What Sparks Poetry

“The Field” was a new way of being with a poem. To focus on one thing, to stick with it, to follow a seemingly organic line of inquiry—this was radically different from what I had been writing. Still, on the evidence of so many poems in my personal anthology that modelled this kind of concentrated attention, like “Opulence” and “Dead Doe,” it was clear I’d been yearning to write this kind of poem for a very long time. 

The first line of my poem, “Beauty is made my fear” is: “What slips from me is what / slips from me.” It occurred to me as I was thinking about those fiddly little typos in my book: first resenting them, then accepting their inevitability, and then embracing them –– “kissing” them, as the poem reads. 

I look to this past for models to meet the current moment: in stories of resistance covered over like bomb shelters, redacted from dominant histories like proper names from a CIA memo. Over the years of my continuing re-education, the Newark uprising has become a flash point from which to begin my studies on a variety of struggles for liberation.

What kind of poetry can we write in the world we live in today? This poem suggests: a jagged poetry that features horror but also humor, that knows tragedy but also comedy, that we don’t know how to trust. An all-too-human poetry, unpredictable, which we must keep going back to, to see what it will tell us today.

In my poem ‘New words, new clothes’ I revisit the time when I abandoned the Tamil language, choosing first silence and then English as replacements. This is a poem about the transformative capacity of words; the power they contain to both illuminate and camouflage in equal measure. There is a sense of defiance in this poem, the short-sighted defiance of youth maybe, which nevertheless ensured that I survived in order to write this poem decades later. I

I’ve been interested lately in being wrong. And in changing my mind—and in catching my mind as it’s in the very act of erring, or shifting, or turning, and in following that act. Which, in a poem, amounts to asking the reader to think something, then to un-think it, and then to replace the first thought with another. Except that you can’t unthink something.

If you think about each poem as a painting or a shadow box or a tiny black box theater with movable parts, each of those stages have their own set of forces, those forces must resolve upon the body, and then the body will then act accordingly. The body has its own force which gets resolved within that matrix. Poetry is thus the art of making things happen. It's the art of producing events, at least on the page. And if poetry produces happenings, it's a continuous presence that isn't fixed to one temporal unit.

The poetics of disruption is a lens to develop a different sort of relationship with disruption, where it can be a giving force. My goal in the “poetics of disruption” was not to find answers necessarily, but to metabolize the inextricable link between intimacy and violence, and falling in love in a time of queer people getting hate-killed, loving in a time of genocidal violence. Not only was my sleep disrupted for so many reasons beyond my control, but then I practiced disruption, where the speaker becomes an agent of disruption.

What I privilege is questioning the notion of things. Questioning myself, the world. Faith. Light, and even darkness. These are all places I am always eager to enter. The pursuit of understanding knows no bounds. And so, the poem Bakandamiya began as a seed to sow into the soil of my mind. 

The multi-genre approach just felt intrinsic to the subject matter, because in a lot of ways, the book is about how history gets recast in genre and how genre acts on story, right? The movie version versus the novel version versus the history book version. I’m really interested, having grown up seeing real life turned into a tourist attraction, how that move inherently emphasizes or obscures different elements of the story.

Gregory Orr, a mentor of mine, immediately comes to mind. He always pushed me to write about what I was most afraid of on the page—and he also encouraged me to embrace my obsessions. I carried both of those things into the writing of the book in almost daily ways. They helped me see the book through.

 In college, I was part of Stanford’s Spoken Word Collective, which was such a loving community, because so often being an artist is about rejection, and about toiling by yourself in your Google Doc alone, and so slam gave me a community, gave me a sense of possibility and of love, of writing in community around writing, which mattered so much to me as a young writer. Even now, as I become more of a “page poet” or whatever, I still have that attention to rhythm and music that's so central in slam.

I’ll ask my students every semester, what is a truly Missourian attitude? Or what is an element of our state that you see, what is Missourian, basically? And every year, it’s literally, I don’t know like going outside during storms? Or like casseroles? There’s not a Missouri identity, and not that I really want there to be, but I do….I am interested in the elements of what makes this place beat, like what is this undercurrent that is here? Because even the people that live here don’t really know.

This is a poem about, about, about. One useful thing I can say about my writing process is that a poem, for me, never begins in conceit, is never led by idea. Poetry, for me, begins in verbal play—and I don’t mean “play” with any amount of levity. This is an utterly serious thing, or can be: patterns of repetition and variation that allow a poem to dramatize parts of our lives that are otherwise inexpressible. Pleasure, sure, but also intuition.

If a language is a mother tongue, a foreign language is an affair. 

At the age of twenty-six, I moved to Paris with the ambition of becoming an exophonic French poet. The university graduate fees were laughably low compared to those in the United States, and I was eager to revise a manuscript of prose poems I had written years earlier while backpacking across Europe. Then Pessoa entered my life.