1. How did your first book change your life?
Music for Exile is my first book-length collection and is the culmination of a process I almost abandoned, so to have it here, physically, tangibly, in the world, and not in a laptop file or manuscript box full of drafts has changed my life immeasurably. Having brought this project to completion is a relief and celebration. It is a point of departure as well! The beginning of a larger conversation with the world. I am deeply grateful to the Tupelo Press editors for selecting my Ms. via their July Open Reading Process. In the U.S. (which has been my home now for many, many years) most first books of poetry are published by way of first book competitions. I suspect my collection may have been challenging for first-round competition readers given the hybrid nature of my work, which when taken as a whole doesn’t fit neatly into any one poetic school or camp. To be honest, ever since reading Ilya Kaminsky’s Dancing in Odessa, to publish with Tupelo had been a dream of mine. Of course, I patiently submitted my work elsewhere as well, but how satisfying to receive Jeffrey Horowitz’s call accepting Music for Exile for publication. Accompanying this sense of accomplishment is a feeling of spaciousness. Now, a second book can emerge, a new wave of poems can come. That feels liberating and fills me with wonder.
2. How did I come to poetry first, as opposed to say, fiction or non-fiction?
I actually didn’t come to poetry first. Had you asked my teenage-self, I would have said I was on my way to being a novelist (while noting that in my chemical engineer immigrant father’s calculus of the world, patent lawyer and doctor were the only acceptable answers to the question of what I would become.) It was at McGill, as an undergrad majoring in Economics, Political Science and finally English Lit (which had been my métier in High School) that I began to write poetry in earnest. I didn’t enroll in creative writing classes at McGill, but one English Lit professor, a Medieval scholar who had previously been at UC Berkeley, encouraged creative responses alongside our critical work. I crafted a short story in opposition to Conrad’s Heart of Darkness, written from the point of view of a Congolese woman responding to the sight of Kurtz and Marlow’s boat coming up river. I have no idea where my copy of that story is or even if I still have it… but clearly similar themes and concerns continue to haunt and inhabit my work. While in Montreal, I was also welcomed into a community of Black Canadian poets, fiction writers and artists – H. Nigel Thomas, Khadejha McCall, Lillian Allen and others. Their gatherings, workshops and reading series, which included visits from Sonia Sanchez, Ntozake Shange, Dionne Brand and NourbeSe Philip, helped to nurture my early work. None of those early poems appear in Music for Exile, of course – and, actually, when first considering grad school, I applied to only two Creative Writing MFA Programs and a Cinema Studies MA/PhD and a Documentary Filmmaking Program as well. I was seriously considering film as a medium of expression. I was accepted into both of the film programs, was on my way to one, had a bit of lifechanging moment and chose to purse an MA in African American Studies at Temple instead. At Temple, I studied poetry with Sonia Sanchez. That my first formal poetry workshop was with Ms. Sanchez was a boon. The river had deposited me exactly where I was meant to be. A few years later I was pursuing my MFA in Poetry at Brown University and unexpectedly seeding a parallel life in the theater.
Note: This answer apparently contradicts my response to a similar question in a recent interview: “I don’t remember a time before poetry.” This version of the question posits poetry as distinct from fiction or non-fiction. The other queried when my relationship to poetic language began. Hence, their contradictory truths.
3. How long does it take to start any particular writing project? Does your writing initially come quickly, or is it a slow process? Do first drafts appear looking close to their final shape, or does your work come out in copious notes?
My usual process is one of gestation and wayfinding over several drafts. I often begin with a seed image - a fragment, a scrap of memory or dream, an historical utterance, a moment of dissonance, a haunting figure, a question or a curious associative friction ––– and allow myself a first spill, potentially more stream of consciousness than poem. I work first in long hand. Blank sketch book paper sans lines. A form or shape on the page may assert itself early on and I may let it. Often, I ignore these early shapes as an attempt to control where the poem is going. Other times, a shape announces itself in such a way that I recognize it as a key into the poem’s unfolding. I am led by Sonia Sanchez’s mantra, “All poems have form. Even free verse has form.” So, from my first spills, I work through several drafts, writing, distilling, gleaning listening for that particular poem’s form.
Time between early drafts and later revisions can be extremely helpful. Letting the poem sit for a few weeks, perhaps even a few months allows me to return with fresh eyes and ears to better discern the poem that lurks within the drafts. For me, residencies such as Cave Canem and Community of Writers have been wonderfully generative spaces, because we are required to craft a new poem a day and are only allowed to bring into each morning’s workshop a poem created within the previous 24 hours. At these week-long residencies, I compress my process––– first spill, through first, second and perhaps a third draft into the requisite 24-hr block, but then return home with a trove of valiant attempts, some almost finished poems, some drafts on their way to becoming poems other than what was first attempted, some pressed into a shape that I can shed and discover anew. In any case, the fruits of those week-long residencies allow me to write productively while also acting and teaching. With less imaginative space to dedicate solely to poetry, I am not left staring at a blank page. I have several drafts from which to begin a process of revision or “re-envisioning” to quote Audre Lorde in her preface to Undersong. (Ah! Just thought of this. I, in fact, first read Audre Lorde while living in Montreal. Thanks to an LGBTQ bookshop up on Blvd Saint Laurent where I happened upon a copy of Black Unicorn. I wonder if that bookshop is still there.)
Every once in a while, a poem appears in a flash, and in fact, at both of these residencies I experienced such an occurrence. Out of the week-long seismic pressure of writing and workshopping a new poem a day, one poem emerged fully formed that would go on to be published with very little revision if any beyond the residency version. Three such poems are contained in Music for Exile. The first is “Vortex.” I’ll never forget: it was my Thursday poem. The afternoon and evening before had been spent at Lake Tahoe, swimming, grilling and playing softball. In their wisdom the poet-founders of The Community of Writers Poetry Week knew we would all need to decompress, re-enter our bodies and be outdoors in community. I remember returning home to my shared writers’ house after that outing, renewed and utterly exhausted and without a poem yet crafted for the next morning’s workshop, which would we be due at 8am. I set my alarm for 4am and turned in early, knowing I just didn’t have a poem in me that night. When I awakened, the house quiet except for my footsteps, I descended the stairs, and while making my tea discovered on the kitchen counter, a copy of the San Jose Mercury News splayed opened. In my half-sleep, I glanced at it… and became ensnared by what I was reading. I couldn’t quite believe my eyes. “Vortex” came in a rush. The found text. The direct quotes, “THE COACHES WERE SALIVATING AT ROGERS’ PROSPECTS…!” All that I knew about ‘slave narratives’ or rather narratives by enslaved Blacks, all that I had been reading about Saartje Baartman’s genitalia being put on display in The Musee de L’Homme not to mention the objectification she had endured during her lifetime, my High School admiration for Jonathan Swift’s incisive deployment of political satire, all that I had learned about the Blues Ballad as engine of witness from Sonia Sanchez, together with that shock of recognition that “what is commonly assumed to be past history is actually as much a part of the living present,” to quote Ralph Ellison’s Introduction to Invisible Man––– converged. In 3.5 hours, I had the poem that I presented to that morning’s workshop, which Charles Rowell would publish in Callaloo, which Michael Harper would honor with The Philbrick Prize for my chapbook, Percussion, Salt & Honey. A poem which now appears in Music for Exile almost exactly as it did that morning in Lake Tahoe… thanks to a newspaper left open on a kitchen counter.
It is incredibly satisfying and always surprising when a poem emerges fully formed, but I also relish the patient process of revising, just as the actor in me loves the process of rehearsing. I am gratefully stunned however a poem arrives, whether all in a rush or by way of a long patient wooing.
4. Where does the poem begin for you? Are you an author of short pieces that end up combining into a longer project, or are you working on a “book” from the very beginning?
With Music for Exile, I certainly did not begin with an idea of the book in mind. It is the culmination of a long woodshedding process. I certainly have my persistent themes, obsessions, concerns, and as the shape of the book came into view, I would let go of some poems, even ones that had appeared in lit journals and magazines, craft new ones, reinstate some older ones when their contribution to the arc of the whole became clear, and so on. The creation and composition of this collection has been a wayfinding process. Even the title went through several iterations as did the order of the poems. By the time I began submitting Music for Exile to competitions and presses in January 2018 through Tupelo’s acceptance of the Ms. in September 2018 and their slated publication of it in February 2021, very few changes were made. Only polishing revisions initiated by me.
For my next collection, I have two working titles I am playing with, a collection of images, persistent fragments and am scribbling notes towards poems. I am intrigued to discover what it will be like to write poems with an idea of a book already in mind.
5 - Are public readings part of or counter to your creative process? Are you the sort of writer who enjoys doing readings?
I definitely enjoy doing readings. I openly claim Caribbean and Black Diaspora oral literary traditions as one of the many tributaries on which my work draws, but while the performative resonance of language is most definitely an element of my craft and approach to poetry, I do not consider myself a performance poet. I shied away from the slam poetry scene, while very much in awe of poets like Patricia Smith, Tracie Morris and others. I sensed, or perhaps feared, that the slam’s competitive element would seduce me into trying to create a “winning” poem, rather than write the poem that was necessary for me to write. I am once again invoking Audre Lorde. This time, her essay “Poetry Is Not A Luxury,” in which she locates eros in “the work our souls must do.”
6 - Do you have any theoretical concerns behind your writing? What kinds of questions are you trying to answer with your work? What do you even think the current questions are?
This is the question I have been most reluctant to answer. Having studied economic and political theory and of course literary theory, African Diaspora aesthetics, cultural theory, anthropology and ethnographic research methodologies – I imagine all of this in some way informs my relationship to language and to poetry, while being deeply aware that theory is not neutral. In fact, when Tupelo selected Music for Exile for publication, the editor’s citation noted both Kristeva and Cixous in relationship to my work. This was both delightful and mysterious to me. I remember pouring over Kristeva’s and Cixous’ essays. Can easily bring to my mind’s eye, their books full of my underlining and marginalia, but my actual copies of those books are tucked away deep in storage. (New York apartments afford only so much space for bookshelves.) I don’t know when was the last time I consciously thought of Kristeva’s and Cixous’ writings, and I certainly wasn’t explicitly aware of the ways in which their theory was still informing my present creative production. I have also grown wary of certain poetic schools or camps that claim an experimental or non-narrative approach to language alone constitutes a liberatory act – without any need or responsibility for concomitant liberatory praxis. As Lorraine O’Grady said so aptly in a recent Brooklyn Museum talk, “Western philosophy would shift every time we were about to be present. Subjectivity became uninteresting as soon as we came into view.” Aha! Oh, yes! I have sat amongst LANGUAGE poets who while supposedly engaged in radical poetics have no problem reinscribing racist, classist and sexist structures in their daily interactions or who have no problem appropriating the non-Western roots of their own experimental approaches to language without homage or citation. I had been writing on the threshold of the narrative and experimental even before attending Brown, and yes there is a rich history of Black experimental poetics (though often excluded and erased from the above assertions.) Yes, I gratefully gleaned much from Rosmarie Waldrop’s illuminating use of the fragment, C.D.Wright’s expansion of the poetic frame, Kamau Brathwaite’s unmooring of Caribbean poetics from colonial metre. Attending the de Kooning retrospective at MOMA, where both his abstract and realist works were vividly displayed, witnessing his resistance to being encamped, his self-given permission to embrace the aesthetic mode of that best served the painting at hand, further affirmed my own Blues aesthetic of standing at the crossroads and delighting in the polyphonic play between form and function. One of my favorite playwrights is Lynn Nottage. She is a playwright of language, of history, of specific and rich characterization, and also an artist forever experimenting with form. No two of her plays have the same form! I love that, as an actor and fellow writer. Early on, I heeded Alice Walker’s paraphrasing of Rilke - that as poets we must trust the questions themselves – and Lucille Clifton’s offering that whereas prose might be about statements, poetry is about questions. Perhaps my central theoretical concern and questions is best encapsulated in the last lines of the front poem or proem to my collection, “… When was the last time/ you made it home?” which close “Letter for Khadejha.” It contains of course the narrative question of the exile and the immigrant with all its reverberations and layers. There is also the question of making “IT” home. The etymology of poet is “maker.” I am deeply curious about all the ways in which my blood, literary and cultural ancestors have made it home, have made a way out of no way – to quote the blues – have made something of this wayfinding journey, have invented, riffed, innovated, contributed to artistic and cultural production for the last 400 years in exile. The resilience and creative inventiveness that have allowed those of us who were never meant to survive - to quote the late Black Canadian MPP Rosemary Brown – to assert our IS-ness in this IT-ness. In Howardina Pindell’s newly commissioned work, displayed just a few feet away from her large scale canvasses charting the traumas of enslavement and the Trans-Atlantic Trade, there is an I-Pad mounted to the wall, and on its black face a scrolling list of hundreds and hundreds of inventions created by Black inventors, many of them enslaved. The notion of transcendence is worrisome to me for it can be coopted by apologists… but to BE IN IT and MAKE OF IT home – home as in self-possession, home as in healing, home as in the co-immanence of the trauma and the embodied contradiction of the legislated ownership of the self – as in the samba – that in its tramp echoes the chained feet of the enslaved while asserting we are here, alive, dancing, moving, making IT home!
7 – What do you see the current role of the writer being in larger culture? Does s/he even have one? What do you think the role of the writer should be?
Not for me to prescribe for other writers what their role should be, but I am most drawn to writers who are deeply engaged and generous citizens alongside a rigorous attention to craft. I think of the legacy Toni Morrison left as a writer, public intellectual and editor, or Marilyn Nelson whose poems bear unflinching witness, or Sarah Ruhl and Tracy K. Smith, both of whom convene artistic community in ways that bring more and more voices into the circle. I personally don’t have much patience for writers who claim to be apolitical. That smells too close to a privileged acquiescence to the systemic status quo and the histories that have brought us here. If your writing isn’t helping to bend the moral arc towards empathy and justice, chances are I may not be reading you.
8 - Do you find the process of working with an outside editor difficult or essential (or both)?
My experience working with the editors at Tupelo has been great. As I mentioned earlier, any revisions made to Music for Exile after the Ms. was accepted were initiated by me. David Rossiter, my editor at Tupelo, was generous, gracious and patient. Book designer Dede Cummings was also a wonderful collaborator. At first, she may not have been aware of how intentional my use of the page, lineation, white space and margins were, but after some great conversations via email, Dede honored all of my idiosyncratic yet deeply intentional moves on the page. I have noticed one tiny typesetting error that neither I, Dede nor David caught in the proofs, but it isn’t egregious. Perhaps if the collection is lucky enough to enter a second printing, we’ll catch it then.
9 - What is the best piece of advice you've heard (not necessarily given to you directly)?
“Listen to the poem; it will tell you what it needs.” Sonia Sanchez
10 - What kind of writing routine do you tend to keep, or do you even have one? How does a typical day (for you) begin?
I have several variations on a writing routine: Am I acting? (and if so, am I in rehearsal or performance mode?) Am I teaching? Based at home? On the road? At a residency? Some consistent aspects of my writing routine: Kitchens are a generative space for me. Ideally, I am at a kitchen table or counter, tea at hand, writing in the early morning quiet, or I am writing in a space that is kitchen-adjacent. In my Harlem apartment, I could look up from my desk through a French door and into the kitchen. In my current Brooklyn apartment, my writing desk is angled askew so that from my living room space I can gaze into my little nook of a kitchen. At Marilyn Nelson’s Soul Mountain Retreat, where I met the poets who introduced me to Kate Rushin’s form, “A Crown of Sevens,” the kitchen was mine to sit in and write on early mornings. I enjoy having long blocks of time. Can easily write for 5 hours straight, then a break for lunch, a long afternoon walk, home, warm up and then off to the theater for that evening’s performance is one routine I have enjoyed. When in the early stages of rehearsal, I refrain from poetry writing, for I need the early morning threshold from sleep into waking to help dream into being the character, role and play-world I am exploring.
11 - When your writing gets stalled, where do you turn or return for (for lack of a better word) inspiration?
I return to the vestiges of past process. I retrieve from my files a stack of drafts that led to what is now a finished poem. The completed poems can have that satisfying yet seductive sense of always having been here. Even the few that do arrive in a flash journeyed to the page via some process. It is helpful to remind myself of that. To see the drafts. The explorations and experimentations. The questing. The discoveries. Even the failed attempts. To be reminded of how a poem first began when I had no idea of where it might lead, gives me the courage to simply begin again.
12 - What fragrance reminds you of home?
Saltwater.
13 - David W. McFadden once said that books come from books, but are there any other forms that influence your work, whether nature, music, science or visual art?
Definitely music, visual art and nature. I mention music in my poems, so hopefully there are some clues there. The poems don’t contain an exhaustive catalogue of the music that sustains and inspires me, but they offer a glimpse. Nature and historic cemeteries. I am inspired by long walks through both. When working at Shakespeare & Co in the Berkshires, Oldcastle in Vermont or the Stratford Festival in Canada, I charted my daily actor’s walk to take me through woods and historic cemeteries. While at Cleveland Play House, I found the downtown historic cemetery and walked to it and through it most every day. Woods were a little harder to come by in downtown Cleveland. Visual art: I was lucky this past year to attend in person and be deeply moved by two long overdue retrospectives of brilliant, yet overlooked, Black women visual artists: Howardina Pindell’s Rope/Fire/Water at The Shed last October, and Lorraine O’Grady’s Both/And at The Brooklyn Museum, just a few weeks ago.
At home in Brooklyn, my pandemic respite was the Brooklyn Botanic Gardens. I was recently decluttering and unearthed a slip of paper from years back on which I had jotted down about 100 different types of trees.
14 - What other writers or writings are important for your work, or simply your life outside of your work?
I have mentioned a number of them throughout this interview and even more are acknowledged in the collection itself. Again, not an exhaustive catalogue of the writers whose work on which my own rests, departs, riffs, innovates and with which my poems argue, but a glimpse into the conversation I am having with the various traditions imposed and claimed.
15 - What would you like to do that you haven't yet done?
Play a leading role in a stunning play on Broadway.
16 - If you could pick any other occupation to attempt, what would it be? Or, alternately, what do you think you would have ended up doing had you not been a writer?
My plate is happily quite full. I am already engaged in multiple ‘occupations,’ and art forms. I’ve even been lucky enough to collaborate with dancers and movement artists – another early dream of mine. As well, I come from a long line of teachers, so toggling between being a generative artist and college professor works for me. Teaching is, indeed, its own art form.
17 - What made you write, as opposed to doing something else?
I’ll answer this in the present tense. What makes me write? I almost abandoned poetry four years ago. I was busy acting. Earlier iterations of my Ms. had failed to land publication. I had begun to think I was perhaps not meant to pursue both, to be both a professional actor and poet. Thanks to a wonderful conversation with poet, Phillip B. Williams in the summer of 2017 and his insights, I renewed my commitment to the Music for Exile, was able to bring the shape of the book into view and re-galvanized my efforts to land publication. What makes me write? Writing to me is like breathing. Even with acting, which feels elemental to me in a similar but quite different way, writing is, indeed, my first breath.
18 - What was the last great book you read? What was the last great film?
The last great book I read? Dared and Done: The Marriage of Elizabeth Barrett Browning and Robert Browning by Julia Markus. I had searched for the book for the years, and then for a few more years it sat on my bookshelf unbeknownst to me (that’s another story!) While hunkered down at home for the longest stretch in many many years due to the pandemic, I realized the book on my shelf was the book I had been looking for! The book that dredges both Barrett’s and Browning’s Creole Caribbean roots! I devoured it in a couple of weeks.
Last great movie? The Last Black Man in San Francisco. I was finally able to screen it online early in the pandemic, and its poignant excavation of home, displacement, gentrification, Black masculinity, community, creative genius, and the destructive and restorative powers of narrative linger with me now. I feel as if I’ve met the characters. I find scenes and moments from the film filter through my imaginative consciousness at least once a week, if not more often.
19 - What are you currently working on?
I am currently in rehearsals and heading into tech, previews and opening for a National Rolling Premiere of Deborah Brevoort’s My Lord, What A Night, directed by Kate Alexander at Florida Studio Theatre in Sarasota. I am playing early civil rights activist, Mary Church Terrell, who was the first Black woman in the U.S. to gain a Bachelor’s degree. She took the “gentleman’s course” in Classics at Oberlin College, and was the only woman, Black or white, in her class. The play is about Marion Anderson’s famed meeting with Albert Einstein at Princeton and Miss Anderson’s journey to civil rights activism. It feels like absolutely the right play to be doing at this moment in time, and a gift to have it be my first in-person theater process and production after our long 16-month pandemic hiatus. It is a joy to embody Mary Church Terrell’s feisty visionary self. Her courage is resuscitating.
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