Sharing Body and Soul and the Time in Between

KARAN

Danez, thank you for magnificent poems over the years, I’m a fan and was delighted to see these poems in the queue. “I’m Waiting for Langston Hughes to Not Be Relevant” broke my heart. “I’m tired / of writing poems to tailor / the hem of my heroes’ grief. / i’m seeking somewhere / our rage doesn’t rhyme.” You want your children to inherit poems “rendered senseless” by peace. What does it mean to be in conversation with Hughes, Jordan, Baraka while also desperately wanting their work to become obsolete? I love the complexity of honoring lineage while also being exhausted by its necessity. Will you say more about this?

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DANEZ

I think about it like a good non-profit who would like to address a problem so well that it shutters their organization. I love the work of my heroes and ancestors, they make me a better artist by their examples and their bodies of work, but when it comes to their poems that either condemn injustice or champion justice,  I would like the justice to finally come, I would like to live in the aftermath of all these poems we’ve written changing the world successfully. I think of the poem “Field Trip to the Museum of Human History” by my dear friend Franny Choi, in the poem are school children who encounter the tools of your average police state with no clue what the items are. I love the vision and hope of that poem. It feels like a simple wish for me to one day live in a world where children read a poem about the wickedness of racism and feel no familiarity. So what does it mean to be in conversation with those 20^th century heroes  and what about their work is unfamiliar? It means the world can’t change as fast as we deserve. 

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KARAN

“Lesbian Time” is gorgeous. You write about Juan, your husband, saying “i knew my love / was for me because he felt / like a sister.” Then you pray, “when we die, bring us back girls.” Gender moves so fluidly here — lesbian time, feeling like a woman, your husband as sister. Have the binaries of gender completely collapsed for you?

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DANEZ

I don’t know if they’ve collapsed, but the walls around any gender that give it definition and volume I find to be quite porous. What I can syphon and collect from the porousness, maybe without entering completely, always feels instructive to pay attention to and consider next to my own humanity and expression. I don’t want those binaries to collapse. Woman/Man, Femme/Masc, there is so much power and so much time inside labels, so much possibility both inside and beyond those boundaries. A poem like “Lesbian Time” didn’t happen by collapsing borders of womanhood, it happened by approaching women and lesbians with deep reverence and asking, “What in my life and what about me could lead us to this?” Maybe it’s a kind of gender of expanse rather than limitation, but that expansiveness still allows for delineation within and beyond the binary. 

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KARAN

The Time sequence is ambitious & brilliant & my favorite — you’re addressing Time as sister, as God, as witness, as the be all & end all. In “Time Speaks,” Time announces “I CAME IN THIS BITCH ON BUCK’S BACK, ARMED” and calls us “COCKY, BRIEF ANT.” That voice is wild, terrifying, magnificent. What made you want to give Time a voice? How did you find that register?

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DANEZ

Well, I wrote a bunch of one-sided letters to Time when I began to find this next collection, so eventually I began to wonder what would happen if it was an exchange and not just me yapping at the fabric of the universe. When it came time to try and write Time’s response to all my poeming which surely has to sound like whining to her ear, I heard this bravado coming back to me and when I think bravado I think emcees. I tried on my best Nicki Minaj wig (RIP to being able to like her music) and got to writing. The poem that resulted is half poem, half 32 bars of Time talking her shit, all ego, queen shit. 

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KARAN

In one “Dear Time” poem, you write, “thought i was the hunter / but here i am, in your belly, killed / yet continuing.” The relationship to Time keeps shifting—you’re trying to control it, then you’re inside it, then it’s riding you. How do you hold all those positions at once?

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DANEZ

Badly, confusingly, astonished, in awe, in frustration, patiently, but with some urgency inside my own ephemeralness. Time touches all! What can I do but try as many approaches as possible to try and touch it back?

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KARAN

“Duty” is one of the most honest love poems I’ve read in a while. “this morning’s sex is rubbing your belly / while you describe to me the consistency of your shit.” You catalog caregiving: wiping elders, washing soiled drawers, “love is shit. love is shit / and blood and tears and milk.” There’s constant commingling of the profane and the profound here. You end with prayers “smelling like dookie and soap.” How do you sanctify the body’s mess?​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​

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DANEZ

If the body is holy, so is its waste, but the waste is just the door into the true holiness of the poem which is love and care, aging, illness, need, dependence. I think the poem finds its real gold trying to say something about our weakness, how we attend to one another, how we are critical to the lives of one another, the layer that tries to catch the attention is the mess, who doesn’t love a poop joke? But there is so much poop in life! I hope we are all taking at least 365 poops a year. I don’t think writing about poop and care-taking changes the stakes or strategies I would use to find language to paint any other scene of intimacy and connection, so you sanctify the body’s mess as you would anything else: with wonder and honesty. 

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KARAN

You reference Wheatley, Hughes, Jordan, Baraka, Finney, and Patricia Smith whom I admire deeply. The Black poetic tradition is “a locked room / where decades fold / like origami around the truth / waiting for freedom unfold.” How do you think about inheriting that tradition while also wanting to escape it? What do you owe the poets who came before?

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DANEZ

Who wants to escape it? That’s not what that poem is saying to me. I want Black people free from the brutality of anti-blackness, plain and simple. While a vehicle to contend with that, the poem is not about wanting to escape the Black poetic tradition, but for Black poets to live in a world free from injustice and violence that ensnares our attention. What do I owe them? Everything, but mostly importantly my rigor and my effort, my endurance and my jubilee. 

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KARAN

Caregiving appears in “Duty.” You say you’ve wiped your papa, your grandma, and your man. This was also the greatest expression of love that I witnessed when my grandparents were bedridden before their deaths. You ask, “what a thing / to become their brief nurse, / their final mother?” That reversal of roles is devastating. Is duty a form of love, a part of love? What does it mean to trust someone with your inevitable eventual failing?

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DANEZ

There is no love without responsibility, so yes, duty is one of love’s requirements. And I don’t know what it means to trust someone with your body that way. I’ve only been on one side of that surrender. I see within it a great amount of vulnerability, to entrust someone not to abuse or ignore our weakness. How powerfully human, right?  

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KARAN

“Time Speaks” is clearly meant to be performed — all caps, that commanding voice. In fact, most of these poems! You’re as brilliant a performer as you are a page poet. How does performance shape your writing? Do you hear the poems aloud as you compose them?

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DANEZ

I’ve come to understand that what separates poetry from other literature is a foundational relationship to music, to sound, and to rhythm. Poetry’s sonic ancestor being far older than its written one, I understand then that all poetry is performance, all poems are waiting to be performed, and that there is no public poem that isn’t affected by the fact that it will have to be communicated to someone else. And yes, I read my poems aloud as I’m writing them as the songwriting has to sing while she’s still finding the song. 

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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. As any great poet, I can obviously see all four elements at play in your work. But if you were to place your work in one of these boxes, which would it be? And do you see yourself moving elsewhere? 

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DANEZ

Soul I say. Shoutout Martín Espada. I think I’ll be fine staying in that quadrant. 

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KARAN

What’s the best piece of writing advice you’ve ever received? Additionally: what would you tell other poets about writing into tradition while also trying to transcend it?

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DANEZ

Best Advice? Idk. A lot of different pieces of advice add up to a reminder to write the poems you feel called to write and not what you think you’re “supposed” to be writing about. Only you can write your poems. Stop trying to write someone else’s. And for the other question, I would need to know more about what that means to those poets. I don’t think about my work in terms of transcending those before me so the impulse feels unfamiliar. 

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KARAN

Would you be so kind as to offer our readers a poetry prompt, Danez? Something simple, strange, or rigorous to help them begin a new poem?

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DANEZ

Write a poem that ends miles from where it began. 

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KARAN

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

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DANEZ

The Real Housewives of Salt Lake City. 

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KARAN

And finally, Danez, since we believe in studying masters’ masters, who are the poets or artists who’ve most shaped your sense of what’s possible in language?

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DANEZ

Patricia Smith, Toni Morrison, Amaud Johnson, Kahlil Gibran, Franny Choi, Angel Nafis, Marvin Gaye, Kendrick Lamar, SZA, Amy Winehouse, Avery R. Young.