by Lauren K. Alleyne

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

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

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

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

Head first
into a temple of gloves
hair wet and tangled

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Oh, that’s a gift.  

It’s a gift to me too. 

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

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

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

Thank you so much for having me!

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

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Photo Credit: Erica Cavanagh