by Lauren K. Alleyne

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

And what’s exciting to you?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

And in the “to read” pile?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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Lauren K. Alleyne is Editor-in-Chief of The Fight & The Fiddle, Executive Director of the Furious Flower Poetry Center, and Professor of English at James Madison University. She is the author of Difficult Fruit (Peepal Tree Press, 2014), Honeyfish (New Issues Press  April 2019 & Peepal Tree Press, July 2019), and co-editor of  Furious Flower: Seeding the Future of African American Poetry (Northwestern University Press, 2020).

Photo credit: Erica Cavanagh