Tatiana Johnson-Boria is the author of Nocturne in Joy (2023). She’s an educator, artist, and facilitator who uses her writing practice to dismantle racism, reckon with trauma, and to cultivate healing. She’s an award-winning writer who’s received fellowships from Tin House, The Massachusetts Cultural Council, The MacDowell Residency, and others. Tatiana completed her MFA in Creative Writing at Emerson College and teaches at Emerson College, GrubStreet, and others. Find her work in or forthcoming at The Academy of American Poets, Ploughshares, Kenyon Review, among others. She’s represented by Lauren Scovel at Laura Gross Literary.
Nocturne in Joy revels in apparitions with a “lineage” that “lead to ruptured paradise,” in the speaker’s father’s “frail sorcery kept mighty in [the speaker’s] mind,” in her mother who “[f]ills / the worry to brim, stewing/ slumber away,” and in that moment as “every spirit/ howl against the organ” at her grandmother’s funeral. Like its title, the poems within the collection enable the speaker to “heal from/ distress/ the result of disturbing life experiences” as the speaker “carry the dark matter/ Against luminous infinity / The nocturne beckons/ My desire to live.”
Tiffany Troy: How does the opening poem, “Heredity,” set up the poems that are to follow? You dedicate Nocturne in Joy to Black womxn. The quotes by Octavia Butler and Audre Lorde both also look to the meaning of finding meaning in a world that demands “Rejoicing, mourning, reveling in our lineage.”
Tatiana Johnson-Boria: I wrote “Heredity” long before I was building this collection. In writing this poem, I was attempting to write my own origin story. Where did I begin, what transpired before me, what brought me to this place? I don’t have all of the answers so I tried to write something slightly speculative, in that the poem leans slightly towards magic and the metaphysical, while grounding the poem in what I remember of my childhood and my family at that time. I have been incredibly inspired by Joy Harjo, especially her lyric memoir Crazy Brave. She writes her own origin story, reimagining the world outside as she was developing in her mother’s womb. It’s such a beautiful way of recounting history and reimagining history. It inspired me to think about crafting a similar approach to my own origin story.
TT: I love the framing of “Heredity” as an origin story, and your honoring of Joy Harjo.
What was the process in putting together this collection? In the Books Are Magic book launch for Nocturne in Joy, you spoke of how the collection is a way for you to make sense of your family, community, and Black womanhood and the desire to not just survive but to also thrive. Who were some of the poets who influenced you in this process?
TJB: Lucille Clifton is a big influencer of not only this book, but me as a person. She said at some point that she writes poems as a means of not falling into despair. I think this is why I’m also writing. This book is my own grappling with what it can mean to not fall into despair. So not so much to make sense of my Blackness but writing to give myself a balm in a world where Black women and femmes are not seen, heard, cared, and protected. It’s me asking myself how can I hold my family stories, not solely as inherited trauma but as the magical source of my own origin? Other poets that I admire who do similar things are Porsha Olayiwola, Diamond Forde, Gwendolyn Brooks, Aracelis Girmay, Kamilah Aisha Moon, and others.
TT: Thank you for sharing this book list and for giving us context in thinking about how the speaker’s origin is magical. I admire how deeply connected too that sentiment of not falling into despair is to the title, Nocturne in Joy, an evening song that rejoices even as the night falls upon the speaker.
Nocturne in Joy has five sections. The first section introduces the reader to the speaker’s Heredity that we first encounter in the proem; the second section is a sonnet crown entitled “Nocturne in Joy”; the third section begins to breakdown in unearthing “itself to marvel the vast and fertile infinite” ; the fourth section turns into a further breakdown of form with dense poem blocks, redacted sections and the fifth section returns us home to a gesture towards infinite joy. How did the collection come to find its published structure?
TJB: It took some time for me to come to this particular structure for the book. I think I could have kept shifting the order of these poems forever, because healing, unfortunately, isn’t a linear experience. I also, originally, didn’t envision all of these poems together, yet through sharing work with others I was getting some feedback about what others saw in my work. There were themes others noticed across poems that I didn’t think were remotely related. I also had separated many of the poems about my own personal mental health from the manuscript. I didn’t share these poems nor think that they could be in this book because they felt too confessional. I think it wasn’t until I integrated these poems that I started to see an arc to this book. A process of healing across the micro and macro aspects of a life. I am specifically thinking of EMDR and my exploration of a treatment I had undergone to find some sense of healing and spaciousness in my life. That act is my own way of trying to uncover my own experience of joy, especially amid trauma, specifically for me, a CPTSD diagnosis. And within this diagnosis I found that I will always be reckoning with the things that have happened to me and I will always need the lightness of joy.
TT: The idea of circularity appears visually in your collection as the recurrence of motifs as well as poetic forms, especially in the fourth section where you define EMDR and explain it through repetition of its definition in different visual iterations.
In your collection, you utilize many poetic forms from different traditions: the haibun, ghazal, and sonnet, to name a few. Titles like “Haibun in which I am a failed Superstition” point to how the poetic form is the occasion or vehicle with which you think about different issues. Then you have a poem “Black Women are Violets,” where the words take the visual form of a violet, with four footnotes which look like the ground or the roots of the flower.
Can you speak to your relationship to form?
TJB: Before I learned more about form, I never felt like I could write poems in form. I didn’t think I belonged in a league of poets who wrote sonnets or haibuns or pantoums. I felt like I didn’t know the rules, and if I wrote poems in form and they failed, that I was an imposter of a poet. I ended up taking a form class when I did my MFA and I was pretty surprised by the way form can be a vehicle for a poem. I read sonnets by Terrance Hayes and Danez Smith. I thought maybe there was a space for me in writing using various poetic forms. I also have a background in film and photography, so I have always been drawn to writing as a cinematic experience. So, some forms like the erasure or concrete poetry, felt like exciting things to try to bridge these parts of myself. Now, I look at form as a way a poem can come to life. I don’t often have many ideas about the form of a poem when I start writing, but a form always finds the poem and becomes part of its universe.
TT: I admire so much how varied the forms are, and how the sections become progressively more “experimental,” so to speak. I am curious, how would you write the poems? Do they differ from poem to poem? What was your compositional practice like?
TJB: Many of these poems were written over many years. Some of them existed as fragments and then I’d revisit them months or years later and something else would come from them. In EMDR, I struggled for a long time to write about my experiences with the treatment. I had the last few stanzas of the sequence as a poem for a long time. I thought about repetition and how to talk about this type of treatment without having to explicitly state what occurred during my treatment. I think I was attempting to do something Carl Phillips talks about in his essay “Beautiful Dreamer” where a poem becomes not a chronicle of a moment, but an exploration of an experience. I wanted to try to make the poem experiential. So redaction, erasure, repeated phrases, etc. were all tools to help me craft an experience similar to what it felt like to revisit traumatic moments. The triptych poem was written as an exercise of ekphrasis really, in writing in response to Carrie Mae Weems’ portraiture work Blue Black Boy. I wanted to write a collection of affirmations that can be paired together or read separately, but almost in an infinite way. I wanted it to feel cyclical and continuous, as if the act of surviving will never cease.
TT: I definitely see how you carried Carl Philip’s idea through. In terms of subject matter, I particularly admire how forthright you are in describing intrafamily violence and instability, and anchoring it to inter-generational trauma and the legacy of slavery and discrimination which persists to this day. Do you have any tips for poets who want to write about their family and inter-generational trauma?
TJB: Someone once told me that if you’re writing about someone you love, try to write the truth, and if possible one kind thing. I think that I took that approach to writing about my family. In what ways could I see other dimensions in the people that hurt me, not to dismiss the harm, but to heal my own self. Sometimes these shifts in perspectives provide so much space for me to reconcile with something. My tip would be to see if that’s possible for you, along with using the page as a way to write for yourself. What do you most need to hear or experience? How can you write into that space?
TT: Yes! I think the idea of seeing not only the multidimensionality of the person who has caused the harm but also focusing on the healing of the speaker-poet is so important and such great advice. Before we close, do you have any thoughts you’d like to share with your readers?
TJB: When writing about my CPTSD diagnosis and trauma, I found it helpful to create rituals for myself. Sometimes I pull a tarot card before writing. Sometimes I lay in child’s pose on the floor. Sometimes I walked outside and felt the air on my skin. It helps to get into the body when exploring the matters that have taken charge of our hearts and minds.
Tiffany Troy is the author of Dominus (BlazeVOX [books]) and co-translator of Santiago Acosta’s The Coming Desert /El próximo desierto (forthcoming, Alliteration Publishing House), in collaboration with Acosta and the 4W International Women Collective Translation Project at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. She is Managing Editor at Tupelo Quarterly, Associate Editor of Tupelo Press, Book Review Co-Editor at The Los Angeles Review, and Assistant Poetry Editor at Asymptote. She co-edits Matter with Darius Phelps.