An excerpt from her work-in-progress “WE” appears in the forty-second issue of Touch the Donkey.
Q: Tell me about the work-in-progress “WE”
A: “WE” tries to think about ecological disaster in terms of collective responsibility. For me that means thinking about collective identity—a sense of global identity and how to give that voice—and what alienates us from this collectivity, which in turn means thinking through mechanisms of atomization and exploitation historically and concretely. So, I’m trying to map out ideas like primitive accumulation, surplus value and profit accumulation, and racialization, but I’m trying to do it through a collective voice that foregrounds the human body, and each individual body's relationship to other bodies, and the metabolic relationship of our bodies with the environment, which is being destroyed.
Q: How does this piece compare to some of the other work you’ve been doing lately?
A: Honestly, this piece is the work I’ve been doing lately. In its entirety, it’s almost a book-length poem, and my writing time has been spent revising it and sending out the book project that contains it. The excerpt is a good fragment of the whole, which works similarly, though it tries to build from laying out the problem of alienation and exploitation to manifesting a solution within collectivity and the forms of revolutionary activity that communality makes possible. So the second half of the poem is hopefully heartening. Your question comes at a good moment, though, since I am starting to think about what I want to write next. I’m not quite sure yet, but I’d like it to center the individual more and the tension between individuality and collectivity, as well as more of the socio-historical concrete that makes up activities like labor organizing and other forms of activism.
Q: What prompted you to aim for something book-length? What was it about this particular piece that pushed you in that direction?
A: This is a great question, because the length of the project is so important to me. When I started this work, I was just writing in response to different texts I was reading: poets like Daniel Borzutzky and Layli Long Soldier, and also Marx and Marxist ecological thinkers like John Bellamy Foster. So everything was initially discrete, but despite reading such different works, everything I was writing was coming out very similarly, and I realized that what I was writing had coherence in that I was exploring how capitalism affects the global body. And doing that meant also exploring how capitalism affects individual bodies, what it means for the experience of labor, and aspects of labor’s organization, including racial hierarchies, as well as trying to capture capitalism’s historical instantiation. So, as I went I was, as Lukács says, trying to totalize, which doesn’t mean I think the book touches on everything, but rather that in its fragments and refractions, it tries to give some sense or aspects of the pattern of the whole.
Q: With a published collection and chapbook under your belt, how do you feel your work has developed? Where do you see your work heading?
A: This project is very different from my earlier work. My first book was centered around an “I” that was definitely a persona for myself. The book was very interested in the way that self-identification coheres and fractures in relation to identifications with others, with trauma, and over time. The poems experiment some, with ekphrasis, voice, and form, but they stay firmly within the lyric tradition. My chapbook is composed of entirely formal poems – particularly obsessive forms – and persona poems that try to think through motherhood and childhood, particularly in relation to violence and trauma. These were not about my personal experience, but they were an attempt – on the part of a young woman – to grapple with questions of intergenerational trauma as I contemplated the possibility of parenthood later in life. The chapbook was very influenced by Ai – a very underappreciated poet. I’m very proud of both, but this later work turns fairly completely away from myself as a locus of meaning. My work labor organizing and becoming a mother enters into it -- but I didn’t write from a place of self-exploration but social exploration, which often meant trying to get outside of my own experience as much as possible.
Q: You mention the poet Ai; what was it specifically about their work that sparked your own? And have there been any other poets or works that have been influencing your current directions?
A: Ai wrote over her long poetic career entirely in persona poems. There are a couple of poems that are drawn from her biography, but these are indistinguishable from the others, and this alone is a remarkable experiment in selfhood and voice. She also often enters into the voices of working-class people -- who continue to be under-represented in literature – and also the voices of people who perpetrate violence. Increasingly, I think non-violence is an untenable position in the face of climate catastrophe, racist policing and mass incarceration, and other forms of capitalist exploitation. The slow violence that millions are experiencing daily cannot be met only with non-violent forms of resistance, though those are incredibly important too. Anyway, other poets I’ve been reading recently include Martín Espada, Ch’oe Sūng-ja, Mahmoud Darwish, and Noor Hindi, all writers whose work embodies the spirit of anti-capitalist and anti-imperialist resistance. Particularly right now, I find it so important to read Palestinian voices, particularly those that can situate the current Israeli violence in a longer history of oppression.
Q: What role do you think literature holds in such moments, and how do you approach the political through the form of the poem? Do you see poems as witness, as document? As call to action? Or something other/further? How does one write around such topics without looking like a tourist?
A: Yes, bearing witness and calling to action, to arms, in the sense of putting our bodies in service of social transformation. I think that poetry, at its best, does both and illuminates underlying causes, and in doing all of this in a form that can, even for a moment, bring people together, maybe enacts the very kind of collectivism that I think is needed. And yes, this issue of not looking like, or more importantly, not being a tourist, or worse, a settler-colonist (though there is a historical relationship between the two that points to the very problems with being a tourist) is at the center of my struggles with this writing. I’m not sure I always succeed. Particularly in trying to write about exploitation, racism, and the impacts of climate catastrophe, and in doing so thinking about collective identity, and using “we,” which implies an “I” who is representing the voices of others, I have worked to try to avoid appropriation and speaking for others, rather than with them. I do know that the kind of solidarity I’m looking for in the text, and that I think we are all in need of to respond to global catastrophe, cannot be found in expecting people to dissolve their differences in service of some abstract togetherness, nor can it be forged if we don’t see the forms of exploitation and the liberatory potential we share. The poem is about that, so at least I hope in centering that complexity, I avoid the worst pitfalls of “tourism” poetry.
Q: Finally, who do you read to reenergize your own work? What particular works can’t you help but return to?
A: A lot of poets I’ve mentioned already fall into this category, especially Ai, Daniel Borzutsky, Layli Long Soldier, Martín Espada. I’d put James Wright, Pablo Neruda, Don Mee Choi and Lucille Clifton in that list, so many more. I’ve spent a lot of time in the past few years with the work of nineteenth-century African American poets Paul Laurence Dunbar and Frances Ellen Watkins Harper, and I think their work and their model for poetry – their real concern for everyday life and its liberatory forces – is going to influence my future writing. And sometimes also I find that the most reenergizing reading I do isn’t poetry but other genres: Marx, Charlie Post, John Bellamy Foster, Thulani Davis, Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor, Hadas Their, Olúfẹ́mi O. Táíwò – all thinkers who help illuminate questions of inequality, race, climate catastrophe – and also novelists like Sembène Ousmane and Emma Donoghue. I’ve been coming back to these two novelists again and again for the way they tell stories of individuals and also societies in motion simultaneously. I’d like my poetry to do that.
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