Book Review: Will the Real Folks Please Stand Up?: Rebellion, Authenticity, and Identity in Hick Poetics

Review by Abby Minor

Hick Poetics: An Anthology of Contemporary Rural American Poetry, Edited by Shelly Taylor and Abraham Smith, Lost Roads Press, 2015, Paperback: $25.00, ISBN 978-0-918786-61-6, 392 pages.

I was raised by a man who had opinions about the word “creek.” My father never missed an opportunity to remind my sister and me that folks who use that word to describe moving water are (I kid you not) “trying to sound like they’re from the city.”  To him the word for what ran through our yard was rightfully “crick,” rhyming with “stick,” or, significantly, with “hick.” At the same time, he and my mother (a Jewish New Yorker who couldn’t give two hoots about rural nomenclature) sent us to a private Quaker elementary school, and my pipeline-welder dad eventually got a PhD in physics. So I grew up with the idea that while you might not actually want to live in a coal patch, intimations of hick-ness could earn you something—but I wasn’t exactly sure with whom or to what end. And I’m still not.

Part of the answer to that question—what do you get when you flash your hick badge?—lies with two distinct, and distinctly related, early-20th-century developments in U.S. thought. On the one hand, Americans came to think of one of our preeminent rural places, Appalachia, as especially white; on the other, we came to associate “nature” with healthful, masculine vigor. The first idea was a fantasy of purity: in the decades surrounding the century’s turn, when interest in the “science” of eugenics reached a peak in the U.S., a surge of social scientists, reformers, and folklore collectors strove to delineate what they perceived as reliably “white.” Faced with Emancipation, migration, and immigration, culture workers turned their attention to Appalachia. And Appalachia, despite the significant presence of African American and non-Anglo mountaineers, seemed to fit the bill.  The idea of Appalachia as a stronghold of Anglo culture was most visible in the work of folk-song collectors, and you can see it still in many old-time music communities. Indeed, early-20th-century song collectors’ work had a lot to do with the fact that, seventy years later, my father—who would never think to trace his father’s banjo to West Africa—would explain to me with pride that his West Virginia kin still spoke Shakespeare’s English.

The second development, the sense of nature as an antidote to cultural effeminacy, was a fantasy of authenticity. This fantasy congealed in the form of the Back to Nature movement, and on that subject it’s worth quoting Modernist scholar Robin Schulze at length:

“Confronted with the specter of a degenerate Europe and the increasing threat that America, too, would inevitably become decadent and artificial as its own culture evolved, upper- and middle-class white Americans turned back to nature for the sake of the American race.  They chose to value not culture, not the artifacts of their evolving civilization, but the idea of health. Always anxious about their poetry, pictures, and music, the art that never seem wholly unique or mature, Americans opted to denigrate such artifice as the root of degeneracy and revel instead in the vigorous life that heading back to nature promised.  If Americans could never truly have a culture, they could best Europe by being fit, and nature was the key to that fitness.” 

It’s not difficult to see how these twin fantasies—one of purity, the other of authenticity—fit neatly together in many ways, or how the Anglicized Appalachian came to represent a holy trinity of related fictions: the eugenic vigor of whiteness; the durability, masculinity, and restraint of working culture; and the innocence of American wilderness. He represented a stay against an impressive array of threats: fainting Europeans, unfit swarthy masses, the regressive culture of underdeveloped “savages,” and the dainty nerves of anemic artists, academics, and the urban effete. This picture was precarious and potentially contradictory (couldn’t the poor, large families of Appalachia also resemble the degenerate masses? How exactly could the culture of the folk be void of the artifice that supposedly defined culture itself?), but it stuck. And so the people of the rural mountains became what the country needed them to be: in historian Fred Hay’s words, “America’s sole surviving remnant population of pure Anglo-American stock”; in other words, a multiple-pronged, reactionary fantasy.

Where I live, in northern Appalachia, people still perform a gauntlet-flinging brand of white rusticity partly born of those century-old fantasies. And while it’s common to associate contemporary gestures of rural bravado with conservatives, in truth performances of hick-face range from the tattered snap of a Confederate flag flown from the back of a PA pick-up to the aggressive stomp of a Brooklyn-based jug band at the local brew pub. Nearly everyone in my rural milieu, from Trump supporters to liberal organic farmers, has their own version of adamantly rejecting “creek” for “crick,” and while I can trace the spit and swagger of these gestures to certain histories, I still can’t entirely parse them out. And so I turn to poets; I read rural poets to find out how we handle the ideologies we’ve inherited, how we echo or interrupt the interlocking isms and fears that still haunt our rural imaginary. 

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There’s spit and swagger to spare in Hick Poetics: An Anthology of Contemporary Rural American Poetry, published by Lost Roads in 2015.  Editors Shelly Taylor and Abraham Smith frame the collection in terms of reclamation and rebellion: “hick in our minds is a powerful rib-jab reclamation of power: it is us taking back this idea of the pastoral—ours to begin with anyhow—a la Johnny Cash’s middle finger,” writes Taylor; Smith calls it an anthology of “roughly reedy exhalations” and “a book built for hearing what some natives & near natives of the pasture have up their grassy, greasy sleeves.”  When Taylor muses on the anthology’s title—“Why hick, you ask? What a terribly derisive word in this modern age of ‘best be careful not to offend’”—there’s a hint of pride at the prospect of offending. In their short introductory essays, both Smith and Taylor use the word piss—Smith uses it three times.  

Rib-jabs, greasy sleeves, pissing—these are not the Back to Nature movement’s innocent rubes. Like reclamations of other slurs (niggah, bitch, queer), Smith and Taylor’s hick reclamation requires some strut and chutzpah, and it plays with the angel/devil dichotomy by which marginalized people are often defined.  Just as nostalgia for an imaginary, simple (white) past hangs around Appalachia and other rural places, so do jokes about toothless-ness and incest.  The rural poor have been not only rosily romanticized, but also politically, economically, and culturally pushed aside. Like dichotomous virgin/whore images of women, like our films that show black people as either saintly or monstrous, the innocent mountaineer and the idiot hillbilly are two sides of the same coin.  We imbue class and region, like gender and race, with contradictory meanings: we see the “folk” as degenerate or salt of the earth, as ignorant or intuitive, as licentious or admirably embodied. Twin strands of glorification and repugnance abide.

Hick Poetics challenges the glorification by glorifying the repugnant.  It hollers back a hundred years at those early folklorists: Hey, we’re not just milk-fed fiddlers, and we can write in ways that are weird, fragmented, experimental, and unhinged.  In rejecting the traditionally-pretty pastoral, Smith and Taylor want us to see not only rural people but “nature poetry” as edgy, funky, rusty, raw. What Taylor describes as “this tough-minded collection of hick poems” does not do what traditional nature poetry has done; readers find fewer revelatory walks in the woods and more roadside trash.  In one of the book’s short essays—each of the anthology’s forty poets introduces their own work—we “find ourselves in the litter of illegal fires, broken bottles, last night’s sex.” Whereas the whitewashed Appalachian promised to stave off degeneracy, Hick Poetics often revels in it, taking pleasure in being a little bit bad and dirty, greasy and grassy, junky and tough.  And, yes, full of piss. 

There’s a class-based protest against the insufferable tidiness of bourgeois aesthetics running through the anthology.  Nathan Hauke’s poems look at the “Dull glint of tinsel near the tree dump” and “A young mother picking lice out of her husband’s hair in Sunshine Coin-Op”; the anthology abounds with “the bruised faces of elderberries and actual bruised faces”, “the dumpsters // behind the TV factory”, and “People who burn old tires indoors in homemade woodstoves.”  And yet, Hick Poetics also often feels like the song of a people split by complexities of aesthetics and class: that line about burning old tires reads, in its entirety, “It’s hard to write about supposedly being a hick when you know or have known real hicks. People who burn old tires indoors in homemade woodstoves, for example.”  For many rural-born poets, the fact that we teach college students or attend conferences or use words like “afterimage” or write poetry—or never burned tires indoors—makes us the city slickers scoffed at by our hometown folks.  That tension is one of the anthology’s major themes: Juliana Spahr writes that she’s been accused of being “a hillbilly fraud”; Juan Felipe Herrera’s sister describes him as “‘del pueblo,’ not from ‘el rancho’ where you know how to make adobe, roast forty pounds of green chiles”; Danielle Pafunda relates: “Am I a hick? I ask. You grew up twenty minutes from the mall, my partner crows.”  

Smith seems to dismiss the urgency of that apparent tension between academic conferences and making adobe (or burning tires, or whatever our home community’s particular rubric for hick-ness is) when he writes:

“how we live now authenticity is clawed at until it bleeds something. perhaps these ain’t ‘authentic outpost inlookings’…but i know this: the stuff of the pastoral is the stuffing puffing up most poets, sometimes; pasture grass gargle, a commonplace. & I do know this book to be looking you square in the star eye.” 

But in the pages that follow, just exactly what it means to be “looking you square in the star eye”—what it means to be sufficiently greasy and grassy rather than stuffed and puffed—isn’t so easily set aside.  The struggle to reconcile the down-home and the intellectual (or the urban, suburban, or urbane) persists: Pafunda responds to her partner’s crowing, “I spent as much time scratching poison sumac and bug bites, as much time up in trees as he did.”  Yet she acknowledges, “I’m a city girl, I’m pretty bourgeois”—then again, “My house was full of guns”—then again, “I’ve never shot a gun myself”—then again, “I know how to hold one, how to aim.” A tension remains.  

As someone who grew up stomping cat litter into the drain field of the busted septic tank (thanks, Dad—real Shakespearian), I know what it’s like to want to honor the rough and rusty, to rub the tire piles and the wood piles in the faces of families who hug on porches while a light snow falls in Christmas-time commercials for Apple products.  So when these poets attend to “paint huffers lagoonside” and “the wall of a rusted-out stove,” I get it. When Ander Monson describes wanting “To manifest resistance to those who’d try to ruin our ruins, to those who choose to flatten us with their attention or inattention,” I get it. When Tim Earley howls, “JANE SMILEY WRITES of THE SCOTCH-IRISH: ‘Mean as a snake and twice as quick…’…. Fuck you, Jane Smiley….gum it up in the Berkeley, gum it up in the New Yorks City, POETRY! POETRY! POETRY! you subhuman fucks,” I more or less get it.  I get that to pay attention to paint huffers and rusted-out stoves can be to reject romanticized ideas about rural purity, to offer a legitimate hymn to the peripheral. 

But I’m struck by how this need to prove ourselves as sufficiently rusty can feel anxious, and by how the terms of this struggle between rural realities and whatever threatens them are still, just as a century ago, so often gendered. It’s difficult not to associate rural-ness with a kind of masculine “real-ness” (whether what’s real consists of racial purity or syntactical fracturing or guns and rust), and too easy to express our thoughts about authenticity—as poets or as country people, or both—in terms that seem to equate the inauthentic (whatever it is) with the feminine (whatever it is).  It’s not so much that what counts as “real” has remained the same since the Back to Nature movement’s apex, but that whatever we call authentic gets coded as tough.

When I feel my own hick rebelliousness coming on (why do I so often mention my father’s tobacco chewing habit, but not his PhD in physics?), I think of the “REDNECK”-emblazoned confederate flags flying from porches and trucks in my neck of the woods, and I pause.  I find it hard to avoid the association between hick swagger and white, masculine defensiveness—“hick,” whatever else it may mean, surely signals rural white masculinity in popular culture—or to resist reading Hick Poetics as, at times, insufficiently attuned to that association.  “This idea of the pastoral” might have been “ours to begin with anyhow,” but I’m not sure who the word “hick” belongs to at our current cultural moment, who it belonged to in the past, or who “we” are. While it’s clear that the anthology aims to challenge and expand popular ideas about who (and what attitudes) count as rural—Taylor and Smith have gathered poets of different races, ethnicities, genders, sexualities, visions, and bearings—it still sometimes seems to gloss over hick’s attendant meanings, and so the hick-as-white-masculinity thing can feel like the elephant in the anthology’s otherwise imaginative and visionary room. In aiming to reclaim what’s been prettied-up by systems of power, Hick Poetics, like my rebel-flag-flying brethren, occasionally engages in a kind of strutting and finger-tossing that has its own thorny power dynamics. 

Describing the literary scene in Fayetteville, Arkansas, poet Matthew Henricksen writes, “We drink coffee and beer and look at trees. We read Frank Stanford…until three AM.  We hardly hear the echoing yelps of universities who only hire book prize-winning PhDs and publishing houses who outsource their printing to Mexico.” And in his introductory note, Smith folds the reader into that coterie of yelpers when he describes the anthology’s poets as “not from where you are now, i am guessing.”  What strikes me is that in throwing the bird at the same urban and/or academic pretense that the Back to Nature movement promised to cure—and that the likes of Tim McGraw still love to disdain—we summon some politically interesting bedfellows. 

I want to resist equating broken appliances or hazardous forces, including the prosodic forces of fracturing and narrative skittishness, with authentic hick-ness—however true to our experiences those things might be, however tempting it is to haul out the rusty washer when tenure-track New Yorkers come around or the dis-associative leaps when traditional nature poets come around—because doing so doesn’t so much broaden as simply reverse the narrative of rural-ness as sweet and recuperative.  I want to challenge what seems unsatisfying about the traditional pastoral without coding it as effeminate and relying on busted septic tanks and jagged syntaxes to beef it up. I want to be skeptical of the romance of fiddles (or lyres), but also of the romance of damage; I want to agree with Adrian Kien that “brutality and survival” have a lot to do with both wilderness and poetry without rejecting gentleness, without calling on that particularly American brand of nature-as-tough invented, in part, as an antidote to art itself.   

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And yet on the tricky subject of authenticity Hick Poetics is, in its poetry and especially in its prose, largely both gratifying and challenging. “When you grew up in the rural South,” writes Greg Alan Brownderville, “even if you work diligently to understate everything, it’s hard to talk about your background without appearing to ham it up and parody yourself.”  Michael Sikkema describes “constantly navigating the country vs. ‘country’”, and Jen Tynes writes of her home town: “In the gift shops around the (man-made) lake that brought in much-needed tourist dollars, you could buy corncobs with a label attached: hillbilly toilet paper.” In naming the weird layers of caricature and commodification that hick-ness accrues, these poets acknowledge the slippery contours of conversations about region and class, as well as the inevitably performative aspects of identity, even as they identify very much as of-their-places.  I hear a wryly complicated comment on rural identity and language when Tynes writes, “…what am I / supposed to covet next? / Another slang for storm.”   

One of the best things Hick Poetics does, even if it does so implicitly, is to address North American realities of place-related loss, as well as the ways in which white supremacy, racism, misogyny, queer-phobia, and whitewashing of rural places are so deeply intertwined with environmental degradation. In other words, the anthology blurs the (man-made) line between the politics of social life and the politics of environment: “My poems engage the subject of Inupiaq cultural and biological extinction,” writes Joan Naviyuk Kane, “…Hick poetics prevents me from losing perspective in the destructive events of recent history and enlarges my awareness of the vast and self-replenishing resources of the human spirit, voice, and intellect.”  Kane’s poem “Nunaqtigiit” picks up where her prose leaves off:

From time to time the sound of voices 

      as through sun-singed grass,

or grasses that we used to insulate the walls of our winter houses—

walrus hides lashed together with rawhide cords.

…

The sky of my mind against which self-

betrayal in its sudden burn

fails to describe the world.

…

Leaning against the stone wall ragged

I began to accept my past and, as I accepted it,

I felt, and I didn’t understand:

      I am bound to everyone.

The scale of loss Kane’s poems engage is distinct to indigenous experience, but the final line of “Nunaqtigiit” points to the ways in which the anthology’s poets are bound together in contending with the still-unfolding erasures of colonization.  They are bound not by the inevitable losses of mortality and accident, but with those caused by spiritual illness and injustice. Hick Poetics tells how “The farms that no longer farm now frack”; how “you cannot love bugles/or understand a calendar/ as long as there is a slaughterhouse”; and, in Juliana Spahr’s poem documenting indigenous Hawaiian’s struggle to access shoreline, “how certain of we have rights on paper yet not in place.”

It’s satisfying, not to mention accurate, to encounter such a broad range of social experiences under the hick umbrella. Brownderville’s “Song for a Kiss” describes a Civil-Rights-Era-childhood in Arkansas, a black girl’s kiss on a white boy’s neck, his disgust, and, later, when he’s grown and yearns to return it: “At once I felt ashamed / for dreaming that my kiss—belated blessing—would be worth a good goddamn. / That it could heal, heal anything: her, me, home.” Allison Adelle Hedge Coke’s dream-like, urgent poem “Sudden Where” speaks from the perspective of young people living in foster care; the poem begins, “Talon-plucked speckled trout from bitterroot bed,” and goes on to extend that image:

  …Thought we were unbreakable

tried so many times to snuff ourselves—each other—blunders were our closest

friends. Kept us from soaring over cloud dreams, swimming in deep water,

skimming surfaces in grasslands without a notion when we’d make it back

to the piney mountains calling us home. That was fostering. Sudden where.

Being left to airs, to talons lifting, sometimes tearing scales as they raised us. 

Reading Hick Poetics is like looking through a kaleidoscope at many, sometimes radically different, North American ways of understanding land: while some poets describe wilderness as a space of terror, disappearance, silence, or absence, others see its recuperative powers—think of Coke’s “piney mountains calling us home.” While some express uneasy or ambivalent relationships to land and place, others struggle to (re)claim those relationships: when Crystal Wilkenson writes, “I am Black. I am Appalachian. People don’t often acknowledge our presence but we are here….We’re here. We’re here,” you understand why she needs to repeat herself.  

The anthology also captures painful tensions between regional identification and radical not-fitting-ins.  Writes genderqueer poet TC Tolbert, “my body my word my horror my healing my home my leaving my god my (w)hole my south,” while Spahr reflects: “5,000 miles from this place, I still wake up at least once a week and think I am there and have to reorient myself.  It is as if I go there in my sleep to rest…And yet I’m not fucking moving back there ever, so don’t ask again mom.” Lisa D. Chavez notes simply, “Leaving Alaska was like leaving a lover, losing a limb.” That friction between identification and distance is a hallmark of artistic life, and it makes for rural vernaculars variously defined: “With what should I encircle my throat so as not to inconvenience the blue air”, writes Earley; a Brownderville speaker “Got so drunk, / I felt like I was working / a Rubik’s Cube with my / eyeballs”; D.A. Powell goes “splat in the oatmeal: granddaddy facedown / disappeared the way a prize hog we were fond of”; and Gillian Conoley manages something between an Appalachian ballad and an Elizabeth Bishop poem when she writes:

no more

shall I wear that old black dress, greasy all around.   no more shall I

wear the old black bonnet with holes all in the crown.

One of the anthology’s emotional currents is a kind of affectless-ness, an opacity that aims to tread lightly, I think, where traditional nature poets have sometimes gone heavy with sentimentality. Dreamy non-narratives and distant speakers (“The bell rings and I assume my charges, / your name bleeding slowly through my blouse, a sparrow // carved it thus, a titmouse, and so it weeps in lieu of me,” Pafunda writes) can move us beyond clichés about human relationships with nature, and can challenge established ideas about what counts as a narrative, or even what counts as a self. Such approaches search for language that feels more honest, more accurate than what co-editor Smith calls “pasture grass gargle, a commonplace.” And yet it’s this dis-associative reserve that backlights and makes striking two of the anthology’s other important tonal strands: moments of straight-up humor, and moments of what I’ll call “land-love.” Hicks are, after all, funny; listen to Michael Earl Craig: 

My little horse must think it queer.

But who cares what he thinks? 

Listening to an animal might get me killed

look what happened to Walter.

And hicks are often lovers; the hicks I’ve known are helplessly, gruffly, often irrationally in love with their home places (“Abigail,” my father would say, “I’ve been all over the world, and central Pennsylvania is the prettiest place there is.”). Linnea Ogden’s poem “Long Weekend” strikes a tone both grumpy-funny and loving—“I hate everything easily this year but /The mockingbirds oh”—and Herrera issues a beautiful, unselfconscious call to affection for the world when he writes, 

let us gather in a flourishing way

en la luz y en la carne of our heart to toil

tranquilos in fields of blossoms 

In another poem, Herrera even instructs us to learn affection from the world: 

the wren

& the tree, always the tree & the

brambles, they are the presidents

of kindness 

Funny and loving, brash and kind, opaque in its ellipses and reservations, talkative and sparse, strutting and tender—Hick Poetics does, ultimately, what a good reclamation project should do: it muddies the waters, it complicates the terrain. The anthology itself feels (to use Tynes’ apt phrase from her stand-out essay on region and racism and class) “generatively rigged.” It’s not perfect and it’s not unified; it uses scraps and, like giovanni singleton, “would do a ‘hybrid’ and douse pinstriped overalls with blue velvet jacket, thinking Thoreau-ian thoughts.” And it puts me in mind of a funny thing that happened a few months ago.

Stationed at a white board at the local nursing home, where I teach a weekly poetry-writing class, I was transcribing memories and details for a collective poem. Most of the folks who come to sit at the dining-room-table-turned-classroom every Friday afternoon are near-centenarians who grew up in farming families rooted for generations in this valley, and yet they’re hardly dogmatic about regional identification; on most days, they accept me as someone more or less “from here,” Jewish mother notwithstanding. But when you’re paying attention to language, slips and gaps show up.

“I’m from the fourth house up the crick road,” one of my students said, and I dutifully wrote it down. I spelled the word as I’d heard it: C-R-I-C-K. My students looked at me, confused. “What’s that word you wrote?,” asked Ralph. “Crick,” I said, “just like Gretchen said.”  “Well,” Gretchen chimed in, “however you say it, you spell it the same as anyone.” 

Turns out it’s pronounced to rhyme with “stick,” but it’s still spelled C-R-E-E-K. Even my dad didn’t know that. 

Notes

Robin Schulze’s work on the Back to Nature movement appears in her book The Degenerate Muse.

Anyone Who Would Talk with Me: An Interview with Julia Spicher Kasdorf

By Amy Lee Heinlen, for The Fourth River

Julia Spicher Kasdorf visited Chatham University as the guest poet for the 2014 Summer Community of Writers (SCW). It was here that I heard Julia read from her enquiring and provocative new project in which she folds language, history, and place into powerful and distressing poems which record the voices of those involved in the Western Pennsylvania natural gas industry boom. Intrigued by her new poems,, I emailed Julia to find out more about her project and this fierce poem.

The Fourth River: At your reading during SCW, you read a series of profoundly moving poems from a current project. Will you elaborate this project?

Julia Spicher Kasdorf: Oh, thanks for saying that you found them moving! The project, which I’m now calling Shale Play, is a series about impacts of shale gas development in Pennsylvania. I’m still working on it, hoping to eventually publish it with photographs.

Last year I was fortunate to have time off from teaching, thanks to a sabbatical from the English Department and a fellowship from the Institute of Arts and Humanities at Penn State. I took 17 or 18 trips to northern PA (Tioga and Lycoming Counties) and southwestern PA (Westmoreland and Fayette Counties, where I grew up). At home and on campus, I learned all I could through print and on-line sources about the history, engineering, and technology of this industry. It can be argued that the current gas boom started at Penn State, with the research of geoscientist Terry Engelder, and that Penn State has shaped state policy and local practices, for better or for worse. Quite a few faculty members in fields outside of geoscience—forestry, agricultural economics, hydrology, rural sociology, landscape architecture and education—do research in this area, too. I will add that the faculty is not of one mind on the issue, despite the common perception that Penn State is in collusion with the industry.

But I really wanted to see what’s happening in local communities. Like Zora Neale Hurston says, “You got to go there to know there.”

I have contacts in western PA from growing up there, and Judith Sornberger and James Guignard at Mansfield University helped me to understand the lay of the land up north. Then I just drove around and sat in diners and talked with anyone I could find who has had experience with shale gas—landowners, leaseholders, workers in the industry and workers around the industry like waitresses, people who live near compressor stations, people who live near wells, an attorney, clergy, activists, anyone who would talk with me. One conversation led to another, and I wrote down everything I could.

TFR: During your craft talk at SCW, you noted the difference between a poet of document and poet of witness. I’m interested in how you think about your role as a poet while you work on Shale Play. Has your view of your role as a poet changed during this project compared to your previous poetry collections?

JSK: This is different from previous collections in that it’s my first self-conscious project of poetry. Sleeping Preacher reads like an autoethnographic project book, but I wasn’t mindful of that when I was writing many of those poems in graduate school. My most recent collection, Poetry in America, makes documentary gestures, quoting voices in my small town during the Iraq war, for instance, and citing historical events. But this is the first Project Book I’ve attempted. It came after teaching a course in documentary poetry: Reznikoff, Rukeyser, C.D. Wright, Mark Nowak, and so on. I’m intrigued by that work, and then we have this industrial invasion happening in rural Pennsylvania that I wanted to understand and record. I’m a poet. I start with language. I’m not an activist who must simplify the discourse. I’m an artist drawn to the complexity and emotional intensity of the situation. I listen. I want to hear how this development will change language along with the landscape. I want to amplify voices—including the voices of memory—that shape experience. That’s how I entered the project, anyway. The more I see and hear, the more I’ve come to identify with those who have been harmed.

TFR: I’m interested to know more about the relationship between the “citizen with too much memory” and the “I” in your poem, “Among Landowners and Industrial Stakeholders, a Citizen with Too Much Memory Seeks Standing to Speak of Recent Events in Penn’s Woods.” What does it mean that she “seeks standing to speak?”

JSK: The “citizen” is the speaker, is the author. The title comes from something I was thinking about. In these Marcellus Shale communities, when there’s a public hearing about something—a pipeline going in, say, or a compressor station venting volatile organic compounds or making a ridiculous amount of noise—there are often restrictions on who has “standing,” which means who is permitted to speak at the meeting. You might have standing if you have a business interest at stake or if you own property within a certain distance. So what qualifies me to speak about shale gas development? This poem is my answer to that question. I guess “too much memory” is a way of saying that I’m a “stakeholder” because of all I carry in my mind and body. My only claim on this place is knowledge of public and private history, how that information comes off the land when I move through it.  

TFR: One thing that struck me is the difference in the tone of the title from the poem itself. I think the title feels distant both because it is written in the third person and because it is explanatory. This has a similar feel to the titles of the poems you read at SCW. How did you come to decide to title this piece and other poems in your project this way?  What work do you feel it is able to do first for you as the writer and then for the reader?

JSK: Yes, this title! Maybe it won’t stay. The poem used to be called “Witness Trees,” but that sounds too much like POETRY, doesn’t it? I’d begun writing these flat titles for the other monologues. The poems are often quite raw, but the titles establish the identity of the speaker with reference to place and often a topic or central concern, for example: “A Student from Tunkhannock Articulates Shale Gas Aspirations” or “A Mother Near the West Virginia Line Considers the Public Health.” The title functions like a handle for the reader to grab onto. This is one of few poems in the series that’s spoken in my own voice, so it seemed only fair to pin that kind of title onto myself, too.

TFR: There is so much history in this piece. It is American history in so many experiences: Native Americans, settlers, the lore of your ancestors, family you’ve known, and your personal ties to the land all show up here. I was struck by the gas company’s invasion of the landscape, most notably in places important to the speaker’s family history, juxtaposed with the early Pennsylvania pacifist settlers’ often violent encounters with the Native Americans. Do you feel that pacifism influences the actions of the people living in these regions today? Or how do you view the juxtaposition working in this piece?

JSK: Certainly for some pacifists living in these regions, that ideal persists and determines actions, and yet one lesson of Penn’s Holy Experiment is that violence cannot be externalized or eradicated entirely.

The piece works associatively, turning from one form of violence to another. You’ll find trees or wood in almost every section. Trees have been associated with human bodies from antiquity—think of Myrrha. Jeff Gundy, a poet friend, read this and said he thinks it’s like surrealism, except that the piece is made of events from memory and history, not imagination and dream. Every statement is factual, as far as I know, except the location of the place where my dad’s feed truck lost its brakes in the 1950s; that happened on another mountain nearby.

TFR: Clearly, you have researched this topic in a variety of ways. What has the process been like as you decide what historic morsels stay in, what gets set aside?

JSK: So much of it relies on the sifting of memory; I have the kind of mind that hoards details and trivia. When people have been able to live in the same place for a long time, stories get inscribed on the landscape the way junk collects in the attic. Yet, places change. That compressor shed at the end of Peight’s lane felt like a violation when I spied it. I was thinking about gas development and suddenly seeing its signs everywhere on the landscape.

I grew up knowing the story of what some people call “the Hochstetler massacre,” but after he was rescued from the river, Jacob had to make a deposition to General Bouquet, so there are records I could read. I researched in various ways, mostly digitally, which felt like such a luxury, discovering all those mostly useless but really interesting details! The corner trees/witness trees turned up in a New York Times piece about forestry studies. Some of the details in the fifth section were passed on from my father-in-law, John Ruth, who’s working on a book about the early history of eastern Pennsylvania, the arrival of the Mennonites, and Penn’s sons and the broken treaties that led to the involvement of Native people in the Seven Years War between England and France.

I wanted to move through time and think about violence in this landscape, but beyond that, intuition determined which details to include.

TFR: This piece explores the complicated, even violent relationship the speaker has to the land she calls home. One of the last sentences of this poem rings with a tension that I have often felt myself, “I drive home and cook my groceries on a gas stove.” What have you found that poetry is able to do when confronted with the dualism of the negative impact of the gas drilling practices on the land and communities close to the drilling versus the modern conveniences most Americans have come to expect?

JSK: Poetry can help us face the facts and feel the grief of this reality. We’re all in it. We’re all implicated. Perhaps there can be hope in that, too, if it means that we can see that we’re all responsible for caring for these places and communities, and for finding sustainable ways to live.

---

Amy Lee Heinlen studies poetry in the MFA program at Chatham University where she also works as a librarian. Her poems have appeared in The Mom Egg Review, multiple volumes of Voices in the Attic, and The Red Clay Review. She lives in Pittsburgh with her husband, daughter, and two cats.

Telling Two Stories in One Breath: An Interview with Tyehimba Jess

by Jessica Kinnison

American poet Tyehimba Jess entered the MFA program at New York University in 2002 with half of his poetry book leadbelly written. His colleagues knew what he was going to bring to every workshop—another leadbelly poem.

leadbelly (2005) follows the story of Louisiana-born folk singer Huddie William Ledbetter, born in 1885, from Shreveport, LA to Texas to Angola Prison to New York City. leadbelly was chosen for the National Poetry Series by Brigit Pegeen Kelly, and was voted one of the top three books of the year by Black Issues Book Review.

A two-time winner of the Chicago Green Mill Slam team, Jess was Chicago’s ambassador to Accra, Ghana. He is the author of African American Pride: Celebrating our Achievements, Contributions and Enduring Legacy (2003), and his work has been featured in numerous anthologies. A Cave Canem Alumni, he received a 2004 Literature Fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts, was a 2004-2005 Winter Fellow at the Provincetown Fine Arts Work Center, and won a 2006 Whiting Award. He exhibited his poetry at the 2011 TedX Nashville Conference. Currently, he is Assistant Professor of English at College of Staten Island.

I interviewed Jess immediately following his reading at the Allegheny County Jail as part of Chatham University’s Words Without Walls Black Writers Series. He visited to tell the story of how Leadbelly’s music lives in each of us as Americans. He says, “At least people are saying his name. They are saying his name.”

.

The Fourth River: Why do you write and for whom?

Tyehimba Jess: I used to write for political purposes strictly. I was interested in writing poems that would inspire people to take political action. That’s what “when niggas love Revolution like they love the bulls” is all about. Those poems were for black people.  But you know you can’t control who reads your work.

So, after a while, I came to accept the idea that I was writing for everybody. Even when I thought I was writing for black people, not all black people agreed with what I was writing. It is difficult to say that you are writing for one particular group of people.  It can limit your imagination. After a while, I was like, “OK, I am writing for the entire world.” I think that later on, it became about writing for me.

The more I write, the more I realize it is about conveying a message. My poetry is pretty clear. Generally, you know what I am writing about by the end of a poem. I try to write that way. But it is working internally, as well.

When I am doing these poems, these syncopated sonnets and all that, I think I am trying to find a way to tell two different stories in one breath. I am looking for metaphors beyond the rhetorical that link into the shape of the poem and [into] the way the poem is read on the page.

FR: What do you think of the academic world as a space for writers?

TJ: I am part of a few different streams of poetry phenomena that are having an effect on the way poetry is being perceived in academia. One is slam: slam was started because of a man named Mark Smith in Chicago who was really disenchanted with the way poetry in academia was presenting itself as a kind of boutique, elite pastime that was not interested in connecting with the ordinary Joe Schmo on the street.

I think that the brilliant thing about Mark is that he was able to start this institution that’s very simple, very organic and really, in a way, doesn’t get the kind of credit in academia that it deserves for its impact on American poetry.

He’s one of those people who deserves a MacArthur grant because he saw a need and he filled it in a very simple way, in a way that answered the call of so many people who were interested. He helped throngs and throngs of people to understand that poetry doesn’t have to be outside of their grasp. It doesn’t have to be something that is performed by other people. They can perform it.

Whatever complaints people may have about slam, it brought poetry to the people and the same with Cave Canem. It’s an institution for black poets started by Toi Dericotte and Cornelius Eady that really eliminated the isolation that so many black poets felt on a fundamental level. The thing about Cave Canem is that it created a connection for black poets nationally and internationally that enabled us to grow at a rate we would not have been able to obtain without that community.

FR: Why did you choose poetry as your form for leadbelly? It reads like a novel.

TJ: First off, I am not as good at fiction as I am at poetry. I seem to be more geared toward saying a certain thing in a certain amount of time. leadbelly is almost all prose poems when he is speaking. Partly because I thought of him in terms of prose, really simply and not all enjambed. You know, it is prosaic and it follows a particular arc. It is linear in that respect. I think those are reasons it seems like a novel, in a way.

FR: Philip Larkin once wrote, “the impulse to preserve lies at the bottom of all art.” In your case, what are you preserving in your poems?

TJ: Yes, I guess I am in the business of historical preservation. There were a few things I was trying to preserve. One was Leadbelly’s legacy but also the idea of the work that the old music has done for us.  When I say “us,” I mean nationally what that work has done.

That legacy continues. The thing I think about a lot is the roots of the music, particularly in regard to the African community and the African-American contribution. With this new work I am doing, it is beyond the music. It is about theater and literature as well. When you look at the intellectual property, so much of that property has been generated from the black community.

Paying homage to Leadbelly, trying to present a portrait of his life, to me, meant recalling the pain and the joy that went into making that music. It lies at the bottom of American music. So I guess I’m back where Philip Larkin was: at the bottom of his preservation.

FR: So under everything is the need to preserve?

TJ: Yes, I would say that. Continue that story forward. Just having people say the word “Leadbelly” today in 2013, I am glad to be a part of that. And it’s not just him; it is the story and everything that the story entails, that idea, that aesthetic.

FR: You were a DJ at the University of Chicago for 10 years.  Who were some of the people you played most?

TJ: Man, I played so many people: Alice Coltrane, Sonny Sharrock, Art Ensemble of Chicago. I think the beautiful thing about Chicago is that they have something called AACM. It is really sort of an avant-garde arts organization.  I was very privileged to see these guys walking around the neighborhood. Overseas, they were superstars. You know, they were just phenomenal musicians. So I got the opportunity to see them on a regular basis. Lester Boyd, Malichi Favors, I got to see Sun Ra a couple times, Fred Anderson.

There was a little bar called the Velvet Lounge. It’s still there. It was the best music in Chicago. It was very cheap. The musical legacy in Chicago was wonderful. Then you also had the blues musicians. So my show started out as all jazz. Then it started to include blues, too. Like I played Muddy Waters, then I’d play John Coltrane, then I’d play some Sun Ra, then I’d go all the way back in the shed to get some Robert Johnson. I’d go back and forth and back and forth. I was playing with what Amiri Baraka would call “The Music,” the idea of the genres of music just drifting together into a continuum, especially with jazz and blues. I loved it. Then I would do interviews with political prisoners, prisoners of war and activists.

FR: I noticed that you use variations on blues phrases in leadbelly like “black snake moan.” Did you put them in while you were writing or did you go back and texturize the piece with common blues phrases?

TJ: It was probably a combination of the two. It’s kind of like the first pass: I go through a poem and have these weak words and stronger words. I take out words that are not contributing to the energy of the poem, and I think about words that could make the poem more active or add to the texture, and I go back and throw in a lot of other allusions. I try to reach in as many directions as I can. Some of them come naturally and those are the ones that I am actually more weary of because they are more likely to be cliché. If they are clichés, I try to come back and change them up a little.

FR: Do you think people who don’t listen to blues would notice blues phrases?

TJ: It’s hard for me to say what people’s perception of blues is. I think partly because I have been listening to it for so long. It is hard for me to detach myself from the lack of understanding regarding blues. If you were to say the word “blues” to most people, maybe one of the words that would come to their minds is “Eric Clapton” or “B.B. King” or “guitar” or the opening of the Dave Chapelle show. So there are a lot of standard images that people come up with. I am trying to write either against that or to deepen that understanding. I think that is true with anybody. If you were to say “polka music,” I probably wouldn’t know that much. I should. I think “accordion.” That is part of my charge to understand how all those musics can relate.

FR: How did your perspective on the book change after you went to Shreveport for the first time?

The most important thing I did there was visit his grave. I also met his grandniece. He is buried in this churchyard that is off of a dirt path that is off a dirt path that is off of a one-lane road. It’s way the fuck out. He died in New York but he was buried down there. It gave me an impression of where he walked. Of course, I was seeing Shreveport past its heyday. I could still see the streets and soak in the atmosphere. It was good to see the places I had written about.

I always felt guilty about the ability to claim that territory. I wanted to treat it with the respect it deserves. I wanted to treat him and the place that he came from with respect. I felt like it was incumbent upon me to give it a visit and say “Hello.” So, in a way, it gave me a kind of permission to continue on that journey of seeking out the details of his legacy.

FR: Is it true your immediate family would not exist without the Great   Migration?

TJ: You could say the same thing for probably at least half of black people in America today. The South was repressive. The North was repressive but in a different way.

FR: Michele Norris said that her parents didn’t talk about the South because they didn’t want to put rocks in their children’s pockets. If they put that anger in their pockets, it would weigh them down. Your parents were active in the community and also in race relations. How did that affect you and your writing?

TJ: It affected me in several ways. One is my dad is an avid, avid reader. He probably had 30 magazine subscriptions and books all around the house all the time. Both of them were very intent on having us read. I have an older brother and an older sister. My brother went to Michigan. My sister went to MIT. I think that my parents’ support and insistence upon college and that exposure to the necessity of reading at a very young age affected me.

As far as their relationships with their hometowns: I went down to visit my grandmother in Greenville, South Carolina when I was a kid. It was like visiting another planet.  This was in the 1970s. Greenville at that time was not the Greenville it is now. It is really a big, bustling city now. Back then, it was not a big place. There was a dirt road in front of my grandma’s house.

My dad didn’t talk very much about (well he didn’t talk that much at all) about South Carolina and his life down there. And my mother would talk about Oklahoma to a certain degree; she still does.

I think that their attitude was similar to what you are talking about. When you look at it, it really was like going from one country to another country. I mean, my dad was in the Confederate state—South Carolina. He still has his high school diploma. The signature on it is Strom Thurmond’s. My dad is 80 years old. It was like an entirely different land of opportunity. There is no way my father would have been able to work for the Department of Public Health in South Carolina at that time. There is just no way; it would not have been possible.

My mother left Oklahoma because she could not attend the nursing schools there. My mom also lived in Little Rock, Arkansas. She graduated before those nine students marched up the steps to that high school. Their attitude was the one of most black folks at that time: they wanted to get out.

FR: You changed your name legally in 1999. What did your parents think about that?

TJ: They were reluctantly accepting of it. I was living as Jesse Goodwin before I changed it, formally, in 1999, but [informally, starting in 1992], everybody called me Tyehimba Jess. You will be surprised how quickly you find yourself around nobody who knows your original name. It caught on within a couple years.  By the time it became legal, it had pretty much already happened anyway.

FR: Tyehimba means “we stand as a nation.” What does that mean to you?

TJ: I got it from a book in college. I took a lot of time trying to find a word that would be appropriate. This word, to me, infused the idea of black self-determination. You know, working together to achieve various and sundry goals. On the other hand, I didn’t want to completely abandon my family in that process. I was disturbed by our name being Goodwin because it was passed down from a slave owner. So I decided to keep my first name and make it my last name. My first name was Jesse, and that is my father’s name and his father’s name.

FR: Did your writing change once you changed your name?

TJ: My name came slowly.

FR: The name was your public persona and slowly became your private persona?

TJ: I think I was part of the last generation to change our names to African names. I mean, I don’t know what 20 year-olds are doing now, but I don’t think they are changing their names to African names. Many of the artists at that time were changing their names if not legally, informally. So it was not a unique thing.

The good thing about it is that I did not change my name more than once and I really carefully considered it before [the change]. I waited for seven years before I made it legal. So I had a long time to live with it. The decision to make it legal, to me, meant that I could stop leading a double life. Stop being Tyehimba Jess until I needed a check signed. It seemed inauthentic. I didn’t consider the name inauthentic. I considered the state’s right to claim what my name was illegitimate. One of my questions was whether or not to give the state that legitimacy, but after a while, I knew that, practically, it was the thing to do.

FR: Where did you start on the page when writing the syncopated sonnet about the twins?

TJ:  I started with the middle. I finished the middle because really the middle is based off of another poem I did called “Blind Tom.” It was the first one I made that went down and back. It was about Blind Tom being buried in two different locations. So, when it came to the McCoy Twins, I was wracking my brain as to how to approach talking about them.

I guess the form and the subject matter came simultaneously. I thought, well, I will mimic the shape of their bodies. So how can I do that? I already had the Blind Tom thing, so I thought I could reverse the polarity to have two heads and one middle. Then I can come up and have one head and two middles. So I did one and I did another one and another one. Those things are like a puzzle.

FR: You said that you don’t write in forms, but there are many forms in leadbelly.

TJ: I guess the counterpointes I’m doing are forms. I also call them double-jointed. That crown of sonnets in the book was the first set of poems in form I ever wrote. The thing about sonnets is that they are long enough to say something and short enough to get to the point. At this point in our history, sonnets can be unrhymed and all kinds of stuff. Fourteen lines, oh, it’s a sonnet. It’s got this kind of elasticity to it. And the rhyme scheme can be as strict as you want it to be and as loose as you want it to be. I am going for the story, in particular.

FR: Which professors did you study with at NYU?

TJ: Philip Levine, Marie Howe, and Sharon Olds.

FR: Did any of those teachers give you a major suggestion for leadbelly that you rejected?

TJ: Yes, Phil Levine told me to put the book in third person. I seriously considered that for a long time. And I couldn’t do it. It was difficult. In that class, I agreed with 99 percent of the things he said. He is a very, very sharp guy. It was hard to do that when I first rolled up in there. I couldn’t do it. It was not a physical thing. It was a mental thing. For me, that is the trope of the book. It would have lost immediacy. I love Phil, though. We are both from Detroit.

FR: Do you feel you have any secret or conspicuous flaws as a writer?

TJ: I don’t think I do personal poems very well.  I think there are some things in my aesthetic that may not be in other people’s aesthetic, such as alliteration. Sometimes I just wallow in it, just roll around in it. I have to check myself.

FR: What was the first poem you wrote in leadbelly?

TJ: It was the one where he is in Red River. He’s run away and they send a dog after him. And he drowns the dog. That was the first poem. It kind of came out of nowhere in a way.

FR: What was the last poem?

TJ: After I finished the book, they wanted me to chop off the last section. My publishers did. The very last poem I had written a year or so ahead of time, then I decided [it] was going to be at the end.

FR: Why?

TJ: Because it is positioned at his christening. I think it is interesting to hear him talk about how he got his name at the end of the book. It is about being broken in a lot of ways.  It is a story about coming into one’s identity.

Jessica Kinnison lives in New Orleans, LA.  Her stories have appeared or are forthcoming in Juked, Cossack Review, Pif Magazine Anthology 2013, and The Southern Humanities Review, among others. Her story “Bone on Bone” was nominated for a Pushcart Prize in 2012.

American poet Tyehimba Jess entered the MFA program at New York University in 2002 with half of his poetry book leadbelly written. His colleagues knew what he was going to bring to every workshop—another leadbelly poem.

leadbelly (2005) follows the story of Louisiana-born folk singer Huddie William Ledbetter, born in 1885, from Shreveport, LA to Texas to Angola Prison to New York City. leadbelly was chosen for the National Poetry Series by Brigit Pegeen Kelly, and was voted one of the top three books of the year by Black Issues Book Review.

A two-time winner of the Chicago Green Mill Slam team, Jess was Chicago’s ambassador to Accra, Ghana. He is the author of African American Pride: Celebrating our Achievements, Contributions and Enduring Legacy (2003), and his work has been featured in numerous anthologies. A Cave Canem Alumni, he received a 2004 Literature Fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts, was a 2004-2005 Winter Fellow at the Provincetown Fine Arts Work Center, and won a 2006 Whiting Award. He exhibited his poetry at the 2011 TedX Nashville Conference. Currently, he is Assistant Professor of English at College of Staten Island.

I interviewed Jess immediately following his reading at the Allegheny County Jail as part of Chatham University’s Words Without Walls Black Writers Series. He visited to tell the story of how Leadbelly’s music lives in each of us as Americans. He says, “At least people are saying his name. They are saying his name.”

.

The Fourth River: Why do you write and for whom?

Tyehimba Jess: I used to write for political purposes strictly. I was interested in writing poems that would inspire people to take political action. That’s what “when niggas love Revolution like they love the bulls” is all about. Those poems were for black people.  But you know you can’t control who reads your work.

So, after a while, I came to accept the idea that I was writing for everybody. Even when I thought I was writing for black people, not all black people agreed with what I was writing. It is difficult to say that you are writing for one particular group of people.  It can limit your imagination. After a while, I was like, “OK, I am writing for the entire world.” I think that later on, it became about writing for me.

The more I write, the more I realize it is about conveying a message. My poetry is pretty clear. Generally, you know what I am writing about by the end of a poem. I try to write that way. But it is working internally, as well.

When I am doing these poems, these syncopated sonnets and all that, I think I am trying to find a way to tell two different stories in one breath. I am looking for metaphors beyond the rhetorical that link into the shape of the poem and [into] the way the poem is read on the page.

FR: What do you think of the academic world as a space for writers?

TJ: I am part of a few different streams of poetry phenomena that are having an effect on the way poetry is being perceived in academia. One is slam: slam was started because of a man named Mark Smith in Chicago who was really disenchanted with the way poetry in academia was presenting itself as a kind of boutique, elite pastime that was not interested in connecting with the ordinary Joe Schmo on the street.

I think that the brilliant thing about Mark is that he was able to start this institution that’s very simple, very organic and really, in a way, doesn’t get the kind of credit in academia that it deserves for its impact on American poetry.

He’s one of those people who deserves a MacArthur grant because he saw a need and he filled it in a very simple way, in a way that answered the call of so many people who were interested. He helped throngs and throngs of people to understand that poetry doesn’t have to be outside of their grasp. It doesn’t have to be something that is performed by other people. They can perform it.

Whatever complaints people may have about slam, it brought poetry to the people and the same with Cave Canem. It’s an institution for black poets started by Toi Dericotte and Cornelius Eady that really eliminated the isolation that so many black poets felt on a fundamental level. The thing about Cave Canem is that it created a connection for black poets nationally and internationally that enabled us to grow at a rate we would not have been able to obtain without that community.

FR: Why did you choose poetry as your form for leadbelly? It reads like a novel.

TJ: First off, I am not as good at fiction as I am at poetry. I seem to be more geared toward saying a certain thing in a certain amount of time. leadbelly is almost all prose poems when he is speaking. Partly because I thought of him in terms of prose, really simply and not all enjambed. You know, it is prosaic and it follows a particular arc. It is linear in that respect. I think those are reasons it seems like a novel, in a way.

FR: Philip Larkin once wrote, “the impulse to preserve lies at the bottom of all art.” In your case, what are you preserving in your poems?

TJ: Yes, I guess I am in the business of historical preservation. There were a few things I was trying to preserve. One was Leadbelly’s legacy but also the idea of the work that the old music has done for us.  When I say “us,” I mean nationally what that work has done.

That legacy continues. The thing I think about a lot is the roots of the music, particularly in regard to the African community and the African-American contribution. With this new work I am doing, it is beyond the music. It is about theater and literature as well. When you look at the intellectual property, so much of that property has been generated from the black community.

Paying homage to Leadbelly, trying to present a portrait of his life, to me, meant recalling the pain and the joy that went into making that music. It lies at the bottom of American music. So I guess I’m back where Philip Larkin was: at the bottom of his preservation.

FR: So under everything is the need to preserve?

TJ: Yes, I would say that. Continue that story forward. Just having people say the word “Leadbelly” today in 2013, I am glad to be a part of that. And it’s not just him; it is the story and everything that the story entails, that idea, that aesthetic.

FR: You were a DJ at the University of Chicago for 10 years.  Who were some of the people you played most?

TJ: Man, I played so many people: Alice Coltrane, Sonny Sharrock, Art Ensemble of Chicago. I think the beautiful thing about Chicago is that they have something called AACM. It is really sort of an avant-garde arts organization.  I was very privileged to see these guys walking around the neighborhood. Overseas, they were superstars. You know, they were just phenomenal musicians. So I got the opportunity to see them on a regular basis. Lester Boyd, Malichi Favors, I got to see Sun Ra a couple times, Fred Anderson.

There was a little bar called the Velvet Lounge. It’s still there. It was the best music in Chicago. It was very cheap. The musical legacy in Chicago was wonderful. Then you also had the blues musicians. So my show started out as all jazz. Then it started to include blues, too. Like I played Muddy Waters, then I’d play John Coltrane, then I’d play some Sun Ra, then I’d go all the way back in the shed to get some Robert Johnson. I’d go back and forth and back and forth. I was playing with what Amiri Baraka would call “The Music,” the idea of the genres of music just drifting together into a continuum, especially with jazz and blues. I loved it. Then I would do interviews with political prisoners, prisoners of war and activists.

FR: I noticed that you use variations on blues phrases in leadbelly like “black snake moan.” Did you put them in while you were writing or did you go back and texturize the piece with common blues phrases?

TJ: It was probably a combination of the two. It’s kind of like the first pass: I go through a poem and have these weak words and stronger words. I take out words that are not contributing to the energy of the poem, and I think about words that could make the poem more active or add to the texture, and I go back and throw in a lot of other allusions. I try to reach in as many directions as I can. Some of them come naturally and those are the ones that I am actually more weary of because they are more likely to be cliché. If they are clichés, I try to come back and change them up a little.

FR: Do you think people who don’t listen to blues would notice blues phrases?

TJ: It’s hard for me to say what people’s perception of blues is. I think partly because I have been listening to it for so long. It is hard for me to detach myself from the lack of understanding regarding blues. If you were to say the word “blues” to most people, maybe one of the words that would come to their minds is “Eric Clapton” or “B.B. King” or “guitar” or the opening of the Dave Chapelle show. So there are a lot of standard images that people come up with. I am trying to write either against that or to deepen that understanding. I think that is true with anybody. If you were to say “polka music,” I probably wouldn’t know that much. I should. I think “accordion.” That is part of my charge to understand how all those musics can relate.

FR: How did your perspective on the book change after you went to Shreveport for the first time?

The most important thing I did there was visit his grave. I also met his grandniece. He is buried in this churchyard that is off of a dirt path that is off a dirt path that is off of a one-lane road. It’s way the fuck out. He died in New York but he was buried down there. It gave me an impression of where he walked. Of course, I was seeing Shreveport past its heyday. I could still see the streets and soak in the atmosphere. It was good to see the places I had written about.

I always felt guilty about the ability to claim that territory. I wanted to treat it with the respect it deserves. I wanted to treat him and the place that he came from with respect. I felt like it was incumbent upon me to give it a visit and say “Hello.” So, in a way, it gave me a kind of permission to continue on that journey of seeking out the details of his legacy.

FR: Is it true your immediate family would not exist without the Great   Migration?

TJ: You could say the same thing for probably at least half of black people in America today. The South was repressive. The North was repressive but in a different way.

FR: Michele Norris said that her parents didn’t talk about the South because they didn’t want to put rocks in their children’s pockets. If they put that anger in their pockets, it would weigh them down. Your parents were active in the community and also in race relations. How did that affect you and your writing?

TJ: It affected me in several ways. One is my dad is an avid, avid reader. He probably had 30 magazine subscriptions and books all around the house all the time. Both of them were very intent on having us read. I have an older brother and an older sister. My brother went to Michigan. My sister went to MIT. I think that my parents’ support and insistence upon college and that exposure to the necessity of reading at a very young age affected me.

As far as their relationships with their hometowns: I went down to visit my grandmother in Greenville, South Carolina when I was a kid. It was like visiting another planet.  This was in the 1970s. Greenville at that time was not the Greenville it is now. It is really a big, bustling city now. Back then, it was not a big place. There was a dirt road in front of my grandma’s house.

My dad didn’t talk very much about (well he didn’t talk that much at all) about South Carolina and his life down there. And my mother would talk about Oklahoma to a certain degree; she still does.

I think that their attitude was similar to what you are talking about. When you look at it, it really was like going from one country to another country. I mean, my dad was in the Confederate state—South Carolina. He still has his high school diploma. The signature on it is Strom Thurmond’s. My dad is 80 years old. It was like an entirely different land of opportunity. There is no way my father would have been able to work for the Department of Public Health in South Carolina at that time. There is just no way; it would not have been possible.

My mother left Oklahoma because she could not attend the nursing schools there. My mom also lived in Little Rock, Arkansas. She graduated before those nine students marched up the steps to that high school. Their attitude was the one of most black folks at that time: they wanted to get out.

FR: You changed your name legally in 1999. What did your parents think about that?

TJ: They were reluctantly accepting of it. I was living as Jesse Goodwin before I changed it, formally, in 1999, but [informally, starting in 1992], everybody called me Tyehimba Jess. You will be surprised how quickly you find yourself around nobody who knows your original name. It caught on within a couple years.  By the time it became legal, it had pretty much already happened anyway.

FR: Tyehimba means “we stand as a nation.” What does that mean to you?

TJ: I got it from a book in college. I took a lot of time trying to find a word that would be appropriate. This word, to me, infused the idea of black self-determination. You know, working together to achieve various and sundry goals. On the other hand, I didn’t want to completely abandon my family in that process. I was disturbed by our name being Goodwin because it was passed down from a slave owner. So I decided to keep my first name and make it my last name. My first name was Jesse, and that is my father’s name and his father’s name.

FR: Did your writing change once you changed your name?

TJ: My name came slowly.

FR: The name was your public persona and slowly became your private persona?

TJ: I think I was part of the last generation to change our names to African names. I mean, I don’t know what 20 year-olds are doing now, but I don’t think they are changing their names to African names. Many of the artists at that time were changing their names if not legally, informally. So it was not a unique thing.

The good thing about it is that I did not change my name more than once and I really carefully considered it before [the change]. I waited for seven years before I made it legal. So I had a long time to live with it. The decision to make it legal, to me, meant that I could stop leading a double life. Stop being Tyehimba Jess until I needed a check signed. It seemed inauthentic. I didn’t consider the name inauthentic. I considered the state’s right to claim what my name was illegitimate. One of my questions was whether or not to give the state that legitimacy, but after a while, I knew that, practically, it was the thing to do.

FR: Where did you start on the page when writing the syncopated sonnet about the twins?

TJ:  I started with the middle. I finished the middle because really the middle is based off of another poem I did called “Blind Tom.” It was the first one I made that went down and back. It was about Blind Tom being buried in two different locations. So, when it came to the McCoy Twins, I was wracking my brain as to how to approach talking about them.

I guess the form and the subject matter came simultaneously. I thought, well, I will mimic the shape of their bodies. So how can I do that? I already had the Blind Tom thing, so I thought I could reverse the polarity to have two heads and one middle. Then I can come up and have one head and two middles. So I did one and I did another one and another one. Those things are like a puzzle.

FR: You said that you don’t write in forms, but there are many forms in leadbelly.

TJ: I guess the counterpointes I’m doing are forms. I also call them double-jointed. That crown of sonnets in the book was the first set of poems in form I ever wrote. The thing about sonnets is that they are long enough to say something and short enough to get to the point. At this point in our history, sonnets can be unrhymed and all kinds of stuff. Fourteen lines, oh, it’s a sonnet. It’s got this kind of elasticity to it. And the rhyme scheme can be as strict as you want it to be and as loose as you want it to be. I am going for the story, in particular.

FR: Which professors did you study with at NYU?

TJ: Philip Levine, Marie Howe, and Sharon Olds.

FR: Did any of those teachers give you a major suggestion for leadbelly that you rejected?

TJ: Yes, Phil Levine told me to put the book in third person. I seriously considered that for a long time. And I couldn’t do it. It was difficult. In that class, I agreed with 99 percent of the things he said. He is a very, very sharp guy. It was hard to do that when I first rolled up in there. I couldn’t do it. It was not a physical thing. It was a mental thing. For me, that is the trope of the book. It would have lost immediacy. I love Phil, though. We are both from Detroit.

FR: Do you feel you have any secret or conspicuous flaws as a writer?

TJ: I don’t think I do personal poems very well.  I think there are some things in my aesthetic that may not be in other people’s aesthetic, such as alliteration. Sometimes I just wallow in it, just roll around in it. I have to check myself.

FR: What was the first poem you wrote in leadbelly?

TJ: It was the one where he is in Red River. He’s run away and they send a dog after him. And he drowns the dog. That was the first poem. It kind of came out of nowhere in a way.

FR: What was the last poem?

TJ: After I finished the book, they wanted me to chop off the last section. My publishers did. The very last poem I had written a year or so ahead of time, then I decided [it] was going to be at the end.

FR: Why?

TJ: Because it is positioned at his christening. I think it is interesting to hear him talk about how he got his name at the end of the book. It is about being broken in a lot of ways.  It is a story about coming into one’s identity.

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Jessica Kinnison lives in New Orleans, LA.  Her stories have appeared or are forthcoming in Juked, Cossack Review, Pif Magazine Anthology 2013, and The Southern Humanities Review, among others. Her story “Bone on Bone” was nominated for a Pushcart Prize in 2012.

Where the Lion is also the Lion Tamer: An Interview with Salgado Maranhão and Alexis Levitin

 by Leah Brennan

Brazilian poet Salgado Maranhão often writes about the dry, harsh landscape of Brazil’s northeast region where he was born. He credits his love for language to his mother and her support of the poets who traveled and performed around Brazil. Striking images of fire, dust, and the sea keep his work grounded in place, but his work also transcends the physical world. He pays homage to the people of his community, and to communities everywhere, formed by place, language, or love.

Maranhão has won numerous awards for his work, including the prestigious Brazilian Academy of Letters Prize for his collected poems, A Cora da Palavra (The Color of the Word) in 2011. Sol Sangüíne (Blood of the Sun) is his first bilingual collection. An accomplished musician and songwriter for many of Brazil’s most beloved jazz and pop artists, Maranhão infuses his lines with a sense of musicality.

While Maranhão considers his lyrics separate from his poetry, he has had considerable success in both. In addition to his awards, a number of Brazilian artists collaborated to produce a tribute album in 2006, titled Amorogio.

For Blood of the Sun, Maranhão worked with renowned translator Alexis Levitin,

author of thirty-one books, as well as publications in 25 anthologies in more than 200 literary journals. One of the most well respected English translators of Portuguese and Brazilian literature, Levitin translates not only sense, but sound as well. In Blood of the Sun, he incorporates assonance and slant rhyme to convey the rhythm of Maranhão ‘s Portuguese.

Maranhão and Levitin recently met with me at Chatham University’s Jennie King Mellon Library to discuss poetry, translation, music, and love. Please note that when Maranhão is speaking, it is Levitin’s translation that I’ve transcribed.

Brennan: How did you begin working together?

Maranhão: We met each other in 2007 at Brown University. The chairman of the department of Portuguese and Brazilian studies at Brown, Luiz Fernando Valente, brought us together.

Levitin: Valente was already a great fan of Salgado’s poetry and was eager to see it translated into English. He invited Salgado from Rio de Janeiro and me, from Plattsburg, New York, much less romantic, to attend a conference at Brown, intending us to meet and hoping that we would hit it off and work on a book together, which is indeed what happened.

Brennan: So, would you consider this work a collaboration?

Levitin: You could say the translation is a collaboration, because, in the process, I went over everything with him. We read it aloud together, and so on.

Brennan: Would you say that’s one of the greatest advantages of working with a living writer?

Levitin: I always prefer working with a living writer. You can ask them questions, both about meaning and about sound. In other words, about form and content. Everyone understands that you need to ask questions about content, but really you need some help with form as well.

Brennan: In terms of form, are you referring to the way the poems look on the page, the structure of the poems?

Levitin: More than that. Listen to this:

Maranhão: Há que se viver o árido / como se cálido.

Levitin: “One must live the arid / impassioned and torrid.” Arido and cálido: it’s not a full rhyme, but a slant rhyme. Arid and torrid: it’s not exactly a full rhyme, but it’s close. Now, listen to the next stanza:

Maranhão: Há que se viver o breu / como se brio.

Levitin: Again, it’s a slant rhyme. Breu and brio isn’t a full rhyme. I made it a full rhyme, and it’s made richer by saying, “one must live the vile / with valor, with style.” So, we have vile and valor as a slant rhyme, and vile and style as a full rhyme. And Salgado can help point out to me the different things he’s doing in the original, so that I can notice them, especially the different things he’s doing with sound. And here, palavra, larva, alarde. He’s playing with the Ls and the As and the Rs, and I have to be aware of it. I try to reproduce it, or to produce some repetition of sounds in English which will not be identical but will create the same web of sounds.

Brennan: I remember reading that, for both of you, it’s the sound that’s most important. You mentioned these moments of good fortune in translation, of finding the word that fits the meaning and also the sound.

Levitin: Sometimes, it takes the passage of time before you find the right solution. We’ve sat around together in Rio working on a poem and not finding a solution, and then suddenly it appears. Or it may only appear the next day, so it’s as if the solution has to mature.

Brennan: Like writing poetry.

Maranhão: Sometimes, the right word comes a week later. You send an e-mail to your subconscious. The subconscious searches its archives, and a week later it comes.

Brennan: So, it’s more like snail mail than e-mail.

Maranhão: Not always at the time you want it. Poetry is mysterious. Like women.

Brennan: Yes, I would agree with that. Can you tell me how working with a translator affected your writing or your writing process?

Maranhão: Well, it’s had a great effect on me. It opened for me an understanding of the field of translation. I’m basically monolingual, so it’s a field that I didn’t have much to do with before. Although, of course I’d read English and American and French poets in Portuguese. I certainly knew that a poem could be translated into another language. What I didn’t know was the modus operandi. How do you actually accomplish it?

Brennan: That’s the mystery.

Maranhão: I was able to experience the craft of harmonizing the rhythms of one language into another, or harmonically presenting the rhythms of one language in another. I discovered what hard work is involved in finding the right word or the right phrase in translation, but also that it’s a bit chaotic or random. Sometimes it just comes from the air. Now, I realize the importance of the translator. And I’m convinced that they are profoundly underestimated.

Brennan: Alexis, I’ve heard you speak about translation as a moral act, as a way to increase understanding between cultures.

Levitin: Of course. I do think it’s moral, but here’s the deal. Anything you do in life presents a moral dilemma, because you can do it sloppily or you can try to do it well. And to do anything well is in a sense a moral triumph. Obviously, you can trap me with paradoxes; for example, the Nazis did their extermination of the Jews very well, and that of course is not moral, so there are paradoxes in what I’m saying, but in general, to do your work well is already a moral triumph. And then there’s the communication. My sense is  that we’re all islands. The reason John Donne said, “no man is an island” is exactly because we are. And we have to overcome that, and surely translating is one hopeful way to make a connection from one island to another. In this case, not just from one individual to another but from an individual from one archipelago–let’s say the Portuguese archipelago–to those of us who live in the archipelago of Anglo-Saxonic English. And making connections is surely, I think, a moral act.

Maranhão: Translation is a vital act for culture and for civilization itself. The labor of these upstanding people, the translators, has been an enormous contribution to all cultures. Imagine what our life would be like had no one translated the Bible, the Iliad, the Divine Comedy, and many other books that have made our life so very rich. Even today, in our technologically advanced era, when you can make a translation from Google. You can’t use Google for essential and symbolic language, though. Despite Google and technology, the translator is essential for helping us bring an awareness and understanding from one culture to another through language.

Brennan: It seems especially true for poetry. There’s just no way to use Google Translate.

Levitin: If Google translated a poem, it would be a totally different poem.

Brennan: When I was reading these poems, I noticed that, while a few of them are in first person, many of them are removed from the personal perspective and focused more on observations, especially of the physical landscape. I’m wondering if that is a reflection of, not only a connection to landscape, but maybe also a lack of ego?

Maranhão: Since my story comes from a community, I was never really alone with my ego, so that even when I do speak in the first person, I am carrying along with me a communal sense of things. I bring a community along with me. Even when I speak in the third person, I am still present as a kind of hidden observer. If you read my poetry carefully, here or there you’ll catch glimpses of me, just as you do of Alfred Hitchcock in his films.

Brennan: Alexis, can you also speak about the question of ego from a translator’s perspective?

Levitin: Even if translators begin life as egocentric as anyone else, they cannot very well remain so. The first factor is that they are completely dependent on somebody else. A poet sits down in front of a blank piece of paper, and something grows on that paper because of the poet. I never sit down in front of a blank piece of paper, because I already have a book in my hand that is written by someone else. Second of all, although poets generally do not become very famous in our culture, translators hardly become known at all. Even if you do a good job, you tend to remain relatively anonymous. Third of all, in our culture, most rewards take a financial shape, and obviously poetry by its very nature, in American society, garners almost no financial rewards, and the translation of poetry even less so. If you’re not humble to begin with, then as you live your life as a translator, you better become humble, because that’s what life is telling you. You’re important, but not that important.

Brennan: Speaking about the support for artists in the United States, I’m wondering what it’s like to be a poet in Brazil?

Maranhão: Recently, enormous state enterprises, such as state-run oil companies or electric companies, have begun to support major artistic events such as film festivals and jazz festivals, which are of cultural interest. In fact, they are also beginning to support things that have some pedagogical value. However, poetry doesn’t really interest government agencies because, alas, it doesn’t appeal to great numbers of people. And more and more, these big companies that have money are often being co-opted by political figures, whose real interest is to win votes, and you don’t win many votes with poetry. Politicians don’t have the slightest interest in poetry. Nonetheless, poetry, which is an amphibian creature, survives both in the wet season and the dry.

Brennan: Can you talk about your experience working with jazz musicians and your experience as a songwriter?

Maranhão: My education as a poet occurred simultaneously with the growth of a movement that was both musical and poetic in Brazil called Tropicália. The leaders of this movement were Caetano Veloso, Gilberto Gil, and Torquato Neto, among others. I was ten or twelve years younger than they were. I had the chance to be friends with one of the leaders, Torquato Neto, and he stirred in me an interest in the vanguardism of poetry, and encouraged me to take part in that world of music and writing song lyrics. Neto was one of the most distinguished writers of song lyrics in Brazil, and he was a close friend of the founders of the concrete poetry movement in Brazil, Haroldo de Campos and Augusto de Campos.

Brennan: So, is working with musicians at all like working with a translator?

Maranhão: It’s a work in metrics, because music is mathematical and the writer has to adjust. If you don’t find the right word with the right rhythm and the right sound, [the song] just won’t work. So, strangely enough, even some very good poets are unable to do [the work] successfully, to write lyrics that work with music. If you’re writing the lyrics first, you have to somehow be foreseeing or imaging the music. A poem has to have a certain rhythmic availability, and even an availability in choice of words, because if it is sung, it is sung for all the people, not only for erudite academics. Erudite poems will not work as song lyrics for the people. And in fact, I do not include my song lyrics in any of my books of poetry, because it’s a different mechanism and a different density.

Levitin: I completely agree with him, but there are people who don’t agree. Back in the 70s, the Norton Anthology included Bob Dylan in the Norton Anthology of American Poetry. I thought it was ridiculous, but they did it. I know Leonard Cohen refuses to discuss the difference between poetry and the poetry of song lyrics, and I must say that Leonard Cohen comes as close as one possibly can in pop music to being a real poet.

Maranhão: Sometimes, a rather fragile, or a slender, slim poem gains great success as a song lyric, because it is anchored on a beautiful melody. There on the white page, that poem is all alone. There, the cruelty of the reader can devour it, because it lies there exposed, and it doesn’t have the music to support it.

Levitin: I think Salgado and I completely agree on this distinction between song lyrics and poetry; coming from him, it’s more significant because he’s succeeded in writing song lyrics, and I’m only an observer.

Maranhão: I am also a cruel reader.

Brennan: I think poets always are. And I have one last question. I’m wondering what the word amoragio means.

Maranhão: I made up the word from two words. Love and another word, something like a surcharge, or the price you pay. If there’s a car that everyone wants, and there are very few of them, the car dealer will raise the price, and that raised price is the agio. After all, the  most expensive thing, in a sense, is love because you pay a very high surcharge in suffering, in despair, in loneliness and loss.

Levitin: He says that [love] is a flame that unties, or unravels the knots in the skein. And easily ignores…I’d want to think about this. I really hate it when he makes me translate poetry in one second flat. The word is good, but it’s also the goods. It ignores the good, and has disdain for truth.

Maranhão: It is a bridge of air.

Levitin: A bridge of air from Eden to insanity. Now, he’s saying that love is a dance before a circle of angels. A dance before a circle of drunken angels.

Maranhão: Where the lion is also the lion tamer.

Levitin: Where the lion is also the lion tamer and who, after rising to the throne of splendor, gives up his own flesh to the hunter. Or, surrenders his very flesh to the hunter. I like that! That’s good. That’s poetry.

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Leah Brennan studies fiction and poetry at Chatham University in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, where she also teaches ESL and yoga. Her translations of French op-eds can be found at WatchingAmerica.com.

Note: The lines that are referenced in this interview are from parts 1 and 4 of Salgado Mranhão’s poem “Blood of the Sun.”  The cover and interview photos are by Kinsley Stocum.