Literary Matriarchs

KARAN

Tatiana, thank you for these poems. I love “Miscarriage Ghazal” — the form of the ghazal feels like the perfect container for repetition and grief, each couplet returning to “mother” in different registers. “The unborn are Gods, born outside of the mind, the skin, the womb.” What drew you to the ghazal form for this poem? How does repetition function in your understanding of loss?

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TATIANA

I thought about this poem for many years before starting to write it. I love the ghazal form, but realize that ghazals often don’t work for me if I’m forcing the language into the form. The repetition needs to, for me, represent an obsession or a yearning. This poem encapsulates that yearning. I think repetition shows how this yearning can be a constant, yet can evolve over time. I also think it represents how losses never leave us.

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KARAN

The letters to Phillis Wheatley are stunning. In the second letter, you write, “A friend once told me they wanted to have children because there are Black people in the future.” That line wrecked me. You’re addressing Wheatley directly, yoking her losses to yours, her survival to yours. What made you want to write to Phillis Wheatley? How does she function in your imagination as ancestor, as mother, as poet?

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TATIANA

The first reading I was invited to give  postpartum was from my dear friend Porsha Olayiwola and it was to participate with poets Krysten Hill, Letta Neely, and Danielle Legros George. This event was inspired by the letters Obur Tanner (an enslaved Black woman in Rhode Island) and Phillis Wheatley-Peters wrote to each other. This was a transformative reading and I feel utterly linked and in love with the poets I got to read with. I wanted to write new poems and I kept remembering how I learned in school about Phillis Wheatley-Peters’ life and her potential children (which may not have existed at all). Being postpartum, and seeing Phillis Wheatley-Peters as a literary matriarch I thought what if I could write across dimensions to her, from this vortex of being postpartum. What if I could write us into a vortex together and see what emerges. I think Phillis Wheatley-Peters encompasses all of those things, yet also is an ever-surviving emblem of to exist in and out of time, and dare I say to be immortalized. Which feels pretty magical.

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KARAN

“Portal” is so visceral. “The opening wants to come open, wild gaping. bewitching eclipse. celestial gateway—yearning for a flickering in the dark.” You’re writing about pregnancy and birth as a cosmic event, as rupture. Throughout these poems, the body is a portal, a vessel, a site of both creation and loss. Can you speak about the reasons and choices behind writing the body?

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TATIANA

Having a baby in my body was one of the strangest, disturbing, uncomfortable, and beautiful events of my life. It feels impossible to explain, especially since every body has a different experience with pregnancy. Yet, I feel like this experience was so shattering that I lost all language for how to express the experience. It is legitimately a time warp, like you’re holding the beginning of a life, and your own life. You’re in an interdimensional experience. It is indeed a portal, one where you emerge from someone else entirely. I think for this reason this poem had to exist in this way, as a real departure from how I used language in the past. As a chronicling of what really is inexplicable, yet very much present and possible.

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KARAN

“The Daughter Becomes Her Mother’s Body” breaks my heart. “I am ruptured harvest.” You and your mother both have your ways (Citalopram, cigarettes). The poem asks, “Could this have been the place / where we were woven?” Will you speak about inheritance? Is it a gift or a curse?

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TATIANA

With this question, I’m just noticing the alliteration between citalopram and cigarettes. I write about this in other places, but my mother’s smoking always bothered me immensely, especially as a child. Now that I’m an adult, I see that her smoking was, for her, a way to cope and to regulate herself in a life that was intensely chaotic. Now that I’m at the age my mother was when I was young, I’m seeing my own ways of coping and there’s really no answers for what we need to lean on to survive this life. I believe inheritance is oftentimes a reality, and it’s up to us to understand what the things we inherit must mean for our own lives. 

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KARAN

“Upon Having Survived Your Birth” chronicles the violence of labor. “The self severed / who can stay the same / after an end and a beginning / make love to each other.” That image of end and beginning making love is so moving: “two ghosts / find each other” — you and your mother, both transformed by birth. Can we speak about your conception as well as experience of birth, both physical and metaphorical?

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TATIANA

In my experience, becoming a mother made me lose a version of myself and in this poem I am speculating that my mother must have lost a version of herself too. I just think it’s par for the course that you become a different version of yourself. The changes that you experience, even as a non-birthing parent, or maybe especially so, are just so present. These changes are continually making you evolve. This is both a physical and emotional transformation. Although I am using metaphor here, I do think what’s happening is literal to some degree. Our old selves are shed and they float away, or hover, or give way to what’s being born.

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KARAN

In the first Phillis Wheatley letter, you write, “There is something about trauma that forces us to infinitely save ourselves. It is a transcendent power, this saving, even when the body has died.” You’re connecting your survival as a Black girl in New England to hers, your mothering to her self-mothering across the Atlantic. What do you think about survival in your work? Is it triumph, burden, or something else?

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TATIANA

I think it’s both a triumph and a burden. I often wonder about why so many of us are forced to learn how to survive in some of the most inhabitable conditions. This was true of Phillis Wheatley-Peters’ life. I can’t even say for sure that she believed her own survival to be a triumph. Yet, in this poem, I imagined that the mind and body had to become transcendent to hold and carry a person while they are experiencing horrific traumas. I think survival is a kind of byproduct of something truly unforgiveable. It’s how we’ve survived that allows us a chance at living, somehow, someway, and again.

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KARAN

“Portrait of a Mother Before Sunrise” gives us your mother’s insomnia, her nighttime wandering. “How all the / fear the body holds / endures in restless / weariness.” Mothers in these poems are always awake, always watching, always holding fear. What does rest mean when you’re a Black mother?

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TATIANA

What an immensely powerful question to ask. It wasn’t until I became a mother that I understood my own mother’s insomnia. I also wrote this poem before becoming a mother, so I think I would write this poem differently now, although I do think this version of the poem should exist as is. I’ve lived with anxiety for as long as I could remember, but after becoming a mother my anxiety was compounded. I learned insomnia and anxiety often operate together. This relationship between my anxiety and insomnia often made it impossible for me to rest. Yet, simultaneously I learned how crucial it is to rest, especially as a Black mother. You can’t evolve, grow, dream, create without rest. I often think of the matriarchs in my family and their inability to rest. What dreams, opportunities, and more did they not access because they weren’t allowed rest. I think rest is a form of liberation. I think systemic oppression makes rest impossible. In that way, resting is a form of liberation and a form of reclaiming power. The mothers I come from often did not have this opportunity, so even when I feel this pull to overburden myself and not rest, I think of rest as a gift from my ancestors. They survived so that I could rest now. It’s a gift from them and it’d be shameful not to honor this gift.

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KARAN

You toggle between the ghazal, the prose poem, the lyric. The Phillis Wheatley pieces are epistolary. How do you decide which form a poem needs? What draws you to work in multiple modes rather than settling into one?

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TATIANA

When I’m teaching, I often call form vessels for our poems. Forms should be in relationship with the poem itself. I think these poems found their form as I started writing and revising. I just trusted that the form would come and reveal itself. We all have these varying dimensions and possibilities within us and shifting forms allows that to be resonant on the page.

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KARAN

This is a question we ask all our poets, because the answers are always so wildly different: there’s a theory that a poet’s work tends toward one of four major axes—poetry of the body, poetry of the mind, poetry of the heart, or poetry of the soul. Where would you place your work, if at all?

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TATIANA

Hmm, this is an interesting question. I think I may always be traversing these axes. Yet, for many of these poems it’s been poetry of the body. I think for so long I’ve been disassociated from the experience of being in my body. I think in healing this, I’ve come to the page to express this healing. I think I’d add poetry of the spirit. I often feel like my poems come from beyond me. Perhaps it’s duende or spirit guides or ancestors. I’m merely a willing vessel for the language.

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KARAN

What’s the best piece of writing advice you’ve ever received? Alternatively: what would you tell other poets about making space for their work?

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TATIANA

I’d say two things. 1. Read. This is an imperative. Especially when there’s this shift from spending time with our own minds and books in search of the ease of AI. Yet, reading makes the writing possible. We’re all in conversations with other writers and I find that we must determine who were are actually in conversation with by reading. 2. Find Community. This feels like it has nothing to do with writing, but it has so much to do with writing. When the writing feels hard and isolating, it’s a community of folks who uplift you that reminds you to persevere. And perseverance is crucial for writing.

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KARAN

Would you offer our readers a poetry prompt—something simple, strange, or rigorous—to help them begin a new poem?

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TATIANA

Write a poem about the last bird you saw. The bird must represent an emotion. Never mention the bird or the emotion. Must have the color blue. Must be 15 lines. Reveal the bird in the last line.

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KARAN

Please recommend a piece of art (a film, a song, a painting, anything other than a poem) that’s sustained you lately or that you wish everyone could experience.

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TATIANA

I recently went to see an exhibit by the artist Helina Metaferia and I am so in love with her work. I also have been listening to Sault, Ezra Collective, and Koffee. I usually start my week with the Astrology of the Week podcast by Chani Nicholas. A poem I’ve been sitting with lately is Nikki Giovanni’s A Journey.

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