a transcription of the poem read on the home pageof this issue
by Erica Hunt
and not disappear in the dredging the edited ledgers omit antiphonal groans
Reader, you were meant to be legible even in the failure to communicate your will to resist snatching defeat from the jaws of easy victory the truth slips in as a figure of speech.
Reader step into my room this page faces you what will I miss if you blink what blots the ink pens and hems the imagination what hides in the brackish back stories hostile to the wobbled word, what resists being pinned to the truth?
Reader, we are carbon, and more the exact degree of life is inestimable— some of us chew ice and others suck chalk some crave salt before there is savor others can never be too full of sugar or bourbon sucker punched and stunned by death’s pugnacious brawl into dream time and song, extending both ends night into day.
Touch, reader, we were meant to touch to exchange definitions and feed the pulse of language. I promise if you step in it will propel you, me, it: topple distinctions ease doubt and belief, and all that in between.
Poem copyright 2019 by Erica Hunt. All rights reserved.
See more poems from Erica Hunt on The Fight & The Fiddle: “Mood Librarian.”
Dear _______________ In this space, in this time, I am a writer, a researcher, a scholar engaged in black study, guiding us through Erica Hunt’s poetics and prose.
Let’s journey together, on this word-train: “Where I am the Sunday / company / glad to be a passenger.”[ii]
A life-long journaler, Erica Hunt’s practice spans more than a half-century.[iii] A graduate of San Francisco State University and Bennington College, where she earned a Master of Fine Arts, Hunt’s creative endeavors include poetry, essays, editing, inter-artistic collaboration, and literary and cultural theory. Her renovative poetics evinces radical practices in Black avant-garde traditions.[iv]Hunt has worked as a philanthropic foundation leader, a community activist, a juror for literary prizes, and a thought leader.
Across the country, she has been awarded distinguished fellowships from the Foundation for Contemporary Arts and the Djerassi Foundation, among others; and she has taught at several universities, including Duke, Wesleyan, Temple, and Brown. Hunt has nourished, and been nurtured by, a range of intellectuals, creatives, and activists engaged in literary and cultural organizations, feminist art communities, and writing institutes such as the Furious Flower Poetry Center at James Madison University, Cave Canem, and the Kelly Writer’s House at the University of Pennsylvania. She has been a consistent collaborator with Black visual artists such as Allison Saar, creative intellectuals such as Saidiya Hartman, fellow poetic innovators such as Harryette Mullen, and composers and performers such as JJJJJerome Ellis.
Hunthas authored seven books: Local History, Arcade, Piece Logic, Time Slips Right Before Your Eyes, A Day and Its Approximates, Veronica: A Suite in X Parts, and Jump the Clock.[v] A wide range of contemporary journals, prestigious literary magazines and anthologies have also featured her work, including: BOMB, Boundary 2,FENCE, Hambone, The Los Angeles Review of Books; In the American Tree, Gathering Ground, and Seeding the Future.
Through dissonant sounds, arch allusions, and deliberate use of silence, Hunt’s poetry strategically tightropes “the verge of legibility.”[vi] Her “oppositional writing” practice incorporates “unrecognizable speech” patterns to counter discursive domination through mainstream literary cultures co-optation of insurgent aesthetics.[vii] This aesthetics of dissidence advances disparate forms of “black avant gardism”[viii] and continues the innovative liberatory praxis of many writers of the Black Arts Movement. With poet Dawn Lundy Martin, Hunt’s visionary assemblage in Letters to the Future: Black Women / Radical Writing, buttressed the visibility and indelible impact of female and genderqueer artists. She platforms artists “committed to a radical practice of literary work, necessary alchemists in the word.”[ix] Likewise, she works to “set boundaries anew” by “estranging familiar forms” like the “letter and diary.”[x]
Let’s reset the boundaries for critical essays on Erica Hunt.[xi]
To assay her treasure in word-wealth, I think with, and write in, the letter mode. I follow an African American literary and cultural tradition of letter-writing.[xii] This epistolary form reflects creative style as intellectual practice. My formal cue comes from Hunt’s career; her prose poetic epistles transform the relationship between intimacy, erudition, and the public sphere.
Yours, truly in public, —M.
* * *
Postcard #1: An Invitation Dear Public One:
I write to you, by the blacklight of poet June Jordan: these letters are things that I do in the dark—and the dawn— reaching for you.[xiii] In some form, these letters are love poems—but not in a sentimental mood.[xiv] My invitation: Do your thing, or yathang! I’d love to read from you once you’ve read Lauren K. Alleyne’s interview and Hunt’s work:[xv] How do you engage Hunt’s (epistolary) practice? What do you encounter in your own letter-writing journey?
Reaching for you,
—M.
* * *
Letter #2 Against Flatness: An Encounter
Dear E: It’s been decades since I first encountered your work. I met your writing-mind—and you—the poet-philosopher in-the-flesh at nearly the same time.
From a region in my place memory, I still see the table-top lectern where you placed the cream and carmine jacket for your newest book (at the time): Arcade.[xvi] You were the “Black woman at the podium . . .” bringing “a treasury of rhetorical wealth;” rewriting “ a radically different text for female empowerment.[xvii]” Once upon a time, the slanted podium you spoke from lived as a tree. Oak? Mahogany? I can’t see the grain, but I remember the wood, stained. I remember grasping the thick sides of the slick square before introducing you for a campus reading.
Arcade’s jacket design featured your name, and your collaborator, the sculptor and printmaker, Alison Saar’s name, too. The words: “POEMS” and “WOODCUTS” in bold, at the bottom, in two ecru rectangles. The rectangles’ edges were serrated. Each bolt resembled a strip of paper or unbleached linen; the beige blocks contrasted the surrounding geometric tiles.[xviii] And I remember a pun about Alison’s artwork: weren’t the book’s pages made of cut, pulped, wood? I thought, but did not ask, this question. It seemed too clever by half.
Now, as I type this letter in bytes, I remember my first encounter with Arcade . . . . The touch of vellum parchment. The thrill of cerebral play. The feel of my index finger pressing on words from your verse, tracing Alison’s lines. Tactile reading. Your poem, “First Words,” curtailed behind—peeking through—Alison’s drawing. [xix] Her printmaking and your wordmaking process, together, “fighting flatness.” [xx] Breaking and bending and baring and blurring boundaries, below . . .
Figure 1: Alison Saar, Wood Cut, Erica Hunt, “First Words”
See how Alison carves a thick curtain, encircled by color and light? See the curved figure, in full fetal position?
I see a world; I see a womb; I see a red moon.
See how the dark lines of your poem hover between translucence and opacity?
“We have this in common: art and life, children, daughters named Maddy,”[xxi] you and Alison wrote. Your collaboration renovates the visual-verbal architecture of Black maternal aesthetics.[xxii]
I read a few words from your “First Words;” you reference: what’s under stones or understates the tension of what’s concealed and what’s shown.
Your riff on “words that return in the face / the face of the familiar” and your penchant for parataxis repeats phrases presenting a surface feel of the familiar. Your deft syntactical shifts from noun and verb catch my eye and ear.
You shadow box with syntax.
“The past tense of read is read,” you wrote.[xxiii] I read Arcade, presently, and what hovers in my ear-mind? Your assertion in the essay “Race and the Poetic Avant-Garde”: “The world is in the text and the text is in the world.”[xxiv]
I echo your chiasmus with my own: The womb is in the text and the text is in the womb.
The carved lines of Alison’s woodcuts create a harbor, a word-womb in wine red, eggshell, and burnt umber. Tricolor enchantment.
Arcade transforms apperceptive possibility. I call this a form of blackalchemy.[xxv]
P.S. Do you see what I see? —M.
* * *
Letter #2B Introduced: Another Story
Dear E: You said “[s]tories . . . are repeated to someone who wasn’t involved, to get your side of the story told.” [xxvi]Well, this story involves you. My side of this story “tells and forgets.”[xxvii]
Not one, but two of my professors introduced me to you during my first year in graduate school.[xxviii]
‘Introduced’ is not quite the right verb.
In “Personal” you wrote: “grammar—a cause.”[xxix]Your continual creative parsing of grammar prods more precision.[xxx] “Tailored,” a denominal verb, better suits the occasion that shaped our first encounter. Two university garments, teaching and mentoring, shaped my enduring engagement with your work.
I don’t remember which came first: reading your widely influential essay, “Notes for an Oppositional Poetics,” in a grad theory seminar, or, being invited to introduce you at a reading. Memory’s mechanics fray the seams; the time slips.
You ask, “[h]ow does she keep the stories apart, from falling into one another?” [xxxi]
I do remember exiting through the side doors of Margaret Jacks Hall, then walking straight across the Quad to the beige and red-tiled building (ironically) called Green Library on Stanford’s campus. I researched the history of Kelsey Street Press, the feminist, experimental-arts press that published Arcade. I scoured the stacks to locate, and read—any, and—everything I could find written by and about you. I scanned the grayish blur on the microfilm—or was it microfiche?— machine so I could access an archived news-page from an early book review from the Village Voice Literary Supplement.
The reviewer began their engaged encounter with Local History by asking: “What might draw a reader into an author’s first book?”
The question, was, of course, rhetorical. The answer was: “Hunt’s opening line was enough to do the trick: ‘I was thinking that if the ceiling were mirrored we would have to watch what wesay about how we feel.’ Local History holds enough cleverly built dislocations to catch . . . readers unaware and force them to go back over that sentence to see if it meant to say what it said.”[xxxii] (13, VLS).
The epistolary, like a book review, is a form of encounter. When the epistle, to use an old-fashioned, clerical term, is enclosed in—or as—an essay, a poem, or a book—as many of your letters have been—the dialogic encounter between writer-and-reader is drawn out across time. The possibility for direct response is deflected into other modes like reviews.
The reviewer’s question emphasizes authorial time, the order of your story. Your first book.
My questions follow a sequence, too: Do you read reviews of your work? Do you ever shift the terms of the encounter by writing a letter to your reviewer?
Until I can read your side of the story, —M.
* * *
Letter #4:Marking Time: Between Enclosure and Boundlessness
Dear E: When you said, “every statement of poetics bears the mark of its time,”[xxxiii] you included your own. Likewise, when you wrote “every artistic practice is imprinted with its particular tensions of audience, time, and place,” you wrote in a public space.[xxxiv]
Place: a Boston Review forum. Time: Spring, 2015. Audience: “known and unknown readers”[xxxv]
The attention to “race” and “the poetic avant-garde” are the forum’s foci.[xxxvi] But the stylistic innovations of your work—aesthetic strategies that include “fragmented voice, disjunctive logic, and paratactic lines”—are not bound by race, language-centered writing or time.
From Local History (1994) to Jump the Clock (2020), your poetic method addresses the reader—and (fictional) recipients—through the forms of enclosure[xxxvii]the epistolary provides. Letters to the Future includes both visual art created in-and-as a letter form, as well as written letters by you and others, from conceptual artist Adrian Piper’s 2013 “Imagine” postcard, to your correspondence with playwright Adrienne Kennedy. I marveled at how you and Dawn choreographed a call and response to cohere each artist’s unique aesthetic expressivity. Your editorial and epistolary practices engage Black aesthetic practices, plural. [xxxviii] E., the friend~ship you and D. share operates as a verb: it breathes air into the sails of Letters; it buoys all 453 pages; it anchors the book’s radical artistic journey.
You said your poetry is “a rehearsal space.” The Black feminist sense of Caribbean rehearsal is evident in your staging of the epistolary as a site for expressive experimentalism. [xxxix]Letters is replete with multiple prologues, forewords, introductions, afterwords and closing words. Within these curtailed forms, you create a sense of aesthetic boundlessness.
But (say) what about “the mark of its time”?
Letters to the Future took protracted time, labor, and yes, love. The need for relation and connection was great, and grave. You observed “the time of this collection, 2015-2017, was marked by an inflection in the world’s deteriorating economic and political relations.”[xl] You invested three years to curate and cohere creative community. Letters anticipated the particular tensions of Pandemic Time, it Jump[ed] the Clock. You struck that clock at the janus hour when you reflected that 2020 “will be marked as a portal or an abyss or both.”[xli]
P.S. What made you shift from an anticipatory temporal mode in Letters to the Future to a “poetics of the present” in Jump the Clock?”[xlii]
marking time until your future reply, —M.
* * *
Letter #5: Notes on Notes: The Temporal, The Oppositional & The Ordinary
Dear E: Did you receive my letter last month? A few weeks ago, I watched the livestream of your conversation with Saidiya Hartman and JJJJJerome Ellis.[xliii] For some time now, I’ve been mulling over your talk, “Language in the Ruins,” and your rehearsal of temporality as a poetic, political and philosophical practice. You commended Saidiya’s “way of reading the past” as a survival practice, a strategic “present tool.”
It was poetic heaven, or at the very least, a haven, to hear you delineate Gwendolyn Brooks’ sonnet, “my dreams, my works must wait till after hell.” (Forgive the sentimentalism of my pun). Your renovative attention to Brooks’ gendered poetics of time in off-rhyme pairs such as “incomplete” and “wait” was spot-on. Your reading of lines like “I am very hungry. I am incomplete” and “No man can give me any word but Wait.” brought Brooks’ lyric to bear on our contemporary moment. [xliv]
“We wait, we wait, are told wait,” you lamented.
“We hold our breaths. I can’t breathe,” you added to this refrain. “How can we wait?”
You work through the wound of “waiting;” you turn the key on “its temporal lock.”[xlv] Thank you for opening the door to “hope” despite justice delayed, justice denied. Your critique of the politics of “patience” tends towards what the scholar Julius Fleming coined as Afro-presentism.
Your focus on the political function of parts of speech in Brooks reflects your investment in examining “the politics of poetic form”[xlvi] in your widely influential essay, “Notes for Oppositional Poetics.” “Notes” elucidates the strategies for “oppositional writing” in two novels: Toni Morrison’s Beloved and Survival in Auschwitz by Primo Levi.[xlvii] E, at first, I wondered why your excellent explication of novels was published in a collection theorizing poetics. But your essay indicates that distinct conceptions of genres, like grammar, are politically and discursively constructed. I first learned from your “Notes” to think critically about the atemporal structure of Toni Morrison’s Beloved. You indexed the “extremely violent conditions” that Black mothers endured within “slave society” as marked by Sethe’s disavowal of “official historical time. ”[xlviii] And violence, specifically the “submerged, disconnected and violent character of contemporary life,” compelled you to change your essay’s original title.[xlix] You replaced “Possibility” with “Notes.”
Possibility points to the future; Notes records, and becomes a record of, the past.
I think, here and now, of Cristina Sharpe’s newest book, Ordinary Notes.[l] Cristina’s distilled, condensed writing on quotidian encounters with antiblack violence and misogynoir indict and unsettle. Have you read it, yet E? What do you think of it, how may you think with it?
In possibility, —M.
* * *
Letter #8 Touching: On Legibility
Dear E: Even if “Correspondence Theory” didn’t hint, I would still feel called to respond; desire to engage your theory and practice; your avant-garde practice as theory.
Not too much time, say, around A Day And Its Approximates[li] after reading your poem, “Reader we were meant to meet,” I caught a snag in the net of your writing-mind.
You have often invoked the strategic power of illegibility in formal innovation, especially for oppressed communities. Imagine my surprise when I arrived at these lines: “Reader, you were meant to be legible / even in the failure to communicate.”[lii] The slippage—between the intention, or the capacity, to be clearly understood, and the inevitable disconnect—piques. The (un)decipherable code beckons and vexes.
I am touched by the tactile in your poem~theory, too. You declared: Touch, reader, we were meant to touch to exchange definitions and feed the pulse of language. I promise if you step in [ . . . ][liii] I step outside of the poem to step into the poem’s promise: the subjunctive “if.” “Were meant to” can also mean “but have not yet;” it can also mean “we might not.”
Does this yearning to connect, this reaching towards the reader, animate your letters? Does the proximal play with proximity, and distance, in your letters delight or rattle? Does the epistolary make a promise it (knows it) can’t keep?
feeling the pulse of (your) language, —M.
* * *
Letter #13: How We Get Free: Don’t Skip. Jump! Fly!
Dear E. You titled your new and selected poems, Jump The Clock. “Jump” is an imperative; “clock” serves as a noun. Let’s make a jump cut, a chiasmic shift.
Let’s clock the jump.
A recent review suggests your phrase could signify “jumping out of clock-time altogether—out of mechanized, monetized time. . . ”[liv]
Does your call to “jump” urge readers to quickly move beyond time’s frame or time frames?
Does your “jump” diddle with the line from the nursery rhyme: “the cow jumps over the moon”?
Does your pun on the cliché “time flies” seek freedom through propulsive flight?
I realize the answer could be “yes” to one, all, or none of these questions.
We connect, and disconnect, across temporal movements and their measurements. Your work indexes the (im)possibility of accurately taking time’s true temperature—even as the impulse to measure, to mark, time’s passage endures. Time blindsides sight. The day shifts from slip to jump. Your poem, “Octavio Paz’ Calendar,” where the phrase, “to jump the clock” appears, underscores this. Your reference to the celestial world, the world of “the sun,” slips into a mathematical one, a world of (dual) calculation. You wrote: the sun pours into pools of heat the same sun you round up to 584 days I tab at 365 and change not keeping score.[lv]
We correspond on differential planes and zones of time. Jumping involves kinetic movement; to jump the clock is to seek flight.
Let’s make a jump cut.
* * *
E., have you read Toni Cade Bambara’s short story, the Education of a Storyteller? Jump the Clock provides a theory of time, space, and flight. So, too, does “Education.”
To make a short story shorter, Bambara begins with a black girlchild, Peaches, in conversation with her Grandma Dorothy. She learns how our African ancestors did the thing that needed to be done. How rest was won. Not despite, but to spite the arresting chain-hold by those European (sea) captains of captivity during that murderous Middle Passage.
Some of us did not die, June Jordan reminds us.[lvi]None of us willingly chose to take the “voyage through death / to life upon these shores” that Robert Hayden chronicled.[lvii]
Some of us skipped the shore. Nah, we didn’t skip. This weren’t no skippity-zippity, “Zip-A-Dee-Doo-Dah,” Song of the South, Disney-movie version; romancing slavery; serving our subjugation on a prettified plantation platter.
Bambara’s narrator tells of “that terrible time when we were kidnapped, herded in ships, and brought here in chains as enslaved labor [ . . . .] when the boat brought the Africans from the big ships to the shore . . .”[lviii]
Some of us walked.
The order of the story goes: “[T]hose Africans stepped out onto the land, took a look around, and with deep-sight vison saw what the European further had in store for them, whereupon they turned right around and walked all the way home, all the way home to the motherland.”[lix]
Some of us flew.
Another side of the story goes: “And there on the deck, we looked to shore, and saw what was further in store and we flew away to Guinea.”[lx]
Some of us jumped! out of the boat into the plane of wet across the plane of air
Later, we learned to tell these storied lessons in liberation. “Of course we know how to walk on the water, of course we know how to fly,” Grandma Dorothy tells Peaches. [lxi]
Your storied lesson on liberation appears in the Author’s Note in Jump the Clock. You said your poems “were and are a rehearsal space for emancipated knowing, thinking and feeling; the open space of hope. . .”[lxii]
I, your reader, respond here—rehearse in the open space beside you: jumping through the opensurrendering to the air not succumbing to the sea your emancipated knowing: how we get free
taking flight
—M.
* * *
[i] I dedicate this epistolary essay, in memoriam, to Althea Tait, an influential writer, professor and scholar of Black feminist literature, children’s literature and poetry and poetics. Althea: “pink-think” theorist of Magenta! Althea, come from spirit-strong faith, family and friendship. Althea, who made writer family breaking bread with we Wintergreen Women Writers Collective. Althea’s sudden passing changed the arc of these letters towards time-slippage.
[ii] Erica Hunt and Alison Saar. “First Words,” Arcade, (Berkeley: Kelsey Street Press, 1996.) p. 9.
[iii] Hunt frames her introduction into poetic practice through journaling, “for more than 52 years . . . since I was a girl. . . and writing poems much of the time.” (Hunt 00:12:15-12:38). Hunt, Erica. Furious Flower Facebook Live Reading Series Presents Erica Hunt, YouTube, uploaded by Furious Flower Poetry Center, 4 Oct. 2021, https://youtu.be/mG7w1lRcUtQ?si=EJyeZGKaT-VGpOWH&t=730.
[iv] I see Hunt working within a Black avant-garde tradition whose formal innovation includes an investment in historical forebears, identified as “contemporary renovative poetics.” Jones, Meta DuEwa, “The String of Grace: Renovating New Rhythms in the Present-Future of Black Poetry and Music,” Furious Flower:Seeding The Future of African American Poetry, Edited by Joanne V. Gabbin and Lauren K. Alleyne, Evanston, Northwestern University Press, 2020, pp. 213-230.
[v] Hunt, Erica. Local History, New York: Roof Books, 1994; Arcade, with Alison Saar, Berkeley: Kelsey Street Press, 1996, Piece Logic, Durham: Carolina Wren Press, 2002; Time Slips Right Before Your Eyes, New York: Belladona Press, 2006 (Reissue 2015);A Day and Its Approximates, Tucson: Chax Press, 2013; Veronica: A Suite in X Parts, Chicago: Selva Oscura Press, 2019;and Jump the Clock:New and Selected Poems, New York: Nightboat Books, 2020.
[vii] “Erica Hunt,” “Notes for an Oppositional Poetics,” The Politics of Poetic Form: Poetry and Public Policy, Edited by Charles Bernstein, New York: Roof Books, 1990, 197, p. 203-204.
[viii]“Black avant-gardism” is a theoretical concept coined by the scholar Keith Leonard. Unpublished manuscript, See synopsis of this project. “Abstract,” ACLS Fellow Grantees;
[ix]Hunt, “Introduction: Angle, Defy Gravity, Land Unpredictably,” Letters to the Future: Black Women / Radical Writing, Edited by Erica Hunt and Dawn Lundy Martin, Tucson: Kore Press, 2018. p. 15.
[xi] For excellent scholarship on Erica Hunt, see: Kinnahan, Linda, “Bodies written off”: Economies of Race and Gender in the Visual/Verbal Collaborative Clash of Erica Hunt’s and Alison Saar’s Arcade,” We Who Love To Be Astonished : Experimental Women’s Writing And Performance Poetics, Edited by Laura Hinton and Cynthia Hogue, Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 2002; Cummings, Allison, “Public Subjects: Race and the Critical Reception of Gwendolyn Brooks, Erica Hunt, and Harryette Mullen,” Frontiers: A Journal of Women Studies. 26a; 3-36; Schultz, Kathy Lou. “Rock and a Hard Place: Erica Hunt and the Poetics of African-American Post-modernity.” How2 1.5 (2001): n. page. Web 21 Sept. 2015. Book-length treatments have trended in the direction of emphasizing the connections between Hunt’s challenges to standardized language practices and conceptualization of political functions of grammatical orders in relationship to Black Arts / Black Aesthetics movement(s) and their relationship to experiments and innovation in (oft unacknowledged) parallels and tributaries with other avant-garde practices. See, Evie Shockley, Renegade Poetics: Black Aesthetics and Formal Innovation in African American Poetry, Iowa City, University of Iowa Press, 2011, pp. 9-12, 14 and 85; Anthony Reed, Freedom Time: The Poetics and Politics of Black Experimental Writing, Baltimore: John Hopkins University Press, 2016, pp. 1-2, 100, 106.
[xii] Examples of black epistolary practice in poetry, fiction and non-fiction, and scholarship abound. Some of the most well-known literary letters include: James Baldwin, Letter to My Nephew, The Progressive, 1 Dec, 1962, Alice Walker, The Color Purple, New York, Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1982, Ta-Nehisi Coates, Between the World and Me, New York: Spiegel and Grau, 2015; Letters by Hunt’s contemporaries in formally innovative, renovative poetics include Nathaniel Mackey, Volume #1, From A Broken Bottle, Traces of Perfume Still Emanate: Bedouin Hornbook; Lexington, University of Kentucky Press, 1987; Barbara Henning, Looking Up Harryette Mullen: Interviews on Sleeping with the Dictionary and Other Works, New York: Belladonna, 2011, Evie Shockley, The New Black, Middletown: Wesleyan University Press, 2012. Recent theological scholarship in black study, and blackqueer studies, comprised in serial letters scholarship see Ashon Crawley, The Lonely Letters, Duke University Press, 2020.
[xiii] Jordan, June “These Poems,” Directed by Desire: The Collected Poems of June Jordan, Foreword by Adrienne Rich, Port Townsend: Copper Canyon Press, 2007. p. 3.
[xiv] I’m inspired by Damaris B. Hill’s address, where she writes “the legacy of these women’s lives chase me like a strong wind. This book is a love letter to women. . .” “Preface,” A Bound Woman Is A Dangerous Thing: The Incarceration of African American Women from Harriet Tubman to Sandra Bland. New York: Bloomsbury, 2019, xviii.
[xv]I’m serious about this letter-play. Email a response letter to: metadj@email.unc.edu. Please put the name Erica Hunt in the subject header of your email.
[xvi] Hunt and Saar, Arcade, Berkeley, Kelsey Street Press, 1996.
[xvii]Hortense Spillers, “Mamas’ Baby, Papa’s Maybe: An American Grammar Book,” Black, White and In Color: Essays on American Literature and Culture, Chicago, University of Chicago Press, 2003, pp. 203, 229. I was introduced to Spillers’ thinking, and her in person, by Professor Sharon Holland during that same semester. Spillers was a Fellow at the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences at Stanford.
[xx]Saar states she’s “always been interested in pushing those boundaries to combat the medium’s [printmaking’s] inherent flatness.” p. 95. Saar, Alison. “Fighting Flatness,” Mirror, Mirror: The Prints of Alison Saar: From the Collections of Jordan D. Schnitzer and His Family Foundation, New York, Printed in Italy, Distributed by D.A.P. See for an excellent review of Saar’s aesthetic practice, see Cristina Sharpe, “Alison Saar, the Alchemist” Alison Saar: Of Aether and Earthe, Pomona, Benton Museum of Art, 2021.
[xxi] Hunt and Saar, “Collaborative Statement,” Arcade, p. 53.
[xxii] Jennifer Nash’s Birthing Black Mothers, Durham, Duke University Press, pp. 103-31.
[xxv]These letters are excerpted from a chapter from my current unpublished book manuscript, “Black Alchemy.”
[xxvi]Hunt, “Chapter 5: Going Home,” The Time Slips Right Before the Eyes, New York: Belladonna, 2006, p. 17.
[xxvii] Hunt, “The Time Slips Before Right Before Your Eyes,” The Time Slips, p.12.
[xxviii] Gratitude to Marjorie Perloff, Professor Emeritus, Stanford University, and, in memoriam, the late Professor Diane Wood Middlebrook, Professor Emeritus, Stanford University.
[xxx] Hunt, “Notes for an Oppositional Poetics,” pp. 197-212.
[xxxi] Hunt, “Chapter 2: Back-Home,” The Time Slips, p. 14.
[xxxii] Review of Erica Hunt, Local History, Voice Literary Supplement, Village Voice, Apr. 1994. p. 13.
[xxxiii] Hunt, “Statement of Poetics,” Furious Flower:Seeding the Future of African American Poetry, Edited by Joanne V. Gabbin and Lauren K. Alleyne, Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 2020, pp. 337-38.
[xxxiv] Hunt, “Response to Race and the Poetic Avant-Garde,” n.p.
[xxxv] Harryette Mullen, “Imagining the Unimagined Reader: Writing to the Unborn and Including the Excluded,” The Cracks Between What We Are and What We Are Supposed to Be, Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 2012. P. 3. Mullen and Hunt share what poet and critic Julian Sphar observes is an “attention to reading . . . rooted in the intersection between language writing’s pursuit of wild reading and autonomy—and identity-centered poetries’ concerns with community building and alliance.” Everybody’s Autonomy: Connective Reading and Collective Identity, Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 2001, p. 115.
[xxxvi]Hunt, “Response to Race and the Poetic Avant-Garde,” n.p.
[xxxvii] Meta DuEwa, Jones, “Reframing Exposure: Natasha Trethewey’s Forms Of Enclosure,” ELH: English Literary History, Vol. 82, No. 2, Summer 2015, p. 411.
[xxxviii] Evie Shockley, Renegade Poetics: Black Aesthetics and Formal Innovation in African American Poetry, Iowa City, University of Iowa Press, 2011, p. 9.
[xxxix] Hunt, “Author’s Note & Acknowledgements,” Jump the Clock, p. 194.; Tanya Shields, Bodies and Bones: Feminist Rehearsals and Imagining Caribbean Belonging, Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2014.
[xl]Hunt, “Introduction: Angle, Defy Gravity, Land Unpredictably,” p. 15.
[xliv]Gwendolyn Brooks, “Gay Chaps at the Bar: ‘my dreams, my works must wait till after hell’”, Selected Poems of Gwendolyn Brooks, New York: Harper Perennial, 2006, p. 23; Hunt, “Language in the Ruins: (Hunt: 00:53:53:-53:47) https://www.youtube.com/live/2bSu_ysGzVQ?si=qUti2tBbUnLf32I0
[lviii] Toni Cade Bambara, “The Education of a Storyteller,” Deep Sightings and Rescue Missions: Fiction, Essays and Conversations, Edited by Toni Morrison, New York: Pantheon, 1996, p. 253.
[lix] Bambara, “The Education of a Storyteller,” p. 253.
[lix] Bambara, “The Education of a Storyteller,” p. 254.
[lx] Bambara, “The Education of a Storyteller,” pp. 253-254.
[lxi] Bambara, “The Education of a Storyteller,” pp. 255.
[lxii] Hunt, “Author’s Note & Acknowledgements,” Jump the Clock, p. 194.
Meta DuEwa Jones is a creative scholar, and Associate Professor in the Department of English and Comparative Literature at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. She authored The Muse Is Music (Illinois, 2011), which was awarded honorable mention for the MLA William Sanders Scarborough Prize. Jones’s current monograph in progress, “Black Alchemy,” is a hybrid genre work of poetry, theory, and memoir that both explores–and participates in–collaborations between poets, writers of autobiography/memoir, and visual artists. How do Black Diasporic creatives attend to the legacy of slavery and global migration and its impact on notions of community, kinship and freedom? “Black Alchemy” seeks to answer that question through research, autobiographical vignettes and close-analysis that considers the points of origin and affiliation of diverse contemporary artists who travel along waterways and byways, trains and trails in sites such as Eritrea, Ghana, Jamaica, South Africa and the United States. Jones’s creative scholarship, focused on African-American poetry and inter-arts, has been published in diverse venues. Jones’s research and writing has been supported by fellowships from the National Humanities Center; the Schlesinger Library at Harvard University; the Moorland-Spingarn Research Center at Howard University; the Rockefeller, Woodrow Wilson, and Mellon Foundations; the Stanford Humanities Center; and the Carter G. Woodson Institute.
In Erica Hunt’s poems, the reader/audience is “meant to be legible,” which is to say the poem is conscious of itself as a voice–sometimes several voices–speaking to a listening ear. Write a poem that is vocally fluid (i.e. entertains multiple speakers), but remains in direct dialogue with the reader/listener throughout. Who’s listening? Who has things to say to that open ear?
I am the second daughter of a second daughter— a second daughter in a luminous loop stitch of girls and women: who test the rope” and— “sell the shadow to support the substance”— who push the outer out from out of bounds— who mime duty to weave the daily bread— who unthread and rewind at night—burning both ends—
we learned never to turn our backs to them lest they underestimate us— never let them assume and erase us— the them that consume and appropriate us— them that see my body as calculus— subtract the profit from sacrifice to their unquenchable god— an ALMIGHTY—dollar—pence—and pound of flesh— for whom no labor is ever enough— demanding “can’t see to can’t see”— rock busting stone busting bone crushing false “god” blind to suffering—
we fashioned hollers and bone calls— blues and hymns to blunt the toll— pay bills due for ransom in order that our daughters live— rise above zero— and raise daughters who liberate their children’s children from— a stubborn clay—this catastrophic dust imagined as freedom.
Tell me, again. How did you get your name?
When my nearest neighbor takes the air on her porch— eyes closed at rest or prayer—turned inward to her youth— she resembles my mother restored to an earlier/older self comfortable in her robe’s faded folds, hair satin scarf-wrapped—
and impossible. I exhale a kiss to her as if she was— my mother— risen from the rest where she had been waiting death— just like the rest of us—just that much closer to the door— she throws an encouraging smile and revives me from unacknowledged slumber—
the way she sees me—helps me to see me— reassembled and framed— a specific noun linked to verb—unwavering and named.
Have you ever come across a book that tells you something about yourself that you did not know?—
Perhaps you meet the gaze— of a person looking out from the book—a turn of phrase— a photo, sculpture or canvas—holds your stare— so that you trip over the seam of uncanny resemblance?
Did you think then—how did they know— how did they see—how did they find that opening between the page and the world?
But, how did you get your name?
Answer: I was a child of testing—tests to supply proof of a valued life and Tests to gauge possible failure. Tests to check in on the already said and tests to confirm tests as a way of thinking.
There was always a test in which one could have scored higher—to improve upon luck in a casino simulation of the odds held in the actuarial table of Black life
living through minus to minus never knowing where the zero stalks my Black marked bulls eye even when I didn’t know it—like
when the cab driver said to me—once I got into the car— “you hailed me as if you were white man,” and then demanded I leave the car.
Question: what is the Black way of hailing a cab?
How did you get your name?
It may have been a coincidence—but the year the Boss was elected was also the year we experienced a great variety of mayhem first hand more than rumored apocalypse handed down by grandparents or read about in the far away anywhere but here
in our midst the bad enough commenced to bleed—with no end to the end— precursors of disasters unending undoing the Boss accelerated failed science to fuel his swagger multiplied sociopathic ideas to which we were already susceptible—vulnerable on arrival (VOA)
Disarmed the armor with casually toxic syntax—the Boss was bluster and seduction—fluent in the language of God’s green acres pronounced over someone else’s land bucolic and folksy with an unconcealed evil and brutality for others
intent on harm—the Boss heaped blame on flame— until flame licked white—racing to the top of self-gain— the Boss stoked anger at strangers and the flames were easy to fan— opened a better view for the crowd to watch them burn
“Burn it all down”
the boss was chief fire-master; a paint-thinner and match striker every surface emblazoned with his persimmon face—eye rolling pageantry
“Burn it all down”
the crowd looked like foot-soldiers in search of the next lynching fanning outward—any enemy to upend and find comfort in its them to unstick an us—to force to kiss gravel—finding the power of death
undoing an enemy who shares the same sun—same bottom of the clock same stick in the eye—same pattern of shadow cast from the feet same result when breath stops mid
How did you get your name?
And then word came to me that my cousin P one of the mother trees—toppled— the forest shook and emptied— all calendars read—for the time being—
countless—days at a time—shift happened— my cousin fell out of bed— dropped to the limit where lungs could still welcome air— fell and woke up with a knotted tongue
her adult child found her— took her sigh for her habit of keeping words tucked in her cheek— took her restraint from taking the bait as consent—her green life nourished by air, rain, debris—her epiphyte life— mouthed a silent call for help shaking the world to its roots— her undoing unheard until morning
How did you get your name?
The story is told of a girl of whom they said the moles across her face were like stars— beauty marks or nova scattered across the galaxy—a constellation’s silhouette— goddess’ retreat into black curtained—eternity—her limbs extended like willows’ drift toward the bottom of rainfall—visible only half the year and then in a beauty of extinguished meteorites—exchanging immortality for silence
The story is told of a girl who solved the dilemma of preferring her face over every doll’s face with their stamped eyebrows, gilt eyelashes and identical lips— pucker-perched between the promontory of high cheek bones’ identifiable mask—so that when doll heads nodded yes— no consent was necessary—our girl learned to—to sit on her hands for yes— and to swallow for NO
The story is told how Ariadne used her thread—a glissando of tap— crash of one sonic element into the next—a drawl and sprawl—shimmering cymbal’s change of direction—confused her pursuers and hid her tracks—drum beats doubled and tripled stops—starts—variations and patterns—
I decided to tell stories as they are told to me— not exactly as told— but as I heard their sharp edges split throats shaking—and imagining— a 15 year-old girl telling and hiding behind rage-cancelling memories— a fully grown woman who has lived most of her life planted in the walls of her home and the broken timelines—poetries of jump rope and hidden grief— poetries of invisibility—the first time by sitting at the back of the class and the next time by sitting in the front— stories that never fit the description of the hero in hiding or the hero’s unlucky number—but falling in between the— lines and past her/our possible lives where —rest—health—bloom are staked and entangled—waiting to be re-stitched —story reconstructed or deconstructed or rescued from small talk by a Mood Librarian.
Poem copyright 2023 by Erica Hunt. All rights reserved.
Erica Hunt’s poetry operates within a critical and illuminating paradox. In it, language and time are both bedrock and evanescent—slippery and uncontainable even as they are essential and foundational. In the poems, time collapses, expands, spirals, contracts bringing history into tomorrow and evaporating the present into a formerly- (and formally-)imagined future. Alongside this shifting time, or perhaps within its shifting, language both emerges and is formed. The shifting of these axes—of what we generally hold to be constants—makes for a creative disorientation, which is to say readers are nudged out of the familiar, rehearsed orders of chronology and grammar, and discover the fissures through which change might enter.
In particular, it is Hunt’s hallmark use of wordplay and repetition that serves to shake loose tired logics, opening within those same logics, an elsewhere born of the language itself. Her poem, “Proof,” provides an example of this revelatory wor(l)dplay:
Proof that we live in a broken world, and a broken world is unlivable.
Proof that the carrot turns into the stick and vice versa. Proof that that seems normal, self-sufficient.
Proof that we sometimes destroy things that are broken and can’t be fixed and sometimes fix things because to live with them broken is unthinkable.
Proof that we switch roles, sometimes to destroy things that are broken and can’t be fixed and sometimes to live with things that are broken because to fix them would be unthinkable.
Proof that we learn to live with the unthinkable. (Jump the Clock, 73)
Sentence after sentence, the poem orchestrates dissonance: the repeated “proof” seems to offer concreteness, carrying with it the air of irrefutability. At the same time, as the poem progresses, following its own line of iron-clad “proof,” the logic unravels, revealing its core horror—“we learn to live with the unthinkable.” The discomfort of the implications of such a logic ruptures the very complacency that would allow it to register as true, as the line’s declaration makes one wonder what manner of “unthinkable” things we have “learn[ed] to live with.” (Genocide? War? Poverty?) Suddenly the reader is thinking about the formerly-unthinkable, unmooring the whole idea of “unthinkability” from its solidity, its status as both given and acceptable. The rupture generated by the activity of thought through the activation of language in the poem opens a possible space where one might choose (or at the very least desire) not, in fact, to live with the unthinkable. A space where change might enter.
In addition to revealing oppressive logics, Hunt’s poems argue for a vigorous restructuring if not complete dispensation of language that does not move us toward liberation. She urges us to reject “words, recognizably impaled, plates of gummy platitude” (“This is no time for nail biting,”) and instead to “Invent the language as if each inflection / belonged to you instead of containing you…” (“The Order of the Story,”)
Erica Hunt was the 2020 judge for the Furious Flower Poetry Prize. She visited the JMU campus in June of 2022, and we talked about poetry, language and what it means to wrestle with their roles in the world. This is an edited version of that conversation.
Thank you so much. I am so excited, Erica, to be having a conversation with you about poetry and all things poems. Welcome to JMU, The Fight & The Fiddle, and Furious Flower! I have a ton of questions. I want to start with just asking about your arrival to the space of poetry. What brought you here? What was your journey to this craft and to this practice?
I would say that, like many writers, I was a big reader, and from an early age, as soon as I could read, I consumed all the books that I possibly could in the children’s section of the library. So at first, I thought of myself as a storyteller. Later, I was a teenager when I started writing poetry. And I didn’t have many models. I remember I had a fourth-grade teacher who gave me Paul Laurence Dunbar, Joggin’ Erlong. I understood this is poetry because you could hear the music of it. Also, the dialect poetry was very puzzling to me. I just didn’t know what to make of it. And remember this 1965 or something, so it took me a while to appreciate what she saw in me. Later on as a teenager, I started writing poetry without too many models. But I would say that my early models were LeRoi Jones, who I saw early in high school, Amiri Baraka, Sonia Sanchez, Allen Ginsburg. In all three of those people, I would say, poetry was connected to a political and social commitment. But being a practical sort, as I was raised to be, that kind of, “take the test, do the test, and get your promotion!” Whatever. You know, civil servants really stressed that. I did not think I was a poet. And I thought, “Oh, I love language. Let me study linguistics, philosophy of language…” Not practical much, but somehow more promised–more legitimate! Isn’t that interesting? So poetry kind of crept up on me and in a way that was expression, but also about language, the wonder of what our language can do, and what it does to us, and to our thinking.
I love that answer. And I love the idea of both wonder and expansion. I know you’re often referred to as an experimental poet. And I’m interested in what you think about that term and how you inhabit or reject or reshape or own that term. Because I think so much of what I sense as experimental is your testing of those wonders and limits of language. Tell me about that.
I think it’s interesting the way that that term finally is beginning to have less of this kind of elitist approach, as if there was only one way to be experimental. In fact, I would say that people, when you sit down and you don’t quite know what you’re going to write, you are in some ways testing something. You’re testing your experience with the language, against the language, in the language. Can it be adequate? And what I’m so interested in this idea of experiment, is there’s so much of our experience, especially Black people and people of color’s experience, which has not been put into literature, yet. Language is so much about our psyche; it’s a social phenomena, we use it to connect and communicate, but there’s also parts, there are territories, within ourselves and within our interactions that are not yet expressed in language or in literature. And then how does that become part of the experimental project? And the project is to begin to mine and excavate these levels of experience and feeling and spirituality and stillness.
Quietude.
Right, right. Quietudes that aren’t quite fully manifest in language. And so, we got lots to do. And experiment is one way to go about it.
I love so much of this, because I feel when I read your work, there’s so much a sense of a mind at work. A mind sort of exploring its own contours. But at the same time, there’s an awareness, like in the poem you just read, of the reader of the other, of the audience. And then I also think of this idea that also is in your work of the poem being part of an even larger conversation. So talk to me about that tension between the quietude and the stillness in the individual mind, and the audience, the intimacy of that. And then that larger conversation, that expansion that I feel is so packed into the work.
That’s good. It’s really astute. There’s lots of conversations, I always say that poems occur in layers. And one of the things that gives us a feeling of Wow, that was a great experience here, reading this poem, is that we can return to it and discover these other layers. We haven’t exhausted the possibilities of the poem. I say to students that if you get to the bottom of it, you read the top line and you go to the bottom and you think you got it all and you’re ready to put it down, then that poem is not very successful. A poem is supposed to make you go, “How did we get here? What was that journey? Let me go back up and read that again.” Not because it’s bad. It might be because of ambiguity, but because there are layers that have been worked into that tapestry, into the framework of the poem.
I’m an introvert, and some of it is sort of internal reflection, but we’re always in conversation. And language is a social phenomenon. We’re talking to other poets, we’re talking to other parts of literature. In my poems, I have a kind of social commentary voice. I’m reminding that we share a common destiny, that we’re connected. We can act like we’re all individuals, or as [Margaret] Thatcher said, “there is no society, only individuals.” We can act like that, but that’s not the case. And that even in our internal reflections, we are powerfully constructed by the society we grow up in. That we live in. Not grow up in, live in.
So, thinking of this social commentary and a larger conversation, we are in a tumultuous place in America and in the world right now. And what do you see as the role of the poets, of language in all of this? What’s our work as practitioners of language?
Yeah, that’s a good question. I ask that question all the time. And I think there’s a particular urgency to that now. Poetry does a couple of things. First of all, one of the things is, it asks us to slow down and read. To not skim, not just go by something. And it pays a particular kind of attention to language and that’s a really helpful thing. The other thing is that we are among the many practitioners of the imagination, of the poetic. Poetics– poesis— I would recall for people means to make things. And so we are making things, and we’re making things and testing things. And some of them are just trifles. But some of them are important pathways of thinking. And those pathways of thinking provide us possible routes for moving past, moving through, untangling–undoing the knots that challenge us right now, and that sometimes limit our lives. So poetry is how we do a kind of speculation, and as I like to say, a rehearsal, for a life that we do want. The life we are trying to move to, that we think, “Oh, I’ll thrive there. Our people will thrive there.”
Our planet might thrive there.
Our planet might thrive there.
The way that you’re speaking, it seems like language is a technology of thinking, and I’m curious about how and if technology— or that thinking of language as a technology—how does that play with the experimentation or the form of your work?
I think I’m open to it. I don’t think technology plays that much of a role, but yes, language is a technology of thinking. Language helps to give our thoughts a sort of shape and form. It’s the clothing of thought. I think somebody says that, “language is the clothing of thought.” It’s sort of like, Oh, that’s what that thought is, I didn’t know it before I wrote it down. I wrote it down and then it becomes clarified. You see its beauties and its flaws and its limits. You see whether or not you’re being grandiose. (Laughs.) Or maybe that’s such a modest observation, maybe that’s all I can say in this line.
Language is “as if…” “what if…” and then finish the thought. That kind of rehearsal. Or “yes, and…” or “this is my experience, and…” or assert [that] “this is my experience. Yes, and…” And to finish that sentence as a way, as an engine for going through a poem.
As summoning also, right? Because the “as if,” calls forth something else that may or may not have been pre-formed.
I’m thinking about your whole other career as a community organizer, and a grant maker, and fundraiser and I was reading about some amazing projects you did over the years. How is that work distinct from or in conversation or congruence with your work as a writer?
I feel like that it’s so interesting. I poured so much of myself into those years. It was a privilege to have people tell me about their lives. I really saw other people’s lives. During that time, I traveled extensively through the South, where I had not been. And I would say maybe I’d spend 30 to 40 days a year visiting organizers and communities who were not in the news or anything like that, but were really making change at the community level. And so, it was really a great honor to support that kind of movement work. I understood something about Black people’s resilience. I’d seen and I had my own examples, of course, in my family and in New York City, but entering communities and seeing where governments were not for them, didn’t work for them, so communities made their own, were able to, nevertheless, make change– everything from school systems and making it better for the kids, to asserting voting rights, electing people who represented them. These are important pieces that actually make it so that I can’t let go of the idea that change is possible. We make change. There is a level of heroism that is right there; that often people know how to solve their problems. They have the solutions they need… it’s like how do you help people? And not go, “oh, you know, well, we know better, we’re gonna find it–” No. I really believe in that bottom up change.
How does it influence my poetry? It made me want to sample, to really tell stories, let other voices through. I’m very interested in that– how do you make a chorus, a choir, in a poem? And to not get so hypnotized? You can get hyper-focused on the enemy– the establishment, the newspapers, the government, certain lies that get told over and over again. And as a poet, you feel particularly sensitive to when the Supreme Court goes on and says, “Oh, your law about guns in this state that y’all voted on… nuh uh… By the way, abortion and reproductive freedom, that’s something we’re gonna give to the state for you to vote on.” So they can put contradictory decisions out in one week. You can get focused on, “How dare they? How could they?” Or you can decide: what are the voices that need to be heard that have a wisdom and express the what if?
There’s a woman, her name is Ruby Sales. Ruby is in her late 70s, maybe early 80s now, and she was an early pioneer of the civil rights movement. She was part of that march over the Edmund Pettus Bridge. When they were gathering, and she was a teenager, the local white people in Selma came with a gun and tried to threaten them, not to march across the bridge. And somebody came in that evening, a white man with a gun, and pointed a gun at her and cocked it. And this white Episcopalian priest, who was visiting from Boston, stepped in front of the gun and got shot and was killed. And it stayed with her. It stayed with her and it changed her life. She became a tireless advocate, tireless worker, for human rights. Human rights, they say civil, but it’s human rights. And she’s quite something, someone I’ve been privileged to meet, she is quite something. And it’s both her spiritual transformation and her political transformation, her intellectual transformation, into someone who’s just ferocious about these things and points out the way that these things– that kind of hatred, that kind of supremacist thinking, is with us now. Destroys us. Takes life all the time, and it’s completely hypocritical. It stands in our way of getting free. It’s a powerful story, she tells these powerful stories, she’s a powerful woman. And those voices… Those voices. And she shows up, other people show up, as voices in the work.
I’m so interested in the lyric and our traditional understanding of that lyric “I,” that singular expression, the eruption from the self. I do think of your work as lyric, but I also recognize these other voices in there. And so how do you think about holding those together? That idea of the lyric self and accommodating the other voices?
I’m very influenced by this idea of collage. Because the collage allows you to have both– to sample from all these different kinds of language sources, including oneself. Collages, we think of it as sort of a European technique, but of course it’s a technique which has many roots in many cultures. I’m very influenced by visual art. There’s this way that you think about any culture that has a sculptural form, a sculptural practice, where there’s synoptic views. So you can look… say you’re looking at a figure, the subject in the sculpture– think of a piece of African sculpture, say, you’re looking at a mask. You’re also looking at the mask in time. It’s usually being worn in motion. In time, it’s facing different directions; there are different inflections. It’s the dynamism. So that our voices, the lyric voice, is not a stable, constant voice. It depends on which time and which gesture and which direction that voice may be facing, who it’s addressing: it’s not always the same. We change when we address different people. Similarly, we’re not always in charge of our voices. Sometimes this voice comes, you go, “Who the hell is this?” It’s because we are socialized. And so those voices aren’t always completely under our control. So, the lyric voice is interesting the way that it is so multiform, malleable. And then when I say choir, it’s like, there could be a Ruby Sales, there could be Erica at 10, there could be some of my reactivity to some newspaper headline, it could be the newspaper headline–all of those things.
I’m so interested, too, in orality as, I think, a huge component of your work. It’s just a joy, and also a whole experience, to hear you read. Can you tell me a little bit about how that enacts or how it plays out in your poetics?
I’ve become very attentive, attuned to performance. The performance of a poem, and you can do anything. You can invite intimacy, even in a large room, by the way you read the poem, and you can get people excited. And you can also highlight lines for people so that they hear–even if other lines kind of go by them, they’ll remember one or two, and that will give them the sense of the whole. Because I’m paying attention, I’m picking up things from singers, jazz singers. Jeanne Lee, I mentioned in a recent essay, Jeanne Lee was an improvisational jazz singer, she passed. But she had a whole range of vocal techniques, but I’ve been listening to a lot of Sheila Jordan and Carmen McRae. And I love Diana Reeves. I love the way that, yeah they’re telling a story, but they’re giving a feeling. You stop focusing on the words and you realize you’re focusing on the way their voice moves. And, “Oh, you were really harmed there.” Or, “Oh, you’re really in love!” And that can be conveyed through a voice, I love listening to that stuff and trying to understand how to join more closely how sound is an aspect of meaning.
We’ve talked about visual arts, we’ve talked about music, and at one point, you thought you were going to be a music writer. How do all of these arts, visual art, other arts, impact and influence on your work?
I learned so much about composition. Like, how do you compose? So you have all these parts, you have all these little art parts. You have a great line. “Oh, that’s a great line. Oh, what a word!” We’re collecting, right? We’re collecting lines. We’re collecting some thoughts, you have this thought, “Boy, that’s a funny thought.” I have this whole thing about when will Black women own ourselves—self-possession. That’s like my little joke. My double entendre. So, I’m always collecting little puns or things like that. And then what do you do with the parts? I’ve learned a lot from listening to music composition, how there’s the head. There’s the tune, and then there’s elaboration and improvisation, and then it goes back to the head. And then you try to end not on the [thud] but you end up, right? You end with an open question.
Just think of a gesture. There’s that. In the visual arts, it’s also about how parts, colors and blocks of color and planes are put together. I love to sit there and just kind of look at the way that things are made. Poesis: how was this made? And trying to imagine myself in the position of that maker. Having to make judgments about where all of these wonderful parts I’ve been collecting ought to go.
With the understanding that there’s an entire pantheon of poets and writers you could choose from, who’s currently energizing you as a writer and just as a human?
Yes, currently energizing me. Well, I’m in a book club. And we’re reading Looking for Lorraine by Imani Perry. Imani Perry got this really interesting way of writing biography. She puts herself in it. Increasingly I’m interested in that, how do you write about a subject and don’t pretend you’re not there?
There’s this way that, sort of like this passive voice writing about something, a topic, like Lorraine Hansberry about whom we care about deeply. I’m interested in the ways that writers, right now, are signaling, “I’m invested in this.”
I’m interested in Saidiya Hartman’s Wayward Lives. And because, again, of the way the imagination and the subjectivity is not denied, but rather embraced, and actually provides us a way deeper into subject matter. And for that reason, of course, I adore John Keene’s Counternarratives. Though, he’s circumspect; he reframes, but he’s on the periphery of the stories in Counternarratives, wonderful work. In terms of poets, I would say that I’m really interested in Tonya Foster’s writing, she writes about place, and about language, and about culture in a way that’s like it’s a moving collage of things, but also driven by the ear. I’ve taught a lot Diana Khoi Nguyen’s Ghost Of, which is a really interesting book, formally inventive, that commemorates her brother who passed and does that through some straight-ahead text, but she also cuts his shape out of each of the stanzas because he’s missing. It’s something he had done just before he died. He cut himself out of all of the family pictures. So she used that as the template for a beautiful work of mourning. So it’s an embodied, it’s like, the body is missing. The body is missed in the text. Very moving. One other person, Akilah Oliver, of course, who is also not with us, but we’re still taking on her work and taking on the implications of it. Oh, and Renee Gladman! We have to talk about Renee. Renee Gladman, who is writing these architectures, which are both a handwritten kind of text where she goes up and down, and it’s really like a scribble page. And then the text which accompanies it, which is these various scenes of place, of a person walking through urban streets and the kind of maze and rumination that if you’re taking a good walk, you allow yourself to do. So those are really also very interesting to me.
And thinking of your own writing, what do you wrestle with, and what delights you in your own creative practice?
This is a great question, because I can get going on this one. Right now, I’m working on something which returns me to early wellsprings of just places where I connected around literature and language. So I’m thinking a lot about storytelling, which is something I am trying to teach myself to do. I tell stories pretty well, orally, but this is a different thing. I’m thinking, how do you put out stories which are not conventional narratives? They are, you know, poetic narratives. So I’m exploring that right now. And I’m finding all these forums. My theme for this is Scheherazade, our woman storyteller who, just to re-tell the story briefly– the frame story. It’s a Persian collection of stories that has been added to, but the frame story is Scheherazade has to tell a story every night to keep the Caliph, or as I call him, The Boss, from this kind of obsessive, murderous idea that women are not faithful. So he would sleep with a virgin, or new woman, and then in the morning, because of the potential unfaithfulness, he would have her executed. So Scheherazade is there saying, “Look, let me tell you a story.” And she starts to tell him a story and tells him a story. And the Caliph, The Boss, looks up and says, “Oh, it’s morning. I’m so into the story. What happens next?” And she says, “Well, you’re going to have to wait till next time–tomorrow evening. This evening.” And she does this, right, then that’s the story, One Thousand and One Nights. So, I’ve been thinking about what is it to tell a narrative, even a poetic narrative, or especially a poetic narrative, as if your life depended on it? What are the stakes? It’s a version of your first question. What are the stakes of literature? What is it that will… rouse us out of this terrible sleepwalk off a cliff as a society and/or hopelessness– the, kind of, collapse into hopelessness? What are the stories we tell ourselves, even as poetic as, especially as poetic narratives, that help us to keep working and moving forward?
That’s what I’m wrestling with. It’s a big chunk.
Tell us about your most recent book Jump the Clock, which is new and selected. You talked about going back to earlier wellsprings and that made me think of that process, what is that like? Tell us about the book.
Sure! I went back and I said, “I’m just gonna choose poems I like!” They got bigger and bigger, I actually you get to see that many of the poems are poems I still like, I mean, a lot of the poems from previous books are there. And then I went back and looked at poems that didn’t make it into the earlier books. And I put them in, you know. I liked them well enough, or I worked on them some more. I saw my evolution, no one is a static being.
We’re constantly changing. And I see myself moving from a kind of, a little bit disembodied, into a more formal way like the correspondence theory with these letters. That was really this playful, formal section into more kinds of… freer. I got freer. To play. That’s the best and that people like to read them and have spoken to me about them. And this is over the years, I could say, “okay, yeah, I guess that’s…” And also of course, it’s always interesting, when people come up to you and say, “this poem really spoke to me, this is what it means to me.” And you go, “Okay!” I love that. I just love that it can have a voice that is not always completely centered in the particularities of how it was composed, but really has this–
They joined a choir.
That’s right. They joined the choir and the work has been completed by the reader. It’s really, really lovely.
Well, that seems an excellent stopping place given that we started with “Dear Reader.” Thank you so much!
Lauren K. Alleyne is Editor-in-Chief of The Fight & The Fiddle, Executive Director of the Furious Flower Poetry Center, and Professor of English at James Madison University. She is the author of two collections of poetry, Difficult Fruit (2014) and Honeyfish (2019), the chapbook (Un)Becoming Gretel (2022), as well as co-editor of Furious Flower: Seeding the Future of African American Poetry (2020). Her poetry has appeared in numerous publications including the New York Times,The Atlantic, Ms. Muse, Tin House, and The Caribbean Writer, among others. Recent honors include a 2021 nomination for a US Artist Award, a 2020 NAACP Image Award nomination for Outstanding Poetry, the longlist for the 2020 Bocas Prize for Caribbean Literature, and the shortlist for the 2020 Library of Virginia Literary Awards. In 2021, she was awarded an Outstanding Faculty Award from the State Council for Higher Education in Virginia, and a JMU Agency Star award.
