The Split This Rock Interview with Terisa Siagatonu

By Franny Choi

Split This Rock Poetry Festival: Poems of Provocation & Witness, April 19-21, 2018.

The festival is three days at the intersection of the imagination and social change: readings, workshops, panel discussions, youth programming, activism, a book fair, and a party. Celebrating Split This Rock’s 10th anniversary! The poets to be featured are among the most significant and artistically vibrant writing and performing today: Elizabeth Acevedo, Kazim Ali, Ellen Bass, Sherwin Bitsui, Kwame Dawes, Camille Dungy, Ilya Kaminsky, Sharon Olds, Sonia Sanchez, Solmaz Sharif, Terisa Siagatonu, Paul Tran, Javier Zamora.

On-site registration is available every day during the festival at the festival hub: National Housing Center, 1201 15th Street, NW, Washington, DC 20005. A sliding scale of fees is available for full registration, beginning at $200. Student registration (with ID) is $75. One day passes are $85. Two-day passes are $170.

Full festival schedule available on the website. The Festival Mobile App is Live! Download the free app  for iOS and Android today for easy access to the schedule, session descriptions, presenter bios, and more! Just search your app store for Split This Rock.

Events Open to the Public

Nightly Free Poetry Readings: National Housing Center Auditorium

Social Change Book Fair: Saturday, April 21, 10 am-3:30 pm, National Housing Center (Free)

Poetry Public Action: Louder Than a Gun – Poem for Our Lives, Friday, April 20, 9-10 am, Lafayette Park (Free)

Open Mics: Thursday, April 19 & Friday, April 20, 10 pm-12 am, Busboys and Poets, 5th & K, Cullen Room, 1025 5th St NW, Washington, DC 20001 ($5 at the door)

Closing Party: Saturday, April 21, 10 pm-1 am, National Housing Center Auditorium ($10 online and at the door)

Open mics and the closing party are free to festival registrants.

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Terisa Siagatonu is an award winning poet, arts educator, organizer, and mental health advocate from the Bay Area. With over a decade of experience in writing, performing, competing, coaching, and teaching poetry, Terisa has shared her work in places ranging from the Kennedy Center of the Performing Arts, to the UN Conference on Climate Change in Paris, France, to the White House. A recipient of President Obama’s Champion of Change Award (2012), Terisa's writing has been featured on Button Poetry, CNN, NBCNews, NPR, Huffington Post, Everyday Feminism, The Guardian, BuzzFeed, Upworthy and elsewhere. A national poetry slam finalist, Terisa is also a poetry slam coach on both the youth and collegiate level, having coached five poetry slam teams to place Top 20 in the nation. Alongside being a full-time artist, Terisa is also a Senior Poet Mentor with Youth Speaks, Inc., leading poetry lessons with Bay Area high school students and professional development with teaching artists. She is one of the co-creators of The Root Slam, a poetry venue based in Oakland, CA, and was a member of the 2017 Root Slam Poetry Slam Team, helping her team to place 5th in the Nation at the 2017 National Poetry Slam competition. Terisa holds a Masters in Marriage/Family Therapy from the University of Southern California, aiming to merge art and therapy throughout her healing work both on and off-stage.

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Franny Choi (FC): Can you talk about one of your proudest poetry-related moments over the past year or so?

Terisa Siagatonu (TS): Last year, I had the opportunity to visit American Samoa and spend an entire week leading writing workshops for 5 of the high schools on the island, including the one my father attended when he was a teenager. The last time I visited American Samoa was 12 years ago, and I remember being 17 years old and complaining about how hot it was, and how much I wanted to go back home to California. On this trip, though, I wanted to stay on the island forever. I still do, even though I'm not there anymore. During that week, I was so grateful to be given another chance to cherish the land, my culture, and my people, with their unconditional love and overflowing hospitality for me and my colleagues. While in each of those classrooms on each campus, something inside of me was changing as I witnessed my own people step into their voices and tell their stories for the first time in their lives. That was the case for all of the students I worked with that week. Every teacher I met said: "that was the first time I ever heard them open up like that." I struggle a lot with owning all of my Samoan identity because of the disconnect I feel at times from being born in the United States, but I felt so at peace and at home during that week on island. It was the first time where I felt the most confident in my ability to lead a group in a writing workshop because this group of people are the ones who are most important in my life: they're my community. I come from them, and I depend on them the way our culture depends on them to keep our legacy alive. I've never felt so proud to be both Samoan and a writer. It meant everything to me to be able to share something as important as writing with my people, because both are the reasons why I'm still here and why I know who I am.

(FC): In your poem “Meauli,” you say, “There is no translation for anti-blackness in a lot of our languages, but it doesn’t mean we haven’t been nurturing it in our language.” What do you want to nurture in your language?

(TS): I want my language to nurture things like patience, forgiveness, genuine empathy, and growth. These are things that were incredibly hard for me to come by when I was growing up. Things I didn't have permission for when I was younger. I want a kind language, one that angles towards hope and doesn't falter when a better way of saying something is close but unreachable in the moment, for whatever reason. I want my language to hold people accountable for how they hurt others, while also knowing how to learn from the mistakes it makes when it causes pain. I guess I want my language to nurture what I've always wanted nurtured in me. I think it's easy to be reactive with language, and go off the rails with whatever emotion we feel is biggest in our body at the moment, without really teasing out what we actually mean to communicate. I want my language to nurture the hard. Not the easy. I want it to re-imagine what is possible when language has only the capacity to heal, and not be a weapon all of the time.

(FC): What do you think is your role in the fight?

(TS): I'm somewhere either in the middle of the pack, trying to make sure everyone is well nourished and has what they need to journey on, or I'm in the very back, walking alongside the slowest, engaging with them in dialogue and actively listening to their every word as we move, and not worrying about being the last ones left. I'm a people person. A "South" in all of those 4 Directions Working Styles group activities (they're the ones who care about the well-being of the people involved and whose strengths lie in being compassionate and group-oriented, even to a fault). I can't imagine a better world than this one that doesn't free us all. I see myself committed, even now, to dedicating my life to understanding what it takes for us to get closer to that freedom. Even if we never reach it in my lifetime, but we reach it nonetheless.

(FC): Can you envision an APIA space that is truly inclusive of Pacific Islander folks? Is such a space even possible (or necessary)?

(TS): I think my Pacific Islander community and I, to a large degree, are moving into a place in our understanding of our identity where we are no longer waiting for permission or asking to be accepted into something that wasn't necessarily made with us in mind (i.e. the "APIA" community). For me, it comes down to: do I want to spend my energy and time teaching non-PI members of the APIA community about the PI community, or do I want to spend my energy and time with my PI community, learning how to be understood and seen on our own terms? For all that we are? There was a time in which we Pacific Islanders believed it was absolutely necessary to be a part of the APIA umbrella because we deemed our smallness (in numbers, in resources, in collective power, etc.) as being a deterrent or an obstacle in our way towards self-actualization and acceptance, but in reality, there is power in all that we are as a people. There's power in us realizing that not only do we come from small islands in the Pacific: we are the Pacific. A whole damn body of water, and the largest body of water this world has. "Inclusivity" is fine, and at times, necessary. But I see a world for me and my Pacific Islander people where we don't have to keep coming from the margins of anything, yearning to be in the center. I see a world in which we are what everything else orbits around. Where we're seen, nurtured, accounted for, and never left behind ever again. 

(FC): What’s the last thing you read or saw that gave you hope?

(TS): Before he died this past January, my grandpa kept a daily journal every year, and wrote in it every single day since 1994. He has 13 red journals, mostly written in Samoan, but some written in English. I read a passage he wrote last year when he thought he was having a heart attack or stroke. You could see where his hand started to shake in writing that passage, as he was describing, on paper, the pain he was experiencing in his chest. I read how he called out for my Uncle for help. The last part of that passage was him accepting this fate and preparing himself to enter God's Kingdom. Although I grew up in a very religious household, my faith in God and in religion was nothing like my grandpa's. He was the most devout Christian I knew, and reading that passage of his brought me to a really scared and sad place, but it also reminded me of how unwavering my grandpa's faith is in his God. And how he was anything but scared that day. I read that and was reminded that I come from the same courageous lineage as this man. That I can also have a faith in something that is as unwavering as my grandpa's faith. That when it's my time to leave here, I hope to have my writings in a place where my future generations of my family can find them as well, and know exactly what to make of them when they read through it all. 

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Additional Links

Terisa’s poems appear in the portfolio of Split This Rock Poetry Festival 2018 featured poets in the April 2018 issue of Poetry Magazine.

“Layers,” the poem Terisa performed at the UN Conference on Climate Change in Paris.

“Pacific Islander Poets Use Art, Stories to Urge Climate Action at UN Conference,”  (NBC News)

Terisa’s poem “Atlas” in the April 2018 issue of Poetry Magazine

Huffington Post feature on Terisa and Carrie Rudzinski’s poem “Women”

Terisa poem “The Day After American Samoa Is Under Water” (The Quarry)

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Franny Choi is the author of Floating, Brilliant, Gone (Write Bloody Publishing, 2014) and the forthcoming Soft Science (Alice James Books, 2019), as well as a chapbook, Death by Sex Machine (Sibling Rivalry Press, 2017). She has received awards and fellowships from the Rhode Island State Council on the Arts, the Poetry Foundation, and the Helen Zell Writers Program. She is a Kundiman fellow, Senior News Editor at Hyphen   Magazine, co-host of the podcast VS, and member of the Dark NoiseCollective. She was a member of the curatorial committee for the 2018 Split This Rock Festival. Photo by Eileen Meny.

The Split This Rock Interview with Sherwin Bitsui

By Susan K. Scheid

This conversation is one in a series of interviews with poets to be featured at the Split This Rock Poetry Festival: Poems of Provocation & Witness, 2018.

The festival is three days at the intersection of the imagination and social change: readings, workshops, panel discussions, youth programming, activism, a book fair, and a party. Celebrating Split This Rock’s 10th anniversary! The poets to be featured are among the most significant and artistically vibrant writing and performing today:  Elizabeth Acevedo, Kazim Ali, Ellen Bass, Sherwin Bitsui, Kwame Dawes, Camille T. Dungy, Ilya Kaminsky, Sharon Olds, Sonia Sanchez, Solmaz Sharif, Terisa Siagatonu, Paul Tran, Javier Zamora.

On-site registration is available every day during the festival at the festival hub: National Housing Center, 1201 15th Street, NW, Washington, DC 20005. A sliding scale of fees is available for full registration, beginning at $200. Student registration (with ID) is $75. One day passes are $85. Two-day passes are $170.

Full festival schedule available on the website. The Festival Mobile App is Live! Download the free app  for iOS and Android today for easy access to the schedule, session descriptions, presenter bios, and more! Just search your app store for Split This Rock.

Events Open to the Public

• Nightly Free Poetry Readings: National Housing Center Auditorium
• Social Change Bookfair, Saturday, April 21, 10 am-3:30 pm, National Housing Center (Free)
• Poetry Public Action, Friday, April 20, 8:30-10 am, Location TBA (Free)
• Open Mics, Thursday, April 19 & Friday, April 20, 10 pm-12 am, Busboys and Poets, 5th & K, Cullen Room, 1025 5th St NW, Washington, DC 20001 ($5 on www.busboysandpoets.com)
• Closing Party, Saturday, April 21, 10 pm-1 am, National Housing Center Auditorium ($10, tickets available soon at Split This Rock's website)

Open mics and the closing party are free to festival registrants.

* * *

Sherwin Bitsui (Diné) is the author of Flood Song (Copper Canyon Press) and Shapeshift (University of Arizona Press). He is of the Bįį’bítóó’nii’ Tódi’chii’nii clan and is born for the Tlizilłani’ clan. He is from White Cone, Arizona, on the Navajo Reservation. Bitsui holds an AFA from the Institute of American Indian Arts Creative Writing Program and a BA from University of Arizona in Tucson. He teaches for the MFA in Creative Writing at the Institute of American Indian Arts. An ecopoet, he has poems published in Narrative, Black Renaissance Noir, American Poet, The Iowa Review, LIT, and elsewhere. Steeped in Native American culture, mythology, and history, Bitsui’s poems – imagistic, surreal, and rich with details of the landscape of the Southwest – reveal the tensions at the intersection of Native American and contemporary urban culture. Bitsui's honors include the 2011 Lannan Literary Fellowship, a Native Arts & Culture Foundation Fellowship for Literature, a PEN Open Book Award, an American Book Award, and a Whiting Writers Award.

* * *

Susan K. Scheid (SKS): Your book, Flood Song, is full of beautiful and dream-like imagery. I wanted to savor it like rich food eaten in small bites. Some of the images that stay with me were: “I pinch your silences into soft whispers, / pile them on your still chest” and “The luminous wander the cornfields without husbands; / their wooden faces splinter the owl’s nest;” and the references to the “cornfield inside you.” I wonder if you are willing to share with us a little of your writing process? Can you describe what takes you to this place where you can write such surreal and powerful poems?

Sherwin Bitsui (SB): I like to think the poems reveal themselves to me on their own, they meet me halfway and it’s my job to give them shape and form. Sometimes I follow them for months and years until I’m able to see their edges sharpen and clarify. My process unfolds — there are many detours along the way. I am lucky to find at the end, a line or two, that speaks to thought in a new and interesting way. Lately, I feel that the poem is already here in our time, a poet just reveals it to the reader or listener—that moment of recognition is what makes poetry most powerful for me. Time and distance fold away, something deep in us is revealed and we are renewed again, briefly, by its beauty.

SKS: In one interview you stated that the Navajo language is “thought in motion”. How does that inform your poetics?  And since you are also a visual artist, does that influence your writing?  How do your poetry and visual art interact with one another? 

SB: I’m always in some state of translation — a poem is also a kind of translation. I don’t know how deeply Dinébizaad affects my writing in English — it’s difficult to see myself and my work as some kind of ethnographic subject. I sense my ability to encounter both worldviews simultaneously gives me the perspective and distance needed to create my work. Language then takes on another quality besides meaning-making — there is weight, movement, tension, texture and tone that also inform the emotional quality of the experience I’m trying to create for the reader and listener.

SKS: In Flood Song, I was struck by the imagery of the land, the water, and the invasion of technology. These poems express the centuries of indigenous people’s struggle, the removal from their lands, the loss of traditional ways, and the encroachment of technology. They speak to me as well as someone who grew up surrounded by corn fields, who now sees so many drastic changes to our planet. Do you think of yourself as an environmental/eco-justice poet? If so, what does that mean to you?

SB: I don’t particularly see myself as an environmental/eco-justice poet. The poems may reveal some aspect of my thoughts on the subject of ecology and our collective response (or lack of?) to shifts in our relationship with the land and environment—but they do so because I only write what is essentially present in my world at the time. It is a difficult time to write poems — there is much to look away from and ignore, poetry doesn’t have that option — it must see and respond even when we choose not to.

SKS: Flood Song has poems with the repetitive drip of rain and the rhythmic lapping on the shores of a lake, or an ocean. This rhythm and many of the images and themes in your book remind me of Walt Whitman. How would you describe the way your poetic voice has developed?  Who are some of the poets that have influenced you?  Is there anyone else (non-poet) that has influenced your work or your poetic voice?

SB: I hope my work continues to evolve with each book — each work teaches me something about myself and the world around me. I always want to feel like I’ve been called to write a poem. Sounds strange, but I know my poems feel forced if I try to write when I’m not necessarily in the right space or time. This may explain why it takes me several years to complete a body of work. Flood Song and Dissolve are both book-length poems. Flood Song is a lapping, horizontal work that moves and takes on the dimensions of a kind of flood.

Dissolve feels like a much different work. It is restrained or tethered to something deep inside; perhaps it’s a floating work, one suspended above the ground but unable to fully free itself from the gravity of the shifting world beneath it. The breath of the poem feels like it’s moving inward as opposed to moving outward. There is also a lot of mirroring in the new work. One stanza or line may contain a gesture that is replicated in another line or stanza. Lately I’ve read pieces from Flood Song before moving into Dissolve, I notice very quickly how my voice has to shift in order to locate the frequency of the newer lines.

SKS: What role do you think poets can play to bring hope to the world?  Do you have any words of encouragement for fellow poets?

SB: Poets renew language and bring worlds together. I’m always hopeful that poetry can change lives. Poets should continue to be uncompromising in their creative vision. It’s also important we support each other and appreciate the very fact that we are here making language do things it is probably not supposed to do.

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Additional Links

Bitsui’s poems in the April 2018 issue of Poetry Magazine, with poems by all the poets featuring at the festival.

Three Poems by Sherwin Bitsui (The Quarry)

I Don’t Stand Alone: Poets Orlando White and Sherwin Bitsui on the Importance of Mentors, by Jennifer De Leon (Ploughshares)

The Motion of Poetic Landscape: An Interview with Sherwin Bitsui, by Bianca Viñas (Hunger Mountain)

Sherwin Bitsui: Sounds Like Water, by Thomas Hachard (Guernica)

Three Native American Poets: a conversation between Allison Adelle Hedge Coke, Linda Hogan, and Sherwin Bitsui with Poetry Lectures from The Harriet Monroe Poetry Institute hosts (audio file, The Poetry Foundation)

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Susan K. Scheid is the author of After Enchantment (2012). Her poetry has appeared in Truth to Power, Beltway Quarterly, Little Patuxent Review, The Sligo Journal, Silver Birch Press, Tidal Basin Review, and other journals. Her work is also included in the chapbook anthology, Poetic Art. She has taught workshops as an Artist-in-Residence at the Noyes School of Rhythm. She lives in the Brookland neighborhood of Washington, DC. She is Co-Chair of the Split This Rock Board of Directors.

The Split This Rock Interview with Sharon Olds

By Danez Smith

This conversation is one in a series of interviews with poets to be featured at the Split This Rock Poetry Festival: Poems of Provocation & Witness, April 19-21, 2018.

The festival is three days at the intersection of the imagination and social change: readings, workshops, panel discussions, youth programming, activism, a book fair, and a party. Celebrating Split This Rock’s 10th anniversary! The poets to be featured are among the most significant and artistically vibrant writing and performing today: Elizabeth Acevedo, Kazim Ali, Ellen Bass, Sherwin Bitsui, Kwame Dawes, Camille Dungy, Ilya Kaminsky, Sharon Olds, Sonia Sanchez, Solmaz Sharif, Terisa Siagatonu, Paul Tran, Javier Zamora.

On-site registration is available every day during the festival at the festival hub: National Housing Center, 1201 15th Street, NW, Washington, DC 20005. A sliding scale of fees is available for full registration, beginning at $200. Student registration (with ID) is $75. One day passes are $85. Two-day passes are $170.

Full festival schedule available on the website. The Festival Mobile App is Live! Download the free app  for iOS and Android today for easy access to the schedule, session descriptions, presenter bios, and more! Just search your app store for Split This Rock.

Events Open to the Public

• Nightly Free Poetry Readings: National Housing Center Auditorium
• Social Change Bookfair, Saturday, April 21, 10 am-3:30 pm, National Housing Center (Free)
• Poetry Public Action: Louder Than a Gun – Poem for Our Lives, Friday, April 20, 9-10 am, Lafayette Park (Free)
• Open Mics, Thursday, April 19 & Friday, April 20, 10 pm-12 am, Busboys and Poets, 5th & K, Cullen Room, 1025 5th St NW, Washington, DC 20001 ($5 at the door)
• Closing Party, Saturday, April 21, 10 pm-1 am, National Housing Center Auditorium ($10 online and at the door)

Open mics and the closing party are free to festival registrants.

* * * 

Sharon Olds is most recently the author of Stag’s Leap (2012), recipient of the Pulitzer Prize and the T.S Eliot Prize (UK), and Odes (2017). She teaches in the Graduate Program in Creative Writing at New York University where she helped found the original outreach program at Goldwater Hospital, a 900-bed state hospital for people with physical disabilities. These programs at NYU now include a writing workshop for Veterans of the Afghanistan and Iraq wars. She lives in New York City. Photo by Hillary Stone. 

* * *

Danez Smith (DS): In an interview by Michael Laskey for the Academy of American Poets, you said the psalms and hymns of the Bible were your first examples of good vs. bad writing. From those early moments, through a lot of your books and most recently your collection, Odes, you seem to have long understood and been a master of the relationship between language and worship, words and praise, both sanctified and secular. If I may ask you, what do you find yourself praising these days? Also, how has the language of your praise or adoration in poetry changed over time?

Sharon Olds (SO): What a cool question! For so long I thought of myself as a whiner, not a praiser. But of course, I wanted to praise the people I most loved–husband, children, friends.   

These days I sometimes say that I first learned about art when I was inside my mother. I experienced meter, I heard and felt her heartbeat and the rhythms of her breaths. Two meters: one faster, louder, more regular; one slower, softer, more improv. So I started with counterpoint.

           

Now I want to riff a little! I see myself as someone who has “never understood anything,” and I don’t see myself as a master, so much as as (“as as”!) an amateur.

           

So I would love to embody, in a poem, with some accuracy – with lots! – what is lovable to me about someone. And what love is, what it feels like. And how it is different from idealization – lord knows, in my heteromania, I have worshipped (swooned over) the beauty of men I have loved. And felt inspired to try to describe the qualities of particular children, a particular child. Love drives us to this!  The life-force desires this. And I’m moved to praise whenever violence is not a part of a child’s life. As if non-violence should be a sort of (godless) sanctified civil right. (Animal right.)
           

And I want to know what happens to kids afflicted by personal and/or communal destructiveness – so we can know each other and ourselves. (Isn’t that one of the species-survival purposes of art – pleasure and empathy?)

           

I write so many poems which fail – due to sentimentality, grandstanding, self-pity, cliché . . . I want to praise courage (a single mother, say, dealing with poverty and violence.)  (I have tried to write that, but I don’t know enough about it to help the poem work.)
           

And I would like to praise myself, insofar as I deserve it – this to counter the inner negative self-image I have, which so many of us have.

           

DS:  Your poem “Silver Spoon Ode,” which I love, wrestles with legacies both private and intimate before turning to a Miss Lucille (who I believe is Lucille Clifton?) that seems to offer both the speaker’s conscience and the poem’s tone a kind of peace, but offers the speaker guidance. I want to ask you about friendship. What have you learned via your friendships, maybe your friendships with other writers, that has shaped you as a poet?  As a citizen/community member?

SO:  I love this dialogue with you. This question seems to be the size of my life. Joy in friendship! The joy of intimacy, of deep, humorous, grateful, honest knowledge of each other.

           

Friendships with writers: relishing the intense pleasure, stimulation, and ease of heart of being in their presence. And they like! us, they (may) love us as much as we love them!  And they don’t agree with the negative bullshit we sometimes believe about ourselves – but they know our faults! They don’t idealize us, or us them. They mean the earth to us, they mean our life to us.

           

And Lucille – so smart, so touching, such a pioneer – I remember once she said something (not mean) about how needy I was – obvious, right? But I hadn’t used that word about myself before. And it wasn’t long after that that some small way came up that I could be of use to her in her own need. The insects is an example. Little did I know, when I was working as a child insect-catcher, that I was in training to serve our sister, our progenitor Lucille of the light!

DS:  I often get approached by white writers nervous to write about race, more accurately their own racial understanding of themselves and their people. I sometimes will just send them your poem “Ode to My Whiteness” (after Evie Shockley’s “ode to my blackness ”). What advice would you offer to white writers about writing whiteness?

SO:  I could offer what Lucille would offer, at Q and A time, in answer to this question. She’d say, in that rich, musical, not high, voice – voice with a lot of warm throat in it –like a contralto, resonant, not actorly or “important,” but sensual and full of meaning, and empty of portentousness –

suddenly as I’m writing this (in my apt in N. Y. C.) I feel so grateful that it came to me, in “Silver Spoon Ode,” to turn to Lucille, and speak a critical truth to myself in her voice. (And as I write this sentence the first Red-tail Hawk I’ve seen in three months just flies from behind a thirty-story building across the street!). I learned so much from Lucille. She pointed out the connection between privilege and sacrifice – my privilege and others’ sacrifice – that those doing the heavy lifting for a society “pay for” the art-making privilege of the writer. There is some kind of see-saw effect between haves and have-nots. (Also, I felt blessed that Lucille called me by my childhood name.)

           

Her advice to a mostly white audience?  “When you write about me, write about you and me. Then you’ll know something about at least part of what you’re writing about.”

DS:  What have you learned about writing poems from reading them to an audience?  When does the question of audience come into your mind and what do you do with it?

SO:  When I’m giving a reading, I’m listening, and looking. I want to put the poems out there clearly – not seductive, not too needy, not with too much emotion or too little.

           

And I get a feeling from the room – I read a poem, and I read the room. The company of others helps me recognize some of the baloney in my poems. And sometimes, after I read a poem, I’ll say, Well, that needs work, doesn’t it?! And we laugh. That’s a pleasure. And a debt I owe any hearer for the psychic help with the poem, the vibes I feel when I first put it out in a communal space. I’m often not confident in my poems. But I think art is important, powerful. I think poetry has to do with our species’ chance to last a little longer. So all poems are potentially valuable.

           

When I’m writing a first draft, I am too focused to be conscious of who besides me might eventually read it. But my unconscious is probably thinking a lot of things while I’m writing! And one could probably tell from reading the draft whether my unconscious image of a possible reader is of someone “smarter” than I or “less smart.”

           

Does the audience a poet’s first-draft unconscious is addressing have an age, a race, a gender, a gender preference, an E. Q., a dance style? How much tolerance/appetite does the imaginary audience have for overt (traditional) form, how much for “secret” (newer) form?

           

I think if we look at our poems we can see who they were written “for.” Mine? Not someone with necessarily a lot of school learning, but someone with a high tolerance for wacky words!

DS:  I want to ask you about poetry as a tool to witness. Often times your poetry has been about you being a witness to yourself, but your poems also witness people in your life, people in the larger world. What has writing about yourself taught you about writing about others?  What has being a witness taught you about your own confessions?

SO:  I grew up without newspapers or T.V. On the radio, I heard not news, but music and “Let’s Pretend” and “Queen for a Day.” 

When I was 14 (1956), I happened upon a picket line in front of a Woolworth’s (I “tell” (sing) this story (image) in a poem called “Secondary Boycott Ode”).

           

When I went to college, the frosh class was shown a documentary about the Holocaust, and my best friend, a Jew, sitting next to me, rushed away out of the auditorium so she could go throw up.  

           

When I was in graduate school, I slept one night on the cobbles of West 116^th Street to protest the mounted police patrols, who were not allowing the community to walk through the Columbia University campus (horses were stepping between our sleeping bags) (“May, 1968”).

           

Then at 22 I began to build a family with someone who read The New York Times every day. News photos came into the apartment and many of them had a haunting effect on me. They terrified and depressed me. It was years before I decided it was O.K. for me to try to write about photos. After all, no one would ever see the poems. It felt worse not even to try. Gradually a few of the many “public” poems I wrote seemed to me O.K. enough to send out, get back, send out. Then, once my first book was out (1980, age 37), I half agreed with the “crickets” (Phil Levine’s word for them) who were disgusted by the personal quality of my poems about family. It took me ages to understand that family poems are political.

           

All along I have written “personal” and “political” poems, maybe roughly 2 to 1 (2/3 close family, 1/3 world family – “strangers”). And I know – it’s like “narrative” and “experimental” – both of them are often present in a poem. But I tend to like a higher percentage of my “apparently personal” ones. They seem to me to work better, they are engaged with something I know a bit about.

DS:  What has being a poet taught you about being a citizen? Are the two things related?

SO:  It is very lucky to have enough time to write. For me it’s been an unearned privilege. It’s also lucky to have enough confidence to write – to believe, at least maybe 51%, that you have the right to try to know what you feel and think, and to try to make a little or big song and dance of it, a story, an anti-story, a dream, a paper dollhouse, an antimacassar with a poem embroidered on it.

             

I am possessed of a lust, a longing, for any poem of mine, any line, any image, to be useful to anyone. If you grow up thinking you are “worse than useless” (i.e. harmful), then having any value to anyone is a HUGE SPARKLING DEAL!!!!!

DS:  I love how you write about any and everything to do with the body. Silly question, is there any weird thing the body does that you really like? What grosses you out?

SO:  Dear Danez!  Thank you for this question! Which worked on me a few days, and then I wrote a grosser than usual poem!  First time I had thought of writing about a recurring childhood nightmare. Thank you, Poet Friend, for keeping me such good company with your great poems and with your kind and relevant energetic questions, so that you pointed me back in time and space to attempt a dis-haunting, and to try for a small new truth.

           

DS:  What advice would you offer to anyone who is hesitant to allow themselves to show up in their writing?

SO:  I might say to them, to us: we are out here longing for you to show up. We need to know who we/you are. Someone said there is one poet for every 100,000 Americans (i.e. Immigrants). I know it can feel self-indulgent to write – nar-KISS-ass – but why not (“Anal Aria”, new poem) – but it’s also the news we otherwise die for lack of.

             

I love your poems, Danez Smith. We so need them, and we need the poems of anyone who is reading this. A poem of yours (whoever you are holding me now in hand) is a call to me. Then mine is a response to you, and a call to your next one!

           

And I’d add my usual advice – take your vitamins, dance, sleep, don’t take any drug or drink too strong for you, take care of your body. It is the temple, the factory, the dance-hall of your art! We love you and we need your poems.

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Additional Links

Olds and all the festival feature poets’ poems in the April 2018 issue of Poetry Magazine

“Calvinist Parents” by Sharon Olds (The Quarry)

Sharon Olds Sings the Body Electric, a review of Odes, by Alexandra Schwartz (The New Yorker)

Kaveh Akbar interviews Sharon Olds at Divedapper

Poetry of the In-between, Olds’s TEDxMet talk

“Sharon Olds, America’s Brave Poet of the Body” in conversation with John Freeman (Literary Hub)

Episode 38: Sharon Olds from the Commonplace podcast by Rachel Zucker (Commonplace)

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Danez Smith is a Black, queer, poz writer & performer from St. Paul, MN. Danez is the author of Don’t Call Us Dead (Graywolf Press, 2017) and [insert] boy (YesYes Books, 2014), winner of the Kate Tufts Discovery Award, the Lambda Literary Award for Gay Poetry, and the John C. Zacharis Award from Ploughshares. Danez is also the author of two chapbooks, black movie (2015, Button Poetry), winner of the Button Poetry Prize, and hands on your knees (2013, Penmanship Books). They are the recipient of fellowships from the Poetry Foundation, the McKnight Foundation, and the  National Endowment for the Arts. Danez's work has been featured widely including in Buzzfeed, Blavity, PBS NewsHour, Best American Poetry, Poetry Magazine, and on the Late Show with Stephen Colbert. They are a 2-time Individual World Poetry Slam finalist, 3-time Rustbelt Poetry Slam Champion, and a founding member of the Dark Noise Collective. Smith is a member of the Split This Rock Board of Directors. Photo by David Hong.