Standards of Beauty, Decolonizing Our Language, and Poetry as a Dialogue With Our Contemporaries: Katelyn Durst on Her Poem "Curl"

Katelyn DurstIn this season of tumult and deep psychic unrest for our country, it hardly seems a coincidence that I'd been pondering bringing in new interviews with poets whose work is inseparable from their activism. Incidentally I'd also been aiming to feature younger voices. By the time of our interview, Katelyn Durst had impressed me not just with her poems of struggle and identity and longing and resilience, but her highly visible and participatory commitment to the social justice that inflames her writing. From a distance of months – I'd interviewed Katelyn back in August – it occured to me while putting together this post that "Curl" is not merely a poem about race or identity, but love. Self-love of the kind Katelyn embodies here, a kind that is so easy to forget in times such as this: just one gift of the many which poets can offer as utterances of comfort in a hurting world. – HLJ

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So you and I first met at Grunewald Guild back in May, and I was sitting with you in the lounge area by the kitchen, and you read me this poem and I remember thinking, “this girl is fearless.” Tell me a bit about this piece – what began it for you and how you wrote it.

It’s so great to hear that, because the truth is I often feel afraid. This poem came out of a homework assignment that was given to an international baccalaureate (IB) 11th grade English class I was TA-ing for this school year. The teacher assigned the poem "Girl" by Jamaica Kincaid, and the poem really resonated with me, with its fractured repetition. If there’s one thing people talk to me a lot about, it’s my hair. So I went home and wrote down the things I remembered people saying to me about it – as it turns out, they were overwhelmingly negative and hurtful things – and wrote them verbatim into what eventually became this poem.

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CURL

Straighten your hair just once. Blow dry it or somethin’ and it will be down to your shoulders. Fix your hair. Tie back your hair. Wear a hat over your hair. I knew that was you because of your big hair. Your hair looks like the Medusa’s snakes. Why do you have just one dread lock? Can you go back and look in the mirror. Sit still while I’m braiding your hair. Sit in this chair so I can see the top of your head. Sit outside so that your hair doesn’t get all over the kitchen floor. How do you make black hair look so nice? You should straighten it. Texturize it. Don’t brush it. Brush it with just your brown fingers. You need to buy an actual brush and a comb. Your hair is so dry it would soak up a whole tub of moisturizer. Your hair is so big. Wow, your hair is so beautiful. Can I touch your hair? Have you ever washed your hair? Is that your real hair? Can you do that to my hair? You should straighten your hair. The back of your head is a kitchen. Twist out your hair by sectioning out single sections and twisting small parts of hair together, like a two-strand braid. Make the twists stretch around your head andwear a silk cap at night to help your kitchen from getting poof or static. Long bouncy curls are cute. I saw a guy who had hair like you, so I assumed he was homeless. Men don’t like curls; they don’t want their hands to get stuck when they run their fingers in your hair. Straighten your hair. Natural is the new black, get your weave here. Put flowers in your hair. This hay will never come out of your hair. You have paint in your hair. That braid makes you look like Pocahontas. Cornrows make you look like a boy. Long braids and gym shorts make you look like a boy. Put curlers in your hair to get a more succinct pattern. Bantu knots. Sculpted Afro. Jerry curls. Did you wake up like that? The less black you look, the less likely you are to questioned by police. Don’t put wool hats on your hair, it will mess up your kitchen. How to get your most defined Wash N Go. How to make DIY Clay Wash. How to make natural, black, curly hair look elegant: Pin it up. What’s wrong with your hair? Why does your hair stick up like that? Your hair looks like a lion’s mane. Are you from Africa? Are you from India? What are you? You look like you just got here. I can’t wait to get home and see your beautiful curls...Daddy. Here is a link to several different wigs you should try. It will make you look much prettier. Straighten your hair. Just get your hair wet so it doesn’t look so dry. Is that a stick in your hair? Do you have green beetles in your hair like Bob Marley did? What kind of hairstyle is that? The straighter your hair, the more likely you are to succeed. So, just sit still. Let this heat press away your curls, your kitchen, your blackness. Let it warm you like the love you are sure to soon have.

Life's Great Lies, Thought Made Flesh, and the Ritual Possibilities of Form: Joseph Fasano on His Poem "Hermitage"

Joseph Fasano

When I initially contacted Joseph Fasano for an interview in late July, I had several poems in mind as possibilities to discuss. But when he suggested "Hermitage" I felt in that choice something of a predestiny; it was the first poem of his I had ever read, and when we had our interview I was reminded what about it had so commanded my attention and drawn me to all of his work: lines of unusual breath and music, cultivated from language of the kind his teacher Mark Strand described as "so forceful and identifiable that you read [these poets] not to verify the meaning or truthfulness of your own experience of the world, but simply to saturate yourself with their particular voices." Rilke's "inner wilderness", twined with Fasano's bracing intelligence, were strongly in evidence throughout this exchange. — HLJ

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It strikes me that the subject on which this poem turns consists in its final two lines: "the great lie // of your one sweet life", that thing at the poem's opening that was once "too much." The speaker's address to a "you", the reader, seems to presuppose that at one time or another everyone will have to reckon with such a lie in their own lives. So let's begin there and work our way backwards…tell us a little about the great lie that began this piece.

All I know is that it's different for everybody, that great lie. It's a platitude to say that we all lie to ourselves in some way to live. Maybe we tell ourselves things are fine when they're not. Maybe we need to believe they're not fine when they are. In any case, of course it's true that a certain falseness in the way we live might protect us from a radical truth we're not ready for. Maybe we need an actual, practical change in our living situation. Maybe we need a change in our way of seeing things. Whatever the case may be, it's terrifying to face the nakedness of a new truth–or perhaps I should say an old truth, an ancient truth that has been living inside us – especially when we hardly have a language to talk about that truth.

I see this poem as the speaker's way of beginning to saying 'yes' to certain things that he had previously rejected–things perhaps in himself, things perhaps in the world. But what interests me most is the silence after the last line. It's clear to me that the speaker of this poem has yet to find a language in which to say that 'yes,' in which to live it to its fullest. I see the final question as both confident and desperate: What would you have done? What should I do? Everything we say asserts our deepest beliefs, even when we're unaware of those beliefs. But what happens when those beliefs change, radically and even perhaps without our knowing? What steps forward to fill the new silence of our lives then?

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HERMITAGE

It’s true there were times when it was too much
and I slipped off in the first light or its last hour
and drove up through the crooked way of the valley

and swam out to those ruins on an island.
Blackbirds were the only music in the spruces,
and the stars, as they faded out, offered themselves to me

like glasses of water ringing by the empty linens of the dead.
When Delilah watched the dark hair of her lover
tumble, she did not shatter. When Abraham

relented, he did not relent.
Still, I would tell you of the humbling and the waking.
I would tell you of the wild hours of surrender,

when the river stripped the cove’s stones
from the margin and the blackbirds built
their strict songs in the high

pines, when the great nests swayed the lattice
of the branches, the moon’s brute music
touching them with fire.

And you, there, stranger in the sway
of it, what would you have done
there, in the ruins, when they rose

from you, when the burning wings
ascended, when the old ghosts
shook the music from your branches and the great lie

of your one sweet life was lifted?

Words and Their Shadows, the Snaking Line, and the Tiny Blades of Language: Cortney Lamar Charleston on His Poem "I'm Not a Racist"

Cortney Lamar Charleston

Some write poetry with an eye towards beauty and their own experience, but it’s a different and very necessary kind of poet who arrives at the page with the intent to unsettle, to shake others from their sleep. From the instant I discovered him during my routine reading on the web, it was clear that Cortney Lamar Charleston is that other kind of writer – in his use of poetry both as art and as path to change, of everything from our relationships to the wider social fabric. In this time of violence against marginalized groups, it feels more important than ever to shed light on those artists who prod us awake to others’ pain, who keep us from rolling over and going back to sleep. I’m grateful to Cortney for the reminder, and for taking the time to do this interview – after just getting back from a retreat at Cave Canem, no less. – HLJ

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I came across “I’m Not a Racist” in One Throne and instantly appreciated the truth-telling in it, this calling out of this country’s racial reality which is frankly a situation most people in my own experience are unlikely to discuss in “polite conversation.”

I’m really happy that you found the poem! Interestingly, I think the unlikelihood of race ever being part of polite conversation is the conceptual foundation of the entire poem. Because people try to avoid the topic completely, it leads to a lot of “mental gymnastics” aimed at skirting around the subject, but language has evolved in such a way that different words, when strung together, can mean the same thing. I can say that I’d rather avoid going to certain neighborhoods because they’re “sketchy” – or, I can say I don’t want to go to that neighborhood because it’s full of poor people or black people, or something along those lines. Either way, whether it’s explicit or implied, the meaning is the same because the word “sketchy” does not have a clean history. I pay less attention to someone’s exact words than to the shadow those words cast on me as the listener or reader.

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I’M NOT A RACIST

I'm a realist: if I see a pack of hoods approaching, loitering,
acting a littering of public sidewalks, I simply

move to the other

side of the street, play it safe. I keep it on me at all times, for safety purposes.

In the event of open fire,

you'd be a hazard I told them when I, regrettably, couldn't
allow the lot of them into the party.

We're part of the same

political party, according to all the numbers I've seen.
When I shut the schools down, I was just

doing what must be done

to balance a city budget out of wack. When I put what
I found in his trunk on balance,

it was enough to tip the scale

towards a felony. I used to be a waiter, and they never
tipped very well in my experience.

While we were placing bets,

I noticed him tip his hand ever so slightly and there was
a ̶̶r̶a̶c̶e̶ face card in it. He didn't seem

like much of a bluffer, so I stood

my ground. On the grounds of merit – that's how I got
into Yale. I'm just not that into black

girls, personally. I mean, personally,

I don't SEE color. I'm so sorry, I really didn't see you there.
There they go, using that word again:

if they can say it, then why can't I?

I can't understand why everybody is so sensitive these days.
I admit, what I said sounded a little bit

insensitive, but believe me, I'm not

a racist. I'm a realist: if I see a pack of hoods approaching, loitering,
acting a littering of public sidewalks,

I simply move to the other side.

I keep it on me at all times, for purposes: in the event of a
hazard, open fire I told them, regrettably,

looking at the body splayed before me.

"Embiggening", What Is Less, and the Human Soul Writ Large: Matt Muth on His Poem "Learning a Foreign Language"

Yep. That's Matt Muth. And a scimitar.

My encounter with Matt Muth at AWP in Los Angeles consisted mostly of sitting across from him at the book fair and watching him repeatedly throw a ball in the air while hawking his Seattle-based publication Pacifica Literary Review. In what would eventually turn into an amusing experiment in meta-conversation, the raw transcript of my Google chat interview with him is shot through with bracketed wisecracks that belie a dead-seriousness over big ideas. Incidentally this would be my first contact with his expression “embiggening”: a word that sounds a lot like “beginning”, and a place I sense this poet returns to often when he’s not running a publication or headed to his next hockey game. “I am a monument,” he writes in a recent Facebook post, and not without irony, “to failing upward.” – HLJ

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Your poem "Learning a Foreign Language", recently out in RHINO, dances at the edges of everyday vocabulary. On the surface it would seem intimidating to a reader who doesn’t know what a postulate or onanism is, yet the poem as a thing is shockingly unpretentious. What triggered the writing of it?

It basically grew out of a feeling of not being good enough for a significant other, but more specifically the feeling that when this person looked at me they were speaking a completely different language than I was when I looked at me, if that makes sense. And the poem is about that odd disconnect between who you thought you were and what you thought you were made of, compared to what an observer looks at you and sees. That was the generative emotional place of the poem.

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LEARNING A FOREIGN LANGUAGE

I needed to associate like with like, object
with suggestion. I needed to be trained. I taped
index cards to my possessions: the nightstand

said onanist, the toilet said equivocator; my desk
was narcissist, and the venetian blinds
were all cowards. I had some nouns, but soon

this was not enough learning: I needed adjectives,
verbs, I needed fluency. Each pair of boxer-briefs
got a false advertising patch stamped

on the codpiece; I wrote won’t block shots
on the blades of my hockey skates in lip gloss,
each new term a wine grape in my mouth —

I burned vestigial into each rib and shaved
vapid on the side of my head. I’m getting better
with practice: soon we’ll be able to communicate —

you’ll sit across from me mouthing words
and pointing, your hands their own bright
postulates, and I’ll thrill with understanding.

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