First off, welcome to Berkeley! As someone who is not only a writer/poet but also works in arts administration, activist communities and restorative justice programs, I’m wondering how you see the relationship between those practices/communities and your own writing. It seems like you have such a rich diversity of experience in both the art world and the poetry world, so I wonder how writing fits into these things, and how your relationship to these various spaces relates to it.
Thank you! I appreciate these questions. I strive to be involved and accountable at a community level with my writing practice. Sometimes this is about affinities and who I connect with mutually. Community also relates to where I am and the land that I am on. Collectively, I worked for years bridging art and publics—via artist run centres, museums, and galleries. This has been mainly as a waged worker, rarely as a poet. In recent years I have enjoyed contributing more as a creative writer for exhibition and publication purposes. Collaborating with artists in the context of organizing (regardless of a gallery) has been a constant to my community work. Always so much going on! Poetry has a tremendous history of being embedded in social movement and poets often take part in public events. I appreciate gatherings that try to be accessible, free, and conscious of their impact. For my book projects, a range of materials related to abolition, anti-colonial and climate justice work informs my reading, research, and experimentation.
UC Berkeley, as a large research institution, is home to many archives - how do you see the archive as in relation to your writing or work (in any facet of that word)?
Yes! It is amazing to be in proximity to the archive and library system here. I was reminded listening to Ana María Ochoa Gautier speak last month at the Arts Research Centre, about the importance of not only seeing and reading but also listening and just being present with relevant archival moments in relation to one’s practice. I am grateful for the membership and permissions that have enabled my access to institutional archives. I have relied on archival research for poetry books. From the Poplars most notably focuses on a seemingly surplus space colonially known as Poplar Island. The book was informed by what was found in municipal and provincial archives related to the place. It also was shaped by what was skewed and what was missing from those archives. Archival lack certainly animated my approach to writing Wayside Sang and efforts to connect with my Black lineage. I recall a note from Venus in Two Acts where Saidiya Hartman remarks, “the necessity of trying to represent what we cannot, rather than leading to pessimism or despair must be embraced as the impossibility that conditions our knowledge of the past and animates our desire for a liberated future.” In that sentiment for me is an impetus to counter and re-form “archive” as it were. Julietta Singh’s meditations on crafting an archive of the body and the powerful reconfiguration of archival document in m. nourbeSe philip’s Zong! are also resonant influences.
One of the things I was really engaged by in your book Harrowings was the way in which it was structured partially by sections titled “Correspondence.” In one section you describe that, through the Emma’s Acres program, you’ve engaged in correspondence with people who are or were incarcerated - that section describes it as “sometimes poetic, with community inside.” It made me think about the way “correspondence” is both a literal body of letters or communication, but also stakes out a relationality or likeness between things and/or people (ie a correspondence “to” something, which seems like it could be the domain of the poetic, and also correspondence “with” a person). How do you see that word working in that collection and elsewhere out in the world?
Harrowings was composed during the recent pandemic, at a time when visiting and secular programming within carceral facilities was mostly suspended, contributing to further isolation (illness and violence) for incarcerated people and their families and community. Letters are dear. Though surveilled, they are one of the few ways incarcerated people can stay in touch. Epistolic poetry can brighten the purpose of letter writing. Sometimes we correspond with people we don’t know, it’s nice to have something to share or to talk about.
During the writing of the book a more intricate exchange was facilitated by the program Wall’s to Bridges. The poet Mercedes Eng and I were honoured to have our books read and responded to with art and poems from inside the (Canadian) federal, multi-level Fraser Valley Institution. At the time we had just started volunteering at Emma’s Acres, which is a humble farm led by people who were formerly incarcerated, and which is part of a network of incarcerated people and their families in the Fraser Valley region of prisons. Some of the poems in Harrowings are broadly addressed to absent labourers who were literally on lockdown and unable to visit the farm on day passes—unable to access this source of fresh air, green space, camaraderie, and food. In that poetry I share observations about the life of the farm, connecting people with the likeness and relationality you mention. Some poems were also practical notes. For example, there is one that draws from institutional forms for allowable content for “pen packs” (in a Canadian context these refer to individualized clothing, personal items and small accessories that are sent, by request, to people beginning their federal sentences). Many people don’t have families who are able to send care packages. Correspondence in this sense is perhaps pedagogical, for any reader, but especially for one who can contribute resources for community inside prison.
I’ve heard you’re a Science Fiction reader - are you reading any particular Sci-fi right now? Do you see Sci-fi in any connection to your other writing?
I always have a book on the go that is in the realm of speculative fiction, seems necessary. As Hiromi Goto observes, “speculative fiction allows for paradigm shifts that […] can disturb us, and can propel us beyond the conventions, complacencies, or determinedly maintained ignorance of the ideologically figured present into an undetermined future.” I recently tore through Martha Wells’ The Murderbot Diaries series, just finished Neal Stephenson’s Termination Shock and started to reread Parable of the Sower by Octavia Bulter as Camille Dungy visited campus last month and in a workshop with students from Hayward High School, recommended the Parable… for its prescient commentary on our current moment. I suppose the main connection between my reading in this genre and my writing are considerations of geological time, popular science, and apocalyptic precedents. Also, Sci-fi contributes important elements to the genealogy of black, queer and femme intellectualism.
Are you working on any writing or projects during your time as Holloway poet you’d like to share with the Berkeley community?
My first month here was focused on the completion of my forthcoming poetry book, Crowd Source, which parallels the daily migration of crows who, aside from fledgling season, journey across metro Vancouver (and many urban centres) every day at dawn and dusk. The poetry considers contemporary climate crisis, social movement, and the practice of ecological futurities befitting corvid sensibilities. Since rolling that out the door I have turned my attention to forthcoming written interviews related to Crowd Source. And I have returned to a rural noir prose project that has been simmering on the back burner for a while.
Referenced Texts
Hartman, Saidiya. “Venus in Two Acts.” Small Axe, Number 26 (Volume 12, Number 2), 1–14. Durham: Duke University Press. 2008.
Singh, Julietta. No Archive Will Restore You. Punctum Books, Goleta, California. 2018.
m. nourbeSe philip. Zong!. Wesleyan University Press, Connecticut, The Mercury Press, Toronto. 2008.
Notes from Liminal Spaces by Hiromi Goto in Uncanny Magazine Issue Sixteen
