PANK Books

An Interview with Elvira Basevich, author of HOW TO LOVE THE WORLD

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Pank Books, 2020

Set just before the collapse of the Soviet Union, HOW TO LOVE THE WORLD is at once a condemnation of the world, a daydream of America, and an unsent love letter—written and rewritten over the course of ten years—to a dead family. A meditation on intergenerational trauma, resilience, and hope, HOW TO LOVE THE WORLD is written in the tradition of epic poetry and follows the author as she retraces her mother’s journey to New York City in the summer of ‘89.

PANK: One line from the poem “A Universal Map of the Womb” stuck with me—there’s a moment where the speaker and her mother are waiting in line for a fast-food lunch in Brooklyn. As she pays for their cheeseburgers, she says, “Now, let’s be like normal people.” What’s the normal that these two figures are reaching for in this book?

ELVIRA BASEVICH (EB): That is a verbatim quote. My mom would often say it when I was a kid. I thought I understood what she meant, but the more I tried to do “normal” things with her and express “normal” feelings, the more I felt like we were drifting away from other families, as I was trying to understand how to build intimacy with someone so traumatized by their past. Is it normal to write a long goodbye to a loved one in the form of a book of poetry? It is for me, I don’t know about other people.

I do know that the most normal thing is also often the most extraordinary if we really take the time to understand what motivates us. To love someone fully—in the light of the specificity of their character and yours, of their past and yours—is the most demanding project that you can ask of yourself, one that can require extraordinary creativity and grit. And if each person faithfully applies themselves to the project of loving (and living) fully, I am not sure how much convergence there will be to recast our collective conception of normalcy.

It can be liberating to let go of conventional ideas. In that sense, quoting my mother was meant ironically in that we would never accomplish normalcy, at least not according to external standards, even if we also eat at McDonald’s, watch sitcoms, and I send her flowers on her birthday. We would never be or think or act like other people. And that’s OK too. Often being different for us felt like a sign of failure or weakness. It is gratifying and sometimes simply necessary to let external standards go. Individuality can then flourish.

PANK: How has Nabokov influenced your work? I found myself struck by references and lines throughout the How to Love the World that called to mind Speak, Memory— the opening poem, for instance, declares ‘I am your baby girl, Mnemosyne’– and the text fluidly incorporates Russian epigraphs and phrases. 

EB: You are an extremely careful reader of the book! I had finished Nabokov’s Speak, Memory just a year or two before completing How to Love the World and was referencing it in the opening poem, “Invocation of the Muses.” Nabokov is a genius.

This project, as well as my next poetry book, is in conversation with Soviet and modern pre-Soviet Russian literature, art, and culture, particularly Pushkin and the poets of the Silver Age popular before the Bolshevik Revolution. I am also consciously situating my work among writers of the Jewish diaspora, both living and dead. This is the context where I feel most at home—my literary imagination lights up. I still have so much I want to say, even as I keep returning to the same themes of family, exile, memory, religion, and loss.

I should add that what particularly resonates with me about Russian modern literature that I admire is the robust role of ancient Greek and Roman poetry. I have been fascinated by the idea of “updating” the genre of epic poetry for the contemporary world, told from the point of view of the most powerless and underrepresented voices, such as refugee women and girls, rather than blood-hungry, violent male “heroes” who through the passage of historical time still seem to have a pantheon of pagan gods on their side.

I remember that when I was a freshman at Hunter College, CUNY, I took an introductory class on Greek and Roman mythology. My brilliant professor said, almost in passing, that there have not been any women who have written epic poetry. I took it as a call to action. I decided then and there as a seventeen-year-old that I will be that woman. It is extremely gratifying to know that I kept that promise to myself.

PANK: How to Love the World builds a picture of American experience that’s filtered through refugee and first-generation lenses–arguably the most American identity out there. What’s the most American day you can remember having? Where did you go / who did you see / what did you eat? Who would you invite to re-enact it with you if you could?

My partner recently hosted a Super Bowl party. He is from Hudson, Ohio, and is a huge sports fan, which I find really endearing. I told him that I’d never been to a Super Bowl party before and had always wanted to go! He asked me what I expected it to be like. In response, I said jokingly that I always imagined orange food. And so, he bought Cheetos, cheddar crackers, and cheese dips. Nothing quite makes you feel American like eating orange food while watching the Super Bowl. It was amazing.

I have started writing my next poetry book. It is tentatively titled Cars. In it, I play with the juxtaposition of Soviet and American highways, manufacturing processes and labor rights, the funny names for car parts and types and models, and the values associated with the commodities that define the ideals of a people and a place. For “research,” I have been talking to my partner about that a recent trip he took with his dad to see the Daytona 500 NASCAR race in Daytona Beach, Florida. It’s been really fun—a very different writing process, compared to my first book! I feel like somehow the writing is bringing me closer to America, even as I continue to think about the idea of “cars” in the Soviet Union.

PANK: How to Love the World functions as something of a palimpsest: personal history overwritten with family history, refugee experience, the long slog through trauma, a fraught relationship with a mother. The book is even broken into Book I and Book II– there’s a distinct before & after that placed the emotional journey of reading as a mirror to the physical journey of the emigre. There is a lot of narrative meat here. Why poetry? What did poetry allow you to accomplish with this book that, say, memoir could not?

I will eventually write a memoir, I know, as well as a historical novel loosely based on the life of my paternal grandmother. But save for Angela Davis and maybe Greta Thunberg, I cannot imagine a memoir written by a twenty-something-year-old having much value. I knew I had to undertake the project about my family and my past—I could not wait that long. My writing of How to Love the World was urgent, even though it took me a decade to write it. I have found that poetry is the most effective way to communicate—and transcend—one’s own experiences. And for that, I will always be grateful to poetry.

I am a voracious reader of novels and it reflects in my poetry. I also love poetry books that tell a story with a complex narrative structure. Ilya Kaminsky’s Deaf Republic is an excellent recent example.

PANK: This book took ten years to write. What would you say to someone embarking on a similar course with a project? Any advice for the journey?

EB: Just. Keep. Writing. There is no other special trick to pull the white rabbit out of the top hat.

And have faith in your voice.

Know that you will finish the project and it will feel wonderful when you do. On a more practical level, as the project moves along, it is helpful to have a blueprint of where you are going and how you plan to get there in the literary execution. For example, which styles would you like to experiment with, whose voices would you like to engage and incorporate, what time of day is best for creative writing?

PANK: If you could upload one text into the brains of your readers Matrix-style before they opened your book, what would it be?

History: A Novel by Elsa Morante.

PANK: Anything else you’d like to share with [PANK] about How to Love the World? [PANK] loves you!

Thank you for giving my first poetry book such a warm literary family—

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ELVIRA BASEVICH is a poet and assistant professor of philosophy at the University of Massachusetts, Lowell. Her poems have recently appeared in Hayden’s Ferry Review, Poached Hare, TriQuarterly, The Gettysburg Review, and Blackbird.

Ask the author: Shira Dentz of SISYPHUSINA

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[PANK] Books, 2020

A new interview with Shira Dentz, author of SISYPHUSINA, as she elaborates on what poetry is and the intense collaborative process at work in her new book, available from [PANK] Books.

PANK: Your book opens with a letter to your readers about your formal
approach to these poems, including concerns like text weight, placement on the page, etc. One thing that jumped out to me was your note that “form is sculptural.” Do you approach your writing practice like visual art-making, with text standing in for a medium?

SHIRA DENTZ (SD): I do regard text as a visual stimulus that impacts one’s reading experience, whether or not this stimulus is foregrounded, though I don’t approach it as a stand-in for a medium; part of its medium is its visual nature. Along with referential meanings, written language has shapes and a surface that it’s shaped on. Before children learn to read, for instance, they respond to letter forms as characters or moods. Of course, as we grow and keep learning, we filter what we attend to, and for good reason, as we’d be overloaded otherwise. I understand, too, that one cannot look and read at the same time, just as one can’t see the “crone” and the “young beautiful woman” simultaneously in the famous optical illusion. So I know that I am playing with a multiplicity when I forefront the visual in writing, and also implicating the reading process.

As a writer, I like to be able to draw from all the elements of my medium—language—and this approach embodies my aesthetic commitment to give space to possibly overlooked details—both in the handed-down handling of my medium and subjects of focus. Also, as every language has a limited vocabulary with which to express the range of human experiences, I try to challenge “the limits of my language are the limits of my world” (Wittgenstein), and experiment with the visual components of my medium in an effort to make language where there is none. All this being said, I am a visual artist too and am sure this is partly responsible for my attention to the visual nature of written language.

[PANK] I’m curious about hybrid forms and how authors define their work when it doesn’t fit perfectly in jars like “poetry” or “prose.” SISYPHUSINA has sections that look like “traditional” lyric poetry, blocks of text that look like prose, marks, and lines like a drawing, sampled text like a collage. Do you define what you write one way or another?

SD: That’s a great question, thank you! This reminds me of the ongoing debate about how to define “prose poetry”—there are many ideas, and for the most part, I think we agree that it’s a generative question in its elusiveness. So I suppose this could apply here. I do feel that I’m mostly a poet, but my aesthetic involves questioning received forms of doing things—what is poetry—I think most writers are engaged with their own “what is poetry” or “what is a novel” or “what is a short story” etc etc. But clearly I’m interested in juxtaposition, both in stillness and movement. I could define it as hybrid or cross-genre. Maybe it’s a genre-in-progress, possibly in the spirit of Lyn Hejinian’s “Against Closure.”

[PANK] Throughout SISYPHUSINA, there are bodies– female bodies that are “imperfect” by some measure, and exhortations or examples of body/appearance modification. In ‘redshift’ an italicized line urges us to “try liposuction!”; earlier in the manuscript, there’s an extensive exploration of how ancient Egyptians shaved, dyed, and styled their hair to change their appearance and achieve an aesthetic ideal; the speaker repeatedly notes trying to lose weight; in “Units & Increments”, the speaker repeatedly states “I’m thinking of eating again.” Text throughout the book is recycled or referenced, making the world of these poems feel claustrophobic in a way that is distinctly female. Is this a moment when art imitates life?

SD: Wow, I guess so, though I hope cumulatively it resolves artistically and doesn’t fall into that caveat of “showing boredom by being boring.” Something that I undertake in this book too is juxtaposing a singular, autobiographical narrative with other narratives as they’ve been constructed both historically and in the present, in a range of realms including science, advertising, and the artistic (including literary) canon, along with collaborations with several female artists in different media. The thread of singularity that your question points to I suppose evokes a beating pulse.

There is something that I keep circling back to, a definitive point that is aging, and for women that includes fertility issues. The recurrences in text are a coming back to the origin point that I’m regarding from different angles. How to open up a new narrative

[PANK] If you could ask a reader to do a little homework before reading your new book, what would your reading list look like?

SD: Part of such a reading list like might look like—

Selected visual art and writing by visual artists Louise Bourgeois, Glenn Ligon, Cy Twombly, Robert Smithson, Jenny Holzer, Kay Rosen, and Erica Baum

Selected poems and texts by Stéphane Mallarmé, ee cummings, Guillaume Apollinaire, Robert Walser, Antonin Artaud, Gertrude Stein, Hannah Weiner, Kathleen Fraser, Alice Notley, and from The Sackner Archive of Visual and Concrete Poetry

Formally experimental collections by Barbara Guest,  Jen Bervin, M. NourbeSe Philip, Francis Ponge, Charles Olson (Maximus), Susan Howe, Douglas Kearney, Renee Gladman, Jenny Boully, Eleni Sikelianos, and Diana Khoi Nguyen

Liminal prose by Clarice Lispector, Nathalie Sarraute, and Rosmarie Waldrop

Journals/diaries by Anais Nin and May Sarton

Short films by Maya Deren And possibly critical writing on literary and visual conjunctions such as Tanya K. Rodrigue’s “PostSecret as Imagetext: The Reclamation of Traumatic Experiences and Identity”

And possibly critical writing on literary and visual conjunctions such as Tanya K. Rodrigue’s “PostSecret as Imagetext: The Reclamation of Traumatic Experiences and Identity”

[PANK] I want to return to the collage-like aspect of SISYPHUSINA and consider your process. How did this manuscript come together for you? Did you collect visuals or text samples as you went? Create them as needed?

SD: I began it as a project proposal for which I was extremely fortunate to receive a fellowship from the Tanner Center for the Humanities that enabled me to devote a bunch of time to it in its initial stage. This stage included researching literature centered on female aging in the life, physical, and social sciences, humanities, as well as its artistic expression, past and present, and in pop culture and in the news media. I took notes, but for the most part the pieces that I wrote during this time developed directly from the snippets of discoveries I was making through my research. Some of these snippets incubated in my mind for years before surfacing in a creative piece. In my conversations, while working on this project, I found that many younger women were very, very interested in reading about and giving voice to this aspect of their life. At the same time, I took up the challenge of writing about aging within the context of my own life. I gave myself freedom to use all types of media, and to play with the nuances of typography as part of my writing process. I worked for many years as a typesetter before working as a graphic artist before returning to school and teaching and brought my experience with the minute shades of type to bear in my expressive relationship to classical notions of beauty and prevailing structures of social hierarchy.

Besides what I culled from research and my personal life, I drew from encounters with art and literature that I had stored in my mind over time. The first “Sisyphusina” poem was born from a constraint experiment given to me by a fiction writer friend when I felt blocked. My initial aspiration was to make a plan for this book’s architecture, but this isn’t my natural way of working, and eventually I let it go—I’m interested in the evolution of structure rather than imposing it prematurely, though I value the generative potential of constraints.

The manuscript’s working title was Rose Secoming—I had already identified that the rose would be a central image in the book, since it’s been associated with ideals of feminine beauty in literature from early on, as in “Roman de la Rose” from the Middle Ages in which the beloved female is, in fact, a rose. I chose “secoming” as a blend of becoming and succumbing. In earlier work, I had begun experimenting with making new words where none existed to articulate female experiences (for instance, there are no female equivalents of emasculation and castration, yet sexual violation of females leaves equivalent scarring).

I continued working on the manuscript beyond the time of this fellowship, naturally, and pieces continued to grow organically from my encounters with others, myself, and the rest of my environment. In 2016, an excerpt of SISYPHUSINA was published as an e-chap, FLOUNDERS in Essay Press’ GROUNDLOOP Series, which “seeks to bring together authors exploring diverse subjects through loud, innovative architectures.”

As I continued to work on what was to become SISYPHUSINA, I moved around for jobs, and during my first year teaching at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, I was drawn to expanding what I knew about new media, having always been interested in being artistically responsive to the current zeitgeist and the emerging new. While looking for artistic camaraderie in my new environs, I met musical composer Pauline Oliveros and visual artist Kathy High, who also taught at RPI, and eventually invited each of them to collaborate with me on extensions to this book. By now I regarded this project as an ongoing one, and for parts of it to spread outside the physical space of my book’s pages seemed “right.” I like the “skin” of video as an element in juxtaposition with my text within the context of this project. Around the same time, YEW, a journal of innovative writing & images, accepted several new pieces and asked if I wanted to collaborate with an artist on images to be published along with them. I asked my friend, visual artist and writer Kathline Carr if she might be interested in creating images in response to my text, and she drew many more interesting images than could be included. When I finally decided to call it a day and to say the book was Ended!, I thought back to these images that Kate had drawn and again, it felt “right” to me to expand the collaborative dimension of this book, its “skin,” so to speak, and asked her for permission to include some of them. I also asked Pauline whether I could include the piece she had improvised for a piece that extended from this project, “Aging Music” with this book’s publication. She had recorded it while performing it in 2015 in a building that she wrote “became activated by the wind and the banging doors and windows became an engaging percussive part of the musical dialogue. The building as an instrument played by the wind seemed expressive too of aging.”

This past year I learned about QR codes and realized using one would be a seamless way to integrate “Aging Music” with the physical definition of the book. A video-poem, “Saidst,” that I collaborated on with Kathy High is accessible via a URL published in the book and online at my website, PANK’s website, and Kathy High’s Vimeo page. Poet and designer Aimee Harrison, with whom I worked on adapting the manuscript’s proportions to the printed book’s dimensions and designed the book’s exterior and its table of contents, was my last but not least collaborator.

In other words, assembling this book was a continuous process and developed along with encounters with new technologies, locations, people, and signs of time. One of the final touches was my choice for the cover art, a painting that I did many years ago, in which I wanted to capture the active dynamic of visible light and crumpled up a piece of foil to use as my model. The result looks impressionistically like a heart, aorta included, or a female sprite clapping, and now, years later, it was decided that this painting would be “Sisyphusina.”

[PANK] Anything else you’d like to share with [PANK]? [PANK] loves you!

SD: Thank you so much for reading this, and I hope it spurs you to check the book out and to more conversation! And a shout-out of thanks to [PANK] and to you, reader, member of our writing and reading communities, for your support of newly published books during this challenging time. I’d like to share, too, my wishes for everyone’s wellness.

PANK’s note: You can read a selection of Shira’s work from Sisyphusina as part of the Academy of American Poets’ Poem-a-Day Series here.

SHIRA DENTZ is the author of five books, including black seeds on a white dish (Shearsman), door of thin skins (CavanKerry Press), a cross-genre memoir, how do i net thee (Salmon Poetry), a National Poetry Series finalist, and the sun a blazing zero (Lavender Ink/Diálogos). She’s also the author of two chapbooks, Leaf Weather (Shearsman) and FLOUNDERS (Essay Press). Her poetry, visual writing, and prose appear in many venues including Poetry, The American Poetry Review, The Iowa Review, New American Writing, Brooklyn Rail, Lana Turner, Denver Quarterly, The Academy of American Poets’ Poem-a-Day Series (Poets.org), and National Public Radio, and interviews with her appear in journals such as Ploughshares, Rain Taxi, and The Rumpus. Shira is a recipient of awards including an Academy of American Poets’ Prize. Poetry Society of America’s Lyric Poem and Cecil Hemley Memorial Awards, Painted Bride Quarterly’s Poetry Prize, and Electronic Poetry Review’s Discovery Award. Before returning to school to pursue graduate studies, she worked as a graphic artist in the music industry in NYC. A graduate of Iowa Writers‘ Workshop, she holds a Ph.D. in Creative Writing and Literature from the University of Utah, and is currently Tarpaulin Sky’s Special Features Editor and lives and teaches in upstate New York. More about her writing can be found at shiradentz.com.

Ask the Author: Monica Prince, of HOW TO EXTERMINATE THE BLACK WOMAN

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[PANK] Web Editor, Erinn Batykefer sat down with Monica Prince to talk about her new choreopoem, HOW TO EXTERMINATE THE BLACK WOMAN coming out from PANK Books, spring 2020.

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For the readers who might not know what a choreopoem is, can you tell us about how you first learned about it and how you approach the form? What does it let you do that you can’t accomplish with another form?

In 2008, my sister called to tell me she’d just read the most incredible thing and I needed to stop what I was doing and go to the bookstore immediately and buy a book. “It’s called For colored girls who have considered suicide / when the rainbow is enuf by Ntozake Shange. N-T-O-Z-A-K-E S-H-A-N-G-E. Now. Go right now.” It was like 10:00pm on a Monday, but I wrote down what she told me and the next day I went to two bookstores looking for it. (RIP Borders.) 

For colored girls… is a choreopoem. That’s what Shange called it. This one was published in 1975 to critical acclaim. I read it in one sitting in my mother’s living room, out loud. I cried the whole time. It was the most amazing thing I’d ever read. I had been reading/watching/writing performance poetry for a few years at that point, and I was a dancer. This choreopoem combined performance poetry, dance, music, song, and art in a way I’d never seen, never dreamed was possible. I thought poetry had limits. I was wrong.

The official definition of a choreopoem, according to me and the thousands of sources I’ve read to become an expert on this genre, is a choreographed series of poems performed on stage with dance, music, live art, and occasionally parkour if you do it my way. The structure takes on at least three forms: a collage, a narrative, or a hybrid where the narrative isn’t the dominant structure but provides a thread to follow from beginning to end. For colored girls… is a collage choreopoem: several characters perform poems with various speakers, transitions are done through dialogue or dance, and they end where they started: “And this is for colored girls who have considered suicide but are moving to the ends of their own rainbows.” (That’s in the first poem and the last.) There are about twenty poems in that show. 

My latest choreopoem Roadmap is a narrative choreopoem. There are characters who change, they only speak in their own essences, and the audience can follow the narrative through dialogue, a chorus, and a guide (her name is Rachel, and she’s terrifying). How to Exterminate the Black Woman is a hybrid of both the narrative and collage form. 

Though I do write “literary” poetry, what I can accomplish with the choreopoem is a captive audience. People attend the show to see what all the hubbub is about. They want to know why it’s called that and not just a play. They want to know why people are singing or painting on stage or dancing or doing backflips. They want to be immersed in something they’ve never experienced before. They want to ask questions about people they don’t always engage with, lives they never interrogate, experiences they’ve never had. I can’t do that with a poem in a book. I can’t do that with just a play. I can’t do that with an essay (well, I can, but not as effectively). 

Ntozake Shange passed away in October of 2018. She likely never knew about the work I’ve been doing, how I have done all this in her honor, for her legacy. I hope she’s proud of me.

HOW TO EXTERMINATE THE BLACK WOMAN functions a bit like a beehive, a single organism made of many. I’m thinking specifically of the sections that are also poems from other books and manuscripts. I’m curious about how you approach writing your choreopoems. Are they like writing a play? Ordering a manuscript and filling in? Something else?

So, writing a choreopoem is one of the most ridiculous things I’ve ever done, and I can’t stop doing it. How to Exterminate the Black Woman is my fourth choreopoem, but only the third to be produced, and the first to be published (yay!). I wish I could say it is the same every time, but it’s not.

My undergraduate honors thesis will tell you that writing a choreopoem requires choosing a subject, researching that subject through interviews and literature reviews, choosing characters, and then writing a million poems until you get “enough.” Which is why some of the poems come from other books and manuscripts. As I write poems, some of them are just fabulous on their own so I submit them to journals or they become part of other collections. But sometimes, as I pull poems together based on the subject, I end up pulling from sources that have already been published. To be honest, I never believed choreopoems could be published as literary works. They are frequently published as plays (Samuel French, for example, owns the rights to For colored girls…) or self-published on Amazon or produced and never repeated (like the 1982 For black boys who have considered homicide when the streets are too much by Keith Antar Manson). But really, the choreography of creating a choreopoem is different every time. 

When I started How to Exterminate the Black Woman, six words came to me in a dream that my dog startled me awake from in the middle of the night (RIP Otis the Pug). I wrote a feverish sestina using those words: fear, expectation, fury, loss, silence, and new. Then I went back to sleep. In the morning, I reread the sestina (titled “When Asked About Power, I’ll Tell Them–“), changed some stuff, and then wrote an outline for the show. I had no plan. But I knew I wanted the show to respond to Beyoncé’s Lemonade (specifically in “Freedom” when she says, “I’mma keep runnin’ cuz a winner don’t quit on themselves”) and I wanted to give a tribute to my closest friends from college, five women who kept me sane my last two years at Knox. But most importantly: it was the summer of 2016. I didn’t know what was going to happen with the election. I was in love with a Black man who I couldn’t keep safe. I was teaching Black children in a summer literacy camp, and Philando Castille and Alton Sterling had just been murdered. I looked around and I couldn’t breathe. I just kept writing poems about Black lives being disposable, about the tragedy of loving someone “who will leave, be taken from you”, about fiercely and unapologetically identifying as a Black woman. 

Then one of my best friends from college got pregnant.

We’ve handled this so it’s okay to talk about. I was the first person to ask her if she wanted to keep the baby. I asked if this was what she really wanted, with her partner (of ten years at the time), with her life. I tell my students all the time that any decision you make you can unmake. Except having a whole child. That decision cannot be unmade as cleanly as moving to the wrong city or taking the wrong job. Humans have consequences. Surprise surprise we fought about it. But the reason I asked was because DT was dangerously about to become President. Black bodies were dropping like flies and no one seemed to care or want to do anything about it.

How do you raise a child in a country that wants to kill them, that wants to kill you?

After that, the show came easily. I had a focus. I had a direction. I knew I wanted the show to answer that question. I was (still am) obsessed with sestinas, so I wrote like twelve more with different subjects, and the whole show was focused around the number 6. Did you know 6 is a perfect number? In the show, there are 6 sestinas and 18 poems, 6 main characters/emotions, and each of them recites at least two sestinas. The moment the show stopped being a collage and turned into a hybrid was when I realized that the show was all about my insecurities about growing up: society tells you to have a baby, to get married, to buy a house and get a steady job and retire at 65 with grandchildren to spoil. But I’m polyamorous, terrified of getting pregnant, and wildly uncomfortable sharing my personal space. How am I supposed to be the person society wants me to be when I defy those norms by “bein alive and bein a woman and bein colored” (that’s Ntozake Shange right there)? 

The narrative began when I introduced Angela and made the six emotions/characters fractured identities she holds. (Angela is my mother’s middle name, and it has six letters, and it means “messenger of God,” which is who Angela strives to be by the end of the show.) Then the show just asked for cohesion, for breath and grace. Using 6 as a guide, it fell together easily.

You’ve had the chance to see HOW TO EXTERMINATE THE BLACK WOMAN performed on stage, and to direct it, too. If you could hand-pick a dream cast, for the “parts of a Black woman” who would you put in each role?

Dream cast? Oh wow. I have never thought about that! I love this question. 

Angela: Janelle James. I know she’s a comedian, but her energy is so on point for a character like Angela.

Fear: Lupita Nyong’o. I think she’s could do the “Closed Borders” poem justice, which has been difficult to get someone to do. Not to mention she has the talent to handle a character that experiences depression the way Black girls are “supposed” to experience it (read: we’re not supposed to get depressed).

Loss: Kimberly Elise. If you’ve seen the For Colored Girls movie, you know WHY.

Expectation: My best friend Kristyn Bridges. I wrote this part for her. 

Silence: Mandi Madsen. She is this stellar actress in NY who is also one of my sister’s best friends. She has RANGE.

Fury: Kerry Washington. I watch Scandal when I run on the treadmill because nothing gets you fired up like watching Olivia Pope handle anything. Plus, have you seen Kerry Washington scream? It’s haunting.

New: Liz Morgan. She was “Binette” in my choreopoem Testify produced by the CutOut Theatre (directed by Thea Wigglesworth) in 2015, and she astounded me. If I could be in her light one more time or get her perform in one of my shows again, I would cry uncontrollably.

This book is comprised of sestinas, a form that functions on subtle and nuanced obsession as it repeats 6 line endings throughout. Are forms your jam, or was the sestina the right vessel for this choreopoem?

Sestina had to be this choreopoem’s vessel. I do not ask the muses questions when they give me gifts, and when they gave me the six characters for the show, I knew the sestina was the best way to format the show. I love forms, but I only developed a real respect for them last semester when I taught Forms of Poetry. There aren’t a lot of forms developed by writers of color, or at least we like to think so, and I appreciated how the sestina challenged me to tell a story cyclically. I can say Black bodies are disposable in a different form or a free verse piece, but the sestina requires you hear it over and over again in new ways, forcing you to really pay attention. 

If you could ask a reader to do a little homework before reading your new book, what would your reading list look like?

Ooo! Homework? Yes. Not all of these are books, but choreopoems aren’t really books either, are they?

For colored girls who have considered suicide / when the rainbow is enuf by Ntozake Shange (choreopoem)

Made to Dance in Burning Buildings by Ayva Pearson (choreopoem)

Let Me Down Easy by Anna Deavere Smith (one-woman show)

Love Poems by Nikki Giovanni (poetry collection)

Native Guard by Natasha Trethewey (poetry collection)

Between the World and Me by Ta-Nehisi Coates (memoir)

Dream with a Glass Chamber by Aricka Foreman (poetry chapbook)

Ferrous Wheel by Natalie Sharp (poetry chapbook)

The Dozen by Casey Rocheteau (poetry collection)

We Should All Be Feminists by Chimamanda Ngozie Adichie (speech/nonfiction essay)

Lemonade by Beyonce (visual album)

Warshan Shire (poet featured in Lemonade)

Ebony Stewart (performance poet)

Citizen by Claudia Rankine (poetry collection/essay collection)

“won’t you celebrate with me” by Lucille Clifton (poem, but also read everything by Lucille Clifton)

I read/watched/experienced all these texts and people leading up to completing my choreopoem. There are way more, but these are the ones that pop up the heaviest for me.

Color is important in this text. There are 6 voices or  “parts of a black woman” that come alive on the page / stage & each is associated with a color– a literal scarf that an actor wears. Is this a nod to Ntozake Shange?

This is partially a nod to Shange. I’ve become obsessed with ancestry and legacy. I don’t mean family trees; I mean artist ancestors, people who pass down their gifts to us so we may use them in a new life. Shange’s For colored girls… uses color directly: her characters are named lady in blue, lady in orange, lady in purple, etc. My characters use color to nod to her, but also because the spell at the end of the show doesn’t work without the right colors.

In 2017, right before I officially finished the show and started submitting it to playhouses and festivals, I met a witch named Ellen Ercolini at Practical Magic Live, a live event I host with Makenna Held and Andréa Renée Johnson (now called Your Leadership Recipe, come see us in France in April!). Ellen told me about frequencies, and when she read mine she looked me deep in the eyes and said, “So much water. You need time, space, and money to write, or you will never be happy.” That was terrifying since I was working five jobs and was definitely not writing. She also told me blue (royal blue, specifically) was my power color and if I wanted to channel energy into something, I needed to use that color. Twenty-four hours later, my best friend Kristyn gave birth to her son, Royal. 

I believe in witches. I believe in muses and spirits and angels and energies and frequencies and miracles and God. I do not believe in coincidences (Rule 39, if you watch NCIS). But I do believe that when a witch tells you something, you have to believe it.

I wrote a spell as the penultimate poem of the show, “Battle Stations.” The colors came from that spell. Before, the characters/emotions were just named. I knew if I wanted something powerful to happen, if I wanted Angela to cease being fractured and return to herself, the spell had to have not only my power color, but the power colors of the women who saved my life in college: purple, silver, yellow, red, green, and of course, blue. Angela wears a black scarf at the end because when you mix all the power colors together, you get black. Get it? Like the Black woman fractured at the beginning of the show? 

Anything else you’d like to share with [PANK] about this exciting new title? [PANK] loves you!

How to Exterminate the Black Woman is not just about the struggle to remain whole in a world that blatantly wants to erase you. It’s not just about the collective memory of Black women navigating relationships with themselves and others. It’s about legacy, about how no matter how often white supremacy, misogynoir, fire, nooses, and bullets try to exterminate us, they have failed. They have failed. They will fail. Every other choreopoem I’ve written was based on interviews and research. This is the first show based entirely around surviving where you will never belong. 

If you want to perform the show, get at [PANK]! They would love to send you copies and a rights agreement!

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MONICA PRINCE, a Black performance poet raised by Guyanese parents, teaches activist and performance writing at Susquehanna University in central Pennsylvania, where she writes choreopoems and performance poetry. Her debut poetry collection, Instructions for Temporary Survival (2019), won the Discovery Award for an outstanding first collection by the publisher, Red Mountain Press. She is the managing editor of the Santa Fe Writers Project Quarterly and the author of the chapbook Letters from the Other Woman (Grey Book Press, 2018). Her creative work is featured in MadCap Review, The Texas Review, TRACK//FOUR, and elsewhere.