Charleen McClure writes and lives a few miles off the Chattahoochee River. A Fulbright scholar, she was a 2020 recipient of the Rona Jaffe Foundation Writer’s Award. Her writing has been supported by VONA, Cave Canem, Callaloo Creative Writing Workshop, the Watering Hole, New York University, and the Conversation Lit Festival. Her work has been published or is forthcoming in The Poetry Project, The Offing, Academy of American Poetry’s Poem-a-Day, Prairie Schooner, and elsewhere. McClure made her film debut in All Dirt Roads Taste of Salt (A24, 2023), which premiered in the U.S. at Sundance and internationally in Spain at the San Sebastián International Film Festival. Her debut poetry collection, d-sorientation, was chosen by Aracelis Girmay for BOA Editions’ Blessing the Boats Selections. It is available to pre-order now.
Charleen McClure’s d-sorientation points “toward reading and seeing something in excess of what is caught in the frame” per Christina Sharpe, and creates dialogue in the erasures and in looking at the body as a terrain through orientation and d-orientation.
Tiffany Troy: How does d-orientation’s first poem, “orientation,” set up for the collection that is to follow? For me, the redaction with the hyphen immediately denotes a type of redaction, where it’s unclear whether the speaker travels north or south, then east and west, and looks topographically and geographically at the speaker’s father’s liver and the slope of the mother’s tongue. It also sets up the expectation that we will be starting with “orientation” and end up in “d-orientation.”
Charleen McClure: In “orientation,” our attention moves across landscapes until it settles on the body. It is the body which guides and directs us through all terrains according to its appetite. How do those appetites orient–or disorient–us? That question begins here and continues through the collection.
Concerning redaction, Christina Sharpe writes about it as a practice to “[see] and [read] otherwise; toward reading and seeing something in excess of what is caught in the frame” (In the Wake: On Blackness and Being). As with many poems in d-sorientation, I think redaction here invites the speaker to see beyond the frame and arrive at a fuller sense of their landscape: geographic, personal, familial, temporal, embodied. And similar to this first poem, arrival is ongoing in those that follow. Like a pilgrimage, we shift and get lost to become familiar to ourselves again.
TT: In the “Acknowledgments” you write that “Writing is meditation. It provides space to be with what-is... How do words, entangled with history and arranged by grammar’s theatrics, interfere with my observations? How can I expose, interrupt, and collaborate with this interference? Can my senses withstand corruption?”
What was the process in writing and putting together d-orientation?
CM: In 2020, Kamilah Aisha Moon encouraged me to apply to BOA’s Blessing the Boats Selection. I applied last year with what was essentially my MFA thesis in the aftermath of the death of another loved one. My primary intention in submitting was to honor their lives, to acknowledge their ongoing presence, and celebrate it in action. In other words, the process in putting it together was the process of grieving.
While revising the collection after it was selected, I realized that grief motivated most of the poems. I’m grateful to this book for moving me through that meditation.
TT: The use of redaction as a means to see “something in excess of what is caught in the frame” is fascinating, in large part because redaction is utilized by the government to remove personal information or to elaborate on the parenthetical, after the fact. The source materials of your redaction are vast, from legal transcripts to R & B lyrics to pamphlets.
How did you choose your source text and what are the rules you utilized to redact from the pieces so that we can better see unobstructed the frame, even when, as in the case of R. Kelly or Sandra Bland, we don’t learn of the backstory in the poetry but rather in the footnotes?
CM: I was compelled by the source texts. And I was drawn to erasure for the tension, expansion, and dialogue that might arise between the original text and a redaction. I let the texts lead then followed behind curiosity and instinct without any set rules.
TT: Would your initial redactions be on the physical page, on a computer software program like PhotoShop, or something else? I ask because it feels like the medium, too, can guide the process of grieving (and healing) at the centerpiece of d-orientation.
CM: I began on the computer in a Word doc for the most part. But I began on paper for “On the West I” because there wasn’t a version available where I could easily copy and paste the text. I had to print it and work with the physical page from the beginning.
The medium, the paper, the space that surrounds words, and which they ultimately inhabit, is a part of the process. Like the silence in a symphony that shapes our relationship with sound. They both contribute to our experience and the meaning that we may make.
TT: Aracelis Girmay’s “Foreword” writes of the refractions, dualities and pairs present in d-orientation. There is a queen, the daughter and mother, the body letting the welp not recognized as the speaker’s, and the polyphony resulting from your insertion of language that you then make new with redaction.
What is the role of twoness and of pairs in this collection?
CM: I think the quest for dialogue that drew me to the erasures was the motivation behind most, if not all, of the poems in the collection. The pairs may arise out of the words given to the tension at play in the space between them. If they have any role for me, it’s to accentuate this space where boundaries are troubled.
TT: To you, what comes first? The poetic form or content? Or do they emerge together?
CM: They emerge together.
TT: Do you have any closing thoughts for your readers of the world?
CM: Simply thank you.
Tiffany Troy is the author of Dominus (BlazeVOX [books]). She is Managing Editor at Tupelo Quarterly, Associate Editor of Tupelo Press, Book Review Co-Editor at The Los Angeles Review, Assistant Poetry Editor at Asymptote, and Co-Editor of Matter.