Hooligan Mag Issue #29

I like how you said you leave it up to your listeners to make their own interpretations. Do you ever have anyone that comes up to you and says “I thought this poem was about this”. Do you ever correct them or do you let them interpret it for themselves?

It depends. If we’re in a workshop and the point is to really help the reader, we help them with the reading comprehension and poetic comprehension. If they give an interpretation that I think is harmful to their process then I’ll correct them. For the most part, I really do believe in the integrity of the reader’s experience and I believe in not being in your readers head every single time. I think if we focus too much on trying to tell [the reader] things, you don’t even have room for them to feel. By resisting the urge to correct or to edit, you leave new opportunities for interpretations that can create a whole different narrative for somebody else.

While you’re seasoned in spoken word, do you prefer seeing your poems in written form?

As a writer and as a reader, it’s important that the integrity of the line and the integrity of the poem is supported by actually understanding how the words look on the page what the line breaks are doing, where they live.

I love poetry so much that I want to make sure that it does everything it can do. When you aren’t necessarily invested in the line or in the edit or in the craft there’s so much that you may miss, and so much that you’ve failed to give to your readers. It just makes for a better poem when it lives well on the page and off the page.

What made you decide to use concrete poetry? Was that a discussion that you had with your editor?

I’m pretty invested in form, I’m super interested in reimagining form and decolonizing form. In general, that’s always been a part of my literary practice; making sure that there’s a visual quality to the literary quality, and that the visual quality has integrity. I don’t necessarily think of the poems as concrete poems. Fundamentally, yeah, totally they are, but the same way a poem ] is linear and has stanzas, the line breaks in that poem are just as important as the line breaks in the poem about the abortion. The line breaks in the Trump poem are there to indicate a sense of impossibility and breathlessness and surrealism, and also a kind of invisibility. I’m interested in making sure that we can get as much fluid meaning in there as what’s practical, and sometimes that means cutting down the words and throwing in something that is more experimental, forcing the reader to flip the page.

How do your mentors encourage you or push you to revise your work?

Being well-trained and well taught is understanding that the editing process and the revision process is just as important as the actual drafting process. I’ve always felt having a community is really important,and I’ve always felt really loved by my literary community and really taken care of. Just being able to watch them in their practice, watch the way they go through their process, just being able to watch them and ask questions has been more encouraging than any like direct advice that they could give me.

What makes 2019 a great time to be a black woman?

It’s never a great time to be a black woman. I’ll say that what makes 2019 exciting, possibly, is that publicly we have a stronger sense of solidarity. We know that in some ways we are in this by ourselves, and so being in it by ourselves means leading as if we are doing this alone. In the last five to ten years, we have really been able to see that and understand it in ways that we haven’t before. Just our commitment to each other, both supporting each other in the literary world which not a lot of people want to support black women but black women in that space, I think we are just starting to understand that we’re we all we got. We just can’t do this shit without each other, so I’m just really excited to be in a world where we have a little bit more power than what we’ve had in the past.”