by Senseteam

“It’s true that they called my name specifically, and that in itself is a wonderful thing, but 10,000 other people rushed through the door with me.” – Nikky Finney on winning the 2011 National Book Award for Poetry

I am so grateful for this Lambda Literary interview with Nikky Finney. Truth be told, I haven’t even finished reading it but I couldn’t wait to share it with all of you. Given the thematic focus of this blog, I figured this excerpt was worthy of a taste, but you really need to read the entire interview.

Did you stay in South Carolina?

I could not have stayed in South Carolina and become the writer that I have become; a writer who relishes exploring themes that are as beautiful as they are taboo. I was always my mother’s most curious child, the one also with the hardest head. I wanted to see the rest of the country and the rest of the globe. I loved to be on the move. I had to see what was down the road and over the hill. South Carolina is a state steeped in conservative values and traditions. There’s a lot about the state that does not like change. As a teenager I knew I would break away from some of those traditions. As much as I loved my family, I knew I would step away from home and make my own way in the world. I had to. I had to leave home, the church, and all the people who loved and protected me. I had to explore all the things that I needed to explore. I knew that I had to leave the southern landscape that I had been born into in order to find out exactly who I was in the world.

Where did you go next?

I went further South (laughs).

by Rook Floro

To wish to be spectacular

like an unlit match imagining to burn

or the spent match remembering its burning:

want flying over its pale wooden body

all acetylene brightness and rough sound –

a dense limb fearless

in knowing the flame, knowing its desire

equals its consumption,

use to uselenessness in the motion

of a body made ash with abandon.

The matches in the fold-over book all agree

it is the most beautiful thing

- from Quiver by Susan B. A. Somers-Willet

by Liza Sylvestre

What a surprise to see my poem “After the First Shot” featured on Verse Daily today.

by Todd Chilton

I once believed the work of advocacy was the work of picket lines and protests, sit-ins and street theater, public hearings and private lobby efforts. Now I realize that the work of advocacy is also the work of the word — our talking and teaching, our writing and witnessing, our texts and testimonies.

from Particular Voices edited by Robert Giard

by I Wayan Sudarsana Yansen

Grateful to Jonterri Gadson for her thoughtful questions about When The Only Light Is Fire. Here’s an excerpt of the interview:

JG     The book’s arc seems to move from boyhood to various representations of manhood. The first half of the chapbook contains several “boy” poems: “Terrible Boy,” “Boy in Stolen Evening Gown,” “Boy at Edge of Woods,” and “Boy at Threshold.” The fire of the book’s title seems to start in the trauma detailed in these poems, in the fields of these poems. How does trauma influence your writing?

SJ     I think of fire as a difficult knowledge. It illuminates, but something must be destroyed in order for that to happen. That paradox, to me, is the task of becoming a person. What am I going to burn down in order to clear a space for my foundation? That is what the archetypal “boy” of the poems is asking himself over and over.

With that being said, perhaps the hardest part of this process isn’t the trauma itself but the fact that boys, in particular, are conditioned to repress their feelings about trauma. I tried to reflect that in the first section of the chapbook by keeping the menace at the edges of the page. In “Terrible Boy,” for example, there are coded references and the final image, but the boy never actually says what is happening exactly.

Also, if you’re in NYC this Wednesday, 1/4, I’ll be reading with Megan Boyle & Thom Donovan as part of the Blue Note Reading Series in Brooklyn. It should be a hoot. Here are the details.

"Seated Man" by de Kooning

• Started my morning off with “To Failure” by Christopher Ankney. These lines, in particular, were the poetic equivalent of coffee this morning: “…like fire once it realizes / it can breathe, you prey on the world, leave us all / self-described martyrs in our own ashes.”
• I’ve been obsessed with Rookery by Traci Brimhall for a couple of weeks now. “Falling” is one of the poems in that collection.
• And let’s take a moment for DeLana R.A. Dameron’s poem “Beetle” which concludes: “Look, I know / what it’s like to see / the world upside down, / waiting for someone / to fix you.”
• In retrospect, these poems in combination — while exquisite — aren’t exactly pick-me-ups, but whatever: It’s the winter solstice; it will be dark again in like an hour anyway.
• Okay, fine: A reason to smile — Landscapes Made of Books!

by Olsen Zander

In the last semester of graduate school, Rigoberto Gonzalez my workshop great advice about what to do when it seems we’ve fallen out of love with poetry: “Go back to what you were reading when you were in love with poetry. Find those poems & see what was in them that made you fall in love in the first place.”

And so, this gloomy December morning, I’m re-reading “Song” by Brigit Pegeen Kelly. Here are the concluding lines, but read the entire poem to see how Brigit drives us to this point:

Not a cruel song, no, no, not cruel at all. This song

is sweet. It is sweet. The heart dies of this sweetness.

by Amy Taluto

So happy to have my poem “Blue Prelude” in the current issue of Jubilat alongside work by L. Lamar Wilson, Eduardo Corral, and Kimiko Hahn among many others. Also, I have poems in the current issues of Hayden’s Ferry Review, West Branch, & Spillway.

Also, grateful to Zahra Darby for this interview about When The Only Light Is Fire. I love being able to have conversations about poetry on this level because, without fail, I learn so much about my own ideas when I have to justify them. Here’s an excerpt:

Thank you for beginning [the interview] with Toni Morrison because, in many ways, hers was one of the first voices that taught me how to speak. I mean “speak” in the sense of using language to stake a claim to my life. Most of the poems in this collection were written because, in one way or another, I needed them. In the same way that a kid creates an imaginary friend to get through the terror that is childhood, I wrote these poems. I wrote “Mississippi Drowning,” for example, because I was drowning in news story after news story of queer men and women of color being attacked, brutalized and killed. It seemed to me then, and now, that the only way a gay or trans person of color makes the news is by dying horribly. I wrote “Mississippi Drowning” because I needed a way, any way, of answering that outrage. Whether or not, the poem holds up to a critical reading is beside the point because the need – and the language that answered that need – is deeply personal.

And I discuss queer mentorship in my most recent column for Lambda Literary: “Over Coffee With Melvin Dixon”. Here’s an excerpt:

Perhaps Melvin Dixon, at this very moment, takes another sip of coffee, arches an eyebrow at the young writer sitting across the table from him, and says, “Baby, what do you mean you haven’t heard of Bruce Nugent?” The young writer blushes, then writes down “Smoke, Lilies & Jade” in his notebook, promising to read it as soon as he can get to the library.

by Sean Edward Whelan

I wonder what Reginald Shepherd would have had to say about the sky over New York this first December morning, and if Tory Dent would decide to sleep in, shoving the alarm clock off the night stand, and if Joe Brainard would be at work on another collage, and who would Essex Hemphill wake up beside this morning, and where is Assotto Saint, and where is Melvin Dixon, and where is Thomas Avena, and where is Donald Britton, and where is Tim Dlugos, and where is Jaime Gil de Biedma, and where is Leland Hickman and where and where…

With a grateful nod to Philip Clark & David Groff’s Persistent Voices (Poetry by Writers Lost to AIDS), I will be tweeting links to work by these voices today, December 1, World AIDS Day.