I first met Antoinette Brim in the summer of 2006 at the Cave Canem Retreat in Greensburg, PA; it was my first summer at Cave Canem, and I was still a little hazy about my “place” in what I imagined to be a “Contemporary African American Literary Canon” in the making. My memory of being there that summer alternates from glum weathers to pressurized atmospheres to intensely bright spots in the clouds. Antoinette was one of those bright spots: she seemed to bounce in her gait, and yet never seemed to quite touch the ground with full force. There was lightness to her. When I read Antoinette’s poems, I look for that lightness, and I find complexity, emotions that are at once vulnerable and brash, succinct, feisty, and winsome.
Tara Betts’ name was one I’d encountered on many tongues, a name I’d seen referenced so often, I found myself nearly weekly scouring the internets for her poems. We met a few years ago at the Bowery, where we were both scheduled to read poems in response to national flags. Tara’s poem had me laughing and nearly howling, thinking and analyzing. I wondered: how did she do that? Her presence was infectious; her poems, provocative, risk-takers.
When Aquarius Press announced their 2009 titles, I immediately jumped and asked Tara and Antoinette to give ZORA the honor of interviewing one another. This blog post will appear in two doses, due to the constraints of the space. I have to say I’m quite happy that the space constraints exist. Tara and Antoinette, in their conversation, are as thoughtful, open, direct, and questioning as they are in their poems. Take your time with their conversation, deliberate with them, as they ask and respond to some of the most heavy and heart-rending questions concerning poetry in the twenty-first century.
~Metta Sáma
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Antoinette: Where would you place yourself in the African American poetic tradition? What trails are you blazing and/or what gates are you keeping?
Tara: I haven’'t really thought about my place(s) in the African American poetic tradition beyond that I see myself in women’s voices and working-class voices. I feel that I’m very steeped in the blues and hip-hop as a matter of upbringing, but I’d like to hope that my work is speaking to people who do not always get a chance to speak. I’d also like to think that I have the freedom to explore different directions in my work. I feel deeply impacted by Gwendolyn Brooks, Lucille Clifton, Patricia Smith to name a few, but I’d also like to say Muriel Rukeyser, Marilyn Nelson, Maxine Kumin, Afaa Michael Weaver. I’d like to see myself in a continuum with Hayden, Sterling Brown, Dolores Kendrick, but still feel free to write a broad range of work that extends expectations like Wanda Coleman or Ed Roberson. I’ve never been much for gate-keeping. It sounds exclusionary, rooted in hierarchy and the same behavior that has kept people out of the literary canon that should have been there a long time ago.
Antoinette: I, too, am very conscious of adding muted voices to the mix of poetry making its way into the mainstream. I think when I think of gate-keeping, I don’t think of gates closing (exclusionary); I think of keeping gates open. Diversity is a tricky thing. One (woman or ethnicity) in the mix often denotes diversity to the larger community. I wonder about this sometimes. But I write what I write. And I hope that I am contributing to the tradition in a meaningful way.
Tara: Well, now, you have me curious about where you see yourself in the tradition.
Antoinette: The first semester of my MFA program, Ruth Forman, posed that question to me. I was stunned. First, because I didn’t yet see myself as a poet. So, to even suggest that I might be a part of the larger tradition seemed almost sacrilegious to me at the time. Second, because before grad school, my education (while amazing) had focused on the canon and very few writers of color. This put me on the path of searching out black writers and their work. Ruth gave me a reading list that was so extensive I was reading at stop signs and traffic lights. All these years later, I am still learning and reading. And I still have so much more to read and discover. If I am blessed with a long writing career, I would like future generations to note me for my honesty and vulnerability on the page. For writing about things we don’t usually talk about in polite company. For being an unapologetically bold, black woman writer. I would like my work to display an arc of growth and transcendence. I would like to make the ancestors proud of me.
Tara: I have to admit that the thing I hate most about moving is my growing collection of books. I am forever reading and searching out new books. I’d like to think that I’d not embarrass my ancestors and elders and my possible children.
Antoinette: I am intrigued by locale and locus in your work. Action happens in very specific places, whether physical sites like a house or bathroom – very domestic places or in very intimate woman places – a shedding uterus or conception on a cellular level. Even geographical locations seem somehow domestic and/or sensually female. And it seems that music accompanies it all, marking time. Can you speak to how you use music, space and theme in your writing process?
Tara: You know I was thinking the same thing about your work! When I was rereading Psalm of the Sunflower, I thought the colors were so rich—reds, blue, purple and gold, gray. The sputter of rocks while driving down gravel road and the covered bridges. All of it made me think of growing up in the Midwest, when so much of your book is rooted in Arkansas. I think music permeated the space that I was in so much that I cannot picture my childhood without those sounds. There is no Betts Tavern for me without Al Green, and there is no adolescence for me without hip-hop. I think writers populate their work with the details that convey the feeling of experiencing something, and studying journalism in undergrad really pushed that instinct for me, so when my poetry started to grow stronger, I think it heightened that impulse. As far as theme, I sometimes run from the idea of it, but I’m seeing how themes can organize a literary experience for a reader. Usually, I write a lot, then I see themes emerge, but I’m trying to work on a project now with that kind of focus to stretch my capacity to write in different ways. I just don’t want to overdo a thematic book when I’ve seen some excellent books that aren’t all fixed on one subject per se.
Antoinette: You bring up an interesting point. I, too, am always writing. But, since Psalm, I have been writing exclusively for particular collections. The direction or theme has presented itself, and I have been working with it. I often wonder if this will be my writing process from now on. I have so many poems and collections waiting in line in my head. Sometimes I miss the organic stumbling that marked the creation of Psalm. Over time, I must have cut 50 or so poems/pages from it, like cutting a gem and letting bits of it fall away. How has your process changed since Arc and Hue?
Tara: I think I am a little bit more conscious of language and how to extend an idea over the body of a longer poem. I used to struggle with that, and my poems were becoming so short. I’m also intrigued with the short form, and I’ve been writing a lot of poems that way, particularly these 7-line poems called kwansabas. My focus is more intense, even if I step away from writing for a while. I often find myself wanting to write all the time, and just feeling distracted by mundane tasks. Even still, the mundane tasks still can become fodder for writing.
Antoinette: Please talk about your poem, “What It’s Like to Be a Mixed Girl (For Those of You Who Aren’t).” The last line is quite declarative: You’re black. There are those black, white and/or biracial who might disagree with this statement. And while this seems to be a very personal poem, the title aside, that it is “for those of you who aren’t” denotes a subtext that speaks to a certain politics of identity. These are very provocative and polarizing issues right now. Please explore the politics of identity in light of your poem.
Tara: Where I grew up there was no doubt in my mind that I was black. Mixed, but definitely black-identified. I have heard these arguments for census boxes and interracial categories for years, but I’ve also been shared space with many black families who say I look like cousin so-and-so, so it’s a relative state of mind. Some people with parents of different races tend to lean more toward one culture than another, which doesn’t bother me. What I’m curious about is why do you lean that way? Is it because you grew up around a majority of people in that particular culture or community or is it because you’re ashamed of that culture, community, or even one of your parents? Some people want to accurately identify all the parts that make them who they are. I imagine if I had spent more time with my mother’s family and learned French, I would be more in touch. I do have a cousin that I relate to like a sister because she lived with us when I was a teen, so she’s probably my closest tie to my maternal side.
As for me, I grew up in a predominantly black community where my mother was the only white person around. I went to Catholic school while my parents were still together and that felt like culture shock to see how white children lived so differently than we did. My grandparents that I spent the most time with were my black grandparents. When my parents divorced, my mom moved us to a block of Section 8 apartments, mostly black and Mexican tenants. It wasn’t until I moved to Chicago and went to college that people started to question my black identity.
In terms of the poem, it was inspired by a poem from Patricia Smith’s first collection Life According to Motown, one of the first books I taught in its entirety to teens in Chicago. In it, Smith has a poem called “What It's Like to Be a Black Girl (For Those of You Who Aren’t).” At first, my poem was a riff from Smith’s that I wrote for her granddaughter Mikaila when she was a little girl. I initially thought about writing it as a kind of guide for little girls like Mikaila, who was probably 6 or 7 when I wrote it. I thought about dropping the parenthetical note, but I realized that there were not a lot of people who understand that experience of feeling like you belong to a culture, even if you do not have the readily identifiable traits that people associate with it. I’m also aware that there’s this dynamic among some people of mixed race that they don’t want to be called Black or African American for a number of reasons, so I wanted this to be an assertion that I would not compromise members of my family or my sense of self for light-skinned privilege. Other people can say what they want.
End Part 1 of 2
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Tara Betts is the author of Arc & Hue (Aquarius Press/Willow Books, 2009). Her work has been adapted for the stage and performed on television. Her work appears in collections such as Bum Rush the Page, Gathering Ground, and both Spoken Word Revolution anthologies. She teaches creative writing at Rutgers University and workshops with teens. She is a Cave Canem fellow. Tara is working on a second poetry manuscript and several other book-length projects, including an anthology of Bop poems titled Bop, Strut and Dance: A Post-Blues Form for New Generations with Afaa Michael Weaver.
Antoinette Brim is the author of Psalm of the Sunflower (Aquarius Press/Willow Books, 2009). She is a Cave Canem Fellow and a Harvard University W.E.B. Du Bois Fellow at the National Endowment of the Humanities Summer Institute. She is a recipient of the Archie D. and Bertha H. Walker Foundation Scholarship to the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown and a Pushcart Prize nominee. Her poetry has appeared in various journals, magazines and anthologies, including the newly released or forthcoming anthologies 44 Writers on the 44th President, In Our Own Words: A Generation Defining Itself, and Just Like A Girl: A Manifesta. She teaches at Pulaski Technical College in North Little Rock, Arkansas.
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