Gathering through Language: A Conversation with Evie Shockley
On September 14th, I had the pleasure of sitting down for a conversation with the wonderful Evie Shockley. Her most recent poetry collection, Suddenly We, had been placed on the longlist for the National Book Award less than twenty-four hours prior to her visiting Texas State University. Having learned the news just moments before meeting her, a new layer of anxiety washed over me as I lingered in the lobby of the Wittliff collections. However, as I spoke with her in an interview that went well over the previously agreed on time, I found that Evie’s love for words, language, history, and humanity brought me into an incredible, inspired space where nothing else mattered besides poetry.
Allie Broussard: So, you had a book come out very recently.
Evie Shockley: Yes (laughing).
AB: (Laughing) Suddenly We. What was that process of writing it like?
ES: I guess this is where I–I don’t know if I’d say confess or admit–I was writing poems, and at a certain point, you feel like, ‘I have a lot of poems, let me go and look and see,’ and it’s that kind of a process for me. It had been a while since my last book, and I thought, ‘How many poems do I have?’ And I started going through them, and it was only then I realized that I had a big mass, you know, more than enough for a collection. Which is important because you’re always going to weed out things and put things aside, but you need to have enough to work with. But it’s at that moment where you have enough, and then you also have this opportunity to kind of look back and see, ‘What are the things that have preoccupied me for the past few years?’ And it’s that kind of rereading, synthesizing, recognizing threads and connections between the poems that gives me a kind of, ‘Oh, okay, there’s something here!’ And then the process at that point, that’s the hard part, really. It’s the putting things in combination and reading through and then realizing, ‘Okay, the connections that I have in my head aren’t really going to be visible to somebody else as they read. How can I rearrange things, or what kind of titles could I give to sections that would help people kind of feel the shape of this book, or do I need to write some more poems that come at the same issue from a different angle?’ That process is probably another six to eight months, maybe even a year while I had a few trusted readers take a look. I just played with multiple different organizational principles, multiple titles. It’s not a glamorous or easy process, but I just kind of get in the middle of it and keep moving pieces around until everything goes ‘click.’
AB: Interesting. So it starts with almost like a subconscious connection of pieces you’ve written that all kind of work together, but then you’re making them fit together.
ES: Yes! I forget who said this, this is not original to me, but you are at the center of all of your poems, right? I mean, that doesn’t mean that the poems are about you. Sometimes they are, but for me maybe less so. But my concerns, my reading practices, my subject position is informing all of them, and so they’re all always going to be connected. The trick is having a moment where you’ve got enough, for me, having a moment where I’ve got enough poems that I can look back and kind of see who I was for that period, so to speak.
AB: Interesting.
ES: You don’t stay the same person. So what was I thinking about? What was coming up again and again as I was writing? And then, how can I organize those connections? Which, I understand because I am in on the process of what made me think to write this poem, a lot of things that don’t actually make it into the poems themselves. How can I arrange them or build an infrastructure for them that will give other people that sense of their being connected? Because I don’t write project books towards a particular subject or starting off in a direction, and because I do a lot of different forms, I often have people sometimes respond to my books as not being cohesive or not feeling like a whole. I’ve just recognized that that’s just going to be the way some people respond to my work. But I am trying ultimately to create for people a feeling of not just being thrown into the whirlwind. You know what I mean? Is that helpful?
AB: Absolutely. It is. Thinking about it in terms of the ‘we’ in Suddenly We, this is so fascinating because you do so much with collaborating, or writing ekphrastically, and it’s fascinating how informing all of these connections and reaching out to your audience, as well, is engaging in all these other artists too.
ES: Yes. I think of the poems, not just in this collection, but, as you point out, thematically in this collection as well. I think of all the poems as a kind of place of gathering. Bringing the people whose work I admire, or whose politics inspire me, without whom I feel like I wouldn’t exist, historical figures. To bring all of those people from different times and places – sometimes it’s a Black gathering, but sometimes it’s much more diverse than that. In this book in particular, I was trying to think of how I can do what I do, which is to write as a Black woman, but in a way that invites as many people into this we as possible. Not always because the we can’t always be about all of us at the same level. Sometimes it’s a we that’s women, and a lot of women can come in. But how can I write a we that’s women, that men can also come in too? That they can, if they’re not addressed by the we, they’re with the we. It’s paradoxical, I know (laughing). And it’s that paradox, that tension, between the things that connect us, and the things where we inevitably diverge from each other and sometimes actively disagree with each other – but how can we be in solidarity, even if we’re not identical.
AB: Very interesting. You’re saying this, and I just keep thinking of those first images of the concrete poems, and the ‘we’ made up of ‘you,’ and it’s just so beautiful.
ES: Ah, thank you. You know, the painter, Alma Thomas, is someone whose work I’ve loved for a long time, and you’ve seen the image, maybe, that inspired the poem. Or if you’ve seen any of her work, her later work, she uses these little brush strokes, and I thought, you get this composite. I mean she’s not the only person who’s ever done that, but unlike the pointillists, who use teeny-tiny little dots, her brush strokes are bigger, they still add up to this larger image, and yet the individual strokes retain their individuality. You can see each one of them and appreciate it, what color it is or what colors are in it. And I was like, ‘how can I make a poem that does something similar with language?’ And that’s how I ended up with that opening page of the book.
AB: Speaking of form, whenever I first got your book, I was just flipping through, and I was like, ‘Oh my God, this is about to be wild and wonderful!’ And it is! Just seeing how you use words on the page. Can you speak to how you approach form?
ES: With great excitement and a lot of openness, I think. I love form because, as you can probably tell listening to this, I start one place and end up another place, probably not even answering the same question (laughing). But I just have a lot in my head at any one time. A lot in my heart, also at any one time. Form gives me something to work with, work against even, work within. That, I feel, is really, really helpful, and I like seeing. Sometimes I’m exploring a form that has been handed down to us to see what those constraints, if you will, make happen. Trying to rhyme on a certain pattern can push you into thinking about a thing in a different way because you’re searching for a word that you wouldn’t have had to search for. And the word that comes up, like, ‘Well, that might not have been where I was heading, but what happens if I go there?’ And then, the poem is becoming. It’s becoming something you didn’t expect, and I love that. But sometimes, I’m also trying to create a form that works with a poem. Something that’s in my head, and I’m like, ‘This idea is not going to come across unless I find a way to kind of embody that.’ So sometimes I’m doing that, sometimes it’s an engagement with other people’s form, like an artform, as I was just saying with the Alma Thomas poem, or the poem that’s a response to Dannielle Bowman’s photograph. Things like that. Sometimes I’m just playing around. Like there’s a poem in the book that’s handwritten, and I’ve seen other people do this. I’m not the first to do anything, and that’s the first thing you have to get comfortable with when you make art. So, I had seen people who had done poems in their own hand and published them that way, and I found that very interesting. But to just do what somebody else did, just to go with it, that didn’t feel interesting for me to do. But there was a moment where I had been asked to write a poem about the umber poets. This is a group of Black poets and a few musicians as well who were writing in New York in the village in the years just before the Black arts movement took off. David Henderson, Ishmael Reed, Calvin Hernton, folks like that, they were kind of exploratory and experimental in their work and wrote poems that were elliptical and sometimes not very straightforward. I wanted to honor their style of writing, and I loved the idea of the play of ‘umbra’ with this idea of ‘umbrella,’ you know, because that’s how you make sense of the word. Once the idea of, instead of ‘umbrella,’ the ‘L’ of ‘umbra,’ once I started playing around with the language in my mind, I knew I needed that big L. In my process, I tend to write everything longhand and then type it. But once I drew that L, I was like, ‘I have to have the L!’ And it just went from there, you know. So much of art is these gratuitous, fortuitous accidents, that if you don’t edit them out, if you don’t tell yourself ‘no,’ they can become anything.
AB: That’s awesome. Speaking of the way that words break, I found it so interesting the way that you play with a word’s physical form, as well as where it breaks into other words, or where other words can be inserted into it. It almost felt like a form of play in that way as well because in some ways it’s whimsical and exciting and in other ways it’s used to feel biting or overcome with frustration at times.
ES: Thank you. You know, I think that’s the influence I would credit to Harryette Mullen on my work. She was somebody who I was reading at a really important time in my career, and it just made a huge impact on me that a poem could seem light and not making a hard-hitting statement and telling a really powerful story, but just playing with language in a way that makes you see how language is slippery or how it can function to oppress us. We make language show its baggage or its underwear (laughing). You do that not in spite of a humorous vibe, but through the humorous vibe. It’s like a dark humor, if you will. If you like dark, which I do, then it’s a surprising, undercutting humor where you’re laughing and suddenly you’re like, ‘Why am I laughing at this? This is funny in a different way than I thought it was going to be.’ That kind of thing. Whenever you can make yourself (and then hopefully your reader) pull up short and think about what’s happening, the response that they’re having, it’s a kind of element of surprise. Harryette Mullen showed me a lot about the possibilities of that kind of work in poetry. I don’t think I do what she does, or when I’m trying to do what she does, I don’t do it as well, but I think I’ve maybe found an Evie version of that that has its own power.
AB: That’s wonderful. To shift gears, I also wanted to ask about when you’re writing ekphrastic poems, either to or for or about the dead. I’ve found in my own poetry, I resonate with a phrase I’ve heard, ‘keeping an open dialogue with the deceased.’ I just wanted to hear your thoughts on that writing, or if you ever feel a pressure when speaking on the deceased.
ES: I have written poems in the voices of historical figures. I think Frederick Douglass probably more than anybody else (laughing). I remember writing at least a couple poems where he’s speaking. You know, it’s kind of hubris and I think it’s important to say that I don’t feel like what I’m doing is ‘this is what they would say.’ They said what they said. They lived their lives. Even those of our ancestors whose voices were repressed or lost to us for other reasons – they did say what they said, so I don’t think of myself as needing to speak for the deceased. I think, though, that sometimes trying to imagine who I would be if I had had all of their experiences that I know of. Then giving voice to that. Connecting it to their names if their names will mean something to audiences because that gets people at the same time and place that you were, right? But not so much ‘this is what Frederick Douglass would have said,’ but ‘this is how I deal with what I know about him and the complicated person that he had to be.’ I’m speaking about a poem, I’m not sure if you’ve read it, but the complicated person he would have to be if he were in a relationship where he owes so much to a person and cares for them, and yet has in a sense connected freedom to things that are not so much connected to that person. It’s like, what do you do when you know you’re being messy? (Laughing.) When you know you’re being messy. So I tried to think through that using his set of circumstances and his ‘voice,’ but not to speak for him. That’s the way I approach it. I get to be in a dialogue, taking whatever has come to me or to us from the past and putting that in conversation with what my imagination allows me to see of that past.
