Creating Community and Curating Poetic Collections: A Conversation with Dr. Malika Booker

TJ: I was very fascinated to learn that you co-founded your own writing collective called “Malika’s Poetry Kitchen” in 2001, which created a well-needed platform for writers from many diverse backgrounds who have often been overlooked or ignored by the mainstream media. As I was looking through your website for the collective, I came across this quote that I resonated with so much. The quote is, “We knew that black and brown bodies, working class voices, women’s voices, did not have a space where they could be heard. And so this writing collective was a necessary and political act”.

Could you elaborate more on why creating these writing communities are very vital for uplifting and inspiring all these writers of different backgrounds? How should those that are interested in writing collectives actually create their own?

Malika: So I’ll start by saying that it was really grassroots. So basically, the British poetry establishment, because it’s British, was really a bastion of white male poets and anybody else was kicked to the curb. We didn’t have a space in. This organization called Spread the Word, which was set up by the London Arts Council, is now called the Arts Council of England. They set up this writing initiative called Spread the Word to facilitate literary development. One of the things they did is put on a thing called “Afro-Style School”.

They invited over Kwame Dawes who had just won The Forward for his collection in Britain, which is one of Britain’s highest poetry prizes. He came over and he did Afro-style school. Now to go back just a few years before, there was a kind of panel where we had all these publishers, big main publishers, and Kwame was saying how he’d sent his book to all of them and he’d been refused and they were saying “Well we didn’t think it was great poetry.” One of them said,” I would publish Gil Scott Heron as opposed to you” and so it felt like this is just showing what’s happening here.

But Kwame’s Afro-style school was so instructive and it was so instrumental in our development in craft, in talking about work, and in initiating the idea that you have to read to write, giving us reading lists to read poets. I also had my friend Roger Robinson who’s also a really great poet and won the Ford Prize, and the T.S. Eliot, which is the highest prize in England to boot, but at that time, he hadn’t. He and I were just young fledglings. We were sitting in my kitchen and I was mourning that Kwame Dawes lived in the States in South Carolina at the time. And he only came over intermittently to do these Afro-Style schools.

And I was saying, we should have a space like this all the time for poets who are ostracized; just writing in community, supporting each other, and growing together. So Roger said, “Well why don’t we do it?” And I said, “Okay, when?” And he was like, “Next week, we’ll start next week.” And I said, “Where?”, and he was like, “Well, we’re in your kitchen. Let’s do it. Let’s start in your house.” That’s how it started, and I thought those fools were just gonna come in every month. For the first Malika’s Poetry Kitchen, we had one person between me and Roger that was an intense session and by next week, we had a core group of people and they kept coming. What shocked me was when they said “See you next week.”

I realized like every Friday I had to clean my house. The sessions would be led by myself and Roger, and later on we invited another poet called Jacob Sam-La Rose. We led the sessions in the first few years and then we developed to people going out and doing other workshops. If they went on another workshop or a retreat, they would bring that information back. We were all about building the craft, and the craft of writing and performance. And then it gradually kind of went into building the craft of writing; getting to know your tradition and getting to know what contemporary writers are doing, but also what traditional older writers were doing.

We would read, and we would write through writing exercises. We would share with each other and we would give feedback and critique. Then it developed into supporting each other. If someone has a performance, then we’ll go and support them. It became this community of writers who were supportive, who we could be vulnerable with in a space around a table with food. I always think food is important on a table.

So in hindsight, I would say just start with who you have. We would just invite people word of mouth and there weren’t creative writing MFAs or MAs at that time, so we just wanted to learn, grow, develop, and read like loads of books that we would bring in sometimes. We’d bring in poems to discuss them such as “What does Terrence Hayes mean by this?” or you know, “What does Toi Derricotte mean by this?, and, “What does Sylvia Plath mean by this?”. We looked at the poems to dissect them and tried to input that technique of the craft into our own work.

TJ: Yes, I agree with that, especially with the aspect of studying those traditional writers because there’s so much that you can take from them, including inspiration. When you spoke about vulnerability in your writing collective, I feel like as a poet, you definitely need that especially when you’re in academic spaces. To be honest and vulnerable with a group of people, while also having that group of people be vulnerable with you, can create sacred connections.

Malika: And it was rigorous; you had to bring poems every week. You had to write.

TJ: I think that’s the fun but challenging part.

Malika: You had to write. You had to bring. You were able to experiment and you had the space to fail. But Kwame had said something to us when we first went to the Afro-Style school that I think was radical to me and I imparted on anybody I mentored. He asked us what we were reading. A lot of us were reading novels and weren’t reading poetry. He said, “Well, how are you a community if you’re not reading poets? Who do you expect to read you?”

And so this idea of reading and writing, went hand in hand. I would say start with a buddy, and start with like-minded people and lay out ground rules. Everything was about the craft. It was about writing. It was about being respectful. It was about understanding that sometimes in writing people could write things unintentionally that might seem cliche, or might seem racist or sexist because some of those -isms are within us, but let them know in critique; gentle critique that shows what is happening and how the work is being read.

But also praise them if they’re growing because you grow together so you can be able to say, “Oh my goodness! You know, you were trying that sonnet, and now you’ve conquered it. I can see the development in your growth.” And sometimes you can say, “Listen, this is a cliche you fall back on. Horses just come into your work all the time. And we might need to think about is this a motif or is this something continuing?”

It was a really constructive space; supportive, but also quite harsh and demanding at the same time. And I think that’s what you need. I would say to people if they want to set up a collective, think about what you want and the fundamental things that you need in there. We all want to develop our craft and grow and become better writers that grow together. We also want to always be a hand reaching forward and a hand reaching back. If you learn something, you pass it on because you’re in the interest of all your community.

Have your foundation of what it is that you’re doing. Everything is about the poem. You’re in service to the poem, and not the poet’s ego or the poet’s personality. Think about when you’re going to meet. If you’re meeting every week or if you’re meeting every two weeks, be consistent with that.

As Malika’s Poetry Kitchen continued to meet on, my mom said I didn’t have a boyfriend because I was doing this Malika’s kitchen thing on prime date night. We met on Fridays religiously so I had to tidy up my house every Thursday.

TJ: This is going to be super helpful for all the MFA students that are in our program. This leads me into my next question about publishing because I feel like that’s something a writing collective, and a lot of poets are working towards with their poems.

How would you describe that process for your books getting published? Is there anything that’s overlooked or surprising about the publishing process and what should poets be aware of, especially poets that are submitting for the first time?

Malika: So for me, I’m a craft how-to poet. I’m always buying craft books, which were helpful in Malika’s Kitchen because you know every three weeks I was running a session. In terms of poetry and what I’m publishing, the first thing in one of my craft books which prepared me I think was Stephen King’s On Writing where he talked about rejections. One of the things that I had to learn is, or that we all had to learn, were that rejections are not to be taken personally.

As a writer, in one of the most creative professions, we’ve come into a profession where rejection is more. You’ll have a hundred rejections to one poem, okay? So figure out a system of dealing with those rejections. Some people will have a folder in which they call “Joy”, where they put the rejection. That’s a thing you know, and some people have a spreadsheet. So figure out a system for dealing with that because rejection might not mean the work is not good. Rejection might mean they’ve had 10,000 poems that are on that theme and rejection might mean that the poem’s not got to the publisher at the right time; or it might mean that it’s a chance to re-look at that poem and develop it.

Submissions are something to kind of help you to complete poems. So you go, Okay, I’m going to submit to these magazines and I’ll finish five poems to do that. Use it as part of writing goals and methods so that it’s serving you.

One of the things that surprised me, I think about publishing, was when I gave a manuscript of Pepper Seed to Kwame Dawes, a long time mentor. He’d be like, “You’re finding good voice, you’re finding good voice”, and I’d be like, “When am I gonna find this voice?” Then one day he said to me, “Okay I’m really interested and I think you’re here now. I would love to be able to talk to you as a publisher of Peepal Tree Press and see if I can publish this manuscript.”

And the manuscript that I gave him, was not the manuscript that got published. So between the acceptance by a publishing place, house, and your publication, if you’ve got a good editor, some of those poems in the book are going to be rewritten in some way. Sometimes they will just ask you a question about the poem and you will look at it and be like, “Oh that’s not it. I’m not there.” The putting together of a collation of a manuscript means that the writer has to step out the room because it’s almost like you’re collating an exhibition.

So the narrative that you had while writing, doesn’t serve it anymore because now you’re going to put poems against each other. You’re building a book. In Pepper Seed, it started with these strong poems about my mother and my grandmother, and they’re really brutal and really raw. I had those at the end of the manuscript because I did it like a novel.

But all my mentors at the time, Bernardine Evaristo, Kwame Dawes, and W. N. Herbert insisted that I open the book with these strong poems that are going to pull people in; and you end on strong poems as well and then you think about how you curate it. You put in poems against each other to see how they talk to each other. Sometimes a word from one poem will speak to another and in the writer’s head, you would never put that together. Those are some of the things that surprised me.

TJ: I feel like this is something we talk a lot about in my own poetry workshops and our professors will ask us, “How is this poem speaking to one of your older poems?; and how would you put those together? What are your themes that you see revolving around your work?”

And I feel like that’s especially important, especially for MFA students, but for people also outside of MFA programs that are thinking of getting collections published. In the editing process, a lot of things get changed, so that’s something really great to keep in mind. I appreciate your take on that because I’m always wondering about publishing and I know everyone else is too.

Malika: One of the things that someone said to me that was really interesting is that at a time when you feel like you’ve cut off the writing, which you never do, have an evening or have a date with your poems. Say like on Saturday night, I’m going to sit down and have a glass of wine or I’m going to have chocolate cake or something really lovely, and I’m just going to read through the collection, and discover what all this clump of poems are doing together.

You can only discover it by reading and then you’ll realize, Oh wait; red comes up a lot in here, and, Oh, there’s this flower. I think there’s the conscious poet’s writing and then there’s the subconscious that’s doing all this work that we don’t see like a swan paddling. So that date with your poem, you can discover so much about what it is that the work is doing in conversation with each other.

TJ: I love your wording for that; it’s like a process for discovery.

Malika: And you’re not judging; you’re not thinking this poem is this or that. You’re just going Okay. Oh that sounds like that too, and that’s on here. It’s almost as if you’re an archaeologist just having a date with your work.

TJ: My last question is on Pepper Seed which is a really fascinating collection. It’s grappling a lot with heavy narratives, and many themes surrounding family, generational trauma, and all these buried stories that are interweaved between Black people of Caribbean descent and also of British descent as well.

The poems in this collection, they’re very colorful, but they’re also very alive in the way that they have all these voices that are carrying language and tones that can be described as joyous and interrogating, but also sometimes a bit traumatic and resistant as well. There’s a good sense of resistance within the voices in these poems.

While you were creating Pepper Seed, were there any risks that you took in terms of writing, selecting, and organizing the poems for this collection? And lastly, one of my favorite questions, how did you discern when a poem was finished?

Malika: I will fiddle with the poem a lot. During the time of writing Pepper Seed, I mean for 15 years, I went to workshops and had mentors. Mostly in all the workshops, poems in Pepper Seed were workshopped with peers in Malika’s Poetry Kitchen and in other spaces. Sometimes, I would say that the poem that made me and Kwame know that I was ready, was the one about the grandmother peppering.

This poem started in the second, or third week of Malika’s kitchen where Roger Robinson set us an exercise to write about something that’s happened in your family; that there’s a silence about it that you kind of remember, but you don’t remember. It’s unspeakable and you can’t bear to look at it.

And I started writing it in 2001 or 2002, and Pepper Seed was finished in 2013. But I wasn’t mature enough as a poet then, to complete that poem. And you know that poem is quite difficult; I didn’t know what I wanted with it and I realized that what I needed from that poem was not to victimize the grandmother. I needed people to look away from black women in pain and I needed us to dwell in the pain of this young girl.

When I can start to make decisions like, What is the purpose of this poem? Has it ended? Do I feel like it’s landed? Do I feel like its line breaks are fine and correct?, that’s when I know that the poem is coming to fruition. Sometimes when my friends say to me “It’s done; this edit that you did, you’ve killed it”, I go back to the one before.

TJ: I think about that a lot with my own poems. Sometimes I look at a poem and I like it, but there’s something else I want to say but I’m always questioning, should this poem be finished? Right now, I’m taking a class centered on writing short poems and so we’re learning how to say a lot but within a very small space on the page and I’m observing that aspect in these poems that you have in this collection.

They speak so much truth and life also back into the characters. And I liked how you said you didn’t actually want to victimize the Black women inside of your books. You wanted the pain to be dwelled upon.

Malika: I think I asked myself a question like, what happens if your inheritance is from a plantocracy?, or if you’re living on the same place that was a plantation, but now it’s the land that you live on? What do we carry and what do we leave behind? For the grandmother, it’s slavery that traumatized her, right?, and for the mother in “Mother Warning” where she says, “never let a man hit you in sleep”. That’s just basically what I was thinking; like how do these poems react to that? Has the poem been true to itself? Is this poem the poetic truth? You know, the door might have been a yellow door, but for the poem it needs to be a red door for symbolism or for imagery. So my mentor always says, when you’re editing a poem, you’re thinking, am I in service to this poem?

Sometimes you’re like, I want to say this, and I want to say that, but the poem has taken off on its own thing. And then now you go, what is the poem on the page saying? Does it need to say that better? Does it need to exploit the sound? Does it need me to ramp up the imagery? Does it need another person to speak in here? What does the poem mean? So I write questions to the poem and sometimes I even write essays to the side trying to interrogate what that poem means.