Interview: Jim Ray Daniels

Jim Raymond Daniels was born in Detroit, Michigan, in 1956. Since 1981, Daniels has been on the faculty of the creative writing program at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, where he is the Thomas Stockham Baker University Professor of English. His literary works have been recognized and highlighted at Michigan State University in their Michigan Writers Series, and he has won the inaugural Brittingham Prize in Poetry in 1985 from the University of Wisconsin–Madison. He was educated at Alma College and Bowling Green State University. Daniels also collaborates with director John Rice to create films of merged media. He is the author, editor, co-editor, or scriptwriter for forty-four books and films.

The following interview took place with Jim Ray Daniels on November 18, 2017, at the Miami Book Fair. Since that time, he has published an additional collection of poetry, The Middle Ages (Red Mountain Press, 2018) and a collection of stories, The Perp Walk (Michigan State University Press, 2019), as well as co-editing Respect: The Poetry of Detroit Music (Michigan State University Press, 2019). While this interview focuses on Rowing Inland, we hope it will illuminate Daniels’s prolific output and poetic sensibility more generally.

Judith Roney for The Florida Review:

Before we talk about your collection Rowing Inland I want to get you to speak a moment on imagery. I watched the trailer for one of your films, The End Of Blessings, based on your poem of the same name.

The camera follows an African American cyclist on his weekly Sunday ride, when he regularly passes an older Italian couple sitting on their porch after church. There’s no dialogue. You concentrate on imagery, sounds, and the breathing, and you’re taking the art of poetry and putting it into film. This may sound naïve, but I was blasted by the film. I mean, we don’t expect to see these kinds of crossovers of art forms.

Jim Ray Daniels:

We know when we make these short films that we can’t expect to make any money off them. There’s been other films made of poems, and typically you’ll see the text on the screen, or the voice-over, and we were like, yeah, we’re not going do to either of those things. We want to make a work of art and do something interesting and different with the medium of film, and so we focus in on sound and imagery, which are also huge parts of poetry writing. In that way, we hope we can get across the essence of the poem.

TFR:

I love that, because when you’re introducing someone to poetry, they can feel quite intimidated They may be too concerned they might not understand poetry. In my intro to poetry classes, I show students pictures of cave paintings to stress the importance of imagery and the ancient tie we have to images. When I watched the video this morning I thought, wow, I want to use it in the classroom.

Daniels:

I’ll give you the link to the full film.

TFR:

Thank you! A film like this will help the student move away from words and worrying about the words’ meanings, to a place where they see the images and hear the rhythms, and we don’t mean perfect end-rhymes. It might spark them to pay attention to sound as they move about their world. So, tell, me, where did this idea came from? I read that you are an avid cyclist—

Daniels:

That’s correct.

TFR:

What sparked you to do this? To move from the poem to the film?

Daniels:

As a writer I try and find what’s going on beneath the surface—and in Rowing Inland, I think you see a lot of it, too, where on the surface it doesn’t seem as if you see a lot of things, or like nothing interesting is happening. So, a guy riding up a hill on his bicycle—on the surface you don’t think there’s anything going on, but there really is a lot layered in there. And, I try to write a lot about my own experiences and enthusiasms. The director—he’s my partner in these films, his name is John Rice, he’s great, he’s also a big cyclist, and he said, “Have you ever written anything about cycling? Maybe we should make a movie about cycling.” And I said, “I got this poem, ‘The End of Blessings,’” and he said, “We can do this!” It’s a short film, and it and the poem each are in three parts: You rise up the hill, the old couple’s there, you rise up the hill, the old couple is not there, he rides up the hill, and the woman is there by herself.

I gave away the ending (laughs).

TFR:

I think it’s a wonderful medium to get people to see poetry as they walk down their street, go to the local store, to see images and hear rhythm all around. Anything to get people to appreciate poetry, but I don’t have to tell you that.

Daniels:

(Laughing) No, no.

TFR:

Rowing Inland is packed with imagery, imagery of Detroit in particular, and memories of adolescence, and parents and the grandfather, the yard, and mowing grass, there’s just so much here. When you’re writing, are you back there in your mind, where you are this past self again?

Daniels:

I get transported back to those places. And it’s really exciting as a writer—as a writer yourself I’m sure you’ve experienced this, too—where suddenly the process of writing does take you back. One of things poetry does is preserves moments in time, like photographs, an emotional kind of photograph, and I like to keep track of things and go back and move forward and revisit things I’ve written about before and see them differently through the lens of the present. I guess I’ve always written a lot about Detroit, and first there was some concern I was repeating myself, but—I feel like I always bring this up, it’s my mantra—novelist Richard Price said that where you’re from is “like the zip code for your heart.” I just remind myself that no matter where I go that’s in me, that place is in me and those people are in me, and they help shape who I am today. There’s the mother lode of experiences when you’re growing up and adolescence too, though not the whole book is about that.

The other thing for me, with that book, is people say, where are you from?, and I say, well I’m, from Detroit, because it’s easy to say, and, yeah, I was born in Detroit. But we moved to Warren, Michigan, right outside Detroit when I was a young boy. And so here, in this book, I deal more with Warren, which is the city bordering Detroit, where I went to high school. People from Detroit know that Warren and Detroit are two very different places. And, it has to do with coming back to James Baldwin in a way, with race. In Jeffrey Eugenides’ book Middlesex, he has some scenes of the riots in Detroit in 1967 and he once said, “Detroit is always about race.” And I wanted to make that distinction, so the long section in the center is a series of poems that are connected called “Welcome to Warren.” I wanted to capture this place people would just drive through, because it’s so anonymous-seeming. It’s basically houses surrounded by car factories. I wanted to try to bring that place to life—even if all the houses on the street look the same, the people are all different.

TFR:

Often there’s a way you might enter a certain collection, maybe from an emotional place or a geographical place, some kind of familiarity, some commonalities, and there was so much for me to discover in this book that was familiar to me. I’m from Chicago. Chicago, Detroit—you and I grew up within a few years of each other, in the land and culture of the steel mill towns, so when I read this, I kept going “yes” and I’ve already marked, noted, and highlighted the heck out of it,

As I read, I was conscious of how you were returning “home” as poet, and I thought about how I return to Chicago in my writing, though I haven’t lived there in decades. It’s my haunt, my muse. So I’m reading about the Detroit area, I’ve been to Detroit several times, I have relatives close by, and I kept feeling how much this is a familiar place, yet it is so much more than just one place.

Daniels:

It’s funny you mention Chicago, because Chicago writer Stuart Dybeck was a huge influence on me as a writer. So Chicago was his town, and he really brought it to life in his poems and stories, he writes both, and was a influence on me as a young writer.

That’s the key to writing about place so that others beyond that place can appreciate it, and that’s where the imagery comes in. Even though somebody may not be interested in going in an auto factory, you’re going to pull them in and say, Hey! look around, There’s poetry here.

TFR:

There is, and you’ve sparked me, inspired me with images of empty factories, the steel factories, which might sound strange. Also, there were so many poems in your collection that talked about the basement, and most of us who grew up “up north” had basements—down here in Florida, we don’t have basements, but there are so many poems in Rowing Inland that refer to the basement—

Daniels:

I never thought about that! But, yeah, (laughing) the basement’s big!

TFR:

In my life, the basement was a place, is a place, that holds a lot of memories. I was so touched by these particular poems, and I think that you as poet sometimes don’t know how your work, your words, might reach a reader until the book’s been out a while and you start to hear from readers.

In writing about the basement, you also wrote “upstairs she kept the order”—speaking about your mother— and then, “Downstairs, he drove another nail in.” You bring us into this neighborhood, this home, so that much of Rowing Inland is clearly set not in the heart of the city, but in a suburb, that commonality of so many Americans. At least, that’s where the first section is; the book is organized into four sections—

You have a line in here, where you’re an adolescent where you don’t quite understand what’s going on in the adult world, and in the “eight mile,” where you have physical landscape a little removed from the city—and as a poet, you make the connections and, then it reaches me, who grew up in a different city. Do the connections surprise you? Or do you feel they’ve always been there and just sort of bubble up a little bit?

Daniels:

I like when the connections surprise me. Your subconscious mind keeps going back to things without your realizing it.

And it’s true that adolescence is a time, especially in the suburbs, where we often didn’t fully understand what was going on. Eight Mile Road is the border between Detroit and Warren where the rapper Eminem is from. He did a film called 8 Mile, because he’s from that area, and there’s this whole border mentality, and that’s why he called the movie 8 Mile, and it’s like ten lanes wide and in the Detroit area. This kind of border mentality has kind of a symbolic resonance. It was interesting growing up there as a kid—you didn’t quite understand what was going on, such as with the riots in 1967.

TFR:

I want to ask about a poem that haunted me, the one about the young woman who died, in the fire?

Daniels:

Marlene, in “Calling out Marlene Miller.”

TFR:

You were in Warren then.

Daniels:

Yes. She haunts me. Basically, your first death growing up—one that’s not like a grandparent. It is huge. Your first love is huge, but especially when your first love is also your first death.

TFR:

And having to put those two together—they don’t leave you. You’ve written about her before.

Daniels:

It keeps on, I wouldn’t be surprised if I write more about her at various points.

TFR:

Some of us have one muse, some several, but we keep returning to them. I tell students to return to them. They’re bittersweet, those sorrows. Marlene Miller comes back again, in this book.

Daniels:

I think there’s three poems in here about her.

TFR:

I was surprised that she continues, yet there was a sense of satisfaction that she does. I start to feel like I know Marlene or I knew Marlene. There were Marlene’s in my life, and I believe many of us have such figures who haunt us.

Would you read a poem for me? “Weeding Out the Week”? Loved it. Took me back to the little brick row houses just south of Chicago, of Riverdale, where I grew up. The weeds, the brick, the rough brick.

Daniels:

Yes, sure, and it’s about trying to find your hiding places (laughs).

TFR:

Yes! Can young people even have hiding places anymore?

Daniels:

That’s a good question. I don’t have the answer, but in our current culture I think it’s harder. Behind the garage, between houses, little places where things were peaceful, and you could sort them out on your own. without the whole world watching

TFR:

To turn to your personal voice, there’s a poem where you were coming into a sort of self-realization. You say, “I only faintly began to realize life is mostly a series of rhetorical questions.” We all go through these self-discoveries, don’t we?

Daniels:

Yes, yes. These are things that happen: self-discoveries are necessary.

Share

Interview: Charles Simic

A Serbian-American poet and former co-poetry editor of the Paris Review, Charles Simic was born in Belgrade, Yugoslavia, and immigrated to the United States in 1954 and started publishing poems by the age of twenty-one, around 1959. He earned his bachelor’s degree from New York University in 1967, and within the year published his first full-length collection, What the Grass Says. He has since published more than sixty books in the United States and abroad along with numerous translations of French, Serbian, Croatian, Macedonian, and Slovenian poetry. He is the author of several books of essays and has edited several anthologies. He has won numerous awards, among them a MacArthur Fellowship and the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry in 1990 for The World Doesn’t End. He was poet laureate of the US from 2007 to 2008.

Simic has taught American literature and creative writing at the University of New Hampshire since 1973 and is now professor emeritus there. The following conversation took place at the Miami Book Fair shortly after the publication of Scribbled in the Dark (Ecco, 2017).

Judith Roney for The Florida Review:

When your family first moved to the US, they settled in Chicago? I felt a connection to that because was born and raised in Hyde Park, Chicago.

Charles Simic:

Actually, it was New York, then Chicago, in Oak Park. We moved because my father’s job had moved to Chicago. I finished high school in Oak Park, then my parents broke up. I left home and was on my own, and got a job in the city on the Near North Side. Then I picked up and went to New York City.

After that, I came back to Chicago, but the family had fallen apart, and there was no money, so first I worked during the day at the Chicago Sun-Times. Not a fancy job, just a lowly job. I started going to school at night, at the University of Chicago. It took a couple of years because there weren’t too many courses at night, but it was an interesting time. I lived on the Near North Side because that’s where the Chicago Sun-Times was, by the Chicago River, so I’d go off to work, finish, then have to catch the . . .

TFR:

The L?

Simic:

Yes! The L train! You know, you’d go down south, to Hyde Park where the university was, and it was a different world there, in Hyde Park. And I was just saying to someone last night how Anglophiled it was at University of Chicago—all the professors wore tweeds and affected a British accent—even though they were born in Wisconsin or wherever.

TFR:

So, they put on fake accents?

Simic:

Yes, yes. And they would say to you, “Charles, if you like poetry, you must read Andrew Marvell.” And I’d say, “Sure, sure.”

(laughter)

TFR:

I’ve lived in Florida for nearly two decades now, but when I started in on the poems of section two in Scribbled in the Dark, the images grabbed me and took me back to my childhood. There’s “Bare Trees,” “January,” “In the Snow,” and “The Night and the Cold,” so many northern images that I felt I was back in wintertime Chicago. It was “Bare Trees” that reminded me of my lost period after high school when I wanted to attend the University but didn’t understand the process. I would go walk the grounds, wander the Oriental Institute, and just hope someone would ask, “Hi, want to take a class?” If I may, can I read you the lines that I felt the speaker was addressing me quite personally?

Simic:

Sure!

TFR:

“The bare branches moving in it, / Are like the fingers of the blind / Reaching to touch the face of someone / Who’s been calling out to them / In the voice of geese flying over, / The shots of a hunting rifle, / And a dog barking outside a trailer / For someone to hurry and let him in.”

Thank you for those words, I mean, yeah, that’s what it was like for me at nineteen.

On a larger subject, I’d like your opinion about the so-called state of poetry in the United States today.

Simic:

In the US there is more poetry being written than in the rest of the world put together. It’s an amazing, amazing thing. There isn’t a huge audience for poetry, but the number of poets now writing compared to when I started out in the fifties and mid-fifties has grown huge. I mean, in the city of Chicago, we knew the aspiring poets and contemporary poets. We knew about Robert Lowell, Elizabeth Bishop, and all the others. I would say there were fifteen to twenty at a given time. It was like a cult!

Everybody was interested in literature, mostly fiction, of course, and not just American but European modern fiction as well. But poetry, well it was really an activity that was marginal, especially in Chicago—always like it had a chip on its shoulder culturally.

(laughter)

TFR:

That’s a colorful way to put it. I’m thinking of [Carl] Sandburg’s description in his poem “Chicago”—“the City of Big Shoulders.”

Simic:

It was such a small poetry community for a while, but then the Beats were the ones who made a big difference. It started with giving free poetry readings with [Allen] Ginsberg and everybody else. They were very, very popular. Then they were at colleges and universities giving readings, and a whole generation discovered this was a lot of fun! Both students and adults showed up to readings, so they started this thing in the sixties, and all of a sudden it caught on. I know my generation of poets profited from this—we were getting invitations from all across the country to come read. This was followed by the beginning of writing programs.

TFR:

Aaah, and now we have the “explosion” of writing programs.

Simic:

Yes, yes. They keep turning out poets. So you see, it’s really impossible to get a clear picture of what’s going on. There was a time until about ten to fifteen years ago, when someone like me who was real passionate about poetry, and others who were passionate, could get a clear idea who the poets of the generation were, even by region, East Coast, West Coast, etc. But now, with the proliferation of poetry on the Internet—I mean, you used to go to bookstores to find out about new poems and poets! There were so many everywhere, each town had a bookstore, and you went to the poetry section, and you could see who was doing what. Sure books are still coming out, but not so easily displayed. They aren’t as “seen.” So now, as I say, it’s beyond anyone’s ability to answer confidently where poetry is going.

TFR:

Tell me your thoughts on something I heard on NPR. It was a comment on poetry, and how in Europe three to four hundred will gather for a reading, but in the US only a few dozen.

Simic:

No, that’s not true.

TFR:

I’m glad to hear it!

Simic:

Years ago, in Russia, when poetry was read, there used to be a lot of people, in Paris maybe a few more, in Germany a little better, and in Spain even more, but here in the United States, there are readings even in remote areas at state universities, in the Dakotas, in Oklahoma, and Kansas. Perhaps because there’s not as much to do, as many activities all the time, they’ll have a poetry series each year which they alternate with fiction, and anyone with respect for literature will come and listen. Hundreds show up! Now, in New York City there’s too many other things going on, so only a few dozen may attend. And now, more recently, it’s just impossible to tell. There’s live reading groups online, and YouTube readings. It’s just impossible to grasp.

TFR:

I wonder, in hindsight, what will we see? I mean, as far as schools of poetry, movements of poetry, eras of poetry. We had the Symbolists, the Modernists, the Black Mountain Poets, and as you mentioned the Beats. What will this era be called, if anything? The Onliners? The Techs? My students go to poetry slams, and most participate, too. That’s kept poetry vibrant for them. I just wonder what this era will be—there’s a lot of political and social justice work out there bringing awareness to the art. Poetry still has a job to do.

Simic:

Yes, yes.

TFR:

Let’s get back to Scribbled in the Dark. When I read the title poem, I knew I wanted to ask you about it.

Simic:

This is a kind of big city experience in this poem. Up until a few years ago, I used to teach at both the University of New Hampshire and NYU, which gave me an apartment. One summer night, late, the Village is full of people, it’s 3:00 a.m., and I hear shrieks in the street, and I wonder, is it joy or fear? Is someone arguing? It could be anything! So I’m in bed, and I get up and look down at the street because it’s dark, and I’m up then—you see, I’m an insomniac, so was my father, it runs in my family, but it’s no big deal, and so if I lie there in the dark I get rest to a degree but no sleep. But, if I turn on the lights it feels like a struggle. And if I have an idea that comes to me, I don’t want to turn on the lights, but I can’t help myself, I have to write the idea down, so there I am, scribbling in the dark, but (laughs), often it’s quite hard to read what I wrote in the morning. But it works—I’ve been doing this for years, because, you know, you’ll forget in the morning.

TFR:

I love that.

Your poem “The White Cat,” where you say “the one who disappeared,” is profound to read.

Simic:

That’s actually kind of a true story.

I’ve lived in a little village in New Hampshire for forty-five years, and I know all my neighbors, a long time, and you get to know each other, and get to chatting, and someday someone says, “I wondered what happened to so-and-so,” and that’s how it starts.

TFR:

It resonates. I like your line, too, “my childhood, a silent movie.” What a metaphor.

Simic:

This was in my childhood in Belgrade. They were still showing silent films. My grandmother and mom would take me, and I’d fall asleep. My mother would nudge me and wake me up during a scene and say, “Look, look, a horsey!” And I’d say “Horsey!” The city was occupied then, and we had a curfew. We had to be home by 10:00 p.m. or we could end up in a camp.

TFR:

Wow. That’s experience, and your experience is, of course, unique, but it’s the commonalities that fascinate me, that span generations, that are ageless. I was raised by my grandmother, who was born in 1892, and she played the piano at the local theater playing silent movies when she was a young girl. We’re still those children, aren’t we? We remember so much.

Simic:

If you want to have a perfect memory of childhood, I don’t know, I had bombs falling all around and worried they’d fall on my head. It wasn’t perfect.

TFR:

I know. As instructors we joke “no one wants to read a happy story.” Some dark material makes the best poetry. I want you to know that I mention two quotes of yours at the beginning of all my poetry course sections.

Simic:

Yes?

TFR:

The two that I always refer to are “Don’t tell the readers what they already know about life” and “Don’t assume you’re the only one in the world who suffers.” I hear these two when working on my own writing, every time, and students struggle so with these concepts.

Simic:

You must out-write yourself. You have to find the way to make it interesting for the reader. You can’t say it in the same old way. You must work to captivate the reader.

Share

Interview: Danez Smith

Danez Smith was born St. Paul, Minnesota. They are the author of two poetry collections, Don’t Call Us Dead (Graywolf, 2017) and [insert] boy (YesYes, 2014), winner of the Lambda Literary Award and the Kate Tufts Discovery Award, and are working on their third. Smith is also the author of the chapbooks Black Movie (Button Poetry, 2017) and hands on ya knees (Penmanship Books, 2013). It was while a student at the University of Wisconsin-Madison that Smith first discovered poetry through the arts program First Wave. Smith earned a BA from the University of Wisconsin-Madison, where they were a First Wave Urban Arts Scholar. They are a co-host of the Poetry Foundation’s podcast, VS. The following interview with Smith took place at the Miami Book Fair in November 2017. Please also see Janine Harrison’s Aquifer review of Don’t Call Us Dead.

Judith Roney for The Florida Review:

I dove into Don’t Call Us Dead with mega-enthusiasm because when I was handed the list of poets I’d be interviewing here at the Miami Book Fair because I have taught your poem “alternate names for black boys” in the protest-poetry section of my intro to poetry class. It’s a great poem to teach for so many reasons. It relies on this list of names, in the body of the poem, which are not names at all, but images, which is the point. It shows students how this poet, you, totally trusts the images to do the work, and I struggle to teach our young poets this form of trust.

Smith:

It’s hard, it’s hard. You know, I was teaching a workshop the other day, and everybody was so caught up in talking content and asking, What do you think of this poem? And talking about it as if it’s a story that somebody just told, and I’m like, No, where are the images, what makes you actually like the poem? I’d been writing a lot of poems about black boys, about police violence, about the many violences America throws at the black body, and I think I got to a point where I could no longer tell the story, I just had to curate the images, to let everybody else tell it to themselves.

TFR:

I like that term, “curate.” I’ll continue to teach the poem, and it makes it so much more exciting to teach it after meeting the poet and to talk about your concept of “curating the images.” About 50 percent of my students are writing about police violence. Many of my students are in that age range of about twenty-five or younger. I’m not going to ask your age—

Smith:

Twenty-eight.

TFR:

How people view the police has changed, and so the culture changes. We all know poetry should try to disrupt, and make changes, and nudge people from their comfort zones, and obviously you’re doing that, clearly, in terms of your writing as well as your performances of slam poetry and your recordings. What do you see as hoping it’s going to accomplish, and will in the future—the poetry—and continue to do so, and with media?

Smith:

I think poetry’s goal has long been to distill something in the human (uniquely human), and the human is often beautiful, but it can be ugly and political as well. Our humanity is an ugly and gorgeous thing. I just hope that people read and that we have a diverse readership. It’s just not about inspiring a next generation of poets, but also making creative poems that inspire the next generation of policy makers, that inspire the teachers, the lawmakers, the educators, the shakers, and the movers, and everybody that makes up our society. To make poems that push the world by pushing the readers, and by offering them something, that some bit of language that can better seed the word in their world, or with words that better describe it. I hope to put into language what I know I feel, and maybe to help other people find some way of being, of seeing, of moving forward.

TFR:

And that language is like magic.

Smith:

Language is magic, yeah. But this language is not high; I think I’m trying better to bridge those two worlds. I want my poems to sound more like me.

But there are many me’s. I think poets always randomly say some high-lyrical jargon off the cuff [laughter] because we’re not even trying [to connect], but poetry for me is most interesting when it encompasses all the language that our world holds.

TFR:

The form of your poem “litany with blood all over” fascinates me. This to me is so powerful: “my blood, his blood, my blood, his blood, over and over” because it works as such a visual object as well. When you say that you’re not just reaching out to young poets, or young students, but across ages that’s great but difficult. I’m fifty-six and grew up in Chicago, but I have a totally different mindset than a lot of other people from where I live now. If I showed my neighbor, for example, a poem, it would mean nothing to him. I struggle to reach those people. Tell me what went through your mind, when working on this, it seems so full of emotion.

Smith:

I think there’s a certain point where a poem decides it wants to break out of some type of a traditional way of being on the page—I became aware of this studying poets like Duriel E. Harris, like Evie Shockley, like Douglas Kearney—and with this poem I reached a point where I had said everything I could say, and what actually needed to come out was something more visual and less legible, but full of emotion.

TFR:

There’s also a powerful rhythm to read this—“my blood, his blood” from the poem we spoke of earlier, “litany with blood all over”—repeatedly, over and over with its powerful visual overlapping like a spell—I don’t know what else to call it. I suppose you could find a powerful way in a straight-form line, but to me this is so powerful that you did it like this.

Smith:

It had to be like that—

TFR:

It had to be it like that?

Smith:

Yes—the poem wants to start breaking out of the traditional strategy for lineation. Even other poems are kind of wonky, where, you know, poets get rather tab-happy, with the tab button on their computer and sort of start pushing lines to the other side of the page for no reason [laughter]. That’s the kind of stuff I start playing with—

TFR:

Tab-happy?!

Smith:

I don’t know what that’s called, so I just call it “tab-happy.”

I’m just like, okay, you wrote a poem and you decided want it to be all over the place, and that’s fine. I love those poems, I write those poems all the time.

Tab-happy sounds so fun—but I think even when the poem is hard—“litany with blood all over” is a very serious and sad poem—but still there has to be an element of play within the writing process, I believe, even when you’re writing about possibly traumatic, or serious, sad, melancholy, depressive, what-have-you topics.

In that moment of trying to figure out how to make this my blood, his blood, this overlapping of language and blood, I think I found a way to lift above language and it actually just becomes the blood on the page. Here’s a moment of play. I remember becoming very excited trying to figure out how I was going to do this. I started writing “my blood my blood his blood his blood” and thinking I wanted this to crash together—How do I merge these things? That part just becomes fun, you start getting into Microsoft Word or InDesign and just have fun.

TFR:

When did you know you were going to be a poet, when did you feel you were a poet, and when did you feel—besides just expressing yourself ordinarily as a young man and a person—when did you say, This is what I want to do? What did you first read that made you excited? Or hear? Music?

Smith:

I wasn’t reading. I definitely came into poetry as an auditory tradition, oratory tradition, oral tradition. I came into poetry first, at least was first excited by it, through the oral tradition. A lot of my teachers were teaching Frost and Dickinson, and blah blah blah—well, not blah blah blah, but at the time it felt like blah blah blah—and Langston Hughes was only taught if it was February. It was spoken word, it was sort of the like Def poetry movement that happened in the early 2000s that caught me up.

TFR:

Got you—

Smith:

Yes, because at first I didn’t know poets were alive.

[laughter]

All the poets they showed us in school were dead! And so I thought poetry died with the poets—I didn’t know there were still living, breathing, poets. I’m glad to see there’s been a greater shift in the last ten-fifteen years to push living poets into the classroom, and the high school and college classrooms, and thank God for it, because for so long, I don’t know what people were thinking in the ’90s and early 2000s. It felt like nobody was actually interested in bringing in anything actually contemporary to students, and what I needed was a voice a little bit closer in, well not in age, but in “moment” to me. I heard that other poets were talking about things I cared about, not just things that happened in the past, but things that still are relevant, that still have echoes, that still have resonance today, where they were talking about today. That felt important. So, you know, I first found a little poetry then. I was always going to write poetry—I didn’t know it was a career option—and in college I was part of a hip hop and spoken word arts program called First Wave at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.

I was curious—we’d have these poets come through and teach us workshops and perform, and I didn’t know how they did this. How do you pay rent and call yourself a poet? Do you have a day job? Some had a day job, some did not, and I think for me it was never a question of whether I was going to write poetry but was more a question of income, which is a very real thing for artists.

I’ve been a poet since I started being a poet at fourteen, but at a certain point I was making enough to be a poet full time.

TFR:

In one interview in 2015, you mentioned that were obsessed with intersectionality. I like hearing about what other poets’ muses are, their haunts, their obsessions. Is this still an obsession?

Smith:

Okay, I don’t know if I’d say I’m obsessed with intersectionality, I think intersectionality is in everything, intersectionality being a foundational black feminist thought that you are never just the one thing—

With my first book, I was definitely obsessed with that. What happened with [insert] boy, part of my life process with trying to build that book was trying to parse out my identity to have a section that was supposedly about blackness, to have a section about queerness, or my life as a sex worker, about my family. The fun part about that was that even as I was trying to suss these topics out, they were still bleeding into each other, still speaking to each other. I couldn’t talk about just being black. I had to talk about also being queer within that, and all these other identities I hold—

They’re all layered over each other. I think then I was kind of obsessed with the concept of intersectionality, but not so much anymore. I think now in my work intersectionality is now just a fact. I think it was something I was playing around with in my first book, and now it’s our lives, we are, all of us, we each are our many selves.

TFR:

As an identification, as a persona, when you’re writing, does it keep changing from poem to poem? You’ve moved on, so what questions do you find yourself asking questions in the newer poems?

Smith:

I think every poem is a pursuit, is a failed pursuit of an answer, but just a poem getting a little bit closer to it. I wrote [insert] boy, and I spent time with those questions, and I wrote Don’t Call Us Dead, and spent time with those questions, and now I’m writing new things and working toward my third book, and so I have questions there that I’m trying to pursue too.

TFR:

It’s great to have a book like Don’t Call Us Dead for my advanced poetry class, for studying form—students need to see these new forms, they need to have their eyes opened. I make it a point to use few, maybe one or two dead poets.

Smith:

Well, now I love Frost and Dickinson, all those folks. I love William Blake, [laughter] and Keats, and stuff like that—

TFR:

Crazy guys!

Smith:

Right, crazy guys! I find something of value in that—but it took falling in love with contemporary poetry for me to be able to reach back, and where we understand something historical of note.

TFR:

Okay, then I want to ask a last question, did it take something to unlock the door, and there you went, and you kind of exploded from there?

Smith:

I didn’t love poetry for a while, and then a professor of mine in college asked me, “Are your poems only going to be good when you’re around to read them [aloud]?” And then that’s what really changed my life and sent me to the page. Then I discovered another whole other realm of possibility of how to be a poet, and I was already in love with the concept of poetry, and it was nice to discover it also be lived in a vibrant way on the page, too, because I think that’s the thing—when I found spoken word I did not also find the contemporary written word. That came later. I knew folks were speaking poetry into the world, but I didn’t know folks were still publishing books!

TFR:

Often people who like spoken word or slam poetry don’t think about looking at it—on the page or in a book. They think this is too quiet, or “I’m not going to get it.”

Smith:

No, no, books are loud, books are loud, books are forceful.

Share

Interview: Sandra Simonds

Sandra Simonds is a prolific poet, critic, mother, and professor. She is the author of five poetry collections: Orlando (Wave Books, forthcoming), Further Problems with Pleasure (University of Akron, 2016, and winner of the 2015 Akron Poetry Prize), Steal It Back (Saturnalia Books, 2015), The Sonnets (Bloof Books, 2014), Mother Was a Tragic Girl (Cleveland State University Poetry Center, 2012), and Warsaw Bikini (Bloof Books, 2009). She is also author of a free electronic PDF collection, Untitled Collage Poems (Bloof Books, 2016). A sixth print volume, Orlando (Wave Books), is forthcoming in 2018, and Simonds is working on another collection, Atopia. Please see five poems from Atopia and a review of Further Problems with Pleasure elsewhere in Aquifer.

Reading Simonds’ work is not unlike plugging into high-voltage poetica, fused with the hard metal of keen intellect, unmistakable humor, the reality of ourselves as sexual beings, and charged with political and social thematic waves. Nothing is at rest in these poems; they shout and taunt, but mostly they invite an engagement to language throbbing with 21st-century life.

Judith Roney for The Florida Review:
I’m thinking I was first introduced to your poetry when I received my May/June [2017] issue of The American Poetry Review, and was intrigued by your poem, “Dear Chris,” which is the first of three poems featured in the issue. It’s a hardworking poem, “long,” and of an eclectic construction that gives it restless energy.

Contemporary epic, or “long” poems, are my latest poetry-drug, so when I read an excerpt from Orlando in The Brooklyn Rail’s e-journal, I was smitten with its forty-eight flowing tercets, where the speaker seems to address the city of Orlando, but soon we’re accompanying the speaker in a kind of kinetic stream-of-consciousness journey, passing through the land of the body as if were a fantasy theme park like Disney World, which is referred to several times in the poem.

The form works fabulously against the energy, creating marvelous tension. Thoughts echo in my reader’s mind of Virginia Woolf’s Orlando, yet I sense you, the poet, clearly enter at multiple points. For example, we see the speaker at their desk, trying to compose on a laptop, but they are interrupted, first by the action of another, then technology fails, and the work is lost. A hard-copy diary is remembered: “. . . and that is precisely the moment you fell out of love with me, / abandoning me to the very diaries and bookshelves of my consciousness, both as a teenage/girl and now as a middle aged woman, so I tried to figure out what I could have done back then, / what confession, what moment of weakness, what apology had driven you out of my life, / so abruptly . . .”

You have a collection soon to be published (2018) from Wave Books called Orlando. I’m excited about this as both a poet, and as a university instructor in Orlando; is the entire collection an epic poem, or is Orlando a long poem contained therein? Where did this spring forth from?

Sandra Simonds:
First, thank you for this question because I’m really excited to talk about Orlando, which I think of as an epic feminist poem that reads like fiction or memoir. In terms of structure, Orlando is composed of two sections. The first section is forty pages and each page is four very long-lined tercets; the second part of the epic is written in a kind of spiraling open form. The second part of the book, in fact, was initially forty or so discreet poems with titles that I, upon revision, transformed into one long second section called “Demon Spring.”

I chose the long poem form because I wanted to work in the tradition of the epic which is historically so heavily inflected with masculine energy. The “epic” has been coded “male” and I was interested in the challenges of writing an epic poem given the gender history. Who is allowed to write our history? Of course, I’m not the first woman to do this. Several feminist long poems that influenced me in this project come to mind including Alice Notely’s The Descent of Alette, Annie Allen by Gwendolyn Brooks, Lyn Hejinian’s My Life, Rachel Blau DuPlessis’s Drafts, and Loba by Diane di Prima.

You are right to note that “Orlando” in the poem is an unstable character—sometimes Orlando is a city, other times, Orlando is a lover, and other times Orlando is an idea or set of ideas. When I wrote the book, this instability wasn’t intentional but it turned out to be an effective way that I could talk about both love and relationships using this figure as well as broader cultural concerns, like materialism, entertainment, the surface and what lies beneath the surface and so on. So the instability of the figure creates a kind of creative and philosophical opening that worked for me and relates to the traditional concerns of epic poetry—telling a historical, social and political story about our times but through a distinctly feminist voice.

TFR:
As a poet, and poetry reader for The Florida Review, I find it increasingly rare that a poem both challenges and dazzles me. I find the poems of Further Problems with Pleasure just brilliant. How did you become involved with the subject or theme of your book?

Simonds:
I wanted to explore a number of themes at the same time: sexuality, sexual violence, sexual liberation, gender shame, the body, perversity, fantasy and how these things are constructed and defined in late-capitalist society. What are the norms? What is taboo? Lacan says, “Do not give up on your desire,” and I think that’s a sort of jumping off point of this book. Okay, well what does that mean for a single working mother living in the Deep South at this particular point in history? What part of our desire is “ours” and what part of it is manufactured?

TFR:
In this collection, is there one poem that worked as the spark for the rest of the pieces? If not, which poem do you feel best anchors the collection for you?

Simonds:
I think the “Further Problems with Pleasure” poems that are positioned throughout the book anchor it because these poems bring the book back to the central questions surrounding the nature of desire and, when the book veers away a little bit from these questions, they are brought back to the forefront of the reader’s mind. I also have a lot of affection for the last poem in the book, “Dear Chris,” which I wrote in response to a poem sent to me by the poet Chris Nealon. I was thinking about all of the leftists who stand up in society against hatred and violence against the oppressed. I wanted to both acknowledge the struggles that we have encountered both personally and more broadly as leftists, what we are up against, what we will be up against, but also to say that what we do every day, our actions matter. That what we did here, right now, matters, to each other and to our children and that even though we all come from different backgrounds, my hope for the future, is that our children will not have to face what we have faced and if they do, that they will be comrades, that they will be on the right side of history fighting for the same things.

TFR:
I’m always curious what literary fields a poet mines; what are you reading now?

Simonds:
I just finished Matthew Rohrer’s The Others, which I thought was great. His storytelling and the way he works with narrative is fascinating. I also just finished Rapture by Sjohnna McCray. I had the pleasure of reading with Sjohnna a few months ago and he gave me the reading copy of his book with all of his notes and directions to himself (Thank you, Sjohnna!). I love the way Rapture tells the complicated story of his relationship to his mother.

TFR:
I think I’d go as far as calling your poetry “combustible” and timely for what’s occurring in the both the political and social arena right now. It’s like the lines are “plugged in” and feel energized, so I must ask, any writing rituals you’d like to share? That is, where do you write best, what time of day, tea, coffee, wine or a bag of chips?

Simonds:
My only trick is to write when you are so desperate that you can’t not write what you need to write—when you read things in the news, write, when you feel a sense of justice, write. That usually puts a bit of urgency into the writing and makes the poems more resonant, so that when you’re drinking a cup of tea, revising those passionate poems, you don’t take out the passion, but you have some passion to work with and frame. I guess that Wordsworth covered this area long before I did, though.

TFR:
As a parent and an academic, a working professor, how do you find or make time to write? Is it easy for you or always a struggle, as in some sort of “compromise”?

Simonds:
It’s always a struggle to find time for me because I’m just a very busy person with two young children, but I think because I’ve been writing since I was a child, it’s like second nature to me. I think I’m probably a person who would write in any circumstances—in a jail or in a castle, in a factory or in an office. I can’t imagine not being a writer and writers write.

TFR:
Who (or what) acts as your muse? Or, perhaps there’s a particular subject you find you keep coming back to again and again?

Simonds:
The dead, the people who have struggled before us for social justice, the unborn, the people who will need our writing when we are dead. My themes usually center around the political—I want to make poems that are both political and creative, that are political but not obvious rants or propaganda, that touch people, that make people think.

TFR:
In your writing process, would you say you write more by logic (doing research, creating notes, etc.) or intuition, or some combination of the two?

Simonds:
I go on intuition and sound always. I have an idea or an impulse and I just follow my gut. Sometimes it’s wrong but more often than not it isn’t. I think that this kind of leap of faith is what you have to really develop and nurture.

TFR:
Anything that people THINK they know about your poetry, that isn’t so?

Simonds:
I don’t spend a lot of time thinking about what people think about my poetry so, honestly, I have no idea.

TFR:
What projects are you working on at the present, and what subjects do you feel are calling you for future projects?

Simonds:
I’m working on an epic political poem called “Atopia.”

Share

Tag: Judith Roney