Posts in Books on Poetry
Poetry as Activism, The Rhetoric of Empathy, and The Breaking of Beliefs: Emily K. Michael on Her Poem "A Phenomenology of Blindness"

Emily K. Michael

When  Emily K. Michael approached Primal School about a possible interview back in May, saying that she was interested in “the tension between performance and page, and the presence of other voices (human and non-human),” I was intrigued and embarked on a lightning tour of the work of hers that was available on the web. In her eye for the world’s beauty as well as her candor in speaking about her life as a blind person, I sensed the stirrings of a rich conversation. I suggested we talk about her poem “A Phenomenology of Blindness” (originally published in Rogue Agent), with its implicit advocacy and benign but frank exploration of  prejudice. I felt committed to exploring thoroughly the machinations of the poem’s central idea and was grateful for Emily’s willingness to go there with me. Discussing her work, Emerson's words came to mind: “It is not meter, but a meter-making argument that makes a poem, a thought so passionate and alive that like the spirit of a plant or an animal it has an architecture of its own, and adorns nature with a new thing.” — HLJ 

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I don’t normally begin interviews by asking poets about their titles, but I’d like to begin there because of the truth claim inherent in this poem’s title. The poem is intended to be a “phenomenology.” How did the poem and idea arrive? 

I suspect that this poem has been a long time coming. It responds to the intense curiosity that I often sense in others, even when it's not directly expressed. People hear that I'm blind or see me traveling with my guide dog or stopping to read the braille on the elevator, and they start firing off questions: "Is it like this? Is it like that? I bet it's like this!" So, when a colleague of mine said she was having trouble writing a blind character, I sat down and wrote this poem.

I wanted to say, "Look, it's not like any of these things." Because others’ speculation and theorizing is done in my absence — or it's done as if I'm not standing there…when I am. Whether it's a portrayal of disability in the media or an actual stranger confronting me at the coffeeshop, nondisabled people seem to take hold of stories of disability without asking us what's really going on.

"Phenomenology" seemed like the right name for a catalog of experiences that weren't what blindness is at all. And that's how the poem helped me to say that blindness isn't all of these things, but it also isn't One Thing. It isn't one story. It's this wild unruly mosaic that's part of my life.

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A PHENOMENOLOGY OF BLINDNESS

It’s not like walking through life with your glasses off.
I mean, sometimes we wear glasses, but they’re different 
from yours. Thicker, broader, darker. And they don’t
work the quotidian miracle of correctable vision. 

It’s not like getting your eyes dilated once a year, staggering
out to the car under those stiff black shades with the sharp edges,
tearing up beneath the merciless sun and wondering how you’ll manage
the drive home. Damn, someone just texted you and you can’t read your phone.

It’s not like groping in the dark when you come home late
and you can’t find your keys because you and your girlfriends
had too many pomegranate martinis. I know it was a birthday, 
but if you could think clearly, you’d know where your keys are. 

It’s not like leaving the nail salon after a pedicure, shuffling forward 
in disposable flip-flops, doing everything you can not to chip that
gorgeous raspberry shimmer polish. It’s not like that at all. 

It’s not like feeling faint because you forgot to eat lunch — you were
working so hard you couldn’t even stop for a granola bar, so you 
cling to your colleague’s arm as he guides you outside. It’s nice 
to have support, you think, nice to know he doesn’t mind helping. 

It’s not convenient, popular, or cumbersome. It’s not a filter
that you can slide over the world, not a stylish coat hanging
in your closet. I, too, am waiting for winter because I love
wearing my coats — peacoats, swing coats, blazers. I have 
so many! It’s just that blindness isn’t one of them. 

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Books on Poetry, Inspiration, MFA, Reading Recommendations, Spoken WordHannah Lee JonesBlindness, Disability, Emily K. Michael, John Felstiner, Rainer Maria Rilke, Rogue Agent, Stephen Dobyns, WordgatheringComment
"Is-ness", Throwing Sonic Daggers, and the Nature of Power: Phillip B. Williams on His Poem "Of the Question of the Self and How It Never Quite Gets Answered"

Phillip B. Williams. Photo credit: Rachel Eliza Griffiths

I first met Phillip B Williams at the Best New Poets reading at AWP 2015 in Minneapolis, after being moved immensely by his poem “Do-rag”. It’s a pleasure to interview him for the blog over a year later, having seen the release of his book  Thief in the Interior, which could not be timelier reading in the wake of recent police violence in this country’s ongoing war on black bodies. With this poem, Phillip explores the workings of a mutable and constantly uncertain identity. Emotive as well as smart, probing as well as generous, the language in his poems carries both music and the invitation for the reader to look and think deeply. This one of Phillip’s is previously unpublished, and I thank him for entrusting me with it. — HLJ    

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Reading this poem puts me in mind of the Talib Kweli line you quote in your book  Thief in the Interior: “But I never write to remain silent.” There’s a recurrence in your work of this theme of silence, from silence as coping mechanism (“If I don’t speak then maybe I won’t die”), to the silencing of the other (“no one listens”). How does this particular poem of yours connect to that silence?

I think in this poem silence operates as both an identifying marker for the powerless but also an omen; the quiet before the storm, so to speak. There’s a kind of puppetry that happens when power is wielded in the way this poem is critiquing. But what happens when the puppet decides to speak for itself and to act on its own accord? What happens when the puppet behaves outside its true nature and acts fully human, rage and all?

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OF THE QUESTION OF THE SELF AND HOW IT NEVER QUITE GETS ANSWERED

In the poem, figure A is distilled to shadow and floor-looking.

Figure B musics crane-necked, anticipatory for the nih-nih.

I’ve always been a sucker for nomenclature.

The many ways I nigger without knowing.
I’m so Black I’m somebody’s mama sewing

her eyes to the ground. Shamecracked. Akimbo in exclusive gaze.

Lawd, Lawd, Lawd—who is I talking to and where is I? One must
prepare to be seen at all times astounded into erasure, ill-imagined.

Some of us eat watermelon in the closet, breath fermenting
and vulpine, to be able to, at all, eat without being eaten.
Safe in the umbra room dancing ensues, uncaricatured O.

Figure B sniffs figure A. Figure A is hips and textile. Puppet-pulled.
History yawns from the Os of likely weapons, a viper in the shade.

I know because in me the dark is alive and the dark makes plans.

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Books on Poetry, Conferences, Craft, MFA, Reading RecommendationsHannah Lee JonesBest New Poets, Carl Phillips, Jonterri Gadson, Phillip B. Williams, Rita Dove, Robert Duncan, Vinyl Poetry
Advice for Poets: an Interview with Tomas Q. Morin

This interview with Tomas is one of three posts on the site that were written for The MFA Project in fall/winter 2015, prior to the start of Primal School. 

I had been a distant admirer of Tomás Q. Morín, but the award-winning poet from Texas finally entered my orbit several months ago when he taught me it’s indeed okay to “friend” a writer you admire on Facebook and enter a conversation. With that gesture of kindness a door was opened to the interview below, a treat for all you practicing poets out there. And be sure to check out his poem “Nature Boy” at the Poetry Foundation website.  — Hannah

Tell us a little about your MFA experience. Specifically, let’s talk about pros and cons: what are some good reasons to pursue an MFA in creative writing? What are some of the challenges?

I’m a graduate of the MFA program at Texas State University. When I was mulling over whether to pursue an MFA or not I was a first year PhD student in the Hispanic & Italian Studies program at Johns Hopkins. I was spending a lot of time writing poems. A friend encouraged me to write a poet whose work I idolized, a story I recount in an essay in Coming Close: Forty Essays on Philip Levine, and after some reluctance, I did. Levine wrote me back and asked me to send him some poems I had faith in with the promise he would tell me the truth. His response was positive and gave me the courage to jump ship at Hopkins and try to learn everything I could about making poems.

I think if you feel you still have a lot left to learn, and we should all feel that way, then you should get an MFA if you don’t have one. The biggest benefit of one, to me, is that it saves you time. In a good MFA program you can learn in 2-3 years what it might take you 10 to learn on your own. There are exceptions of course, but I think this is generally true. Being in an MFA program is like becoming an apprentice to a cobbler. By the end of your apprenticeship you won’t be a master cobbler that makes the best shoes in the world; rather, it means you know how to make shoes. What you do with those skills and how far you take them is up to you. The same goes for writing stories and poems and what not. One challenge to getting an MFA that I haven’t seen go away is navigating all the self-doubt and anxiety and fear that so many students feel. When a lot of people who all feel like that get in one place for a few years it can create a tough atmosphere for everyone. This is where teachers and mentors and administrations need to step in and be supportive and encouraging.

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Books on Poetry, Conferences, MFA, PoetryMFA, Reading Recommendations, RevisionHannah Lee JonesEllen Bryant Voigt, Mari L'Esperance, Philip Levine, Tomas MorinComment
Reading (& Copying) to Write

One of a series of bi-monthly posts for The MFA Project, a resource on the web for writers seeking a minimal-cost writing education. 

Great fiction writers, it can be argued, are made out of good readers. And readers of everything: poetry, novels, nonfiction, magazine articles, and, if you’re like Sherman Alexie, the backs of cereal boxes. Just about everything can be fodder for the creative process, and every serious writer knows this, seeking out that special material to throw in the reptilian story processor of the mind for future deployment in the form of a short story, a poem, a novel of his or her own.

Every time we read a book, the flow, the cadences, the rhythms of sentences implant themselves in the brain. Later, and scarcely with our awareness, they eventually get shaken up, scrambled, and tossed back out, only this time as unique and fully formed expressions we’ve created ourselves. After about a week of reading a lot of books I always scratch my head in amazement when I find myself saying things in conversation, for example, that I never would have thought it in me to say. Eloquence rarely comes easily for most of us, except by spending time with words, bathing in them; and, whether you’re a poet or not (and especially if you’re a poet), putting them in your mouth and tasting them, observing their texture, noting their umpteen different shades of meaning.

In case you think that’s a little overkill, in a recent interview, renowned novelist David Mitchell expressed in the nerdiest manner possible how much he loved the language. “The best part, the part you begin with, is the sentence. Say you’re working on a sentence,” he said. “And you’ve got these ideas. Use subject, verb, object. Then, let’s make it a little Yoda-like; rearrange it a little. Someone described my character Hugo Lamb as an ‘Oxbridge Huckster.’ Lovely! Never seen those two words together, so let’s combine those. But let’s not end there, let’s have a comma – and tack on an adverb at the end. Badaboom, ch-ch-boom! It’s just GREAT.” The geekery of this comment drew laughter from his audience at the Wheeler Centre. But if you dig down, past Mitchell’s memorable characters and his innovative storytelling, it’s his enthusiasm and energy for bringing his language alive on the page that makes his writing so sublime, and why his novels have drawn such an audience.

So how do we cultivate that same Mitchell-esque passion in hopes that his brand of genius will eventually osmose into our own brains?  

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Books on Poetry, Craft, Habits, InspirationHannah Lee JonesComment