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(Animal Heart Press, 2019)
INTERVIEW BY KATE HOYLE
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Poet Alexus Erin talks about her debut collection, about the poet as specter, about ritual, politic, and writing to a “capital G God”
Kate Hoyle: There’s so much that this collection is doing, let’s get right into it. St. John’s Wort feels interested in the space between word and feeling, as introduced in the collection’s first poem “June 9th, 2015”. Have you felt these poems as vehicles to bring language closer to truth/experience?
Alexus Erin: I think not just in the first poem, but in all of my work, I’m interested in how my explication of the feeling, my explanation of the feeling, how close it is to the word as it would be read by my reader. I am very interested in semiotics and etymology. In these layers of meaning. So yes, the distance between the word and the feeling, I try to draw a mirror to that space, knowing that a word will never sum it up, but I‘m gonna get as close as I can. In one of my poems, not in this collection, I note how the word blessing comes originally from “to make bleed”. Which is that poem… ah it’s called “Great Black Hope”.
KH: That title. Would you talk about how these poems speak from within and also sort of push up against the expectations of identity?
AE: I’m really interested in all of my work the sort of narratives that we normally subscribe to, particularly as someone who has identities at marginalized intersections, that poem is very much about what it means for the individual when considering the perception of the audience. I draw from WEB Dubois’s idea of double consciousness, the idea of knowing how you’re perceived, by an Other, by an audience, as a Black person. In “Great Black Hope” I bring this concept to my own experience in the world of academia. I attended a largely white, K through 12 private school and there was a black admissions counselor who would call me and my brother “Great Black Hope”. I must have been only eleven, so my brother was eight. To hear that, to be expected to perform to that, it’s a lot. I think Muhammed Ali was called that, I’ve heard it in reference to Obama, but one person can not be the singular hope for a people. That poem is about aspiration and expectations and how a person is not a narrative, a person has one.
KH: There is a holiness present in the world of these poems – They seem to be in relationship with the divine, both in direct conversation with a “capital G” God and also in the intimate sort of rituals they embody, Could you say something about that?
AE: A lot of my poems are kind of like prayers and petitions–when we think of praying, we might think about praises, and about asking a capital-G God for something, but many of my poems say to God “hey, look at what I’m experiencing” and that sounds almost inflated, but because I am a woman of faith and I feel I have a direct relationship with God, it’s almost like saying, “look Dad, this is what I am experiencing, can you see what I’m seeing and feel what I’m feeling?”And there’s a duality in who I’m calling Dad. In some poems, I’m talking about my biological father, and I talk to a heavenly father in others. I think they reference one another. And because God in these poems is linked to the more sobering ideas of death, violence, invasion, and illness, the holiness of the poems themselves does its best to counteract that darkness and acknowledge the inherent holiness in all living things.
KH: I think it does that successfully, there’s a balance, a magic inside the grief. And I wonder about the role of the natural world in these poems, and how it relates to the intimate, and the political? I was reading the collection in Golden Gate Park and as I arrived at the end of this poem, a red tailed hawk landed on the grass just ten feet from me. I’ve never seen a hawk land on the earth before, it felt a certain kind of blessing.
AE: I’m fascinated by that – I tend to ascribe meaning to all things, but I’d really love to know what that means. I don’t think that I am naturally a ‘nature person.’ I spend a lot of time in cities, but the fact that there are other things living that are witness–that serves as another character and another voice – there are times when I am in conversation with nature because, like God, nature is the other thing that sees everything.
KH: Hmm, yes. I love this quote, from your piece in The Poetry Question, that says “As a young, Black, woman poet, the political is paramount and ultimately inextricable to informing my experience; […] Poetry facilitates a platform to express larger political concerns- be they of the mass failures of global powers and self-sick demagogues, to the politics of the body and identity”. This collection holds a vital tension, an intimacy between the historical, the political and the personal. I’m thinking of Coretta Scott in “Black Girl Prayerbook”, of the speaker’s father in “St. John’s Wort”.
AE: I’m always interested in domestic space because of its intimacy and because of the gendering location it has for women, that it can be a space of liberation and has certainly been a space of subjugation. When it comes to “Black Girl Prayerbook” and Coretta Scott specifically, I wanted to imbue an image in the poem of the contrast between the joy of time with her family at the dinner table, against the tragic and turbulent outside. I was writing that poem not too long after Ferguson. I was living in Switzerland, going to class and spending time with friends and at the same time thinking about the plight of my people back home. These things always happen at the same time, and we’ll always experience them at the same time. There’s also the scene in that poem of our music teacher who had been there and marched. She taught us the black national anthem (at this largely white school K-12) and she got so emotional. I never forgot the image of her, that she was re-living the bloodbath of the civil rights movement, that we weren’t there for. This poem and the collection are interested in that dynamic, being aware of, versus not being aware of, acting in the context of the event and acting outside of the context of the event.
KH: You mentioned that most of these poems are coming from a first-person speaker and I wanted to ask, particularly in “Black Girl Prayerbook”, who is speaking, and to whom?
AE: A lot of these poems I wrote in 2014-2015, so immediately I want to say that it’s me writing a letter to God, telling him what I see, how I can go to class and have an argument about morality versus ethics and then go on the internet and watch Missouri burn. Saying to God, look at these two lives I have to lead. Now, interestingly enough, that the poems are being published, and when I read them, it feels like me talking to that me from back then, who was talking to God. I have a spectral relationship with the work, almost phantasmic as if I’m talking to things that don’t exist anymore but that definitely existed, and that in the reading of them I return into that portal somehow. The poems are almost like a reminder—like writing little clues to myself, the way it presents it is that I am talking to God or to my dad or to nature, but it feels like writing myself a secret note, in a code that only I would know how to decode – that’s at least what it’s like when I’m writing.
KH: I love that, I feel that too, that my poems are often something like a “Note to Self, for Survival”. Thinking of survival, this collection does not deal in insignificances. You really address and are able to hold some of the bigger elements of this human beingness. The book brought me into and through a journey of grief and loss, as well as one of wonder, of witnessing. And I really feel these poems wielding the power to resurrect. Do you want to share about the titular poem and how it holds the whole?
AE: St John’s Wort touches on a couple of critical points. That poem oscillates around a difficult time when I was witnessing a lot of difficult things, one of them being my father having an aneurysm. The idea of losing a parent, of losing what he meant to me, the idea of not having a future with my father, somehow the idea held maybe more darkness. The idea that there would be no hope, had a particular sinister quality to me. That poem lives where I feel like I’ve pressed my cheek against the glass of that sort of loss, where being that close almost feels like the loss already happened.
KH: Are there any poems or writers that you remember offering a touchstone, helping you through that time?
AE: I’m a huge Michael Dickman fan. His work has a lot to do with scenes surrounding violence and the suburban, the creeping dark that can accompany the quotidian, as well as flashes of light, flashes of miracle, the supernatural. I’ve actually met him several times, I‘ve told him about this book. His work is amazing, it’s gotten me through so much.
KH: Such a gift and I think a particular power of poetry, to bring us through some of the narrow places. I feel your work doing that. Ok, do you want to talk about form? The poems in this collection take a range of shapes and structures…
AE: Yes. I mostly follow my intuition, but I am a huge fan of the miracle of enjambment, and all the types of meaning aligned space can bring. In my work a lot of the time I am very attentive to and giving a lot of intention to where the lines break. And I’m always a huge champion of space on the page, and space when you’re reading. I think as a person I can forget to breathe, so when looking at my poetry, having that space there reminds me where the breath is supposed to be, where the living is.
KH: Mm, yes. Yes. How are you spending your time now? You’re working on your Ph.D. in Medical Sociology in Manchester—that seems like a lot. Are you taking a breath, a pause from writing, are you writing new poems?
AE: I let the poems make the decision, which is a real choice. So a lot of the time they absolutely just happen anyway. I might intend to do some science, and the poem just says no. When I, God willing, travel to Australia to interview aboriginal women about their experience of birth, I am going to add poetry as a method. So as part of my research, these women will have the opportunity to write poetry about the lived experiences of their pregnancy and about the experience of their care. I think poetic inquiry can be a wonderful method and that it’s terribly underused. I might be the only medical sociologist who thinks so. Some colleagues have said, “well what can a poem tell you?” My response is, literally what couldn’t it tell you.
KH: Exactly. That’s incredible. Yes, the entire worlds contained in a poem. As we close, is there anything else that you want to say?
AE: I guess I’d like to say that a lot of these poems worked very well as a coping mechanism amidst very painful and difficult things happening. So some of these lines are really truly artifacts of older harms. That alone has such value to me. There was a me who was in there. I couldn’t put my pain on pause—I picked up a pen, I came up with something, and I decided to keep it and trust it. To me more than anything that’s the value of a lot of these poems, that they’re still standing there in the heat of the fire. I don’t know how much advice I can give to other poets, but if your work is still close to that heat, I think you’re reader will be able to feel it.
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ALEXUS ERIN is an American poet, performer, and Ph.D. candidate living in the UK. Her poetry has previously appeared in Potluck Magazine, The Melanin Collective, The Nervous Breakdown, The Audacity, American Society of Young Poets, God Is in the TV, LEVELER, Red Flag Poetry, Silk + Smoke and a host of others. She is the author of Two Birds, All Moon (Gap Riot Press) and Cartoon Logic, Cartoon Violence (Cervena Barva Press). She was the 2018 Poet Fellow of the Leopardi Writers Conference and a performer at Edinburgh Fringe Festival (2018). Her screenplay, American Lotus Project, won the screenwriting award at Temple University’s Diamond Film Festival (2015). When Alexus isn’t writing, dancing, singing, comedy-ing or researching maternal/child health, find her growing plants in your walls as the co-founder of Wallflower Hydroponics, and trying to catch up on sleep.
KATE HOYLE was raised in Moraga, California. Her work has been published in Scoundrel Time, The Tupelo Press 30/30 Project, and Typishly. She is an MFA candidate in Poetry at the Warren Wilson Program for Writers.