it was an independent study about hip hop and literature, and I would bring in a bunch of poems for Mark to read — some stuff that I written and the poets I felt like I was in conversation with or inspired by. And then we’d go to his office once a week and basically argue for two hours and he would pull something out of the conversation and be like, “That’s interesting. Next week bring me back 1200 words about that, or bring me back 1500 words.” So, I’m there and I’m blustering, young and arrogant as hell. (Laughs.) And I’m like, “Oh, man, you know, Black people don’t trust books.” And he’s like, “Oh, word? Cool, tell me more — go write a paper on why.” Which I think was such a good way for me to learn for two reasons: number one because he legitimately needed that answer, right? It was a place where we could really bridge understanding. But also, it helped me to distill some of the things that I know intuitively or that I’ve learned through osmosis or the cultivating of my communities, but had never explained or interrogated. 

What are you working on right now?

I’m always doing a million things. I have been editing a number of books: I edited Eve Ewing’s first book of poems, Electric Arches, and also Kevin’s book, A People’s History of Chicago, and I’m editing a couple other folks’ texts. Me and Eve cowrote a play about the life of Gwendolyn Brooks that’s getting produced, and then and I’m working on the next book of poems which is titled, tentatively, Finna. That book is, yeah, I don’t know, it’s interesting; we’ll see what happens to it; we’ll see what it’s becoming. [Note: Finna will be published by Random House/One World in 2020]

So, I’m gonna back up to the play situation. How is it writing across genres, in the dramatic genre?

It was a good bridge, because it’s a play about a poet, about poetry, so there are ways in which it feels very poetic. It’s also a really interesting version of a play, because the theater we’re working with does shadow puppetry. So in the play there’s live performance elements and shadow puppetry elements, and there’s also a live band performing, who are building music specifically for the play, so I mean there’s a ton of genres at the table.  But I enjoy it because I think one of the things in poetry that really moves me is the notion of voice and the notion of who is talking and what they’re trying to communicate, so getting to build that has been really rewarding. And it was kind of cool to do a play that had this sort of historical nature to it, because I kind of got to scratch my undergrad archival itch: We went down to the university of Illinois and looked through Miss. Brooks’ papers, and so the last act of the play almost happens in letters — letters between Miss Brooks and people in the community, or Miss Brooks and young people, or Miss Brooks and like Etheridge Knight or Sandra Cisneros or the school principal of the school she had a continuing relationship with in the projects in Chicago. So, yeah, it was just a really, really fun project to work on.

I just came across a letter from Brooks to Hughes in the archives at UVA a couple weeks ago, and she was just like, He-ey! 

Ooooo! Nice. Yeah, the thing that’s great about her is she’s so funny, that in her personal papers you see her making all these notes to herself, there’s just all this ephemera, and at the point at which she’s very aware that she’s gonna be archived, so like there’s a letter from the [19]80s and there’s like a little note that she writes in the margin and that: “I wanna get tattooed,” where someone — I think a PhD student in India or something — is writing to ask her if they could interview her, or something like that, some sort of request and they’re writing their dissertation about her and Hughes, and the person refers to them as “negro poets,” and this is like the 80s so she has none of that. She’s like, “The name for me and my people is BLACKS,” and Blacks is in all caps. And I was like, “Yo!” Miss Brooks was like, truly the GOAT, truly not having that! There’s so much, man … she has so many fantastic … I don’t know. I’m really interested in how she engages with the notion of her own legacy.

So Brooks is a literary but also cultural icon in a lot of ways: for example, that role you talk about, of her writing letters to people in the community as well as other poets. How do you define the role of the poet in a social space? What’s our job description?

Wow. Man. What is our job? I mean, I’m hesitant to give any large prescriptions for poets, ’cause I think some poets are excellent teachers and excellent mentors, and part of their job as a poet is to usher a next generation, sometimes of poets but also of young people in general. That’s one thing I think that you see with Miss Brooks: She was so interested in the outcomes of young people in a way that feels so genuine, right? And people really respond to that. Being in Chicago, you know, you just run into people and you bring up her name and they’re like, “Oh! I won a Gwendolyn Brooks poetry contest at my school and she like came and gave me $50 dollars” or whatever. There’s countless examples of that kind of generosity, not just financially but just of spirit.  So I think that can be part of it, right?

But I guess like at the core when I think about writing, I think the poet’s job — if anything, if a job exists — is to like bring some emotional intelligence to bear on the world, on the happenings of the world, whether those happenings are the grass growing and the trees flowering, Tamir Rice being shot by a police officer. I think that, like, ultimately to me the poet’s project is one of humanizement.  Or at least that’s I think part of my project.

So I feel like one of the things that Wild Hundreds really manages to do for me as a reader is to witness violence and give testimony of it, but it also manages not to aestheticize or make it beautiful, or to glorify it in any way. I think that’s a really fine line for anybody writing about violence — particularly in terms of racialized black death — to not make it simply a poetic device or a poetic spectacle, but to somehow honor it. Can you talk to me about how you negotiate that as you’re writing these poems?

I think about violence a lot, because I think that like when I think about my own relationship to violence. It’s a developing relationship, and I think it’s a kind of relativism. I think that the reality is that the world is brutal, and the condition of the world is such that every day that you live, your living is enabled by things dying, right? So that means you are a kind of violence — your existence is a kind of violence. So, certainly, that means that violence produces things and sometimes things that are beautiful and necessary or whatever, brutal as it might be. But I think it is essential that we always remember that that shit is violence, right? So that as we’re interrogating the uses and the drawbacks and whatever, that we don’t ever forget that this has a cost.

So, you know, in the book there’s a poem about me and my homies basically getting drunk and getting into a fight.  Like me getting drunk one night and being like, “I’mma fight all y’all,” and then that happening, and that’s a poem, right? But the thing about that poem is that yes, it’s violent, and it’s also deeply sensual; there’s something, dare I say, erotic about it. And certainly loving, ’cause these are, you know, my homies. And the fight is a kind of play, but also it’s not, and I think that that is always a thing that we’re negotiating.

For me, it is important in all times neither to ennoble the violence in a way that lets it off the hook, or make it so gruesome that we feel like it’s a thing that does not exist, cause that’s the thing that produces poor American history — these notions of heroicism all come from that.

Another project in the book is language; in particular, Black and
perhaps even a Chicago dialect — a way of speaking, a syntactical behavior that is in itself conscious about it. Tell me a little bit more about that, like what was the underlying poetics of some of those decisions? 

I think that it was that in many ways, poetry to me is most exciting when it really does sound like how people might sound, because I think that our everyday is poetic. I think there are things that my mother says to me on a phone call where I’m like, “Yo, I’m taking that, Mom. Appreciate it.” (Laughs.) “Thanks for the line!” Or, you know, talking shit at the basketball court with folks, I think that produces poetry a tremendous amount.

And so some of what I was attempting to do, and I attempt to do in all my work, is to display that across the book, across the text. ’Cause I think often there are these notions that the way that Black folks — or not even necessarily Black folks, but also any kind of marginalized community — that that the way that those folks speak and behave and believe and practice is unstudied, unskilled, degenerate, whatever. And for me I’m like, “No no no no.”  (This is kind of going into the next project, but…) “No no no.” These things have a deep set of rules and a deep kind of code around ’em. You just might not know it. 

So back on the next project, I was reading an interview with Kaveh Akbar, and you talk about “the difficult work of improvement.” I’m always interested in the poetic process of going from one book to the next book, or even from the one poem to the next poem. What’s “the difficult work of improvement” that you find yourself embarking on now or in general?

A few things. Number one, I’m tryna study and understand linguistics more. It’s a very … I don’t want to say, like, lazy study, but it’s certainly not academic. I would also say that I’m trying to, make sure that the work stretches in different ways, that I make moves that, how can I say … I want it to be clear that this is a book that I could not have written, like, at the time I was writing this [Wild Hundreds], for whatever that’s worth. I’m also tryna understand meter more, ’cause as much as I’ve been engaged with form, I’ve always had an estranged relationship with meter and am tryna challenge myself on that and just reexamine how I think about sound. And I also think trying to be mindful that all the poems have this, that they present in different ways, they’re not all first-person singular pronouncements that all have a similar move to them and have a similar shape to them.

So a lot of it is craft, and craft-wise, you’re saying you want to make sure the poems don’t present in the same way, but in Wild Hundreds, repetition is one of the hallmark forms, or formal presentations that the book makes: the theme, the title, the collection itself circles back. What were you trying to do with repetition in this book?

The first role of repetition in anything, I think, is emphasis, so it’s a bit of that. It’s a bit of a challenge to myself to say, “Okay, I’mma write as many poems as I can about Harold’s Chicken Shack.  How can I make all those different, or how can I use each one to dig a little deeper to get a slightly different angle to the thing?” I think that’s part of it. Also you know I’m in love with hip hop and I’m in love with the notion of the hook or the notion of the ad lib — the notion of voices returning, so that the fact that Rick Ross or Jadakiss or Jay-Z, you know, all of these different rappers like have, not even lines that they’ll come back to, but like guttural impulses, and you’re like, “Oh, yeah.” Like, “Turn this song up right now, ’cause 2 Chainz is about to come on, ’cause I heard, you know, cause I heard that.” And so, I think about how to do that in a book.

Why the ampersand? I’m always curious about that choice.

Oooooo … I like the ampersand. Okay, so we’ve talked a lot and I’ve sort of mentioned hip hop a lot as a thing that that shapes my artistic thinking, shapes my political thinking, and I think it, yeah it kind of shapes my aesthetic. I like that it makes the line shorter and more compact. And it quickens a kind of line — even seeing many ampersands in a row makes a beat; it kinda creates a kinda percussion. Also, I am a terrible visual artist and am always interested in what, in the spaces where I can produce something that has a visual component, despite not being very good at the actual technical doings of those things, so I like the ampersand for its aesthetic quality.

So, let’s circle all the way back. You started poetry at this super young age, are there things that you would go back and tell young Nate?

Oh, you know that’s hard. “Read more.” I think that would be the thing that I want to say. But realistically, I don’t know if I’d even say that ’cause I really value the way that things have turned out. I’m a very deeply flawed person who makes mistakes constantly, but I do value many of the lessons that I’ve learned along the way through great generosities of other folks and those mistakes and, you know, the times that I was smart enough to listen or shut up, whatever. I don’t know if I would tell myself anything, I think I would just let it ride.

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

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Lauren K. Alleyne is Editor-in-Chief of The Fight & The Fiddle, Assistant Director of the Furious Flower Poetry Center, and Associate Professor of English at James Madison University. She is the author of Difficult Fruit (Peepal Tree Press, 2014) and Honeyfish (New Issues Press  April 2019 & Peepal Tree Press, July 2019).

Photo credit: Erica Cavanagh

by Lauren K. Alleyne

Black folks — their history, their dreams and struggles — are the central concern of Tyehimba Jess’s poetry. Built with a solid spine of research and lyric muscle, and always speaking with authentic voice, his poems reconstruct the forgotten or mistold stories of Black Americans with an eye to making visible the hardships they endure(d) in white supremacist American society, as well as their full engagement in their humanity in spite of it.

Jess’s first book, Leadbelly, journeys through the blues musician’s life, giving insight into what it meant and what it cost to be an imperfect Black man of talent in an unforgiving culture. The poems do not flinch from the harshness of Leadbelly’s experience nor his rough and sometimes violent character; however, the poems also insist on giving him dimension and, most important, portraying him as a whole and worthy human being. The poem, “martha promise receives leadbelly, 1935,” for example, offers a moment of love and ritual between Leadbelly and his wife Martha Promise upon his return from jail:

you got to have the wildweed and treebark boiled
and calmed, waiting for his skin like a shining baptism
back into what he was before gun barrels and bars
chewed their claim in his hide and spit him
stumbling backwards into screaming sunlight.

The language of the stanza itself, with its assonance and alliteration, its imagery and internal rhyme, creates a soft and soothing atmosphere, which enacts the balming with which Martha prepares to receive Leadbelly. Moreover, as she preps the elixir that will bring him back to “what he was before,” she also refuses to have him defined by his worst moments and actions. In (re)claiming him from “gun barrels and bars” she anoints him as someone worth fighting for, someone deserving of love and of the work it takes to bring him back to the person she knows is below the roughened exterior.

It is, perhaps, this sense of being known that best encapsulates what Tyehimba Jess accomplishes in a poem and in a collection: the subject is always held close, examined with care and compassion. It is always clear that the poet has left no stone unturned in either the archives or the imagination, and Jess’s second collection, Olio, even more than his first exemplifies this. Rich with footnotes, end notes, and documentary poems, Olio is a testament to the value of research. The persona poems that make up the collection come from an array of voices of several Black entertainers in the early 1900s, and for each, Jess creates a narrative that compels the reader to learn the character in a variety of ways. Including materially. Olio leaps off the page, putting the poem into the reader’s hands via tear-off sheets, literally adding another dimension to both the poem and its subject.

On the page, too, a multitude of rich dichotomies mark the poetry of Tyehimba Jess. His poems hold within their lines both the past and the future, recorded history and imagination, the public and the intimate. Though the poems in his two books take public figures as their subject, Jess brings the reader up close as well, and insists that we hold both the interior and exterior worlds in our minds. Here is a prose poem in the voice of the first Black opera singer in Carnegie Hall, Sissieretta Jones:

I sing this body ad libitum, Europe scraped raw between my teeth until, presto, “Ave Maria” floats to the surface from a Tituba tributary of “Swanee.” Until I’m a legato darkling whole note, my voice shimmering up from the Atlantic’s hold; until I’m a coda of sail song whipped in salted wind; until my chorus swells like a lynched tongue; until the nocturnes boiling beneath the roof of my mouth extinguish each burning cross.

In true Jess style, the poem relinquishes neither the ugliness of history, nor the miracle of Jones’ talent. We are large enough, these poems argue, and we are duty bound to hold them both.

I spoke to Tyehimba at the James Madison University studio, where he was on campus as a presenter at the 2018 Furious Flower Collegiate Summit. The following is a lightly edited transcript of the conversation.

You just read your poem “An Interview with a Blind Boone,” (see audio on the homepage) and it feels almost like a statement on poetics. Is that a fair description?

Well, you know, the book Olio, which that [poem] comes from, is about an exploration of the lives of 19th century, early 20th century African American folks who were trying to make a living through the creative arts against the groove and with the backdrop of the minstrel show. And I also think that it’s relevant today because none of us wants to be claimed by the minstrelsy that surrounds us and the minstrelsy that so many forces try to conscript us into.

In many ways, your poems all center on performance — Leadbelly and, certainly, Olio. What’s that fascination with the performer?

That’s a good point. You know, I think that what it has to do with is finding a true path to oneself through one’s art, and that’s definitely what Leadbelly was doing. He was struggling with inner demons and trying to wrestle with those demons to try and excavate his art from underneath all of the turmoil of emotions that he felt. And with the folks in Olio, I think that they were — and Leadbelly was also dealing with the backdrop of the minstrel show — but these folks were also dealing with performance, with legitimacy and authority and dignity and trying to salvage that dignity in a morass of racial division and animosity that surrounded the performances.

You are drawn very clearly to the persona and to inhabiting those different voices — this is a double question — why persona? And how do you distinguish your own poetic voice or how do you think about your own poetic voice as it manifests or works in concert with persona?

Yeah, that’s a good question. I guess I chose persona because I just got really fascinated with these historical figures. I’ll tell you a story: When I was writing Leadbelly and went to my MFA, one of the instructors there said, “You know, you should just change it all to third person.” And this is someone I respect very much. Actually, it was Philip Levine. And I really-really-really-really-really had to think about it really hard and determine whether or not I thought that was the right way to go. He had a point, in that it makes an assumption to claim the “I,” you know? It claims that you have the kind of knowledge to their psyche that you wouldn’t ordinarily.

It’s audacious.

Yeah, you know it takes a little nerve to do that. I considered making [the poems] third person but lost so much energy in that translation between third and first person — that kind of immediacy was lost. I just couldn’t do it. So I stayed with first person. And I think it also puts me, puts the author, in a position of trying to really empathize with the character; there’s a challenge to see all their greatness as well as their flaws, and to portray all of them as equally or as artistically as one possibly can.

I love the idea of empathy as a requirement of the persona. Were there characters that you found hard to empathize with? Where was that empathic inclination or demand of the form challenging for you?

Yeah, that does happen, and I think that challenge remains. For instance, there’s Ernest Hogan, who’s really the developer of the coon song, and really I use his own words when I approach him in this text because I want to get his real thoughts exactly: you know, what he thought about developing or being responsible for the coon song genre, right? There’s other times, you know, with John Lomax, where as much as I have critique for the way John Lomax dealt with the way that he tried to use Leadbelly’s talent … . Long story short, John Lomax and Leadbelly met while Leadbelly was in prison, and after Leadbelly got out of prison he went to work with Lomax to kind of get to help him coax songs out of Black folks on plantations and in penitentiaries. Then they went to New York, and Lomax tried to keep Leadbelly as a kind of an artifact of sound rather than an artist who is continually growing in their own sound, and Leadbelly resented that. There was some racial resentment in that, as well, but I think (to get back to your question) he [Lomax] was not a sympathetic character, and so how do I empathize with that? And I did my best to do that while also maintaining an eye toward the fact that, quite honestly, I wouldn’t know who Leadbelly was if John Lomax hadn’t come around, but at the same time recognizing the kind of stresses and the kind of problems that relationship had.

You’re not doing a single persona — you really sort of inhabit a universe! Was it hard to shift in between those voices, especially in Olio? Leadbelly was more contained, but Olio is so expansive in scope. What was it like to go into the consciousness and minds and circumstances and to do that emotional interior work around so many characters?

I tended to stay on one character at a time, ’cause it would be very hard to move back and forth so often. So I would tend to write one character, finish a series, and then set it down and walk away and then come back and do revisions as I was doing other characters. I think now [that] one of the ways I’ve managed was through the use of form and each character kind of inhabiting a particular form and letting that be part of the definition of the voice. And also, I just tried to do as much research as I could about the folks before, you know, I went in to write about them and imagine sitting around the table with them.

Shots with Leadbelly?

Right! (Laughs)

I know there was good whiskey; I read the interviews.

There was some whiskey involved. (Laughs.) Why shouldn’t there be?

Indeed, why shouldn’t there be?

But talking to him and saying, Look, I hear your story. I know it as best as I can. I’m trying to do it justice. I hope we can have a nice conversation and walk away with something that we can both know, we can both treasure. And sometimes it worked, but there were a lot of people that couldn’t, like, really get in the book — [I] couldn’t quite figure it out how to do it. The people you see in the book are the people I worked for. That survived.

You mentioned form, and there’s no way we can have this interview without talking about your relationship to form and your conceptualization of form. I always teach Leadbelly, or rather, poems from Leadbelly, as the pinnacle of line break.

Thank you.

Well you use all the tensions of the line, right? White space and text, sense and sentence, sound and silence. You take all of those things and put them on crack in Olio, but they’re also clear in Leadbelly. So talk to me a little bit about that precision of form that you clearly work within.

Well, one of my first teachers was Sterling Plumb, and Sterling Plumb writes about music; he writes about living musicians. He’s really kind of created in his books a community biography of the blues and jazz musicians of Chicago. But when you look at his line breaks, he’s able to achieve so much in just the way he pays attention to the way the line breaks — the ability to start over, for the reader to change direction after every line break. And I learned a lot from reading a lot of Sterling and coming away from that with the idea that the line should be a poem and should come as close to being a poem as it can be. And then the stanza should come as close to being a poem, and then the poem is a poem, then the section is a poem, then the sections make the book, which is a poem, you know? And I try my best to follow that.

… the line should be a poem and should come as close to being a poem as it can be …

The line is a poem. That is as good a mantra as any: the line is a poem. So thinking about, again, forms: You have the ghazal in here; you have the sonnets. Do you have a favorite form?

(Laughs.) Well, the form I favor the most is the sonnet.

Why?

Well you know I really only write crowns of sonnets … (Laughs.)

And I only ever run marathons. Not. (Laughs.)

But you know in the crown of sonnets you can tell a great story. Seven, or fourteen to fifteen, you know, you have a lot of space to tell a good story. The other thing about the sonnet is, you know, if you can’t get it done in fourteen lines, then you really need to check again — you know what I’m saying? Sonnets is where I’ve been leaning towards right now. There’s a lot of room to move around in them; there’s just enough room to get what you need done, but there’s also enough to make you not ramble. (Laughs.)

You mentioned readers earlier, and particularly with Olio, but, again, in general, one of the things about how you maneuver form is that readers have a lot of agency, a lot of control, over their experience in reading the poem. Why is that so important to you?

In some ways, it happened by accident, in that I was experimenting with contrapuntal form and it occurred to me during the Blind Tom poem where he’s one body, two graves; it was the first poem that I wrote that looked like that. In the middle of writing that, I realized that it could read up as well as down, and thus you could get a down-up and also horizontal reading through it, and go in multiple directions if I just altered a few things in it. So I did that, and then that made me think about elasticity, you know? You have that elasticity to go in multiple directions, then that opens up a whole, whole cornucopia of possibilities where you can join poems together, and they can read up and down, and they could do all kinds of other things, and that’s what started to intrigue me.

Also, I think it adds another metaphor. In the case of “Blind Tom: One Body, Two Graves,” there’s the metaphor of resurrection, and the case of the McCoy twins. You have the concrete structure of the poems that stands out as metaphor for the bodies of Christine and Millie McCoy. It also engages the reader in a kind of play. And it is a bit of a contrast to think of these very serious historical subjects and think of the wordplay involved in that, but I think that when the reader is able to select the way that they go through the poem — going down, up, whichever — they get engrossed in the different way but at the same time, they’re learning this person’s story, in a way that will stick with them, and that they might not have under other circumstances.

I feel like some of the poems in Leadbelly perform in that way a little bit, but not on purpose?

In Leadbelly there’s a few contrapuntal poems, which is where the contrapuntal journey really starts in Leadbelly, but they’re not in form. They read left to right and down, and they read down once, one side of the caesura then down the other side of the caesura and then across the caesura, and that is a different agency, in that you do get to choose. Well, first I’m gonna read this one, then I’m gonna read that one, and then I’m gonna read them together. I guess there is some degree of agency in that.

What would you point out as one of your significant encounters with a poem or a poet that transformed you? Is there a moment you can point to?

Phew. Wow. There’s a few of those! I saw Yusef Komunyakaa’s poem “Facing It” on a Chicago city bus, and I remember reading it and thinking, I kinda get it, but not exactly. I think this was the year he won the Pulitzer, and so when he won I remember going to see him, I think it was at Columbia College, just off of State Street or maybe it was Wabash. I can’t remember. And I went there with a lot of question marks, ’cause I got the book Neon Vernacular by that time, and I had read it, and I was like, Uh, okay, you know, but then when I heard him read it, it completely transformed my understanding of the book, and it just deepened in such an incredible kind of way, and that was a transformative moment for me. Definitely.

I feel as though my students had a similar experience when they heard you read, and I’m always interested in the relationship between the poem on the page and the poem in the body, or the poem conveyed on the vehicle of the voice. Certainly, especially with this text but also with Leadbelly, the way you embody those poems, it’s a completely different experience than reading them. How do you try to get the reader into that possibility? How do you negotiate that difference between the page life and the embodied life of the poem?

Ideally, I’d like the reader to walk away from the poem having read it in the same way that I would read it, and having them read it in their mind the same way I envision seeing it. And I have no control over that, so all I can do is work with white space, line breaks, and the functions of punctuation the best way I can to inform the reader and give them clues as to how this poem is to be heard. But I also think that you know I was very fortunate. I was on two slam teams — Green Mill Chicago: mmhm yup, what’s up?!— and I learned a lot about the power of using the voice to join the poem to, to take the poem from the page and make it really live in the audience, you know? Patricia Smith, who is my colleague at College of Staten island, and was also you know [part of that scene], hearing her read her work and then seeing how vivid it was also on the page was the argument that made me say, Okay, it really is possible to work in both directions. I’d say the same for Yusef and I could say same for a few other folks, but the idea is that the poem is not just on the page; it’s in you, and when you bring it to other people, you’re publishing it in their ears, and to treat it as such.

… the poem is not just on the page; it’s in you, and when you bring it to other people, you’re publishing it in their ears …

So with Olio, it’s not just that idea of the poem being outside the poet, but outside the page. There’s a way in which this book is really concerned with materiality — in addition to vision, the inner ear, and in a live reading, the voice, it also brings the hands into play. It’s really engaged in tactile encounters, and so tell me about that with this particular project, and do you think it’s something that’s going to stay?

Well, to put it briefly, there four fold-out pages. And each of those fold-out pages contains a poem that can be torn out of the book. And I’m just going to demonstrate here. (Tears a page from Olio.) What I want people to do for the book is to disassemble, to deconstruct various parts of the book in order to reconstruct the narratives inside the book. And so it becomes a very tactile experience for the reader because they get to take these poems out, and they’re written in such a way that, two of them — well, actually, three of them — are constructed so that they go from a two-dimensional plane into a three-dimensional plane, such as a cylinder. It goes this way (makes a long-edge cylinder of the torn out page), a cylinder going the other way (makes a short-edge cylinder of the torn page), and then finally a torus — which looks as such when you fold it down the middle and then bring the two ends together — that can be read around and around on the inside going both ways, around and around on the outside going both ways, and then from the inside to the outside going multiple directions.

I feel like my brain just exploded.

(Laughs.) And then finally it becomes a mobius strip when you take one side and you give it a half twist — I’m not doing the best job right here with this — you combine them as such and that becomes a mobius strip. And that’s representative of the kind of conundrums. In this case, this is a poem between Paul Lawrence Dunbar and Booker T. Washington, where they’re talking about lying, they’re talking about masks, you know? And using masks in order to achieve various ends.

What do you feel or hope that engaging this poem with my hands will tell me more about what the poem is trying to say?

Well, a couple things. One, books are still valuable technology, you know? We don’t think of them as technology, but that’s what they are.

Absolutely.

They’re a tool; they’re an instrument that delivers a voice from one person to another, and we have a long intimate relationship with the book that will not be supplanted by purely electronic means, you know? That’s one. Two is really the idea that you are deconstructing the history, deconstructing the text, in order to reexamine and reconstruct actual histories the way they’ve been experienced and interpreted by the livers of that history, which is what we have to do all the time. As Black folks we always have to take the history that we’ve been given that has been presented to us and say, “Wait a minute, what’s the real curve in there,” right? And deconstruct that and then re-understand that narrative in such a way that gives us agency, you know? And that lets us fully understand the capabilities of our agency and so that is what, that’s what this deconstruction and manipulation is all about.

Also, you know, it is about play. It’s about having fun, you know, rediscovering the text and rediscovering ways in which the text can go — having the ability to go up and down and diagonal, etc., you know? I think that there is that element of fun, which is reminiscent of the idea of actually attending an olio. ’Cause the olio was the middle part of the minstrel show in which there was a variety of acts — juggler, dancer, a singer, you know, a contortionist, right? And so that becomes reminiscent of the idea of actually attending the olio, but in this case its attending an olio filled with folks that were struggling against the idea of the debasement of themselves through the minstrel show and trying to achieve a kind of higher purpose through their art.

Is that what poetry is for you?

Definitely. Now, poetry, you know … When I went to college I was gonna be a social worker, and I think I was I was gonna get a degree in public policy. I’d been kind of convinced that literature was not gonna be the way, and I also thought that it was gonna serve my community more, but, you know, that [social work] takes a certain level of patience I just don’t have, to be 100%. I wish I did, but it takes that special kind of person and a special kind of skill set to really do that work well and effectively. And I found that it was not making me happy; I was not serving the jobs that I had. So after a few attempts I turned back to poetry, and what I found was that, you know, I took a step towards writing, it took two steps towards me. And essentially, that helped me make up my mind. I felt like, well, if this is what I’m here to do, then that’s what I’m here to do.

I love that the man who figures out how to write a poem so that it can move in five different directions thinks he doesn’t have patience, because I know you didn’t do that in one try. (Laughs.)

No, that’s obsession. (Laughs). That’s just straight, complete, obsession.

So, you did your MFA at NYU. What was the experience of the MFA like? What was the positive? The negative? Do you tell your students to get an MFA?

Okay, a couple things on that. Number one, before I went to my MFA I went to Cave Canem. And I did not realize how much I needed Cave Canem until I was actually there, and I discovered a whole ocean of voices that were speaking back to me and telling me new ways to encounter being about the craft, new ways to encounter, really, just some bare-bone things about making a living, straight up, you know, being a poet, and about navigating academia. I would not have been able to do NYU if I had not done Cave Canem, ’cause Cave Canem introduced me to the workshop method and the correct attitude towards the workshop situation, and it got me ready for that experience. And so, then I went to NYU.

But I’d also come out of slam, too. So, when I went to NYU, it was definitely a great move ’cause I finished writing Leadbelly at NYU, but one thing that I did know that at the same time was I would go to Bar Thirteen, where Lynne Procope and Roger Bonair-Agard were putting on this weekly slam, and it was fire. Very few of my compadres in the MFA would wanna go, and that just baffled me because what they were missing out on was one of the most vital contributions to American literature, I think. I’m lucky I come from two things that were vital contributions to American literature: the slam and Cave Canem. Slam: Mark Smith, Chicago Green Mill. You know, look at all the slam poets that are coming out of slam, entering MFAs, maintaining their voice, and then forging fantastic work after that that’s changing the canon. The same with Cave Canem, you know, people coming in Cave Canem like me, and then gettin’ schooled and then going into these MFAs and, you know, doing their thing. And what I saw was people, the majority of people, at that time were not interested in it, they looked down on it, and I thought that was very unfortunate. It’s their loss, really.

I’m lucky I come from two things that were vital contributions to American literature: the slam and Cave Canem.

I say all that to say that there really does not have to be a difference between the two, you know? They’re the same thing. What moves people, moves people, that’s the bottom line. Whichever way you get there, that job has got to be done. By the time someone finishes reading the poem they have to be in a different place than where they were before. And this world got along fine without MFA programs for a long time, you know? And to your query about encouraging my students to go for MFAs, I encourage them more to write and to read and to write and to read. I didn’t go for my MFA ’til I was like 36, but I think if I’d gone earlier, it would not have served me quite as well.

So I want to think about you as a teacher for a while.

Uh oh. (Laughs.)

What are some things you try to give to your students in the class? Say you have somebody come saying either, “I don’t know anything about poetry” or “I want to be a poet when I grow up.” What do you try to give that student?

I think one job is to demystify a lot of poetry. People encounter poetry in elementary school, and somebody’s telling them something has to be iambic and blah blah blah. And you know I don’t fully dismiss the ideas of meter, etc. But I don’t emphasize it. I want to introduce people to contemporary poets that are doing what they do right now, so they can relate to it and then lead them back into the history of, well, who influenced them, ok, then who influenced that person, then who influenced that person, then you start to get into a historical understanding of poetry, of the literature, and really to have fun. My rule is if I’m having fun then you’re probably having fun. So you know, to have fun, crack a few jokes, share a few poems, and to have them enjoy the act of writing poems without fear of Oh, this an A poem, this is an F poem etc.

Is there a particular poem that you find is particularly handy for teaching?

Gwendolyn Brooks’s “The Mother” ’cause, I mean, it becomes a contradiction in the very first line, and then she has a subtle use of rhyme throughout the entire poem. It can’t decide whether it’s an anti- or pro- poem, and it causes a certain level of debate, you know? Who else …? Yusef, you know, Dien Cai Dau. I could think of a number of poems from Dien Cai Dau that that are just stunning because of imagery, imagery, imagery. Those are the two I can think of off the top of my head.

What’s an unlikely inspiration for you — as in, we wouldn’t guess it, but you find it inspiring?

Okay, let me think about that: an unlikely inspiration, something that has inspired me that you wouldn’t really think would inspire me, right? Huh. Science fiction. I love science fiction.

This book is from the future so I believe that, I believe that. (Laughs.)

I’m a big science fiction fan. Star Trek, you know, Star Wars — not as much as Star Trek — I love science fiction. I just devoured science fiction when I was a kid.

What are you working on next?

We’ll see. I will say this. There’s a lot of things that happened post-World War I that people really have not talked about very much. So you have to think about that period as the time when this country was really recovering from a Civil War and trying to figure out who it really was. It wasn’t a major world power yet, but you have the beginning of, you know, colonization in all other parts of the world. Industrial Revolution. Urban migration. All kinds of stuff happened back then, and Black folks were doing incredible stuff back then, too, so that time, that period of history still intrigues me quite a bit.

Our readers are varied: they’re students, they’re educators, they’re other poets. What are three things you want to tell them about that you’ve learned from your journey that you would pass on.

Okay. One is you have to write for you. I’m not saying ignore what everybody else says about what you write, but what I’m saying is in the end it’s your work, it’s your poem. You can’t write something to please everybody else. That’s one thing. Two, you have to be willing to take a chance and do something that’s not necessarily popular, you know? Writing about 19th century African American performers is not necessarily the most popular choice, right? And three is learn your history. Learn the history of your country of origin; learn the history of the country that you’re living in. Listen to the music —  listen to the old music, and listen to the old, old music. Because the music and the literature, and the Black experience are absolutely combined. You really can’t separate them in our literary tradition. And when you follow the music, you’re following the literature, and you have all kinds of opportunities, not to mention the fact that there’s so many similarities between music and poetry. But you have so many opportunities. Explore that.

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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, Assistant Director of the Furious Flower Poetry Center, and Associate Professor of English at James Madison University. She is the author of Difficult Fruit (Peepal Tree Press, 2014) and Honeyfish (New Issues Press  April 2019 & Peepal Tree Press, July 2019) 

by Lauren K. Alleyne

“We must bear witness to atrocity,” writes Marilyn Nelson in her crown of sonnets dedicated to Emmett Till, “A Wreath for Emmett Till.” She continues, “We are whole. We can speak what we see.” And Nelson’s work — clear eyed, accessibly and piercingly languaged, and unflinching in its confrontation of history’s horrors — absolutely abides by this mandate. The penultimate sonnet of the series offers these lines:

Like wildflowers growing beside the path
A boy was dragged along, blood spattering
Their white petals as he, abandoning
All hope, gasped his agonizing last breath.

Here, the poem is both gentle and firm in guiding and holding the reader’s gaze to the terrible action. The wildflowers and their white petals offer their fleeting solace of beauty while also standing in for the whiteness that stands idly by while black bodies are tortured. Till is a boy in this quatrain, the flowers and petals surrounding him symbols of innocence and fragility. In Nelson’s rendering, his humanness proves undeniable as he bleeds, breathes, and hopes, even as his blood, breath and heart are being taken from him.

While Nelson advocates for seeing, her path to action is also marked by deep and open listening. This is demonstrated most clearly in her several persona poems and dramatic monologues in which she gracefully channels the voices of her subjects, understanding that her own voice must move out of the way to fully realize theirs. In Fortune’s Bones, her collection about the remains of an enslaved man, which were non-consensually appropriated to science by his master, a bonesetter, Nelson writes poems from several points of view, including Fortune himself, his wife, and the man to whom Fortune “belonged.” Speaking from the perspective of the white slaveowner/bonesetter, Nelson writes in “On Abrigador Hill,”

… the first cut takes my breath away;
It feels like cutting the whole world —
It falls open like bridal gossamer.

While this is undoubtedly a challenging persona to inhabit, Nelson captures with acuity and without judgement the slaveowner’s fascination with his project. Prior to these lines, he acknowledges Fortune as human, but barely, describing the corpse before him as “the former body of my former slave, / which served him who served me …,” which certainly, if convolutedly, lays claim to the enslaved body in life and in death. The sonic anaphora of “It feels” and “It falls” that comes later clues us in to how completely enthralled this man is with the possibilities of “the whole world” he is cutting into, and the tragic fact that in his eyes, Fortune is no more than an object, albeit a fascinating one.

Nelson’s work is an invitation to be actively engaged with the world and all of its stories: to listen, to witness, and to speak.

As judge of the 2018 Furious Flower Poetry Prize, Nelson read at JMU with her selections, winner Heather Treseler and honorable mention Keith Wilson. We spoke in the studio, and what follows is a lightly edited transcript of parts of that conversation.

The poem has the ability to invite you into an experience. The poem reduces the experience to a few words and intensifies it, kind of like simmering a broth until the taste is stronger.

What makes the poem in particular — as a genre, as a form — such a useful or good vehicle for history? Why the poem as opposed to another form?

I’m not sure the poem is more useful as a vehicle than prose, but the poem has the ability to invite you into an experience. The poem reduces the experience to a few words and intensifies it, kind of like simmering a broth until the taste is stronger. And the poem kind of does that, boils experience down to its essence.

So, thinking about the idea of persona, you walk in so many different shoes across the span of your career as a poet. Has adopting all these different masks revealed anything to you about yourself or your own voice as a writer?

Well, I’m not so much interested in writing about myself, so my voice as a writer, I think, is the voice of someone who has the ability or the interest at least in writing, inhabiting different voices. It’s kind of like being an actor, and an actor is someone who can inhabit other characters, and an actor can change their face, can change their voice, can change the way they move, and that’s what acting is about. And in many ways I think of what I’m doing as a kind of verbal acting.

So the idea of persona really is something that is put on and taken off without any sort of bleed through?

I hope. (Laughs.) Although I’ve never written about anybody really evil, I remember reading once an interview with James Earl Jones in which he said that one of the things he would like to do is to play a really evil character. Eh. I don’t think I want to do that.

What was the persona that was hardest for you? Which persona did you struggle with the most and why?

I wrote a book about George Washington Carver, and I had a very hard time allowing myself to take on the Carver mask because it was clear from the outset that he was a genius, and I just felt like it was presumptive for me to try to write in the voice of somebody who was such a genius, who was so much smarter than I am. It took me probably until a third of the way through the book to dare to write in his voice. The first part of that book is written in the voices of people around him who could tell stories about him, so that I could tell his life without inhabiting him.

What helped you make the leap into his voice?

I think it was just after living with him for a long time, I came to understand him and he started talking to me and saying, It’s okay. It’s all right. You can do this. He became a dear familiar.

That’s funny because my next question is literally, “Who is the voice in your head when you write?”

It’s kind of hard to explain. I’ve noticed I’ve seen several essays or interviews with fiction writers who will say things like, “Well, I wanted the character to do this,” or “The character wouldn’t do it,” and every time I’ve read something like that, I’ve thought, That’s strange. But it does happen that the character kind of tells you what is going to happen, especially characters you don’t know. With Carver, I lived with him for about five years. Most of the other projects I’ve done have not required that level of commitment, so when I’m writing about characters I don’t know, I … Okay, for example, in my book Seneca Village, which is about a village in Manhattan in the early 19th century, one of the characters is a German composer who is clearly a little bit batty. I really didn’t know him that well; I did as much research as I could about him and then I just trusted that I could write in his voice. He surprised me! Some of the things he said went in directions I didn’t expect.

How do you engage research? And are there moments when it’s in tension with the writing you want to do?

I think that for me the tension is allowing or forcing myself to stop doing research. History is so full of interesting little detours, and you can get involved in going off on a detour and spend a couple of weeks over there, and I sometimes have to force myself to stop. It’s kind of like doing family research or any genealogical research. I did a book about my family history, and I had to stop because I could see it could eat up the rest of my life [because] it was so interesting. And with Seneca Village, the same thing happened; I had to get to the end of that book because I could see that if I didn’t just cut it off, I could spend the rest of my life writing about these characters I had invented. They were interesting to me, and I fell in love with them. One of the characters — I was writing from names and occupations I found in the census records — was a boy who was about 10 years old when I first encountered him, so I wrote a couple of poems about him as a boy. And I really liked him. So then I wrote a couple poems about him as a young man, and then I started thinking, Well, what would happen to him? And I thought, Maybe he’ll go west and maybe he’ll wind up in California. So I wrote some poems in which he is going to California, and then he’s in San Francisco, and I could have gone on writing the whole rest of his life. I had him disappear in San Francisco because I didn’t want to be that caught up in his life.

Would you say he was your favorite persona?

He was one of my favorites, yes. I really did love him.

You’ve had so many books and a very full poetic career; what are some of the most memorable junctures along that journey? What are some moments that were transformative or just memorable?

One of them is the fact of my Carver biography. I intended it to be just a normal poetry book about George Washington Carver, and I was planning for it to be published as an ordinary book of poems with print on white pages. But I met somebody [again whom] I had met about ten years earlier, and in the interim he had become a publisher of children’s books. When I met him then the second time, he said, “Let’s do a book together.” I sent him everything I had that was appropriate for children, and he didn’t like any of it. Finally, I said, “Well, what I’ve got is half a book about George Washington Carver. It’s not for children; it’s real poetry.” And he said, “Let me see it.” I sent him this unfinished manuscript, and he said, “I’d like to publish this.” I was afraid this would be the end of my career as a poet! Who’s gonna read a book of poems for children? But I let him do it — gladly let him do it — and it changed my life. It was extremely successful, and other publishers started coming to me with projects they thought I could write because I had done this Carver book. I suddenly became a children’s book writer or a writer of books for young adults, and I have a couple of textbooks about children’s literature that are used to teach children’s literature in schools of education. My Carver book is described as a turning point in American children’s literature. Who knew? So that was memorable.

And then with Fortune’s Bones, I’ve had a lot of wonderful luck. This book came to me because the skeleton [of Fortune, a slave] is in the collection of a historical museum in Waterbury, Connecticut, and the director of the museum asked me if I would write some poems to honor this skeleton. They had already done the research, and she gave me a pile of printed materials; they had had forensic scholars and historians do research about the skeletons. All I had to do was extract the poetry out of the research. I’ve had several projects that came to me like that, as gifts. And really, they really felt like gifts from on high. I don’t know how many of them you want to me to describe, but there have been several. A couple of times research information has just fallen into my lap — I wonder what this boy’s name was? Bingo! A local historian sends me a letter saying, Oh, that boy you were interested in, his name was … It’s been fun.

Do you have any encounters you would describe as transformative with individual poems, ones that changed your interior trajectory?

I have several in the writing of Seneca Village. That book taught me things. There’s one in the book about my family history. I have a poem in which my great grandfather is conceived: his mother was enslaved and his father was a white man who didn’t own her, and the story that my family has passed on was that this was not a plantation rape, but a relationship. They had two children together and he gave her a house later. I don’t know anything about the relationship; all I know is the myth that went on in the family. So I was writing about this scene in which he stumbles to her cabin one night, and it’s a sonnet, and when I wrote the last two lines the rhyme is, And it wasn’t rape in spite of her raw terror and his whip. When I wrote that couplet I was scared. I thought, I can’t write this. I can’t publish this because it so flies in the face of everything that we believe. And yet it just felt like I was saying something that I needed to say. So that’s something that, you know, you write the word and then you go, (gasps).

So that just gave me goose bumps. What was the last thing that you read that stopped your breath or gave you goose bumps?

The last thing that I read that really impressed me is a novel by a German novelist named Jenny Erpenbeck. It’s a novel in which an elderly retired German professor gets involved in the lives of a group of refugees, most of them from Sudan, some of them from the middle east. He gets involved in their lives and at the end of the novel, this group of refugees is kicked out of the place they’ve been camping, and this professor moves over and starts sleeping on the couch and moves people into his home. It’s a novel that shows something about the possibility of humanism, the possibility that we seem to be constantly telling ourselves is impossible. Maybe it’s an impossible fantasy, but I was very touched by the novelist’s willingness. 

So, you taught for a long time, but you no longer teach as much, so do you miss the classroom? What did you enjoy the most or least about teaching and teaching poetry in particular?

I’ve seen students have that ah-ha experience when I’m able to show them something that relates to their lives, something that they are experiencing.

I miss the classroom occasionally, but I don’t miss grading papers. What I most liked about teaching was teaching literature classes, when in discussions of something, a poem for example, I could see students eyes get big — Wow! — they’d never thought that before. I taught one semester at West Point, a wonderful experience, and it was a poetry class: in one discussion we were talking about Robert Frost’s poem, “Acquainted with the Night.” I said, “It’s written in terza rima,” and I explained terza rima, and one of the cadets fell out of his chair! He was so surprised he just fell off of his chair! And I’ve seen that figuratively happen with students learning something, getting some insight — I mean, in the case of this cadet it was about the technique that the poet had used [and] he hadn’t been aware of as he’d read the poem, but I’ve seen students have that ah-ha experience when I’m able to show them something that relates to their lives, something that they are experiencing.

I was telling somebody recently about a class I taught (gosh, this was years ago!), in which I had carefully planned the syllabus but we reached the end of the syllabus before the end of the semester so we had another week, three class meetings, left. So on a Monday I said, “Well, you know we’ve done everything I planned for us to do during this semester, but we have these three days to talk, so what do you want to talk about?” And they said, “Let’s talk about sex.” So we had a serious conversation about love and relationships for an hour, and that was Monday. Wednesday, I said, “Okay, same thing: I haven’t planned anything. We’ve come to the end. You’ve learned and I’ve taught you everything I planned, so what do you want to talk about?” And they said, “Let’s talk about religion,” so we talked for an hour about religion. And on Friday, the last day of class I said, “Okay, so what do you wanna do?” And they said, “Let’s do what we’ve been doing.” I said, “What we’ve been doing? What do you mean?” They said, “You know, talking about the important things.” That was moving, talking about the important things — using literature and poetry to talk about the important things because teaching is not only about conveying information, it’s about helping people have some insight into the right ways of living. I do miss that.

I think people need to find their own paths and be true to their own paths, and I guess that would be my advice. Be true to the path that’s put in front of you. And speak the truth: don’t be afraid to say what you know is right.

What are some mistakes you see most frequently in beginning writers and what correctives do you offer when it’s creative writing or poetry?

There’s too much careerism, I think. Which I think is dangerous for a poet. I think you should just write, just open yourself to the muse and write the truth. I have this feeling that a lot of young poets are looking over their shoulder to see what the person next to them is writing, you know? And then trying to write the same thing. I think people need to find their own paths and be true to their own paths, and I guess that would be my advice. Be true to the path that’s put in front of you. And speak the truth: don’t be afraid to say what you know is right.

You said in an interview that social justice and beauty are your poetic paths, that those are the two bedrocks of your practice in poetics. I’m curious, is there ever tension between social justice and beauty or aesthetic?

Yes, of course. And I’m not sure which one to value over the other. Writing for social justice is what I think is writing the larger truth, and beauty, I think, comes accidentally when you write for a larger truth. Kind of like greatness: you don’t write to be great. Greatness is something that happens because you’re busy doing the right thing. You don’t say, “I’m going to win the Nobel Prize.” Instead, you choose to write your work on a small scale and to speak the truth that’s necessary to make people learn what justice is and why justice is important. To learn what respect is and why it’s important. Those are on the small, human level, and then if it’s intended for you then the larger — let’s call them rewards — come by themselves. You can’t aim for them. And I think too many people aim for them and are dissatisfied when they don’t receive the rewards that they think they deserve.

You said “of course” to the tension between social justice and beauty, and I want to push on that a little bit. Can you think of a moment or a poem where there was that tension and you felt like maybe you wrestled with it or had a choice to make around it? And how did you resolve that?

I wrote this poem about the lynching of Emmet Till, and I was very busy writing about that subject as I worked on that poem. But at some point, the poem started moving in a new direction over which I felt I didn’t have too much control: the poem started becoming a poem arguing against starting a war on Iraq. I didn’t plan that. I didn’t expect it. But it was right. And in that case, the poem’s dedication to social justice went hand in hand with the beauty of the form of the poem. So maybe, if one is lucky, the dedication to justice doesn’t move one away from beauty, but it leads one to a kind of higher beauty. I don’t know …

I want to go back to the sonnet. You love the sonnet: Why?

Several years ago, when I was teaching, I was asked to teach a brief seminar on the sonnet. So I did some research about the history of the sonnet, and one of the things I read is that the sonnet — the Petrarchan sonnet — came into existence as a way of replicating the perfect proportions of the Fibonacci sequence and the golden mean — the golden ratio, it’s also called — which you see in nature, in nebulas and in trees and in the proportions of the human face and in Greek temples; so that 8:6 ratio is an attempt to do that verbally. I was just blown away by the idea of trying to write a poem that is perfectly proportioned, and I started writing sonnets then as a way to trying to figure out how people were doing that. My experience with writing sonnets is that the more you write the more clearly you understand why these proportions are perfect. They are as perfect as is possible to create verbally. The fact there’s a turn, a logical turn that’s not [there] because a poet decides to put it [there] but because the form requires it, because it’s part of the turn in the proportions, I don’t know, I just really love that. My Emmet Till book is written in Petrarchan sonnets and it’s also a circle, because the circle is the other perfect form in nature, and I just really feel that there’s something unconscious in us that responds to things like that. We may not understand why, but we respond to a kind of physical beauty. We respond physically.

What are some things that you wish you’d learned early on as a poet?

I wish I had learned other languages; that’s one of my primary regrets. I wish I had really learned a couple of other languages. Because I think it would’ve made it possible for me to read poetry in other languages. I feel hampered by my inability to understand what’s happening in a poem in another language. I wish I had learned a language that’s more useful — French or Spanish; I learned German and Danish, gah! I think my poetry would be stronger if I were able to read poetry in another language.

What are some non-poetry things that sustain you?

I used to quilt, and that was a great joy; I must have made 20 or 25 quilts, and I loved the fact of producing something useful. And baking bread: I used to regularly bake bread that was also the art of usefulness. Most of what I do is words on paper, which, you know, you can take them or leave them, but a quilt you can sleep under, bread you can make a sandwich, so that’s sustaining. And living and having a life that is connected to the natural world: I don’t do that anymore — my joints have gotten bad. But I used to hike and backpack and cross-country ski, and I’m so glad I had years of doing those things. Hiking in the backcountry and sleeping in a tent — that was really nourishing.

What’s the thing that isn’t talked about enough when people talk about poetry?

Silence. I think most of us live lives that are full of noise, and most of the noise that surrounds us is meaningless. I am of the old school, which believes that poetry comes out of silence, and the way you invoke poetry is by learning how to silence all of those extraneous voices. Meditation is a good way to do that, and for some years I included periods of meditation in my creative writing classes because, you know, you get up in the morning, you turn on the radio or get in the car, and you’re listening to something, and we very seldom have enough quiet to even hear birds or to hear that kind of whooshing in your ear when you’re in a silent place and just listening, and you hear this kind of whoosh, like I don’t know what it is — maybe it’s the blood going through your veins, I don’t know what it is, but we’re very seldom quiet enough to hear that, that sound of silence, and I think it should be talked about more. That’s kind of ironic isn’t it?

You’ve been a poet laureate, and you serve as a Chancellor of the American Academy of Poets. What are some organizational conversations that are happening around poetry that you think are interesting, compelling, necessary, or that are just happening?

I think there is a lot of interest in encouraging young people to explore poetry. One of the things the Academy of American Poets is doing now is putting online videos of poets — the chancellors — reading poems and then inviting school children to write letters. I think it does two things: it encourages children to interact with poetry, and it also encourages them to interact with the poets themselves, so I think that’s very important.

And then I’ve been involved in a couple of schools in which schoolchildren have been encouraged to do their own historical research and write poems based on their research, which I think is so valuable because it teaches them about history. I was at a school someplace in Pennsylvania last week, where I was introduced to a project that took place in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania. Harrisburg has a community that’s called the “old eighth ward.” It was a diverse community that was demolished between 1910 and 1920 in the expansion of the grounds of the state capitol building. This group of sixth graders was introduced to the idea of the history of the old eighth ward; they were given census records from 1910 and invited to write poems in the voices of these people who had lost their homes. I was at a reading in which 6th graders were reading their persona poems about these early 20th century people. It made me so proud: it was really impressive! And I’ve seen this done in several schools. It makes me very happy.

I know you’ve judged a lot of prizes including one for Furious Flower, and I know you read a lot, so what are some movements, or some trends you’ve been seeing in contemporary poetry? How would you frame what you see happening in our poetry of our time?

We’re producing a lot of small literary communities that are so small people don’t read each other’s work. There is not enough crossover. That makes me sad.

One of the things I have very mixed feelings about that I see happening is a special interest in writing about one’s very detailed personal identity. And on the one hand, I think that’s wonderful. But on the other hand, what I think I see (this is based entirely on Facebook, not research at all), is that we’re producing a lot of small literary communities that are so small people don’t read each other’s work. There is not enough crossover. That makes me sad. My graduate degree is in ethnic literature, and I was in the early days of multiethnic, multicultural literature, and I was one of the founding members of an organization called Multiethnic Literature of the United States. This was in the 1970s, and at that point people in that group were interested in reading each other, and I don’t think there is enough of that kind of crossover anymore. So if I am a bisexual, half-Black, half-Chicano writer, that’s who I’m gonna read, and that’s who I’m writing for. I really feel that that we’re losing something of interculturality, or cross-culturality; I may be wrong about this, but, I really don’t know how to think about it …

I keep seeing people on Facebook asking things, like, the other day somebody posted something asking, What poets are writing about fat consciousness? Okay, I suppose, you know, you’re going through some kind of issues and you want to find somebody who’s writing about them. When I was pregnant with my first child, I couldn’t find a poet who had written about pregnancy. It was something that I needed to find, but I wouldn’t want to read poems about pregnancy all the time!

It’s a question of tension again, right? Between the idea of representation and seeking that representation in text and at the same time being limited by it.

Yes, I’ve done this twice: I’ve offered workshops on the poetics of listening to others. And so instead of having people look inward and write about their own personal experiences, have them sit together in pairs and talk and then write about each other, each other’s experience. And I have a feeling that learning to hear the other, learning to experience the other, and learning to inhabit the other is a way of moving toward a kind of healing of the separations between us. The last time I did this was about a year ago in New York, and it was just an experimental thing, but several people came afterwards and thanked me for that and said that they had come away from this workshop not only with poems that they, both people in the dyad, were happy with, but that they had come away with friends, that they had talked about deep things. The Jenny Epenbeck novel I mentioned starts with this professor approaching these refugees with questions: Where did you sleep when you were five years old? What song did your mother sing to you when she put you to bed at night? That kind of intimacy allows people to hear each other beyond the mask of otherness to recognize who we are really, who we truly are.

So what are three poems that you might want our readers to read? Another voice that they might listen to that you think can offer light, wisdom, or courage?

I think Yusef Komunyaka’s poem “Facing It” is a poem that teaches us something about light in the middle of vast darkness, to find the light that you’re still here, that’s miraculous; we don’t very often recognize the miracle of presence, of continuing from moment to moment. That’s one.

Naomi Shihab Nye has a poem, “Gate A-4,” about being in the boarding area in an airport in which there is a Palestinian woman, and everybody’s afraid because she doesn’t speak English (she’s speaking Arabic), and she’s upset about something. And Naomi, who speaks some Arabic, asks to talk to this woman, and she discovers this woman is trying to get to her son, and that she’s from the same village Naomi’s father is from, and so they make this human-to-human connection. This woman stops crying, and people stop being afraid of her because they [no longer] think she’s a terrorist going to blow herself up. And she has cookies in her luggage and takes them out and shares them with Naomi and with the other people. And then there are other people who are in the boarding area [who] pull out their little snacks and they have this little party together. Such a wonderful poem about reaching across barriers and finding humanity!

And let’s see who else would I want to … wow, um, a poem by Richard Wilbur, “Advice to a Prophet,” in which he addresses a future prophet and tells him not to tell us what he sees, not to tell us what he knows, and to allow us to go on making our mistakes and loving each other in our clumsy ways — it’s a very beautiful poem. Every time I read it I’m moved by it.

Thank you. What wonderful gifts!

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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, Assistant Director of the Furious Flower Poetry Center, and Associate Professor of English at James Madison University. She is the author of Difficult Fruit (Peepal Tree Press, 2014) and Honeyfish, which won the Green Rose Prize from New Issues Press and is forthcoming in April 2019. 

by Lauren K. Alleyne

Reading a poem by Kwame Dawes feels like traveling in two directions at the same time: the poems are always anchored in the sensory — rooted in rich, delicious detail that grounds one firmly in the poem. However, the poems simultaneously carry an undercurrent, or perhaps it’s a reaching — something larger than you that pulls you toward itself, demanding you abandon yourself and follow it. Over the course of 21 books of poetry (perhaps 25 by now, as Dawes seems to produce and publish books faster than is humanly possible) Dawes’s concerns, of course, shift and evolve (he has written on family, on the HIV epidemic in Jamaica, in the voices of Gullah women and of the sober histories of the American South) but never lose their commitment to transport, to expand the consciousness of all who encounter them. The following lines from the poem “Debt” in his 2017 collection, City of Bones, offer a dramatic example of Dawes’ dexterity in moving his readers between opposing poles of feeling:

… How happy
he was to see her glow with the swell
of the child in her, and then the way
she slipped away, a mattress soaked
in blood, the baby, the girl wailing,
his hands too clumsy to hold this
flesh, what is owed an ordinary
black man with nothing to show for his life?

The poem’s speaker has lost “the girl who carried his seed” in childbirth and within the space of a single sentence, Dawes moves the reader through the girl’s life, full with possibility, to her death in which she is emptied and exsanguinated — her child-heavy belly and her slight, slipping spirit; the speaker’s happiness engendered by the pregnancy to his anxiety of solitary fathering; the baby, just beginning its journey and the speaker looking toward the end of his life. One would also be hard-pressed not to shudder at the image of the bloody mattress, which graphically represents the mother’s death while hearkening back to the sexual act that would have conceived the child. From line to line, image to image, the reader moves — now here, now there — while still feeling rooted in each place. (Are we not drawn to both the wailing baby and her clumsy-handed father?) The poem’s agility forces the reader to move quickly and unquestioningly between the strange and the familiar, the ephemeral and the corporeal, the past and the future. The poem thus becomes a vehicle for empathy, for expansion, for encounter with what is outside of us and, if we let it, ourselves. 

I think the poem has universal application, because as long as human beings sing, and long as human beings consider what they say, I think they are engaging in the exercise of using language in a certain way. 

Kwame Dawes visited Furious Flower as a part of the launch of his anthology Bearden’s Odyssey and spoke with me at the James Madison University studio. The interview has been lightly edited for clarity.

How do you define a poem? What is a poem to you? What is a poem?

Obviously it’s a difficult question because sometimes we run into this question when we look at something and go, Well, this is not a poem, but I think it has to be problematic, and the idea of the final poetry has to be based on tradition. There is the notion that the poem is directly related to song, to the expression of experience through an organization of language that heightens the articulation of the experience, and that has the benefit of consideration of the way things are said for the way things are said. I think that is really important, and that consideration then relates to the questions: How do we communicate? How do we express things?

The tool we have to express things is language; it is the use of words, the use of all the things that surround words. So a poem strikes me as something that comes down to us through tradition. I don’t think somebody just wakes up having never seen a poem before and decides that after 10 syllables they’re going to stop and then go the next line and then stop — they saw it somewhere. So when people declare I’m so original, I’m like, Nah, you’re not that original. There is a tradition, and the tradition is related, as I said, to song because when we think of all the words we use to describe poetry, to talk about poetry to this day, we’re still talking about things like assonance; we’re talking about rhyme; we’re talking about rhythm. We’re talking about elements that have to do with sound, to do with music, to do with how music is constructed — repetition, refrain, things like that. And we all understand song. It seems to me we all understand the song is again a construction of experience that turns experience and the articulation of the experience into an art, into a piece of art — a thing that we can come back to, look at, return to again and again.  So, this is the most basic way that I understand the poem, and that’s why I think the poem has universal application, because as long as human beings sing, and as long as human beings consider what they say, I think they are engaging in the exercise of using language in a certain way. 

So then over time all our instincts for something fresh, for something that makes us think, and feel, and express, and how we manage language to achieve that become part of the exercise of poetry.  But the judgment of a poem is rooted in what we know, what we’ve seen, what we’ve heard and what has moved us. And, therefore, I think the idea of tradition becomes really important.

I want to hone in on the idea of music, because music is so important in your work.  It’s muse; it’s in the sonic rhythm; it’s in the way you read.  Talk to me about that in terms of your writing.  How do you deploy that sense of music and sound?

Some years ago a woman who was a really great mentor to me when I lived in South Carolina — Ellen Arl, she’s passed away now; she was a Chicago woman who lived and taught in South Carolina for many years — took me under her wing, in her own bullying manner, really to teach me how to teach composition. (I came from a British tradition and students didn’t matter. Here, they did what you told them to do and so she began to tutor me.) But she also was a remarkable poet, and Ellen would read my poems and would talk to me about them. And one day, she was reading through, it may have been Jacko Jacobus, and she said, “I need to talk to you about something.” And she said, “You use sound — there is music and sound in your work — beautifully.” I’d never been conscious of doing this and she started to point it out to me. The two lessons in that for me were, first, there are things that we do by our imitation. The poets that I enjoyed and I sort of paid attention to were people like Hopkins, people like Ntozake Shange, people like Derek Walcott, Kamau Brathwaite, Lorna Goodison. And if you think about those poets, what draws you to them is rhythm, but also sound and the way that sound is used.  She [Ellen] was pointing out to me something that was happening, and she said, “So now when you’re writing or editing pay attention to all these things that are working and build on that.”

So for me, the other root of that experience, I think, was a fascination with the possibilities of music and a kind of envy of the musician. I think the songwriter is a cheating poet, because of what the songwriter can do — you know, you can take a pretty dumb line and you put a good melody and it’s gonna fly, it’s gonna be beautiful just by the way the line is sung. And so you begin to realize that the sound of a word is as important as the meaning of the word in a poem, and when you get to that point, I think you’re really starting to to enter a space. So I’m trying to replicate melody by the use of assonance, by the use of rhythm and meter because the emotional impact of song is a startling thing. It’s where a melody can move you because of the things that it echoes and it stays in your body in remarkable ways. If I can do that as a poet then I’m doing something.  I remember Derek Walcott talking about Bob Marley on this BBC program called Desert Island Discs and he described … he picked two Marley songs, of course — “No Woman, No Cry” and the other was “Redemption Song” — and of “No Woman, No Cry” he said, If I could write and narrate as pure and beautiful as that, a love lyric as pure and beautiful as that, I would be a happy person. If a poem achieves even remotely close to that, I think it’s stunning. Now, I know the poets out there who be going We do better. We are, like, more amazing. Which is true, but a good song is a good song. You know? Whatchu gon’ do?

I know you also have a theater background, which to me seems not sonic, but very visual and dynamic. How does that background play into how you write a poem?

It has to play a really significant role, in ways I don’t even understand the extent of it, but I can tell you one way it really struck me: you know, a lot of my poetry enters the mind of other people. It’s not even quite persona. I’m subtle, and I’ll speak the voice of other people, and I’ll enter their heads and so on. I would say 60 to 70 percent of my work — it could be higher — focuses on women. (Somebody can work out the psychology of that, but I won’t get into that!) And the question becomes: What right do I have? This is a conversation I’ve had with students who write. They want to know: Can I write about somebody not like me? Can I write as a white person, about a Black person? Do I have a right to it? And it’s a really fascinating question because it occurred to me that as a playwright, this question does not come up.  The problem with writing plays is, you are writing other people. You have to find how they sound, and that’s the test. Nobody sits down and goes, Can I do this?  If you’re doing it then you’re doing it. What I got is that permission. But more important, I felt the burden of doing that, the responsibility that I have to be convincing. 

If I cannot empathize with a character, with a voice, enough then I’m failing in the imagination, because the empathy is fundamentally an act of the imagination.  So the failure to write a character is a failure of my imagination and frankly that’s a failure of my craft so I have to work on that to make it work. 

I remember at one point I decided to write a play with a cast of all women because the small company that I had formed, I couldn’t get any guys to join, so I had all these women in the company, and I really had to write plays for these women’s voices.  I said, Sure, I’m going to write this play. So I write the play, and I take the play to the cast, and we do a read around, and they just look at me and go, “This is nonsense. We don’t talk like this! We don’t behave like this! Women don’t talk like this: This is foolishness! We’re not doing the play!” And I thought, But I’m the playwright, like, I’m the artist here. I’ve done all this work! But they were not having it. So then I thought, What the heck am I gonna do? This is a crisis! Then I figured I better learn, though I was what, 21? 20? and convinced I knew everything about women because, you know. (Laughs.) So then I get this brainwave — and to this day I think it was divine — read women poets.  So I went to the library. This is at the University of the West Indies, and for better or for worse, in 1981 I could get all the books by women poets in the library and put them on the table. I could put them all, you know, whatever that meant. And I read, and I read, and I read. And that’s when I ran into Ntozake Shange’s “For Colored Girls” and that changed my life, that work — the multi-voice, the way that she … all the poetry of it and the sheer raw energy of it. I wrote the play again.  I went back to the cast and they said, “Okay, now we can do this — you have to fix a thing or two, but we can do this now.”

Now, the lesson for me was first of all, yes, I can write any voice I want, but there are certain voices I must recognize my distance from and therefore I must work harder. There’s certain risks that one takes, you know — if you’re a white person writing in a Black voice, don’t just think, I’m a writer; I can do that. No, there’s a price that you have to pay to do that, so there’s pressure on you to do better at it.  (Also, it’s a myth that we think we write ourselves better; that’s another myth. We think, Because it’s my story I can … no. Maybe part of your work as a poet to find voice is to really to understand and hear your own voice.) But for me writing for the stage cleared all those problems.  It showed me the challenges, but also showed me that if I don’t do this then I’m not an artist. If I cannot empathize enough with a character, with a voice, then I’m failing in the imagination, because the empathy is fundamentally an act of the imagination. So the failure to write a character is a failure of my imagination, and frankly, that’s a failure of my craft, so I have to work on that to make it work. 

Nice, empathy and craft as essentially linked.

Absolutely, absolutely. I think racism is a failure of the imagination. And racist writers are poor craftsmen.

I’ll have to sit with that.

Work in that. (Laughs.)

The story, the play, the poem: they’re all language, but they’re different maneuvers of language. How are those experiences different for you?  What allows something to come out in one form versus another?

One of the things I talked about in the past that I think is worth saying again is that, you know, people say, “What inspires you to write?” and I really sort of resist that idea. Partly because it’s not that I sit down and go, “Here’s an idea, okay, should I write a poem about this or this?” It doesn’t work that way, not even remotely that way, for me. What happens to me is — okay, two things may happen to me. One is, if it’s poetry it comes in a different way.  What happens to me with poetry is I feel to write a poem; that’s all it is.  It’s just like my body says, “Poem.”  I don’t know what it’s going to be about, and when I sit down to write whatever, I figure it out.  Making the poem is my inspiration, which is not sexy. I mean that’s like saying I need to take a dump, which you know, you just need to do. (Laughs.)

The form that I enjoy the most in its entire process is the play, because the play begins with the idea but it begins to become communal very quickly and that — working with multiple artists and so on — is exciting to me. I find that really dynamic.

To be honest with you, with fiction and drama and the other things, I’m saying I need to write, say, a play. Then I ask myself, What is this play going to be about? I’m not juggling Should this be a play? Should this be a poem? Because they come in the form that they are, there’s no back and forth. And for me, it’s levels of tedium — that’s what it is. Writing a novel or fiction is, frankly, tedious to me; its just words and words and words, all these words! And I just find myself swimming in words. I mean I’ll do it, but I don’t enjoy it.  I enjoy the final product, I do, but I don’t enjoy the process of doing it. 

I guess the form that I enjoy the most in private is the poem. The form that I enjoy the most in its entire process is the play, because the play begins with the idea but it begins to become communal very quickly and that — working with multiple artists and so on — is exciting to me. I find that really dynamic.  So the genre dictates the content and I’m not sitting down saying, I have this great idea, should I write a play?  Should I write a screenplay? I’m not thinking in that way. I’m thinking, I want to write something and let’s see what it’s going to be.

You mention the collaboration, the working with others, and I know you’ve done a whole interview about collaboration and why that’s exciting.  What are some challenges of collaboration?

The biggest challenge of the collaboration is the beginning of the collaboration; that is, picking the right person to collaborate with. I think once you’ve picked the right people to collaborate with, the rest is gravy. Because the problems arise if there’s a vision that doesn’t connect, right? That creates its own problems, and the uneven distribution of either interest or ability can be a problem. When I collaborate with an artist, I want to give up to them what their genius is. I want that to shape the project, and to know that they will trust my genius, my ability to shape the process. That trust is really important because otherwise the collaboration is pointless. If I keep saying while I’m working with somebody that I could do this better, it’s a problem. If somebody else could do it better, it’s a problem. So the key to collaboration is identifying a shared understanding, and then also a willingness to sort of stay in lanes and appreciate how one affects the other.

But every project is fundamentally different. Kevin Simmonds, who I’ve worked with for years, is a remarkable poet and great musician; I have absolutely no problem handing Kevin a bunch of poems and saying, “Set it to music,” and I know that what he will do with it is going to be stunning and it’s going to change even the way that I see my work. I think and I trust that he respects my words so he will do them justice, he will treat them right. So that collaboration works, but for me it’s finding the right person, the right partner, the right artist to work with.  For the theater it’s dependence. I mean, you write a play, you cannot be the play. The actors have to do it, the director, the lighting people — you yourself cannot do it. The trust has to be there.

One of my favorite of your projects is Live Hope Love, which is itself a beautiful collaborative effort. I’m interested in technology as a collaborative partner: How do you see technology as it affects the creative process?

For me this is very pragmatic in the sense that a lot of the work that I’ve been able to do over the years has been brought on by technological changes.  It’s sad to think that I’ve seen so many changes. (I’d like to say that the world has changed fast rather than I have lived long.) When I started writing my plays, just to get copies of the play for the cast, I had to get to a Getstetner machine, okay. I didn’t have much access to photocopying. It existed in 1980, but not in Jamaica, not so easily: you’d have to, you know, take out a loan. So, you type on these sheets of paper that punch into this sheet, and then you run that through the Getstetner machine, and it makes multiple copies. This was revolutionary, because before that we had to write out the play again and again. I know that this change happened 30 years before then, but for me access to that was remarkable. 

So leap forward to 1990, 10 years later, I’m in Canada and I discover e-mail. In 1990, they’re doing e-mail in the basement of the University of New Brunswick, and I write an e-mail to somebody and it is immediately there. Four years before that, I was communicating with my wife, my then-fiancée, by letters, where you have to wait for the letters to come, and then suddenly somebody tells me e-mail can get there that quickly. So when I think of technology I think of how technology has literally transformed the work that we do. For example, the work I do with the African Poetry Book Fund: all the editing we do with all these poets from all over the world is online. The editorial team communicates online and by digital means; we edit, we do PDFs; we send things back and forth; we work with artists, and so on. It has made more rapid the process of making things happen, so when I say that in five years the African Book Fund has been able to publish 50 poets from Africa, that is because of this technological aspect of life.

And it affects so many things. It affects even the notion of exile, because of our capacity to move and to travel. There’s a joke I was telling the other day at a conference and it’s true: there’s a poet, a great poet in Florida, who likes to talk about things he misses in Jamaica — “I miss my mango; I miss my ackee” — and I thought one day, But you’re in Miami! (Laughs.) First of all, mango grow in Miami, and akee grow in Miami; just go down the road and you can get a tin of akee. As a matter of fact, go down the road and you can get a flight to Jamaica and get all the akee you want! And you’re not running from anybody, so what is this poem? So even poetry must be changed because you can’t sing that lament anymore; the world has contracted. 

So it’s a funny way in which technology has been remarkable in that regard. So even the work with Live Hope Love, that we decided to create the platform online, to then use music, to use Josh Cogan’s photographs, to use poetry — all of that is directly because of this access to technology; the Emmy we won for it was for new approaches to reporting. The new approaches were technological approaches, but of course, they affected the form of articulation, the language, the style, the approach, the relationship between sound images and poetry and so on that happened as a result. So for me it’s rich territory. It’s something that has brought tremendous benefit. I’m not the kind who sits down lamenting the loss of the quill. I’m not. I don’t miss it. 

Are you a longhand writer?

I write longhand, yeah: poetry. Fiction is just too many words — just go straight to the computer — could you imagine transcribing all that crap? Too much words. But my poetry I write longhand, for the most part.

I had a professor said that when you decide to make this your work, and you’re just surrounded by language all the time, that your relationship to words necessarily changes — you don’t ever really read “for fun” again. Has making this work changed your relationship with language? And what do you do for fun?

Well, you know, being a writer and particularly an editor has changed my relationship to language, but not tremendously. I’m moved by work because it moves me; I found myself able to be moved by work. And as an editor I’m willing to say that I’m moved by a poem that I may not publish because I realize what connects me emotionally to a work maybe exists, but that the poem itself hasn’t achieved it. It’s not finished or as brilliantly done. Like I said, you can get a really sucky lyric and it’s a great song. So I recognize what seems like a contradiction and I’m comfortable with it. I also read a lot: I read on Kindle; I read a lot of nonfiction; I read a lot of fiction; I listen to audio books and so on, and I’m entertained by that. I’m not sitting down thinking, Oh, I should write this; it doesn’t occur to me. So I have a long list of pleasures that I get that way. I guess my other fundamental pleasure, just pure pleasure, is television. Online: Hulu, HBO, Netflix, Acorn TV, I could go on. There’s a show called 19-2, and it’s a Canadian police drama; it’s shocking — like brilliant — it’s Canadian; it’s really good. There’s a French version set in Quebec and then there’s an English version set in Montreal. They just re-did it. It’s stunning.  So I’ll spend many hours doing that.

You’ve just relieved me of the guilt I feel every time I’m watching something and think, I should be writing right now, but this Criminal Minds episode is really good.

Nope. It doesn’t bother me one bit. (Laughs.) I’m just sayin’. I was looking at that drama, and I realized they said there are 38 episodes. And each episode is an hour, so I just watched 38 hours! And I thought, This is insane! I felt like I’d started watching it yesterday, you know: What happened? When did I watch 38 hours of this thing? I mean, people say you multitask and yes, I do. I do crossword puzzles and I play Scrabble while I’m watching, so that’s multitasking. So I’m really productive. (Laughs.)   

As an editor, you read a lot. What are some common mistakes you see from young poets or people who are sending you things, and what advice do you have for them?

The most fundamental reoccurring problem is a typical thing — there’s nothing new about it: cliché. The failure to recognize just how language is to be used and so on. And you have cliché of language and cliché of idea. I think sometimes we miss that. I think more experienced writers find themselves slipping into the sloth of cliché of ideas.  And then there’s a cliché of self, so if I know somebody’s work and they start becoming a cliché of themselves; that can also be a problem.  So that’s one that stands out. 

The other one that stands out is — and this is a personal thing, I think, it might just be my thing — metaphor. I think the intelligence of form or even an experimentation has to be consistent: if it’s random it should be consistently random; if it is attempting something, there’s a logic to that thing. I think sometimes the thought hasn’t been carried through enough. Similes and metaphors are traps where that happens often, right? And people sort of fob it off, they just go, Well, it’s kind of cute and flashy, but it doesn’t make any sense. And if you dig deeper and ask, Is it really like this? If you push it, you realize that you have not found the right metaphor; you haven’t found the right simile. And we’re attached to sometimes the first thing that comes to us, without the painful, muddy process of saying, Let me try this. Let me try this. Let me try this. Because then it feels like it’s not original — it’s not inspired. I think the lie is that the first one is magical. That’s not true. That’s not true. That just proves to be not true, not the case for me anyway. My first thoughts are not necessarily my best thoughts.

So when I say no to a poem, it’s not always because of, you know … so 80 percent of the time, I’m saying, Look, this poem hasn’t come together. Maybe less than 80. But for the most part I’m putting together an issue that should have a coherence and should have this dynamic relationship.

I read an interview where you push back against the term “tastemaker,” but, you’re a publisher, an editor, you’re a judge, so you definitely have a hand in what reaches the public — the readings, the poems and poets that get seen. What are some things that guide you in those important roles?

Okay. So everything is different to me. Every area in which I’m functioning as a kind of editor is different. If I look at Prairie Schooner, the literary journal, the journal is what I’m putting together. I think sometimes people mistake literary journals as “the best of,” and think we’re publishing the best that comes to us. This is not true. I think people should reconfigure what they think we’re trying to do; certainly what I’m trying to do is to make the issue an interesting issue. An interesting issue means we should be able to read that issue and be drawn through that issue in interesting and fascinating ways that move us, that take us through different emotions, that show sides of things and so on.  I’m interested in constructing an interesting issue, which is different from saying I’m doing the “best of” because the “best of” would mean this — and I’ve used this example many times, but it’s true. Because it happens. There was a period where I was getting a lot of poems by middle-aged men about remembering — not middle-aged; they were like in their fifties and sixties — and they were remembering their first love, right? And there was one season where I had about 15 of these poems that had made it through the round and got to me. Now on their own each of them was kind of interesting, but after reading two of those I was going, Really? Are we doing this again? And now of these 15 poems, eight of them may have been much stronger than a poem about boats sinking in the Atlantic, right? They may be technically stronger.  But I’m not going to publish 15 poems about dudes remembering their first love. That’s not an interesting read unless I do a special issue on dudes remembering their first love. I’m going to use the sinking boat; I’m going to mix it up. So when I say no to a poem, 80 percent of the time, I’m saying, Look, this poem hasn’t come together. Maybe less than 80. But for the most part I’m putting together an issue that should have a coherence and should have this dynamic relationship. So that’s one process. That’s not a “best of” process, and therefore I don’t pretend that we publish the best writing in the world. I don’t know what that looks like.

Now if I’m judging a contest, that’s when I’m really gatekeeping; that’s when I think I’m really involved in this process of eliminating because you’ve got to pick one winner out of 200 or 300. Well, okay, I have to pick one, right? Does that mean the rest of them suck? Each one who loses is going to feel a little sucky about it, but the truth is, that’s not what it means. There’s something limiting about that process, and it’s kind of a crazy process. But I always think of myself doing multiple things: I also recruit work; I also acquire work; I also edit many writers’ individual work to push forward in different places, so every time I see something that I think is promising and interesting, I can be an advocate for it.  And I think that balances my whole attitude of this whole idea of determining taste and so forth.  I think what drives me most is that I’m working with Caribbean poets, African poets, finding a vehicle for their work to shine and to be put out there because there’s been a bias for whatever reason in publishers taking that work. And it’s good work as far as I’m concerned, and in that instance I’m certainly involved in a very aggressive action of trying to bring work to people, and that’s hugely important to me. So I guess I’m in the position that you could call power — I have some power; but I’m not deluded by this power because the power has to be understood in a certain way. If you say, I sent you some poems and you didn’t like them, that’s power, yes. Right? But I also have gone out to look for poems. You see what I mean? So there’s another act to that power that I think is different.

So you situate yourself more as an advocate than a gatekeeper, it sounds like.

Yes, yes.

I have firsthand experience of one of your magical powers having you as my editor — the ordering of poems. You talked about it a bit regarding the journal, but how do you do that with your own work? What are some of the things you do to make a coherent collection?

That’s one of the greatest joys in my life: I love to organize a manuscript. I cannot express how much I love to get a pile of stuff and then to think, How do we present this in the best light? How do we take this from here to there?  All these voices and so on. To me, it’s really a matter of thinking of the entire book, and it’s about thinking of the book as a grand tone poem. A series of tones. That you’re introducing the voice, you know, so that the reader can emotionally connect to that voice and trust the voice early enough so that they will then go on the excursion, take risks, trust the voice going through. And sometimes I’ll make a note and say, We don’t trust you yet. You can’t put this poem here; we don’t trust you yet. We haven’t reached a point where we say, It’s worth it to go with you, because you see, what happens when people read, they’re reading with the understanding that this is going somewhere. If your plan is to disappoint them and that’s your desire, then you have to get us to trust you enough to say, I buy your idea of disappointment as a valid sort of artistic emotional moment. But building that trust seems to be one of the more important things. 

And then, the collection has to have a kind of connective trajectory that helps us to find echoes. Then you play all these wonderful games of using words that echo each other, put in poems beside each other that don’t seem obviously related, but there’s a word, there’s a line, there is something that is echoing, and the reader is going through and thinking, This is really coherent but I don’t know why. It’s very exciting to be able to play that through and organize it in sections thinking about would a section work or should it work through as a whole … I find that to be incredibly exciting. Titles! How titles work with other titles; what an epigraph can do to a poem: all of these things strike me as part of something beautiful and remarkable. And I love doing it. And I think I do it really well because I get a kick out of doing it. I really do. There are lots of things to think about, you know, because I think a book is a whole thing. It’s true especially about a collection of poems because it’s true sometimes we dip through collections, but if we were to sit through 60 pages or 70 or 80 pages, it doesn’t take that long to read a collection, and you want to have that journey; you want to have that trip, through, whatever that trip is. That, I think is rich. You don’t want to be tired of a form. Say somebody says, Okay, half my book is sonnets, and half my book is this other form. The question is do you just dump all the sonnets together? If you do that, do they work that way? Or do you split them up? All these great questions, right? To me they’re exciting questions. As you can tell. 

You’ve written 21 books, and I forget how many of those are poetry books.

No, it’s 21 books of poetry. The rest, you know, we’re going up into the 40s there. 

I stand corrected.

I earn my Hulu time. (Laughs.)

What are you still learning from poems? About poetry?

I discover what I’m thinking by writing. I don’t know what I’m thinking until I start writing. I don’t know what I’m feeling until I start writing. Well, I know what I’m feeling — if I am annoyed then I am annoyed, but that’s not a poem. The poem is a reflective moment — it’s a moment of reflection, and it’s a moment in which the intellectual, the emotional, all of these things are coming together and they’re expressing, and when I start writing then I’m constrained by form. I’m doing a series of poems with the Australian poet John Kinsella, and we’re working with these Spenserian stanzas and just some really fairly strict form. We’re working in syllabics and rhyme, so it’s a rigid form, and we’re going back and forth, but even as you’re writing in this form, the compulsion of finding the rhyme, you’re also discovering ideas, feelings, meaning and so on and so forth.  So I cannot not be writing a poem because as I write a poem, I’m changing, I’m evolving, and the world is changing and evolving, and it helps me to crystalize, or to at least come to some understanding of how I’m engaging this work. How I’m seeing this work. So the pleasure of doing that never never never never never goes away. The necessity for it never goes away.

The other thing I’m very interested in is ekphrasis — working with art. Again, it’s a way of me thinking through and feeling through the things that move me, the things that my eyes see and the things that engage me. So poems are always teaching me because the poem is my way of understanding myself, understanding how I’m engaging the world, how I’m understanding the world. Because we work, we come to understanding through feeling but also through the articulation of language. And in the manipulation and the handling of language, we then discover things, right? Yeah.

So, the world comes in here, and we live in a time where art in general is under threat. And you’ve said in other places that the poem is important enough that it should be subsidized. What is the work of poetry and poem in the world? Why is it so important that it should be subsidized?

So here’s what I would say: I actually don’t think that poetry is under threat. I don’t think so. I think the publishing of it may be under threat, maybe. You know, there’s a notion that I never had, that said I should make my living as a poet. I’ve never had that notion. So if I don’t have that as a burden … Now for you to stop me from writing poems, that’s a different thing, but nobody’s really doing that, at least not in the U.S. currently. Now people will say, “I choose not to write poetry because it doesn’t pay.” I suspect that if that’s the case, good. (Laughs.) Now, you know, should people get paid for poetry? Sure. But the point I’m making is when you take away my ability to write a poem, that’s one thing. 

Now, should poetry be shared? We can restrict that, and that’s been restricted forever: it’s been restricted for gender reasons; it’s been restricted for racial reasons; and we are constantly fighting to have voice, to have the work all there, to have the work shared, and I think that process should not be driven by market systems that say that something has value because it sells well or because it can pay for itself. This is a ridiculous idea, and it’s a ridiculous idea especially in the area of art because the value of the art is not what people will pay for it, right? Because people pay for a lot for nonsense, right? I mean, like, pay a lot for a lot of nonsense. So it can’t be that that shows that it’s valuable, and I think that’s why I say that art should be subsidized. But in a sense, is it being subsidized or is it just being paid for what it is? Either way, whatever we call it, I believe that some forms demand it because their currency may not sell as much; you know, a collection of poets may not sell as many as a novel. Does that mean that the novel is more valuable?  I don’t think so. Its costs … maybe monetarily … it may be more valuable, but in terms of its impact and its necessity in the world? I don’t think it necessarily is.

And I don’t think it’s a sign of a great work that many people see it. I think we will eventually reach the point where if something lasts beyond its generation and its time, we applaud it and we say amen, but we can’t test that. We can’t know that in that way. So for me, actually, I don’t have the sense that poetry in my lifetime is in a healthy state — it’s in one of the most healthy states. It’s more diverse, we hear more voices, the opportunities to publish abound, and I think some exciting work exists. I expect that with all the exciting work, there’s gonna be stuff that’s just not particularly good, but otherwise we won’t know what is exciting, so that doesn’t worry me at all. I do think that writers need that support, and writers who write work that is not necessarily popular should be supported, and the value of the work should not be predicated on its marketability. I think that’s a mistake.

You are a person who has his finger on the pulse of the many voices of poetry out there: Is there something you would describe as characteristic of the poetry of our moment?

I think what is interesting is how we are writing the body in this world. And how we’re writing about this moment by our silences and our noises, right? So, there’s noise abroad, you know? I’ve seen a lot of writers writing TV poems — when they’re writing their socially conscious poems, they’re writing what they watch on TV. So you can see that there’s an episode of CNN or some news story that they’re writing about in the poems. But that’s because it’s ubiquitous, right? News cycles are coming around and around, so I think that’s happening, but I’m always interested in those poets that do something else with it, that take it beyond that, that really go further in their reasoning, their examination, and position themselves within that space. 

It seems self-serving to say this, but frankly some of the best work, the most exciting work I’m seeing, is being written by the poets out of Africa. The poets we’re encountering — whether it’s Ladan Osman or Warsan Shire or Romeo Oriogun — I mean these poets are gifted. They’re not a joke, you know, and my commitment is that they are given the chance to write multiple collections, to build a career that will be substantial. I think one of the problems we have is in the poetry biz today: we’re hyped on over-hyping. A new poet that’s just come up and written one book and we go, like, OMG, this is, like, you know, going to change the universe. It may, but we won’t know that until they’ve written 12 books and we go, The first one was the best. (Laughs.) But we don’t know that, right?  The truth of it is, we have to make space for poets to write their second, their third, their fourth book — to grow with their work and to develop the confidence that they’re not burdened with the task of I have to go win this prize, or I have to do these things. But there are exciting words: poets coming out of the Caribbean, for example. I think this is really exciting. Poets coming out of Mexico: there’s some really interesting work that’s coming out from there. 

So I’m up. I’m excited about it because when I read a collection that is interesting and is fresh to me, it’s because it transported me into a space I haven’t had access to, and the poet’s standing at the door and saying, Come in: that’s beautiful to me. They’re saying, Did you notice this? And I say, Look! There’s that! What?! That to me is something. And I think a lot of times, the people are letting me into the room, but it’s like, Okay, I’ve seen this. You know what I’m saying? But it’s the doorway: that is language. It’s sort of fresh use and engagement of language. And I think that that’s actually exciting.

So the body seems like a very interesting theme with all these poets and what they’re doing is they’re saying, What does my body mean in this space? How do I write about my body in this space? Or the body in this space? This is not new in poetry, but it has become an interesting way of reading what contemporary poetry is doing, and I think it’s exciting.

The age of embodiment.

The age of embodiment. Yeah.

That idea that I’ve met people, I’ve sat on stage with people, and talked to them about their work and had conversations — some have actually read some of my work.  That has been a big deal for me: it’s meant a lot. 

What has surprised you most in your own very impressive career trajectory?

What has surprised me?

Surprised you.

I was gonna say something facetious, but I won’t. See that’s remarkable self-control, right? (Laughs.) Not a whole lot. No, I would say that the people that I’ve been able to meet and to talk to — like grown people — has been a pleasant surprise. You know, to say that I’ve had conversations with writers and poets who I admire and I think are amazing — that I’ve always admired — I’m grateful for that, and I never take that for granted; I never take it as par for the course. When I went to Iowa in 1986 as an international writer, it was a big deal, you know. I got this gig and I was there as the playwright. I’d barely written a poem (well, okay, I’d written a lot, but they were really bad). And there I remember meeting Ngugi wa Thiongo. This is when … this is 1986, right? And Ngugi was starting to say a lot about he’s not going to write in English anymore and so on. I had read Ngugi at university, so to meet meet Ngugi wa Thiongo was huge for me. I met Gabriel Okara. They don’t probably remember that I met them, you understand, but that was huge for me. That idea that I’ve met people, I’ve sat on stage with people, and talked to them about their work and had conversations — some have actually read some of my work. That has been a big deal for me: it’s meant a lot. Now, my father was a writer, and I grew up with people like George Lamming and Kofi Awoonor coming through my home. So it’s not the idea that I’ve met famous people, but I didn’t know them as writers. When I became interested to meet Kofi later on as a writer, him looking at me and saying, “Look at you, little boy, you become a writer now” — that’s huge for me. That’s beautiful. That means a lot. That’s still a pleasure and a joy.

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Lauren K. Alleyne is Editor-in-Chief of The Fight & The Fiddle, Assistant Director of the Furious Flower Poetry Center, and Associate Professor of English at James Madison University. She is the author of Difficult Fruit (Peepal Tree Press, 2014) and Honeyfish, which won the Green Rose Prize from New Issues Press and is forthcoming in April 2019.

by Lauren K. Alleyne

“VIOLET    VIOLENT    VIOLA    VIOLATE”: This sequence of “v” words closes Anastacia-Reneé’s poem “Dear Little Girl,” from her collection (v.). The range of connotation and the suturing of meaning through sound and music that create the poetic impact of this list — a flower colored both twilight and bruise; the definition of fatal force; a musical instrument; a breach of boundaries — is a hallmark of Anastacia-Reneé’s work. With a poetic sensibility simultaneously cutting, vulnerable, wry, and audacious, she produces poems that are both expansive and targeted. While the poems are unapologetic in their Blackness, their womanness, their queerness, and their hybridity, they are also clear in their invitations to those outside of those perspectives to consider them. Her hilarious and sarcastic poem, “I Just Love Her So Much,” is an excellent example of this. Through a stunning ventriloquism, Anastacia-Reneé demonstrates classic Black double consciousness by describing the experience of being around white women who “dote and coo over Michelle Obama” while treating the speaker like “an everyday nigger,” which is to say, ignoring her completely.       

            … and they must have said classy & strong & strong & classy & humble & smart & classy & strong & graceful & witty & intelligent & classy & strong (not feminist) a million times (sitting next to you) & there you are & they never even say good morning (hi, hello, go to hell)

The repetition in the poem, both comedic and relentless, serves to confirm the experiences of ordinary Black women who most likely recognize the situation, as well as reproduce it (in all its grating glory) for those to whom it might be unfamiliar.

The speaker’s saltiness serves as entertainment on the surface, but as in many of her other poems, Anastacia-Reneé fully utilizes the power of voice as a meaning-making device. In this poem, the speaker’s openness and transparency allow us to see multiple levels of harm and outrage. First, there is umbrage taken on behalf of the ignored speaker (that “hi, hello, go to hell” can work both ways!), but it gives way to weariness as she wonders “maybe you are not strong or classy or lulu lemon enough.” However, the speaker also expresses sisterly outrage on behalf of the “strong & classy” Black women so beloved by the white women as she side-eyes the way they “talk about Michelle as if they are on a first name basis with her.” The poem’s ultimate recognition is that while invisibility is demoralizing, visibility also comes with a price: “you are not the kind of woman of color who will hang on any white person’s wall (with thumbtacks).” Most powerful, however, is the claim that undergirds all of Anastacia-Reneé’s poetry — despite all insistences to the contrary, we are all worthy.

Anastacia-Reneé was a featured poet at Furious Flower’s fourth biennial Collegiate Summit, which explored the theme “Poetry without Boundaries” for three days with undergraduate students. It was my great pleasure to speak with her in the studio at JMU about her path to poetry and her three recently published collections.

So first I want to talk about your path to poetry. It’s pretty nontraditional, so why don’t you tell me a little bit about how you got here?

I am a late bloomer; I tell everyone this. I was always writing in high school and some of college and elementary school, but as far as really taking myself seriously, that didn’t happen until my first child was about two years old. I started writing profusely. It was just like something poured out of me, and I couldn’t stop. And I would — once Brandon was asleep — I would write until I couldn’t write any more, and then I would get up and start the day, and still I was like, “Oh, this is nice: you’re such an awesome and dedicated hobbyist!” and “Wow! You do this thing often, hmmm.” Then it became “Oh! You have seventy poems, so maybe this is pretty serious.”  And still I was in a bit of denial.

I didn’t finish my bachelor’s degree until my children were in school. I worked a full-time job, and I went to school full time, and I raised my children — and I got my bachelor’s degree in English with emphasis in creative writing. But I had children young. I had children in my twenties, early-early twenties (20, 21), and all my now-colleagues were out partying, or going straight from their bachelor’s to their MFAs. And I didn’t do that thing. I didn’t have that track, so in some ways I felt like I was missing out — I didn’t have the academic connections, I didn’t have mentors, I didn’t even know what a writing residency was!

When I found out people actually go places to write for concentrated amounts of time, I was like, “This is a joke! How did I not know about this?” And then I stumbled upon something called Cave Canem, and I really thought this was hilarious.  I remember reading the literature thinking, “What are you talking about? A home for Black poetry? Is this a joke?” Because I was in the Midwest; I was in Kansas City, Missouri. I mean, growing up they didn’t even talk about Black poets. I was only told about Maya Angelou during Black history month. Or James Baldwin. I had to learn about Audre Lorde and Lucille Clifton on my own and from my mom being a librarian. So when I read this, I was like, “Wow! I need to figure out what this is about and if it’s real.” I was still very skeptical; I thought, “This is a joke,” and it wasn’t! So I applied. And still, still, still … by that time I even had a couple of editorial essays published in credible magazines. I’d won the San Diego journalism press club award for an article called “War Torn” about being the daughter of a Vietnam vet, but I still was like, “You’re not really a writer writer,” whatever that means.

I spent three years learning forms so that I could break them. I just decided, you know, I’m gonna get this for myself, in a way that I can do it. I just became a secret forms studier …

But I applied to Cave Canem, and when I was accepted — I remember sitting on the edge of the bed trying to explain it to my children, and I remember them being so full of joy for me. It’s like I could see the joy reflected. I was so excited! And that Cave Canem, I met Patricia Smith and Yusef Komunyakaa and Ed Roberson and just some amazing amazing amazing amazing writers, and that’s when I said to myself, “Wow, I am one of those people.” Again, late bloomer. Most of the people I was there with had already published a few books, or somebody was their mentor since forever who was an accomplished writer, and I just didn’t have that story, so sometimes I think I let self-doubt get in the way of the goals that I set for myself. I always battled with that part, being the oldest of my colleagues, but some of my colleagues having it look like they were much more successful than me.

Tell me a bit more about what organizations like Cave Canem and Furious Flower have. When you say “one of those people,” what was that connection, and what was that like?

I needed to see people who were similar to me but not me doing the work. I needed to be around a group of people who would test my craft ability, not ask me, “How is this subject relevant in the world?” I needed to be around people who understood the poem — we didn’t have to talk about what I meant at the heart of the poem. It’s something about the comfortability of being around someone that says, “Yeah, yeah, yeah, I know all about that, but is this the format you’re comfortable with? Cause how’s that gonna be?” I craved that and didn’t even realize it, and once I got it, the biggest thing that stuck with me with those workshops and even Callaloo, which I heard a lot about, was that I took the spirit of that with me outside of those places. All these places were so near and dear to me, and they’re so powerful, and I have that within me! So then I started going out mentoring other people, you know? “This is great, but what about this? And have you heard about this organization?” Something in me wanted to be a crusader for other people. I felt like, “I can’t be the only one who doesn’t know about this.” I wanna tell everybody, and that’s what I’ve been doing.

You had a first book around 2000 and then a gap. You had a couple chapbooks and then in 2017 you had three books come out. The persistence paid off, so what are some of the internal and external things you did to keep yourself going in that in-between time?

To be honest (and I’ve never said this out loud) I stole — okay, not stole, but borrowed — a lot of curricula. I wasn’t able to get my master’s or MFA when I wanted to, so I would just ask people, “Can I see that? Can I see your syllabus for your class?” And the classes that I found interesting — I would hoard all the books. I just taught myself a lot of things. I spent three years learning forms so that I could break them. I just decided, you know, I’m gonna get this for myself, in a way that I can do it. I just became a secret forms studier, and someone would mention a book, and I would listen intently, but in my mind, I’m like, “All right, you’re gonna go get this book, everybody’s talking about it, you’ve never heard of it, you’re gonna go get this, you’re gonna read it, you’re gonna study it, and you’re gonna come back and have this conversation.” I just decided I wasn’t gonna let barriers stop me.

But I have to also be honest: I spent a lot of time alone, feeling like I’m never gonna be up to snuff, like someone’s gonna ask me a question and I’m going to say, “I — I — I — I don’t know about that,” or “I’ve never heard about that writer.”  I battled with yes you can do it; you’re just as great, and no, maybe you should just stop this thing. But I did keep going. And I can’t stop writing. That’s how I knew I wasn’t a hobbyist — even if I wanted to, I could not stop writing.

And then I started doing this thing called “the grind”: we write every day. It’s just basically accountability. I’ve been writing every day since August 2010. And it doesn’t matter if it’s a word. Sometimes it’s a line, sometimes it’s a whole poem, sometimes it’s flash fiction, and sometimes it’s an essay. But I was committed to that, and so these books weren’t all born for me last year; it’s a culmination of things. It just so happened that they were all published in the same year. I keep telling people, “You show me someone who can write three books in one year!” If that was the case I’d have a million books! These books were gestating a while.

I will start out writing in form and just immediately break it; something is rebellious in me. I don’t know if it’s because I’m a late bloomer. I don’t know if it’s my way of reacting to oppression. I just am like, “This is a great sonnet and now I want it to be a sonnet-couplet-tonka-haibun!”

The books are distinct, so did you find you were working on one and then another and then another? Or did you kind of piece them together? How did each of these books come to be?

I knew when I was writing Forget It, because Forget It is a fictional memoir …

Fictional memoir?

Yeah, I think I made that up. I’ve been saying it, and people are always like, “Huh?” Maybe I did. I don’t know. I knew that I wanted to be brave and tell a story about a series of events that happened in my life, but I also knew I was scared. I was like, “I don’t really wanna tell all of these things.” I needed some help, so I decided to pull from one of my fictional characters from my one-woman show, “alice,” to help me. I was like, “Homegirl, help me write this, these true things that hurt.” So I knew — I actively knew — when I was writing Forget It, because it was true. Forget It was like, “Ahhh! You again! Ahhhhh, this again! Oh, that memory,” you know? Also, Forget It involves my children, um, in a not vague way. Some of the poems in (v.) I could be like, “It could be your child, too,” but Forget It, they’re very much mine.

(v.) is just a compilation of poems. There was a set of poems that I’d written and pieced together, and then some that I was like, “I have to talk about the election. I have to talk about these things; they have to be in there.” Answer(Me) is about heartbreak and love, and I knew I was writing Answer(Me) because of the form and the shape. But I will say they all felt different in my body. What I didn’t know was that I was going to publish all three books — because, again, I’m just writing because I have to, because I have to do it — and then I got to a point where I was like, “Even for me this is a lot of work. Maybe you have some manuscripts here.” And that’s when I was definitely able to old-school print everything out and say, “This goes with this; this goes with this; this definitely goes with this.” But something about Forget It feels different. Even when reading it in open space, I have to prep myself to read from Forget It, whereas with (v.) I usually let the book tell me. But with Forget It, I’m very hovery-mothery, like, “I guess they can handle [this], or maybe I’ll share that.”

You talked about the form of Forget It, and you have footnotes in (v.), so I’m interested in how you conceptualize and utilize form. What’s your relationship to the poem as a form on the page as a visual?

I work really hard, and sometimes I laugh at myself.  A poet right now who I admire form-wise is Tyehimba Jess — I just look at the books and I’m just like, “Wow.” This is what I love about him: he maintains form, and there are so many other writers that do. For me, I will start out writing in form and just immediately break it; something is rebellious in me. I don’t know if it’s because I’m a late bloomer. I don’t know if it’s my way of reacting to oppression. I just am like, “This is a great sonnet and now I want it to be a sonnet-couplet-tonka-haibun!” And I don’t care if the reader is reading a poem and going, “Huh? This is kind of haibun.” I’m not interested in if the reader can recognize the forms or not. I want the reader to feel like the poem has taken a shape on the page and has its own form. I do feel like when you do write in form, and people recognize it, it can potentially be better. But I don’t, and I actually don’t want readers to get caught up in that; I want them to feel and see the shape of the poem. 

So it’s interesting, though, because you say you start in form. Why not just start in free verse?

Sometimes I start in free verse, but because I spent years like, “You will learn this, you will know this,” I find myself writing in form even when I don’t want to. That was a hard-core time for me, making myself do that, and I when I write in free verse — what I think is free verse — I actually see my kind of form, if that makes sense. So then I sit there wondering like, “Okay, so technically you’re creating a form, and now you’re abiding by your own form,” and then I say to myself, “And now should you break your form?” And I do, so I guess it’s a multiple form breaking. There are many poems that are written in Forget It in the same style, and something about Forget It I chose — I’m like, “I like this form that I created and it’s safe. I created it and it’s safe and it can hold this. And it can hold it because I already don’t want to write about these things. I already don’t want to do it,” so I needed that. But for (v.) and Answer(Me), I didn’t need that.

You’re a performance artist, also.

You know, I’m so happy you’re bringing this up, because in the last three years I’ve refused to be called a “spoken word poet,” for these reasons: what I’m noticing is, and I don’t want to just say it’s typical of where I live, but … I could be on the bill with four other accomplished people, but who have less books than I have, and they will be referred to as “writers,” and I will be called the “spoken word poet.” In most cases, I’m the only brown person, and what was happening was I felt like my craft and my work wasn’t being celebrated. It’s not my fault that when I get on the stage and choose to share my work with you — that I worked hard on, that is crafted — that I want you to feel it. You should be honored! I struggle — I struggle a lot. I just feel like any writer who is sharing their work should be honored for their writing craft. I think there is a community of people that, when they hear “spoken word poet” or “performance artist,” they don’t think about the time it took to make the words that are spoken to the audience, right? It’s not improv! I really respect people who can improv and, like, stand-up comedians and free stylists, but I wrote this piece, you know? And now I’m sharing it with you in a way that I deem worthy because I want you to experience something. I want you to feel something when I’m sharing it with you, but I’m not performing it for you. I’m sharing it with you.

I was thinking more in terms of the one-woman show and the plays: how do those non-poetry and actively in-space performances inflect the poetry?

Yes, 9 Ounces is a play, a one-woman show, but I think the desire, again, to make the audience feel something makes me want to share the poem in the best way. I feel responsible: I don’t want to just get on the mic and read it. I want you to feel something. Even if you’re repulsed, I want you to feel something. There’s a poem I read, “WWBD (‘What Would Becky Do’),” where many women have walked out on the piece, and it used to hurt, but now I’m like, “Good! You feel something!” But if I just get up with a book and read the words, I feel like I’m not being my best self. I need my, our, writing community to know that just because you choose to read and I choose to share it ferociously doesn’t diminish my work and my craft and my talent. We are the same.

 When you share these ferocious, amazing, crafted, gorgeous, important poems, and let them loose in the air for the audience, what do you hope for? What do you want them to do?

 We’re overusing the words, I feel, “social justice,” “change agent,” whatever, but I feel a responsibility to talk about things that make people uncomfortable, and I feel a level of responsibility to speak up for marginalized voices, or for people who maybe won’t ever be in front of a microphone. Because of that, I want them to walk away changed in some way. So if you feel something, great.  If you changed after you feel something, even better. Those are the two goals I’m going for. Lastly, I want the young poets to read and just listen to other poets. I think while we’re in a somewhat free world and we can still do that, that is the best gift ever. I was transformed by reading other people’s work — dead people, living people, other writers — and I want one day (it’s corny), but I hope one day to be a part of a poetry legacy; I want someone to say, “Man, [reading] Anastacia-Reneé’s (v.) for the time was X Y Z.” 

Who are you reading right now?

I must admit, I just came from AWP [Associated Writers and Writing Programs] which means I can’t mention all the names, but I grabbed quite a few books from the Cave Canem table. And so I’m reading at least 10 poetry books, and I’m rereading Octavia Butler’s books.  I’ve read them before, but something is pushing me to read, to take a second and third look at them, so I’m reading those. And lately I’ve also been reading short essays by random people. I’ve been making that part of my daily routine, just to read a really short essay, just to change it up a little bit.

If you had five candles on your poetry altar, which poets would they be burning for and why?

Living poets or dead poets?

They’re your five candles — whoever you want!

Sigh — always Audre Lorde. I wish and wish and wish and wish and wish that she would come from the spirit world and we could have lunch together. Always Audre. June Jordan and James Baldwin and, oddly enough — I know this is gonna be strange — Shakespeare. I want to understand what he thought he was creating and what he thought. Did he have any idea he was gonna be, like, number one in the canon? I just kinda want to interview Shakespeare: “So tell me how dost thou do this?” I want to do that.

What is that, four? My God, I need like a million, a million, a million, a million! But I think I will reserve the last candle for the poet right now that’s writing, that doesn’t think they’re ever gonna amount to anything.  I used to be that poet.

I love it: A candle for the unknown poet.

 Yes, candle for the unknown. You’re such a poet! A candle for the unknown poet.

So you are here at an event at Furious Flower called “Poetry Without Boundaries.” What are some boundaries that you think poetry encounters, and why is it important to traverse those boundaries?

I think some of the boundaries are old boundaries, and they end up being just systemic. I really do believe there is a such a thing as racism in poetry, and I don’t know necessarily how to put my finger on it, but when I go to Barnes & Noble just to look and see what’s on their shelves for their top 10 poetry books, or when I look at the best sellers, there is still quite a disparity in terms of diversity, and I don’t know if that’s because of the subject matter or that’s because of the writers, but I still think that is a huge huge huge boundary. I also think there is a genre-bending boundary  (I’m a cross-genre writer), and though we’re getting better — people are making up words for it, people even solicit, “Hey we want your hybrid work” — I think there’s still a certain group of people that think poetry should be one way, and if your poetry is not that way, you will not be published. You will not be asked to read. You will not be in the top 10. You will not win an award. And the way to bump up against that boundary is to compromise, but I’m not willing, so I have to deal with what that means. If that means compromise, and I’m not willing, then I need to move on for that particular boundary. Another boundary is just access. I think that there are so many writers that are amazing writers but just have no idea how to get past the “I have a journal full of poems and I don’t necessarily know how to make that better.” I think that’s a big, big, big boundary.

I know that you’ve taught a lot, so what do you try to gift your students? What do you try to gift that student who has a journal full of writing, or the one who hasn’t even started to journal yet? What do you try to pass on?

I try to pass on internal confidence: I really want a person to leave thinking, “I can do this.” So I’m always trying to give tools. I would rather give you the tools than do it for you, so I stuff a lot of information into students, like, “These are the secrets; these are things you should know at 15 or 18 that nobody ever told me.” So that’s one thing. Also I like to tell them things, small things, like, “Maybe you should write every day,” or “You don’t need to pay money to have a group of friends to workshop and critique,” or “Request certain books at the library and they’ll get ’em.” I usually try to give my students 10 good things, 10 rules to follow, or 10 tips. It’s one of my favorite things about teaching, and then I feel like we’re both winning — I told you some things I wish I had known, and now you know the things, and now you can tell somebody, and you can do the things. 

I also think talking to students about how to be active listeners: How can you be a poet-ally?  I didn’t know, and there was no class. I don’t really think I learned what that could potentially look like until I went to Cave Canem in my thirties! I don’t want somebody I’m teaching to be 31 before they realize, “Oh, this is how I can support another writer,” or “This is how to be an ally.” And then I hope that translates and transcends into the bigger picture. When I think about it, those are pretty lofty, but those are always my goals going into any teaching setting. It doesn’t matter; those are just always my goals.

Who is the work for? Why am I writing if it’s not meant to tell a whole truth? What is the point of telling the half?

Again, I’m interested. I want to key in on the listening: tell me a little bit more about that.

I usually give a short exercise where a person says a line and the other person does not respond.  They just need to sit there and look and listen. They hate it. It’s uncomfortable. Then I usually have the person deliver the line, and I ask the other person to make a comment about the work — not about the person, not about the delivery of the work, not about anything but the work. Then I ask the person to read the line again, and I ask the listener, “Can you repeat the line? Is there something you remember?”

I just feel like technology and so many other things are stopping us from being active listeners with our mind and our hearts, and I think we’re just like, “I’m not gonna feel anything. I’m too busy to feel. I don’t have time to be sad or happy. I just need to get to the next thing.” So I really try to work on what that looks like. Then we get into it: is there something that you liked about it? Is there something that you would change? More specifically, not something you would change because you’re the writer, but something you would change about the way they wrote it.  I guess it’s also not letting the listeners be the center of the critique. I just feel like we don’t really — I’ve been a teacher for a long time — we don’t really have a class for that. We’re not teaching it very much.

What was your most memorable poetic encounter? Either with a poet or a poem?

Just one?! Ah, oh, my gosh. I have to say for the record there is not just one —

(Laughs) For the record: noted in the record.

There’s many. But my most outward, active, uncontrollable, physical thing related to poetry happened at Cave Canem in a workshop with Toi Derricotte.

Of course it did.

It’s so funny! Okay, so I’m loving, I’m mushy, I’m not aloof, but I do have the ability to say “You know, I’m not gonna go here. I’m going to active listen; I am not getting in here with my feelings.” And so I listened to her say, “Write about the hard stuff. Tell the truth,” and I was like, “Yeah, that’s cool; this is all great.” And I listened to everybody else’s work, mm-hmm, and then when it got to me, I couldn’t read my poem. I couldn’t read my poem because I did not write the full truth. It was the first time I said to myself, “You have been so busy trying to write like the canon or please others or do it in a form, or not hurt anyone, you have been taking away 50% of your personal truth!” And so when it came to me and I couldn’t read the poem, I instantly realized that’s what was going on, and I just lost it. And then she was just like, “Good! Good! Now read us the poem.” And I was just like, “But it’s not …” and she was just like, “No, read the poem.” And I was able to say what the things that I omitted were, and the reason it changed me is because it made me realize, you know, you’re never gonna please everybody. Who is the work for? Why am I writing if it’s not meant to tell a whole truth? What is the point of telling the half? It just brought up so many questions that I still ask myself, and so for that reason I would say it changed the trajectory of where I thought I was headed as a writer, and that’s not where I was headed at all. Not at all.

If you had to give readers a key to your work, what would it be?

I’m visual, too, so I would have a blue star that would say, “Some of these poems are scary or sad or might make you want to turn the page,” and in parenthesis it would say, “Stay there.”  Just … just stay there. I would have a little sunshine that says, “Some of these poems are ridiculously funny and absurd, even when sad things are happening, because we need humor.” And I would have an ellipsis to say, “There’s some blanks, so that you, reader, have some agency.” Not a mistake; it’s blank so that you can figure out how you feel about a thing, if you were in the situation. And lastly, I would have a long list of writers that I would thank immensely just for having conversations with me, just for sharing their work with me. I just don’t think we lift each other up enough. I would spend pages and pages on conversations and quotes so that other people could see and read those things. Another part of the key would say, “The writer is imperfect, and I am okay with that.” I used to believe that to be a writer you should be striving for perfection, but I don’t. I’m okay with the reader watching me fall.

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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, Assistant Director of the Furious Flower Poetry Center, and Associate Professor of English at James Madison University. She is the author of Difficult Fruit (Peepal Tree Press, 2014) and Honeyfish, which won the Green Rose Prize from New Issues Press and is forthcoming in April 2019.

by Lauren K. Alleyne

Without question, Yusef Komunyakaa is one of the luminaries of contemporary American poetry. His impressive career spans well over 40 years, during which he has deeply affected the literary landscape. Komunyakaa’s work is musical, muscular, and finely crafted. His is a poetics of witness — of clear-sighted, unflinching seeing — that compels readers to locate themselves solidly in the moment of the poem, whether it is detailing the ordinary movements of daily life, reentering the otherworld of mythology, or recounting the harrowing details of life in combat. In “Seeing and Re-seeing,” published in the 2005 special issue of Callaloo, poet Toi Derricotte writes of Komunyakaa’s work, “The most permanent thing about the voice is the language it leaves behind—images so real they are like ripe fruit in the mouth” (513).

The confluence of rhythm, form, and sensory detail in Komunyakaa’s poems works to pull the reader along a journey from which she returns transformed. Consider Komunyakaa’s most famous poem, “Facing It,” which opens thus:

My black face fades,
hiding inside the black granite.
I said I wouldn’t
dammit: No tears.
I’m stone. I’m flesh.

The consonance, assonance, and alliteration of the poem’s first line begin its music — the reader fading into the sonic allure of the poem, as squarely inside it as the speaker is inside the monument. The poem’s sounds pull us even deeper in, even as it expresses resistance; the subtle rhymes of “granite,” “wouldn’t,” and “dammit,” and the domino of “t” sounds end abruptly in the word “stone,” at which point the poem surrenders — “I’m flesh.” The poem’s formal and sonic maneuvers work to completely immerse the reader into its world of doubling: we, too, are both “stone” and “flesh”; we are both the “I” and ourselves.

Komunyakaa’s “Heavy Metal Soliloquy” begins with a rapid sequence of images, the poem quickly overwhelming the reader with visual, tactile, and sonic sensations, which work in a similar fashion:

After a nightlong white-hot hellfire
Of blue steel, we rolled into Baghdad,
Plugged into government-issued earphones
Hearing hard rock. The drum machines
& revved-up guitars roared in our heads.
All their gods were crawling on all fours.

Here, we see another key characteristic of Komunyakaa’s — the poem’s turn from one reality and way of seeing to another. The first five lines of this excerpt work within the register of the literal, even in their more poetic moments (e.g., “white-hot hellfire”) but the use of the word “gods” in the sixth line changes the scope and reach of those previous lines, hinging the immediate to the eternal, the mortal to the divine. It is in moments like these that Komunyakaa’s writing brings to light myriad possibilities, offering us new ways of seeing and being ourselves in the order of things.

Yusef Komunyakaa was the subject of Furious Flower’s 2017 Summer Legacy Seminar. He spent a week among the participants — scholars, poets, educators — as they engaged with his work in a variety of ways. What follows is a transcript of the public conversation we had at that event, which has been organized and edited for clarity.

I’m very excited to be having this conversation with you, Yusef. I wanted to do it publicly because we all are scholars, we’re fans, we’re all very excited to be here [at Furious Flower’s 2017 Summer Legacy Seminar], but tell me about your experience here this week: What’s it been like to be the subject instead of the writer?

Especially the shy poet! (Laughs.) It has been really informative because one sits in a place doing what one has to do, but at the same time it’s interesting to see all these in- depth analyses, hear these in-depth analyses and realize what one does is also public. So it’s been great.

We’ve been talking a lot about your form and taking apart really meticulously form in books like Taboo and Talking Dirty to the Gods. But I’ve also read places where you say you write on fragments of envelopes and snatches of things — small spaces. Walk us through that making that you do, which comes from these snatches to the worlds within those poems. What’s that movement like from the fragment to the completed, formal, structured whole?

Well, usually the fragment is really a distilled moment, and it has to do with the music in the phrase or an image — usually image, because I think I probably wanted to be a painter earlier on. The image works for me in a unique way because the mind functions almost as if a hidden camera is in the psyche. What I mean by that is that I want to be able to almost dance to the images I create, because languages are the first music, and the body is a great amplifier: I feel the poem. And these moments, these fragments, when I actually sit down, those pieces converge and flow together to make or create a more complete, whole reality. So it’s not like painting with numbers or anything like that, you know. (Laughs.) But the poem is a symbol; it’s “a made thing,” to go back to Williams. But also going back even farther in my own time or reality, because my father was a carpenter — a finishing carpenter — and I’d be really excited early on when he would cut a board and it would just slide into place. It was perfect symmetry: it made perfect sense even though he had to measure it a number of times. So that’s been my process.

There are other poems, though, that are complete when I start writing them, especially in Talking Dirty to the Gods. I think it had a lot to do with the form, the illusion of symmetry, the four quatrains. Sometimes I would walk to work and assemble the poem in my head — with the line breaks and all of that — and when I got to the office I just wrote it down. But I think it had something to do with the form. Other poems that that are longer, more … not fragmented, but … Hmm, let’s say this: it’s almost like the musician assembling a song. I would like to think of it that way; perhaps it’s an illusion on my part (laughs), but I would like to think of it that way.

What I mean by that is that I want to be able to almost dance to the images I create, because languages are the first music, and the body is a great amplifier: I feel the poem.

You’ve talked a lot about the image, and you’ve written a lot about the image: it’s really essential and it’s central. You’ve also given us, over the years, amazing images of war and some really difficult and violent moments. I’m curious: Can the image do violence? Is there a line or a negotiation you have to wrestle with as a writer who’s creating a precise image of violence? Is there a risk of also enacting that violence or is that the goal? Is there a struggle of the ethics and the aesthetics of that?

The poet is not a journalist, a reporter. What has penetrated one’s psyche one delivers to the page. It’s a process, a negotiation, and if it’s a violent image, it’s a violent image. What’s interesting as I go through the poems and look at the poems is this: since I’ve internalized elements of violence (let’s face it we all do), there’s also the other side of that. There’s the opposite of that [violence] and those things can live side by side. I think that’s what’s happening. If I look at the poems, there are images of nature, there are images that come out of the composite of what one has taken in, and some of those things are beautiful and some of those things are outrageously violent. But I think it has a lot to do with where I grew up and how I grew up. I was very close to nature from the onset. It’s interesting to look at, say for instance, a jewel wasp. Just the idea of the jewel wasp: how it can sting a cockroach and plant an egg, and the roach is eaten from inside? There’s something very violent about that. Nature is that way, isn’t it? It’s not just the human. Nature itself is violent, so it’s not that we celebrate that, but that we respect it.

You wrote, too, that the making of art changes the creator, and I love that. How has writing and art-making changed you? What have you seen in yourself differently?

I suppose growing up in Louisiana, going out into the environment when I [was] six, you know, discovering things I didn’t know, that in a way was a rehearsal for becoming a poet. I think that’s what’s happening. I didn’t know it at the time, you know, looking at things, discovering things, what have you. I realize that in doing that — this is much later — in retrospect, I realized that in taking this venture out into nature, trying to understand things, not purposely but just accidentally, perhaps I was being changed. And much later writing on the page — I write everything in long hand — just the motion of the pen across the paper, that is an action, and it has everything to do with the whole evolution of the human brain, and the dexterity of the hand and what have you. So in doing that I realize that, yes, I’m being changed by the motion of the instrument. We are very complex organisms and we are changed by stimuli: what we come in contact with, what we do, how we see, the spirit of the moment, but also something deeper than that — the complexity of being human.

And that comes a little bit more alive in the act of writing.

Yes.

I’m curious now about the poem as a finished thing. You’ve talked about the making, the inspiration, the changing. But as one changes and goes back to the poem, it’s a different interaction: how do you know when a poem is done?

It’s a rather intense negotiation. One reason I say this is I haven’t always been totally aware of this. (Laughs.) But, when I was in graduate school I took a class with Howard Moss, who was editor of The New Yorker at the time. And I said, “How many poems do you receive?” He said, “Oh, maybe, oh, 2,000 a week.” And I said, “How do you get through all of those?” and he said, “Oh, well, we don’t.” So I said, “What do you mean?” He said, “Well, sometimes it’s just reading the first few lines.” So the entry of the poem is important. But I took one step farther; I said, how does a poem end? And that is also a process of negotiation. Initially, I write everything down. In revising, I never add, okay? Sometimes, I edit from the bottom of the poem. And the reason for that is that often we have just who we are; we want to make sure the reader receives everything, gets the poem, when in fact the most provocative, truest essence of the poem, we have written past. So that’s what happening — it’s that process of negotiation. But even I’ve written poems that have been published, and I’ve gone back and circled phrases, words, you know? It’s an ongoing process.

We are very complex organisms, and we are changed by stimuli: what we come in contact with, what we do, how we see, the spirit of the moment, but also something deeper than that — the complexity of being human.

You mentioned your teacher, and you’ve written and talked about [Robert] Hayden, [James] Baldwin, [Gwendolyn] Brooks — lots of masters who have really influenced you. Are younger and contemporary writers influencing your work? Are they changing or influencing how you see poetry or write poetry? Who’s exciting you?

Well, I think that’s always present, being in the world. Just being in the world — who we are — we’re taking everything in. And yes, there are voices out there: some of my students, you know, some of their images, they’re rather instructive. The musicality of certain poets doing something different than I’m doing: that is instructive as well. It’s how we live in the world. The spirit of living is important. I’ve been teaching for a very long time now, and there are people doing all kinds of things out there; there are some examples right here, right? Right, Ed? (Laughs, gesturing to poet and former student Ed Pavlic.)

What’s your favorite way or what’s a favorite entry for teaching poetry, and who are some poets you find yourself teaching often?

I try to go across the map. Okay, there are certain writers who seem to always be there. I’m just listing off a couple of those: Robert Hayden is usually there. A poet such as Elizabeth Bishop, she’s usually there. Muriel Rukeyser — and that’s a voice lots of us may not even be aware of, but she is always there, I think. We can go on and on talking about her, really, because I think she’s such an instrumental voice for American poetry. Gwendolyn Brooks is there, especially the first poems. [Amiri] Baraka, especially the first poems. And we can go across the map: translations. [Czeslaw] Milosz is so important. [George] Herbert is so important to me.

I teach a craft course, and it’s really a literature course, and throughout the semester we cover between 12 and 15 substantial books. I’m talking about books, like (gestures to imply thickness), okay? A good example is the last craft course I taught — spring — where the sacred and the profane converge, that was the idea of the course. Starting off with [Gaston] Bachelard’s Poetics of Space and The Psychoanalysis of Fire, coming up to contemporary voices. (I like to surprise myself. I don’t like teaching over and over again the same books, okay? That’s one thing. I don’t like teaching from yellow notepads, you know?) I used to teach the history of African American poetry; we start in 1746 — “Bars Fight” up to contemporary; usually in two semesters from 1746 up to the Harlem Renaissance, then the Harlem Renaissance up to contemporary, so two segments.

Speaking of the sacred and the profane, I know you were raised in a Christian household and have said the music of the South, the rhythms of that upbringing, affected you. God, or at least the idea of God, appears often in your work — overtly, elusively, indirectly, and so I’m really interested in what role the sacred/the divine/the holy — i.e., the idea of God — plays in your writing. How does God feature in your poetics?

God? Okay, okay, I suppose God does appear … (Laughs.) Well there’s a moment when I read as a teenager … I read the Bible through, came back to it again and read it through

Hold on. What version?

King James.

Phew! Okay!

Yes, King James! So I came back to it and since then I’ve read various translations. One of my close friends, Willis Barnstone, has translated the Bible a number of ways, even located the poetry within the context of the Bible. After reading the Bible the second time, I realized I had great questions. I had great questions, okay? (Laughs.) And those questions are still alive in my psyche. Because what was happening around me in the segregated South: it wasn’t lining up, you know? It didn’t make any sense, because I felt like, okay, if one risked walking into a certain kind of church on Sunday morning, there would have been great violence delivered. Okay? That did not work in my psyche. And the other thing I began to look at: wherever Christ appeared in the context of the Bible became an emotional and psychological equation for the socialism. So I saw Christ as a socialist. And that is something I held onto.

I want you to talk a little bit about your relationship to translations: You’ve been translated. Do you translate, and what value do you find in that process? Who are your favorite poets in translation?

One of the favorite poets for me of course is [Pablo] Neruda. Neruda is so important as a world poet. [Federico] Lorca is important. A poet such as Milosz is important. And it’s interesting with Milosz, because I’d come across an image — I think it’s “A Poor Christian [Looks at] the Ghetto,” that particular poem — and there’s an image of a mole with a lantern underground. I had never come across an image quite like that, so that was a very informative image for me. I think it colored a lot of … not necessarily images in my work, but permission — permission to let the brain do what it does best, and that is imagination, going back to Phillis Wheatley’s idea of — her poem “On Imagination” — mental optics. So a poet such as Herbert is so important because of his facility with philosophy. And there are other voices out there, of course, [François] Villon. In Galway Kinnell’s translation of Villon, there’s a line: “I will my bones to the dice-maker.” I said, “Where did that come from?” (Laughs.) So all these things become a composite within one’s psyche, and it is something to not work against but to beckon to. And it gave me permission not to over question the images that came out of my psyche, to embrace them.

It also makes me think of that phrase you say, “Language is first music,” because the music that will arise in another language is different than our music, but then it can influence our music and our images, as you say. Absolutely.

Yes. I was working with a young Vietnamese poet, and he’s a very interesting poet for a simple reason. This was in 1990, that I came in direct contact with him, in Hanoi. He had gone to school in Cuba, and my question to him was Who are the poets there who informed your work? And of course, you know, the first person he said actually wasn’t a Cuban poet: Neruda! And looking at his work — I began to work with him to translate passages of his work — he’s different from any of the other Vietnamese poets and I think it had to do with him spending time in Cuba. Vietnamese have rather interesting relationship to poetry and translation when I think about it because early on there were poetry battles between Chinese and Vietnamese poets! Duels going on with verse, which is a very informed way of dealing with chaos.

We’re informed by what we take in, and we’re also informed by what we push against. And I’m not about going out and using one’s body as a weapon; I’m talking about pushing against that which I think humans have always possessed, that question about mystery.

Speaking of chaos, we are in very chaotic times — nationally and globally, certainly — and we’re wrestling with the complexity of language in a time of language reduction. How can language function? What’s its role? And what’s a poet’s role in times such as these?

It’s interesting because I don’t think of the poem as an emotional ad. What I mean by that is I don’t think the poet can fear the complexity of the language — that’s what he or she is working with. So the poem is not an emotional ad for a moment: going back to something that Gwendolyn Brooks had said, “Art is that which endures.” The poet who’s writing the poem has to be surprised, and that individual is surprised through language, and sometimes it’s the density of the language; it becomes an experience. I don’t think the poet should write down to the reader. There’s a place where they meet. I know for myself, reading poetry, there weren’t really the simple poems, because I like going back to a poem again and again. And sometimes even in writing a poem, I like to be able to say, “Damn, where’d that come from?” I already know; that’s a problem.

So is there a tension between art being the thing that “endures” and art being able to speak to present moment?

The poet isn’t a journalist. In speaking to the present moment, sometimes we speak to the present but we also speak to history and the future. I would like to think of it that way, where it’s not just written in a single moment, dealing with that moment as if I’m a journalist.

I saw a video clip of you saying racism is a land of mental illness. Can you talk a little bit more about that? And do you think there’s a treatment or cure?

Okay, I know the clip you’re talking about. Have I revised that? No. I still believe, yes, it’s a mental illness. And the reason is that you need one factor that can change the personality — I’m talking about on, not just an emotional level, but on a biological level of an individual. That is a mental, I don’t want to say illness; I want to say mental deficiency. That’s what I believe.

Bowen talks about fear, says it’s fear that drives the lynch mob out into the streets. We may be talking about the same thing in different degrees. I think it’s a dialogue — well it’s more than just a dialogue, but — we need to face up to what this is about. And we have to move through something in order to come to the other side of it. This is what I believe. You can’t go around it; you move through it to the other side of it, and perhaps you’ll change. Move through it, and you’re changed. I think it’s also taught: racism is taught. I’m not talking about the fact that one is singled out and tutored, but body language is the first thing. That’s how small children are often taught elements of racism. Children are great readers — they are amazing. And they’re being taught when they’re not aware and even the parents or the adults around them are not aware, by body language.

Going back to the war for a minute. How did that experience inform your use of language, and what did it tell you about social identity?

Going to Vietnam was very instructive, but I suppose I came to war very early. I write about this: there’s a preface to an anthology entitled Inheriting the War where I write about the fact that I’m 6 or 7 and my great uncle, who had been to World War I. He defined it as “on a barrel detail,” which was a strange way of defining World War I and his experience. But then he told me in a graphic way what that meant. There is so much trench warfare, you know, in World War I, there were so many soldiers getting killed that the only thing they could do was bury them there, and then come back and exhume the bodies. And that’s what he was doing. It was a horrific description of war. You have two dog tags, right? Put one in the mouth of the corpse and one in a bag. That was very … well, to carry around that image, I think, was an anti-war statement. The other thing he said was that the only thing he had been taught was to kill, to drink, and gamble.

So bring that back to identity and to language.

Well, I know the history of Blacks fighting in wars. My uncle, I think, fought under the French flag. When I got to Vietnam, I had all this in my head, you know? I wasn’t afraid of the landscape, and consequently when I saw the people often working in the rice paddies and what have you, I said, “Oh, these are peasants.” This same people I’d come from in so many ways in rural Louisiana. And yet I knew — I wasn’t insane — I knew that they could kill you, you know? There was a lot of tension there. Okay, for example, I refused to use those derogatory terms for the Vietnamese. And I would question people about them because I thought it paralleled other similar terms for African Americans — that kind of … you know, degradation. You have to degrade before you can kill. So in a certain sense, I identified with the Vietnamese, and yet I knew that I could get killed by those same individuals. And that’s a real trick inside the head to think about it in that way.

I don’t think the poet should write down to the reader. There’s a place where they meet.

In the rear, that’s where the problems exist between American soldiers. Not in the field, not on the LZs and what have you — you know, when they’re dependent on each other to fend off the enemy — but it was in the rear when they were drinking and trying to forget the war and elements of the war. But mainly when they’re drinking. Then the real American shows up again. That was real problematic. The Vietnamese knew that demarcation, they knew what was happening in the American psyche when it came to race, and sometimes they expertly played up on it. The idea of Hanoi Hannah is a good example of that, right? Her voice penetrated. You know, “Hello GIs. Guess what’s happening back home?” You know, that gets your attention when you’re out in the middle of nowhere. I suppose she saw the parallels. Ho Chi Minh was very interesting because he knew the American constitution, but he also knew all the problems with America, so the Vietnamese were very informed when it came to race. 

What do you read besides poetry? And what other areas of interest do you have? What other disciplines are you interested in?

I suppose since high school I’ve been intensely involved with history. One reason is because I had a superb history teacher, Mrs. Green. And so that’s been going on for a very long time. Philosophy is important to me; when we think of philosophy we think of abstract thinking, but when it converges with nature it becomes doubly interesting for me. Well, I used to assign for students Scientific American, and the reason for that is, well, I didn’t initially know but finally I came up with this: it is where terror and beauty converge, align, and that makes sense to me. But also I think it has something to do with the images; there are some surprising images in science and also [surprising] realities, I think. And questions; questions are so important. I read a little bit of everything, really.

What are some daily practices around your writing process?

It’s a daily practice. Okay, let’s start this way. Okay. I used to think I could remember everything. I had that foolish belief I could remember everything, but no that’s not the case, especially recently. So I keep a pad of paper beside the bed and often I write at least a few lines before my feet touch the floor. I’m not one for remembering every dream, and yet I know that I’m dreaming because we’re all dreaming in some way. So sometimes that first image that I write down seems almost as if it came out of a dream. And yet it is instructive. I’m not talking about where I’m writing for hours at a time; if I’m writing for 30 minutes that’s fine, not sitting there where you’re writing for hours at a time. You don’t have to. I think this is probably true for everyone out here: writing is taking place even when we’re not writing. But we don’t have to be overly conscious of that. You know?

That’s a good segue into advice for emerging writers. What do you tell young writers they need to do or think about? What advice do you have for them?

Okay, my advice is to write every day and to read everything. And don’t worry about getting published. That’s the other thing: don’t worry about getting published. My first collections were small books. A good example of that is that Lost in the Bonewheel Factory. I was reading from that and a publisher, Chris Howell of Lynx House, said, have you sent that out anywhere? And I said, no I haven’t. So I worked on it a couple more months and then I sent it to him, but the main thing is I was interested in hearing the poems come alive. I used to have this straight man that I used to work with (laughs), a poet by the name of Adam Hammer, we were in graduate school together at Colorado State. Adam was so unusual for a simple reason; because when his father had worked on the Oakridge project, the atom bomb, Adam as a teenager had translated Rimbaud. He had gone to University of Massachusetts without a college degree for the graduate program. So he was very unusual, and we used to do these poetry readings together. He was really the quintessential surrealist, an American surrealist; that’s how his mind worked. And we used to play off of each other, which was an interesting experience because I was writing poetry entirely different than his, and so within our poetry reading you would see huge ranges taking place, you know? That was instructive, where the mind could travel.

So you’d advise young poets to expand the range of what they’re exposed to?

Right, right. You don’t want to have 20 poets reading the same poem.

Looking back at this long illustrious career, what are you most proud of? What do you wish you’d known earlier? What do you know for sure? What are you still learning?

That’s a huge question! I suppose what I’m most proud of is that I realize that I have been informed by the place I grew up and it has given me a certain kind of tenacity. That’s what I’m most proud of.

For me, the poem — the new poem, the poem I’m working on — is the poem that I care the most about. Not that I work past poems or anything like that, because I’m constantly returning to poems, but I’ve been informed by the present. The way that I work is that I’m working on more than one collection of poems, side by side, and I move from those places and hopefully being surprised and sometimes fumbling on to something that I never thought I would write about. That’s very important to me — when I thought I would never write about something. When I didn’t even know I would write about it, you know? So one laughs and says, “What in the world? Where did that come from?” And sometimes when I’m working on a poem, I find myself working on another poem within the context of that poem, you know, so that’s important — to realize that sometimes we’re working on multiple things within the context of a given poem.

We’re informed by what we take in, and we’re also informed by what we push against. And I’m not about going out and using one’s body as a weapon; I’m talking about pushing against that which I think humans have always possessed, that question about mystery. That’s what makes us human I think, that we think of the world as mysterious, and consequently because we’re thinking about the world as mysterious it’s always beckoning to us.

That was, to use your favorite word, instructive! Thank you.

Thank you!

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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, Assistant Director of the Furious Flower Poetry Center, and Associate Professor of English at James Madison University. She is the author of Difficult Fruit (Peepal Tree Press, 2014) and Honeyfish, which won the Green Rose Prize from New Issues Press and is forthcoming in April 2019.

by Lauren K. Alleyne

Patricia Smith is a presence. Whether on the stage or on the page, her voice is powerful, sure, and unmistakable: it compels and captivates; it is insistent and it is urgent. Across the span of her long career as a wordsmith, Smith has deployed her voice as a vessel for empathy, pulling readers and listeners under its spell outside of themselves and into, for a moment, the internal landscape of others. From a skinhead to a Greek god, from hurricane Katrina to Lucky (the dog whose world Katrina destroys), from the mothers of murdered Black boys to the gun that brings their end, Smith “goes there,” delving with both compassion and insightfulness into the worlds of others and bringing their stories into the light. The first section of “Sagas of the Accidental Saint,” for example, runs through a litany in the voices of “the mothers of the lost” to whom the poem is dedicated:

that’s my son collapsed there, my son
crumpled there my son lying there
my son positioned there my daughter
repositioned there my daughter as
exhibit A there my daughter dumped
over there my son hidden away there
my son blue there my son dangling
there my son caged there my daughter
on the gurney there on the slab there
in the drawer there my daughter splayed
There my son locked down there my
son hanging there my son bleeding …

The poem dives into the soulscape of these stricken women with a starkness that is both bracing and heartbreaking.

Smith brings to bear all the tools of music in the crafting of her poetic voice, the auditory elements of her work implemented with an enviable deftness. This precision and sonic seamlessness both open the door to the difficult subjects that Smith embraces and also holds the reader within them. The poem transfixes. Then transforms.

The engine of Smith’s work, though, is its scope: her determination to tell the whole story means moments are connected to other moments, which are connected to other stories, which are linked to a history that otherwise might seem too distant to matter. The aforementioned section of “Sagas of the Accidental Saint,” concludes thus:

                        shot as prey shot as conquest shot as
                        solution shot as lesson shot as warning
                        shot as comeback shot as payback shot
                        for sport shot for history that’s my son
                        not being alive anymore there that’s my
                        child coming to rest one layer below
                        the surface of the
                        rest
                        of my life

 there

In these closing lines, the mothers’ exquisitely rendered grief becomes both microscope and telescope, making visible the way the past holds space in the present and the future, linking the interior and exterior worlds, and unveiling the tangled and multitudinous strands of this story. Smith’s is a formidable and essential voice, and one to which we should continue to pay close attention.

Patricia Smith is the author of ten books. She served as judge for the Gwendolyn Brooks Centennial Poetry Prize sponsored by the Furious Flower Poetry Center, and she spent an hour in the studio with me talking about her own story. This is an edited version of that conversation.

Tell me about the process of writing Incendiary Art. Where did this book begin?

It didn’t begin the way it ended up. I found a couple of news items about men who had drowned their young daughters, and I knew I was going to write about them. I wrote a poem, and then I started thinking about all the other ways that men can drown their daughters—emotional, psychological, things like that—and that goes back to when I was growing up: I remember the fathers who weren’t in the home but they were in the neighborhood. It was almost accepted that the father would be in the home for a while but then split, and I had so many friends who would point to their fathers on the street and say, “That’s my daddy over there!” I wondered what leads to this dysfunction where a man considers his blood kin so disposable. In both [news stories], the men had gotten angry at the mother and said, “Well, I know how to fix her, I’ll just kill …” and I’m like, “What?!” So initially it was going to be (and get this title, because this is the only time you’re going to hear it) “When Black Men Drown Their Daughters.” And then I thought “Yeah … I’m going to be Alice Walkered or something,” you know? And so I was writing a lot of poems, poems about, for example, that thing in the heartland where some fathers are “marrying” their young daughters and having them vow to be celibate—it’s terrible—and so then I thought maybe I should make it [the collection] all [about] fathers. And so for a long time I had that idea set. But then I felt myself straining—you sort of write it through, you write it out, and you go, “Oh, this is not enough for a book,” you know, and so I put that aside for a while.

I wondered what leads to this dysfunction where a man considers his blood kin so disposable.

Meanwhile, there was this drumbeat, this continuous drumbeat of these lives being lost, usually at the hands of the police. I always tell my students to look for the voice that they’re not hearing, so I said, “Wow, all those people have mothers.” And you see the mother twice: you see the mother at the beginning, in all the chaos where someone comes to her and says, you know, “your son is dead” or “your daughter is dead,” and then you see the mother again at the end when the person responsible for the death of her son or daughter is deemed not responsible, and more chaos, and then she’s gone. Okay, so you don’t know what the process is—how do you fill that hollow of having a child and then not having one? And then losing your child so publicly in some instances, too, and then having the child be railroaded and stereotyped in all kinds of ways. So I started with that. That was a little bit easier, because there were so many cases to work with, so I have the mother look at these different cases and say this is her child, this is her child, this is her child, and then I had to write the poems from her point of view. That kind of took over the book …

Now you might be wondering how I got to the title! That’s another thing. There are three movements to this book: there’s the drowned daughters, there’s the saga of the accidental saints (that’s the mothers), and then there’s incendiary art, which started after a Donald Trump rally while he was still running for president, and there’d been attacks on minorities who were coming in to the rallies. They interviewed this one man who had attacked one of the Black people at the rally, and he said, “You know, I sure would like to burn a Black man.” I was like, “What?!” And so it got me thinking about the role of fire in our lives. I thought about when I was growing up, the riots after the MLK assassination, how my whole neighborhood was just burnt to its bones, and it took years and years for it to come back. That, and then Tulsa, which a lot of people don’t know about, and the MOVE bombing in Philadelphia, and the Rodney King riots. I just decided that I wanted to go through—because I did hear someone else say, “Well, they [Black people] go burning their own neighborhoods down”—those two things, and I thought, “I need to stand in the center of the fire for a while and see …”.

I had a moment before I put the book together when I thought I should just take one of these things, and I felt kind of strange for having these three directions—and there aren’t many poems in the book that aren’t connected to one or more of those segments, so I had to kind of think back to what kind of books am I seeing, what do I want, and it kind of backfired in a way. I love the book, but it’s a very, very hard book for me to do a reading from simply because when you’re doing a reading, you’re measuring—you’re doing long poems, short poems, funny poems, form poems, free verse poems—and there’s no relief. There’s no pull up out of this book. And maybe if I’d thought about that a little bit more, I would have changed direction, but I’m pretty happy with how it turned out.

It’s a phenomenal book. You say there are three movements, but that doesn’t address the elegy, that final movement at the end of the book that pulls the arc out of that public space into a more personal space. How did that come to be?

Well, so there’s one poem that I don’t like, that I don’t think did what I wanted it to do. I added it at the last minute, and you know how it is, you look back at your book and think, “Why didn’t I revise?” It’s called “Sometimes,” and it’s basically about when Black folks kill their own. I was trying to have that kind of be a segue into the idea that “not-every-life-is-lost-at-the-hands-of-the-police/not-every-hand-is-lost-to-race.” I don’t think it’s effective, but that was meant to be the segue into the next section. I thought about that for a while, and even my editors were saying I had to make sure that that elegy, which is really long, contributed to the book. In a way, it probably should have been in my previous book, but my book before, which sparked the elegy, was out and about before I even thought about the poem. So … I’m not sure … I like it in the book. I’m just not sure its place in the book is cemented in the way that I would like it to be.

It’s interesting, though, because when I read it, what I read was this conflation of both the daughter and the father—the opposite of the drowning in one sense that happens earlier in the book; on the other hand, it’s also another drowning—in the grief. But then there’s also a collapsing of the mother and the daughter: you write, “the daughter dons the widow garb” and so, ultimately, there’s an intense connection between the father and daughter. So to me, that poem pulls all of the things together.

Well, it was kind of losing both my parents in a way. My mother is not an emotionally giving person. She’s a functional parent. She’s a comb your hair, take you to church, check your grades, whoop your butt, you know—she’s that parent. And so my father was the person I told everything to and poured everything out to and the one who, if I say something like, “I wanna be a writer,” he doesn’t say, “Only white people do that,” which is what my mother said, in a way trying to protect me, but my father saw that my future was not in being protected; it was in taking chances. So [when he died], everything just stopped. Everything just stopped. And still, to this day, my mother and I look at each other sometimes and think, “And you would be who?” She doesn’t really know me. She’s not the kind of person who would say, “Tell me about yourself,” or “Tell me about your passions,” so what I’m most passionate about in life, my mother doesn’t recognize. This means nothing to her. So it was like losing both my parents. It’s something I don’t think I’ve ever gotten over, but it’s also something that infuses the writing. My father was a born storyteller, so I hear his voice all the time. That elegy, I guess, is a move toward writing the poem, the my-father-is-gone poem. I’m not even sure that’s it yet. I’m not even sure that’s it. It doesn’t in any way encompass how important he was in my life. I’d do a whole book about him …

My best friend, the novelist Catherine Chung, has a theory that the book isn’t done until you write something that breaks you. Was there a poem in particular that just took it out of you to write?

It’s funny, because it’s not a very specific poem, it’s at the very end of the book, so I think it’s maybe an entry to another project or book or something, but it was one of the “Incendiary Art” poems—“Incendiary Art: The Body.” I think because it brings all that heat and motion and chaos and question back to the one person standing there, threatened and encouraged or broken or something, you know, and I didn’t realize when I wrote it that it was going to be that poem, but when I go back to the book it’s really difficult for me to read. I pulled it out a couple times, because when I do readings I will do an excerpt from “Accidental Saints” or maybe I’ll do the Emmett Till sonnets, but it’s hard to pull out two or three things, and say, “Oh I’m going to do a 30-minute reading,” and so in the quest for those single poems, I pulled that out and read it a couple times, and the second or third time, I went, “I can’t do that.” It opened up everything that had gone into the book. The same way that you end a poem thinking about what you want the reader to walk away with, I think, “I want the reader to be restless and troubled,” and I didn’t want to tie it up in a knot, and I don’t think that does that. There is some image from a movie, and it has something to do with the cosmos, where everything comes in to this tiny dot of light, and that’s the dot of light. That’s the poem that would probably push me into whatever my next project is.

You have ten books, and earlier, you talked about the connection between Shoulda Been Jimi Savannah and Incendiary Art, so do you revise into a new book from the previous book? Can you talk about the evolution from book to book, and what propels you from one project to another?

There are other things that tie into that. For starters, the fact that I got introduced to writing poetry by getting up on stage and doing it, so a lot of the revision or going back in to work is because I might pull something from my third book and do it in a reading and go, “Oh, I can change it.” I can change it when I’m doing a reading, though I can’t change the book. So instead of me thinking, “Well that book’s gone. It’s out,” I keep resurrecting things and throwing them into the mix; it keeps the poems fluid. Even where I go back and say, “I wish I had written that differently,” I can perform it differently; I can bring it back. And I’ve gone back into previous books and started pulling things out, and thought, “There’s no reason I shouldn’t be reading these things.”

My very first book happened because I was very visible, and there was somebody at a reading who was connected to a publisher who asked if I had a manuscript—which I did not, but I tell everyone if anyone asks you that question, say, “Yes, I do,” and then worry about it when you get home. And so it’s a very undisciplined book because I gathered everything I was reading on stage and stuff, and was like, “Here!” I didn’t know anything about craft or line breaks or anything. If you had snatched a sheet from me on stage, it would look like a block of prose, because I just wanted to get it down so I could read it; I didn’t care what it looked like. And when I would read something and breathe, I just threw a line break. And so that’s how the book came out. And I still love that book, because I was so young. And I think the first three books were kind of like that, although with the second book, which is Big Towns Big Talk, I was thinking music; I wanted to do music poems. I’m a music fanatic. And so I wanted to have a bluesy feel, which was also an excuse to keep me from paying attention to craft (you know, “I want it to feel like improvisation!” you know, yeah, whatever).

I got involved in slam, and my social circle was there, and then I realized that someone can hear a line or a poem or something that really connects with something that’s going on in their life, and they can be changed.

And then when I realized that people really listen, that it wasn’t a recreational exercise … I mean, I got involved in slam, and my social circle was there, and then I realized that someone can hear a line or a poem or something that really connects with something that’s going on in their life, and they can be changed. And so the book Close to Death was my first kind of admission that I was doing something socially that could be important, that I had a venue to tell a story or to address an issue that I didn’t really know was that powerful before, but I still think that the poems weren’t very disciplined. I was still getting a lot of attention for being a performer, and the books were nice, but they were kind of … a backdrop to that. And then I lost that publisher—they went out of business. I never sent a book out to anybody, you know, I’d just been in the right place at the right time, and so I did that, and then I won a contest that published a book, and then I was affiliated with Coffee House which is a real great press, and I talked to them about where I wanted to go.

Blood Dazzler was also my MFA thesis. So in that time I had really dedicated myself to learning craft, learning the language of prosody and learning who the important poets were, which I kinda think I knew, but … You know how we all have those conversations where you have no idea who people are talking about, and I said “yeah” a lot. I knew who the important poets were, but not who influenced them, who they influenced, and giving myself some sense of being part of that lineage somehow was really empowering. Then I felt the books had more of a back to them. I found out that when you put those things in your toolbox, you know, when you learn a lot about craft, then poems that had been just moving around on the page for years because I didn’t know what was wrong with them, it was because they were asking for something I didn’t know yet how to do. And so all of a sudden, it’s like, “That’s a sestina!” It’s so wonderful to have those things at your disposal and let the poem tell you what it needs and then say, yes, I have that now. So that was a real turning point for me.

I felt the shift happen around Blood Dazzler, so it’s interesting to hear you articulate it in this way.

It was a lot more confidence. I think the confidence shows even in that I took on telling a whole story in a book. Close to Death was not like that. Close to Death was like African American men in different phases of their lives—some in the south, some in the city—it wasn’t necessarily focused on violence or anything like that. But the thing about Blood Dazzler is there was a whole inner struggle about whether I had the right to write that book, you know, and the concern about appropriating people’s voices. But then I said, “Look, I think the poet’s job is to be a witness, and if I’m just going to be a witness to things that are right in front of me and accessible, then I don’t think I’m doing my work.” And it wasn’t a regional story; it was a human story. And there are a lot of people regionally who were doing work, and I thought, “Well, put our voices together, and you may get the entire story, but I shouldn’t back off because I don’t have any history in the Gulf region.”

And here’s this brief funny story. So Natasha Trethewey is a poet who does have a history in the region, and people had built up to me this whole thing that she’s really upset that you wrote this book and you’re not from there. I’m like, “Why would she be?” And there’s nothing there, but they’re building up this whole thing. Finally at this AWP [conference], I think, they set up an event where she and I were going to have a conversation with each other; people were signing up like it was going to be a cage match, like there was going to be a pit of Jell-O or something and we were gonna go at it—the Gulf region’s mine, arrgh! And so we’re sitting in these chairs, and I’m thinking, “Well, if it’s gonna come up, it’s gonna come up …” And we had this great discussion! She said, “No, I really wanted the viewpoint of somebody who wasn’t there,” and all that, and then we found out that what we did have in common was a murdered parent, and it just kinda came out in the conversation and I just thought, “You know, there are no stories a poet shouldn’t reach for.” There just aren’t.

I want to backtrack a bit and ask you to think about a question: what’s the line between exploitation and exploration of a subject? Especially around current events. You said you wrestled with it. If you had to say what the line is, if you had to articulate what that line might look like, or how you know if you’re stepping over that line as an artist …

I think the answer is: you have to make sure that you write the hell out of it. You can’t slack if you’re in territory that might be questionable. You really have to write it.

Well, I’ve been writing persona poems all my creative career, you know, but I don’t step in and say, “I know everything about what it is to be in this position.” I step in and I look around and say, “Okay, what’s accessible to me? What can I do?” So for example, okay, there’s this skinhead, and I don’t know how he became the way he was, so let me explore and see one possible way this might have happened, which then when I’m out of the persona, enriches who I am, not as a writer but as a person, you know. At least I think it does. I feel that it does.

With [Hurricane] Katrina, there was the poem [I wrote] about the 34 nursing home residents—my mother’s sister was in a nursing home for a long time, and the task of taking care of her was portioned out to a number of people in our family. I was probably in high school, about 16, and they’re like, “It’s your turn to sit with your aunt.” And she was not the formerly God-fearing aunt that I knew. I mean, she would curse like a sailor and throw things, and no one had given me any prep, and it was a very strange place to be. But I remember there were two things they did while I was there. When she was asleep, I would walk around and I would talk to the other residents, and there was always the one woman who would put on full makeup and sit around, and there was the ex-soldier with all his stories were about “the war.” The other thing was that when it got out of hand with my aunt, there was a button my her bed, and if I pushed it, somebody always came to help. When I saw the story about the residents in St. Bernard Parish, and the fact that the administrator, the person who’s supposed to be in charge, had left them and had said, “I’m sure that someone would come and get them,” all I could picture—and this is the hazard of being a poet—is the room is dark, the water is rising, and I could see people pushing the buttons and nothing happening. So that didn’t bring me into the story on a “I am Chicagoan and I’m going to write about something that happened in a place I am not familiar with” level; that brought me in on a human level that could have been moved anywhere. And the fact that we tend to—when it’s on the line—we tend to write off our elders a lot, that’s what pulled me into it.

I did not intend on writing a whole book! I really just wanted to stay in that story for a while, and I remember reading that poem somewhere—and I’m very aware of my audience when I’m reading. That’s one thing I brought over from slamming, that if there’s not enough energy in the room, you change the poem that you’re reading; if there’s too much energy, you want to change the energy in the room, you could pull it down—but there’s a woman right in the front row of the audience and she’s looking at the clock, and she’s looking at her watch, and she’s fidgeting and I’m, like, “Hmmm.” By that time I had just become aware that there might be some people from the Gulf region who’d say that the work didn’t feel true, because I didn’t have anything regional in the poem, so I asked her afterward. I said, “I noticed you were a little uncomfortable, so I wonder if you could tell me about that,” and she was like, “Well, they had Mardi Gras this year …” and I was like, “Wow!” I realized there were a lot of people who just wanted it to be over. They didn’t want to see any more shots of people being lifted in baskets; they didn’t want to hear any more tales of disaster. I think that’s around the time that Monica Lewinsky said, “Hey, I still have the dress,” and everybody went “Whoop! They’ll be fine.” [Turns her face away.] And like [that woman in the audience], they see one building go up and they say, “Wow, New Orleans is fine now.” And that pushed me. I realized I’d been internalizing a lot of things I’d seen, and that some invisible thing had been stopping me from writing, and then I said, “Okay. I’ll do my readings, but before I do my reading about the nursing home resident, I’ll have three to four Katrina poems to say, ‘Let’s take your mind back for a while, know that this is still going on.’ ”

I think the answer is: you have to make sure that you write the hell out of it. You can’t slack if you’re in territory that might be questionable. You really have to write it. And that’s why I was so happy that [writing Blood Dazzler] coincided with me getting a little bit more confident about form and saying, “I can’t think of a form for this poem so let me hold on to it for a while, and maybe it’s something I’d never done before.” It was really important to me that the poems be sound. So if you don’t have a particular interest in the story—and maybe everybody didn’t—that they could appreciate them as poems. I think I’m probably proudest of that book. It represented for me a real departure from territory that I was comfortable with.

I want to backtrack to your MFA, because I feel like you’ve referenced it as parallel to Blood Dazzler—what was challenging, surprising, fun about that process for you?

I didn’t go in, as so many people do, looking for the program to give me a voice. I know sometimes it’s like, “I’m going to use this program to find out who I am.” I knew I could hone my voice, I could do other things with my voice, and I wanted a program to alert me to those possibilities. But that thing that I talked about before, about having some sense of how I fit in the canon and where, that was the most important thing for me. I was the person in the front row, my arm shooting up all the time, because we have a way of talking like people already know everything, especially in the MFA, like, “Well we’re all here because we’re so well-versed in all the poetic everything, you know.” So they would mention names and I’d go, “I’m sorry, can you give me a list of books so I can become familiar with this poet that we’re talking about as though I’m already familiar with them?” I didn’t care what people thought. I just wanted to leave with stuff that I feel like I had missed out on, you know. I was in a workshop on non-western forms, and I was like, “Yes! I can do this and this,” and then maybe we’d concentrate on villanelles and do things like that. Somebody tried to get me to love Emily Dickinson, and I don’t. And what was really funny about it is she was almost moved to tears because I was doing the reading and it was fine, but I just didn’t relate, you know, and so she was like, “But you’re a woman. Can’t you see?” And I just looked at her. It was fantastic. “You know what I really love? I love how passionate you are about this.” And that’s what made me want to read more Emily Dickinson, not that you say that there’s some weird connection that I’m missing that you want, that you need me to get, because that’s not going to happen, I could tell you. “I’ve read enough to know it’s not going to happen, but anybody who’s as passionate about something as you are,” I said, I love that you love her that much.”

And there were the discussions where you could turn to anyone and just start talking about writing, and it wasn’t like when you got home and it’s like, “Oh, you did that nice, cute poetry thing.” So I felt that it was really just time for me, and I was very greedy and very possessive of my time there. Of course, there’s always more that you can learn, but I think that what I did there really changed me as a poet. It just opened up so many other doors. I was able to look at poems that I loved and that I went to again and again and again, not knowing why, and it’s because the poet had done something technically to help heighten my response to the poem, but I couldn’t see it. I could feel it, but I didn’t see it. Now I can look at a poem and go, “Ummmm! I see how you did that! I see how you shifted that rhyme scheme!” I mean, even poets that I’ve loved for a long time, like I’ve loved Gwendolyn Brooks, but when you really look at the technical things she did in her poems … So it opened that up for me. It gave me—and I don’t even think this was a primary thing—it gave me a legitimacy in a way. I wanted to teach, and people were asking me to teach, but for short stints—come here for a month or something—and I thought, “What am I going to do so that I am surrounded by my art all the time? So that if I’m not writing, I’m talking to other people who want to write?” And I knew I needed to have the degree to have that flexibility, that there’d be more places that I could go to. I miss it. I kinda wish that I could just take another couple years and just do it all over again! And you can, of course, do it on your own, you can do your reading, but you don’t, right? Because life. Because deadlines. Because money. You can do it on your own, but to be in that place, where everybody kinda looks at each other once in a while and smiles—and I’m sure a lot of people don’t have this experience—but it was so wonderful already having the sense of self and saying, “I want to see how much more that can be, and you guys are going to show me!”

You write across multiple genres: what’s that like? How do you know when something’s a poem versus an essay? What do you take with you into other genres, or what do you have to leave behind?

I realized that a lot of what I know about characterization or the arc of a story comes from poetry because, if you look at it, a good poem should include an entire story in a really tight and controlled space, so every single word has to do work. When you’re cutting, you’re cutting all that stuff—“You’re not in service to me, word! Away with you!”

First of all poetry is at the root of all of it. I have a thing when I have to do a speech or something (and I’m terrified of public speaking when it’s not a reading, like, you know, a keynote address or something): I always, always, write a short poem to lead in to the thing, because it grounds me. It’s the same way going into other genres. When I wrote my first major short story, it was about a woman who was psychologically abused by her teenage son. When she went for help, she met a woman who did a poetry therapy thing, and she would go off on the days that she had it really rough, and she was keeping a notebook of poems, and that got me into the story. I realized that a lot of what I know about characterization or the arc of a story comes from poetry because, if you look at it, a good poem should include an entire story in a really tight and controlled space, so every single word has to do work. When you’re cutting, you’re cutting all that stuff—“You’re not in service to me, word! Away with you!” And so, when I’m allowed the privilege of opening one of those stories up and I have space and I can really concentrate on the characterization or the setting or things like that, poetic language comes into view. And I was surprised, because there’s always these articles that are like “10 Ways to Write a Short Story,” and so I thought there would be some technical aspect of it that I’d have to study up on, but I just did a story. And I love story. That’s what leads me to poems. A really good story is like … really? Are you kidding? And you find maybe a little snapshot of that story and you write a poem, but that doesn’t mean the whole story leaves you. So I take poetic sensibility into the story, and I let that get me through. I love describing people. I love describing characters.

And about the essay thing—it’s funny you should say that—I have this poem that’s actually in Jimi Savannah about my mother, and it’s called “Annie Pearl Upward,” and it was a little longer before, and I sent it out— I can’t remember to what magazine—and then I get this note that says, “We’ve chosen this for The Best American Essays,” and I go, “Wow. Wow! Okay!” So when I’m teaching creative non-fiction and we’re talking about lyric essays, I’m blurring that line all the time about what you can do and the chances you can take and the forms that you can write in, and sometimes prose poetry is moving its way in there and stuff. So when someone says so now write an essay, I immediately—remember when I told you that that if you first snatched a paper from me when I was first reading on stage, it’d just be this block?—I actually will write poems out and put an essay stamp on them. Folks are like, “Thanks for the essay,” and I say, “You’re welcome.” I don’t think there’s anything I wouldn’t try to write because the grounding, the poetic grounding, is so strong. I don’t think a lot of poets who say, “Well yeah, I can do poetry, but I can’t write a short story,” or “I would never try a novel.” No, no, no, no, no!

So many words!

I know it’s a lot of words, but it’s only a few at a time. And then I started reading novels that weren’t necessarily … they were more like snapshots in the life of someone. They were more like interconnected short stories, but disparate, and so the narrative arc goes through the stories, so your character starts here and ends here, but you don’t have to. The thing I hate is the pesky part when you have the storyboards and whatnot. I can’t do that.

I’m blurring that line all the time about what you can do and the chances you can take and the forms that you can write in…

What are you working on right now?

I’m working on a project now that comes out of Incendiary Art, out of the “Accidental Saints” suite with the mothers. I was thinking, once everything’s over—and this came to me so clearly—she wakes up one morning and she’s got to go to the laundromat, and she hasn’t had to go to the laundromat since that happened. Or she has to go to church. Or she is lonely and she meets a man and she makes love again for the first time. And how nothing she does with the rest of her life can not be connected to her child. And so I’m starting to write a series of short stories and all the short stories have exactly the same beginning. It either comes in dreams or it’s something she’s thinking back on, and it’s the time when someone comes to the door and says … and sometimes they ring the door of a big house, sometimes they’re downstairs knocking because there’s no doorbell and the elevator doesn’t work. So it’s not the same woman all the time, but it’s the same woman in a way. And then she goes and there’s a story about the door and how this woman reacts and then there’s a story how she goes back to church or she goes to the local club to listen to the blues, and I dunno if it’s going to work. I thought about it. I put it on the shelf. I thought about it again, and I say that if something keeps coming back to me that way, that’s the thing I need to be writing …

I love collaborations, and so I have—my husband and I have—this huge collection of 19th century photos. We have cabinet cards and daguerreotypes and tintypes and things, so much so that we have no place to store them. We’ll probably wind up leaving them with someone who can store them: it’s a really large collection of African American photos. So I had proposed for a grant that I would do a series of dramatic monologues and kind of have an “Our Town” kind of thing with these photos, and have a book with these photos. And that’s a thing that draws on what I’ve learned about characterization. At first it was just gonna be photo-poem, photo-poem, but then I thought, no. Let’s have them connect somehow and have a focal point—a woman who’s a focal point—and have these other things that are written around her and these other voices around her. And if you hear me talk about any other projects besides the two I’ve just mentioned to you, stop me, because I really need to get this stuff done!

You’re a teacher now, what is the thing you try to have your students leave your class with? What’s the thing you try to gift them most earnestly?

Everyone has a passion. Everyone’s craving something. It might be something simple. It might be I need to know where I’m sleeping tonight, or it could be I want to win a Pulitzer Prize, but for a lot of my students, they don’t reach, they don’t reach far enough, their dreams are so small, it’s like they’ve kind of figured out I’m just going to dream about what I’m sure I can attain, you know. So I try to introduce them to so many different stories and different ways of telling them. Like okay, we’re going to do the book, and now we’re going to the Nuyorican Poets Cafe, where you could see the guy who was waiting out in line with you come on stage and do something, and then he’s going to disappear, but you’re going to come to class the next week, and you’re going to be full of his story. Okay. So the story doesn’t have to be spectacular, you just have to tell it in a way that it’s unforgettable … so stories about people braiding hair, make me see it. One thing that has happened, and I think this is what is kind of driving me, they go, they leave, and then they show up a year two years later at a reading or someplace, and they’re like, I never forgot what you said about … so I stopped expecting the immediate payoff of in a classroom where they’re working for As.

It’s a blind faith thing in a lot of ways. I think just showing them how excited I am about what I do, and that I’m a working writer, I’m not somebody who’s looking back at the good old days, and saying “Oh, when I was …” so it makes it more immediate for them. And then to take them to see working writers who are close to them in age, who aren’t necessarily … you know, this is not a money-making enterprise. You have to really love something about it, not just the audience, because the audience is fickle. And then with each student, you kind of have to figure out what’s going to draw that particular student in. And that’s kind of like most of the work.

Who is in your poetic pantheon? Who are the writers you really feel led you to poetry, taught you how to write, move you still?

I used to have a list of people that I’d say when asked that question. And I realized I made up the list and it wasn’t the real list, and I was saying what the person who was interviewing me probably wanted to hear or what the school where I was would like me to say.

I want the true list.

Gwendolyn Brooks is on the true list. I’ve never seen anyone be able to … not tweak language, but just own it. I want to write about simple things in the way that you will not forget. I said one time in an interview that my goal was to be thought of the way Gwen Brooks was thought of, and it felt like such a travesty coming out of my mouth, but I really aspire to that level of artistry. Not adulation or anything, but just that … her stamp was on everything: you could read something that she wrote and know it’s her without her name being on it, and that’s like the ultimate to me. Stephen Dobyns: that’s my guilty (white male) pleasure. When I was just trying to surround myself with books (I was still on slam and doing that) I used to volunteer at bookstores, and there was one bookstore in Chicago where I had a lot of downtime, so I’d go to the poetry section and I’d start pulling down books. And I didn’t know who I was supposed to be reading, so I wasn’t going through picking out books. I was just like, “Let’s see,” and I’d read like the first three and just go no, yes, no, trying to kind of figure out what is that I love and why. And there was a book he wrote called Cemetery Nights, and I pulled it down and had no idea who it was. Stephen writes about those little tiny horrors—the things that happen in our lives that we rush to pave over and think, “Thank God that thing is over! I never have to look at that again!” But once you become a poet and you’re a true poet and you look over your shoulder, that pavement you think you buried something under is going like this [undulating motion]; you cannot say that you’re a poet unless you unearth those stories and see where they lead you. He was the first one that—I would just sometimes be so disturbed by things that he’d choose to write about because they were just so … It was like taking me and just being like “Look!” and because of the way he did it, I couldn’t turn away from it. And so that gave me permission: You can write about that stuff? You can go that deep? And he remains that for me. It’s sort of like your first lover, your first poet who really says this is something that I want to do with my life as opposed to something this is something I do in my spare time. And when you start to see people who have six or seven books and you go they’ve committed to this, this is what they do, you know. He was one of those first people.

I have a real affection, a real debt to the people who pump gas, school secretaries, mothers, drunks, ex-cons, who felt that they had a story that was pushing them hard enough to come and stand up in a room full of strangers, you know, and maybe come back. 

And something I’ve realized lately is when I was—I’m originally from Chicago—so when I was going out and reading at a bunch of open mics and features and things like that, there were about six places every night you could read poetry. So we used to just write a poem, you’d read here, and then the whole group would just head on over to another place and you’d hear everybody’s poems. So I have a real affection, a real debt to the people who pump gas, school secretaries, mothers, drunks, ex-cons, who felt that they had a story that was pushing them hard enough to come and stand up in a room full of strangers, you know, and maybe come back. For a lot of them, that was their first real community. I can remember lines and poems from people twenty years ago. Never saw them again. They may have never come back, but the risk involved in being that naked and need[ing] to say your life out loud that way, I think that those people have probably pushed me more than anybody that I can open a book and read. I miss that. I love when you’re doing a reading and you see somebody’s eyes go, “I could! That’s happened to me, and I just didn’t know there was a way to do it.” I would love to see people run out of the reading with pens going, “Whaaaaaa!” You know? They’re more important, and I think I need to start saying that more. Because I want—I hate the phrase “ordinary people”—but I want people to see what’s accessible, what they can do, what they can reach, and how it can help them move from day to day. And maybe it turns into something, or maybe it doesn’t, but that story lasts because I still remember it.

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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, Assistant Director of the Furious Flower Poetry Center, and Associate Professor of English at James Madison University. She is the author of Difficult Fruit (Peepal Tree Press, 2014)

by Lauren K. Alleyne

Love—a radical, inclusive, and transformative love—undergirds the work of poet Danez Smith. In the world of Smith’s poems, love is abundant: these poems love Black people, queer people, God, kin and self and strangers alike. These poems decenter through love, erasing margins and reconfiguring the world as a space in which the marginalized body is worthy, the dismissed spirit is honored.  They imagine lovingly. They critique lovingly. They mourn and celebrate and insist lovingly.

Within this powerful framework, Smith’s poems offer a rigorous exploration of the systems we inhabit that corrupt love, that work instead through fear, oppression and division. Which is to say, there is no fluff here. Love is claimed as a powerful ally against injustice, a force harnessed in service of a greater good. There is love enough, these poems argue, to make a new world if we choose to, and they proceed to do just that. “summer somewhere,” the opening poem to Smith’s newly released collection Don’t Call Us Dead (Graywolf Press, 2017), for example, posits a radical counter-reality that sees, nurtures and loves killed Black boys in a heaven where they get to experience what it’s like to “live/on land who loves [them] back.” In this way, the poems constantly hold before us the chasm between the possibility of actualized love and the realities we inhabit:

please, don’t call
us dead, call us alive someplace better.

we say our own names when we pray.
we go out for sweets & come back.

The poems also show the difficulty of loving in the world as it exists. We are flawed, human, and fall short of our own possibilities.  “& even the black guy’s profile reads  sorry no black guys”  shows how we have all been diminished in our capacity to love both ourselves and each other, and demonstrates a compassionate resistance: “if no one has told you, you are beautiful & lovable & black & enough & so—you pretty you—am i.”

Love, does, however, have its limits. In “dear white america,” Smith writes, “i tried to love you but you spent my brother’s funeral making plans for brunch, talking too loud next to his bones.” Excising hate, willful apathy and destructive blindness is also part of the work of love these poems manifest. Ultimately, Smith’s work serves as a call to love and act courageously, to expand our capacity for compassion and care, and to “Let ruin end here.”

In the studio at James Madison University, I spoke with Smith about how poetry can be a tool in the work of making better our imperfect yet wonderful world.

Smith is the author of [insert] Boy (YesYes Books, 2014), which won the 2014 Lambda Literary Award; the chapbook, Black Movie (Button Poetry, 2015); and Don’t Call Us Dead (Graywolf Press, 2017), which is currently a National Book Award Finalist.

Tell me about how you came to poetry.

So I started writing the earliest things that I could call poems around the eighth grade. I had this notebook that I covered in duct tape, and it said “Danez’s Thoughts & Ideas” in a Sharpie on it. And so there were poem-ish things that I didn’t know to call poems, words, maybe diary entries. There were also drawings and writings about my theories on time and how the universe worked and other weird stuff, and then extremely horrible misogynistic rap—very, very bad raps that were just like complete lies about all the women I didn’t want and cars I didn’t have—that I was trying to emulate from all my favorite rappers.

And then in ninth grade, my school, Minnesota Central High School, had a very storied social justice based theater program that I got involved in through my teacher Jan Mandell. The whole purpose of the class was to get us to think about social justice through the lens of theater. We wrote our own plays. We didn’t worry about learning scripts or all that, and part of writing our own plays and these community theater pieces was writing monologues. But they weren’t monologues per se because we didn’t necessarily have characters; instead everybody was talking about whatever social justice issues we decided we needed to address.

And then Paul Florez and Rafael Casal, these two poets who were based in the Bay Area at the time, came to our high school through Youth Speaks and Brave New Voices and performed for us, and it was amazing. We all looked at each other because we hadn’t realized that what we’d been writing as monologues were actually poems. They [Flores and Casal] were doing a better version of what we’d been doing. This was also the same time that Def Poetry was on HBO, bringing spoken word into the national consciousness again, and for me, for a long time, poetry had been dead. I didn’t realize there were people living who wrote it. We’d never been shown a living poet in school. And so we really latched on to it. Once we saw them, we were like, “Cool! We’re poets! We love poetry!” So we started a little open mic in our school, and the next year we organized a team to go to Brave New Voices International Teen Poetry Slam for the first time, which was in The Hague that year. And I was hooked. Ever since then, I’ve been okay/comfortable calling myself a poet.

Tell me a little bit about Brave New Voices and your experience with it.

Brave New Voices will be in its twentieth year in 2017. Youth Speaks is the local organization that focuses on bringing spoken word and hip hop to youth in the Bay Area, and Brave New Voices is the national organization. Youth Speaks is the largest national spoken word organization out there. Brave New Voices is one of their national programs that brings 500 to 600 youth from all over the world—English-speaking countries, mainly—to whatever city it’s hosted in that year, just for a festival of poetry and social justice, and getting to meet each other. I went for the first time in 2005, and it blew my mind! Not only did I know there were living poets now, but they all looked like me, and they were my age. It was completely transformative to experience that and to see that poetry was something viable and real and to know that it was still affecting people’s lives and that it was still harboring a community for folks. And so for me, falling in love with poetry through Brave New Voices and through my local community in Minneapolis was always a gift—poetry was there, but also there was that gift of community that it gave me, you know? Immediately in poetry for me, from the very genesis of my time as a poet, was communing with folks. It was about being in a room and sharing ideas. It was about creating and making each other laugh, and making each other think, and asking each other questions. So Brave New Voices was really mind blowing for me because it immediately shifted my mind about poetry from some solitary act to this global experience.

You’re a member of two collectives, Sad Boy Supper Club and Dark Noise. How are they different? What’s your role in them? How do they help you with your writing?

Sad Boy Supper Club is maybe a step below a collective. What had happened was … [Laughs] myself and three other poets Sam Sax, Cam Awkward-Rich, and Hieu Minh Nguyen were already a group of friends, and we wanted to slam together one time, so we went to the Rustbelt Poetry Slam, which is a regional poetry slam, and we just had a great time. Also, the folks of the Sad Boy Supper Club are some of my first readers. I think it’s important to note I never really had other queer friends, and so they’re my first group of friends that identified as queer that I have a lot of ties with.

Dark Noise was different. Dark Noise was actually brought together and formed in a very particular way. It was the brainchild of Fatimah Asghar and Aaron Samuels, and they sort of invited us all to have a conversation about what making a collective would look like. When Dark Noise came together we were all twenty-three; we were all at a similar stage in our careers and trying to figure out if we had careers; and it was just a space for us to sort of … feel. We needed a space where we could say the things that were uncomfortable to say in public spaces, a space to feel like our art was cared for and was insulated. We were all transitioning from the spoken word/slam realm to the literary world, which immediately felt more white and harsh to us. And so we were all very scared and didn’t know what it meant to have all these white folks looking at our work now. And, you know, both of those places I think about as homes—all the collectives.

With Dark Noise, when we were first talking about what we were besides a group of friends who love each other—and I do think that it’s important that we center love—everybody was more a performance collective or people who had open mics. But Dark Noise was different from that. We didn’t even live in the same city. We were six artists living in about five different cities, and that’s shifted all over the place since then. But we wanted to be radical and intentional about the ways in which we loved each other. And Dark Noise is really the only experience I ever had like that. With Sad Boys, I was friends with all of them to various degrees before we came together, and [the collective] solidified much of our friendships for me. And naming it felt important. Dark Noise was really an experiment in love for me. I didn’t know several members of the collective when we met up. But I remember we met at Jamila and Fati’s apartment in Chicago in the winter of 2012, and it was a magical energy in the room; it was something so spiritual. Having folks in this great literary landscape that are not as concerned about the words but are concerned about the vessel that is me, and that also support the words as well: that is what Dark Noise does for me. That is a very special thing. And I love seeing different collectives and people naming themselves. There is a power to naming these friendships and relationships we all have. But to be intentional about the ways in which I care for people: that’s what those collectives bring to me.

I want to step back to the idea of audience. You mentioned stepping back from the world of performance to the literary page, which you say felt harsher and whiter. I’m interested in that idea. As a creator, who are you thinking of when you write? You’ve said in some places that you write for the “queer Black boy,” almost in some sense for the self you were, and that’s really clear and present in [insert] boy and in Black Movie, but then you address other readers in your poems, too. “Short Film” for example, says “ … dear reader, what does it feel like to be safe and white?” That tells me that you’re aware of another audience, so how do you think about audience as you’re writing and scripting the work?

This is not a simple question. I think about audience all the time. I think it’s probably a question I’ll wrestle with for the rest of my artistic life! My first mind is usually to say that I’m writing for me, but that’s never really true, I think, because I come from a performance background, and there’s always a second thought behind the I’m just writing this for me that asks, What is this going to sound like in the ears of other people? and Who is this going to be useful for? 

I’m usually writing for Black folks, I think, because that’s who I am of. I love to write poems that my family can engage with, the folks that I grew up with can engage with. In that question of audience for me is also a question of accessibility. I’m oftentimes interested in having widely accessible work that can be engaged with both by somebody who never engaged with poetry but is also interested in the work and the seasoned poetry reader. But then I think there’re a lot of times, too, when I think about the white gaze. When I first started being a writer in the public sense I was very taken aback by the idea of the white gaze, and what that did to my work, and what it meant. A lot of my early poems, at least early in terms of publishing, were very mournful and tried to mourn for Black people in a particular way—even a lot of the first poems in [Insert] Boy. But once I was aware that there were so many folks that didn’t know how to feel about that mourning in public, and about letting people into our intimate spaces, and about letting people into our Black and miraculous and fragile psyche, I wanted to do something with that looking. As in, If I have your attention, what am I going to do with it? If I know that you are engaging with my work, if I know you as an outsider who I might consider my kin, how do I manipulate your viewing of me so that it’s useful for the people that I’m usually writing about? You know, I know you’re looking; what am I gonna say to you now that I have your attention? And that is also an attempt to challenge the reader, especially the non-Black reader, or the non-queer reader, and also to invite them in in a particular kind of way. If we know that they’re looking, we can challenge them but also invite them to play, to take that step in. And not to step in to be comfortable, but to step in to wrestle. That’s become important to me. That question of audience is often hard, and sometimes I don’t know until the second or third or fourth draft of a poem who I’m really trying to write for.

Let’s talk about the process of writing a poem. Where does it begin? What are the stages you move through?

You know, I think I’ve gone through various modes of how I write. How I’m writing depends on my life at the moment. A lot of the poems from Black Movie, for example, started on my phone, and a lot of the poems in my next book, Don’t Call Us Dead, too. I was living in the Bay Area, and I had a 15 – 20 minute train ride to and from work, and there was nothing to do on the BART but stand there—your phone service doesn’t work, there’s all these tunnels—so if I wasn’t reading a book, I wrote on my phone and I knew I could get a pretty okay draft of something done in the time it took to go to and from work. Many of my poems started there. And then there’ve been other times in my life where I’ve had more strategic writing processes; I’m thinking of Sad Boy Supper Club. Me and Sam Sax would for a long time just sit up all night on Facebook Messenger, just talking back and forth, and if one of us got silent for a while, we knew they were writing a poem. I know for Black Movie, Sam saw all those poems, because some nights I’d just sit up and write three of them, because I was talking to a friend, and we were talking about life and poetry, and then he’d say something that’d spark something in me, and I’d go away and type away, and I’d be like, Here, read this, I just wrote it in the last 15 minutes. And so that’s where a lot of that comes from.

Right now, poems have been coming a little bit slower. I used to be a very fast writer. I used to be the type of dude that was writing 5, 6, 10 poems a week. Even if I didn’t use them all, I know I made words happen on the page. I can’t be that dude anymore. Now I look back and think, What were you on?! Now it’s a bit slower, now a bit of language comes to me, just a tiny bit, a fragment, and I’ll wrestle with it for a while. I have a little notebook (okay a lot of notebooks— some are small, some are huge and would take up this whole table) where I’d just write a phrase down a couple times, and it wouldn’t really announce itself, or what it wants me to do with it yet. I think about it while I’m grocery shopping, think about it while I’m in the shower. Eventually, I’ll sit down and write out the poem. Now I think I want the language to be more precious and rare. I think that’s required me to slow down a little bit. I think I’ve written all the poems that I know how to write. And now I’m trying to move into that space where I’m writing into the unknown, and writing to surprise myself. And that happens all the time; I think that’s how you know you’re having a growth spurt, that moment when you’re bored with yourself. I’m on the precipice of one: I need it to happen.

What’s your biggest challenge right now? Is it time? Is it getting the work together? What’s hard?

Right now the biggest challenge isn’t time per se … I think it is that element of surprise. I was just telling Fati the other day that I haven’t written a lot of poems lately, and by lately I mean two to three months, that have really… shocked me or surprised me. I’ve written poems that I knew I could write, and I think they’re good poems; they’re standard Danez hits. Sort of like you know Beyonce is going to give you a particular kind of song, and every album you look forward to that song. Or like Gucci Mane (I’m really big into rap) so like Gucci Mane and Azaelia Banks write the same song over and over again, and I know how to make the same kind of poem over and over again. So now it’s really just trying to reach towards and away from lexicons and dialects that I own. Like I want to write thriller poems that use the language that I use all the time when I’m talking with my homies, that raise Black dialect to the level of intellect, and that still wrestles with stuff but within the Black dialect. And I also want to reach away from what I know and find words and phrasings and thoughts and fragments that I don’t necessary deal with. And I’m having … I dunno if I’m having trouble with the poems, but I’m having trouble with my own patience. You know, I have to let it build. And I think I am learning how to not pump stuff out so fast, which is hard for me because I just want it to hurry up and come, but sometimes a poem takes two months or three months or a year to write, and it’s hard! And so now it’s getting used to that slowness, and being okay to wallow in the thought is what I’m struggling with right now.

And also I want to move past grief. I want to move past shame. And I think that grief is definitely a useful emotion and a necessary one, but I am really interested in trying to find the poetics of joy right now, in trying to find those more nuanced and quiet places that I can look. I think for a long time I have looked to the loudest thing in the room, and written about it, and I’m trying to see what I’ve left unnoticed.

I want to follow up on the idea of a “poetics of joy” and a search for the “quiet things.” I watched your TED Talk, and in it you talked about that idea of being asked a question that then sparks something, some sort of ‘open door.’ What questions are you trying to name now?

Right now in my writing, I’m asking myself a lot of questions about friendship, and what the texture of that particular kind of love is, and what the basic necessity of a friend is. I’ve been having a lot of thoughts about the difference between when you grow up and have your family— you know, you love your mom because she’s your mom, but also because she feeds you and makes sure you have things, and buys you toys—and the idea of friendship. Your first friend is the first person you love that doesn’t provide you with anything but love, and that [understanding that] I necessitate nothing from you but you is a very interesting thing for me. And I want to figure out where we really hold friendship in our hearts and what are the particulars of that. And so I am writing about my friends a lot right now, and it’s fun.

It seems very clear that your self and all the ways that you think about self are the source of the poetry, and you’ve said in other places, “It’s me.” And the word confessional is itself a contested label to give to one’s work; I want to know what you think is necessary about the confessional? What’s important about writing or claiming the confessional?

There’s something so brutally honest about the confessional, but also it’s the way I was raised, you know? When I think about the confessional, I do think about all those great confessional authors that have led us to now, but I also think about church, and how I grew up, and the idea of confessing, and the idea of admitting, and offering it up. I come from a very Christian background: Baptist. And I think about all the times it was just like, “Let go. Let God.” You need to admit it, then lay your burdens down, and for me that’s what makes me feel the most clean. I need to write these confessional poems so that I can be clean. And I need to write in such a way that you see the dirt, you know, that you don’t always see the mucky water, but I want you to see the pieces of that dirt in there. I want you to feel that soot. And so the confessional for me is instinctual. It’s an honesty that I think I’ve been indoctrinated into. And maybe a dishonesty, too—I lie hella in those poems! [Laughs] But there’s still something true in there!

And I think for me in that question of audience and that question of accessibility also lies the roadmap to why I am so confessional. To confess, I think, means to be clear. You can’t really have a foggy confession—that’s not really confessing. You can, but, you know, it’s like saying Hey Pastor, I did some thangs. You can’t say that. You have to say the thing that was done, so I think that in that question of accessibility, it’s not also just giving people accessibility to what I’m trying to say, or my experience, but it’s also giving me access to myself. When I kind of move my own mirrors out of the way and I open up all those doors, and finally get to see clearly to the root of me … And that’s what I think confession does.

What does it do for the audience or the reader?

I think it invites them in, whether they want to be invited in or not I hope … well, I’ve heard it from folks, and I’m glad I’ve heard it, that they read my work, and they’re able to admit things to themselves, or they’re able to finally start to talk about the stories in their lives that they weren’t able to talk about. They’ll say “I’ve never seen somebody say this so bare, or say this so brave.” I’ve heard the word bravery thrown around, and I don’t know if its bravery, but I hope that it allows folks to stand up in themselves a little harder. And I hope it allows them, if not to speak that honesty or to speak that clearly about themselves, then to at least engage with it within themselves internally.

And then there’s the question of not just confessional poetry, but poetry in general. This is always a loaded question, but you write and talk about writing about grief, Blackness, “Black as hell poems,” queer poems, into violence and a very, very imperfect world. What’s a poet’s job or a poem’s job in terms of relating to that imperfect world?

Hmm … I think about poems as gathering grounds. You know I think we all can gather in a poem and really meditate on something, or commune around something, or feast on something. I think that’s tied to my coming to poetry through spoken word, which was a very blessed experience because I don’t necessarily understand the idea of the lonely poet toiling away in the night; for me the act of poetry is always necessitated by other people. You can’t be a spoken word artist by yourself. Or maybe you can? [Laughs] And so that idea of what we do when we gather, you know, what do we do together? We commune; we laugh; we cry; we mourn; we praise; we destroy; we build. I want the poem to be all that. I think poetry at its best creates co-conspirators in the work. Somebody comes into the poem and they become a partner in healing or your partner in mourning, or they become an activist homie in the work. It gets us riled up; it calms us down. But I think what poetry does at its best is offer that human connection.

I’m not interested per se in poetry that seeks to push people out or poetry that blocks you from getting to its heart. Though sometimes I like it. I think every type of poetry is cool sometimes, but for me I think of Lucille Clifton, I think of Amiri Baraka, I think of Langston Hughes, I think of a lot of the great Def poets, I think of Suheir Hammad, I think about all these folks whose work for me has always been about inviting people, not only into the poet’s experience, but into their own experience, and inviting people to leave the poem and shout some shit out in the real world. And so that’s what I think poems offer us. They offer us temporary sanctuary, but after we leave that space, either we take a little bit of that sanctuary with us, or we go back into the world knowing about that imperfectness, and we leave with maybe a tiny tool to help perfect it a little bit more.

 I want to go to the idea of the body, which is in these poems. There’s an interesting tension inherent in writing about the body: it’s what you’re in, it’s your vehicle; but it also is or can become abstract in the poem. I’m going to quote you to yourself: “The body is too sacred to be left out of my poems.”

 Oooh!  I said that?

You said that! So, talk to me about the body, about writing the body, and how you do that.

You know, as a Black queer man-looking thing moving throughout the world, I ain’t got no choice but to think about the body. My body is a point of contention all of my life, you know? How my body moves through space either as an actor or as an endangered artifact in this American context; how my body desires other bodies or pushes up against other bodies, and how that’s supposedly supposed to make me burn in some place; every act that my body can take, even just existing is dangerous, and so I’m always thinking about my body. But at the same time I think that the body is so holy and it’s beautiful. I think when you know the danger your body is in you have a different relationship to it, and you know just how precious that is because you know just how easy it is to lose it. And so I am always thinking about my body not even just in poems but as I move throughout the world—thinking about how I offer up my body to other people, whether that be through work or how I feed other people or whatever. It’s unavoidable. Wait. What was the question? I’m sorry! I’m just like, I’m gonna go on about the body!

How do you deal with that in language? What are some of the tools you take to all of that complexity?

Fleda Brown, an amazing poet from Michigan, did a Q&A one time at my MFA program and said that in order to really write about something, you should try to write away from it for a very long time. And I think I spent a very long time trying to write away from the body, and I know that there’s something very important that keeps on pulling me back. I’ll try my hardest to not talk about the body, especially like hands and mouths, which are my two favorite things to ever put in a poem, and they always come up, and I’m like, Okay, I tried to write away from you and here you are, so you deserve to be here. Like, Hi hand, hi mouth, good to see y’all again. I just deal with it because I don’t know any other vessel with which to touch other things in my poems, you know? It’s going back to that idea of the confessional, right? I think I have a hard time thinking about that idea that the lyric ‘I’ is just this voice speaking out into anonymous space. I dunno how to disembody the voice from the body, especially when my body is all that people use or need to make an assumption about me. My body speaks for me before I even say anything, and so if I am going to be this voice speaking into a room, my body has to be present; my body is what colors and textures that voice, my body is what holds that voice, and so… you know, it’s hard. I don’t know how to talk about the things I talk about and not bring in the body. I don’t know how to talk about queerness divorced from the body; I don’t know how to talk about race divorced from the body; I don’t know how to talk about God divorced from the body.

So for me the body is my link to everything else I write in my poetry. You know, it is about that physical act of touch that, as a person, is very important to me. I’m very touch heavy. It’s my love language. (Have you ever taken that test? It’s a good test! You’ve got to take the love language test!) I’m very heavy on touch, and so the body is that catalyst, is that bridge to everything else in my work. I can’t really engage with the world without first contending with this tiny world that I have.

I’m going to zone in on that tiny world, because you brought up queerness and race and I want to talk about gender and the specific role of it. [Insert] Boy is gendered, and I know you prefer gender-neutral pronouns, but there’s an emphatic masculinity, I want to say, in [Insert] Boy—a challenge to it, an exploration of it—so I want to know how you see gender in general, but also how you work with that note in the poems.

I identify as gender neutral, but I cannot divorce myself from boyness in any type of way. I’ve spent so much of my life being a boy and being socialized as a boy; no matter how I view myself I will always be my mother’s son— I will always be a grandson; I will always be the boy in the family. And I love boyness in that way. I do have a lot of fond memories of that. But romantically, I sleep with men—I say I’ll whatever with anybody, but most of the time they tend to be men more often than not—so I’m constantly wrestling with boyness, and I think I will for the rest of my life. The next book definitely contends with that, too. It’s how I learned to see the world; it’s how the world sees me.

And I always think about the shackles of masculinity. Masculinity is a sad thing. Men are so desperate to be not-men, or to find a new way of doing it, Good Lord! And so I think for me a lot of that wrestling with masculinity that happens in [Insert] Boy is me questioning and wrestling with my gender as well, and really thinking about if I do wear this moniker of boy, of man, what does that mean? What tribe am I a part of then? What histories do I hold if I am that? And I think that I am that, and I wonder oftentimes, too, how my race makes my gender even more complicated. For a long time, I didn’t identify as gender queer because I had only seen it filtered through a white body, and I’d never seen other black folks who were still wrestling with gender. I’d met transfolk, but never anybody who was in that liminal space. And so I mean it’s still very new for me and I’m trying to think about it, although it feels true. And oftentimes I even wonder what my gender would look like if I maybe had less of a strong relationship to my family, or if sometimes I say, if my grandmother wasn’t alive… I care a lot about that woman, and being gay was hard enough … the gay thing was one thing, but I dunno if grandma can handle …

“Danez killed grandma!”

Yes, “Danez killed grandma. He showed up to Thanksgiving in some heels and micro braids…” and as much as I would love to do that, I mean, these are things that I think about, right? And so it’s like, what does gender mean as a peace that we negotiate with other people and with the world and what that intimate space is. And I think that what I’m trying to do is a play on masculinity: If we are to be men—cis men—in this masculine way. How does that body, that vessel, mean? How do we negotiate with the world around us? How does the world negotiate us and deal with us? And I think especially in that idea of violence and danger, right?  Gender neutral or not, I have a Black man body, and I think about that. There’s no person of color, whatever gender, that doesn’t walk through the world wondering/knowing how dangerous that is, and so until I don’t, until I am not read as a Black man, or until the Black man identity is not as feared or unfairly mythical as it is, then I will always have to have these questions about my shape within the world. So masculinity is a tricky thing: I hate it. I hate it. I hate men so much. We’re horrible people! We do such bad things!

But again, I think there’s a wrestling because I think there’s also a tenderness to the boy, a tenderness for men in [Insert] Boy.

Well they need it, you know! I think that’s what’s missing from a lot of the common discourse about manhood: it’s tenderness. It gets to be such a hard, amorphous, just like—not amorphous, amorphable? Is that a word? It is this unmovable monument that so many men are stuck in. I want to bring softness. The masculine cannot exist without the feminine; it has to engage with it in some way, and who says that femininity is necessarily soft? But I want to bring that tenderness. I want to bring that softness. I want to introduce men to a wider side of manhood and to think about what it means to need, to be held, to need love, to need quiet, to need … to need. And to be okay with that needing is a lot of what I’m trying to do, and you know, I hope—especially for my straight Black men homies—that they can get past the queer stuff and see that there is a need for us to engage with vulnerability.

I think the poem about your grandfather is one that really wrestles with that, right? Here’s this guy at the end of his life who comes to need to be held to do things, and there’s almost a lifelong unlearning that has to happen by force in the poem.

Exactly.

You said “mythical.” So I’m going to turn to myth. Black Movie takes on The Lion King, Sleeping Beauty, fairy tales, the Bible—as does [Insert] Boy—all of these huge cultural narratives. Talk to me a little bit about your relationship to those bigger stories and how you work with them in a poem.

I’ve always been obsessed with the mythic, with the imaginative, in some way. I’m a big comic book head. I’m always up in somebody’s alternate-reality TV show and cartoon and all that kind of stuff. All that stuff fascinates me. And so those same desires are what gets me interested in the Bible—which could be a cartoon or could be a comic book very easily, you know—and the Greeks. I’m always obsessed with how we blend the magical and the real, and I think that is the space that I live in a lot of the time. I do believe in these types of things and I’m very interested in how the spiritual and unreal is real in our lives and so I think a lot of my work does seek to smash those right up against one another. You know, something like the Bible, I’m trying to subvert. I’m trying to take the Bible and push queerness inside of it, or take God, you know … I can’t write a sex poem without using some religious imagery somewhere in there, and it is recognizing this holiness that feels of my upbringing, but also feels instinctual.

I’m interested in language that lifts us into the surreal, because we are surreal beings. We’re real and we’re also surreal, and you know, we dream, which is the most surreal thing in the world. Any creature that has the ability to fabricate all these worlds within its mind subconsciously is worthy of bringing that same type of fabric-making that we have in dreams into our real world and into our writing. Through dealing with the surreal and dealing with the imaginative, we also show the real life possibilities of things. So if I want to show you that we live in this flawed world, I want to make it flawed in a way that’s so fantastic that it reaches past your understanding of the flawed world in a way that lets you come back to the flaw, thinking, but also to point us toward better realities, too. Ross Gay said in this panel one time that if we want to have a world without prisons, then we have to write about worlds without prisons, so that way people know that’s possible, right? And I think for me that’s ringing true a lot lately, so I’ve been trying to use myth and magic to lift us into safety and to lift us into freedom and to lift us into newer possibilities. Through the surreal we get that exaggeration for our audience and our readers that allows them to settle back into their own worlds, but a little bit extended, stretched. You know, you stretch it all the way out, so that way you come back a little bit bigger than you were before.

Luke Cage? What do you think?

I have not watched too many episodes of it, but he is fine. He is definitely fine. I do not appreciate the respectability politics of it. You know, he had that whole thing in the second episode about the N-word, and I was just like, Get away. But the women on that show are fantastic. And I do love that Luke Cage has always been a character for decades now.

I’m not a comic head, so I don’t know the back-story.

Oh, yeah. So Luke Cage was Blaxploitation Superman, had been with his lil afro back in the day. There’s always been something to the bulletproof Black man that is such a …  and especially in this moment, right? So the fact that Luke Cage in 2016 is getting this hit TV show is big! And that’s always what I loved about Marvel is that they’re not scared to actually raise our world, to actually use their characters to say something very strong about our world. Before Luke Cage, it was Jessica Jones, who is this woman who has all these powers, whose whole storyline was dealing with domestic abuse, and trying to get rid of this lover. And I love that Marvel is not scared to take it there and to really give people powers that would be useful in the real world. How many of us wish to be Luke Cage? I wish we could be bulletproof in those moments. And so, yeah, it’s phenomenal in some ways. But there’s also other things that I kinda side eye.

Imperfect…

Yes, Imperfect.

So the other theme I noticed resonates both in the book and in your comments during other interviews, and I think even just when you’re talking; you reference this idea of multiples—multiple realities, multiple gods, multiple selves. Tell me more about why that idea of plurality is so intriguing to you?

You know, I like me some Whitman. I am large. I contain multitudes of crazy motherfuckas. But I like playing with how we view a thing. I like the idea that I can show you this—my own body, let’s say—from six different vantage points, and over here I look like a fish, and over here I look like a tree, and over here I look like a halfway decrepit building, and over here I look like a fire hydrant, whatever. I like playing with those views because it goes back to that idea of mythic-ness. I always like the gods that could turn into a thing. You know Zeus (problematic a character as he is): I like that sometimes he’s a swan, sometimes he’s a cloud of gold dust coming down and descending on folks, and I like to think that in poetry I’m allowed to live these other experiences in that same way. In poetry I am allowed to be winged; I am allowed to exist in ways that this physical reality does not let me, and so there’s a lot in those multitudes, a lot of childhood imaginations; when you’re a kid you want to be everything when you grow up, and in poetry that’s my way to be everything. I like blurring those lines between what’s a god and what’s human, you know, the ways in which we are godly. Those multitudes allow me to play with that image and to play dress up—to drag—as these different entities in a cool way.

Tell me about what you’re working on now.

So, my next book is gone; it’s away from me. [Laughs]. It’s called Don’t Call Us Dead and it’s closely related to [Insert] Boy and Black Movie, I think. Well, in some ways. There’s a long poem in there called “summer somewhere,” which I think is a more accurate attempt of something that I tried to do in [Insert] Boy with the poem “Song of the Wreckage,” which was supposed to be a quadruple sestina that failed … it was bad …

QUADURPLE sestina?!

Quadruple sestina: Twenty-four 24-line poems. I wrote them. They were trash. I kept eight. But “summer somewhere” seeks to build an imagined paradise or heaven that is exclusive to murdered Black men and boys. And so there are those same themes of violence, but this time I’m much more interested in healing than I am in grieving—although that sense of grief is there. But then it contends with my own mortality. I was diagnosed with HIV in 2014, and a lot of the book stems from there, and this sudden shift that I had from this fear of the external world and what it would do to my body to now this internal view of what might body could do to itself. And so it wrestles with those differences; some of the poems I wrote when I got diagnosed, and I was trying to process and sort of learning to live with this virus and what it means to renegotiate mortality. And then there’re some poems that blur those two worlds together: What does it mean to be? To live in a world where the world and your body are both coming at you at the same time? So that’s the next book, and then, there’s a chapbook about friendship that’ll come out at some point. Maybe that’ll be a full book one day—I like writing about my friends.

So what’s that process like? Do you say, “I’m gonna write a book,” or do you write a poem at a time and then amass them? And then what’s the process of moving from “here’s a scrap of language” to “Here’s a poem” to “Here’s a collection that I’m gonna shape and organize and them present to the world?” What’s that movement?

Black Movie was very intentional about being a book. I wrote “Dinosaurs in the Hood,” in January 2014 and then a month later I was like, Oh, I wonder if I could do that again?! And for a long time that was my process. I have so many series of poems that will never see the world because they’re trash, but if I wrote one thing, I would always try to dig the well until it’s just empty. And so Black Movie was like “Dinosaurs in the Hood” happened—that was the first poem (it was the last poem in the book)—and the second was “Sleeping Beauty in the Hood” (which is the first poem in the book). I was really trying to dive into this idea, and I found myself obsessed with trying to write through this lens of film.

[Insert] Boy was just a modge podge: like, I want a book! And what could it be about? And it’s actually interesting; the version of the book that got accepted by YesYes is completely different than the version that eventually got published. I think there’s something like thirteen poems that were in what got accepted as compared to what actually got published, so basically a complete overhaul.

But yeah, I think a lot of times I do have that same question, like if I have a question I’ll write the poem I’ll know the poem doesn’t answer the question completely, and so its about trying to write those other poems that kind of complete the question that sort of make up the answer to that one simple question. But then sometimes it’s by accident, like this friendship stuff. It was very much by accident. I just looked up in the middle of summer and I was like, If I had to have a book right now—I was in my MFA program, so, I was like Oh, I have to write a thesis next year,soif I had to have a thesis tomorrow what would it be about? And I was like Oh, I got like thirty-five pages of new poems about friends, and oh, well this is half way there. But oftentimes, I don’t know what I’m interested in. A lot of times for me it’s the poem, then the poems, and then, eventually, maybe, the book.

Do you have a secret or a trick for organization of a collection? You have done it twice…

I know. You want me to reveal my tricks. My only secret is that I always try to end with joy. I understand that I write a lot about heavy stuff, but my only thing is that you should leave the book uplifted. Even if we move through hell and high water, I want always want people to leave the book feeling like something else is possible, and like we’re moving toward solutions, and feel like we’re moving toward joy. That’s my only thing with how I tend to order. So now, all the books I ever publish will tend to joy [Laughs]. It’s really the only thing. Otherwise it’s just about putting it all out there and asking the poems to talk to you, and really that’s kinda what my friends are for. I’ll be like, Listen, I feel this is where it’s supposed to start, this is how it ends, tell me how the middle goes …

What is something that keeps you sane outside of writing?

Cooking. Especially for other people. Or just for me. When I’m sad I make myself a steak. And working out. Which is new. (Well, it was like that, and then it wasn’t like that, and now it is like that again, where if I haven’t run for a couple days I’m very aware of it.) It helps to clear my head. And then, you know, I am a very big location person, and so I know that I’m not okay if I haven’t been to Minneapolis in a long time, and I think actually that’s where I need to live for the rest of my life, because I know how to be there. I know who I am there. And there’s nothing better than sitting on my porch with my grandma; we split a watermelon—and [Laughs] yes, that’s the most stereotypical thing I’ve ever said, but it’s totally true. We split that watermelon, and just watch people walk by.

If you could go back in time to any age and tell yourself something that you at that age needed to hear, what age would it be and what would you say?

Hmmm. I would go back and tell my 14-year-old self that it was okay to be nice, and you don’t have to be the loudest or the meanest person in the room in order to take care of yourself, because I was definitely mean. Like, if you made fun of everybody, then nobody could make fun of you. I’m nice now. And I’ve always been nice to homies, but I have a list of people that for our high school ten-year reunion, I have to go back and apologize to, say, I was mean to you for no reason. I actually really liked you, and I just didn’t know how to act as a human.

And I think I would go back, since we’re thinking about this, I would go back to 22- or 23-year- old- Danez, and tell him that it’s okay to slow down, and it’s okay to wait. You don’t need to try to rush everything. I tell my little homies in the literature world this, and they look at me like What are you talking about because you had a book at 23-24? But the act of slowing down is so important. I think I was in such a rush to have a something— especially getting caught up in between the literary and spoken-word worlds—I was so ready to have a book. I needed it at that moment, and I’m glad that it happened. It’s hard to regret your first book when it did well, but I was in such a rush. I think there are still ways in which I am very much at the beginning of my poetry career. These two books, like, I love them, but also I was just running and running and running, and I think I needed to take a breath and breathe.

And you’re breathing now! What advice would you give to the readers and viewers of The Fight & The Fiddle?

A good mentor of mine, Rafael Casal, said you should take in three times as much art as you output, which I find to be very true. Even when I’m stuck, I realize I haven’t gone to a museum in a while, or haven’t listened to music in a new way for a while or haven’t read a book in a new way for a while. And then, I think we’d talked about questions a lot, I keep a literal list of the questions I’m asking myself. And so if you figure out how you’re trying to figure out the world, I think your writing will figure out itself. I always have to know what I’m trying to look at in my daily life, and that sort of guides me to where I’m looking in my poems.

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

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Lauren K. Alleyne is Editor-in-Chief of The Fight & The Fiddle, Assistant Director of the Furious Flower Poetry Center, and Associate Professor of English at James Madison University. She is the author of Difficult Fruit (Peepal Tree Press, 2014)

by Lauren K. Alleyne

“Listen like a safecracker, navigate
the intricate ruptures by ear …”
—from “Marginalia” by Gregory Pardlo

A master of the image, Gregory Pardlo demonstrates how the poet’s eye can both arrest and transcend time. Consider a poem like “Double Dutch,” in which he describes the movements of a young girl playing thus: “the bells tied to her shoestrings rouse the gods / who’ve lain in the dust before the Dutch / acquired Manhattan. How she dances / patterns like a dust-heavy bee retracing / its travels in scale before the hive. How / the whole stunning contraption of girl and rope / slaps and scoops like a paddle boat.” This exquisitely rendered scene is a carnival of the senses—tantalizing the eye and ear, tickling the nostrils, throbbing with motion and touch—deliciously present. At the same time, the image draws us back to a time that predates the republic, juxtaposing the language of commerce, acquisition, and colonialism onto this girl’s body and its luminous enactment of liberty; it is a portal in and through time and, as Pardlo says, a “keyhole … the possibility of opening.”

Textured with history, myth, allusion, Pardlo’s poems also possess a wry self-reflexivity that reassures readers they are partners with the authorial voice on the journey of the poem, rather than spectators in an esoteric endeavor. However, readers are also expected to pull their own weight, as the poems are vehicles for dense explorations of the limits and complexities of the human condition. “I don’t know what is in me I can’t contain,” Pardlo writes in the ekphrastic poem, “Bipolar,” and indeed many of his poems are transcripts of seeking—the lyric artist painstakingly arranging and rearranging the units of language to code, recode, and question what exists and what lies beyond the known.

Pardlo read at James Madison University on March 23, 2017. In the studio earlier that day, he spoke with me about his projects, his process, and poetry as a means to discovery. The following is an edited transcript of our conversation.

At the University of Virginia last week, I attended a symposium—they’ve recently opened a center for poetry and poetics—and the subject of the inaugural symposium is the question I’m going to ask you right now: What is a poem? 

Well, in my workshops when I’m teaching, I have this exercise that I’m going to give away now, because it kind of gets students to back into the question of what is a poem. So I’ll say, “What’s a poem made of?” We can often start there. And somebody will say, “Words.” (Well, they’ll say a lot of other stuff—“feelings,” etcetera—but I say I’m trying to get to the materials, and then we’ll get to “words.”) Then I say, “Give me some words,” and then I start writing words on the board, all over the place, and it’s a big hodgepodge mess—some big, some small, some cursive. And I step back and I say, “How do you like my poem?” (Laughs.) And the responses are just fascinating. Some people get maaaad! (Laughs.) People get defensive; they get scared …

I say this to say a poem—how we define a poem—is more indicative of the individual’s own perceptions of her/his limits. So, for example, I’ve had students who come from self-professed strict backgrounds, and there’s a lot of fidelity to the idea of a poem. The poem has to be metered and rhymed, and it has to participate in the tradition in a very faithful way. Of course, no it doesn’t, but that’s what they’ve decided. And so what I want my students to do—and often when I’m teaching, I’m teaching myself—so I want my students to think about where they’re drawing the line in terms of how to define a poem, and to be responsible for it.

So. Your next question might be: where do you draw the line?

Where do you draw the line, Greg?

I want to keep finding that line. It becomes a problem when I think I know where the line is. As soon as I fool myself into believing—or being comfortable with, at any rate—the idea that I know what a poem is, then I’m in trouble! I have to always be in a state of doubt and suspicion.

I love that exercise and the collection of words. If you could try, though, how would you define what moves a collection of words, or a feeling, into the realm of the poetic, into a poem?

Well, that’s the thing. As soon as you have language, you have, arguably, poetry. Which is not to say you have intention. I’m very liberal about these things, and I’m open to the idea that at some point what matters is subjective, so what matters is who is looking at it. If I’m the one crafting the thing, I’m the one determining the parameters and the limits, but there’s also the reader involved, and so there’s found poetry all over the place, right? And none of that has any intention. It’s what we’ve projected on to it. When does it come into the realm of poetry? The reader can decide that it’s poetry. For me, when does it come into the realm of poetry? I’d say—and this isn’t entirely right yet—I’d say when there is a central image. I think about the image as a kind of keyhole into the larger poem. I don’t know what’s on the other side of that door, but there is a keyhole there and, therefore, there is the possibility of opening.

You said once that “a poem fails if it’s in service of the poet’s ego,” which is a really wonderful way of putting it. Who or what should a poem serve?

Well it shouldn’t serve the idea. I mean that’s what I advocate getting away from: the idea of the poem being in service of anything. Now, I recognize, too, that there are [other arguments] … I think back to W. E. B. Du Bois’s famous statement—“I don’t give a damn about any literature that’s not propaganda”—and certainly we’ve gone through the Black Arts Movement, where the work is put in service of some communal collective ideal. Great. But what I mean by the poem should not be in service of the ego is that the poem should not—or, rather, the person writing the poem should not wish to have him or herself viewed in a particular way by virtue of the poem.

So the poem is not a mirror of the author.

The poem is not a mirror of the author. Of course, it comes out of the author’s mind and imagination, but if I’m writing, for example, and I want the reader to think well of me, and, by the same token, if I want the reader to chastise me because I’m feeling guilty about something, then I’m using the poem in a way that skews it away from … I’ll use the word “art.”

In some sense, the poem is not in service of art, but its goal is art. Art is the thing that it’s moving toward. Maybe beauty?

Well, that’s the big fuzzy question, which is truth and beauty—how do we know when we’ve arrived there? And you know, I’m happy with it being a big fuzzy question.

How does the poem or the poet fit into the bigger picture, into the bigger organization of things? 

So, I will contradict myself. I think the poem, whether it’s intended or not, has an ethos, and that it’s in an ethical relationship to the context in which it is received; that is the culture, the society, the community. So whether or not I have an agenda for the poem, there is going to be a relationship to an environment. As benign as I may think my work is—say I’m writing about mountains and rivers—there is a relationship. That’s unavoidable.

When we recognize the poem has an ethos, my argument is that the poet has some—I’m hesitating to use the word “obligation”—maybe a responsibility to be conscious of the ethos, of how the poem is either affirming or undermining or in conversation with the dominant narratives of society. So if I am writing a poem to be in conversation with a normative notion of race or gender, and I should probably be aware of that, probably be conscious that those are the narratives that I’m operating in. Now the problem is that when you have these big sort of master narratives, it’s hard for most people to be aware of them because we’re so immersed in them. So I guess I think about it in terms of a process of getting to various degrees of self-awareness. There’s no way we can be aware of all the narratives that the poem is operating in, but in the process of writing the poem, I want to keep thinking about those narratives and how my poem is going to communicate within them. That has nothing to do with the content of the poem. I think there’s a difference. How do I explain this now? … Okay, so the metaphors that I choose, the way I construct the speaking voice on the page, the way that the world is seen, these can be entirely interior to or aside from the actual content or what the poem is about. But they, nonetheless, are participating in various narratives, so that’s where I put the idea of responsibility and ethos.

You mention the process: What is your process? How does a poem begin? How does it evolve? And how do you know it’s done? 

Well, I can answer the last part of that because I’ve thought about it an awful lot, and I know the poem is done when something happens in the poem that I did not expect. If what’s on the page is familiar to me and does not challenge my perception of the larger narratives or behavior, then the poem’s not done, and I have to keep working at it until something happens that was completely unexpected. The question of process … who knows? Who knows where this stuff comes from? (Laughs.) Sometimes I’m actually intentional about it, and I sit down at my desk and I’m going to start writing until something happens or something begins to happen. Other times, something in the world occurs, and … well, I’m a little cynical about this one, because, you know, anytime people find out you’re a poet, the minute something happens—somebody spills a glass of water—they’re like, “Oh! That’s a poem! You better write that poem!” And you’re like, “No! That’s not how it works!” (Laughing) I guess people want to be helpful; they want to contribute.

So you sit down to write, or something moves you, or somebody spills a glass of water, and you have your image. Walk me through what happens next. Are you writing line by line, are you writing to the image, are you writing to sound? All of the above? Longhand? Notebook?

Absolutely longhand. And it’s a combination. I can’t separate out the writing through sound versus image. But I’m always writing against logic, writing against the kind of predictable semantics. But then I’m also very often trying to capture a narrative. Then there are those times when we have our handy received forms that give us a starting point, you know, a sonnet or pantoum, or golden shovel, for example.

As you mentioned received forms, I’m thinking about modality in your work. And I’m really interested in it because in several interviews you’ve talked about the pain in the lyric, that it’s not without cost, a psychic cost. And many of your poems are lyric, but as you mentioned, you also write narrative, and you use the persona, and I’m interested in several questions there: Are there different costs within the different modes, and can you parse those out? How do you deploy mode? And given that it is costly and painful in that way, why are you drawn to the lyric, anyway?

The payoff is this moment of discovery when something happens that surprises me. I go to and read poetry for those moments, and so when I am writing poetry, it’s just another way of looking for that moment. But it’s a different story when I’m rooting around in my own head looking for these things. And so I guess, like I said, I’m always writing through sound, and if I’m writing through a received form it’s a kind of way of backing into an emotional danger zone, right? I always tell my students we have denial for a very good reason—to keep us sane, to keep us safe, so that we can move through our day with some measure of sanity. But my job when I sit down to write is to circumvent that wall. That wall is crafty! It doesn’t want anybody to get behind the lines, so I have to find ways, to trick myself or distract myself from the project by looking at/concentrating on craft for the first several drafts, then after a while, I can ask, what’s that?

So when you see what’s there, how do you know when the poem needs to be narrative versus persona versus lyric? Let’s take, for example, the wonderful poem “Alienation Effects.” That is an incredible persona, and a really unexpected one. Where did that come from and how/why did you make that choice of the persona?

Luis Althusser had a memoir, The Future Lasts Forever, which I came across in a bookstore and was flipping through. I’d read some of his work as a philosopher, and I was curious and was kind of being nosy, and I noticed this detail that he’d murdered his wife. And I was like, “WHAT?! How does that happen?” And I found myself thinking about it more and more, and so I didn’t know where it was going and the reason that it’s so long is that it took me so long to dig up what was hiding inside of it. I kept looking for something. I guess my clue is if I keep thinking about it, then there’s something there.

I’m still pushing you on mode, just because you choose his voice as opposed to your lyric curiosity or a narrative retelling of that story. 

It’s a device. I want to recreate my path to the surprise for the reader, and the way in—one part of that surprise. So if the way in was Luis Althusser, then that’s how it’s going to go down. And when it’s a lyric, when I’m backing in through a list of images, and after a while the images begin to coalesce into something, it’s like “Oh! Okay! That’s where that was going!” But I want to preserve, again, the process, the getting there.

That brings me to the question of the reader. Who are you imagining you’re writing for? And I say imagining because I know you’re not thinking Grandma might read this in order to compose, but I assume that we all have some sort of audience in mind. Your work is layered and textured with lots of references and allusions, so who are these folks? What do they need? What do you want them to come back with from the journey you’re taking them on?

Delight, and it’s horribly overblown or hubristic to say it, but enlightenment. I guess it’s something I aspire to. The reader is, I suppose, the younger version of myself that felt locked out, that felt underestimated, that felt dismissed. I’m writing the poem for that undergraduate who did not have a way in to classical literature, to canonical literature, but could have had a way in through pop culture or a curious question or a swinging lyric—and I want that kid to have access to the poem. Once, in this case, they get in there, I’m going to ask ‘em to do some work! I’m not carrying you! But, yeah, we’re going to work together. And I do want to maintain a sense of generosity. So, that said, I know there are readers who are not gonna stay with me, and that’s a sacrifice that I’m willing to make. And there are readers who are just not going to dig it, and that’s absolutely fine. It’s odd: the one thing I do not want is to be popular….

You do not want to be popular?!

(Laughing) The irony! The irony! It’s kind of cliché at the same time, right, so I’m thinking of Jonathan Franzen years ago rejecting the Oprah Winfrey book selection. I’m aware of the associations with elitism and ego when someone says, “I don’t want to be popular,” and maybe there isn’t a door out of that. How do you save yourself, Pardlo? Get out of this one! (Laughs.)

Well, here’s the thing. I don’t want to imagine a broad readership. I don’t want to intend a broad readership, because that is a disservice to the reader. I’m reducing the reader from a complex individual to a demographic. I’m flattening the reader out to an idea of “general people” and that is the disservice, that is the condescension. So I imagine a very unique reader with a very unique set of interests who is open to change and challenge and who is curious.

I want to go back to that kid you mentioned earlier. What was your first meaningful encounter with poetry?

Until very recently, actually, I have been telling people that it was when I got to Rutgers in Camden and took my first poetry workshop. But I was writing very bad rap lyrics in high school, as well. So I go back to seventh or eighth grade, when I wrote a rap song and a classmate saw it and convinced me that it had to be re-written in calligraphy, and I thought, That’s silly, but fine, sure, okay, you wanna do that? So he takes the paper and I never see it again. And it was really confusing to me. Why would anyone steal words on a page? That was a really productive moment—this stuff has that kind of value? People care like that about it? I was just having fun! But then recently in an interview someone asked me a similar question and somewhere at the back of my head Robert Louis Stevenson came to mind, A Child’s Garden of Verses, and I wondered, Why am I thinking about this book? And I kept thinking maybe I saw it somewhere recently or someone mentioned it, and I was talking to my mother some time after on the phone, and I was like, “Have you ever heard of this book, A Child’s Garden of Verses?” She says, “What? We read that book together every night! You love that book!” And then she started reciting—“Don’t you remember this poem?”—and she recited another. Now I’m getting choked up. But it was wild. Denial, right? The mind puts up these walls, and then says “Now you’re ready to know this.”

That’s beautiful. Who are some acknowledged patron saints of poetry, some folks on the other side of the denial wall, who taught you how to write?

Yusef [Komunyakaa], absolutely. He came to Rutgers in Camden where I was an undergrad at the time, and gave a reading and I was just like, What?! What just happened?! I was walking around in a daze. And the next day I rush to the bookstore, and I get Neon Vernacular, and I’m sitting on the bus in West Philly, weeping, because that keyhole that I’d been looking through had a world much larger than I’d anticipated. I think that’s one of the moments that I want to share. So Yusef was a big model for me in that regard. And then [Walt] Whitman. I was a big Whitman fan, I guess because of the largeness, the expansiveness, the inclusiveness; that was very attractive to me. And Hopkins. I remember reading [Gerard Manley] Hopkins and thinking, What is this guy doing? Why is he torturing the language like this? So I think what maybe if we’re looking for a connecting throughline, there’s a degree of intensity that I’m looking for.

What is the strangest place poetry has ever taken you?

You mean geographically or emotionally?

You once said your advice to poets is to travel, to go somewhere strange, and I had the same response you’re having right now: should poems make us travel to strange places in the world or in our own heads?

Well, certainly, since we were talking about “Alienation Effects”: that took me to some strange places. I dunno. It’s hard to say now because they’re no longer strange once I’ve gotten there. They’re strange in the process, but after … less so.

I can say that there are some poems that have done things in the world that I didn’t expect and never foresaw happening. So it’s interesting to get an email with a link to a YouTube video of some children reciting one of your poems. That’s taking me to some place really …

Where were these kids? Just out in the world memorizing poems?

Apparently!

That is wonderful. And strange. And wonderful!

Exactly!

The poet John Blake did a TED Talk about reading Marty McConnell’s poem, “Instructions for a Body,” and the last line (“Do not let the universe regret you”) was one of the motivations for him to reassess his life. I think that’s a big demand of poetry, but I ask the question because sometimes people have answers like that for it: Has a poem ever changed your life?

There was a poem that I came across, and it had meaning only to me, and it was, I remember, it was Pattiann Rogers’s “All the Elements of the Scene” and she broke the fourth wall, as it were, and I was like, You can’t do that! You know, so my parameters, or the line I’d been policing as to what is or is not a poem was at the level of addressing the reader, and when she broke that rule—made me aware of that rule—it gave me permission to do all kinds of things.

Let’s talk about essays. Did you finish the MFA in Creative Non-Fiction?

Yes, I’m polishing now. I’m in that stage where I could go on polishing for a very long time, but I’m painfully aware that at some point I have to let it go.

How are you finding writing in prose similar or different to poetry?

Digest led me to the essays. And I’m thinking about the sort of landscape of ideas that I could craft within an essay and the way that I could move rhetorically through an essay, the way that I could draw on various materials and all the stuff, everything; whatever you can do in an essay, you can do in a poem, right? But I dunno, there were a bunch of poets-turned-essayists and I guess I just wanted to experiment with the form and then got into it. I’ve been working on a PhD, too, and so I’d done a lot of academic writing, and I was frustrated with the limits of academic writing and I wanted to get out of that context and say, you know, Haha! I’m gonna do it anyway! I’m gonna do what I wanna do! and take the academic essay in a more lyric direction.

But I also had this story, this family story, that I knew I had not in any way addressed. I have one poem in Totem, “Winter After the Strike,” but that doesn’t go anywhere near the depth of the experience of the air traffic control strike in 1981, and I wanted to know more, too. I knew there was a world of knowledge that I didn’t understand, and didn’t have access to, and so the essay allowed me to do the research. But there are the same kind of demands of emotional surprise, the same thrills of transgressing against the form—and I know there are people very close to me who are going to say, “That’s not an essay, that’s way too lyrical, and you’ve gone off the rails!” But it’s fun: I enjoy it.

And so what do we have to look forward to? What’s ahead for Gregory Pardlo?

There are a couple of projects on the horizon. First, this essay collection. The other is a collection of poems that I’m loath to talk about because they’re dangerous for me—very dangerous for me right now. And that’s precisely why I have to pursue them. So there is that.

How exciting! A dangerous collection is brewing!

Dangerous for me. Other people probably won’t find it daunting or surprising. And there’s also a craft book.

Wonderful! Thank you for sharing!

Thank you for a great conversation!

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

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Lauren K. Alleyne is Editor-in-Chief of The Fight & The Fiddle, Assistant Director of the Furious Flower Poetry Center, and Associate Professor of English at James Madison University. She is the author of Difficult Fruit (Peepal Tree Press, 2014).