Produced by the Asian American Writers’ Workshop, The Source is a poetry podcast miniseries hosted by Divya Victor and Ashna Ali featuring conversations with five poets who discuss one of their poems and the story—and source—of its creation. 

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Ashna Ali (AA): Hello, I’m Ashna Ali. 

Divya Victor (DV): And I’m Divya Victor. 

AA: And you are listening to The Source, a poetry podcast produced by Asian American Writers’ Workshop. And we are your hosts.

DV: Ashna is a queer disabled poet and a child of the Bangladeshi diaspora. Their debut collection, The Relativity of Living Well, came out in September 2024 from Bone Bouquet.

AA: Divya is a poet, essayist, editor, and educator, and a daughter of the Tamil diaspora. She is the author of several books including Kith and Curb. She is also the director of the creative writing program at Michigan State University. 

The Source came to be because Divya randomly saw one of the four tweets I’ve ever tweeted in my life. In that tweet, I asked why no one had created a show or series where close readings of poetry could be showcased in the way that music often is. She DMed me and asked if I would do it if given the chance. And then she gave me that chance. 

DV: This was during the pandemic lockdown, which resulted in loneliness and separation from sites of our creative practice, and simultaneously there was a feral, exuberant outburst in creative collaboration. Ashna and I had never met each other, but we decided to make something together. We were motivated by the grand questions. Why not here? Why not now? And if not us, then who?

AA: Together as poets and avid listeners of poetry podcasts, we notice an absence of programs that depart from formalist analyses, and that access the human experience of poetry making: the labor, the love, the stories at the foundation of composition, and the narratives that are revealed through publication.

We invited five contemporary BIPOC and LGBTQIA+ poets: Zaina Alsous, Rajiv Mohabir, Hala Alyan, Douglas Kearney, and Josè Olivarez. We spoke with them about their creative process, and they told us about the making of their most treasured poems, their motivations for writing them, and explained choices about craft and kinship with the audiences that they hoped to reach.

DV: As scholars, editors, and poets, we know to rely on literary analyses and paratexts to understand poetry, but this time we want it to get back to the very makers, the very sources of creative work—hence the name, The Source. We tell the story of the poem from root, to seed, to bloom. 

AA: Welcome! We invite you to join us on The Source.

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AA: We are so, so excited to have you with us, Douglas. Thank you so much for making time to join us on The Source. 

Douglas Kearney (DK): I’m very, very happy to be here. Thank you, Ashna.

AA: Folks, Douglas Kearney’s lyrical poems range across the page bridging thematic concerns that include politics, African American culture, masks, the trickster figure, and contemporary music. He describes the non-traditional layout of his poems as performative typography, as he said in a conversation with Amaud J. Johnson for Boxcar Poetry Review. He said, “I wanted to take what I knew about poetics and say graphic design, and try to figure out the dynamics of certain poetic devices.” In the same conversation, Kearney discussed the relationship between his poetry and politics. “For me, the political is a part of how I see the world. My art-making doesn’t begin without realizing who I am and what it means for me to be writing a poem and not doing something else.”

Kearney’s full-length poetry collections include Sho, published by Wave Books in 2021, which was the winner of the 2022 Griffin Poetry Prize; and Buck Studies, from Fence Books in 2016, which was the winner of the Theodore Roethke Memorial Poetry Award; Patter, from Red Hen Press in 2014; The Black Automaton, Fence Books, 2009; and FEAR, SOME, Red Hen Press, 2006.

He is the 2021 recipient of OPERA America’s Campbell Opera Librettist Prize, because he is also the librettist of Someone Took They Tongues: 3 Operas, and has staged four operas including Sucktion, Mordake, Crescent City, and Sweet Land, which won the Music Critics Association of North America’s Best Opera in 2021.

DV: Today we’re gathering around a poem called “Sho.” It’s the titular poem from Doug’s book Sho. The book’s title asks us to think about shows as in performances, and show, as in “show us your work,” and “sho” as in the colloquial pronunciation of “sure,” an agreement to something that we don’t quite know what it is yet.

The poem uses a received form, inspired by Doug’s former student, Indigo Weller, which enacts a lace-weaving pattern and uses kilotons or end words in a repeating, interlocking manner, similar to but different from a sestina. And the poem laces repeated words to stitch together scenes as disparate as sailing or shipping, maiming or carceral violence, and performances of all kinds—performances on the stage, performances in the academy—and it helps us think about the connection between the histories of those scenes and their specific impacts on Black subjectivity.

Doug, we are so, so thrilled that you’re here to talk about this incredible poem with us.

DK: Thank you, Divya. Thank you, thank you so much for that and, Ashna, also for bringing in and creating space for me to be in. You know, Divya, just like whenever you talk about my work, I sit there like, okay, yeah, I’m alright, I get things done! Things get accomplished! I feel like something is happening. And so I just really appreciate even that brief exegesis. 

AA: Time to get cozy with poems. Doug, before we get cozy with yours, we invite you to introduce yourself in terms of the poem. So we’ve introduced you from a more biographical point of view, all of your many titles and awards. But where are you in relation to the poem that you’re going to be reading for us and talking about with us today?

DK: That’s such a fantastic question. Every now and then you write a poem that you can feel is going to be an anchor of some kind, where you accomplish something with it that is in part something you knew you were aspiring to do, right? You kind of have these ideas of like, oh, this is gonna be… this is the kind of poem I want to write, this kind of poem I want to be able to write.

But “Sho” was a poem where I saw some of that, but was also just really surprised by what could happen in this poem. The question of the intersection between Black folks’ entertainment and violence—I mean, that’s a long-standing question. That is probably the question of my work. And yet, “Sho” does something with that in a way that I hadn’t felt I’d done before.

It just feels like one of those poems that’s a gift. And in many ways, it was a gift because it is based upon a form that a student of mine, Indigo Weller, made in a course that I really love teaching called “Pattern, Constraint, and Sound,” which is a course in which all the students create two new poetry forms, and we all write in one of them. And we’re actually not workshopping the poems, we’re workshopping the forms. So we’re talking about what the form makes possible.

So in a lot of ways, this poem to me feels much closer to the way I tend to think about the privilege I have as a teacher, which is that I get to share what has taken me fifty years to figure out, or to even just know it as a question—sometimes it’s just a question that I figured out after all this time—and I get to share it with students of multiple ages, experiences. And for some of them, they’ll hear that and go, Oh! And they’ll immediately know what the next piece is. And I get to watch that get taken on and taken off, right? That, to me, is a really beautiful feeling. And it is the primary privilege of teaching—to offer what you know so that somebody else doesn’t have to go through the process of knowing and learning it in quite the same way.

With this, here‘s an idea for a class. And in some ways—course evals are one of the ways a university measures, it’s one of the ways we can look back and see what students attach to—but as a proof of concept for a course, this poem is like, whoa! Like, yeah, I guess that as an idea it can work. I guess that as a process of thinking through what we expect poems to do. And how we can transform that or change the way we think about that. You know, Indigo’s torchon, that’s absolutely, to me, a proof of concept about that. And it’s funny, my next book, which will be out in 2025, is also based upon a form that a student made. And that poem is called “I Imagine I Been Science Fiction Always.” That was Teo Rivera-Dundas in a robot voice poem, is what it was.

So yeah, it’s exciting. I feel like my relationship to this poem is one of surprise, a great deal of pleasure, and a feeling of responsibility for making sure I executed the form in the spirit in which it was designed.

DV: And speaking of surprise, and pleasure, and responsibility, and how all of these are carried in the body—we invite you to bring voice to the voice and read the poem, please.

DK: My pleasure.

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Sho

A torchon after Indigo Weller

Some need some Body
or more to ape sweat
on some site. Bloody

purl or dirty spit
hocked up for to show
who gets eaten. Rig

Body up. Bough bow
to breeze a lazed jig
and sway to grig’s good

fiddling. Pine-deep
dusk, a spot where stood
Body. Thus they clap

—

when I mount banc’, jig
up the lectern. Bow
to say, “it’s all good,”

we, gathered, withstood
the bends of dives deep
er, darker. They clap

as I get down. Sweat
highlights my body,
how meats dyed bloody

look fresher for show
ing, I got deep, spit
out my mouth, a rig

—

id red rind. Bloody
melon. Ha! No sweat!
Joking! Nobody

knows the trouble. Rig
full o’ Deus. “Sho
gwine fix dis mess.” Spit

in tragedy’s good
eye! “This one’s called …” Jig
ger gogglers then bow

housefully. They clap.
“… be misundeeeerstoooood!”
Hang notes high or deep,

—

make my tongue a bow—
what’s the gift?! My good
song vox? The gift?!?! Jig

gle nickels from deep
down my craw. They clap.
I’se so jolly! Stood

on that bank. Body
picked over, blood E
rato! Braxton’s sweat

y brow syndrome®, spit
out a sax bell wring
a negrocious show

—

of feels. Fa show, sweat
equals work. Bloody
inkpot of Body,

I stay nib dipped, show
never run dry! Rig
orously, I spit

out stressed feet. Lines jig!
Ha ha ha ha!!!! Good
one [that/I] is, bow

deep but not out. Stood,
shining, dim. They clap,
waves slapping hulls. Deep

—

don’t mean sunken; good’s
not yummy, right?! Bow,
blanched with foam, jig-jigs.

“This one’s called …”—they clap—
“‘_ _ _  _ _ _ _ _ _   _ _ _ _ _barrow.’ So much dep
ends / upon / dead _ _ _ _ _ _ _” Stood,

I on that bloody
rise of sweet Body;
there you is, too. Sweat

it, let’s. They clap—“Rig
ht?” some ask, post. Spit
tle-lipped: I said: “Sho.”

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AA: Thank you so much for that. 

You talked a great deal about the pleasure and surprise and the responsibility involved in asking students to create new forms and then writing together with them in those forms. Can you talk to us about this form?

DK: Absolutely. So as Divya pointed out, Indigo was, in some ways, hot-wiring or re-mixing the sestina as a sort of opening model. And whenever I talk about the sestina, I always call it the most asshole game of HORSE you could ever play, where you just create all of these constraints. When you think about the musical and vocal and traveling musician traditions that something like the sestina comes out of, it really is this sort of “top that, top that, top that” sort of thing. And the sestina kind of haunts creative writing programs especially in the early aughts. There’s people still doing them as this kind of thing to accomplish. “Can you write a sestina,” right?

And so Indigo, in his own work, was deeply engaged with questions of masculinity. Particularly how to reckon with toxic masculinity that you both inherit, that you witness, and that you also have an experience that I’ve been calling “foist,” “foistitude,” or “foistedness,” where it’s something you don’t want, but you have it. And then how do you wrestle with that?

So in many ways, like this form, the torchon is a lace-weaving pattern. I believe it was Indigo’s grandfather—not his father, I believe it was his father—who worked in a factory where this happens. So you have this kind of textile-based labor, right, which, depending upon the culture you come from, may be associated with masculine identities in people, or feminine identities in people, or nonbinary, right—but for him, this draws him to his grandfather. 

The way I think about form is: form is how much of what kind, right? How many lines, how many rhymes? How many syllables, how long is it? But structure doesn’t always accompany form. It accompanies forms like sonnets and haiku. In a sonnet, the structure is argue, argue, argue, argue, counter-argue, right? It’s a philosophical form. Haiku contrast two things but leave the space of the full epiphany, which we might note a lot of in Western poetry as being the thing that people are really after. But there’s a way in which the epiphany is allowed—the reader is allowed to have the epiphany, rather than watch the poet have the epiphany. Rather than a kind of, when I’m feeling uncharitable, a kind of insight porn where it’s like, “Oh, wow, yes, that poet had a deep thought, I watched that poet have a deep thought, so now I have a deep thought, yay!” Right?

But structurally and thematically, one of the things we’re supposed to do in a torchon is to address a question that we’ve had a lot of times but we still haven’t come to a conclusion with. And the teleutons create that cycular thinking, or the return—just this kind of focus, and this focus grappling and unraveling, of course, which is a powerful thought intention with what the form is named for. So taking apart, but also becoming more deeply entangled in the conflict or the tension or the question that you have.

So those are some of the aspects of it as a form that feel really important to me. I believe, if I remember correctly, we were supposed to keep a syllabic count. And I tend to prefer odd-numbered syllable counts. That tends to be what I do. So that sort of animates this poem, the five-syllable lines. Those are some of the things that come with the form and that I feel you’re responsible for if you’re going to call a poem this.

DV: And, what you’re saying here, Doug, about this form articulating a particular kind of question that just won’t go away—I’m thinking about compulsive questions that show up in anxious states. Or when the historical scene doesn’t remain historical, and it shows up in the present.

And this helps me hear what you said earlier, that the connection between Black folks and attainment and violence is the question of your oeuvre. It helps me hear it in a particular way. So thank you for that.

And I’m thinking now about compulsion, the compulsory return of something, in relation to the compulsiveness, or the fixedness, or the automation of factory life. And just how fixed forms automate something that necessarily exceeds what can fit into an automated structure. So I wonder, especially given how you perform a kind of automated or technologized voice in your performance, just now in the reading, how you’re thinking about the relationship between the organic body that’s so very present here—sweating, bleeding, it’s this exuding body—how that body exists alongside the elements of the voice that are automated or performed as automated.

DK: That’s such a great question. There was a commercial for Lincoln cars probably ten or fifteen years ago, and there’s a moment in it that I always think about. It’s playing a 1950s sort of jazz orchestration that has this very almost Ray Scott sound, that kind of mechanistic thing that’s happening. And it’s panning through all of these different tableaus.

What I remember is: They kind of pan through an automotive line. And so you see the robot arms assembling a vehicle. But then they cut to a Black man in what looks like a suit with a sheen, like a kind of almost metallic sheen. And he’s playing drums, but he’s in the middle of this massive drum fill. So you have this juxtaposition of these robot arms building the car, and then his arms. [Drum sounds] Like he’s doing all of this stuff, right? Maintaining a look of cool, while doing this extraordinarily athletic and technical work on the drums.

And when I saw that in a commercial for a car-make called a Lincoln, I started thinking about the automation of the Black body. And the sheen of the suit is metallic, and he’s being juxtaposed with robots while he’s doing this thing that at that time—we’re in a different time in our relationship to technology than even fifteen years ago, of course—but at that time, that drum roll, that drum fill, was signifying a kind of a human activity and a human grace. And a human… agility, right?

So when I think about that, and I think about my second book, The Black Automaton—the thing about an automaton is they’re oftentimes mechanical, but you can begin to think about cyborgs and robots throughout history. I’m trying to remember which god this is, but I think it’s pronounced Nuada, who has a silver arm—that’s a cyborg. Right? That’s a cyborg from millennia ago as a concept.

So when I think about the automation, specifically in my own performances, what I am mostly referencing is how the drum machines associated with hip-hop have infected, and affected—I should say infected, inflected—and affected my poetics.

If you take something like an NPC, you’ve got a box and it’s got all these pads in a grid on them. And you can map sound onto those pads. So you could map an entire sentence, you could map a bar of music onto one button. But then you can also change those pads so they each just have a part of that. So it can move from “I love you” to “I-I-I-I-I-love-love-I-I-I-I-I-love-you-I-you-I-you-you-I-love-love-I-love-you-love-you.” And the mechanical aspect of it is… to my head, my attempt to differentiate between a kind of repetition as utterance, which will be characterized by different inflections, different emphasis on different syllables, that kind of thing [laughs], a different sort of tone.

But in a lot of poems where I perform, I’m thinking like I’m a drum machine. And so that clap has to be the same each time we get to that phrase, because it becomes a sort of plastic unit, right? I think a poet who does this in ways that just leave me absolutely speechless is Tracie Morris. Tracie Morris is… there is nobody out there who does this with what in hip-hop production we might call them micro-chop. Like, even chopping down the lowest… like a phoneme, right? My favorite one of hers is “Slave Sho to Video aka Black but Beautiful.” And it’s made all the more ridiculously remarkable that that was totally improvised. Even the initial sentence that becomes the raw material for which this three minute long performance-poem precedes. And so that kind of mechanization is something that I’m interested in.

I’m also interested in what it means to be a body at risk. What it means to create these sorts of tensions between being up there sweating, spit flying out of my mouth, all of those kinds of things is a very particular body to look upon. A very particular subjectivity to look upon. And to feel as though what I’m allowing myself to do is be taken to the endpoints of certain models of humanity. That becomes another aspect of the mechanization. If I am being mechanical at some level, then what I’m suggesting is that if I cannot successfully complete the mechanical act, I am a broken machine.

But am I already claiming the space of a broken machine by being a human pretending to be a machine? Or, by being a human on this line and a machine in another line? I just think about that a lot. I think about what it means to be automated for somebody else’s pleasure.

DV: And when I listened to you here in the context of Michigan, so close to Detroit—I’m in East Lansing, Detroit is just an hour away—I can’t help but think about how Ford Motors also had the Ford Institute for Education where they were teaching—in a very programmatic, highly formalized way—immigrants how to assimilate into American life. And so much of that was about accent reduction, was about truly changing the very inflections, and the emphasis of those syllables, in your speech.

DK: Exactly, right.

DV: So to Americanize the voice, to naturalize it in a way, and to do that to those who were so intimately involved with the automation of the nation. So it’s a particular inflection in my regional positioning in relation to your poem. But what you’re saying, Doug, about labor and automation connects very much to the question I’m sure Ashna has coming up.

AA: Right, I mean, it changes the context in which we think about the labor of writing a poem. The labor conditions of writing a poem about labor conditions that sees the body as a labor condition. So, what were the labor conditions of this poem? How did the poem begin? Where were you? And particularly in this relationship with automation, how does one—as an organic body in relation to automation, imitating automation, and performing the failure of that automation—do that labor in space? And what does it actually look like to sit down and do this work?

DK: That’s an excellent question. And the process does really connect to a measure of automation. So when the students would produce their forms, we would have a class session where they would describe both. The assignment was that they had to write two poems in each form as models, but also to protect, to guard against students doing impossible, obnoxious forms that no one could ever write. They had to do two of them themselves to cap that in productive ways.

But to follow the pattern, because Indigo included three, or maybe even four, different diagrams, which could give us patterns. And so the first automation that I did was pretty much just looking at one of his poems and cutting off everything but the last word of each one of each line, so that I could see how the teleutons interdigitate, how they blended. So it really started off, first and foremost, as almost using his poem as a stencil or as a blueprint, so that I would understand the sequencing of the teleutons. And so that was the first step. It was quite literally deleting everything on the line head and then figuring out what my words were going to be.

And from there I’m writing to meet the word. I’m writing each speech line—so each four syllables—to meet the word. And what happened as a process of that, which I found really interesting—and this is something that people who write in recursive forms do—you find ways to have variation. You use homophones like they’re, their, there. So you go “Haha! I’m technically…” kind of a thing.

But what became really interesting for me that I was really struck by—and it’s something that I had done before, but it felt much more… the word would be mechanical, here—is what happens when you have insisted on maintaining a consistent count, but you run out of syllables in that line so you’ve got to break that word. So of course, the crafty part is making sure that the syllable that I’m breaking matches the teleuton. So spit, spit-tle. You do that kind of thing, “blood E / rato,” right?

So that’s trickery. That’s craft trickery, and I love that shit! But I didn’t know what that meant for the recitation of the poem as I wrote it. This is something that’s different. This is a jam in the photocopier, or you’re shredding old bank statements and you’re so tired of doing it and you’ve just put in two sheets too many—you knew it was two sheets too many, but you’re hoping to get away with it—and now it’s jammed. So that became something really interesting, because I don’t often know how I’m going to read something while I’m writing it.

A lot of the times I do not. And in fact, there have been poems that I would never have written if I were thinking about how I was going to read them, because as soon as I dealt with how to read them, I realized they were impossible. Or limiting or just strange. But with this one, it was finding ways for the machine to begin to choke. For the machine to have slight mechanical if not failures, difficulties. And so that “spit-tle” moment where it’s like: How do I get from this hyphen to the rest of it? And how do I make sure that because of the inevitabilities of the form, that it’s going to be these words? How do I make it so that a listening audience hears that hyphen, hears that break? Hears that gumming-up of the works for a moment.

And then that as a thing that I know I must do each time. So now I have—[sound]. And I have that—[sound] trying to get these syllables back together. And then I have the moments—there are only a couple of these—where I’m actually quoting a particular recording in my head, like that “… be misundeeeerstoooood!” That moment, I have to become a jukebox, just for a second. And so all of that work and activity and the dynamism of that feels like a kind of machine in and of itself. 

I am dedicated and love—some people don’t, I imagine some people don’t think this is true but—I love the idea of other people reading my work and not reading it the same way I read it. I love covers, you know? And I love the possibility of what happens when somebody would read this differently, what becomes more present, what becomes less apparent. But for me when I read it, it kind of becomes this machine. This Rube Goldberg machine that’s going to damage as much as it builds. Destroys as much as it tries to construct.

DV: And that tension between the jukebox and something like “Braxton’s sweat/ y brow syndrome,” helps me think about how syndromes repeat in bodies but with a difference. So here’s a pattern—this is what we know on a genetic level, this is how the chromosome will inflect this—but when it shows up in your body, it’s going to show up differently. And so that helps me think about the tension between what is organic and enfleshed, and what is automated or even habituated or patterned.

What I’d like to think about now is how this arrives to the first bodies in your life, the kind of circle of care, the people who warm the first draft. The people who carry it for you. Could you tell us about how that early draft arrives to them? How you share it with your first readers, how they talk with you about it, how you care for the poem in its early stages?

DK: I love that framing. How do we care for the poem, what parts of a poem are umbilical? It just needed to exist to get them out of your imagination, onto a paper, or a screen, or into the air. But now that it’s there, that part doesn’t have to be there. I love thinking about that kind of care.

In this case, I was able to have the experience of teaching a class but also being a workshop participant. Since the poems were there to workshop the form, it felt appropriate for me to write a poem as well, beyond just the kind of “I’m making y’all do this, so I’m gonna do it, too, we’re all in this.” So sharing it with the class was fun, in that you get to be like, “Alright, look, I did one, too, we’re all doing these.” But it did also make it possible for me to decenter a certain measure of the ambitions one feels for their poems. I was excited that the poem more or less fit the form. I was excited that I had chosen to do it the longer length; there were a couple of lengths offered, so I was like okay, great, you know, I did it.

But it was remarkable how quickly the course’s objective of—we’re not going to treat each other’s poems preciously or even as the subject, we’re going to just talk about what it was like to be in this form. The kind of embodied quality. We asked questions, I asked questions. I have a list of questions around these forms: What does it feel like to be in this poem? What kind of sentences can you write in this form? What emotional pitch do you feel nominates itself with this form?

And so there was a way in which we were just all a bunch of bodies that had done this mechanical thing. Right? We had done this mechanical thing. But here we were as bodies, and here we were talking to Indigo using the form as a way of talking to him about his poetics! So if somebody creates a form—there’s all kinds of ways people go about it. Some people do it just like, I don’t want to say as a goof, but they’re sort of just going like, “Oh, hey, let’s try something that’d be fun.” But other people are trying to figure out how to see the poems that they could use to help them understand their poetics. 

And there’s something about the levels of proximity and distance, this intimate detailing of “Well, this is what it was like to write it.” Because we all have to write process statements, what it feels like. So I remember that the complexity of the form and what it was demanding felt harrowing. If you’re talking about writing poems in form, this felt like that. I was excited. I was sure I had done some things wrong. [Laughs] And some of that is when I looked back at it without looking at the sheet of how you make a torchon, I was trying to reverse engineer what the form was. So there were moments where I was like, wait, I must have thought did I? Why is there a new? Huh?

So being in that space was fantastic because all of us did our best with whatever the form was, but we came ready to talk about the experience of writing more than we came ready to—what happens in some workshops, unfortunately—ready to defend your poem, or to be the spokesperson for your poem.

And so the question I ask my students is: do you think of the workshop as your first audience, or do you think of it as collaborators? And I intentionally keep it a binary just to see where they lean more in how they think about treating their classmates. This was a place in which the baseline felt like collaborators. And there was something very exciting about that as a feeling. Especially when, as long as you shout out whose form it is, you could be developing a new tradition honoring a classmate.

So that’s the space of labor. We produced, I think, three or four that week. We wrote three or four poems for the workshop. And it was a heavier week. But we came and were able to talk about what Indigo, in that case, valued, what was driving him and what was curious for him.

DV: I’m really appreciating that in this exploration of the fixed form, which so often is understood as an achievement of mastery—misunderstood as an achievement of mastery—that your students and you, your co-writers, your collaborators, and you allowed for all the space of mystery to exist. And mystery in the midst of that mastering, which is, of course, also central to your work. Thank you for that, Doug.

AA: Now, if within that mystery and that collaboration—if that’s the seed, if that’s the sort of womb space in which this production takes place, eventually this poem does leave the factory and become a product. It faces editors. It faces publishers. It faces reviewers, where it’s no longer living in this very complex, dynamic, and interpersonal context.

So I’m curious about that process, the editing process—how does it become this product that, without your voice or without the animation of another voice, doesn’t move, exists as text, and object text that moves and circulates as product? And how did it get to become that thing? And what is your relationship to it now that it’s a prize-winning text, that it’s part of these very illustrious bios. And without this conversation, no one would necessarily know about the extraordinary fertility and community of its production cycle. So if you could sort of speak to the many lives that it’s lived since that womb space, I would love to hear about it.

DK: When I think about that, it makes me think about something that I also talk a lot about in the classroom, which is revision strategies. I contend that “I want to make the poem better” is not an adequate revision strategy. And the reason why I came to that—beyond the idea of a kind of provocation—was, I imagine everybody on this Zoom and anybody listening later on has encountered a poem that they did not like at first, and then four years later, it’s one of their favorite poems. And that the reverse is also true, right? Here’s a poem that you wrote that you’re like, “This poem is incredible, this is the shit,” but then four years later, you’re like “Ugh, why did I like that poem?”

So can we make a poem better? When we can’t even tell when a poem we like is going to be a poem that we’re going to like forever and always? So I tell my students to think of something very specific to do with this next draft. Like, “Oh, I think I’m going to increase the amount of nature imagery, because I want to see if this takes place and what could happen.” That you can look at it, and be like, “Okay, well, I dove deeper into that,” and see what becomes possible there.

I also insist to students that you just save a draft—every significant change, make a new draft. Because you never know when draft twenty-three really started happening at draft fourteen. And you might get to draft twenty-three and be like, “Ugh, I’ve killed something in the poem. How can I go back?” And at that level, it’s like playing a video game where you can take a path and it’s a path that you don’t like, you don’t get where you want to go, and reset from the save point. So the draft is just the save point for your adventures.

I can’t remember what my revision strategies were for this one—in part because I think the form was so tight that I think for the most part things stayed pretty similar between the drafts—I do remember there was some business around the image of “grig’s good / fiddling,” like that image of trying to create this forest or woodsy scene. That could suggest everything from a kind of a Song of the South sort of zip-a-dee-doo-dah to a lynching scene, to all of that kind of thing. I think I remember having to tweak that or mess with that.

The syllabics force me to make very different kinds of decisions than when I’m just open and flowing out. So I do enjoy syllabics for that reason. I also like writing to syllabics from the get-go; I have taken drafts of poems that I’ve really liked, but they don’t feel like they have a shape, and a part of my revision process would be like, “Okay, my favorite line in this poem is seven syllables long. What happens if the whole poem is seven-syllable lines?” And then I’m making different decisions about sound.

Something, though, that did happen as a kind of an editing process that didn’t come from a person who existed in the poetry ecosystem necessarily as an editor, was that I read this poem at the 92nd Street Y in an event that I believe Tyehimba Jess curated. We had relatively short amounts of time; I know that I was sharing the bill with with a couple of different folks: LaTasha N. Nevada Diggs I remember immediately and there was somebody else who I should probably be Googling right now so I can give them their props, too.

But in this, I knew I had a limited amount of time, so I was going to introduce it. So I was like, “I think all you need to know is that this is a torchon and it’s a form that my student Indigo Weller created.” And the performance of that piece was on their [website].

Oh, [laughs] Tracie Morris was the other person, so yeah, cool. I mentioned Tracie earlier, so I don’t feel as bad. [Laughs] Tracie Morris was the third. But it’s online with the 92nd Street Y, and one of the commenters—and I don’t read comments, I don’t know [Laughs]. It’s maybe some kind of soul-eroding thing that I do to keep my ego in place—but the comment was basically like, “Actually, no, I do need more than that.” So I was like, “Well, yeah?”

So the editing that’s happened has actually kind of been happening in live context. To the extent that I have a little, brief spiel, elevator pitch of what the poem is. But also, I did a project with the experimental animator Laura Iancu, in which we created what looked like a live Zoom reading. This is in 2021, and Nick Twemlow was one of the organizing intelligences of this thing. But we pre-recorded the reading, and then Laura Iancu created special animations, things that couldn’t happen in a live Zoom reading, but you wouldn’t know it until it happened. And so, what breaks the fourth wall is my reading of this poem “Sho,” and then going back and reading it again, but doing explanations of every pun, every line, every bit as it went. So it’s reading it, but now these voices are being layered, these faces are being layered, as my little—to that person who said they needed more—that became my kind of like, “Yeah, I’m gonna give you what you asked for, whether you…” You know. “This is what you asked for, right? Okay.” And so it becomes this dense machine of an unedited version of it, a kind of explosion. So that’s sort of the life of that poem.

AA: Douglas, how might we and our listeners find this animation?

DK: Ah, I do believe it still exists on the YouTubes…

AA: Yes, we will absolutely put that in the show notes, that sounds incredible. And generates so many other questions, but in the interest of time, we’re going to ask you the signature The Source question. Are you ready?

DK: I’m ready. Let’s sign this thing.

DV: So when we named The Source, we thought about the soils that we write from—our earth, our ground, what makes our ideas germinate. So answer this question however you please: at this very moment, Doug, what’s in your soil?

DK: Ooh. I would have said bodies. I would have said bodies. But interestingly enough… I want to say… My wife tells me about—I think it’s, oh gosh, what is the flower? 

There’s a flower that if, when you plant it, you put a penny at the root of it—I think it’s hydrangeas—that if you plant it and you put a penny with that, it makes a color that would not otherwise occur naturally in the plant. I think it’s hydrangeas, so I will say there’s a penny. There’s a penny in the soil.

Because and I know, I know you feel this, Divya, that I feel like I’m at a moment in my writing life where I could just keep doing the same thing. And that would be fine. I’d be like, “I’m ready for that poem. Yeah, that’s fine. That was pretty cool.” But I just want to keep changing, because I write poems first and foremost to make myself what I would consider the person… I want to make my actions match my speech. I want to make my principles apparent, and to feel responsible for the things that I write and say, and what they put out in the world.

Writing poetry has always been a space for me where it’s sort of like, “This is a snapshot.” Even when it’s not a lyric poem. I am the person who decided to do it like this. My fingerprints are all over it, even if I never use the pronoun “I.” So, for me, the sense that if I look back at my life, and I see a poem like “Live/Evil,” where I realized the violence of metaphorical speech, even in something like the blazon where you’re supposed to elevate the beloved. But you very rarely elevate them by calling them another human. It’s always objects, celestial forms, animals, meteorological conditions. The dehumanization of a blazon is its primary rhetorical situation. You’re no longer a person; you are an entity with eyes that are pools. You’re no longer a person; you are an angel. You’re no longer a person.

So when I think about that, as a poem that exists where I’m like, “Oh, crap, I have dehumanized a person,” which is a kind of abuse. I now have to live in a world in which I know that I was capable of that. And that if I do it flippantly later on, somebody can go, “But… what changed since this happened?” What changed that made this feel alright right now? And it’s not about getting caught out in the way I think a lot of people feel anxious about being caught out now. It’s also not about not being able to change, right? But I have a record that if I change, I am consulting that record as much as anybody who wants to track my changes would do it. And so I find that to just be an amazing thing. It’s amazing, it’s challenging, but I do think ultimately, it is a privilege of being a person who complete strangers have decided it’s worthwhile to read what he was thinking about at 2:30 in the morning. That’s kind of wild.

So a penny. [Laughs]

DV: Yeah, that copper, the copper superconductor that moves energy from one place to another, and thinking about the automaton, the blazon, and the human, I can’t help but take us back to Jean Toomer, “her lips are copper wire.”

DK: Oh, yeah. Yeah.

DV: “Then with your tongue, remove the tape and press your lips to mine, till they are incandescent,” right?

DK: Mm hmm. And the Robert [Sheckley] poem, the Robert short story is always like… that’s a cyborg. Like, the dive head as the house, as a diving, I’m like, yeah, that’s a cyborg.

AA: The catalyst and the machine.

This has been such an extraordinary pleasure. And thank you so, so much for sharing your poem, your story, the source, and all of the lives that your poem has lived. We appreciate your time.

DK: I appreciate y’all so much. Thank you very much.

This interview, which took place on October 9, 2023, has been edited for length and clarity.

Douglas Kearney, “Sho” from Sho, copyright 2021. Used with the permission of the author and Wave Books.