Jen Fitzgerald is a poet, essayist, and native New Yorker whose work has been featured on PBS Newshour and Harriet, as well as in Tin House, Salon, PEN Anthology, and Cosmonauts Avenue, among other places, and is forthcoming at Colorado Review and Public Pool. She is the host of New Books in Poetry Podcast as part of the New Books Network, and a member of the New York Writers Workshop. Her first collection of poetry, The Art of Work, is forthcoming with Noemi Press in September 2016.

During 2016, the Spotlight Series (usually) focuses on two poets per month whose work and consciousness move us, challenge us, inspire us. This month’s surprise!-special-feature third poet is Jen Fitzgerald.

Fox Frazier-Foley: Talk to me about the core of your creative drive and the expression it finds through poetry. There are lots of ways to be creative in this world—what motivates you to write poems, specifically? Additionally, what motivates you to navigate the poebiz landscape?

Jen Fitzgerald: My creativity makes me feel as though I am functioning at my highest level of “human.” It comes, entirely from within me (I of course recognize inspiration and stimuli), it forms inside of me, and then I am the means by which it finds its form outside of me. It is something that I have denied others access to as a kind of self-preservation. Very little was mine throughout my childhood and adolescence. I vigilantly protected my thoughts, imagination, and drive to create. I kept my inner life sacred. Because of this, having my work in the world is alternately exciting and slightly unsettling.

Right now, I am interested in “full rooms.” I find these through a mixture of photography, poetry, prose poetry, and the lyric essay. A “room” could be completely full with only a few couplets, or it may take a series of photos and prose for readers/viewers to inhabit a space, wander around, and feel present. I do this by feeling—like reaching around in the dark until you recognize a form and grabbing hold.

What primarily propels me is that I am not supposed to be able to do this—I wasn’t supposed to be able to go to graduate school, I especially was not supposed to be able to go to graduate school for poetry, and I am not supposed to be able to define my life by my art. My family didn’t pay for my school. I worked three jobs at some points while going to school part time. It took me ten years to earn my bachelor’s degree.

Because I felt like I didn’t belong in these spaces of higher education, I was extremely anxious that it would be taken away from me, that my achievements would be credited to someone else, and that no amount of labor would ever be enough to prove that I had the intelligence, ability, and drive to be a successful writer and poet. I tolerated exploitation because I thought it was the only way a person like me would be granted access. Because of this, I worried a lot about “poebiz” at the beginning of my writing career—I no longer do.

FFF: What are your influences—creatively (esp in terms of other media/other art), personally, and socially/politically?

JF: I find myself most influenced by framing the world around me. I do this primarily through photography—essay and poetry follow shortly after. By moving through whatever landscape I am in, looking for the perfect frame, I feel that I am “elevating the everyday.” There is so much art present in simple moments!

I understand how important it is for working-class, blue-collar people to see themselves in art. They think, as I have been told, that these experiences are not worthy of artistic rendition. From witness comes action—this stands true, further as: from viewing comes creating. Art moves us; it moves us especially to try our own hands at building, painting, sculpting, and making tangible representations of beauty. Those with power are all too quick to cut off the majority of our population, our laboring population. There is talent among the ranks of men, women, and non-binary laborers. There are artisans and creators, there are innovators and a resourcefulness that one would have to witness to believe. But they know about whom stories have been written and who appears in portraits. It can be discouraging. We artists can subvert that understanding with our own labor.

FFF: Describe your aesthetic as a poet. What do you value? What do you try to do with/in your work? What, to you, makes cool art/literature? What’s most important for you in a poem, or in a book of poems—as author and as reader?

JF: I like to think of myself as an “Ashcan Poet.” If you all are unfamiliar with the Ashcan School, definitely look them up. There were a group of artists, loosely affiliated, at the end of the industrial revolution in this country. They were disenchanted with academic realism and they rejected Impressionism. They sought, instead, a gritty realism. This was also during the time of Riis’ documentation of NYC slum conditions in, “How the Other Half Lives.” Their paintings were journalistic and sought to render truth.

Poetry, like painting, can become a sort of self-replicating algorithm, where we do what has worked best for centuries so that we can get in under the radar. I am interested in innovation, taking risks, and challenging myself to challenge the art form. I have seen a movement toward this ideal in contemporary, American poetry, especially among emerging poets. And I fucking love it.

What is cool/important?

Hybridity

Realism

Hyper-Realism

Narrative Drive

Grittiness

Honesty

The Body

I value impact—I know what I want to do and what I want my poetry to do in the world. I value connection. While I may not be “a poet’s poet,” I of course want my fellow poets to read and connect with the work as I have read and connected with theirs. Just as I wrote this for my peers, I wrote this collection for the members of UFCW Local 342, for my grandparents, for undocumented workers world-wide, and for anyone who works three damn jobs and still finds time for their art because it is the only way they feel at peace—the only time they know bliss.

FFF: Tell me, if you’re willing, about something—an experience, a piece of art, anything really—that has fundamentally moved and/or shaped you as a person. What was the experience? What was it like? How did it shape you as an artist/poet?

JF: Two, disparate and unlikely bedfellows come to mind as helping me form as a writer. These were, hearing Maurice Manning read for the first time and Super Storm Sandy.

What transpired on Staten Island during and after Super Storm Sandy has deeply affected me as an artist. I learned the difference between voyeurism/exploitation and framing to elevate. I began to understand that we have a responsibility to represent ourselves. If we don’t, we leave ourselves open to misrepresentation, historical revisions, and being made caricatures of through the skewed lens of the privileged.

Fact: History Gets Revised.

I am cursed with a long memory and a keen sense of injustice. My writing is memory interacting with artifice. I will drag a fragment of each of these facts through every sentence I write:

• The borough president reported to the city and state that Staten Island was fine after the storm, some downed tree limbs at most. He hadn’t even left his neighborhood. The entire shoreline of our island was devastated.
• It took six days for the Red Cross to show up. They started soliciting donations 24 hours after the storm. Proud people made on-air pleas to get some sort of help. The discomfort and pain of asking for help was apparent on their faces and in their body language.
• The NYC marathon was due to start only two days after the storm. AIG set up heated tents with hot food and drinks at the starting line for the runners. The starting line was near marsh land where we were looking for the bodies of our missing.
• After threats and protests by islanders asking for help and respect, the marathon was cancelled. AIG packed up their tents. The entire surrounding area was comprised of homes torn to shreds, overcrowded shelters, no electricity, no heat, and families riffling through rubble in their yards to salvage whatever they could of their lives. They watched the unused heaters carted off and the untouched coffee poured out on to the street.
• Mayor Bloomberg flew a helicopter around a portion of the shoreline, landed for a few minutes to make a statement, and then left. He did not return again.
• We set up our own relief networks. We solicited our own donations and distributed them to our neighbors.
• Entire communities were uprooted, there was a mass exodus of poor folks, renters, and those who couldn’t afford to rebuild. Insurance companies did everything they could to not pay up. Portions of the island will never be the same again.

The first time I heard Maurice Manning read, I was in the auditorium of The College of Staten Island (years before Sandy). Much of my knowledge of poetry was the classics, and I was not wholly impressed. When I heard Manning read, when I heard the cadence of colloquial, I was struck. I didn’t know I could render, so honestly, the people in my everyday life. My people have a cadence too— it may not be as melodic as Manning’s, but it still sings. And they live ordinary lives that I too, could elevate to music. It made me feel powerful.

FFF: Name a book or two that you think everyone should read, and tell us a little bit about what makes it/them so mind-blowingly awesome.

JF: I think that every poet should read books about the natural world, clouds, storms, plants, flowers, fauna, etc. I think every non-fiction writer should read The Red Book by Jung or Joyce’s Ulysses to sit in completely disorientation with the furthest stretches of what the human mind can do to reality, and every fiction writer should read poetry to release their pen’s inner scalpel. And those who don’t write, have the luxury of reading absolutely everything for sheer enjoyment.

I also suggest finding three different mediums that deal with the same content.

Lastly, I suggest reading whatever the hell you want because we get enough syllabi, recommendations, and must-reads.

FFF: Anything you want to talk about pertaining to your art/craft/literary or writing life that I didn’t ask?

JF: I’d like to talk a little about what I’m working on right now—in particular, the new collection I’ve been focused on for the past year and a half. The poems, so far, have been written while traveling the country in a sort of frenzy or fear of staying still. I just moved from Staten Island, the place I grew up, the place my family has called home for nearly 200 years. It was part of my identity and moving from it deprived me of the insulation that ready-made identity affords. This distance was necessary to create emotional and geographic space from past and continuing trauma. This is coupled with the desire to understand what it means to be an “American,” and the geographical, historical, and moral boundaries that go along with this term.

This collection is about “hiraeth,” the Dutch word that means nostalgia or homesickness not only for a place, but for the feeling a place elicits. I moved from state to state hoping this longing and confusion could be assuaged, that a feeling of comfortability could be triggered and I might feel at ease, maybe even at home.

These States of our nation, These States of mind, These States of being all represent the varied people, terrain and beauty that we are surrounded by in our everyday lives. We don’t need to run frantically, though I do recommend it for the wanderers and explorers, to find a new version of ourselves. I discovered that a physical journey to find where one belongs is actually a journey into the self, regardless of how the landscape might change. I am still on this journey and wonder is this very journey is not simply a life well-lived.

Jen Fitzgerald is a poet, essayist, and native New Yorker whose work has been featured on PBS Newshour and Harriet, as well as in Tin House, Salon, PEN Anthology, and Cosmonauts Avenue, among other places, and is forthcoming at Colorado Review and Public Pool. She is the host of New Books in Poetry Podcast as part of the New Books Network, and a member of the New York Writers Workshop. Her first collection of poetry, The Art of Work, is forthcoming with Noemi Press in September 2016.

Michael T. Young: Thank you, Barbara, for agreeing to an interview.

Your newest collection is called Other People’s Stories. I wondered if you could tell us a little about the significance of the title and how it relates to the theme of the collection.

Barbara Elovic: Other People’s Stories serves as the title and the underlying theme of my poetry collection for a few reasons. As a young poet I wrote mostly confessional material. As I got older I found myself less interesting as subject matter and was intrigued by the idea of telling stories that weren’t about me. Philip Levine said long ago in an interview that even though the audience for poetry is small he wanted his poems not to be so recondite that someone had to be a regular poetry reader to understand what he was talking about. That idea appeals to me greatly. I also was lucky enough to have both as a friend and teacher the underacknowledged brilliant poet, Enid Dame. She taught me about the craft of midrash poetry in which the writer chooses stories from the Bible as subject matter to retell with one’s own understanding, insight, and spin.

Even though some of the poems’ subjects are imaginary creatures or people I’ve only read about, I’m telling their stories not mine. Of course, my perspective influences the telling and clues about me are revealed, but the I of the poem is someone other than Barbara Elovic.

Michael T. Young: The collection seems to explore the complex and often plastic way stories are told. I think of the last lines of the poem “Arshile Gorky,” which go, “the stories he told about himself/were just another work of art.” I wonder if you could talk a little about the art of storytelling and its importance in the collection.

Barbara Elovic: I believe that as people live through their days part of their consciousness is the story of the life they believe themselves to be leading. We as individuals tell stories to ourselves, not necessarily as they happen. Perhaps after a day or a much longer period of time an introspective person sits quietly and thinks about what he or she has been doing and what it adds up to. This was an idea featured in feminist thought a few decades back when women were acknowledged to think of themselves as the heroes of their own stories; specifically as regards the Western literary canon in which male heroes and protagonists predominate. Or the idea that what Hemingway wrote was full of big ideas about the world and women who wrote about what happened in individuals’ homes were not doing something equally important.

Michael T. Young: A number of the poems hinge on a shift of perspective or alternative points of view as, for example, “Eve’s Version,” or “You Think You Got Problems?” I wondered if you might address the significance of these alternatives in the collection and its theme.

Barbara Elovic: “Eve’s Story,” and “You Think You’ve Got Problems?” are written in the first person because I wanted the poems to have immediacy for the reader. I come from an Orthodox Jewish background from which I’ve lapsed, but I was taught stories from the book of Genesis when I was a very young girl. When a person learns something as a child it sticks with them on an almost subliminal level. So I had both what I learned as a small God-fearing child in mind when I wrote both poems and my adult re-evaluation of the biblical stories referenced at play. I believe now that Eve was portrayed as a temptress and a troublemaker. Now I think being a troublemaker can be heroic.

Michael T. Young: The collection takes up a number of political and socio-economic issues. There are the overt poems about Robert Moses or Susan B. Anthony. But there’s also the poem about Dorothea Lange. Could you tell us a little about these political and socio-economic issues and how they relate to the collection’s theme?

Barbara Elovic: Robert Moses and Susan B. Anthony were clearly the kind of brave troublemakers I just mentioned. And Dorothea Lange is best known for the pictures she took while working for the WPA Artists Project that Franklin Roosevelt established to help the country out of the Great Depression. Her compassion for her subjects make her photos breathtaking. She composed her most famous photo, “Migrant Mother,” with the subject at the center. The mother’s hair is dark, but her face is deeply lined and she’s probably younger than she appears to be in the picture. Two small children with their backs to the camera bury their heads on both of the mother’s shoulders, framing her. We as viewers can only see the mother’s eyes. The photo makes explicit that she bears the weight for the care of her kids literally. Long after I had seen the photograph, a documentary aired on public television about Dorothea Lange and helped explain at least one source of her compassion. She had suffered from polio years earlier and that pain helped her identify with the suffering of people from a less-privileged class than hers.

Michael T. Young: What do you see as the relationship between imagination and history? How is it important for us today, dealing with current issues in the world?

Barbara Elovic: It took me decades to learn that the history taught me up until high school was only one version of America’s story. Now that I embrace left-wing politics I would say that in fact what I was taught was a combination of propaganda and lies. In fourth grade we talked a little about racism and slavery, but nothing much that I remember was said about the persistence of racism. The story of Thanksgiving was a pallid, happy story worthy of a bank calendar; Native Americans and the Pilgrims sitting down to dinner and being good neighbors. Indian reservations were still to come and the imminent theft of their land appeared nowhere in my social studies textbook.

Imagination at least in part is what one thinks for herself when ranging outside of the conventional boundaries of a shared narrative. American Exceptionalism, which many people in this country take as a given, is a myth to me that excuses the murder of the indigenous population of this country and the second-class citizenship of people of color. And then there’s the right to interfere in other countries’ politics because we’re inherently better than they are when all we’re really doing is adding to global corporations’ profits.

Cell phone cameras have only recently revealed what American cops see as unquestionably appropriate behavior when harassing, wounding and even murdering black men and boys. We now at the very least have some cognitive dissonance popping up, but I don’t see police training or tactics adapting. In fact right-wing politicians blame the group Black Lives Matter for inciting murder of police, which is malarkey to be blunt. They are demanding equal treatment from law officers, but the cops have tin ears and see them as a threat. And too many politicians back them up.

Michael T. Young: In reading the collection and considering the importance of telling our own story and even the freedom to remain anonymous, I also wondered where those needs come together with our need for friends, for companionship. Is that intersection where we share a common story or is it in some other place?

Barbara Elovic: I think in today’s political climate in which rancor predominates we tend to have many friends with whom we share ideas about what’s going on around us. I have friends really annoyed at me for not being a Hillary Clinton supporter. That disappoints me greatly. I’ve learned of late to nod and make sympathetic noises because I don’t want to argue anymore. I was the captain of the debating team in my high school, but that was a long time ago.

I have this Jules-Feiffer-inspired notion of adults as aging bodies encrusting little children inside them riding tricycles whose feet don’t quite reach the pedals. I think it’s the rare person who actually grows up as she grows older. I think artists, those that interest me anyway, are truth tellers. That doesn’t mean they have outstanding social skills, but it makes their ideas more interesting. It also doesn’t make me want to be friends with great artists.

I was very young when I went to graduate school in creative writing and I was overwhelmed and didn’t know how to behave among the professors. Most of them weren’t very kind and too many of them had serious drinking problems, which brought out the nastiness in them. Their best selves were in their poems, not in the personae they paraded around among us lowly students.

It’s wonderful to have friends from different backgrounds. Today my poet friends fill some of that bill.

Michael T. Young: Which is your favorite poem from Other People’s Stories and why is it significant for you?

Barbara Elovic: My favorite poem in the collection is the last, “Leap of Faith.” My father died when he was in his early sixties after suffering from Parkinson’s disease for more than twenty years. When I was young and naïve I assumed I’d have a book published by the time I was thirty because I would calculate the ages of the contemporary poets’ whose first books I admired. They were usually in their early thirties. Easy peasy. I’ve written many poems about my father and had hoped to make his story better known because my poems would be widely read. Ha!

Michael T. Young: Are there any prose works that you feel have significantly influenced you as a poet?

Barbara Elovic: For this collection biographies had direct influence on some of the poems I wrote. I also wrote some of these poems many years ago. Biographies of Robert Moses and Arshile Gorky supplied some of the information for the poems about them. I loved the Curious George books as a kid. I learned the improbable story of his creators from an exhibit at New York City’s Jewish Museum. That’s a very specific answer to your question. In a more general sense I assume that every book that I read and enjoy influences me. I won’t read beyond page fifty of any book of prose that displeases me because there’s always so much more to read and life is short.

Michael T. Young: What are your favorite activities that have nothing to do with poetry or writing?

Barbara Elovic: I enjoy teaching the Pilates exercises as well practicing on my own. I love taking long walks. I also love to travel and gain the perspective that I get from seeing other places and talking with the people living there.

Michael T. Young: Thanks for your time, Barbara. Let’s close with your favorite poem from Other People’s Stories.

Leap of Faith

Whether I light Sabbath candles
on time or not at all
is only my affair.
So when the eager young woman
comes between my friend and me
on the street to ask
Excuse me are you Jewish?
I always lie.

What I love and whom I believe
is strictly up to me.
My prayers are only mine and always private.
But my father who died years ago
took his faith with him across the ocean.
Running from the Nazis kept him motivated
the rest of his short life.
On his yahrzeit I light a candle
that blazes while I sleep.

If you would like to read a review of Other People’s Stories, you can find it here:

My Wife Says That If You Live 20 Years

Without having to go to a funeral, you are really lucky. The girl on TV is no older than I was when everyone
in my quivering home learned to hustle one more ghost into our already overflowing pockets
& even though it is not real, she is being swallowed by a carnivorous grief that is howling & escaping through 
the screen on all fours, pacing around at our feet & begging us to move. Pissing on the blanket sewed by a
grandmother’s hands. Hands that were once a salve for every wound, hands that once clapped along with the 
good gospel in a church shack & once cupped a child’s crying face & once broke bread & then one day just 
broke. Outside, another sky undresses itself to its blood red flesh & what kind of world is this to bring a child 
into anyway? The names we carry have been carved into so much stone clutching the ground in Ohio it is 
impossible to consider how many years it would take to lift them out and pass them on to anyone as small as 
the crumbs from a good meal. but who are we to deny our families the delivery of new blood? New hands to 
assist with the burial and becoming of the earth that chews at the edges of whatever years our elders have left 
& maybe even us in our youth even though we moved out the hood & gunshots don’t echo over the river out 
here & boys don’t leave the barren fields & go to war just so they can fall asleep with full stomachs. It is 
somehow easy to forget that there are so many ways to die while black & not all of them involve being made 
hollow while the world watches & isn’t that a funny thing? How there is all this danger I ignore & make plans 
for 2016 & beyond & beyond & our fathers still want grandchildren in spite of all this & I am afraid that if I 
do not raise children to carry the heft of my body when it dies then I will be only bones after my soul exits to 
spare all of you such heavy lifting & how awful would that be & who would speak my name around a drunk 
& buzzing table when the card game runs dry? & on the elevator, when the woman eyes how I lock fingers 
with my wife, she leans in close & tells us she can tell we’re newlyweds & we smile & she asks how many 
children we’re going to have & I look past her face & into the metal wall where my fading reflection is 
whispering enough to carry endless caskets through the sinking mud.

The House Party, 10:30PM, Courtright And Livingston

another storm is crawling its way from the west
a grey husk rattling the windows of any small town it passes through
scaring the deer from their spring drink and crowding the forest
with the tremble of retreating hooves
the percussion of fear
here, a mother has left a house to her boys
left a Friday night to its own unraveling
the walls stretched to capacity
the bedroom a father never returned to in winter
now a dj booth
bring only yourselves and whatever can be passed
through the eye of a sewing needle
that which put its arms around the splayed denim
of jeans an older brother outgrew
and pressed the edges together
gifting them another year of life
another party where someone will pull a boy
close by their belt loops while
the dj plays One More Chance
for what feels like the 25th time in a row
one for each dealer who didn’t live long enough
to arch the wood on a house’s floor like a good spine
thrown into the heat of dance
by now everyone knows the chorus
even the line of bodies outside the door
eager to get in
stretching down the street
past the graveyard where ten niggas
got buried last Tuesday
the chorus jumping off of every living tongue
from courtright down to east main
the lightning sneaking behind everyone’s back
to turn the sky blue
a brief and bright sweater pulled over the cool night’s stomach
and the thunder that follows
an eager god begging the dj to run it back
one last time

Hanif Willis-Abdurraqib is a poet, essayist, and cultural critic from Columbus, Ohio. He is a poetry editor at Muzzle Magazine, a columnist at MTV News, and a Callaloo creative writing fellow. His first collection of poems, The Crown Ain’t Worth Much, is being released in 2016 by Button Poetry/Exploding Pinecone Press.

During 2016, the Spotlight Series focuses on two poets per month whose work and consciousness move us, challenge us, inspire us. This month’s second poet is Hanif Willis-Abdurraqib.

Fox Frazier-Foley: Talk to me about the core of your creative drive and the expression it finds through poetry. There are lots of ways to be creative in this world—what motivates you to write poems, specifically? Additionally, what motivates you to navigate the poebiz landscape?

Hanif Willis-Abdurraqib: So, at the core, I believe myself to be a storyteller. I think of myself as someone who sits in the tradition of black storytelling, and I think poetry is the best way that I can get those stories outside of myself and into the world where they can (ideally) meet other people who see themselves in them, or live them in a different space. I think that is my motivation on both fronts. I’m not too into all of the pobiz stuff, if I’m being honest. I keep track of it, I’m a poet who writes and publishes, so I’m active in it. But it’s a space that I think holds the art back by holding up all of the wrong things and people so frequently. I see poets of color changing the landscape. Queer and trans* poets changing the landscape. The pobiz aspect of it is rarely interested in holding that up, and so I think I’ve weirdly created my own pobiz. It’s mostly just a biz where I push that work to the front and try to make it more visible.

FFF: What are your influences—creatively (esp in terms of other media/other art), personally, and socially/politically?

HWA: I’m getting much more into pulling influences from non-poetry places. I still get my main influences from poetry, of course. All of my peers/friends/the legends who occupy the genre. But I really pull from a lot of other things. I love Josephine Baker. I watch and read a lot of Josephine Baker interviews, over and over. I really pull so much from the way she moved through the world as an artist who was deeply engaged in social movements. Same with Nina Simone. Those are my two bridges, right now.

FFF: Describe your aesthetic as a poet. What do you value? What do you try to do with/in your work? What, to you, makes cool art/literature? What’s most important for you in a poem, or in a book of poems—as author and as reader?

HWA: I like work that I can fit inside of, even if it is about an experience that is not my own lived experience. So I try to offer that to anyone who reads my work. I think the writing should be a living breathing space. As much as a museum, or a park, or your favorite room. What is most important to me is crafting that space and allowing people to walk inside of it. I don’t necessarily believe that the work should always teach. Sometimes it should be funny, relaxed, something to escape into . . . but an escape, nonetheless.

FFF: Tell me, if you’re willing, about something—an experience, a piece of art, anything really—that has fundamentally moved and/or shaped you as a person. What was the experience? What was it like? How did it shape you as an artist/poet?

HWA: Terrance Hayes’ poem “We Should Make a Documentary About Spades” was the first poem I read that made me feel like I could write the way I wanted to. A narrative that seems scattered, but is still tight, hitting all of the right notes, speaking to a very specific type of blackness that I understood. It was an entry point, to me. A thing that told me I could rejoice in and talk about culture and have it be understood. I was lost before reading that. I was trying too hard to bring people along for the ride. It opened up a world in which the ride is already full of your people, just waiting for you to join.

FFF: Name a book or two that you think everyone should read, and tell us a little bit about what makes it/them so mind-blowingly awesome.

HWA: A book I think that everyone should read is Alice Walker’s The Temple of my Familiar. It is the first book I fell in love with, and I just re-read it like last year. It has aged well. I think it’s the book that gets lost in her catalog, but it’s risky. It takes chances when dealing with narrative and voice, in ways that a lot of books don’t. It taught me how to write into story using my voice in as many different ways as possible.

FFF: Anything you want to talk about pertaining to your art/craft/literary or writing life that I didn’t ask?

HWA: I have a book coming out! My first full-length poetry collection, The Crown Ain’t Worth Much comes out July 19^th, from Button Poetry!

FFF: Congratulations! Tell us a little bit more about the book. What was it like writing it? What are its overall goals, as a project?

HWA: It was hard to write, specifically because in order to pull it off the way I wanted to, I had to revisit memories and places, and force myself to be honest about them. The pursuit of nostalgia for nostalgia’s sake is, most often, dishonest. I approach nostalgia, most times, with a type of selective honesty, and I couldn’t do that here. It’s a book that offers a small window into the generational violences of gentrification. And so, I had to consider how these things sit in emotional and physical spaces for myself and people I love. That’s hard, especially when I’m talking about the dismantling of my actual home—Columbus, Ohio, a city I love. Pulling that grief out of myself and sorting it out on paper was hard. But it made me feel closer, more connected to the city that still remains.

Hanif Willis-Abdurraqib is a poet, essayist, and cultural critic from Columbus, Ohio. He is a poetry editor at Muzzle Magazine, a columnist at MTV News, and a Callaloo creative writing fellow. His first collection of poems, The Crown Ain’t Worth Much, is being released in 2016 by Button Poetry/Exploding Pinecone Press.

Cup Your Body into Someone Else’s Longing

In Emily O’Neill’s Make a Fist and Tongue the Knuckles, (Nostrovia! Press, 2016) the boys are sweet even when they are leading you by the hand to the back of the bar and the girls always know better. These poems are intimacy laid out on a conveyor belt—all parts are deconstructed and rebuilt. The intimacy is cataloged from kissing a stranger on a porch, to admiring a lover’s freckle colony, to justifying one’s job when meeting a date’s parents for the first time. O’Neill’s imagery travels around the block a few times and doesn’t apologize for it: her poems are harsh, gritty beauty.

O’Neill begins her dark walk with the poem “World’s Smallest Woman.” Her words are almost like those of an instruction manual:

“You can’t explain surprise

to yourself. Somebody else has to.

In the mirror your hair gets longer but

your eyes remain the same depth. Keep that

gulf to yourself.”

How many faces do we have to show others? To ourselves? O’Neill’s speaker knows about crappy first jobs, sharing drugs at work, making out in cars, knowing more about her own exit from a relationship than the other person in it.  She isn’t afraid to expose skin or call it like it is. One of the first poems that displays this distance in connection is “Your Boy Came By.” In the third stanza, aloofness plays a part but people still strip down the ankles at the end of it.

“Didn’t buy you a drink because why bother

bartering. Your boy, for free of you

won’t risk it…”

O’Neill’s speaker can only “fly away from the fire before (she’s) finished.” (From the poem “No Flinching.”) The details in racking up relationship bodies are staggering. Knives are a repeated image. Some knives are imagined as being planted in dirt and then growing trees on top of them. Let something lovely grow from weapons meant to cut. One knife is placed in the speaker’s hand by a shirtless boy who recites Coleridge. There is also blood (“I’m sure I’ve bled on sadder men,” is one memorable line from the poem “How To Whistle.”) In contrast, there are also multiple images of shoulders. We carry burdens on our shoulders and each poem in this collection is fighting a fight. We don’t know who wins but that doesn’t seem to matter. The fight feels important.

O’Neill never writes about intimacy in a clichéd way. In the revealing and almost confessional “Need to Know,” we witness exquisiteness. We recognize the exchange here between two people:

“I took my dress off for you—an invitation

to keep seeing what you shouldn’t take.

You won’t just take and I like that.

You hesitate and I bite harder. I want you

stuck like river bending in a valley…

Here, my fingers. Little ghosts. Here,

your fingers troubling me like rain

haunts the freeway in a dream.”

In such a hunger driven, spiny collection, this subtle moment is beautiful and haunting and gives the reader a glimpse into O’Neill’s softer side.

Here are some of O’Neill’s knowledgeable lines that are written like a manifesto, like we should be taking notes:

“Can’t be poor when you’re a killer.”  (“Lucky Like That.”)

“Give me a choice better than razor or grave.” (“Always a Sinner.”)

“Leave marks or I won’t learn.”  (“Always a Sinner.”)

“You were falling asleep on camera as I was waking up on camera.” (“Orioles.”)

“Never liked men with guitars. How they need constant noise keeping them still.” (“Last Year’s Blues.”)

“Shoes make the man aware that he can leave at any moment.” (“How to Whistle.”)

O’Neill’s speaker instructs us on how to survive, but it’s tough.  In “Poem for Brunch with Your Family Where They Asked When We’d Be Married,” there is a whole world of characters revealed throughout the two page poem. Here is an example of the inner psyche of the speaker here:

“It wasn’t that they asked what I did for work and choked

at the utterance of waitress or your mother’s insistence

on grad school as unfortunate or your uncle demanding

a second glass for the beer in front of me…”

We witness O’Neill’s speaker as a prisoner at this uncomfortable table. We feel her skin

crawl at being judged by these people who do not know her and may never know her well. We empathize. We also want to run away.  The speaker confesses:

“Yes I have parents. No, you can’t meet them.

My father is dead and my mother needs coaching

on how not to kill what she loves.”

Then the poem takes another glorious turn with these lines:

“The disappointment I am for not dropping everything

to stand by my man…Part of womanhood is waiting for

your turn to speak and they wouldn’t give me one and that

tells me everything about weddings…”

This poem is a novel of voice and vigor and slaps us across the face, and we still want more. Whereas so many of these poems circle around the speaker’s relationships, there is a transience to the language and the actual fleetingness of the intimacy. Its breakneck pace is powerful and does not let up. (It is, “O’Neill writes “the dance nobody teaches:” (From “Need to Know.”) We cannot go to O’ Neill for answers though, even though she has already told us how to live. She reminds us in the last line of the very last poem “Not So Fast,”

“Don’t answer me. I won’t stand still long enough.”

Luckily we read her words, hold them, tread on them softly, because she deserves no less and we cannot stay away, even if we end up following her into the cold, dark night.

Jennifer MacBain-Stephens went to NYU’s Tisch School of the Arts and now lives in the DC area. She is the author of eight chapbooks and two full length poetry collections forthcoming from Yellow Chair Review and Stalking Horse Press. Her chapbook “Clown Machine” recently came out from Grey Book Press this summer.  Recent work can be seen or is forthcoming at Jet Fuel Review, Lime Hawk, The Birds We Piled Loosely, Queen Mob’s Teahouse, Inter/rupture, Poor Claudia, concis, and decomP. Visit: .

Abnormal Repetitive Behaviors

Or “stereotypies,” as animal behavioral

Researchers sometimes call them, are seen

Especially in research animals who live

Their lives in tiny cages or who live                                                                                                                               

 In larger cages in zoos, anywhere there is

A sense of conflict and panic and feeling trapped

it is four decades later, but my body                                                                                                           

behaves as if it does not know this,                                                                                                                      

As if everything now is the same                                                                                                              

As it was then and it is on guard,

this body on guard before it thinks.

My grandparents were beautiful like the glass

and their voices were always kind

and now the tea cart sits in my living room,

sunlight twinkling across the long-necked bottles.

My daughter, at thirteen, this unicorn, all legs

and brains and speed, now winning

All her cross-country meets and reassuring

Herself when she too melts down,

Caelan its only hormones. what

you are feeling isn’t real.

My daughter, who knows at thirteen

Things it has taken me

four decades to start sorting out,

what my grandmother, my father’s mother Annie,

could never sort through with all those

emotions running through her like flame,

making her dangerous, the one you can’t stand

to be around; never for Annie, four decades for me,

what my daughter knows now

at thirteen.

Terror still lives within these poems and sorrow for the cruelty and chaos of a world in which humans cannot seem to exist without destroying as much as they create, but the vision of a new world is there. What an amazing and powerful book.

kiss the sound i make with my feet.
i am far
from everything
but i try.
 i can’t read what people say about trans women anymore
or i stop feeling for months.
such is life.
soon i will turn 28.
i am approaching the sky.
every birthday after 30 will feel like a statistical anomaly
because it will be.
it’s okay to feel what is true
in your hands
and in your teeth.
it doesn’t have to heal you or set you free.
it just has to remind you that you exist.
i hardly exist and it’s fine.
i’ve climbed out of too many windows to care
but i care. i do.
i care so much i can’t get out of bed some days.
crying helps, but not enough.
why should i have to cry?
you cry. you show me something. tell me how much it hurts
to exist.
bookend my body with all your rain
until i grow into something better.

i don’t have the luxury of pretending i’m just like any other woman

when i died nothing changed and everything was normal

the sun set at 4:47 p.m. on the dot

i was caught up in a green flash of light called beautiful

we are all called beautiful when we become bodies

“we must not be loved”

“we must not be loved”

“we must not be loved,” i whisper

to a picture i took of myself in the mirror

i’m just like any other woman

my name is god’s empty dream

my name is joke on primetime television

i love to laugh but the sound has become poison to my blood

it hesitates to flow and then explodes with fury

i am a sloshing bucket full of memories

i drown inside myself

trans woman

asterisked human

pull of flesh speaking gravity’s only language

hear both sides of the story.

i need to see birds pecking out your ears.

we must consider everything.

you will bleed to call me male.

i will squirm and piss myself

off.

here, a bandage. wrap it around

my body. i am shivering

in the cold of you, you real woman forest.

i am thousand year old fungus

mourning all the light

that has passed over me.

here, both sides of the story.

something on the internet about echo chambers.

something on the internet about dead trans women.

here, both sides of the story.

i have not slept in five years.

i called you to come carry me away and

you swallowed me up instead.
 

Joshua Jennifer Espinoza is a trans woman poet living in California. Her work has been published in The Offing, The Feminist Wire, PEN America, and elsewhere. Her full-length poetry collection THERE SHOULD BE FLOWERS will be released this month (August) through Civil Coping Mechanisms. More of her work can be found at joshuajenniferespinoza.com and on Twitter @sadqueer4life.

During 2016, the Spotlight Series focuses on two poets per month whose work and consciousness move us, challenge us, inspire us. This month’s first poet is Joshua Jennifer Espinoza. 

Fox Frazier-Foley: Talk to me about the core of your creative drive and the expression it finds through poetry. There are lots of ways to be creative in this world—what motivates you to write poems, specifically? Additionally, what motivates you to navigate the poebiz landscape?

Joshua Jennifer Espinoza: My drive to write mostly comes from my inability to understand and deal with my own emotions as a trans feminine/mentally ill/traumatized person in a world that kind of hates all of those things. With poetry I can attempt to subvert the language of the world that has been inscribed on and within me against my will. In navigating the poetry world I am motivated by the same thing that motivates me to navigate the world at large, and that is simply surviving as unscathed as possible.

FFF: What are your influences—creatively (esp in terms of other media/other art), personally, and socially/politically?

JJE: Panic attacks, comments sections on articles about trans women, bad dreams, good dreams, bad memories, good memories, poems I’ve only half-read, windy days, people who I love and who inexplicably love me back, the possibility of the end of this world and the emergence of a better one.

FFF: Describe your aesthetic as a poet. What do you value? What do you try to do with/in your work? What, to you, makes cool art/literature? What’s most important for you in a poem, or in a book of poems—as author and as reader?

JJE: There’s a line in one of my poems that goes “the only aesthetic i have left is survival” and I guess that sums it up pretty well. I’m interested in art that does some kind of work in addition to simply existing as a beautiful object. I would love to be able to just create aesthetically pleasing work or whatever, but I don’t feel like I have that luxury. I’m more interested in disruption, not in the sense of being shocking for its own sake, but in the sense of challenging that which keeps me in the position of having to fight for survival.

FFF: Tell me, if you’re willing, about something—an experience, a piece of art, anything really—that has fundamentally moved and/or shaped you as a person. What was the experience? What was it like? How did it shape you as an artist/poet?

JJE: Before I finally admitted to myself that I was trans I had spent a long time getting sicker and sicker, physically and emotionally, from the stress of holding it all in. I hadn’t cried in years and every day was one long panic attack. Near the end of this I stopped eating and was totally dissociated from everything. I was sure I would soon either be in the hospital or dead—but finally something in me broke and I just started crying in the car one day. I remember vividly my head against the window, the sun warm against my face, staring off at some mountains in the distance and sobbing because it all felt so real for once. I started feeling everything again and within weeks I was like “Holy shit—I’m not a man and I never have been.” I think a lot of my work attempts to recreate those moments of breakage, of transcendence through pain and destruction, of the necessity of tearing something down in order to discover or create something better in its place.

FFF: Name a book or two that you think everyone should read, and tell us a little bit about what makes it/them so mind-blowingly awesome.

JJE: Zong! by M. NourbeSe Philip completely destroyed everything I thought I understood about poetry, history, and the articulation of trauma. José Muñoz’s Disidentifications is essential for anyone interested in a non-whitewashed history of a queer and trans resistance that operated through the strategic appropriation and purposeful confusion of the cultural products and signs of white supremacy, heteronormativity, and the gender binary.

FFF: Anything you want to talk about pertaining to your art/craft/literary or writing life that I didn’t ask?

JJE: Not that I can think of! Thanks!

Joshua Jennifer Espinoza is a trans woman poet living in California. Her work has been published in The Offing, The Feminist Wire, PEN America, and elsewhere. Her full-length poetry collection THERE SHOULD BE FLOWERS will be released this month (August) through Civil Coping Mechanisms. More of her work can be found at joshuajenniferespinoza.com and on Twitter @sadqueer4life.