Please tell us about the making of “When I Was a Man.”
I’d been writing parts of this poem in my head for months, but most of it arrived on the page this past June at the Cave Canem retreat, which is a week long with daily workshops. In my group’s first workshop — led by Lyrae Van Clief-Stefanon — Kristiana Rae Colón submitted a poem that (though I won’t disservice it here with simplification) presented questions about gender equity, consent, violence, and intimacy in ways that I found impossible to respond to with easy or familiar political posturing. This poem very noticeably silenced all the male members of our workshop, which was a performative aspect that preoccupied me for days. At the same time, I was — and am — practicing awareness of how much space I take up as a man / someone with male privilege, and to witness men elsewhere interject our subjectivities without petition or self-consciousness and then be rendered speechless in this space that sort of requires dialogue — that shit was so interesting. My attempts and failures to answer that silence became “When I Was a Man,” which I submitted for workshop a couple days later.
Do you practice another form of art? If so, do you find that it competes with or complements your writing?
I play bass guitar. There’s no competition because, lamentably, I’m not currently in a band. Every few days I have a solo jam session in my front room, which is sad and cathartic and productive for my writing.
Do you have any poems in mind that you would like to write, but you know they are not ready to be written yet?
Many. I’m working on — that is, mostly conceptualizing — a 40-section poem titled “Quarantyne.” So far, I think only four of the sections I’ve written will survive. It’s difficult to write the piece in earnest, I think, on the eve of a possible Trump presidency, among other factors.
Do you write in forms?
Almost always. Theoretically always. As a student of Carl Phillips, I like to entertain the argument that every poem that presumes to escape form is in fact employing a nonce form. From there, I kinda challenge myself: What will be this poem’s particular form? What are its rules? How will I break them?
What thoughts do you have about poetry’s relationship to the supernatural?
Goodness, I’ve been in this question often lately. I keep thinking about the historic synonymity of Blackness and supernature, about systemic erasure and the miracle of being, about the irony of my English literacy and the poem’s moment of puncture that no language ever seems to satisfactorily explicate. I think poetry is to me as supernatural as anything.
I’d been writing parts of this poem in my head for months, but most of it arrived on the page this past June at the Cave Canem retreat, which is a week long with daily workshops. In my group’s first workshop — led by Lyrae Van Clief-Stefanon — Kristiana Rae Colón submitted a poem that (though I won’t disservice it here with simplification) presented questions about gender equity, consent, violence, and intimacy in ways that I found impossible to respond to with easy or familiar political posturing. This poem very noticeably silenced all the male members of our workshop, which was a performative aspect that preoccupied me for days. At the same time, I was — and am — practicing awareness of how much space I take up as a man / someone with male privilege, and to witness men elsewhere interject our subjectivities without petition or self-consciousness and then be rendered speechless in this space that sort of requires dialogue — that shit was so interesting. My attempts and failures to answer that silence became “When I Was a Man,” which I submitted for workshop a couple days later.
Do you practice another form of art? If so, do you find that it competes with or complements your writing?
I play bass guitar. There’s no competition because, lamentably, I’m not currently in a band. Every few days I have a solo jam session in my front room, which is sad and cathartic and productive for my writing.
Do you have any poems in mind that you would like to write, but you know they are not ready to be written yet?
Many. I’m working on — that is, mostly conceptualizing — a 40-section poem titled “Quarantyne.” So far, I think only four of the sections I’ve written will survive. It’s difficult to write the piece in earnest, I think, on the eve of a possible Trump presidency, among other factors.
Do you write in forms?
Almost always. Theoretically always. As a student of Carl Phillips, I like to entertain the argument that every poem that presumes to escape form is in fact employing a nonce form. From there, I kinda challenge myself: What will be this poem’s particular form? What are its rules? How will I break them?
What thoughts do you have about poetry’s relationship to the supernatural?
Goodness, I’ve been in this question often lately. I keep thinking about the historic synonymity of Blackness and supernature, about systemic erasure and the miracle of being, about the irony of my English literacy and the poem’s moment of puncture that no language ever seems to satisfactorily explicate. I think poetry is to me as supernatural as anything.