M: Your first collection appeared in 1980. Since then, you have produced ground-breaking work across genres. What do you feel has changed most in your poetic practice since you first began writing? Â
R: Poetic practice can also mean how the writing gets done. When I was a fledgling poet, I wrote to a world that didnât know I existed, basically calling out: âHere I am! Is anyone there?â And with every response â a stranger writing a letter or attending a reading â I could feel the tribe growing larger, stronger. As I continued publishing, teaching, and giving readings and lectures, my audience grew. Now Iâm fortunate to have an readership that appreciates my work, which is wonderful; but when I sit down to the blank page, I canât assume to know whoâs in that audience or anticipate what will move them. A poet addresses the void and hopes someone is listening; the poem is both a shout into the cosmos and a whisper into a strangerâs ear. Iâve been called a public poet, but for me the act of writing is a very intimate â nearly illicit â undertaking; to be aware of all those incognito readers, waiting, while trying to coax a poem into being is to become self-conscious in the worst way â inspiration either flies right out the window or chokes on its own sputters.
Which brings us to changes in my physical poetic practice over the years. Â When I was young with a myriad possibilities before me, I could write anywhere â in a coffee shop or on a park bench, at a card table with a 12-inch TV blaring from the corner of the room. But the world's racket seems more dissonant now, and I yearn for quiet. I try to carve out as large a chunk of uninterrupted time as I can finagle and retreat into a near-monastic seclusion, far away from the clamoring voices, until I can finally hear the whispers at my core. Poetic practice becomes a physical escape â shut the door, turn off radio and phone, block the internet â to a desert island of the mind where the cacophony of opinions and expectations has fallen away.
I began as many young writers do â reading voraciously, emulating favorite poets, searching for my âvoiceâ â as if voice were a static quality.  Everything Iâve experienced and lived through has somehow affected my writing, even my passionate pursuit of decidedly non-poetic hobbies like  ballroom dancing and sewing: I pay more attention to syllabic dips and swirls; I relish stitching the parts of a narrative into a three-dimensional garment that can pirouette in the center of a lyric moment. Collaborating across genres â with composers, visual artists, architects, dancers â has enriched my poetic intonation and pacing. But I would say that being a practicing musician has been the greatest game changer. I started playing cello in fourth grade, around the same time I began writing poems and science fiction stories. And itâs fair to say that the poems in my earlier books were written by a cellist; I liked working those lower registers. But when my professional life began to speed up and my schedule grew too busy to accommodate dragging a cello along on book tours, I took up classical singing, reasoning that at least now I could carry the music with me, inside me. I discovered that I was a soprano, which meant if I wanted to make music, I had to lead the choir; so I learned to relax in that thin upper air and float without looking down.  Over time, some of that chutzpah has rubbed off on my poetry. Quite a few poems in my latest book could have been sung by a dramatic soprano; thereâs a conscious vocal projection, conveying the melodic line.
M: Thank you so much for that extraordinarily thoughtful perspective. I love learning about your process.Â
We are living in a distinctly troubling and fraught moment, as the title of your newest collection suggests. What themes and threads were particularly on your mind, and where might we locate hope at this time?
R: This question touches on so many threads! The key word in my book's title is not âapocalypse.â Â When we hear of an apocalypse, we think of the dismantling of everything we hold dear â absolute destruction, the end of days, perhaps even the troubling times weâre living in. But an apocalypse can also refer to a resurrection, the notion that a revelation will be born from the ashes. I hoped the reader would bear both meanings in mind, to learn and rise from the wreckage. Â
Yet this is no doomsday collection of poems! The organizing principle behind my book lies in the word âplaylist.â Just as you might assemble a playlist of songs to accompany you through the day, buoying your shifting moods â soothing tunes when you hit a rough spot, ebullient when celebratory spurts are called for â the poems in Playlist for the Apocalypse are intended to serve as companions for their readers, charting the ups and downs, even the tangentials of life in the here and now. Some provide comic relief, in the vein of âlaughing just to keep from cryingâ; others rage or simmer or grieve. It can be a solace to remember that civilizations have weathered these kinds of disruptions and terrors before, so hopefully we can do it again; then we catch ourselves thinking: Why havenât we come further, why do we keep repeating our mistakes? All these ambivalences, the solace and the warnings, resonate with Playlist for the Apocalypse.
I like your turn of phrase in âwhere might we locate hopeâ â the idea that gaining hope requires some effort on our part, rather than expecting hope to be bestowed. Any great work of art, anything achieved by sheer human enterprise pushed to its limits, is a location for hope. To create something beautiful, even if the subject matter springs from horror, means that the artist was able to articulate difficult emotions. Identifying an injustice or injury is not enough; but conveying that outrage and anguish so that others comprehend and empathize â that is where hope resides. It means the human spirit has found a way to grapple with its demons and lived to tell the tale.
M:Â How does historical and etymological research figure into your work? What is the process like as you think and weave these subjects into your drafts?
R: Iâm an African-American female, so I grew up sandwiched in by historyâs many layers: History with a capital H was anything from the past deemed worthy enough to make it into the books I was required to study; current events were played out on television with ongoing interpretations tumbling from the mouths of pundits. But there was also a lost history passed down through generations, tales gone blurry from the retelling, adults snorting at news coverage, outraged whispers over yet another injunction or beating. So I grew up witnessing the extraordinary struggles of ordinary people â acts of quiet valor and sacrifice, their muted anger and steadfast resolve â and I realized that the official version of events rarely dished up the whole story and was often far from the truth.
It seemed inevitable that Iâd end up exploring these suppressed chronicles â what I call the underbelly of history â in my writing. Which means I do research, lots of it; though Iâm not after facts per se. I want to bring the facts to life, to restore three-dimensionality to individuals who have been flattened by hatred, caricatured into anonymity. Â
Iâve always been drawn to the voices that have not been heard. For instance, the poet Sarra Coppia Cullen, who lived in Veniceâs Jewish ghetto in the 16th century; because of her religion and gender, she hasnât been accorded the recognition she deserves. Or from another section of my book, the spring cricket singing in the hedge, who knows heâs considered âmerely an annoyanceâ by the very human beings heâs been observing from his hidden perch. There are victims and villains of the Black Lives Matter movement â some anonymous, others whose names have joined the bitter daily count â who have become part of our tragic news. All this is in the warp and weft of my poetry.
Although Iâve written quite a few poems dealing with history, I rarely go out looking for an event or person to write about. Itâs more like the subject finds me; itâs almost like being haunted. Â Sounds like sorcery, but itâs not, really; Iâll stumble across an intriguing nugget of information and curiosity pulls me in deeper. Iâll wonder what this person saw when they looked out a window, what their bed linens felt like, what they ate for breakfast. As I become more familiar with their environment, the more I find myself living in their world, too. Only then will my protagonist begin to speak to me, through me.
Most of my persona poems begin this way. Â I know more about crickets than anyone who's not an entomologist needs to know â how long they live, what they eat, the various sounds they produce and what those sounds mean; I even got down on the ground to approximate the view from a cricketâs vantage point. In the poem âBellringerâ, the speaker is Henry Martin, a slave who was born on the day Thomas Jefferson died; for years Henry Martin tolled the hours at the University of Virginia, Thomas Jeffersonâs âacademical villageâ. The irony of this serendipity moved me to read everything I could find about his world â tidbits about the lack of discipline among students (each of whom was permitted to bring one slave to the university), where the best food was to be had, and so on. Once I actually began writing the poem, I put the research aside; and when I got stuck because I couldn't hear the sound of the bell as he hear it, up there in the belfry, I put the poem aside and did more research on the casting of bells, what metal composition produced the roundest tones, the architecture of bell towers, until I could hear that molten stroke. It's one of the most exhilarating aspects of writing â Â that dance between fact and imagination.
Which brings us to the etymological side of language. The shadow side of our discourse â whatâs murmuring underneath the words we toss about each day âfascinates me. Of course, as a poet I love everything about words; words are my medium, my clay, the piece of earth out of which I fashion my vases. Â And sometimes going back to the origins of a word can tell you so much about the emotional energy it churns up when it is uttered; even if that bit of informationâs no longer apparent in the word today, it somehow still resides at the core. So if Iâm stuck in a poem, Iâll look up the roots of words that are bothering me, and often that will push me through. I'm an unabashed etymological junkie.
M:Â Are there any other books or works of art with which you feel the book is in conversation?
R: Oh, so many! The section called âAfter Egyptâ has been guided by the voice of the aforementioned Sarra Coppia Sullam, whose poems and letters articulated outrage with an exquisite balance of grace, despair, hope and retribution. She reminds me of Muriel Rukeyser, whose voice also infuses this work. On the other end of the outrage spectrum thereâs Sylvia Plath. No one does anger better! Those deft tonality shifts, rapier indictments . . . Â sheâs definitely the patron saint of the section called âEight Angry Odes".
I finished Playlist for the Apocalypse during the early days of the pandemic. While fiddling with recalcitrant words and settling on the final order, I decided to reread two Italian classics: Â Danteâs Divine Comedy, followed by Boccaccioâs Decameron. The Inferno struck a chord in me urgency huge influence â the relentlessness of its reckoning, but also its thrust of hope. But the release of tension I experienced while rereading the Decameron was surreal. There I was, amusing myself with this massive book of stories in the middle of a pandemic, just as Boccaccioâs young people fled plague-ravaged 16th century Florence and escaped to the countryside, where for amusement they set themselves the task of telling a story apiece each evening: ten men and women, ten stories a night for ten nights â a hundred tales in total, a sort of metaphorical sandbagging against the flood.
Other works of art, other genres? I listened to a lot of blues, a lot of  Leonard Cohen, but also German Lieder â art songs by Schumann, primarily. In both the blues and Lieder thereâs something about the length of time allotted in which to express emotion, an extreme stage of being, that implicitly shaped some of my poems.
Music was both the inspiration and the scaffolding for the section called âA Standing Witnessâ, which was conceived as a song cycle in collaboration with the composer Richard Danielpour. Knowing that this song cycle, which spans the past six decades of American history, would be premiered by the incomparable Susan Graham â knowing that this amazing mezzo soprano would be singing the words that I was writing â definitely had an influence on the sequence evolution, simply because thereâs an unmistakable gravitas to the mezzo soprano voice. The soprano range suggests a clarion call issuing from the empyrean â but additional layers of the mezzo register triggers echoes deep beneath the surface; it compels us to listen. So Iâm back to being a cellist again!
