A: Your poetry is so rich and spans such a wide range of forms and multiple landscapes of language. Wanted to ask you how you see the architecture of your work – both its content and its associated processes? 

REK: Despite the fact that it seems very structured, the structure is always inevitably organic and so it changes from book to book. As much as the structure changes, the grammar changes, the syntax changes, the language itself changes. I like to take on different forms and different structures. And, as much as I play with form,  I try to play with syntax and with grammar and with content and all of those things.  

I have a few new manuscripts right now. One is in the form of a gigan, a group of formalized poetic constructs repeating over and over again. It’s titled Fifty-Five Gigans and Five Notes. Another is the manuscript, /domina-Un/blued, a wild experimentation with form and the layout of the poem, though the narrative arc may be straightforward. And also, Third Voice ... traditional lyric narrative disrupted by form.
 

A: How do you make decisions about where you’re going to take language?  

It has to do with what the poem needs. I may write a poem one way, and the poem tells me that this is not the way, that there’s something else that it needs. I can write a poem and do nothing to the poem but change its form, and the poem changes. I’ll justify it, I’ll add or remove line breaks, I’ll take out the stanzas, I’ll put in the stanzas, and there’s a new poem. 
 

I use the metaphor of architecture, but how do you yourself conceptualize that process?

Architecture is one way; prosody is another way to conceptualize it. A free form is not free. It just means that the form emerges organically through the process of the poem becoming poem. As much as the poem itself dictates to me what the form might be, that form changes, depending on its context.  I have poems published one way in a journal, but when they become part of a book, they change.  

So I guess architecture is a good metaphor. And it’s a non-static architecture, it’s a shifting architecture. Maybe it’s contextual architecture? 

It’s like this: If you had a table, that table might be fine in and of itself, but then you bring the table home, and it doesn’t quite go; it doesn’t quite fit. So then you take out sander and sand off stain, you cut off the feet, or paint it. It’s the same table, but you’ve made these alterations so that it becomes a congruent element of your home.  The same goes for elements of the poem.

You write in your blog about Langston Hughes' work being about “conflict and intent and philosophy and commentary.” Can you speak to how you see your own work engaging with conflicts, intentions, philosophies and commentaries, especially given the contemporary moment?  

One of the things people don’t realize about Hughes in terms of “The Negro Nation and the Racial Mountain” is that it’s really important to contextualize what he says against George Schuyler’s essay to which he was responding. Schuyler wrote an essay a week before Langston Hughes’ essay that came out in The Nation. It was a week to the day and the title of Schuyler’s piece was “The Negro Art Hokum.” 
 

I went to graduate school and got an MFA, I got a PhD in modernism, focused on 19th- and 20th-century literature. I have read and have taught “The Negro Artist and the Racial Mountain” numerous times. And it wasn’t until recently that I realized that it was a rebuttal to Schuyler. Lots of people know that, but I didn’t. I went to the Schuyler article. His first sentence is: “Negro art "made in America" is as non-existent as the widely advertised profundity of Cal Coolidge, the "seven years of progress" of Mayor Hylan, or the reported sophistication of New Yorkers.”  What he’s saying is that Negro art made in America is a myth because Negros in America are Americans. We eat the same hamburgers; we go to the same churches. We’re Americans and that the literature of white Americans and the literature of black Americans is just American literature.  One of the reasons that Hughes challenges that is stated in his opening line: “One of the most promising of the young Negro poets said to me once, "I want to be a poet—not a Negro poet," meaning, I believe, "I want to write like a white poet"; meaning subconsciously, "I would like to be a white poet"; meaning behind that, "I would like to be white."  

And so, I take that to heart greatly, because I understand that struggle. I understand the struggle between wanting to be a poet, but also acknowledging and embracing the fact that I’m a black poet.  

Nikky Finney said to us once at a Cave Canem gathering that all black poetry should contain a freedom narrative. And I’ve never really forgotten that, because I don’t necessarily think that every poem that I write contains a freedom narrative, but every book I write collectively becomes a freedom narrative. And it could be something racial, or it could be something gendered, or something economic. I feel an onus, regardless of how experimental the work is that I’m producing, to really address that subject. Regardless of how the subject plays out—whether it’s a matter of empire, sexuality, economy—I feel that there’s an onus on me to somehow become a proliferation of the freedom narrative. 

How do you balance that? 

My freedom narrative may not take the form you would expect. For example, in the new book that I just finished, /domina-Un/blued, I play with the idea of empire. I also play with the idea of slavery and ownership. I intersect the traditional ways we think of the slave within the context of empire and then the contemporary ways in which empire has affected us. It offers almost an ironic view of that sense of owning and slavery, which moves into b/d/s/m.  So you have these addresses in the book where I address “the you” as Y/you to show that there’s this perpetual relationship of dominance and submission that we’ve built into our country through the traditions of or through the legacy of empire. 

This leads me to the question of the form of the gigan. Can you speak about how you came to the gigan, and what you think form, in general, contributes to the poem? 

Forms are formalized prosody.

I came to the gigan, and for me, it was a way of centering and becoming still. There’s some way that producing poems over and over that are in an organic form can be a wild exercise for me, and I was working on a manuscript that eventually has become this /domina manuscript.  It was so complex, and it was taking so many different avenues, and so when I was done with it, giving it time to sit for a little while, I decided to create this form as a matter of discipline and stillness. I wanted to use the form to help me throw off habits, devices, tropes I kept using over and over. I wanted to get rid of biblical allusion—this isn’t part of the form, but on top of the elements of the form. Physically, on the page, I set a number of rules for myself:  No biblical allusions, no historical allusions, and no references to my personal pasts. It allowed for a certain freedom because I had this 16-line form. When I wrote two lines, I knew that I had the lines of the frame; when I wrote 10 lines, I knew what the next thing I had to do was; when I wrote 14 lines, I knew that it was time for my volta.  It was like having a plan for living.

It made me think of Benjamin Franklin, who used to keep these journals for himself, and he would completely block out his day. So, between eight and eight thirty, he would do his biblical readings, and between eight-thirty and nine, he would consider the implications of science, and between nine and nine-twenty, he would sit in the garden, and between nine-twenty and ten o’clock, he would work on physics. And he was very regimented. And for me that’s what happened with the gigan. It became a road map of what to do next, and it was a very freeing experience. It required me to be still, to do nothing, to say nothing. To live in that space and do what ever I could in that small space, because I didn’t have any other space to work with. 

It’s so funny how constricting ourselves can create such a sense of freedom. 

It relates to this notion of empire that I’m talking about.  In this next book, I’m talking about the notion of being owned. When you take that notion of being owned and bring it forward, when you contemporize it, there’s this weird sense among that ownership community that this is a source of freedom. That’s what got me interested in including that in the book: this contemporary sense of consensual slavery and the idea that people feel that that’s a freedom. That’s fascinated me.  

When I was writing the gigans, I had not yet thought about that aspect. But I had thought about the idea of making a cage for myself. I remember thinking and talking to people about Kafka’s story, “The Hunger Artist,” and how within the cage he performs the ultimate act. He has the most control, he is the king of his own dominion, he is the father of his own legacy, and he has his own life in his hands. I thought it was an interesting metaphor for the fiction of freedom. I read Kafka’s “Hunger Artist” over and over again, trying to really understand the function of the cage. Especially in that story because he doesn’t have to be caged to do what he does.  In some ways that cage allows him the freedom to be in his own space. And the cage can keep the outside out and the inside in.  

This next question comes from a place of recognition. You’ve had to confront death in your own life. What gifts has that confrontation given you? 

I had cancer twice before I was 21, and so that age is a threshold to your life. When I was 15 and had cancer, it wasn’t that it wasn’t a big deal, but I got it, and we fixed it, and you go on. In some ways I went on as the angry teenager. I lived hard and partied hard and six years passed, and then I got cancer again. For me it was this defining moment in my life, and if you believe in g-d—and I’m not always sure that I do—it was like he was tapping me on the shoulder saying, “You apparently didn’t get the message the first time.”   

At that moment I really got to work. I called myself a writer and said I wanted to be a writer before then, but at that moment, I thought, I need to get something done because I might not be here, I might be checked out. It began this period of serious work. I went back to school, and I got my B.A., MFA, I got my PhD, I wrote a few books. The last eight years has been me taking a breather from that furious period of just needing to produce, produce, produce. I’ve been enjoying the luxury of being able to sit back and really craft in a way that I hadn’t before, and not feel under the gun in the way that I did in my twenties and thirties.  I always felt the onus of time, but as I move through my forties, I care less about that. I’ve surrendered to the process of life, and I feel like I’ve done something as opposed to nothing. If life gives me the benefit of two, three, four more books or another shopping trip, it’s a gift, and I’m lucky. Whereas when I was younger, I felt like something was getting taken away. 

It seems to me that in having to confront death or illness—and then surviving it—there’s a sense of urgency that emerges about life. I don’t think it’s a common experience, and so I was wondering if you could talk about that sense of urgency in your own life.  

Yeah, I did have that. I really felt a sense of urgency in my twenties and my early thirties. I just clipped through it. I published my first book the month I defended my PhD dissertation and the next two books came rather quickly. The publication didn’t come quickly; it was the writing. During that time I was working on a dissertation, and I was writing three books, and I honestly felt that I was up against a stopwatch. And then at some point in my late 30s it occurred to me—and I remember the specific moment—that I had not yet expired.  And I’m still here.  I think it was also the moment that I started writing the gigan. The moment that I realized I was still here, I stopped approaching my life with such a sense of urgency, the rushing, the need to get from there to here. It’s possible that it could be reflected in that work. I wanted to find a stillness like what we find in meditation. Gigans are each 16-line meditational songs. They reflect my need to simply be still and to have clarity at that time in my life.   

How do you leave old skin behind, and what does poetry have to do with it?  

It’s funny you say that because I do it a lot.  You can see this with each book. I work in a [writing] program that labels itself a program of experimental and innovative writing. I identify as a lyric poet.  Now, lyric poets might look at my work, especially my new work and say, “We don’t get it.” They may look at the gigan and say, “Okay, we get it.” They may look at /domina-Un/blued and not get it. I throw off my old skin so often. I have that modernist sense of “making it new.” I take that quite literally in my own work, partly because I want to present something new to the world, but also to allay my own boredom. I get bored writing the same kind of poem over and over, the same kinds of narratives over and over, the same kinds of grammar. Every poem, regardless of how traditional or nontraditional it looks, is an experiment in language, and even more importantly, with sound.  The common thread in everything I write regardless of how it looks on the page is the sonic element. If the poem doesn’t sing, it fails for me.  

Entering your work is like sitting and listening to live music; it’s a fourth-dimensional experience. 

Interesting you talk about live music. Live music goes into fourth-dimensional space, which is a dynamic space. You’re unable to not move. You move your body. Every time you move your body, you move it in a different way. The form varies each time. It’s an organic form. The music is still there, and it’s the priority, and the most salient element. That’s how I feel about the poem. The most important thing is the sonic element, and everything else comes after that. The sonic element has a lot to do with how I determine the form.  

Can you talk about new technologies, and how you see these technologies in relationship to poetry and voice?  

I just started reading and trying to educate myself on digital technologies and digital poetry. I think there was a time in my life as a poet, early on, when I scoffed at anything that wasn’t what I knew. I may have had a more closed definition of what poetry is, or what lyric is, or what experiment is, or what innovation is. But in my old age and wisdom, I just don’t care. I literally don’t care. I don’t care how you write it, what you call it. If it’s this creative thing that you want to include under the rubric of poetry, I completely embrace it, and I accept you.  

That said, lately I’ve been seeing visual poetry, and I find it fascinating. I understand now how they claim the legacy of poetry. I understand how visually they play with my perception, and they can interrupt my perception, they can surprise me, they can comfort me, or they can disturb or disrupt me.  I’ve been listening to digital poetics. I listen to Anne Tardos and another writer named Jonathan Bach. Lori Emerson, whose area is digital poetics, has just joined the University of Colorado faculty. When we hired her, I was intrigued by her work. I started doing research into it, and I thought, What a great cousin to have. Spoken word is one cousin, the innovative poets are another cousin, and digital poets are another cousin. They’re all interesting in their own way. It’s just like a family reunion. We spend more time at one table than the other, but they’re all in the same family. I find something interesting and valuable in each of those subgenres.   

What kind of impact do you think new technologies have on language? 

I think they make other languages available—that which you don’t have available to you on the page. For example, say I want to make a long “o” sound go on forever. I have a poem with the world oligarchy in it. I write it as “o-o-o Oligar-r-r-r-rchy.” I can only hope that my readers understand that device. With visual poetics you have so much more freedom. The other thing about digital poetics that I find interesting and find curious is that digital technologies are so often based almost solely on the sonic element. They take that one aspect of the lyric that we privilege so much, and they create a sensor out of what they do.  From my perspective, digital sound poets may be the highest form of lyricists.  

Can you talk about being a mom and an artist? 

It’s important to normalize poetry and writing for my child. It’s a part of her home; it’s a part of her life. It’s a normal aspect of being a kid. For so many kids, poetry lives in the realm of the other, it’s unfamiliar, or we do it in school. I want the idea of poetry to be as normalized as music or television or the computer or anything else, so that it’s a part of her life. 

What thoughts and kernels of insight do you have for younger women poets just emerging onto the scene?  

The greatest advice I can give is to be fearless and to not predetermine who you are as a writer. One of the most difficult things for me as a teacher and mentor is when students come to me with pre-articulated limitations such as: “I’m this kind of writer, or that kind of writer, this is my subject, that is my subject, etc.”  They aren’t open to the endless possibilities available to them. I mostly suggest to students, and especially to women, to be fearless in what they do, to take risks. Some risks will pay off; some won’t. But nothing will ever pay off if you don’t take risks.

One of the things that I love, love, love about Wendy [Walters] is just that. What I love about Wendy is that she’s one of the bravest poets that I’ve ever encountered. She goes to the page, and she doesn’t care what’s expected of her. She writes in a way that feels right to her. She takes those risks. She opens herself up to possibility. At the same time she really invests in craft, and she’s hard on herself as a poet. And I’m hard on myself, too.

So, what I say is open yourself up to the possibilities; don’t limit yourself. And then once you take those risks, come back to the poem and then be hard on yourself. Then pound out the poem, then give it a form, then revise it and revise it and revise it again—because this is a craft.