.jpeg)
1 - How did your first book change your life? How does your most recent work compare to your previous? How does it feel different?
Wow, great question. My first book, Maroon Choreography, changed my life in profound immediate ways. Stephanie Burt wrote a sweet review in the New York Times Book Review, which brought significant attention and light to my previously subterranean existence. I moved into community with so many other great souls, became known in a way. Financially, my entire life changed for the better. I got a new job and tenure at the University of California Santa Cruz, was able to move from New Orleans back to my home state of California, to live by the ocean which is something I always wanted. Maroon continues to create such powerful opportunities to think deeply with many people I would otherwise not have a chance to study with. I receive messages all the time from people who express gratitude for that book. It's an ongoing phenomenon. My second book, Septet for the Luminous Ones, has brought me into deeper community with contemporary poets, which is something I did not know how much I needed until I began to experience the unmatched joy of being able to pick up my phone and type or speak a message to some other brilliant living poet who lives hundreds of miles away from me, to momentarily feel less alone in the general vastness of being a poet in this world-simulation that still—on a mass scale—has no idea what we are, or what we are for.
2 - How did you come to poetry first, as opposed to, say, fiction or non-fiction?
I first came to poetry as a child. I began dancing when I was 3. I began reading and writing when I was 4. Growing up, my family was very mystical, musical, spiritual, so at home it was easy for me to "be" a poet, meaning I could explore and deepen my neurospicy sensibilities—I was a sleepwalker as a child, I had incredibly vivid dreams that I could recall with great detail, I began astral traveling, I was deeply connected with spirit realms, could commune with spirits, other entities, was incredibly sensitive (secretive), had a lot of imaginary friends, would spend hours preoccupied within the invisible realms in our backyard, on camping trips, or just drifting around aimlessly in my own imagination, I could easily imitate the sounds of other people's voices, could sing lyrics to songs even if I had never heard the song before and was singing it for the first time, had an episodic memory that felt almost epic, for the most part all of this was fine in the context of my family. I went to a public, creative arts school, I was in a magnet program, so I was involved with various creative practices as a child. In first grade, I guess around age 7, I started reciting poetry by Harlem Renaissance poets, Gwendolyn Brooks, Langston Hughes, other greats like Emily Dickinson, because my teacher, mom, and assistant teacher—three Black and Brown women who were all about Black history and Black poetry—co-created a daily practice that they collectively reinforced at home, in the classroom, at recess on the playground, and in the world. My mom would have me read poetry aloud to her most nights when I was young, she taught me how to type on her typewriter at the kitchen table, she also taught me how to sew, so poetry became something embedded within my daily practice of reading, studying, playing, moving, making, breathing, speaking, being. Just this very natural thing. I finally began writing poems around age 14, which makes sense to me now because that was around the time when I told my mom I wanted to begin practicing witchcraft and I was no longer interested in going to our Christian Science church. Fortunately for me, she listened and supported my decision.
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 of copious notes?
It takes me a very long time to start anything. Writing is no different. Sometimes I get a very clear flash of an entire project—generally a book—I see, feel, experience it as a finished product, understand exactly what it is, experience a heightened ecstasy that's unlike anything, then soon after I lose the thread and can't seem to figure out how to get from A to B. But if I feel that flash and commit to a project then I'm determined to see the thing through, no matter how long it takes or where it takes me. My first book was written in time constraints, it was my tenure project, so there was external pressure which I did not enjoy. Writing Maroon was such a painful process for my physical body, because I was so focused on the work itself I could not properly attend to all the signals coming from my body, or actually release years of the accumulated pain that I was working through in the process of shaping Maroon whose form changed dramatically from initial drafts to the published book. I was super anxious the whole time. I really had to learn how to get out of the way, to stop trying to control it, to let the book become itself and not what I wanted it to be. Septet came in a delicious flash. Suddenly, after Maroon, I was receiving invitations from poets to submit new work. I was shocked to learn I actually had more work, a lot of it! Rae Armantrout sent me a letter asking if she could put me in touch with her editor (now our editor) Suzanna Tamminen at Wesleyan. After talking with Suzanna, I ended up writing Septet in nine months, which was entirely unexpected, a beautiful surprise! A doula friend, Laurel Gourrier, told me it was a pregnancy and to treat it as such. I've never been pregnant with a human fetus, but I really loved working in a gestational way, some of those final poems look the same as they first arrived, many of them went through several revisions before the final shape. Now, because I no longer have any time constraints, I have this incredible freedom to truly listen to a project, to allow it to come in its own time, to readjust energetically to receive the work, receiving poems is a serious energetic commitment (it's not often easy on the body), I'm much better at listening to my body, pausing, properly caring for myself, releasing, moving stagnant energy, and understanding how certain things I'm working through in the poetry is connected to actual trauma I've experienced in my human life, and the deep ancestral work I'm healing at the cellular levels through my mother, grandmother, and all our mother's mitochondrial DNA. Working this way feels super natural, healing, sacred. I'm currently writing three books, different genres, all at once, have never done this before, it's ongoing. The first sensation of these three new books emerged while I was wrapping up Septet, and by post-production I was committed to bringing these new books into the world, began making notes on what I thought they might be. They change so much as time passes. Lovingly, I refer to them as my triplets. It's such a slow, intentional, co-creative process. Only a little comes, or sometimes these huge floods, followed by long periods of nothing. I spend a lot of time reading in the nothing.
4 - Where does a poem usually begin for you? Are you an author of short pieces that end up combining into a larger project, or are you working on a "book" from the very beginning?
I'm generally working on a book from the very beginning. The poem, or really the book, arrives with a line, a sound, a sentence, a fragrance, laughter, a texture, an image, something sensual. In late spring 2021, I was sitting in a little casita in a rural town in New Mexico outside of Santa Fe when the line "petrichor / a waft just now" floated in with the breeze, and the scent of coming rain. I heard the line in the wind, could feel it in the scent, wrote it down, it was the beginning of Septet long before I began writing it. The actual line appears in the poem "acid west" which emerges pretty far into the actual book, I was thinking partially with my friend Joshua Wheeler's Acid West, after spending a lot of time with his book on the beach, probably thinking about the constant interplay of beach and desert. Poems are such intimate spaces for me. They often begin on the precipice of great love, essentially for myself, and personal things I am exploring with friends and lovers.
5 - Are public readings part of or counter to your creative process? Are you the sort of writer who enjoys doing readings?
I love reading poems. I want to read more public poems. I go through shadow and light periods. Sometimes I just need to be unperceived, in the dark, left alone. Other times I like to be very intensely in the light, just everywhere as much as possible. I'm coming into a bright moment. I live in a small coastal town in California, which is not at all like a city, it has a much sleepier, subdued, sensuality that I truly adore. Like no one is rushing, no one is really trying to impress anyone, people are just grateful to be in a shared creative spirit, it feels like a great place to start talking into some microphones. The pace is exactly my pace. I've been slowly making plans to do public readings here in Santa Cruz, where the poetry scene is microscopic but intimate. I want to get up to the Bay Area and start hanging with those poets too.
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?
These things have shifted dramatically for me post-tenure. Before my first book, I was basically trying to hone a language to discuss what I care about, what I think about, what I study. I seem to be very obsessed with intimacy, sensuality, and beauty, the way we (as a species) can experience these heightened existential states of being while still grappling with the horrors of systemic racial capitalism. That's the very broad thing. More specifically, at this point in my life, as a 42-year-old Black woman, I am preoccupied with graceful aging, with renewing my relationship with my uterus and hormones, with being a lunar creature, with deepening my Tantra, with spirituality, with love and loving. It's so rare to encounter mainstream positive literary portrayals of Black women who are truly inhabiting their power, who are loving fully and deeply, or the only spaces where I witness such delight is in the works and practices of Black Lesbians. Politically, in my writing and in my life, there is a very strong Black Lesbian ethos, that is my main concern now. And I mean "Black Lesbian ethos" in that Cathy Cohen ("Punks, Bulldaggers, and Welfare Queens") sense where a Black Lesbian politic is less about sex and who is sleeping with whom, and more about intentional relating and caring for each other. I don't know exactly what other people's current questions are, but I am asking questions about how I can be more loving with myself and others in a time of continuous violence, precarity, scarcity, isolation, and fear.
7 – What do you see the current role of the writer being in larger culture? Do they even have one? What do you think the role of the writer should be?
The writer is so essential. I think people forget this, or do not realize that the objective reality we inhabit is a narrative, something written, something reinforced. Everyone is talking about Artificial Intelligence (AI), everywhere I turn, so much anxiety around that, and whatever current trend in the media. Everything is written. People speak things that are written. For better or for worse. Each writer has a different role. My role as writer is to spread love, to try and play my part in shifting the vibrational frequency of this planet from fear-based to love-based frequencies. It's easier, I think, to do this with music. The next closest thing is poetry. As a Black woman, I've experienced some terribly painful shit in this life, so much core trauma, inherited legacy pain, but I work hard to transmute that pain into something beautiful. I'm so disciplined in my craft, practice, to raise the lyric to a more conscious level, even if it doesn't come off that way to a reader, I know what type of energy I channel into my work. It's all Love. I think the role of the writer, on some levels, is to become exquisitely devoted curators of our craft — whatever forms we're working through and contributing to — to make a point of contextualizing our work in the "traditions" and groupings (et cetera) that inform and shape our work. I read so much. Poetry. Philosophy. Fiction (both great and bullshit). Essays. I read much, much, more than I write. My practice as a writer mostly involves a lot of deep study and also communion and conversations with the friends who help keep my ideas in motion. I think our role is super communal. I learn so much more about my role by being in community with friends, both practicing and non-practicing artists, experiencing moments of life together, having conversations about what we do and don't do. There's sometimes a tendency for people to distinguish practice as some sort of rudimentary form that one must relinquish after a particular stage of development, at which point one presumably becomes adept, or proficient enough to no longer need to practice. Writing doesn't work like that for me. Even though lately much of what I think of as my "best" writing arrives quite rapidly, in order to receive these glimmers, I must practice to keep my instrument (my bodyaura) functioning at its optimal and ready to receive when it's time. The whole process is incredibly feminine. I sort of work like an improvisational experimental jazz artist, those harpists and horn players of the 1960s and 1970s, it only seemed as if they were jamming free, but they could only do so because they spent so much of their time in deep continuous study, practice, and play. I'm grateful I have the privilege to live how I live. That I get to immerse myself fully in the creative process to the point where I get to live inside my works-in-process. For folks who still have to deal with a 9-5 job, or who are struggling with securing basic needs, it seems the role is to remain true to their struggle, to express what needs to be expressed, to honor the tiny snatches of time when there is a moment to continue practicing, to continue shaping whatever poem, story, or missive that is their pleasure (and perhaps purpose) and to share it with the world.
8 - Do you find the process of working with an outside editor difficult or essential (or both)?
I love the process of working with an editor. It's essential. I'm very independent, but receptive. I don't like being told what to do. That's a huge turn off. I love when an editor trusts me, when they step back, when they (perhaps) perceive some glitch or sticky part in the work, but they let me figure it out on my own. I like faith. A lot of space. And figuring shit out on my own.
9 - What is the best piece of advice you've heard (not necessarily given to you directly)?
June Jordan said "poems are house work" and I think that's the best advice I've ever heard because it explodes into meaning and is resonant with how I live in my physical home and physical body, what I do in these spaces, whom I invite in to these places, the work I do.
10 - How easy has it been for you to move between genres (poetry to essays)? What do you see as the appeal?
It appears seamless, but it's hard as hell. I use entirely different sensibilities when writing an essay versus receiving and shaping poetry. I'm doing this now in the three books I'm writing. One is poetry, the other essay, the other fiction. I think the appeal for poets to move between poetry and essays is about being known. It's essential for poets to place our work in the context of other poetry, throughout time and space, and to talk about the continuity, the expansions, whatever else is happening, through essays. We are the only ones who can do this. We cannot rely on (non-poet) literary critics or analysts, to define what is taking place within our poetry. Plus, the labor of writing essays helps keep the tradition of poetry alive for future generations of readers and I am so committed to this particular part of the practice. And for me, it's totally practice. I practice each day and night. Mastery is a myth peddled by racial capitalism.
11 - 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'm incredibly domestic. Being intentional with how I make home is necessary to my practice. At home, I live a very simple, ritualistic life and poetry is deeply embedded within this. I don't like routine because it's too rigid for my lifestyle, but each day I tend to do the same things with slight variation. I move intentionally (either hike, yoga, dance, sometimes run), I breathe intentionally (in meditation), I prepare nearly all of my meals, I fast sometimes, I drink a lot of water, I have a journal I write in daily or many days a week, I eat in a seasonal Ayurvedic way to maintain balance, I spend time on the ground outside (in the sun, in the grey), I listen to the birds, I talk with people I know and strangers too, I work with plant medicines (cannabis and other herbs), sometimes I work with magic mushrooms, I feel things very deeply, I make love to myself, I pay attention to how my energy shifts throughout my menstrual cycle, I show up in the ways I can in my communities, I read something, read a lot of things actually, I share the house with visitors I love, I remain in flow. The university where I teach is on a quarter system, I do not teach every quarter. If I'm in a teaching quarter, my rituals expand to allow more space to deal with more humans than is typically the case for me, but I still dedicate time to my creative practice. Days of the week have spiritual significance. I follow the astrological movements of the planets, the phases of the moon, I am always moving in accordance with the great invisible threads that hold us all together. Every day I recommit to life. Every day I practice deep gratitude for the overall abundance in my life. When I am not in a teaching quarter, I am much more disciplined in my daily rituals, there's a precision, a tightness, a minimalism I cannot even articulate, but it's palpable. When I'm not teaching, because I live alone and do not have any children, I move into the delicious phase in my year where I feel as if I am living in a continuous artist residency only broken by going out dancing with local friends which is totally part of my writing practice.
12 - When your writing gets stalled, where do you turn or return for (for lack of a better word) inspiration?
I remember hearing the singer Erykah Badu say in an interview once that there's no such thing as a creative block, that when we arrive at an impasse it's actually just a moment of heightened receptivity, we enter an intensive downloading or uploading part of the process. This might be another exceptional piece of advice, it changed how I think about creating. Sometimes it feels frustrating when the writing stalls because I love creating, but I understand it's necessary to the process, to life. Everything goes through cycles. Nothing is in full bloom all year long. Whenever I experience these pauses, I don't even think about it anymore, I just surrender to the experience, feel things very deeply, pick it back up when it's time for me to re-enter the great stream. It might sound terrible, but when the creative process slows down, I often turn to my lovers and friends and family who I had been unconsciously ignoring while I was busy at work. I also return to nature, take longer, slower walks, immerse myself with the earth, go deeper into meditation, sleep longer, sometimes hop around in various books or sometimes binge watch a great television series. I'm not so much searching for inspiration in these moments, I feel as if I'm reacclimating to the material plane, the whole thing is super grounding. I also tend to write very long letters to friends, to poets, to other people during lulls.
13 - What fragrance reminds you of home?
My home often smells like jasmine, sandalwood, frankincense, ganja, cedar, copal, cumin, cinnamon, coffee, rose, olive oil, lavender. These scents remind me of home.
14 - 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?
Yes, nature. I live very close to the ocean, it's such a delight to exist in the continuous sensation of coastal life, and the lifeforms that are here, various birds, flora and fauna, everything is so fertile, lively, synergistic. The way the weather fluctuates on a coast is so different from where I grew up in a desert valley in Southern California and the landlocked experiences I had living outside the state in Georgia, Wisconsin, and Louisiana. On the coast, there's a constant marine layer, at dawn at dusk, interspersed by bright sun, it changes rapidly, the movement is a rhythm I'm still learning and honing in my craft. For the past couple years, one of the greatest influences on my work is the soundscape created by my friend and local dancehall DJ Selecta 7 (aka Osha B) who hosts a weekly radio show on KZSC 88.1fm and streamed online called "Reggae Love Radio" on Saturday nights, and his monthly global bass music dance parties called "Outernational" here in Santa Cruz. Both surreal music spaces are great companions for all three of the books I'm currently preparing. Because Osha is super technical and precise, his shows/parties are so carefully curated they feel like poems, or a kind of poetics that is at the exact frequency in which I create, so his curatorial work within his scene is super influential.
15 - What other writers or writings are important for your work, or simply your life outside of your work?
Everything by Nathaniel Mackey, Renee Gladman, Ed Roberson, akilah oliver, Alice Notley, is important to my work. Various books on Tantra. Also, I can't stop reading Jasmine Gibson's A Beauty Has Come. Otherwise, lately I've been reading fiction series in English translation. Yoko Tawada's Scattered All Over the Earth, and Suggested in the Stars (look forward to the final book in the series, Archipelago of the Sun) translated by Margaret Mitsutani. I also love Solvej Balle's On the Calculation of Volume (books one and two of a seven book series, translated by Barbara J. Haveland), which is unlike anything I've ever read. I like stories that are mundane, minimalist, serial, composed through the simplicity of looping a certain sequence of events over and over with slight variation, which happens in both Tawada and Balle's work. I've also been reading a lot of Clarice Lispector's work alongside work by Hélène Cixous. I've been reading More Than Two (the original and the second edition) on healthy polyamory, because I've been polyamorous for 20 years but just barely reading these books because I'm writing about polyamory in a way that's still very fresh and exciting to me, so these books are helpful. I just got Debbie Urbanski's short stories, Portalmania.
16 - What would you like to do that you haven't yet done?
Grow food. Go to Morocco, Spain, Thailand, Bahia, Patagonia. Make quilts. Grow roses.
17 - 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?
Hmm. I'd probably work with textiles, make quilts, work on looms to make natural fiber blankets and clothing. Actually, I'd live on a farm with my partner and other people we love, some bold new age commune where we all have our own yurts, we'd all make a point of loving ourselves and each other, plus we would live with sheep who we would carefully shear each season, lots of other animals. It would be a lot of work, a huge commitment, the whole thing would be rootsy, artsy, herbalist, based in trade, biodynamic, with plenty of time for shared walks, meals, intimate conversations. We'd host wellness retreats for people who live in cities and want to reconnect with the earth. This is the dream! Fuck, I'm so cottagecore. Maybe we could start some new great cult. Haha! Oh, or a filmmaker!
18 - What made you write, as opposed to doing something else?
My frequency did this to me.
19 - What was the last great book you read? What was the last great film?
No idea.
20 - What are you currently working on?
A poetry book called, Cosmic Libido. An essay book called, Love Scene, or dancehall on the radio. A fiction book whose name cannot yet be revealed to the public. And, co-directing, co-creating, co-curating, and co-editing a juicy new poetry micropress, LUCIUS, with my friend Ian U Lockaby. We're preparing to publish our very first chapbook this summer—Nathaniel Mackey's very beautiful So Woke We Saw Thru Stone, which continues his double long song, ongoing still!
No comments:
Post a Comment