“Be Kind Rewind: Where Poetry Meets Proust,” an interview Series by L.J. Sysko
Poetry writing is a holistic proposition, and I believe we ought to talk about craft granularly while we discuss the psychological growth and wellbeing (or lack thereof) that drove it. Since high school, we’ve rightly been New-Critically conditioned to separate the speaker from the poet, but I want to restore unity for the sake of this discussion about art making. While we’re feeling retrospective, let’s admit old-school pop cultural influences, personal milestones, relational drama, and makeover montages into the record.
L.J.’s rules of the game:
“The Proustian Questionnaire” is a parlor game lauded by Marcel Proust, the French writer, for its revealing power. To poet-guests, I present all 35 original quiz questions with the Be Kind Rewind version riding parenthetical sidecar—like a madeleine beside the tea. My poet-guests select six from the list to answer: two from The Now, two from The Then, and two from The Way Back When.
Let’s get started:
If Southern Gothic pulled up a barstool and sighed: “Another funeral today,” his murmur clearing the lump in his throat and cutting through the genre’s smoky tropes to wring meaning from so many deaths. All this lowered “oak” into the South’s silent soil.
In Greater Ghost (Four Way Books, September 2024), Christian J. Collier’s debut full-length poetry collection, ‘what if’ gives way to ‘if then.’ The Tennessean whisks us through spirituality’s dense woods, follows along amber rivers of corporeal love, and sinks into the animal hours of grief—less concerned with conforming to Southern Gothic (or Southern Noir for that matter) than leveraging it as another non-viable construct (alongside the vicissitudes of Christian faith) for comprehending Black love and loss on this scale.
Time lapses graveside in an interminable Hamlet-ian loop in which families gather at the “gape shivering to be filled.” We never get the whole story of the “101 haints”—the big losses Collier’s book alludes to—at least not in full– ... not the one about his “mama’s mama” whose house in Macon was “conned away from her” by the city ... not the one about a cousin’s murder ... and not the one about his lover’s miscarriage, which serves as the book’s emotional climax-nadir. In other words, there are long tragic narratives to be shared ... but not here. Instead, the violence in Greater Ghost is in its redacted roll call; deaths occur off stage as a matter of exposition, leaving us catching our breath alongside Collier as he looks into the abyss from a diasporic promontory. In poems like “The Men in My Family Disappeared” and “Benediction for the Black & Young,” our attention is “a cube of butter sink[ing] into the navel of grits” (is there a more unique (and Southern) metaphor for nihilism’s deconstruction as it winds us back to the body?).
Greater Ghost’s poems occupy a realistic plane with racism, poverty, and violence serving as a ghastly “congregation of teeth sleeping on the trail,” and there’s not enough supernatural agency in the eye of “a gray fox,” in the “stomach of an apple,” or in the “swaying shadows” to restore what’s gone—what’s been taken. “Holy, the Grey Goose, / the Elijah Craig Small Batch,” the “Jamesons” and “Hennessy & Crown;” “I am soaked in my losses,” is the narrator’s opening gambit, and thus begins the transit of mothers, cousins, lovers, uncles, and the unborn through poems’ earthy shades—“copper,” “umber,” “bronze,” and “sepia”—before disappearing. Collier’s tour of loves lost feels ghostly, as though we’re witnessing the landscape through a tear-hazed scrim. Why? Our mentor is himself a spectre left behind— less Hamlet than Horatio, stuck swilling silence in this joint called Living.
I interviewed Christian about his book, his writing life, and the truth of how he got Here.
LJS: What or who is the greatest love of your life? (The BKR version: Does poetry—either writing it or reading it—feel crucial to your existence? If yes, tell us how you’ve used it to deliver you here to this very moment.)
CC: Poetry does feel crucial to my existence, and it has for a long time. When I first started reading and writing it, I was trying to woo a girl I attended high school with, but very quickly into my education, poetry allowed me another lens to see myself and my world through. That has always remained the case. A few years after I began writing, HBO’s Def Poetry started airing, and not only was it a way to see poets from across the country, but it allowed me, in a way, to feel connected to a poetic community.
Within the past five years, I had an epiphany that changed the way I write. Rather than trying to shape the poem from the beginning, I’ve become much more trusting in the work guiding me where it wants to go. This process, which was largely influenced by artist Mark Bradford, is how my books Greater Ghost (Four Way Books, September 2024) and Gleaming of the Blade (Bull City Press, 2022) were composed. Also though, this new manner of working gave me permission to bring more of myself, my world, my people into my poems in interesting ways.
I feel like I’ve arrived at a place where poetry has afforded me the opportunity to make work that I’m proud of and work that those closest to me can see themselves in, and that makes me feel happy. I’m not on this journey alone, so it’s important to me that the people who’ve lifted me up feel seen and like they’re part of what I’m doing as well.
LJS: What do you consider your greatest achievement? (The BKR version: In your most recent “good” poem (or collection), of what are you most proud? Explain.)
CC: Right now, the thing I’m most proud of is one of the smallest parts of my book. So much of Greater Ghost is about my family. At the end of it, there’s a list of friends and family who are no longer here, and since I completed final edits, more of my loved ones have passed on. When I got married a few years ago, I didn’t have much family in attendance because the men who would’ve driven my aunts, cousins, etc. up here for the occasion are gone, so what I’m most proud of is the dedication at the beginning. Greater Ghost is dedicated to the Colliers and Hollingsheds—my mother’s and father’s families and the people responsible more than anyone for shaping me into who I am. I want my people to know how grateful I am for them, and I want the love and appreciation I have for them to be something they can see in print.
LJS: Yes, can you talk more about that dedication? The people who aren’t on stage in the poems–ghosts, family–but who are nonetheless here?
CC: It’s interesting because there are people who aren’t with us anymore, even after the manuscript’s final draft. Where I come from, there is this belief that, in one way or another, you carry your people with you. So it’s not just, ‘I’m going to college.’ It’s: ‘We’re going to college.’ And I’ve never lost that.
A lot of what I’ve done or been fortunate to do in terms of poetry, writing in general, and being an artist, it feels to me that I carry my people with me. Most of them have not been able to see or experience my work. I used to be on the road quite a bit and, you know, you’re in a room doing a thing for a night, and my family were never really there in those rooms, and so this is the most visible thing where they can really kind of see themselves–see some of our story, some of our history. I think that there’s that adage of being able to give people their flowers. To me, this is a way for me to do that.
For at least the people who are still alive and if I’m blessed to have children, just being able to ... one day somebody can pull a book off the shelf and say, ‘Dad did this and this is where we come from.’ That felt really important to me.
LJS: You referenced “those rooms” where you began as a performance poet. What did you learn from that genre and era?
CC: Starting in 2009, I started venturing out (of Chattanooga) wherever I could to experience other scenes and see how my work was landing. Chattanooga is the home of the two-hour excursion. We’re two hours away from Nashville, Atlanta, Birmingham, and Knoxville, so, for years, I would regularly jump in my car, which I dubbed the Mobile Office, and go somewhere to hit an open mic or a slam. In 2014, I started landing features, and that same year, I received the Loft Spoken Word Immersion Fellowship, which allowed me to go to Boston, Washington, and Minnesota.
I learned that time functions differently onstage. Often, we feel like we’re speaking in a casual, measured manner, and then when you see the video later, you witness yourself motor-mouthing your way through a poem. I had to learn to calm down.
Also, when you’re in front of an audience, you have different tools at your disposal. For a long time, I found myself in rooms with people who weren’t necessarily poetry fans. In order to win them over, my banter between poems had to do a lot of work, and at the end of my set, they would have received poems, jokes, social commentary, etc., and more than once, someone approached me to tell me that they don’t really dig poetry, but they liked me.
Over the years though, I understood that for audiences who are coming to open mics and slams, they don’t usually have the text to read from, so I would lean on different devices to make the work more accessible for them. On the page, a reader can always return to a piece over and over again to build understanding and see different layers and textures.
LJS: On your book’s textured and layered first page,“Boot Hill” feels like an abstract of the entire collection’s motifs and themes. It reminded me of Shakespeare because of these lines: “Where can one bury their skull & not hear, / in some direction, the cicada song of the living?” I thought, ‘Oh, we’re gonna be in the graveyard a lot, watching the gravedigger work,’ and your Yorick skull is a mimetic for you undergoing your own spiritual scrutiny.
When you were thinking about a setting to establish your ideas and the book’s ironic quest, were you thinking, ‘Yes! It’s the graveyard!’?
CC: I really wasn’t!
I consider this book a gift. I mean, I’m sure every writer is like [speaking in a deliberately hushed and affected tone], ‘This book was a gift.’ But I really feel like, in a number of ways, this was.
I started cranking it out with no real expectations in 2019 after coming back fromThe Frost Place. It just hit me to meditate on the theme of ghosts. What does it mean to be a ghost? What are the ghosts you carry? I was writing into that; I was getting one good poem a week and sometimes maybe two.
LJS: Oh wow!
CC: Yeah, just seeing what was there. It wasn’t until I hit a point where I had nothing else to say that I started taking inventory, and then I started to see place pop up. That was really a surprise to me.
There’s this rural setting, in Macon. I think that place is always important in my work, but it’s just one of those things that, in the interrogation, presented itself, and it unified everything.
LJS: What is your greatest extravagance? (The BKR version: Describe The Zone—your most luxurious and extravagant minutes or hours spent writing a poem, a book, a line, a rhyme.)
CC: Maybe six years ago, I had my last bout with the flu and had a fever for three straight days. When it finally broke, for some reason, my body got really accustomed to silence. All these years later, that’s still the case, so my favorite time to write is the hour or two I get to myself right after work and before my wife comes home from her job. I’ve worked from home since the beginning of the pandemic, so I can transition easily from me on the clock to creative me, and as soon as I shut down my work computer, the sun is beaming through the windows, my neighborhood is pretty still, and my house is mostly silent. It’s the perfect time for me to lean into the work without distraction or obligation.
LJS: It sounds like your experience at The Frost Place followed by a healthy diet of silence helped you create this book. Do you remember anything specific about what you felt, heard, or learned at The Frost Place that resonated through the silence?
CC: I remember many things that Tyree Daye, my workshop leader, said during the course of that week. I’m not sure if I’m in workshop with anybody else if I have this book or how this book looks. The first poems came from his worksop through the different permissions that he gave me.
The first thing he had us do was list some of the components of our personal identity. I come back to it fairly often because the way that you see yourself will change as you change and the things you encounter change. I always think: I’m Black, Southern, male, family-oriented, spiritual–and more so spiritual than religious–, and all those things really show up in different ways in my work. And they also allow me to form a system of symbols and to make meaning. That’s just one thing that I have found really helpful in the years since. And they’ve allowed me to make a literary signature. To make my poems distinguishable.
LJS: Speaking of symbols ... brackets and redactions are important elements of punctuation and typography in Greater Ghost’s poems. Brackets for secondary titles feel like a portal through which the dead can speak a little. And the redactions may be a limit or defense against the haints fully returning?
CC: The book is, to a certain degree, a Choose Your Own Adventure. You can see it as one linear story or as four different storylines braided. I wanted the ghost poems about one specific person to distinguish them a bit more, thus the brackets.
The redactions are something I have been doing for a couple of years, starting with “When My Days Fill With Ghosts,” because I was asked to write about what it was like to be Black in 2020. And I thought a great number of things. The poem started presenting itself in vignettes, but I was writing about real people: real people that I lost or real people in the news. When you’re writing about people who cannot consent to be in the work, you’re left with some choices that you personally have to be ok with, either way. So I started redacting the names. If you’re wired like this where you’re looking for deeper meaning, you can insert your own names where those redactions fall. It’s another way to bring the reader into the work if they’re so inclined; if not, they’re left with that mystery of who these people are. It’s working on different levels. I’m still doing it.
It’s a relationship between letting people in and putting a limit on how far they can go but also giving them a door where they can have their own experience. I like leaving doors for whoever’s on the other side of the poem.
LJS: If you could change one thing about yourself, what would it be? (The BKR version: When walking the halls of The Flannery O’Connor School of Childhood Recollection, what do you see over and over again? Why? Are you glad about this or no?)
CC: Lately, one of the chief obsessions that’s popped up in my work is nostalgia. People, places, and events from my younger days in Tennessee are kind of screaming at me, which is fine. I think there’s definitely something there worth interrogating, and I’ve been allowing myself to dig in. I’m pleased with the poems that have been emerging, and I think they’re in conversation with the poems from my chapbook, so that’s a pleasant surprise.
Beyond that though, I’ve been finding it hard to let nostalgia be nostalgia. I’ve reached out to a few people I knew many moons ago, and it’s become painfully clear that the moment for us to exist in each other’s lives is long gone, but the desire to see how people are, what their lives have been like, if they recall particular things from twenty-five or so years back, etc. haunts me. I don’t quite know how to feel about that.
LJS: This longing for story and then skepticism about it–I noticed this geometry in some of Greater Ghost’s poems. Setting up narrative exposition and then eschewing it, almost treating it as a red herring, funneling down to land instead on a wizened truth statement.
CC: I really enjoy a poem that moves. There’s that quotation about no matter how much you love poetry, you’re always looking for a reason to stop reading a poem. It’s kind of like boxing where styles make fights. So if I can keep you on your toes and you don’t know what’s coming next, there’s a good chance that maybe you make it through the poem, right? So, I’m trying to surprise and seduce. From line to line. I think that I’m really just writing into surprise. Again, in 2019, I had what I call my 2nd great epiphany. I started thinking that all text is malleable. If that is the case then everything is possible. You can fill everything, every experience, with language. So I stopped really trying to compose with intention, and I’m just mainly interested in interesting language, interesting combinations of language. I’m just moving words around and I’ll stumble into something and I’ll go, ‘Oh, that’s interesting,’ and I’ll add something else to it and go from there.
So that part of the brain, the internal editor? That guy’s not allowed into the room yet. He comes in later, and that’s where the buffing, and the shaping, and the structure, and the looking at the container happen. That’s his job. So, constantly I am surprised by what’s there. It is not intentionally put there.
I figure if I’m surprised–[mumbles with wonder] ‘Oh, that’s neat, we went from here to there’–there’s a good chance if you’re on the other end of the poem, you’re having that same kind of experience.
So much of the book is ... we’re dealing with death, which is very natural but also supernatural ... it allows me to go different places where I don’t have to be confined to the everyday concrete world. We can begin there, but we can go so many other places, right? I was able to lean into that a little bit more.
And get kind of weird in hopefully good ways.
LJS: I think that’s really interesting, just sort of letting go of intentionality and entering a meditative space of arranging ... as you’re doing that, would you say music or the sonic effects of language are foremost in your mind? Or is it image or some combination?
CC: I don’t know. I mean, I think I probably lean on music, but I think that a lot of the music in the final version of the book came out during those last couple bits of revision just to try to amplify it because I kind of felt like it gives it an almost spell-casting quality, you know? Just that rhythmic and melodic aspect. I tend to have images in mind or they pop up, but between the two, I think music is the one I’m a little bit more wired toward.
LJS: Yeah, because I noticed that you use doubling. And I thought of it almost as a coping mechanism, like a life raft in the midst of all of this spiritual uncertainty. That sometimes the creating of pairs, symmetry, sonic accord ... that those are there as tentative stability. As in, ‘Well, if nothing else, let’s cling onto this.’ But then even those tend to wash out, too. This was less a logical decision and more an arrival by virtue of this intuitive process?
CC: Oh yeah, for sure.
LJS: “Blood” is one of the many poems in the book that feature women, giving them the last and best word. [Laughs] Which I admired.
CC: In some ways women kind of haunt the speakers in different ways, right? Which I guess makes sense; I mean the whole thing is an interrogation of what makes a ghost. Our ghosts aren’t everyone who’s died. Sometimes it’s the person you wished you kissed in ninth grade. That’s a ghost you carry if you’re like, ‘Oh, I should’ve...’
LJS: Yes, love and sensuality are here, too! The poem “Sanctuary” is an astonishing poem because you achieve this pronoun slippage where there’s two female figures in this poem, and they become interchangeable with one another for a glimpse because of that pronoun. And it’s a stripper and the dying mother! It blew my mind! The risk of that! But also the commitment to the speaker’s own perspective of what grief feels like so that even two absolutely separate and objectively living beings felt trauma-blended and dead, right? I ended up in this book not knowing who was alive and who was dead, and that binary understanding of those spaces–all spaces–was obliterated.
CC: Oh. Wow. I don’t even know what to say about that. That’s great.
[Laughing]
CC With “Blood,” it’s such a dreamy poem ... Going back to permissions .... Ilya Kaminsky talks about this quite a bit: bridges in poems? If we identify that we are talking to God, or talking to the deceased, or we’re flying–those things that break the rules of the normal, accepted world–we can go anywhere. We can do anything. I think that the communication that you could have with somebody who’s no longer here is fascinating, and if they can still judge, what would their judgment look like? That informed that poem.
But my grandmother pops up in a couple other poems, too, and I didn’t really anticipate what she would say. That’s the thing that catches me the most now is that I’m taken aback by allowing her to have a voice in the poem and what actually emerged. That’s wild. I was telling somebody a while back about the difference between my chapbook and this one, and I was like, ‘They’re both really personal books in different ways, but this one ... because I’m not a big cryer or anything like that, but this one has real emotional stakes for me.’
And that’s somethin’.
LJS: Who are your favorite writers? (The BKR version: Whose poems struck you first—in school, at whatever age—as personally affecting?)
CC: The first poems that enraptured me were Shakespeare’s sonnets. Then when I was in tenth grade, a friend gave me Catch the Fire!!!: A Cross-Generational Anthology of Contemporary African-American Poetry one day after gym, and that opened me up and introduced me to Sonia Sanchez, June Jordan, Toi Derricotte, and more. Also, I bought She by Saul Williams one night at a Books-A-Million, and the accompanying CD was really evocative. In hindsight, hearing Saul helped me realize that poets could lean into the music of their work. Years later, Gregory Orr would posit that music is one of poetry’s four temperaments, and it makes total sense that music would be, no pun intended, instrumental in delivering pleasure to someone hearing it. Language itself is musical, and poetry is an art form that has its own life when spoken aloud.
L.J. Sysko is the author of THE DAUGHTER OF MAN, which was selected for the Miller Williams Poetry Series by Patricia Smith and published by University of Arkansas Press in 2023, and BATTLEDORE, a poetry chapbook about early motherhood published by Finishing Line Press in 2017. Sysko’s work has been anthologized in BEST NEW POETS and LET ME SAY THIS, appearing also in publications such as Ploughshares, The Georgia Review, The Missouri Review’s “Poem of the Week,“ and Mississippi Review. A former high school English teacher, Sysko is now Director of Executive Communications at Delaware State University and a Contributing Editor at Tupelo Quarterly. She lives in Wilmington, Delaware with her family. You can find her at ljsysko.com.