Split This Rock Interview with Camille Dungy

By Melissa Tuckey

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

Early-bird registration IS EXTENDED to Friday, February 23, at midnight EST at Split This Rock's website. Visit the registration page to register now.

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Photo by Rachel Eliza Griffiths.

Camille T. Dungy is the author of four collections of poetry: Trophic Cascade (Wesleyan UP, 2017),  Smith Blue (Southern Illinois UP, 2011), Suck on the Marrow (Red Hen Press, 2010), and What to Eat, What to Drink, What to Leave for Poison (Red Hen Press, 2006). Her debut collection of personal essays is Guidebook to Relative Strangers: Journeys into Race, Motherhood, and History (W. W. Norton, 2017). She has also edited Black Nature: Four Centuries of African American Nature Poetry (UGA, 2009) and co-edited two other collections. Camille T. Dungy’s honors include an American Book Award, two NAACP Image Award nominations, Sustainable Arts Foundation fellowships, and two fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts. Her poems and essays have been published in Best American Poetry, The 100 Best African American Poems, nearly thirty other anthologies, and over one hundred print and online journals. Dungy is currently a Professor in the English Department at Colorado State University.

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Melissa Tuckey (MT):  In both your memoir, Guidebook to Relative Strangers, and your most recent book of poems, Trophic Cascade, motherhood is central. In your poem “Trophic Cascade” with regards to the reintroduction of gray wolves, you write, “Don’t/ tell me this is not the same as my story. All this/ life born from one hungry animal, this whole/ new landscape, the course of the river changed,/ I know this. I reintroduced myself to myself, this time/ a mother. After which, nothing was ever the same.” I’m curious if and how the experience of being a mother has changed your art, or changed how you think about or approach your writing?   

Camille Dungy (CD):  I wrote two whole books — Trophic Cascade and Guidebook to Relative Strangers — trying to explore if and how the experience of being a mother might have changed my approach toward my writing, my communities, and the world at large. My brief response here would be that the introduction of my daughter into my life has expanded my sense of commitment to hope, to possibility, and to actively working to build strengthening connections between vulnerable communities. I am more aware than ever of our vulnerability. This awareness is partly due to the presence of my child in my life, certainly, but it is also due to the awareness cultivated as a result of living a politically, historically, and environmentally conscious life.

MT: The natural world has been a strong thread in your work. And in Trophic Cascade, many of your poems address the issue of environmental crisis, or loss. The last year has been incredibly harmful for both social justice and the environment. How do you deal with such overwhelm in your writing? What are the challenges in trying to find language in the crisis we are confronting?  What is your advice to writers who are trying to address the ills of the world?

CD: I had already finished the poems in Trophic Cascade before the election of November 2016. Which means that, though I do believe the poems are directly relevant to these times, they were not written in direct response to the immediate political and environmental moment you describe in your question.

Sadly, there is very little about this current state of affairs that surprises me. In fact, there is very little about this current state of affairs that is new. Our nation’s disregard for and violent treatment of people it would call different, would call inferior, would call unwelcome is not a new phenomenon. Though we certainly have seen an increase in the degree of devastation and rapaciousness openly sanctioned by our government, the ideas that this moment of environmental and social/political crisis began in January 2017 is folly. It is a misconception that prevents us from addressing the crises at their roots.

My advice to writers is to pay attention. To continue to pay attention. Look at the root causes of the crises you would address in your work. Every one of my books addresses political, historical and environmental topics similar to those I address in the two books published in 2017. I may come at the questions from different angles, but the questions that concern me, the crises that concern me, have remained consistent. This work we’re doing is constant.

You know those people who run what they call centenary races, or even more remarkably Deca Ironman races? They run ten marathons in a row or finish ten Ironmen. One after another. Day in and day out, they’re completing these demanding races. It’s exhausting, I’m sure, but they know what they’re getting into. That’s what it means to be a social activist, an environmental activist, a civil rights activist, in this country, in this world. You’ve got to do the work, recharge however you can, then put in more work. There will always be another challenge to complete.

MT: I sometimes think the most dangerous thing that can happen right now in this country is the loss of hope. It is such a cynical time. What feeds your sense of hope? Are there books you turn to that feed your spirit?

CD: You’re absolutely right. Part of the strategy of this administration is to force us out of hope. The barrage of new insults, the constant unanswered calls to my Senator’s office, the installation again and again of unsuitable judges and cabinet members, all of that is designed to make us give up, to make us think it will be impossible for us to effect the change we want to see in the world. Simply knowing that the entire point of it all is to make me lose hope is often enough fire up my will to maintain hope.

I read June Jordan (I’m so excited about the new collection of her work!), Audre Lorde, Toni Morrison, James Baldwin, Lucille Clifton, Gwendolyn Brooks; and I read my peers, who are producing some of the best literature America has ever seen. Truly. Astounding work is coming from writers of color and politically and environmentally-engaged writers today. That gives me all kinds of hope. We have not been silenced.

And, my daughter gives me hope, and she ignites my determination not to allow my hope to be shattered. I will fight for her and for her dear sweet little friends and for the narwhals and the manatees and the snowy owls and the elephants. And I will cry sometimes for all of them, for all of us, and then I will wake up in the morning and find a new way to fight.

MT: You have a new book of prose and poetry, which seem to be written simultaneously. Did the experience of writing Guidebook to Relative Strangers inform your poetry in any way—I mean, do you have a sense that the two forms of writing are in conversation, as you are writing? 

CD: What I do is write one line and then write another and then another. Some of the lines came out as prose. Some came out as poetry. You’re right that they were written nearly simultaneously, but I wasn’t thinking about it that way. I was just trying to write, and sometimes one mode worked better than another. Sometimes, I was writing prose. Sometimes I was writing poetry. And then at some point one book called to be gathered, and it was not long before the other called to be gathered as well.

I don’t know that the two forms were in conversation for me anymore than night and day are in conversation. Which is to say, one is very different than the other, but they are also really not so different at all. They are both actually always taking place on the planet at the same time. If you take a larger view of the planet, you can see night and day existing at once. I am beginning to think that this hard separation we make between genres might be dangerous. We’re into categories and divisions in this country, often dangerously so. Since one of the things I am working to resist are categories and divisions that allow us to belittle and marginalize one group in favor of another, I’ve begun to interrogate my thinking about all sorts of divisions.

MT:  You are tremendously active, writing, reading, teaching, mothering. How do you make the most of the time you have for writing?

CD: I don’t feel like I DO make the most of the time I have for writing. I feel like I am always wanting to be writing more, reading more, and also mothering more.

I always wish there were more time in my days. I think that at one time in my life I didn’t have to sleep as much as I need to sleep now. Maybe I used to steal more time from myself, as the women poets used to suggest needed to be done for women, and mothers in particular, to find time to write. I think my daughter has changed the way my time and attention can be apportioned.

What I’m working on now is honoring the time I do have. When I’m with my daughter, I try to be fully with my daughter. Device-free time whenever possible. I try to be similarly focused when I have time to be with the page. I listen to a lot of novels and nonfiction on Audible—I’ll tell the world that little secret. It feels like cheating as a writer not to be reading everything from a book, but Audible has kept me in books over the last few busy years. Listening to Audible, I can “read” while gardening or washing dishes or walking to work. I don’t have much curl up and just read time in my life right now, but I’m not willing to give up books just because I don’t have leisure hours.

 I’m not as productive as I’d like to be, but rather than being down on myself about that, I am learning to honor the fact, and trying to be as productive as I can be with the tools I have at my disposal.

MT:  What’s next for you?

CD: It’s always one line and then another line and then another. That’s all I can pledge to myself and the world. One day, hopefully, those lines will add up to something, but at this point there’s no telling what or when that will be.

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Additional Links

On Black Nature: Four Centuries of African American Nature Poetry, edited by Camille Dungy. (National Public Radio)

More than Just a Single Identity: A Conversation with Camille Dungy, by Raj Chakrapani (The Rumpus)

“Frequently Asked Questions: #7,” by Camille T. Dungy (The Quarry)

Visit also Dungy's poems “Arthritis is one thing, the hurting is another” and “Daisy Cutter” (The Quarry)

Reading at the Lunch Poems series at UC Berkeley

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Photo by Dave R. Phillips.

Melissa Tuckey is a poet and literary activist. Tenuous Chapel, her book of poems, was selected by Charles Simic for the ABZ First Book Award in 2013. Other honors include a Black Earth Institute fellowship and a winter fellowship at Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown. She's received grants in support of her work from DC Commission on the Arts and Humanities and Ohio Arts Council. Tuckey's poems have been anthologized in DC Poets Against the War anthology, Ecopoetry, Fire and Ink: Social Action Writing, and Truth to Power. Tuckey is a co-founder of Split This Rock where she currently serves as Eco-Justice Poetry Project Coordinator. She’s editor of Ghost Fishing: An Eco-Justice Poetry Anthology with University of Georgia Press. Melissa Tuckey lives in Ithaca, New York.

Split This Rock Interview with Kazim Ali

by Domenica Ghanem

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

Early-bird registration has been extended to Friday, February 23, at midnight EST at Split This Rock's website. Visit the registration page to register now.

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Kazim Ali was born in the United Kingdom to Muslim parents of Indian, Iranian, and Egyptian descent. He received a BA and MA from the University of Albany-SUNY and an MFA from New York University. His books encompass several volumes of poetry, including Sky Ward, winner of the Ohioana Book Award in Poetry; The Far Mosque, winner of Alice James Books’ New England/New York Award; The Fortieth Day; All One’s Blue; and the cross-genre text Bright Felon. His novels include the recently published The Secret Room: A String Quartet. Among his books of essays is Fasting for Ramadan: Notes from a Spiritual Practice. Ali is an associate professor of Creative Writing and Comparative Literature at Oberlin College. His new book of poems, Inquisition, and a new hybrid memoir, Silver Road: Essays, Maps & Calligraphies, will both be released in 2018. Learn more at his website. Photo by Tanya Rosen-Jones.

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Domenica Ghanem (DG):  What do you think is the relationship between your poetry or poetry in general and politics, especially in “Trump’s America?”

Kazim Ali (KA): Well, we have all of us always been "political," or functioned in a political and social context. To be given additional context or attention since the election due to the racism and prejudice slung my way does not make a better situation for me or other Muslim writers. Still, I am glad to see many younger Muslim voices in poetry--Tarfia Faizullah, Solmaz Sharif, Kaveh Akbar, Ruth Awad, Fatimah Asghar, Leila Chatti and Zeina Hashem Beck all come to immediate mind but there are so many others, so many I couldn't even count them.

Truly in the past ten years there has been a wave of young Muslim poets publishing and for this reason I feel very sure, very confident, not at all in crisis. I write about the body, I write about the spirit, I write about music, art and dance, but none of these things, none, are separate for me from one another or from this vague term "politics." Politics means how we live in the world. Unless you live with the privilege of being able to ignore that then you are political.

DG: Many people have become more aware of social issues because of the Trump administration’s open assault on many communities. But for many people, including us in the Muslim American community, we haven’t had the privilege of ignoring these issues. In what ways has the work you’re doing today in your writing and in your classes changed or been affected by today’s political environment, or are you working with the same themes you’ve been building on? What themes remain relevant?

KA: A little while ago I thought I ought to stop writing about God. The reason is that I was starting to have ideas. Ideas mean a system of ideas. Every idea you have may preclude another. I thought that it would be better to have a space of unknowing and that other poets would continue to make poems about God. I don't know if I have kept my promise or not, but by turning away from the task of trying to know the unknown and from the vocabulary of the spirit, which is necessarily the language of abstraction, I was able to come back into the world.

What occupies me now is physical landscape, the history of places, the ways human communities work in time and space -- maybe I have become a sociologist or a geographer -- but I still work in sound and gesture. At the moment it's contested places that interest me --the struggles of the Pimicikamak Cree of Northern Manitoba against the provincial government which dammed the river that gave them their livelihood and compromised their culture and their way of life; or perhaps the work I do in offering yoga teachings and trainings to Palestinian people in the West Bank. Or the "border" communities that exist in every American town and city, not just those on our southern border.

DG:  You’re described as an “American poet”, but I understand you have a layered ethnic and national background and do a lot of international travel -- how do you find your poetry is received differently in different countries? What themes seem to resonate on a universal level?

KA: I have traveled a fair amount, but it is (mostly) not to do poetry readings or participate in international literary communities. I have done some of that in India and was fortunate enough to publish a book of selected poems in India a couple of years back. But my travel in other places has been as a private citizen, a wanderer, an explorer, a writer (to be writing, not to have a public life as a "writer"), for international solidarity work or for my work as a (volunteer) yoga teacher. I have been strongly affected myself by the literary contexts of the places I visit. Palestinian poet Mahmoud Darwish and Urguayan Cristina Peri Rossi have both been very important to me. Among French writers Ananda Devi and Marguerite Duras are both touchstone figures. In India I met many incredible poets and writers whose work nourishes me.

DG:  How do you use poetry as a tool to teach about subjects not necessarily having to do with poetry – like social issues, or general self-expression? Things you often learn about in college that aren’t necessarily dictated in the curriculum. In some of your work you talk about being both Muslim and queer. Do you find that there’s a lot of push and pull between those identities? Has poetry helped you reconcile them?

KA: On the one hand for me there isn't a push and pull between the identities because they each live inside of me. Also, the identities are fluid and I construct them and they construct me through my life. My relationship to each has changed. Certainly, of the poets I love, dearest are the ones who can reveal to me the internal life, the strange negotiation that we all have to make in a larger external world that does not include us. That's not unique to being Muslim or to being queer but to every person. Poetry too can give us a sense of how time works, how place/space and its construction by political and social forces govern our beings. 

DG:  I’ve often struggled with what it means to be a “good Muslim woman” and sometimes more importantly a “good Muslim daughter.” Have you had similar struggles of trying to be a “good Muslim son?” What level of support have you had from your parents?

KA: I can't talk too much about my family here, beyond what I've put in books. We are trying to find our ways and some times have been easier than others. But I will tell you this much, Islam is a religion of plurality and always has been. You must find what truth is in it for you and what place it has in your own life. That too has fluctuated and changed for me throughout my life. As I say in a poem called "OriginStory," "I have not been a good son." It's as ironic a statement as it is sincere. I have no answer.

DG:  There are so many prolific Indian, Iranian, and Egyptian poets -- do any of them in particular inspire your work?

KA: So many. I am working on editing a (very small compact) selection of contemporary Indian anglophone poets for POETRY; I'll say Eunice de Souza, who recently passed away, was a favorite for me. Sohrab Sepehri, the twentieth century Iranian poet, is a major touchstone figure. I've translated three of his books (published in one volume by BOA Editions). I find in his work a marrying of physical and spiritual, concrete and abstract, that I have found nowhere else.

DG:  In a recent interview about your poem “Checkpoint,” you said that sometimes you feel like a journalist and that “Checkpoint” is an interrogation of passport control at the Ben Gurion Airport in Tel Aviv. Life in the occupied territories is certainly an under-reported story. What are some of your other poems that might offer us a glimpse into the stories you’d like to see reported in the news? 

KA: I worked on many poems from my experiences traveling that are in my two forthcoming books; I'm working on two current projects, both of them are nonfiction. The first is a short book about the Canadian dam I mentioned earlier. The part of the story I didn't tell you is that my dad was one of the engineers who helped to design the electrical systems of the dam. I don't think any of the workers back in 1976 knew what the impacts of the dam would be, but I grew up there, in a trailer-park town in the middle of the boreal forest, for four years while this dam was being built. Last year I went back up there to the reservation and stayed for a little while and researched and interviewed aboriginal elders, activists, and government officials.

I am trying to recount the simultaneous stories of my own personal journey and the story of the Pimicikamak. My second project is about teaching yoga and making connections between the ancient teachings and the current situation in the Middle East. What most people may not know is that yoga has been in the middle east for hundreds of years. In the 1500s one of the more enlightened princes of the Mughal empire, Dara Shikoh, commissioned Farsi translations of all the texts and yoga made its way across Persia and into the Arab world. It may be new to teach in the context of life in the contemporary West Bank, but it's not new at all.

  

DG: You have two new books coming out this year, what excites you about each?

KA: I have a book of essays called Silver Road: Essays, Maps, & Calligraphies. It intersperses short essays with diary fragments, short poems, and lyric "prose maps," that each try to tell the story of a place in movement. I like the braided form and the book has been a long time in the writing. In fact, all the braided strands were written separately and apart from each other-- there was no intention at the time of original writing that they would make a book together-- so it feels organic, an archive of my life and a pattern of my way of thinking.

In March, my new collection of poems is coming out. It is called Inquisition. I am excited about it because I feel like I have moved into different modes -- it includes lyrics, narrative poems, even two pieces that had their origins as spoken word pieces. With each new collection I want to turn a corner formally, but I also want to challenge myself as a poet in terms of subject matter, how honest I can be, how many risks I can take. So, this book has a couple of poems that worry me, that frighten me in terms of making me feel exposed by putting them out in the world. So that's thrilling and anxiety-inducing.

DG: If someone were exploring your work for the first time, which work or works would you suggest?

KA:I couldn't say. I have written in so many different genres and modes that they make a beautiful pattern for me. If I could suggest anything I would hope a reader would not just read one book but would try two or three or four.

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Additional Links

A reading of the essay "Poetry is Dangerous" by Kazim Ali from ORANGE ALERT: ESSAYS ON POETRY, ART AND THE ARCHITECTURE OF SILENCE (University of Michigan 2010).

Interview with Kazim Ali, by Kaveh Akbar (Divedapper).

Interview with Kazim Ali, by Britney Gulbrandsen (Superstition Review).

"Peach" by Kazim Ali (The Quarry: A Social Justice Poetry Database).

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Domenica Ghanem is the media manager and co-manager of the communications team at the Institute for Policy Studies. She is an activist and writer on issues of the drug war, criminal justice, justice for Palestine, rape culture, and Islamophobia. She graduated from the University of Connecticut with degrees in journalism and political science in 2015.

Split This Rock Interview with Javier Zamora

by Erica Charis-Molling

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

Early-bird registration has been extended to Friday, February 23, at midnight at Split This Rock's website. Visit the registration page to register now.

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Javier Zamora was born in La Herradura, El Salvador, in 1990. He is the author of   Unaccompanied (Copper Canyon, 2017). He holds a BA from the University of California, Berkeley, where he studied and taught in June Jordan’s Poetry for the People program. Zamora earned an MFA from New York University and is currently a 2016-2018 Wallace Stegner Fellow at Stanford University and a 2017 Lannan Fellow. He is the recipient of scholarships to the Bread Loaf, Frost Place, Napa Valley, Squaw Valley, and VONA writers’ conferences and fellowships from CantoMundo, Colgate University (Olive B. O’Connor), MacDowell Colony, Macondo Foundation, National Endowment for the Arts, Saltonstall Foundation, and Yaddo. In 2016, Barnes & Noble granted him the Writer for Writers Award for his work with the Undocupoets Campaign. He was also the winner of the Ruth Lilly/Dorothy Sargent Fellowship and is a member of the Our Parents’ Bones Campaign, whose goal is to bring justice to the families of the ten thousand disappeared during El Salvador’s civil war. Learn more about Javier at his website. Photo by Ana Ruth Zamora.

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Erica Charis-Molling (ECM): I first encountered your poems in the ecojustice poetry anthology Ghost Fishing that’s launching this spring. So many of the poems in that book, yours very much included, embrace the personal as political, but also the land we inhabit as political. Can you say something about the connections you sense between landscape and the political, as it connects to your writing?

Javier Zamora (JZ): Landscape makes me think of Lorca and duende. I think like many writers, I’m very much intrigued by the idea of duende, this “dark force” that inspires amazing art. When I was at NYU, I was lucky enough to enroll in a craft course led by Yusef Komunyakaa that explored Lorca’s theory of duende. What I still remember from that course is the emphasis Yusef placed on the following excerpt from Lorca’s essay: “The duende is not in the throat: the duende surges up, inside, from the soles of the feet.”

What is important is the “surge,” where does it come from? It comes from the ground. It comes from a particular place. If we take this to be true, every place has its own individual duende. In different places it’s called something different but the idea is the same. You can call it feelin, blues, heart, soul, son, “it,” etc. If we write from a literal place, that landscape dictates the politics it has seen and experienced, the history of that physical place.

ECM: Unaccompanied is written in both English and Spanish. One of your poems says “I was ready to be gringo / speak English…” but the English in the poems is often broken or interrupted by Spanish punctuation (inverted question marks). It made me think of Paul Celan, whose fractured poems were, in part, a product of trying to write poems in German as a Jew during the Holocaust. He was trying to write about trauma in the language of those inflicting it, as in a similar vein you’ve noted “Unaccompanied is written in the enemy’s language.” Do you see your work as subverting/recreating English? And how is trying to help your readers to imagine the unimaginable/unspeakable something like the act of translating?

JZ: Reading Paul Celan’s work has certainly helped me with my trauma and there are poems that his work “unlocked” for me. Before reading Celan, I always felt like an imposter, a traitor, writing about what had happened to me and my family in the “enemy’s language.” Unlike Celan, I live in the country that helped displace me from my homeland. I think that also contributed to my self-immolating attitude towards my writing when I started off. I didn’t know whether to write in Spanish or English. Celan and other poets like Zurita, Darwish, Hikmet, made it OK for creativity to flourish amongst trauma/displacement.

By that I mean there was room for decisions like keeping the grammatical punctuations in Spanish. I do see these decisions (and the decision to include Spanish without translating it) as subversions towards a speaker that speaks English. I also see this decision, as you mention, as a way to recreate/revolutionize English to better accommodate for the languages it ingests via its vast colonization of the world. There is a reaction when a language interacts with another. One doesn’t completely swallow the other. I hoped to show some of this process.

ECM: It seems like there’s been a lot of dislocation in your life—leaving one home very young, going through traumas that dislocated many of your memories from you, arriving to another place that doesn’t feel like home either, all of this the impact of a war you were a generation removed from. I suppose in a way even higher education and success in the literary world could be a type of dislocation. If that rings true to your experiences (and please say so if not!), how have such experiences influenced your poetics?

JZ: I constantly feel like I’m walking in dissonance between all of the mentioned above. Like I’m juggling multiple things at once I shouldn’t be juggling. It’s a strange experience to be an immigrant in this and any nation. Dislocation, dissonance, any noun with the prefix dis- in front of it, gets at the heart of this feeling: negation, reversal/absence, separation, removal, “expressing completeness or intensification of an unpleasant or unattractive action.”

How this affects my poetics? I don’t exactly know. I can say that it’s strange to navigate the “world of poetry” (as it’s presented/sold to us in the United States) as a first-generation immigrant. I don’t know how that’s affecting me, but I know it is. We (People of Color) are constantly being asked to juggle more than we are capable to in the poetry world but also, and more importantly, in society as a whole. That demand or perceived demand has to have a not-so-pleasant result on us and what we highly value (for poets, that would be poetry).

ECM: You’ve spoken before about storytelling or silence as a means of control (or the perception of control) for those who have been through traumatic experiences. I actually have a budding theory that negation is particularly helpful in telling such stories—that when retelling trauma it’s sometimes more possible to write “I am not,” than to write “I am.” I noticed that you actually end Unaccompanied in negation with the line “nothing has changed.” What role do you think negation plays when writing from places of trauma? Could you speak about the empowerment of telling your story or its illusion? 

JZ: To backtrack to my previous answer, I think the prefix dis- is very much in tune with the realities of immigrants. Negation is part of this reality. I end the book with that sentence because nothing has really changed for immigrants/refugees in this country. On the contrary, this country is becoming even more anti-immigrant/refugee. There is power in telling my story. The appearance of control in the act of writing is what first drew me into poetry. I could shape how people were talking about people like me: Salvadoran immigrants. Now, more than ever, people want to learn about “the immigrant experience.” There is something very interesting that occurs when there’s a “want” of anything. Instead of humanizing, oftentimes the opposite occurs. It’s a very fine line. I’ve been getting a lot of requests for interviews/essays since the recent announcement to cut Temporary Protective Status (TPS). Why weren’t these requests made possible before? When shedding light into this immigration status would’ve/might’ve made a real difference?

Most of the time, there is a failure at humanization. Be it because of deadlines, word limits, etc. In a book, you dictate your own deadlines/word limits, etc. The private act is empowering. I’m seeing that the public aspect of having a book can sometimes be dehumanizing. There is more of an illusion at empowerment there. There is more room for tokenizing. The public vs. private. It’s a very complex line to navigate when writing about traumatic experiences. I’m still learning how to navigate it. How to guard my private space. How to stay human.

ECM: You’ve noted the rising chorus of voices as more immigration poems, written by those who are themselves immigrants, are published. But you also seem very interested in “pushing the boundaries” of those narratives and conversations.  Where do you see it going, in your own more recent work or in the work of others?

JZ: I hope that it is not only a fad. Immigrant voices seem to have the spotlight on them, for now. I hope this is not a negative effect of having 45 in the presidency. When he’s gone, which will happen, are we going to forget about immigrants? Are we going to think everything is fixed when a Democrat comes in? Are we going to be swayed into a “post-racial” mindset like we were with Obama? A complete denial and demonizing of 45, Trump as scapegoat for all the evils of the political system. Like there isn’t a little bit of Trump in Dems and Reps. I’m very worried.

I want to push the conversation toward writing immigrants without the backdrop of trauma. I’m a culprit of this, but I needed to write Unaccompanied for myself. I needed it to help me survive. In an ideal world, Unaccompanied is just the stepping-stone that will liberate me into writing something else. I’m now trying to push toward something more “complete.” I’m still trying to figure out what that looks like.

I think a more complete depiction of an immigrant has a lot more joy in it. I’m not saying that there isn’t joy in my book, there’s a lot of joy in survival and trauma. Now, I want to pull joy a layer above where it is now in my poetry. Again, this is the aim. We all have aims, and then, what comes out of us is completely different. I want to be more in-tune with the physical place I inhabit. Going back to duende, I want the ground to tell me where my writing should go. I want to be able to listen. I want to be happier in my real life (outside of poetry). I’m actively seeking it. I want that happiness to seep into the page.

ECM: Speaking of the next generation of writers, you’re an educator as well as a poet. Do the two careers/practices inform each other? What important lessons have you learned from your students? 

JZ: Writing and teaching go well together. They inform each other. What doesn’t fail to surprise me is the need for poetry in the students’ lives. It shouldn’t, but it still does. Poetry makes a difference, you can see it in the way students talk about poetry. Once the student finds a poet that resonates, life seems to have a lot more possibility, more magic. It’s a beautiful thing to notice.

I think because of the route I’ve been on, the fellowship route, the academic route, this feeling of possibility, of poetry as magic, has been slowly but surely taken out of me little by little. That sounds awful to say, but academia seems to shatter poetry for poets. At the same time that creative writing minors and majors are growing across US universities, there are not enough jobs for MFA/PhD’s being created. It’s like the deans of universities just want to profit from this boom via cheap labor from poets. All across academia, the people I talk to, seem to be disenchanted with their “positions” in XYZ University. There is a lot of unhappiness in academia. There must be another way to be a poet. I think we have to find new ways to be a poet without teaching in academia. And to find teaching that values us, pays us enough to exist. And/or to exist without teaching. To simply be poets.

ECM: It seems like much of what you're talking about has to do with the administration/bureaucracy of the academic environment.  If we could find another way to run these institutions, one that would allow poets to be poets, as you say, I wonder if poets would then rediscover some of the magic of sharing poetry with students? Perhaps a different environment might allow a more positive flow between the two? Or is it more of the tension between public (the classroom) and private again, do you think?

JZ: I think the bureaucracy of it has to do with it, but it's not the sole culprit of what I'm talking about. Yes, the administrations could be run better. I think this could happen if the funding didn't come from outside sources. Be it at private universities that have budgets paid by corporations, or at public universities where creative writing is constantly trying to be defunded, or made to run with less people getting paid less. But also, the culture of academia could be better. I think the entire idea of "producing" poets is off. Oftentimes our teachers are in a disconnect with the poetry world as is, and the world that they knew on their way to their professorships. (My world may be at a disconnect with what my students are going through as well). 

We have to question what it means to encourage publication at such a short age. Surely we can't all be geniuses. We can't all enter the job market and get a position that does not dehumanize us.  We can't all be the next hot new poet. Where does this come from? Who is it serving? What is being lost when we aspire to fulfill these roles? I'm worried when I see my students, undergrads, or when I hear high-schoolers ask about publishing. I think the ambition that I saw in MFAs when I was in them, is shifting to our undergrads, to high-schoolers, getting younger and younger. I'm worried that in this shift, the magic, or something, is being lost. Mind you, there is nothing wrong with ambition, but I'm worried if an entire generation is ambitious to a point that the magic is lost. 

ECM: What are your artistic influences outside of poetry? Who’s inspiring you right now?

JZ: I love watching things on the screen. Maybe too much. Films and anime always help me with my creative work, as well as helping me relax. The latest series that gave me a poem was Dragon Ball Super. Fiction and essays really tap into my creativity. Kiese Laymon’s How To Slowly Kill Yourself and Others in America should be required reading. The new Alice James Books’ We’re On: A June Jordan Reader, is a necessary reminder that June is one of our most important voices. I always try to have an ear outside of the US, so I’m reading Valdivia by Chilean poet Galo Ghigliotto, translated by Daniel Bortzutzky.

ECM: What are you working on now, or hoping to work on next?

JZ: I don’t know what I’m working on. I’m trying to take it a page at a time. It’s a scary process, but one that reminds me of how I started writing, without any expectation of ever getting published. The act of writing is returning to me and me alone. Thinking of the public/private, I want to move towards the private more for quite some time. I hope that whatever is created rushes from the ground.

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Additional Links

"Cutting Saguaros," an essay by Javier Zamora (POETRY Magazine)

"Unaccompanied, an Interview with Javier Zamora" by Deborah Paredez (Poets.org)

"An Immigrant Who Crossed the Border as a Child Retraces His Journey, in Poems" by Jonathan Blitzer (The New Yorker)

from "The Book I Made with a Counselor My First Week of School" by Javier Zamora (The Quarry: A Social Justice Poetry Database)

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Erica Charis-Molling is a creative writing instructor for Berklee Online. Her writing has been published in Crab Fat, Broad!, FUSION, Anchor, Vinyl, Entropy, and Mezzo Cammin. She is currently the Eco-Justice Anthology Support Intern at Split This Rock's Eco-Justice Project supporting Ghost Fishing: An Eco-Justice Poetry Anthology. She’s an alum of the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference and is currently pursuing her M.F.A. in Creative Writing at Antioch University.

Split This Rock Interviews Sheila Black, 10th Annual Poetry Contest Judge

Split This Rock's Program and Administrative Associate Tiana Trutna recently interviewed Sheila Black, judge for the 2017 Split This Rock Annual Poetry Contest. In the exchange, the two cover topics such as disability, intersectionality, what Sheila looks for in a poem, and joy. We invite you to get to know Sheila Black and be sure to send in your poems for the Annual Poetry Contest by November 1.

ABOUT SHEILA BLACK

Sheila Black is the author of House of Bone, Love/Iraq (both CW Press), Wen Kroy (Dream Horse Press), and Iron, Ardent, forthcoming from Educe Press in 2017. She is a co-editor with Jennifer Bartlett and Michael Northen of Beauty is a Verb: The New Poetry of Disability (Cinco Puntos Press), named a 2012 Notable Book for Adults by the American Library Association.  A 2012 Witter Bynner Fellow, selected by Philip Levine, she lives in San Antonio, Texas where she directs Gemini Ink, a literary arts center.

THE INTERVIEW

You co-edited the phenomenal Beauty is a Verb, The New Poetry of Disability with Jennifer Bartlett and Michael Northen. What surprised you the most about this anthology’s impact?

I think what surprised me most was the fact that BIAV (Beauty is a Verb, The New Poetry of Disability) even came into existence and then that it was noticed. I should explain—at the time Jen and I and Mike began this, we had nothing more than a glimmer of an idea behind us.  None of us had jobs in academia or many publishing contacts at that point. I had just left the university where I’d been an adjunct and then a contract instructor for many years, and had no job, and no clear sense of job direction. Jen was trying to eke out a living as a poet and adjunct instructor, and Mike had just retired from his work as educational coordinator for Inglis House, a facility that serves people with disabilities in Philadelphia. In a way, our lack of sustained employment was good, because we devoted ourselves entirely and wholeheartedly to putting together Beauty is a Verb. But to be honest I think we had very modest expectations of what would become of it.  We imagined years of sending the book to small presses—some sort of small quiet publication—and just the satisfaction we’d done good work.

What actually happened was a little more miraculous. On New Year’s Eve, when we’d been working on the project for about nine months, I went to a New Year’s Eve Party and happened to be seated next to Bobby Byrd, poet and publisher of Cinco Puntos Press.  He asked me what I’d been up to. I told him—and I must have sounded excited, because he asked to see the manuscript. I sent it to him New Year’s Day. Two days later he called me and said Cinco Puntos wanted to publish it. I suppose I am telling this story for all the writers and thinkers out there with a project like ours in their minds—a project born out of sheer faith, love. An amateur project, if you will. I think BIAV taught me anyway that if you really go with what you believe, and you do your very best to make the work strong, bigger things can happen than you expect. 

What makes you proud about the book’s accomplishments?

I am proud that Beauty is a Verb  helped move non-disability communities away from a purely tragic conception  of disability, or disability as simply a condition of being “less than.” I’m glad we were able to trace through the wonderful writers who contributed some of ways in which disability is a socially constructed phenomenon and how that construction occurs.  And—I have to add—it still shocks me how dominant the idea of being “less than”: is—not only for people with disabilities, but for communities of color, communities of immigrants, LGTBQIA communities. We know it is wrong, but even so that idea persists and gets reproduced. I’m proud that BIAV is one of the many books of poetry, cultural artifacts we are seeing now that are exposing that idea for the fraudulent construct it is.

You’ve said in past interviews that while editing the anthology, Beauty is a Verb, The New Poetry of Disability your ideas about disability expanded. Could you share a bit about that?

By expanded my ideas of disability I think I meant I did not fully appreciate the creative aspects of most disability experiences—by that I mean the multiple ways in which alternative embodiment or what is often called “disordered thinking” often lead to experiences and insights that simply wouldn’t be available otherwise. To give some specifics—the way Larry Eigner describes space from the perspective  of one who does not move freely within it; what ASL brings to the language of a poet like John Lee Clark—a kind of filmic quality or way of charting action; or how C.S. Giscombe conceives of transportation systems or “settling land” in a completely unique way that arises both out of his experience as an African-American man and a person with a disability; what Norma Coles’ work post-stroke tell us about the relationship between the word and what lies before the word. I became more appreciative of everyone’s—and I really do mean everyone’s—possession of a unique set of experiential information that can add to the body of all our knowledge; I think empathy, when it is really empathy, is less sympathy or pity than a bare recognition of that fact—realizing that expanded my sense of value and made me question the hierarchies, I had always lived within, which in most cases were historically established. What was it Elizabeth Bishop said in “To the Fishouses?”—“our knowledge is historical, flowing and flown.” When I was editing Beauty is a Verb I thought a lot about history—both as resource and burden. 

You’re helping to launch a new literary organization for poets with disabilities called Zoeglassia. Can you tell us more about the organization and its aspirations?

Zoeglossia is an idea still, but soon to be implemented. I am very excited about it. The founders, Jennifer Bartlett, Connie Voisine and I were very indebted to forbearers like Canto Mundo, Kundiman, Cave Canem, and Lambda Literary—organizations that pioneered the idea of creating open spaces and supportive communities for African American, Asian-American, Latino, and LGTB poets. We were talking about these organizations, and how important they had been, and started to think that writers with disabilities really needed a similar space. In fact, this need seemed particularly urgent to us because people with disabilities are often isolated—in pure economic terms they also often don’t have significant resources to travel, to engage in mainstream writers conferences, educational opportunities, etc. 

The goal of Zoeglossia is to create an annual retreat that would involve professional development of attendees by prominent, established writers with disabilities. This would include writing workshops, lectures, panel discussions and literary readings. The emerging writers will be selected competitively based on their writing and their expenses at the retreat will be covered in order to facilitate participation. Writers will attend the retreat three times over a five-year period to attain the credential of “fellow.” While people with disabilities are among the largest minority group in America, writers with disabilities are vastly underrepresented in academia in general, and specifically in publishing, creative writing programs and the organizations that govern the field. We look to Zoeglossia to be an advocate for more representation of people with disabilities, but also a space for nurturing writers with disabilities to produce their own best works—a shared creative community with all that this implies.

With Vilissa Thompson starting the #DisabilityTooWhite conversation on Twitter, there’s been some critique lately about disability being portrayed as overwhelmingly white in the media and disability community. How do you negotiate your whiteness as a disabled person and what are your thoughts on intersectionality?

Vilissa Thompson is telling an important truth. I am not on Twitter—I am such a technology Luddite—so I missed this when it first happened, but she is so right. The media does portray disability as overwhelmingly white. It is also true that within disability communities we have a long way to go in terms of being fully multi-cultural in our organizations and movements. The sad irony is that this is exactly not the experience of disability itself. One of the powers of disability—if I can use such a word—is the way it cuts across differences of race, class, and nation.

I was stopped a little by the second part of this question…I tried to figure out why I was having a hard time answering, and I realized it was the word “negotiate,” which I perhaps wrongly tend to associate with business dealings or work conflicts. I don’t know that my whiteness is negotiable. What I mean by that is that it is the weight of history…To be white in this country is to have a history of enforced privilege—to have been part of a story that is terrible and raw and involves genocide, and slavery, and colonization, and a pattern of oppression that has not yet ended.  I may long to disavow that personally, but I really can’t, and I think—if I could be so bold—that to “negotiate” it feels wrong to me.  I am not sure what to do about it, but it feels more like something I just have to sit with, live with, mourn and try to address—but not in a way that is controlling, because control, or the control implied for me by a word like negotiation, feels all wrong for the scale of the thing. That historical weight feels rather like something I should hold in the darkest silence of myself, try to breathe through, and try to really contemplate hard. I guess I am trying to say my personal negotiation feels a lot less important to me than being vulnerable to it. 

Intersectionality seems to me the way we have to move to move forward, particularly as the tools, especially the psychological modes of oppression, often function in remarkably similar ways—no matter what group they are used against…I hope that the movement toward greater justice for people with disabilities, people of color, LGTB people leads to a different sense of social order, a different way to understand and value our communities. A movement, in other words, that creates an order that is not quite so much like our current one, which is a little more like a pyramid scheme than I would like—a few lucky souls at the top and everyone else struggling to rise. I don’t think it has to be that way, but the alternatives are not easily arrived at. I think intersectionality, if considered as a dialogue between, could be a real space for forging something new. I try to push that in my work as an activist. In my writing, to be honest, I hold myself much more tightly—I think the real work I do is simply to try to tell the truth of my consciousness in as openhearted, vulnerable and ruthless way I can.

A successful poet in your own right, can you tell us more about your writing process?

Zadie Smith, who—as well as being a wonderful novelist—writes for me are what are perhaps some of the best personal and critical essays of our times, said something about writing or being a writer that I loved. “Tell the truth through whichever veil comes to hand — but tell it. Resign yourself to the lifelong sadness that comes from never being satisfied.” That was from a list she made—a great list—of advice to writers. 

I think that is pretty much my writing process. I try to tell the truth. I resign myself to being disappointed, because of course to convey the truth you can’t simply tell it, you have to eke it out of yourself through all kinds of indirection and necessary discretion, tempered, I think, by a willingness to be ruthless, and mostly with yourself, which involves a lot of failure—moments when you don’t get it right or just aren’t up to the task. 

I still find the production of a poem mysterious. I draft quickly and write a lot of drafts very quickly, but I revise very slowly. I have friends who are the other way around, but whichever way you choose, I think you have to work hard in the end. I also read a lot because nothing inspires me to want to write more than someone else’s beautiful poem. Yet that only helps to some degree,  because to be good—though you never entirely know if you are good—you have to be willing to listen and nurture that small stubborn self that knows something—what? That’s the hard part, pinning down that “what” that no one else knows.

As Split This Rock’s 10th Annual Poetry Contest Judge, tell us what you look for in a poem.

What I look for in a poem?  I have no idea until I find it. I like to be surprised. I like writers who weigh words in their own unique way. I think the work of a poet happens in much the same way as pearls are said to be made—something irritates or upsets you, or you just don’t understand it, and you spend a long time playing words, language until you find a way to get at that thing, maybe in part by suppressing it or not directly stating it, or only expressing it, in a way that also transforms it into an experience that contains something ineffable, a sense of the mystery of being. I like works that reframe ideas or experiences for me in ways that make me reconsider or renter that experience. I like poets who are vulnerable and also in complete authority. I like to hear a voice, a particular voice in a poem. Maybe that’s what I like most of all, the sense of a voice speaking as if through me in a way I have never heard something spoken before.

Outside of the world of poetry, what brings you joy?

I think writing a good poem—rare as a butterfly on your hand—well, that is still one of my great joys. My others—in no particular order:

• I like to go sit in a dark bar with a good friend and one delicious cocktail
• I like to cook. I read once that Hanif Kureishi (the author of “My Beautiful Laundrette”) complained in his divorce from his second or third wife that she read cookbooks in bed, and I thought, “But that’s me, I read cookbooks in bed!” Reading cookbooks in bed makes me happy.
• I like to go to movies alone in the middle of the afternoon.
• I like to read.
• I like to hang out in the kitchen with my children.
• I like to go to museums and look at one painting for half an hour and then leave.
• I like to travel almost anywhere.  I think most, if not all, of the happiest times of my life have been when I was on the road or in a motel or hotel room or a borrowed house in a city I didn’t know.

All these things do give me joy—even if it is sometimes a slightly melancholic joy. 

What would you like to be known for and how would you like to be described?

I am fifty-five, and I am feeling that pressure of age—a pressure to know who I am and what I’m about, which I don’t entirely, except, maybe I would like to be more fun as I go on. I’d love to be described one day as  a wild and reckless old woman, who people visit just because she is good fun—someone capable of joy. That and a good friend, a decent mother, an activist, a poet who tries,

All things considered that is probably more than enough.