Be Kind Rewind: Where Poetry Meets Proust
Interview Series by L.J. Sysko
“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:
Diamond Forde’s The Book of Alice (Scribner, January 2026) opens with an omniscience so trenchant, so Biblical, and so lyrically rooted that when the first tendril of “I” wraps its little kudzu finger around our wrist and boards us onto the diasporic train northward–toward New York; toward Forde’s grandmother, the titular Alice; and, eventually, toward Forde herself–we go, wheels greased with gravity and glee. We go...with Diamond Forde through the branch and bole of her family, from the begettings of Genesis through the ironies of Revelations with a notable stop at an apocryphal book of the Bible Forde herself invented: Daughters. We go...from Southern Gothic personification of nature–”Beneath her / the earth whets its hips”–which feels less allusive of Toni Morrison than a baked-in, blood-riven matter of literary course...to Forde’s hip-hop-inflected persona–”yes, I am someone’s daughter / damn near bald with her hand on her cock.” The sum total yields a voice so replete in its complex rendering of hundreds of years of Black feminine ancestry that The Book of Alice‘s King James black leather-bound conceit can barely contain it. Behold census tables, pop culture references, soul food cookery, complex feminine archetypes aplenty, male characters as NPCs, and verse so rich it rings. The introductions I write to these interviews aren’t meant to sound like book reviews, but I find my adjectives procreant and my nouns compounding two-by-two, ampersand-shimmering in sequins & swelter. If that sentence sounds overwrought & overawed, well, that’s what comes of reading Diamond Forde’s The Book of Alice. I’m still sitting here listening to the fading notes of Forde’s first-person omniscience. What a world. A world where bottom land beguiled away from the boughs of the family tree has been brought back–root, recipe, rhyme–pulsing in time to the Poet’s bloodline. “O Maidens / of mud,” when I walk outside, I’ll be shocked to find it’s still daylight; “we’ll root / in raw dung, / kick wherever / our pink hooves please, / outnumber / the men / who’ve penned us / here–feed / till our bellies bulge / into boulders–be / too large / for any hook / to hold us.”
I interviewed Diamond about her book, her writing life, and the truth of how she got Here.
LJS: What is your greatest fear? (The BKR version: Is it reading your poetry in public, the workshop from hell, encountering your early poems in the grocery store? Feel free to tell us a horror story.)
DF: Probably the biggest risk I take in poetry writing is writing to be perceived. I’m so scared of being seen in my writing, or maybe of my writing outing the real me in ways that I can’t control. I’m a conundrum in that way—Whitmanian multitudes—I write to be seen and to be as honest as I can be in that seeing, more honest than I feel safe enough to be in this off-world page, but I’m still afraid of it. There’s nothing more thrilling and terrifying than having someone else say that they could see you and hear your voice in a poem. [Laughter.]
In my defense, doesn’t it take guts to confront our true desires head-on? Poetry is me confronting my deepest desires. It scares the shit out of me that someone else might see that desire, too. It’s easier for me to imagine myself as a forgotten object. And that’s the wildest thing about writing—I write because I want to take up space. I want to live like a haunting in your imagination.
LJS: THE dual impulses for writers: the audacity to aspire to “live like a haunting in your imagination” AND the humility to “imagine myself as a forgotten object.”
DF: I feel like my whole life is just paying poetry back because poetry has given me everything I ever imagined I wanted. I was really a dorky kid. Really, really fucking dorky. I moved around a lot. My dad was in the military for a while, and then my parents got divorced, and so I was kind of hopping back and forth between houses. I was never really in one single place for any extended period of time, and so I didn’t have a lot of lasting relationships either, and so poetry has been the space where I was first introduced to the power of community.
I had this learning community when I went to undergrad, and I chose creative writing. In my first workshop, I was introduced to literary magazines; I didn’t know they existed before that. To see and to create this anthology of writers that I got to be in community with and to spend time with their work–editing their work, right?–to closely engage with it and become intimate with it? Created friendships on the page in ways that I was dazzled by.
I was hungry for that kind of friendship, for that kind of community, for something that felt long lasting. And I think that’s what made creative writing stick for me, because at the time, I really wanted to be a comic book writer. That was my dream.
LJS: Huh! Really?
DF: I wanted to draw and write comics.
LJS: Can you draw?
DF: Probably not anymore, but I used to, I used to draw a lot. I took a lot of art classes. In fact, I was my art teacher’s informal TA in high school. I would basically finish up my work in my other class and then go off to the art room, and she would position me as her assistant. I would help the other students with their projects and then just create my own stuff using access to her materials and she would give me feedback. And that was how I spent chunks of my time in high school.
And so I really wanted to draw, but I took a drawing class in my undergrad and the teacher there hated me. To be fair, she hated everybody, if you were not one of her chosen favorites. And she was very, very mean to you, and not even in just like an “I am being critical of your work to improve it kind of way” but just in general, the way she talked to you was really mean, and I realized if I continue down this path, I’m going to have to keep taking classes with this person. I was feeling so alienated on the art side of things in ways that I was not feeling on the creative writing side of things. So, community made that choice for me.
LJS: You were describing having moved around a lot. I was going to say about you that it also probably means you were really close to your teachers. As soon as a talented kid like you moves into the school, you’re best friends with your English teacher.
[Laughter.]DF: Yes, I think one of my favorite English professors was in high school, actually. She was probably the realest woman I’ve ever met. So, Miss Yates, if you’re still out there... I love you and I miss you. Miss Yates was, first off, the snazziest, most expressive dresser I have ever seen. Everybody in our classes would make fun of her outfits because she would wear these elaborate fur tops and patched-together denim skirts. It was the wildest thing I’ve ever seen, but I was obsessed with it. I was in love with her, and she did not give a fuck about your opinion of her. And so I was like, that’s a queen. That’s who I want to be.
She would stand up in front of the room, and she was very vulnerable with us in terms of the navigation of her pain. I know that she lost a son at some point in her life, and so it had really skewed her perspective of the world. The world had kind of given her a harsh dose of reality. And so she felt like it was her responsibility to be real with us. She was very strict and diligent about making sure that we were good researchers. And then her mantra was, “Life sucks, and then you die.” And on a regular basis, whenever anybody was upset about something, she would whip that out: “Life sucks, and then you die.”
And as someone who was experiencing a deeply troubling home situation that was making life feel unbearable at times–it’s weird–you would think that mantra would throw me into the depths of despair, but it didn’t. It really made me feel community in pessimism, if that makes sense. Yeah, in that we are all simultaneously navigating pain. And I think that’s probably the biggest alienating factor of pain is the loneliness that comes with it, the isolation that comes with it. And to know that this woman was still palpably navigating that hurt, that every day she woke up and life still sucked, and she kept navigating it anyway, that was huge.
LJS: And not only navigating it but choosing these kinds of optimistic gestures: continuing to ornament herself authentically while leveling with high school kids using that kind of Existentialist-Buddhist ethos, which is the province of good high school English teachers the world over, you know?
DF: Every time I think about who I am and want to be in the world, it’s not quite Miss Yates, but I feel like every day I am strapping up my Miss Yates boots, if that makes sense. I am ready to tackle the despair of the world. And I think somewhere along the way, I discovered my optimism, and I think that discovery was in the friendships I’ve gained. I think that community has been the life-sustaining force that I never knew was possible.
LJS: Who are your favorite writers? (BKR version: Whose poems struck you first—in school, at whatever age—as personally affecting?)
DF: There are two poems that come to mind, and it might be because I revisit them often. Ai, the poet, was a huge influence on me when I was first coming to poetic writing. Maya Angelou was my first poet, but Ai was my first grown girl poet. She awakened the adulthood in me.
In particular, I was obsessed with her persona poetry; even at its most irreverent and controversial, haunting and volatile, it seemed to me that Ai was giving me permission to write, to write my darkness, which I use in the sense of what is hidden as much as I use in the visible markers of my race; her poetry was against the very idea of who was or wasn’t allowed to speak in poetry. So, to say that Ai was the poet who first gave me permission is an understatement.
The first poem that I ever encountered by her was “Respect, 1967,” which encouraged me to read her collected Vice, then “Salomé” then “Cuba, 1962.” And let me tell you, “Cuba, 1962” is a haunting behind all of the poems in The Book of Alice.
Yes, that poem was the first to truly contextualize the violence and legacy of American imperialism for me, as I didn’t even know about the Cuban missile crisis until I read it, but before I could even understand those historical nuances, the poem afforded me the keenest insight into the sweetbitterness of grief. Just look at its final lines:
“Whoever tastes my woman in his candy, his cake,
tastes something sweeter than this sugar cane;
it is grief.
If you eat too much of it, you want more,
you can never get enough.”
I think about this moment often. I have recited these lines to myself so often, they live in me (and I think it’s important to choose what poems we want to live in us). It was the first poem that taught me the intimacy of our wounds, what it means to love and lose, what it means for that hurt to be communal, to be global. To say that this poem has transformed my relationship to grief would be an understatement.
And perhaps it’s no surprise, then, that the poem that has also most transformed my relationship to grief would be Li-Young Lee’s “Eating Alone.” It’s a beautiful and devastating poem, one that I teach almost every year if not every semester, that constructs the devastation of loneliness even at its most linear levels—a masterclass in writing. Lee is one of the best to ever do it.
But there’s this one image—one line—in the second stanza that I come back to over and over: “a hornet / spun crazily, glazed in slow, glistening juice.” In the poem, the speaker is walking through a nearly empty garden when the memory of his father, who is no longer with him, comes to him. He sees, in his imagination, the father bent over to lift up a pear, and in the image is the hornet, feasting.
Part of the ways that I’ve changed my relationship to musicality, or tried to discover the relationship between musicality and embodiment, is to try to think more concretely about the relationship language can bridge between the reader and her audience. One of my goals for The Book of Alice was to create poems that invoked mouthfeel, that could recreate the sensations of eating cake, decadence, in our mouths. I wanted moments in the poems that felt rich as excess, and I think part of that motivation was me trying desperately to write my own version of that Lee line—“a hornet / spun crazily, glazed in slow, glistening juice.”
Isn’t it a marvel how thick, slow, and purposeful the tongue moves to hold that line, as if jutting through thick honey, sweet grief?
LJS: Which talent would you most like to have? (The BKR version: If we look at Gregory Orr’s Four Temperaments—the Myers-Briggs of poetry personality—order is key. I’m an I-S-M-S (Imagination-Story-Music-Structure though the double ‘s’ of Story and Structure throws an alphabetical wrench into this conceit, so let’s change Story to Narrative; now, that’s better: INMS). What’s your order? And explain how you’ve seen this pattern enacted in your work over time.)
DF: When I first came to poetry as an undergraduate, I think I used to be NIMS; I was deeply invested in the unfolding of a central narrative in a way that I think I am trying to get back to. These days, I think I’m more MINS, or M I/N/S with the (INS) lined up simultaneously rather than in any semblance of order, but damn, do I miss the relationship I used to have to the arc (ark?) of poetry.
Narrative is a vehicle; it carries us forward from one land of poetry to another. I hate to use the word “discovery” here, colonized as it has been beyond its meaning, but there is an instinct towards discovery in poetry, which I suppose can and has been used colonially, but also means that the goal of any great narrative is to go somewhere, a journey that can or cannot take us to the same place we started, and I miss the places I would land myself in poems.
It’s crazy how much any articulation of the temperaments is also an articulation of poetic philosophy.
To be honest, I changed my writing style because of Orr’s “Four Temperaments.” To be more precise, it’s because a writer I looked up to as my senior in undergraduate had went on to pursue a Master’s in Creative Writing, while I was still dreaming such a thing was possible, and they shared that essay with me, told me that they thought that I was great at narrative, but the music in my poetry was weak, and I resented that statement so much, resented Orr for telling me that I couldn’t be the poetic avatar—master of all the temperaments—unless I was some 16th century dead guy (Shakespeare). So, I wrote harder; I made my weakness my superpower.
And through that effort, discovered that there is so much in the relationship between musicality and embodiment. I think, from now on, musicality will always be a key part of who I am as a writer because it is a key part of who and how I am. But I bet narrative, structure, and imagination all construct the same. I can’t wait to “discover” those connections more over time.
LJS: I think anyone reading this who’s had a tough moment in workshop may wonder how you reflect on that piece of feedback? I know what direction it took in your poetry, but I wonder about that moment.
DF: I think it is where the heart of competition lies. This was a person who I very much respected because they were a little farther along in the path that I wanted to follow, and who, when I was first coming to writing, was really a kind of guiding force for me. They were the editor of my school’s literary magazine before I was and they taught me the ropes on how to be an editor. And so I put a lot of stock in what they had to say. So...[chuckles]…my first instinct was probably pettiness because I was like, if that’s how you see me, I want you to see me in a different light. I don’t want you to see– and maybe this is where the cowardice comes in–I don’t want you to see my weakness. And to have someone who I respected so much say so frankly, “I see your weakness,” brought out the coward in me, brought out the obstinance in me. Because I think obstinance is a natural instinct I think I have to fear, and in particular, my obstinance is a reaction to a fear of rejection. So whenever I feel the most vulnerable, I become the most stubborn. You think you see this supposed weakness? You’ll never see it again!
I’m really grateful for that push now, because a lot of the things that people, I think, celebrate about my work the most is musicality, and it became the sort of venue for me to feel a little bit closer to parts of myself that I thought I had let go of.
Quick aside: My mom is a fantastic singer. My grandmother was also a really great singer. I do not have that ability. I am garbage at singing. I think it was around the time American Idol first came out. I was singing for my mom because I was like, “I want to be on American Idol.” My mom was like, “Nope, not your career path, baby.”
LJS: Oh wow.
DF: Yeah. I was devastated, obviously. My poetry became my way of singing.
LJS: I am fascinated by this because of the intrinsic joyousness in your poems, even if they’re elegies, they’re song, and that is its own kind of comedic impulse. In your words, even in “the sweet bitterness of grief,” you’re still feeding us. And so we feel nourished even as we’re being told the bad news.
The Book of Alice‘s Notes section reads, “I hoped that...I could tend against the silences of legacy, archival erasure, and the perceived excess of Black female embodiment that I know and navigate.” Each of those items is a nullification, but you’re coming in and asserting, affirming, delivering, which is so close to what you say about the sweetness of the cake, right? The decadence and the mouth feel. Your “tend[ing] against the silences” feels like entering a church when a choir is practicing–absolute resonance that sounds like singing into an emptiness.
DF: I used to go to a mega church as a child. We were part of that “World Changers Creflo Dollar” conglomerate and my mom and my aunts were performing in the choir, and so I used to get so excited to hear my family singing as part of the choir. When I was hearing that resonance, I felt God. And so I want these poems, yes, to be a singing. But I want it to be a singing that other folks can pitch their voices into. I want that choir. I want that reaching out.
That term “sweetbitter” actually comes from Anne Carson, and in particular her investigation and translation of Sappho’s work in Eros the Bittersweet. I don’t actually think there is much division between love and grief. And so a lot of these poems, I really wanted them to hold that sweet bitterness. I think there are poems in the book that are more bitter.
LJS: Yes. For sure.
DF: Yeah, the poem “Portrait of My Grandmother as Lake Lure in Winter,” I think, is a little bit more bitter and yet what a weird vulnerability it is to say [to Alice]: “I really wanted to paint you well; I wanted to show your goodness; I wanted to illustrate you this way. And yet, you were a person who never told my mom you loved her, who also probably never told me you loved me, who might not have necessarily even seen me as family at times, and yet I’m still telling your story anyway.” I think music really does allow me to reach to that sweet, bitter heart of all things.
LJS: Is the enactment of musicality something that predominates in the editing phases? Are you going back into the poems, thinking, “This phrase feels pat or that one sounds flat,” and then zhuzhing?
DF: Oh yeah, definitely. 1000%. And on the opposite side of the spectrum, sometimes I’m saying, “I have overperformed here and that overperformance is impeding the line from being able to say what it wants to say.” It’s another avoidant strategy for me because when I feel like I’m getting uncomfortably close to the truth, I start singing louder.
LJS: Woooooo!
DF: [Nodding.] I need to dial it back. And so it is a negotiation with the poem. It’s funny how much the metaphor of the choir feels so true, I think, to my understanding of music in poetry because it is all about harmony for me, right? I think the power of music is that it harmonizes. Whether that is the voice within me and the voice that I construct on the page being in harmony. But also I think musicality has a way of harmonizing mind and body.
When I teach music to my undergrads, I try to remind them that music is the vehicle back into ourselves. That poetry is very much an investment in the body. In ways that we forget about because we’re all still stuck in our heads. I think image works the same. We filter the world through bodily experience. Even if I am only reading a piece, the poem is reminding me of sensations I have had in my body. Imagination and Music–those kinds of expanding impulses–are all about how we get back to the chaos of embodiment, so it is a way of harmonizing this space [pats head] with this space [pats chest]. [Laughs.]
Basically, I edit with audience in mind. I try not to write with audience in mind. That’s because, if I think of the audience, I get scared and won’t write what I need to write.
I want you to read this book and feel compelled to say some of the lines out loud sometimes, to have that instinct. Because what a gift it is to ask this moment to live within your body, to put it in the air. And that way we’re both singing together no matter where we are. I think of these things as a gift given through music, through poetry. I just want to pay poetry back for all its goodness.
LJS: I think the additional gift of your compositions is the structure. The way some of the narratives move, there’s an asymmetry or surprise, a discordant thing that happens to leaven whatever might be the perceived lyrical sweetness. The “Census Sonnet” that closes the Exodus section is an ingenious mechanism for propelling us from third-person Biblical formality into the more first-person orientation of the Daughters section. But here’s something weird I wanted to talk to you about from the middle sections: the power of the ampersand.
DF: The more that I was engaging with this book, the more that I was trying to think about the forms that are the Blackest. For instance, that “Census Sonnet”...I was reading Fred Moten’s and Stefano Harney’s The Undercommons: Fugitive Planning & Black Study at the time and there was just this small passage about counting, governance, and the census as a structure of death for Black folks. I’m thinking about all of the ways in which all of our history becomes a kind of political document that is taking stock. To have your history contingent upon enslavement, to be a person derived into inventory is a unique kind of violence that I wanted to sing into. And yet, on the flip side, we have recipes, which more directly create community, the idea of the recipe that I know came from my mother, which came from my mother’s mother, and to have these as an inheritance, gifting them outward a little bit? Some of those recipes withhold–shhh!–
[Laughter.]You don’t need to know all our secrets. And that’s an active choice of silence.
And then the ampersand, which I was told is the Blackest of punctuation...
LJS: Really?!
DF: Yes. It supersedes Black writers, obviously, but there is a legacy of Black writers who do use and manipulate the ampersand. And I think that it is a beautiful way of bridging time, too. The ampersand is kind of like an “et al.” It is a combination of two letters and that history has been erased over time and reconstructed in silence so that the symbol becomes a symbol of itself. I’m trying to think: is there a moment when I ever use “and” in the book? I feel like I might’ve given myself one “and,” but I don’t know if that’s true. I need to check. I was pretty resistant to using “and” over time. I also think that, on a craft level, using the ampersand also made me more conscious of when I used “and.” I think as writers, we overuse it. So having to shift the way that I use “and” made me more purposeful.
LJS: [Dear reader, I checked. There are no “ands” (only “&”) in The Book of Alice‘s poems themselves. There is only one “and” deployed, in a title—of the aforementioned “U.S. Department of Commerce Bureau of the Census: 1960 Census of Population and Housing (or Census Sonnet)”—for bureaucratic verisimilitude.]
Just, or at least proportional, outcomes are not the inheritance of diasporic Black experience. The Book of Alice corrects (with the coherent-ish procedures of the recipe poems, as one example), criticizes, and chronicles.
DF: Right! I was thinking about the tension between what’s external and what’s internal. There was this really beautiful book by Kevin Quashie called The Sovereignty of Quiet: Beyond Resistance in Black Culture that I was obsessed with while I was working on my dissertation. And he talks about the difference between silence and quiet. He says that silence is a force of oppression, an external force that acts upon you. You are silenced. But quiet is interior. It is what happens inside. And he is asking in particular what exists in the quiet interior of Black people because we constantly think about Blackness as resistance–as having to resist against silence. And, yes, that is an unfortunate, true navigation of what it means to be Black in this country, but also simultaneously when we only focus on Blackness as resistance, we neglect what is happening in the quiet. And so for this book, I really wanted to reach into the quiet, to oppose silence by reinforcing what happens in the quiet inside.
LJS: That feels like a run of poems at the end of the book where you’re vacillating between internal and external, beginning with “To the People in Hell Who Want Ice Water” then “The Sow Speaks to Noah,” which...begins with a gigantic ampersand!, and reads like an ars poetica, mentioning the ambivalence of being “the voice of a generation.” I noticed allusions to Beloved and the Middle Passage, but then the next poem kind of spanked me for doing that. The title is “I Can’t Write About the Ocean Without It Being About Slavery,” and I thought, oh shit. It felt set up–you posit the imagery and then we’re going to discuss it on the next page...
DF: Yes, that poem, “I Can’t Write About the Ocean Without It Being About Slavery,” my editor wanted me to cut that one from the book originally...
LJS: [Sits up straighter.]
DF: Yeah, because she said, “It doesn’t fit. It’s a totally different voice.” And so I...that pettiness kicked in. [Chuckles.] I was like, “No, no, no, no, no, no. It does fit.” And so I had to figure out the order. And so having those two poems next to each other, I think, my editor–[laughing]–had a new understanding of that poem. But, yeah, that poem almost got cut.
LJS: It is very much what you were saying about external vs. internal. “The Sow Speaks to Noah” is a retort to the silencing of a character in the Bible and then the next poem is a very punchy, post-Postmodern, first-person, fourth-wall-breaking title (right, very American...?) with this opening line: “…but what if I want to fuck the ocean?” So, I do understand the editor suggesting that these are spoken in different registers, AND [laughter]…this is what the overall conceit of the book allows for. It’s asking–what if a contemporary persona such as myself were in control of what’s written here? What would we / she / they actually be saying if in charge of these etiologies? And, alright, it may be ribald, but its tone feels like an imperative payoff.
DF: A big part of the book for me was thinking about the exercise of control that was happening here. In particular, to be the person who is telling my grandmother’s story means that I am exercising control over her in ways that she can’t resist or navigate against. She’s gone. I tried to make that a recurring theme and negotiation in the book, also knowing I am creating a narrative of who I am, which will change when an audience consumes the book, too. When we ascribe Blackness to be just resistance, we are erasing a human subjectivity. Black people aren’t symbols. My grandmother’s not a symbol; I’m not a symbol. We live, we breathe, we exist. It’s lows and woes. It’s loves and leisures. I want it to be undeniable.
I want us to have to exist with the discomfort of how we make meaning of things. To say, “Yeah, I know I wrote this poem in the voice of a pig; I know that when I’m writing this voice, you are also thinking of the Middle Passage in the same way that I am thinking of the Middle Passage. I have to constantly be aware of the ways the ocean works in my own work. And I shouldn’t be the only person who has to carry that responsibility. You get to carry it too. I know what you’re thinking. I’m thinking it too. Haven’t I been trained this way? Haven’t you been trained this way? Let’s look at the mechanisms of our training, and resist.” To say, “No. I am here. My body is alive. It’s literate. It’s able to navigate this language, this world we live in and still exist.” I want that to be undeniable in this book.
LJS: I noticed that Madonna, Barbie, and Cher interceded in these poems, as disturbing turns. The line in “Ars Poetica with Snow Globes,” “because this is how I learned to love too / doggedly chasing my fakes,” made me feel as though the speaker had been boiling slowly in a pot of white popular cultural reference and will have to rescue herself from within it, but sometimes she doesn’t fucking bother because it’s warm in there.
DF: It’s safe in there. And we’re all doing it. And to try to love in a different way is to put yourself out as an obstacle. June Jordan talks about this in her speech Where Is the Love? about love as a quintessential part of all of our movement: literary, historical, political. Where are you putting your love and to whom? If your love isn’t operating for the most marginalized among us, can you even call it love in the first place? Our own American allegiances to patriarchy, capitalism, and racism are teaching us. They’re corrupting our love; they’re creating substitutes and replacements for love, and they’re telling us that this love is commodifiable. And it’s easier. It’s easier because it’s everywhere. And to reject that is uncomfy. We spend a lot of our loves avoiding our own ugliness. I know I’m very good at it. [Laughs.]
LJS: What is your most marked characteristic? (BKR version: Of all the available poetic technical concerns beginning with the line and ending never, what are your most central obsessions? Has this shifted over time, across projects, or even during projects? If yes, tell us about the moment you shifted your attention.)
DF: My poetic obsession has always been “control,” even before I knew that’s what I was writing about. So, from the first poems I’ve ever penned until now, everything I write about is all about “control” at its core—the loss of it, freedom from it, desperation to regain it, even asking where our concepts of control came from in the first place.
I’m a fat Black woman in the South. Every day I live, I’m wrestling for control of myself, my narrative. Even in my attempts to establish a poetics of excess, I was responding to the parameters of control that shape all of our lives. I’m not very good at feeling limited. There’s a kind of bravado and affront in the voice of my poems, I think; it’s my way of trying to fight myself out of the boundaries of living.
LJS: From the initial impetus for what became The Book of Alice to harnessing a sustaining concept, then writing into it, submitting the manuscript, and hearing of the smashing acceptance from Scribner–a Big Five publisher!–was there a bifurcation once you felt the weight of the impending audience?
DF: The weight of perceived responsibility. I need these poems to do what they do and I need to know who’s reading and I need to know who might find themselves here and I need to think about my responsibility to my family in ways that I did not necessarily care about when writing the book at first.
The book was my dissertation and a lot of poems have been dropped, added, or deeply edited since that stage. I wanted to echo treatment of the mother body, as I did in my first book, Mother Body (Saturnalia, 2021), with a narrative structure that established an understanding for my reader first, then complicated that understanding as it went. The book has gone through so many organizing principles. It has five sections now; when I conceived it, there were only three: just Genesis, Exodus, and Revelations. I realized that I had to allow for more resonances to creep in and the poems to guide themselves more. To be imaginative. To create apocrypha. There is no book in the Bible called Daughters!
I leaned on the language of “begat” a lot in this book, as in “so-and-so begat sons, who begat another” and so on, because I want The Book of Alice, first and foremost, to focus on women who have been the most erased in our history and canon. I wanted to have a book that focused on women, a legacy of daughters. I am a daughter, my mother is a daughter, and my grandmother…What does it mean to have generations of daughters and daughter trauma to carry into me?
LJS: What is the trait you most deplore in others? (BKR version: How has the world or your contextual place within it served or hindered your writing? Is there anything you wish you could change about “Poetlandia” as it currently exists? The way your family apprehends or doesn’t apprehend your art?)
DF: Because I love conundrums, I’m going to say the trait that I most despise in myself is cowardice.
I hate being a coward. My therapist would ask me to reframe, might call it conflict-avoidance, but I think that’s just an emotionally distant way of saying I abandon myself. I abandon myself first in times of crisis (I have too many examples of this)—and in a political climate like ours—where the best among us are being spirited off the streets, fired for free speech, starved into submission—there is no room left for any of us to abandon each other. No one is free until we’re all free.
And I think that’s the danger of a low self-worth. When we forget to value ourselves, we lower the value of those who depend on us. If we can’t advocate for ourselves, first, how will we learn the skills we’ll need to show up for others?
I know that what I’m saying might sound self(ish), could be misconstrued, could be asking me to prioritize myself in ways that could encourage even more self-centeredness, but if my or yours or anyone’s idea of Self isn’t automatically constructed by, with, and through Community, isn’t defined by your relationship to those you know who exist around you, for you, because of you, then you don’t really know yourself either.
I think there’s always been a push and pull in poetry to think about art as political or apolitical—as the intersection between beauty and truth—as if Beauty is a thing constructed outside of the political—but I ask you, what’s more beautiful than survival? Than facing our fears together, hand in hand? Than inviting the truth in? That’s what Truth is, I’d wager. An invitation.
LJS: Where would you most like to live? (BKR version: In Poetlandia, who would you most want as your next door neighbors? Why?)
DF: Ai, Sharon Olds, Patricia Smith, Donika Kelly, Erika Meitner, Tarfia Faizullah, and Audre Lorde all come to mind immediately, though there are no doubt poetry homies I want to live beside—Nabila Lovelace, Kayleb Rae Candrilli, Jessica Nirvana Ram, Phillip B. Williams, and Kay Ulanday Barret. These were the poets who taught me how to live through their poetry, their community work. Most importantly, these are the poets who taught me I was allowed to live.