PERMANENT RECORD: Poetics Towards the Archive, ed. Naima Yael Tokunow

 

            Before coming to this project, I had spent nearly a decade thinking critically about the Black American record (or lack thereof), and how my understanding of myself as a Black American, my family, and my culture has been shaped by what I can, and do, know through searching archives. These archives include materials from my family and the state, from papers and oral histories, and from political and artistic recordings. Many records are missing, misremembered, or unfindable. Some are full and jumbled, hard to decipher. Most are couched in death, grief, and loss. This cannot be and is not the “full story,” although we are socialized to understand records as such, rewarded for reinforcing its “wholeness,” and often penalized for pointing to its deficiencies. Many have written beautifully about the wound of not-knowing—our homeland, our people, our tongues, our separation from culture.
[…]
            And so, Permanent Record hopes to apply the kind of pressure that turns matter from one thing to another by asking hard questions: How do we reject, interpolate, and (re)create the archive and record? How do we feed our fragmented recordings to health? How do we pull blood from stone (and ink and shadows and ghosts)? What do we gain from our flawed systems of remembrance? How does creating a deep relationship to the archive allow us both agency and legibility, allow us to prefigure the world we want? Through this reclamation, we can become the ancestors we didn’t have.
            Permanent Record wants to reimagine who is included in the archive and which recordings are considered worthy of preservation, making room for the ways many of us have had to invent forms of knowing in and from delegitimized spaces and records. In doing so, we explore “possibilities for speculating beyond recorded multiplicity” (thank you, Trisha Low, for this perfect wording). This book itself is a record. The book asks what can be counted as an epistemological object. What is counted. Who is counted, and how. (“INTRODUCTION: Archives of/Against Absence: exploring identity, collective memory, and the unseen,” Naima Yael Tokunow)

Newly out is the anthology Permanent Record: Poetics Towards the Archive (New York NY: Nightboat Books, 2025), edited by Albuquerque, New Mexico-based writer, educator, artist and editor Naima Yael Tokunow. Since being announced as Nightboat’s inaugural Editorial Fellow back in 2023, Tokunow has put together an impressively comprehensive anthology on loss, reclamation and the archive, working to gather together elements of what had, has or would otherwise be lost, pushing through conversations on what might emerge through and because and even despite those losses. “you spend a lot of time thinking about loss,” writes Minneapolis poet Chaun Webster, as part of “from WITHOUT TERMINUS,” considering if what is missing has / a form, wondering if there is a method to tracing what is not visible. there was / a time when you thought that if you just had greater powers of imagination, or / if you could somehow place yourself securely along the tracks of family and / cultural history that you could gather sufficient evidence, collect all the bones / to make something of a complete structure.” Across a spectrum of lyric by more than three dozen poets, Permanent Record speaks of a range of cultural and personal losses, from a loss of language, home and family, reacting to colonialism and global conflict to more intimate details, writing against erasures both historical and ongoing. There is an enormous amount contained within these pages. “In the obits mourning the billionaires,” writes Hazem Fahmy, a writer and critic from Cairo, in “THE BILLIONAIRE / (ARE YOU BOAT OR SUBMARINE?),” “it is mentioned that they paid / $250k to die before the eyes of the entire world // a laughably cheap ticket / compared to the cost of carrying // a child onto a floating grave. Whose mercy / would you rather stake your life on? The ocean’s?”

On the back cover, the collection self-describes as a “visionary anthology that reimagines the archive as a tool for collective memory. Reflecting on identity, language, diasporic experiences, and how records perpetuate harm, this collection seeks to reframe what belongs in collective remembrance.” “When the ceiling drops / the rain stops / beating down but / now you’re beaten down,” writes Okinawan-Irish American poet Brenda Shaughnessy (one of only a handful of poets throughout the collection I’d been aware of prior), as part of the sequence “TELL OUR MOTHERS WE TELL OURSELVES / THE STORY WE BELIEVE IS OURS,” “though it’s the beat / that drops now / and we dance / in the rain / like sunbeams / made out of metal cloth, / tubes of blood, / and scared, sewn-up eyes.” The anthology includes writing by more than forty writers, most of whom are based in or through the United States and further south (with at least two contributors on this side of the border in the mix as well: Hamilton, Ontario-based Jaclyn Desforges and Toronto-based Em Dial). The work in this anthology is rich, evocative and very powerful, even more impressive when one considers that the bulk of the list of contributors are emerging, with but a single full-length title or less to their credit. Tokunow offers an expansive list of contributors from all corners, with an eye for language, purpose; one would think if you want a sense of the landscape of who you should be reading next, Tokunow’s list of contributors to Permanent Record is entirely that. Listen to the lyric of this excerpt of the poem “QUADROON (ADJ., N.)” by Em Dial, that reads:

QUADROON (adj., n.) language of origin: once again, linguists spit their bloodied air: from Spanish cuarteron, or one who has a fourth. i pinch the linguist’s tongue and gawk at the way they betray themselves. not one who has three fourths. not the haystack with a needle inside. instead, any drops of life in a sterile lake are isolated and named. the lake’s volume is doubled again and again and again and again until science feels faultless renaming them Statistically Insignificant.

The anthology is organized in a quartet of loose cluster-sections—“MOTHERTONGUED,” “FILE NOT FOUND,” “THE MAP AS MISDIRECTION” and “FUTURE CONTINUOUS”—each of which, as Tokunow offers in her introduction, “begins with an introduction of sorts—a lyric map legend to the work within, inviting you to pull the threads of the framework through the pieces.” The approach, as one essentially lyric, is intriguing, offering a collection of writing sparked by purpose, but driven and propelled by a core of stunning writing: Tokunow clearly has a good eye (part of me wants to ask: where are you finding all of these writers?), and knows well how to organize material around a thesis. The introduction to the final section, for example, reads: “We have your number and all quarters. Fortune folds us up—without a line to the dead we can hear the blood rushing, a cup against our drum. The gifts we make ourselves (destiny or doom) hold up in flat daylight, some familiar oath, some new contract: we are finger-deep in the sand, spinning and spiny, no new lines but this soft, fat earth. Still falling off the page, we ziiiiiiip. We hold the mirror slant—sky and her big feelings bounce. What can we mine of the future and if, oh not extraction, then what can we lift, whole and breathing, over our heads?” As San Francisco-based poet Talia Fox writes, to close the lyric “NOTES ON TIME TRAVEL / IN THE MATRILINEAL LINE,” as held in that same closing section:

the curse is simple, and it begins with water

  the water my mother bathed me in was crab water (it is, after all, the water
alotted for soldiers and the children of soldiers and their children and especially
their children)

like a spell, like a spell !

when i close my eyes i am wading through a shallow river at evening. i come|
across a forest clearing where bodies have been strung up, faceless, bobbing
in the trees

As I mentioned earlier, more than forty contributors, and I was previously aware of only a few, such as poet and translator Rosa Alcalá [see my review of her latest here], Jaclyn Desforges [see her ‘12 or 20 questions’ interview here], Em Dial [see her ’12 or 20 questions here], multimedia poet and author Carolina Ebeid [see my review of her Albion Books chapbook here], Phillippines-born California-based poet Jan-Henry Gray [see my review of his full-length debut here], Minnesota-based poet and critic Douglas Kearney [see my review of his Sho here], and Brenda Shaughnessy (all of whom I clearly need to be attending far better). The wealth in this collection is incredible. Or, as Brooklyn-based writer, playwright, organizer and educator Mahogany L. Brown writes as part of the expansive “THE 19^TH AMENDMENT & MY MAMA”:

The third of an almost anything
is a gorge always looking to be
until the body is filled with more fibroids
than possibilities

12 or 20 (second series) questions with Jaclyn Desforges

Jaclyn Desforges [photo credit: Jesse Valvasori] is the author of Danger Flower (Palimpsest Press/Anstruther Books), one of CBC's picks for the best Canadian poetry of 2021. She's also the author of a picture book, Why Are You So Quiet? (Annick Press, 2020), which was shortlisted for a Chocolate Lily Award. Jaclyn is a Pushcart-nominated writer and the winner of a 2022 City of Hamilton Creator Award, a 2020 Hamilton Emerging Artist Award for Writing, two 2019 Short Works Prizes, and the 2018 RBC/PEN Canada New Voices Award. Her writing has been featured in Room Magazine, THIS Magazine, The Puritan, The Fiddlehead, and others. She is an MFA candidate at the University of British Columbia’s School of Creative Writing and lives in Hamilton with her partner and daughter.

How did your first book change your life? How does your most recent work compare to your previous? How does it feel different?

I’ve had publishing baby steps. I don’t have a clear before and after. I started off with my chapbook, Hello Nice Man, which came out with Anstruther Press in 2019. That was a wonderful experience, not just because I got to work with Jim Johnstone on my poems, but because I got to go through the whole cycle of launching something without the immense crushing weight of it being a full-length book. Strangely it ended up being a more public launch than my subsequent two books, because those came out during the pandemic. 

So with Hello Nice Man, I ended up throwing a big party here in Hamilton and inviting everyone I knew. Family, friends, writers. My mentor Miranda Hill came and introduced my reading and said such nice things. My brother sang songs. It was really a blast. I’m grateful that I did that, that I hired a caterer and everything and made a big thing of it. At the time it was all just for fun, but those memories are really important to me now. 

After HNM, Why Are You So Quiet? (Annick Press, 2020) came out. That felt higher stakes than the chapbook experience, but in some ways it felt lower stakes than the release of Danger Flower the following year. Writing the picture book wasn’t something I planned on (though a psychic did predict it, back when I was a teenager.) So that whole thing just felt really fun. Danger Flower was the culmination of a wildly improbable goal I’d set for myself when my daughter was a baby. The idea of me actually having a real live poetry collection published by an actual publisher seemed impossible. I wanted it too badly to even think about. 

Mostly I felt relieved when my books came out. I'd always had some tiny secret faith in my future as a writer, I think? But I wasn't conscious of it. Most of me thought it was highly unlikely that I would both desperately want to be a writer and also be capable of being a writer, and also have all those necessary synchronicities line up in order for this stuff to actually happen. Like, what are the odds? I remember having those thoughts in grade 4. 

Now my understanding of reality is such that I think my early longing to be a writer in the world was a kind of premembering. But having my books come out — especially Danger Flower — allowed me to relax finally, because something I always privately believed inside myself — I will write a book of poems — finally existed in the world. It sort of reminds me of when I was first pregnant with my daughter, being as careful as possible on the subway stairs. She was only the size of a grain of rice and I said to her silently, I know you are real. But it was terrifying because I was the only person in the universe who knew she was real. You know? She was the realest anything. She was my grain of rice. And this book was real before now, too. All these years. Why Are You So Quiet? was real, too. I’m so relieved that my creations are out in the world now being perceived by others, because it is a lot to carry the weight of something’s realness all alone. 

How did you come to poetry first, as opposed to, say, fiction or non-fiction?

I’ve done every kind of writing. It’s hard to know what came first. My first self-published work was a how-to guide for collecting Beanie Babies. That was probably grade three. My mother printed it out and distributed it to various family members. I won a poetry contest through the library when I was in high school, but I was too embarrassed to show up to the award ceremony. My mom still has that poem framed. It wasn't awful. 

After university I went to journalism school, I wrote for magazines, I did ghostwriting. But when I decided to really make an effort at creative writing I chose poetry because I have always had an internal radio station of poetry in my head, I guess the way other people have an internal monologue. It used to frustrate me because I wondered why I wasn’t daydreaming about characters like other writers. The things I wanted to write about didn’t have anything to do with people, for the most part. I wanted to write about what I felt and how I experienced the world. I didn’t see myself reflected in three acts or a hero’s journey. My inner world isn’t particularly plotty.

Plus, I’m really concise. Maybe not in this interview, but generally. I’m traumatized by bullshitting my way through essays in school, trying to hit the word count. I just wanna say what I wanna say and get outta there. Poetry is good for that. 

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?

I tend to write in quick bursts. A first draft of anything is generally pages and pages of meandering non-linear thoughts. Partway through I’ll start writing at the top of a document instead of continuing at the bottom. It’s sort of a collecting process — ideas, lines. It’s messy and it has to be. If I let the control-y part of myself get involved at that point, she’ll control the life right out of the project.

It has to be dark and not looked at directly. It’s a mess. It’s not a shitty first draft because it’s not even on the continuum of good and bad yet. It just is what it is, and I let my pile of pages grow until I start to get a nagging sensation that it’s time. And then I print the whole thing out, highlight the parts I like, and then I open up a new document and start writing it from the beginning. 

Before I got comfortable with this process I would do only the bare minimum of collecting and I would get to arranging and put all of my energy there. Because I wanted so badly to make a new poem. Now I’ve made lots of poems so I can play in the muck for longer. My new poems are longer and fuller than my earlier ones. I’m letting them stretch their legs a bit. I’m giving a light touch when it comes to editing. My goal used to be make good poems. My new goal is to make poems that feel alive. 

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?

Poems always come from the same place, which is some physical felt sensation in my body — like some tightness on my throat or whatever — which turns out to be where emotions and images and memories are stored. So I start with the physical sensation, see what lives in there, write those things down and then arrange the lines into a poem. It’s very somatic. I’m glad it is. I find it exhausting to approach poetry as an academic exercise these days. I’m just not as interested in my own thoughts as I used to be. I’m trying to reach past my intellect as much as possible for something else. 

Are public readings part of or counter to your creative process? Are you the sort of writer who enjoys doing readings?

I love doing readings. I love reading poetry out loud, especially my poetry, because it’s written in my own kind of music. I’m grateful people want to hear them. Reading poems out loud is the culmination of the creative process for me. I think my poetry is best experienced out loud. 

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?

I think the question I'm always getting at is, what is true? I'm always trying to say the truest thing as plainly as I can.

I try not to get too theoretical these days. I'm trying to stay as rooted as possible. But the themes that come through in my work tend to be about bodies, quietness, nature, mothering, sexuality, trauma, neurodivergence and consciousness.

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?

I think there are different kinds of writers and they occupy different kinds of public roles. I have a clear sense at this point of what my role is as a person/writing person in public, but I wouldn’t say it’s what anybody should be. It just sort of is who I am. I think my role as a poet is to stay in tune with what I’m picking up energetically, what I’m thinking about and feeling, and getting it down on the page. The best feeling is when people recognize their own complex emotions in my poems. They read and feel seen. That matters to me a lot. 

I’ve said before that I feel sort of like a mermaid, like I occupy two different worlds, one normal one on shore in which I go grocery shopping and stuff, and another underwater life. And I feel kind of weird and like I don’t belong in either world, but it’s okay because I have an important job to do. I have to dive for shiny things and bring them back to shore. And the shiny things help people get through, I hope.

Do you find the process of working with an outside editor difficult or essential (or both)?

I like working with an editor, especially for fiction. Usually by the time I get to the submissions stage, I have been staring at whatever project for so long that I can’t make heads or tails of it. So it’s nice to have an external person. Poetry-wise, I have worked with so many wonderful teachers and mentors. I feel now like I am very in tune with my poems. I  don’t seek outside feedback as much with poetry anymore. I have loved ones to whom I send poems, usually in audio format, but I don’t ask for feedback. And poetry editing is such a tricky thing. It requires a light touch. Edit a poem too much and it ceases being the same poem. I like creating iterations instead of fiddling with each one for too long. 

What is the best piece of advice you've heard (not necessarily given to you directly)?

I can’t remember if this was Margaret Atwood or somebody else. Maybe it was a chorus of people. Take care of your body so you aren’t in pain while you’re writing. I have to meditate and do yoga and eat properly and sleep properly to keep my mind clear and able to write things. If I don’t do my stretches I’m hunched over in agony at the keyboard. Eat soup, make a story. I think we tend to forget how physical we are. I think I tend to forget how physical I am. I live in my head a lot. I’m constantly trying to bring my consciousness down into my body. But it’s complicated in here and uncomfortable sometimes. 

How easy has it been for you to move between genres (poetry to children's books)? What do you see as the appeal?

It’s pretty easy. I’ve written in all kinds of genres. It’s fun to shake things up. I think writing in different genres is great because it also opens you up to new audiences. There are some folks who just aren’t into poetry and who wouldn’t think of buying a collection. That’s cool. I think my fiction is infused with my poetry, and my picture book, too. It’s just a different form. I’m still bringing the sparkly treasures onto the shore.  

What kind of writing routine do you tend to keep, or do you even have one? How does a typical day (for you) begin?

These days I wake up at six and do meditation and yoga. Then I write for an hour, with coffee. Get my kiddo ready for school, drop her off. Walk in the woods. Then I work for a few hours, nap at one. Pick the kiddo up from school. Rinse and repeat. 

I’m not the kind of writer who writes for a long time every day. It’s never more than an hour or two. Most of my work involves teaching, doing public appearances, reviewing poetry for the Hamilton Review of Books, and the usual sort of administrative stuff of life. I like being out in the world, teaching and speaking. I’ve tried in the past to cut that stuff away and be a writer who just writes all day, but I get bored and lonesome. I can write a lot in a very short period of time. A a few thousand words in an hour. I can’t sit there and do that all day. I like having other things to do. 

When your writing gets stalled, where do you turn or return for (for lack of a better word) inspiration?

Writing for me is just listening to the poetry radio station in my head and writing down what I hear. So if it’s not coming through, it’s for a reason —- usually my nervous system is all wound up, and I’m suffering in other ways too in addition to not writing. So I have to solve the nervous system problem. Which sucks usually because it means I’ve been avoiding some kind of pain or issue, and now I have to face it. 

The act of writing itself is easy. It’s opening an app on my phone and typing some words. If I can’t do that it’s because there is something wrong. Maybe I’m making up some big story about what people will think about me or my work. If it’s a problem like that, I need to surrender to the reality that I can't control what people think about it. That can be very uncomfortable. I prefer to be certain about things. But that’s not reality. 

Things that don’t work to jumpstart my writing these days: deadlines, competitiveness, the desire to meet social expectations. I can't scare myself into compliance anymore. I have to solve the problem directly. 

What fragrance reminds you of home?

Library books. Hamburger helper. That post-vacuum smell. 

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. Yes and yes and yes. All the things. Being in nature is important to me. Science especially is really nourishing for my writing as a source of metaphor. I love reading about insects and their strange, unfamiliar lives. I also really love surrealism in all its forms. And horror movies! Hereditary is one of my favourites. I think it’s really important for me to not get too caught up in one particular form of expression. It’s important for me to play around in other forms and spheres of life. Not everything is writing.

What other writers or writings are important for your work, or simply your life outside of your work?

There are too many to count so I'll just name a handful. Autobiography of Death, which was written by Kim Hyesoon and translated by Don Mee Choi. All The Gold Hurts My Mouth by Katherine Leyton. Mary Oliver. Ariel Gore. Angela Carter. Carmen Maria Machado. 

What would you like to do that you haven't yet done?

Record an audiobook. Start a chapbook press. Write a novel. Edit an anthology. Write a video game. I mostly just want to keep making stuff forever. 

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?

When I was in grade eight, we had to do this online career quiz. My recommended careers included writer, psychotherapist or clergy. So probably something like that. There's also an alternate universe Jaclyn who became a massage therapist. In real life, I tried to be a journalist, but I wasn't cut out for it.

What made you write, as opposed to doing something else?

I tried to fight it. I really did. It was way too scary to become a writer. I had absolutely no faith that I would be able to do it. I was terrified of opening the box and seeing if the Schrödinger's cat of my writing talent was alive or dead. I'm pretty sure it was alive. I keep feeding it, anyway. 

I tried to do something else, anything else. But all my abilities seemed to converge around writing and speaking. I'm not a linear thinker. Physical reality bores me. All I want to do is write and think and talk. Eventually I had to really give this a shot, stop dancing around it. Eventually it was scarier to not do it than to do it. 

What was the last great book you read? What was the last great film?

I'm reading Brat (Gordon Hill Press, 2022) by Sophie Crocker right now and really enjoying it. And the other night I watched Knives Out and loved it. 

What are you currently working on?

I am writing a book about how to write poetry. It's also kind of a memoir about growing up in the 90s as an undiagnosed autistic girl, and how learning to make poems offered me a way back to myself after years of masking and self-abandonment. I'm also still tinkering with my short story collection, Mothworld, which was my MFA thesis. It's got ghosts and fig wasps and talking hamsters. Ultimately it's all about complex, offbeat, traumatized characters who find love and connection in unexpected places.

12 or 20 (second series) questions;