Hello, there.
My question for you is, how would you
describe your writing process when thinking of a poem?
Because the director said that you can sort of
take from everything around you, whether it's experiences
or even objects [INAUDIBLE].
I don't think that I have a process that
can be broken down into a series of simple steps or--
I mean, it's never simple.
There are writers--
I find this with fiction writers a lot.
They will say, like, first, I get up in the morning,
and I run five miles.
And then, I come back to my study.
And I, then, will write for the next five
hours uninterrupted before winning the National Book
Award.
[LAUGHTER]
I don't have like--
I hate running.
I hate sports.
Pretty much I have to force myself
to even just go to yoga class.
So I don't have that type of like routine.
I write in fits and starts.
I sometimes can write in complete silence.
I guess I prefer that.
But I wrote a lot of the poems of which I
particularly the villanelles while half listening to like
the entirety of Downton Abbey just playing episode
after episode because it was just engaging enough,
but then not.
I could like listen to it a little bit,
and then also write a villanelle.
But that only happened one time.
It feels like every book is really, really different.
Every project feels very different.
It feels like it requires a different writing process.
I always feel like I am doing it wrong
whenever I am writing something which
probably means that I'm producing
things that need to be written.
So there's some weird uncertainty
and like imperilment that I seem to require plus Downton Abbey
in order to write-- it's like a very strange alchemical process
that does draw from all of the things that are around me.
If I'm traveling a lot, then the locations of that travel
will end up in the poems.
If I'm doing like historical research,
genealogical research, then that will appear in the poems.
Conversations that I have with people,
sometimes that will appear in the poems as well.
If not the actual conversation, then something
about the texture of the conversation will appear.
But I can't really choreograph any of those things to happen.
It's just sort of situational with me.
It's a good question, though.
I'm cheating, but it's something that I didn't
get an opportunity to ask you.
Can you talk a little bit about how you
decide the forms of your poems?
[? There ?] that you sometimes do prose or prose
poems and other times you do things
where-- they're in stanzas.
So can you talk a little bit about how
you make that decision [? for ?] the poem?
I always write different kinds of poems.
So in each book, you'll see many forms being used.
There are lots and lots of poets of color
who are writing wonderful work right now, and of course,
have always used traditional anglophone forms,
such as the sonnet.
And I wanted for "Witch Wife" to try
to work with a traditional verse form.
I mean, I have like a pantoum in here, and I have a sestina.
But I wanted to do like a sustained thing
in traditional verse form.
But I didn't want to write sonnets
because there were already so many wonderful ones that
existed that I didn't want my poems to be compared
to all of that.
So I was like, I'll try something else.
And then, I was like, I wonder I wonder
if I could write a villanelle.
I really had not written villanelles
prior to this project.
So there's something really wonderfully dark
about a villanelle.
There's something-- it's like a velvet ribbon,
like the way that the repetition happens
and you sort of see one side of the ribbon.
And then, it repeats against, you
see another side of the ribbon as it goes forward.
That really matched up with the kind of personality
that I wanted to come through in this book.
So I really wanted the spine of "Witch Wife"
to be these villanelles that I wrote.
And the other forms are just what
the poem needs at the time.
Sometimes the poem does need to be in a prose block,
and other times it needs to be in some other occasional form,
or maybe a traditional form.
I do test out different forms for poems
that seem to want to find a resting place that I haven't
already found for it.
So sometimes I'm like, I want to write a villanelle,
and that can happen.
And sometimes, I'm working on a poem and the lineation
and the enjambment of that poem becomes
apparent in revision which I've actually learned now
is part of writing.
The revision process is at a time of discovery
just as much as a drafting process is.
I'll ask a question.
Who are your influences?
Well, thanks to you all, I got to put together
a lucky 13 buzz--
[LAUGHTER]
--that I grabbed off of the shelves over in the library
which-- what direction is that in?
Where's the library?
Over here.
Yeah, so that was amazing, wonderful experience.
And so some of the books that you'll find on there--
I picked La Vita Nuova by Dante.
I picked the collected Phillis Wheatley.
I chose The Grey Album, Kevin Young's book, critical book.
What else did I pick?
Rita Dove's "Mother Love" was gifted to me by my high school
English teacher.
It was really the first book of poetry
that I ever read cover to cover.
So I mean, that was a book that just had to be,
that had to be in that stack.
I'm reading a lot of poems by African American women.
I'm reading Camille Dungy, Tracy K. Smith.
I have Life on Mars in my stack.
But I just taught her new book Wade
in the Water which is an amazing book.
There's so many exciting women poets
that I feel like I've had to--
I feel like I'm sort of scrambling
to get my reading of women poets of all stripes up to speed.
Because when you're at a traditional University,
certainly--
in my generation of poets that came up,
it was mostly male poets that were on the syllabus.
And so you to sort of--
you have Dickinson in there, but Dickinson almost doesn't even
count as a woman really in that way.
The way that she's narrated into the canon,
it's just like Dickinson.
But next to all of these other men--
and then there's no other women on the syllabus.
And no one ever talks about that situation until now.
So I mean, I'm still really discovering
so many wonderful poets whom I should have read earlier.
I should have taken upon myself to read earlier
when I was an undergraduate.
One of the books in the stack is Anne Sexton's All My Pretty
Ones which was a book from the early 1960s which
is an amazing--
just an amazing book.
We read a lot of Plath, but we also
need to read Sexton and particularly that collection.
It's very emotional and personal,
but it's also very formally robust and rigorous.
And you just see her attention to form play out
over the course of that book.
And it really just sets the table for so many other things
that you can do in poetry.
So I'm reading--
I'm influenced by a lot of women poets
at this point, a lot of poets of color at this point,
but I also really like going back and reading
older things, things that are slash quote/unquote
"canonical."
I always go back to Dante.
Every time you open up the Divine Comedy, it's happening.
They're on the journey.
It's going on.
Similar-- you can open up a book like Moby Dick too
and the same--
that's the same effect.
And that's not true of every book
that you open up where the book is actually like taking place
no matter what page you open it to.
So I kind of look for that feeling or effect.
So hearing you talk about Camille Dungy has influence
to you and noting that a lot of their poetry
deals with nature, I was wondering, in your poems--
particularly, I noted in "Little Gals."
There seems to be an intersection between nature
and imagination in that poem or something like fantastical.
I wondered, what space do you make for imagination and maybe
fantasy like the entrance of that into your poems
and like nature as like reality and sort
of the intersection of the two?
That's an excellent-- I think that's an excellent question.
For me, I am a person who is a very uncomfortable in nature.
I will get the most mosquito bites.
I will get lost.
People will have to come rescue me, like, all these things.
I will ski off of something.
It's not-- I don't have this like amazing comfort
like within nature.
So for me, a forest, like, clearing or something
is like the space where something magical could
possibly happen.
So I think about nature in the like Midsummer Night's Dream
sense of it's this other sphere.
It's like closed to this other thing, this other place,
or this other realm maybe.
And when you go into nature, you're
going into this other realm.
One of the things that happened with Black
genealogy is that I went to Virginia.
Also-- my mother decided because this
had to do with genealogy and her family
that she was also going to be supervising this research.
So she came with me to Virginia.
And I had-- we found out from the Historical Society
that basically my great great grandfather and his family
were buried in this small family plot
that-- it had been part of their farmland.
I mean, like traditionally people that had farms,
you'd have like a family cemetery plot within that land.
But then, what happens is that when the land passes out
of the family, then the knowledge of where that burial
ground is also departs from the knowledge of the family.
So we rediscovered that there were these like eight
graves in this one spot.
And so we were like, whoa, we're going to the woods,
and we're going to find these graves.
But neither one of us knows anything about the woods,
but whatever.
We went.
We figured out how to get to this thicket of, whatever,
forest in the rural Virginia.
We were like, we'll just use the GPS.
Phones didn't work.
We were like, well, we'll follow this path.
Path ran out.
There is a kind of blindness that
comes over you in the woods if you're not a person who
can be in the woods.
They tell you, like, when you're drowning that you can't tell up
from down.
When you're in the woods, and you
have no idea why you're in the woods or where you are,
you start to have this forest blindness where you're
like you lose all sense of direction which is dangerous
if you're actually in the woods.
So it was a super, super stressful situation,
but it was also--
I also knew that I was stepping into this other realm.
And that if I was--
I literally was like, if I'm meant to find these graves,
then I will then I'll find them because I
had no other tools and no skills otherwise to find them.
And I didn't-- we weren't able to find them.
And we went again with the Historical Society
lady who had originally found the graveyard,
and she couldn't find them again.
And so it must be that it's been so overgrown even
in the few years that where she first photographed them
that maybe the gravestones have fallen down.
Maybe there's vines and stuff growing over them.
We were probably within like 20 feet of them,
but we couldn't see them.
So you realize you're not in control at that point.
You can't just like walk into the woods.
You can't just like hack away the vines and suddenly
the thing that you're looking for is there.
The woods will decide what you're going to do,
or what you're going to get to see.
And they decided that we would have this other experience,
but we wouldn't be finding these particular graves.
I also came away with a very clear sense that it was enough.
I don't-- my mother and I don't have to go there a third time.
Like there was this message that I
felt was being given to me where it was like, you did OK.
You didn't find what you wanted to find.
You don't have to come here again.
And I don't know who gave me that message, but it definitely
felt like it was from another place
and not just coming from my own fear of the woods--
[LAUGHTER]
--which is also very real.
[? Well, ?] thank you, Kiki.
Thank you.
[APPLAUSE]