Split This Rock Interview with Aracelis Girmay

This conversation is one in a series of interviews with poets to be featured at Split This Rock Poetry Festival 2016: Poems of Provocation & Witness. Complete information about the festival can be found on the website. Follow the 2016 Fest Interview tag to find all the previous interviews.

by Narges Shafeghati

Photo by Sheila Griffin

Aracelis Girmay is originally from Santa Ana, California. She went *to school* at Cave Canem, Acentos, NYU, Community~Word Project, and Bar 13. Girmay is the author of the poetry collections Teeth and Kingdom Animalia, and the collage-based picture book changing, changing. She has been awarded the GLCA New Writers Award and the Isabella Gardner Award (BOA Editions), and was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award. Most recently, Girmay's poetry and essays have been published in Granta, Black Renaissance Noire, The Spoon River Poetry Review, and Prairie Schooner. She has received grants and fellowships from Civitella Ranieri, the NEA, and the Whiting Foundation. For the past few years, Girmay has been studying texts and other materials that, through form, language(s), diction, and gesture, perform and think about place and loss of place (or displacement) and what this sometimes has to do with the sea. Her book, The Black Maria, is slated for publication by BOA in spring, 2016. Current collaborations include work with the Critical Projections collective and a translation project with writer and visual artist Rosalba Campra. Girmay is on the faculty of The School for Interdisciplinary Arts at Hampshire College and Drew University's low-residency MFA program. Before that, and for several years, Girmay taught community and youth writing workshops.  For more information, visit Girmay’s website. (Photo by Sheila Griffin)

***

Narges Shafeghati (NS): Do you remember the first poem you’ve ever written? (If yes,)What made it a poem/ Who called it a poem? Who made you write it?

Aracelis Girmay (AG): I do not remember the first poem I've ever written (I don't think). But I do remember clearly the red typewriter my Aunt Pat gave me in 7th grade. It was her typewriter at her bank job. And then it came to be mine. I loved that typewriter. The mechanism. The machine of it. The color. The clunk and work. The effort of it and the effort it required of me. I wrote several things using that typewriter but the one I remember most was the tiny little square of text about a friend's suffering in the domestic realm. Now, looking back, I think I made it so small to get some power over a sadness that felt forever and engulfing. The poem for me, then, was about smallness (that was what a poem meant to me, I suppose). That smallness helped the world and fact of it seem more navigable.

NS: What role did your parents or the closest people to you play on your path to discover your inner poet?

AG: What an immensely beautiful and powerful question. Thank you, Narges. Both my parents are wonderful storytellers. As they are talking/telling story, they are simultaneously transported into the realm of the story or history. Growing up, my brother and I were constantly asking for stories and/or listening in on the stories the adults were telling each other in the front seats of the car or around a table or at a barbecue or party. I have always loved the turns of phrases, the small details of each person's way of seeing, saying. A grandmother's gesture, the wideness of Aunt Darlene's smile as she talked about a book. There were poets around me. Everywhere. Makers of dinners and stories. Artists. Dancers. Dressers. A community of family and friends who could keep telling the same story again and again and again in different ways even though we were all there when the story took place. I love that. That way of sharing, again and again, what we all felt/saw happened... as if to say, Can you believe it? --or--Do you remember? Don't ever forget. --or--I was Here once. And you were Here. And we were Here.

NS: What made you want to be a teacher?

AG: I want to be a part of the world/community who nourishes imagination and love and kindness and bright rigor and curiosity--especially with/for young people. Teaching seemed a way to do this. Also, teaching was a way to be around people who are constantly (and vulnerably) trying, working Toward together.

NS: How do you nowadays show your love, affection, gratitude to dear ones? What is your favorite way of doing so?

AG: I love, love writing letters. Sealing the envelope. Choosing a beautiful stamp then dropping it all in the blue postal box on a corner here or there. I also love flowers--bringing flowers to someone dear. Or making butter cake with Nutella icing and berries (black, raspberry) and maybe a flower here or there on its butter cake-with -icing hair. There was a year when I was making a lot of flan, but I have moved out of that year into this new one with butter cake. I also sometimes (though rarely these last years) make collages/cards. Tangerines and lemons are also the perfect, perfect gifts--especially in snow and winter. That shock of brightness.

NS: What about strangers?

AG: Smiling. In and with my mind saying Thank You. Stopping someone to say, Oh! Talking when it is right to talk beside and with. Writing poems often. Poems that are odes to strangers or full of lessons that they helped me to understand whether or not they knew that they were teaching me to see.

NS: What is your relationship with the Middle East and Sudan? Is there personal experience or only empathy behind the poems in TEETH?

AG: I have never been to Sudan but it is near my father's country, Eritrea, and is, especially since the struggle for independence and the refugees who moved to/through Sudan from Eritrea, forever holding hands with Eritrea. The questions I am asking in these poems (questions about displacement, exile, state-sanctioned violences, and then beautiful, subversive acts of possibility and remembering) are part of a river of questions that I am asking/thinking about throughout my work and in relation to Palestine, yes, and Sudan, and Eritrea, and the United States, and Puerto Rico. It is important for me to think about the ways that all of these stories are connected even though history books have bullied me into thinking that I was wrong to connect them.

NS: What would the ideal gender (equality) education look like to you when it comes to raising your own kids? What would be self-evident to your kids and what would freedom for them look like?

AG: This question is immense and beautiful and big. I must take more time to think about what I would like to share here.

NS: Lastly, what ADVICE would you personally consider most important TO A YOUNG POET who is, especially regarding her dream to teach poetry as a liberating force and life-changing element, yet SEEKING A BALANCE BETWEEN a full dedication to serving and enabling art AND the need of self-expression and concentrating on personal artistic development.

AG: The one thing I would say to myself if a version of me were asking this question (and I suppose this is true, I do carry/have carried this question) is: how are all of these elements part of the same thread? Isn't there a way that the nurturing one's teaching is also the nurturing of one's artistic practice? And vice versa. I can only speak for myself: I am the best, most alive and asking writer when I am working in community (reading with others, writing and sharing with others, thinking through questions across/through several fields and disciplines). I feel most liberated (or close to liberated... on a kind of brink) when everyone is teaching/might teach and is learning/might learn. For me, it is not difficult to work in community but also to carve out space to work on one's own (partially because I think teaching necessitates reflection just as writing necessitates reflection/revision and so this time/this balancing is built in). Where things become tricky for me is when money is part of the equation. Figuring out how to balance the amount of money/work it takes to pay bills with the desire/impulse to work on quieter personal projects is consistently difficult. I hate that this is true. One thing I am asking is, How do I make sure to value this quiet non-paid time and really respect/carve out time to be quiet in the reflection or the experimenting with the making of work--realizing that it is absolutely antithetical to what the culture of capitalism (as my colleague N. A. often says) expects from us and how we are expected to think about valuing our sense of time.

***

Narges Shafeghati, 23, is the eldest of a Muslim Iranian couple, a designer and a poet. Born and raised in Germany, she is currently finishing her undergrad in the Expressive Arts in Social Transformation in Hamburg. Narges is a poet, a pluralist, and a dreamer. She is fluent in and in love with German, Farsi and English, learning Hebrew, and working on translating Persian and German poetry and prose. From Oct'15-Feb'16 Narges was a full-time intern with Split This Rock in DC, where she experienced her dream work environment, made lovely friends, met her dream colleagues, AND the love of her life.

Split This Rock Interview with Reginald Dwayne Betts

This conversation is one in a series of interviews with poets to be featured at Split This Rock Poetry Festival 2016: Poems of Provocation & Witness. Complete information about the festival can be found on the website. Follow the 2016 Fest Interview tag to find all the previous interviews.

By Kit Bonson

Photo by Rachel Eliza Griffiths

Reginald Dwayne Betts is a writer and poet. Four Way Books recently released his second collection of poems,Bastards of the Reagan Era. His first collection, Shahid Reads His Own Palm, won the Beatrice Hawley Award. Betts’ memoir, A Question of Freedom: A Memoir of Learning, Survival, and Coming of Age in Prison, was the recipient of the 2010 NAACP Image Award for non-fiction. His writing has also led to a Soros Justice Fellowship, a Radcliffe Fellowship, a Ruth Lily Fellowship, and a Pushcart Prize. In addition to his writing, Mr. Betts serves as the national spokesperson for the Campaign for Youth Justice and was appointed to the Coordinating Council of the Office of Juvenile Justice and Delinquency Prevention by President Barack Obama. He is currently a student at Yale Law School.

***

KB:  So, I'm a neuroscientist and I recently started writing poetry again after a long hiatus. Last week, I told my sweetheart (who's also a scientist) that the inspiration for a new poem can often start from observing contradictions that no one else noticed.  He remarked that this is often how a good scientific study also starts.  Do you think of writing poetry as engaging in an experimental process, where one digs down to find out how different elements relate to each other?

RDB:  Partly, yes. But then I would argue that unlike the scientific process, some of the failures [in the] poems lead to some unexpected places have value in a way that might not be true for science. Almost as if I find myself hypothesizing that one thing will be true when I begin to write a poem, and when I discover how wrong I am, it’s not disaster as much as an unexpected discovery. Especially if we’re thinking about a series of poems and how meaning accretes across them. 

KB:  When I read about your having trouble with the law at a young age and then ending up attending Yale Law School, it reminded me of a similarly public journey of another accomplished Black man:  the scientist Carl Hart, who wrote in his book High Price about using and selling drugs as a teen and then becoming a research pharmacologist at Columbia University.  It seems to me that both of these stories illustrate how we can become aware of a problem through our own experience and then develop a commitment to help others out of the same condition.  Do you think that as a lawyer, your own history of resilience can inform the path of others who are struggling?  How did you come to a place where you knew your life needed to be dedicated to helping others?

RDB:  I’m not sure. There are always these similarities that are most noticeable when people have experienced similar life-changing type experiences. And so yes, for me, prison irrevocably changed the way I view things and the way I operate in the world. That, more than resilience, informs what I will ultimately do and I hope that the things I do will speak to others, maybe inform their path, maybe frame their decision to take a different path. Maybe part of this is me being reluctant, also, to point to some internal quality like resilience that lead me to a number of unexpected career choices and professional opportunities. 

  

KB:  You often tell the story that your life was changed when someone slid the anthology The Black Poets by Dudley Randall under the door of your cell when you were in prison.  The ability of poetry to deeply affect prisoners has a long trajectory:  Nelson Mandela spoke of reciting the inspiring "Invictus" poem by William Healy to fellow prisoners at Robben Island, and Aung San Suu Kyi wrote her own poetry about the political conditions in Burma.  Closer to home, Jimmy Santiago Baca (who was one of our Featured Poets at the 2008 Split This Rock Festival) also tells of how he began writing poetry while in a maximum security prison in Arizona.  What is it about poetry that is personally transforming for so many who are imprisoned?

RDB:  I don’t know. I do want to believe that poetry is personally transforming to some, especially in prison. But honestly, I’m not as convinced that this is true as your question suggests that you are. Mandela, Suu Kyi, Santiago Baca – these are exceptional people. The push towards poetry is an important one, but I probably am more concerned [about] the transformative quality of prison, because those transformations are frequently far more sinister and last longer than what poetry does. All of which is to say it’s dangerous to think of this gift in a way that shifts the discussion away from the monstrosity that is prison. 

KB: For a socially-engaged poet, there is a lived reality and yet there can be poetic license in our narratives, both personally and in terms of our writing.  What do you think about the need for hard honesty in our work, as well as the use of softer symbolism that can convey hidden truths?

RDB:  I’m not sure what you mean by this question. First, I desperately want to dispel the notion that there is a difference between the socially-engaged poet and the poet who isn’t. Recognizing that to be socially-engaged can mean many things, I’m reluctant to push on this category. Especially given [that] the category doesn’t invite us to think of the commitment people have to their community by doing volunteer work, by tutoring, by doing community building that is distinct from advocacy work. Second, poetry is imagination. It is craft and music. All of it is poetic license. And so I’m not sure that there is a distinction between hard honesty or soft symbolism. I mean, I’m not really sure at all I know or can recognize a distinction between the two. What I do know is that there are lines in poems, like Lucille Clifton’s line:  "mine already is an afrikan name". Or Joseph Brodsky’s: "I have braved, for want of wild beasts, steel cages". There are lines that remain in my head and grow not only to mean something but to shape how I recall certain moments of my life. 

KB: Is there a poem of yours that you wish more people were aware of?  

RDB:  Say a poem like "What We Know of Horses," this is a poem that I admire that I’ve written that I hope people will read. It’s a poem that I think is layered and builds as it develops and riffs off of other poets and ideas and histories. And it’s a personal poem, a love poem, a tragic poem. I don’t know. Beyond wanting people to be aware of any given poem, I would want to, in a moment of arrogance maybe, push people to think beyond labels for any of the poems that I’ve written.  {Poem below.}

KB:  The more that any of us read poetry, the more we can realize that there are writers from other eras who resonate with what we are attempting to do in our own work, even if the form is different.  Are there any poets in the past who were representing their time the way you feel you are doing for your time?  Or is there a poetic tradition that you feel you are keeping alive and hope to pass on?

RDB:  There are many poets. Lucille Clifton, Etheridge Knight, Henry Dumas. There is Sonia Sanchez, Ethelbert Miller, Wanda Coleman. Brodsky. Gilbert. Both Christopher and Jack. But claiming a tradition – I’m a young writer and so that’s a more complicated question because you have to earn the right to be a part of a tradition. I’ve written a few poems, but don’t think that I’ve gotten to the point where I can honestly say I am keeping anything alive. I’m just happy to be in conversation with my peers and the world at this point.

What We Know Of Horses

by Reginald Dwayne Betts

1.

& when my brother says Swann Rd. 


is the world, he ignores boarded 


vacants, broken windows - this place’s


shattered glass? He tells me 


“believe the world is tenement house, 


a pocket full of stones, a world


of ghosts, & what’s left of ash & 


smoke after each inhale.” I visit now 


that a prison cell holds his world.


Dead men circle every block 


we know, thread this world


with quotes from psalms, “the sorrows 


of death embrace me,” “some trust 


in chariots and some in horses.” 


They embrace metaphor, disbelieve 


gravity, breathe in a haunted world.


& what of my brother? Running 


these streets, he was a horse –


graceful, destined to be 


broken. Why admire horses?

2.

Why compare everything fast 


& beautiful to horses?


My daddy’s generation had a saying 


for men lost in the world,


it was true of my uncle, my cousin – 


men strung out on horse,


chasing the dragon, shivering 


with the memory of that stallion 


gone postal in their veins –


called them lost in place,


with cities buried

inside them – horses


inside them stampeding. 


My brother put his faith in horse,


& there is no map to find him now. 


He tells me he inhales


the funk of men doing life 


& knows he is in hell,


that he has dug his grave 


amongst bricks that embrace him.  


He - exile, with only rusted iron  


& bricks bracing his two hundred pounds.

3.

Who admits this cage embraces 


him?  “History is written 


on the back of the horse” broken 


by the world. We all in prison now. 


I stare at this man, my kin 


ruined by embracing


night. Call this place a horse collar, 


& watch how it cuts into skin, 


how the leather embrace

s
all of our necks. Even as a visitor 


behind plate glass I brace


myself for cuffs. This not Swann 


Rd., this burden placed on me,


these memories of courtrooms 


& the places where bodies were found. 


& still, I want to stop & embrace


my brother, to hold him close 


& pause to inhale the scent of prison, 


to tell him what I smell, what I inhale,


is still the body of a man.

4.

How can a man inhale


so much violence & not change?


I light my Newport, inhale.


Think on how his voice has changed. 


My man, now a feral horse


wearing kick chains: unable to sleep, 


always on guard, inhaling


the air for prey, as if he is still 


the predator, as if  he can inhale


death & keep on living. Death 


the elephant in this world.


I imagine the other men here, all 


in a world filled with a casket’s aftermath. 


How much grief can you inhale?


My brother tells me he prays 


at night, he wants to leave this place.


But we know all his wild hours placed


him in this mural of blood.  


His hunger placed him in C-block, 


Cell 21. It suffocates


& nothing replaces time.

5.

“You okay in here?” I ask. 


But he’s in a place 


only he knows.  When he walks 


away he embraces


the kind of rage I fear. A man 


killed a man near him, placed 


on a gurney & rushed 


down a sidewalk.  Dead 


in a place where no one gives 


a fuck if you’re breathing. 


To be a horse galloping away


is what I want for him, 


he wants horse trundling through 


his scarred veins. Prison 


has taken the place of 


freedom, even in his dreams.

6.

& I know, this is not a “world


where none is lonely.” & I know, 


he is lost to the world,


& I know he believes this: 


“I shut my eyes and all the world


is dead,” & I know that there is 


still a strip, a place


that he believes is the world:


Swann Rd., where he can inhale


& be free. Sometimes his cuffs 


are on my wrists & I embrace


the way they cut, as if I am the one 


domesticated, a broken horse.

(From Bastards of the Reagan Era, printed by Four Way Books in 2015)

***

Kit Bonson is a Board member of Split This Rock, where she serves on the
fundraising and Festival committees. Kit is is a neuroscientist in the DC area who has also been an activist for peace and justice and for women’s reproductive health for over 30 years. She is especially proud of initiating a collaboration between Split This Rock and the Abortion Care Network (a national group of independent providers and pro-choice supporters) for a Pro-choice Poetry Contest – now in its fifth year!

Split This Rock Interview with Jan Beatty

by M. F. Simone Roberts

This conversation is one in a series of interviews with poets to be featured at Split This Rock Poetry Festival: Poems of Provocation & Witness, 2016.

Pre-registration will close today, Thursday, March 31, at midnight at Split This Rock's website. Please, register now.

Jan Beatty’s fourth book, The Switching/Yard, was named by Library Journal as one of ...30 New Books That Will Help You Rediscover Poetry. The Huffington Post called her one of ten “advanced women poets for required reading.”  Her new book, Jackknife: New and Selected Poems, will be published in Spring, 2017 by the University of Pittsburgh Press. Other books include Red Sugar (2008, Finalist, Paterson Prize), Boneshaker (2002), and Mad River (1994 Agnes Lynch Starrett Prize). Limited edition chapbooks include Ravage, published by Lefty Blondie Press in 2012, and Ravenous, winner of the 1995 State Street Prize. Beatty hosts and produces Prosody, a public radio show on NPR affiliate WESA-FM featuring national writers. She worked as a welfare caseworker, an abortion counselor, in maximum security prisons, and as a waitress for fifteen years. Her poetry has appeared in Poetry, Best American Poetry, and awards include the Pablo Neruda Prize for Poetry, two PCA fellowships, and the $15,000 Creative Achievement Award from the Heinz Foundation. Beatty has read her work widely, at venues such as the Geraldine R. Dodge Festival, Split This Rock, and the Los Angeles Times Festival of Books. She directs the creative writing program at Carlow University and the Madwomen in the Attic Workshops, where she teaches in the MFA program.

* * *

Simone Roberts (MFSR): Let’s start by getting one subject out of the way. In your interviews, it’s clear that you’re surprised that readers or critics are surprised/outraged that one of your major themes is violence and everyday brutality enacted on women. I’m surprised, too. Their tone simpers as if they’ve just never read such hard and bruising imagery before, as if you are doing something unfair to them. It’s clear there’s a patriarchal taboo here. Their problem seems to be that when men’s poetry glorifies the brutality they inflict on each other it’s heroism, and your poetry is guilty of messing with that heroic masculine. As if violence is only heroic, instead of mostly just venal and selfish and ego-serving, and inflicted on intimates. I’m sure you’re a little tired of talking about the “scandal” of your realism. Instead, I want to ask you this: how would you like to see people (poets, teachers, readers) using poetry to connect intimate safety with social justice for women?

Jan Beatty (JB): Well, messing with the “heroic masculine” is still apparently a cultural crime. In answer to your question, I always want to return to the power of one voice. A woman speaking what is true for her can make a door where there is no door—that’s the power that I trust, that I live inside of. I don’t have a plan or desire for how I’d like to see people use “…poetry to connect intimate safety with social justice for women.” As long as women continue to write what is unspeakable to them, to write the brutality that happens to them—what they know in their bodies to be real and relentless, and totally unacceptable—then those voices will rise to help other women. As you know, this violence against women is deep, it happens every day all day—and yet, when women speak of it, there is tremendous resistance. We need to write the resistance and read the tough poems at readings—you never know who is listening, who needs to hear that she is not alone.

I have the privilege of directing the Madwomen in the Attic at Carlow University in Pittsburgh, a program for women writers ages 18-94. Our entire reason for existence is to sandblast the invisibility of women writers. Part of our mission statement is that we “…value women’s work as writers, dreamers, and architects of society.” There are women who first joined Madwomen, saying: “I couldn’t write until my husband died. I was too afraid.” We have young women who are afraid to use the pronoun “I” in a poem, because some male teacher told them that it was self-involved. Talk to any woman, go to any writing class, and you’ll find stories that need to be told, but have been suppressed by violence against women—physical, emotional, psychic—whether in the world at large, in the academy, or by the white male poetry mafia. So, my suggestion is always to go to the power of the singular female voice in speaking and writing.

MFSR: “Three Faces and All These Fallen Gods” has a lot going on: The Missing Father, transgressive sex, and child’s longing. But, the interesting theme to me, the deeper register in the poem is about the world, or men, just not being *enough* -- real enough, intense enough, seductive enough for some kinds of personalities.

Younger, I spent many years wishing men
would say something hotter than I could think of--they never did.

Because really, I want to be relieved of making it all up--

let them run it hard and right for a change.

For me, this theme marks a lot of your work -- missing the mark. So, in the other direction: What satisfies in this time? This might be a question about poetry, or poetics, but it might be about the world in which we make them.

JB:  I guess the idea of missing the mark feels like an understatement. For me, it’s more like the great morass between how things are and how things need to be in terms of social justice. I’m obsessive and driven—and don’t think in terms of satisfaction that much, but in terms of striving, aiming towards a deepening in my own work. What that usually means for me is complication. How can I complicate the question or subject so that I can get to the heart of it? How can I strip off the easy, down to the metal inside us? What comes after our radiant failures?

MFSR: While we’re on brighter thoughts, I wonder, what’s the poem keeping you company these days? What’s the poem you’re rolling over in your mind?

JB: As part of the Madwomen Reading Series, we just hosted the amazing writer Diane Glancy. Her new book, Report to the Department of the Interior is filled with stunning poems of land and body—poems about the forced “education” of Native American children in boarding schools. There’s a poem, “Those Old Voices Are Always With Me,” that is just transforming—but you have to buy the book.

MFSR: Another major theme for you is the lost family, your search for your birth parents, all the biological and biographical holes in your personal narrative, even the everyone-and-no oneness of your biological father. As a reader, it makes me feel protective of you when I read these passages. Not that you want that, and not that your position is all that unique, but you are one of the very few women who write about it. We could take “Ghostdaddys” for an example.

My reach was endless, I was

birthed in a meteor shower and

all the stars knew my name.

……...

My face the face no/

father, unrecognizable/so why not?

I was the ultimate cum-shot,

I was the wildly surviving thing,

racing after ghostdaddys in dreams

Dear father, whoever you are,

I hope the sex was ravenous,

with cross/checking, slashing/

I hope there were slats of light everywhere
to see my star on the other side.

Abstracting this a whole bunch though, do you feel that this fact of your life puts you in a poetically or politically useful relation to the social currents of our era? Questions about location, belonging, identity, really realness -- they seem to be sticking around our culture, and for you are shaped by your being a daughter rather than a son.

JB: Thanks for asking about this. I do think my position is unique in that I’m not only writing about location, belonging, identity—but writing about it through the lens of adoption. Many people will say, “I had a terrible mother, or my mother died, or I was raised by my aunt,” etc. etc. Although I’m sorry for their situation—not knowing who you are, where you came from—is a very different trauma. I spent my first year in Roselia Asylum and Maternity Hospital in the Hill District in Pittsburgh, PA, and didn’t know my real name until I was in my late thirties. Walking around the world not knowing is an extreme dislocation. The culture then steals your name and history and wants you to be grateful for it. That’s where I first learned brutality and the need for truth. So, yes, I think that I’m in a position to write the “real” body in a politically necessary way.

MFSR: You write often about the hole of “no dad” and the hole of “mother’s anger” that mark many of us. Parents check out in so many ways. And that’s usually the first of many dings and cuts. Then the world comes for (many of) us. One very human response to that is to beat the life out of ourselves. Booze and drugs are two easy ways we do this, there are others. It’s going to feel like whiplash to ask it this way, but Starhawk’s new novel is about how we who are damaged in this world might fare when we (always have to) build the next world. It got me thinking, and I wonder how you take the idea: what to do with our damage in and as we make that other community?

JB: Although it sounds dramatic, I really don’t think I’d be here, that I would have survived, without poetry. As a young child, writing gave me a world to live in, a place to escape to. Years of bad poems and locked journals under my bed. I know that many writers have this experience. But, although poetry can bring release and bring speech to the page, I don’t believe in poetry as therapy. What to do with our damage—I would say that we each need to do the individual work needed to heal ourselves. I’ve been in therapy for many years. The healthier I become, the more I can bring to a community of writers or students. But, of course, everyone needs to do what they want to do. All of the damage that we carry has great capacity to help others—it could be through writing, speaking, or just walking around as ourselves. The poet Maggie Anderson used to say that she pictures an older woman somewhere who needs to hear what she has to say. This helps her to write. You never know who is getting something from what you say or write. I know that I couldn’t write some of my tougher poems without the women writers who came before me, and who are writing today. When I am afraid to put something on the page, I think of Adrienne Rich, Anne Sexton, Gwendolyn Brooks—how did they write their brave poems at a time when women’s writing was barely being published? I hope that I can contribute to that community of writers.

MFSR: The feminine voice in your poems isn’t afraid of her power. “Tomorrow in the open I will be legion-- / you will see me bleeding from every pore, / a woman in the switching/yard,” she says, coming into the land of her birth father’s people, the voice of that connection coming on cosmic. This is also a speaker who would, if she could, shoot her no-good boyfriend. I like her, identify with her on lots of levels. Not because she’s edgy, but because she’s in herself, and that doesn’t mean her life is neat and tidy. She may not be you, but she’s related to the poet who puts “Switching”  -- “she became her own father” -- right next to “Dear American Poetry,” and doesn’t wink. The two make a triptych with “Stein: Letter to a Young Rilke,” advising the mystic to earth it up a bit. The place your poems live in Switching/Yard seems to be that place Virginia Woolf was describing when she talked about writers and “bisexual” minds (her usage, not mine). What you’re describing here is a kind of gender fluidity we don’t explore all that often, one that naturally and consciously and deliberately takes on the symbolism and textures of traditional masculinity. What’s your thinking about gender spectra, and switching, and the place of not-apologizing for inhabiting a whole self?

JB: Well, yes, I don’t want to be confined to one kind of voice or gender or one kind of gender, etc. I wouldn’t call the voice in my poems a “feminine” voice, but a woman’s voice. A woman who switches, yes—sometimes speaking as a man, a father. Sometimes speaking in a more fluid way, across a range of voice. I don’t know why someone would apologize for inhabiting a whole self, since that’s what we are. I don’t mean to imply that any of this comes easily. The problem seems to come in saying we are this or that----since that rules out other this or that’s. I think that this switching is common and explored a lot—but I would like to see a lot more acceptance of fluidity, since that would give us all room to breathe. I’ve never been a fan of categories. If I step in one, I’ve got one foot out the door, which is the way I like it.

MFSR: And that question, has something to do with poetry and publishing. In the small world of literary criticism or theory, we go around and around about how and if people are shaped by official or sanctioned culture, when that culture is made by (a small group of people), and how or if that culture is a machine for discipline, for lopping off parts of the psyche, the body, our ability to be fully. Split This Rock was delighted to publish “Dear American Poetry” as a Poem of the Week because we know in very great depth that American poetry is vibrating now with voices that put paid to the myths of that official culture, including its ideas about what poems are and why. What’s been the most promising trend or even insurrection that you’ve noticed over the last ten years or so?

JB: Yes, thank you for publishing “Dear American Poetry”—I thought it was brave of you. Well, I would say that Cave Canem has really changed American poetry in a much-needed way, supporting the work of African American poets. Also, the terrific journal, Bloom, published by Charles Flowers, has brought more visibility to the voices of queer writers. And Split This Rock has become such a great, energized movement for poetry as political action and diversity.

MFSR: One thing I really admire in your poetic is your insistence that the poem take the shape and form, or lack of it, that its subject and tone require. Better to stretch form than to silence a truth seems to be your way. Poems come fragmented, poems come linear, they’re full or bare of metaphor, like the range in Red Sugar. And you let some of your poems talk about themselves in ways that could be annoyingly ironic and “meta” and are instead admissions that you’re borrowing and running with it, as in Switching/Yard. How does that set of choices work for you? How much “listening” to your poems do you need to do to see their form?

JB: I’ve always tried to focus on writing the poem. What I mean is that I actively fight against any idea of project or plan or received form. Partially because I hate the idea of a project or guidelines that would limit or constrain what I would write about—but also, because I’m a big fan of organic form. I like what Levertov said about working intuitively: “… content and form are in a state of dynamic interaction; the understanding of whether an experience is a linear sequence or a constellation raying out from and into a central focus or axis, for instance, is discoverable only in the work, not before it.”

I’ve always been a fan of “finding the poem in my body,” as in working intuitively, combined with research, experience to be open to the poem forming. I’m a slow writer, and I believe in letting poems sit and develop. After usually many, many revisions over time, I’ll come to the poem. When I finished the manuscript for my first book, Mad River, I thought I had a problem because it had taken me ten years to write the book. There was a variation of tone and form that I thought was a weakness, but my editor at the University of Pittsburgh Press, Ed Ochester, told me that this variation was a strength of the book. I was happy to hear this, since I need a lot of room in my life and in my work—and I balk at the fixed idea of narrative arc, what seems to me to be a restrictive, conservative structure.

MFSR: What’s next for you? What are you imagining and working on now?  

JB:  I have a book coming out in Spring, 2017—Jackknife: New and Selected Poems, University of Pittsburgh Press. I also have a lyrical nonfiction book on adoption called American Bastard that I’m hoping to get published soon. I’m looking for a publisher, so if anyone has a lead, let me know. Other than that, I’ve got some new poems that seem to have to do with women bodies and maps.  

Thanks, Simone, for the interview and all the time spent on this. Best of luck with your work.

* * *

Beatty notes her press on her website: janbeatty.com. For this interview, I was inspired by these:

• The Poet on the Poem: Jan Beatty at Blogalicious
• Review of The Switching/Yard by Jan Beatty by Kay Cosgrove at Green Mountain Review
• The Switching/Yard by Jan Beatty, Jacob Victorine at Muzzle Magazine
• JAN BEATTY’S "SHOOTER," A CONTROVERSY FOR FEMINIST & GENDER POLITICS, BY MARY KATE AZCUY at HEART ONLINE

M. F. Simone Roberts is the Poetry & Social Justice Fellow for Split This Rock. Roberts is an independent scholar of poetics and feminist phenomenology, a poet, editor, and activist. She is co-editor of the anthology Iris Murdoch and the Moral Imagination: Essays and author of the critical monograph A Poetics of Being-Two: Irigaray's Ethics and Post-Symbolist Poetics. Her poems are coming soon to a journal near you. Descendant of both aristocrats and serfs, she adventures this world with her consort, Adam Silverman.