DONIKA KELLY and PHILLIP B. WILLIAMS in conversation
Donika Kelly, author of The Renunciations (Graywolf, 2021), and Phillip B. Williams, author of Mutiny (Penguin, 2021), had the following conversation about their new collections over Zoom, between Iowa City, IA, and Philadelphia, PA, on February 16, 2021.
PHILLIP B. WILLIAMS
They can decide what they want to keep in this recording or where they want to begin, but I would like to begin by saying, hi. It’s great to see you.
DONIKA KELLY
It’s good to see you too, Phillip.
PHILLIP B. WILLIAMS
How long have you been working on this new book The Renunciations?
DONIKA KELLY
Some of the poems are as old as 2013. I would say I started working on it in earnest in 2016. I had a complete draft by the end of the summer of 2018, which was strange.
PHILLIP B. WILLIAMS
Why was it strange?
DONIKA KELLY
I don’t know. It was just a surprise to discover, Oh, I have a project! after Bestiary, the first book, was published. I had a lot of alone time, so that also helped.
There wasn’t really anything to do but write while I was up in Western New York, teaching at St. Bonaventure and being cold. All I did was write. But I would say, actually, I was working on a number of the poems even before I moved, because I think Bestiary was mostly drafted by the end of 2013. So I think that I was writing towards this project without knowing that I was. And then in 2016, I was like, well, here I am, lots of time on my hands: let me see what this looks like.
PHILLIP B. WILLIAMS
Were you surprised by the process of consciously going into something without a plan, saying, well, let’s see what happens—as that oftentimes backfires?
DONIKA KELLY
I thought the book was going to take on more threads, but it ended up just really having two. There are the poems that deal with divorce and then the poems that deal with childhood sexual abuse. And just trying to process those two things at the same time, I was like, that feels like enough things, we don’t need more things.
How about you? How did you approach your book? Your process of writing, it sounds both slow and fast at the same time somehow.
PHILLIP B. WILLIAMS
Well, I wasn’t originally writing a book. I wasn’t writing poems at all. I spent all of the second half of 2017 through the top of 2020 not writing poems at all. I wasn’t even reading them unless I was teaching them. I wanted to spend my time working on something else. I was just overwhelmed with all the poetry that was coming out. I felt rather disconnected from the community, period, and I hit a reset on that, and so some of the poems that appear in Mutiny were written prior to 2017, and others appeared very quickly throughout 2020 up through January of this year, with the poem “Final Poem for the Black Body.” For me, it was one of those things where the book didn’t need to exist until I needed to create it, and it was sudden, the need to write the poems, which is why the process for me was so quickened. Because I had been sitting with so many ideas and a lot of energy, a lot of images, maybe even some lines, I wrote those poems swiftly. I had been writing the way we’re not often taught we can write, which is in the head.
DONIKA KELLY
Yes, the poems were waiting at the door, right? As soon as you open the door: well, come on in.
PHILLIP B. WILLIAMS
My work was invitation, really, I just opened the door and they tumbled inside and crammed there and then I gave them the space to fall in. It was like a really, really bad cartoon, one of those Warner Brothers cartoons. And I had to contend with their want to be in the world right now.
Tell me about this title, The Renunciations. How did you know this was it, how did you get here?
DONIKA KELLY
I had a working title which I knew wasn’t good, but it was what helped me keep the book in frame. The working title was Bear God, as a kind of imperative: bear God. As I was revising the manuscript and thinking about bringing it to Jeff Shotts at Graywolf, I thought, this isn’t going to be the title. One of the things that I see happening in the book is that the speaker has elevated the beloved and the father into these exalted positions. I think the father held a kind of absolute power, and so part of the speaker’s process is to pick away at the base of that power to try to bring the father into scale. And the beloved was a kind of god, but not like an omnipotent god, just a person who ordered the life of the speaker. So that title, Bear God, was helpful while I was writing the poems, to help me keep the image systems in check. But then I sent Jeff the book, and Jeff was like, “What is this title?” and I said, “Yeah, that’s a great question.”
So I sat down and I just started writing out what I thought the speaker in the book was doing in the investigation into these two relationships, and then thinking about these two people who are very, very different, so at one point I thought, well, what do you do when you kill a god?
I was like, nobody’s dying, no gods are dying here, that’s not quite right, it’s not deicide, that’s too intense for what’s happening. And somehow I got to the idea of renouncing, to the act of saying that these folks don’t have the power that they once had. I thought, well, the verb Renounce feels kind of interesting as a title, but what if instead these poems are the renunciations themselves? What if this manuscript the practice of renouncing, this book the artifact of having renounced? And then I thought Renunciations felt right. And that plural felt really important, that it wasn’t just the refutation of one of those strands, but two ways of thinking about these two really important relationships.
I think you have something similar going on with Mutiny, right?
PHILLIP B. WILLIAMS
Well, I was just thinking that we could have switched titles for our books and it would have been fun. We would’ve been perfectly fine and no one would have been the wiser. What is the phrase? We would have been none the wiser. Mutiny against everything! Just burn it all! Sick of it all! Tired of it all!
And particularly, even the idea of what it means to have a poem about mutiny… One of the obvious strains of thinking was, oh, there has to be a poem in here where a mutiny occurs. I was sick of thinking of mutiny in ways that didn’t allow me to be mutinous in my thinking. I was considering, what if it were a book completely of “formless poems”? I mean, poems that didn’t use traditional form in any capacity. But then I felt that was too predictable. That is a move that is predictably like mutiny.
To be mutinous in this capacity would be to write poems that were very tight, that use the tercets, the quatrains, the couplets, that were, if anything, thinking about different ways of rejecting whatever it is that a speaker is burdened by. The speaker is not burdened by the government in that way. Sure, yes, capitalism, racism. But if you’re writing toward a thing, you have to consider the expectations of the audience that is asking for it. It instantly becomes a consumer project, and I didn’t want Mutiny to do that just by the title alone.
“Well, how’s he going to be writing about systems of government?” I couldn’t do it, those predetermined algorithms. It doesn’t mean that I’m not going to do it in the future. I don’t know what I’m going to write in the future. I wonder what it means to have all of these poems that keep recycling the same symbols and images in every book. The deer in every book. There’s the moon.
DONIKA KELLY
It’s where the poems come from, Phillip. The poems come from the moon.
PHILLIP B. WILLIAMS
The poems come from the moon, which is not necessarily an untrue idea, right? The poems come from images, from what has the most impact on us in life. It’s not a bitterness that I have toward the moon. I love the moon. The moon shows up in my poems that are published and unpublished. I think it is a beautiful image. I want people to keep writing about deer and moons and all that. Also, what if we couldn’t anymore? If someone said, this is the last time you could do that? In the end, Mutiny was less about actual mutiny and more about saying goodbye. To me, this is a collection of goodbye poems as opposed to poems of rebellion.
DONIKA KELLY
In Mutiny, nearly half of the poems are “final” poems, starting with “Final First Poem” which opens the book, and including “Final Poem for Grandma Elizabeth’s Cancer,” “Final Poem for the Bullet,” “Final Poem for War During War,” “Final Poem for the ‘Black Body,’” “Final Poem for the Moon,” and so forth. Can you talk about how that series is working on its own, but then also in relationship to the poems in the book, especially toward the end, that engage so potently with grief and loss?
PHILLIP B. WILLIAMS
The “final” poems are, to me, ways that I say goodbye to all of the things that were, for better or worse, weighing on my mind. Goodbye to the moon because the moon will show up in a poem and just sit there and take over the poem, truly. “Final Poem for the Crow” considers the crow as an image of blackness or black people, of abject blackness, of oppression. But “crow” doesn’t need to be a crow. Every time I wrote “crow,” its very color became such a cliché. Even if it were just a bird of grief or a bird of death, I could no longer use the crow to point towards those feelings.
I wanted in this book to say goodbye to the image systems, the figurations, things like that, but then also to say goodbye to ideas and behaviors in the community that just annoy the hell out of me. Like in “Final Poem for the Famous Poet”: we need to let go of the idea that we can simultaneously say we do not want famous poets while also constantly, endlessly, trying to build ourselves up to be the next famous poet, or wanting our friends to be famous poets but then thinking of another writer who is getting recognition, “Oh, we don’t know that person personally. We don’t want them.” The contradictions, the hypocrisy.
I wanted to say goodbye to those things that are more systemic in the field of poetry. What does it mean to actually feel a kind of grief while you’re sitting at some writing residency, expected to produce art, inclement weather all around, and the only thing you can think of is, someone in my family is dead, but the field of poetry is demanding that you go and produce work? What if you’ve generously given me this time and space to write, but the only thing I can do is grieve: will you allow me to not write and just grieve?
I think that leads into the other part of your question, which considers the poetry of grief. I think the common images in poems and the subjects for which I wrote “final” poems are also worthy of grief. We can grieve while saying goodbye to those figurations. Losing the deer. We could grieve the loss of the stereotypical first poem, the poem which typically goes, “I am the I, here are the things that we're going to talk about in the book,” right? We could grieve saying goodbye to the formulas, to everything that’s formulaic.
It’s also okay to actually not say goodbye to the familiar formulas. It’s just the way it goes for me. But if you’re writing about yourself, you’re inevitably writing about other folks. I don’t know if there’s a way to get around that. Also, I think that’s the power of poetry, to connect with others in that way. And yet can we pause for a moment and think about the kind of poetry we keep writing all the time and just consider if we’ve gotten ourselves stuck.
DONIKA KELLY
Yes, and is this where we want to be? What would we like to continue valuing? Are there other things that we haven’t imagined yet that we could value?
PHILLIP B. WILLIAMS
Absolutely. And it’s interesting that you’re asking me about the repetition of “final” in my book titles, because you do a similar thing in The Renunciations—you have multiple poems title “Dear—” and several poems that are self-portraits and several poems that call themselves “Sighting” and…
DONIKA KELLY
And three poems called “The Oracle Remembers the Future Cannot Be Avoided.”
PHILLIP B. WILLIAMS
Right, so you have a lot of series, and also your book’s six sections alternate titles. You have “Now” then “Then” then “Now” then “Now-Then” then “Now” then “After.” Can you talk about the titles of your poems and these section titles and the passage of time?
DONIKA KELLY
I love using the same titles again and again or using the same structure for a title because it frees me from having to wrestle with a title. If I come up with a good one, usually, like if it’s a good title, like “The Oracle Remembers the Future Cannot Be Avoided,” I’m like, why wouldn’t I reuse that title? That just feels obvious, like wearing my favorite shirt over and over again. But it sort of frees me up in a way to do whatever I need to do in the poem, where I’m like, okay, so I guess this is connected, the poems that share the same title are connected to each other.
So the Oracles appear in the sections that are about the speaker’s father and sexual abuse. The “Dear—” poems, those are all about the end of the marriage. It just became a way of organizing information, of just saying, okay, how are these poems speaking to each other, and how can I not even necessarily make that explicit, but just recognize that that’s happening?
The “Dear—” poems are really meant as epistles, poems that are addressed to the soon-to-be-former beloved, the soon-to-be-ex. What does it mean to write a letter to address this person within the constraints of the poem? That’s not a real letter. It’s not actually asking for a response. It’s like the therapy letter where you write the letter, and you know you’re never going to send this so you can say all the things you want to say.
I felt like that was a lot of the work that those poems were doing, especially because at the time, my ex-wife and I had just separated and we were not talking. I was respecting that boundary, but I still had a lot of feelings, so I was like, what do I do with those feelings? I put them in a poem. That’s where they go. And then I thank the moon for the moonlight…
The place I lived was so cloudy that, whenever the moon was out, I was so excited because it was cloudy all day. It was cloudy all day. It was cloudy all night. Whenever I saw the moon, I was like, “Thank you. Please. Thank you.” The Oracles are a way for me to navigate histories that are only partially known to me: I’m drawing on my dad’s history. I always want to say “father” because I feel like that sounds fancier, but that’s not how I talk about my dad—he’s my dad—and the things that I know about him are incredibly limited.
I didn’t want to speak from this position of “I know these things about him” or “I know these things about this figure who is similar to him who’s in the book.” The Oracle became sort of an intermediary for processing some of his history, and then also some of my own history, which felt too difficult to own. The Dears, the Sightings, the Oracles were about managing memory, managing memory and experience, and I think that, to a larger extent, in concert, they’re managing time.
As for the “Now” and “Then” sections, it felt important to indicate that things weren’t happening at the same time. An oracle is a figure that we think tells us the future, but if the oracle is in the process of telling people one thing about the future, the oracle might remember another prophesy and be like, “Oh yeah, yeah, yeah, they couldn’t avoid that one either.” Like, that was going to happen whether or not they tried. They tried, and still the son kills the king. It’s going to happen, and you’ve got to roll with it.
In titling the sections, I’m just trying to ground us, and trying to ground myself, and trying to keep the speaker grounded, because it’s so easy to get lost in memory and in trauma.
PHILLIP B. WILLIAMS
That makes sense, and in a way, I still felt ungrounded: not angrily lost, but I was still lost in some of the poems, because the speaker would say one thing that was so visceral, and then in another poem or maybe within the same poem, something else comes off as coded or out of time. I interpreted some of the work in the book as willfully enacting the messiness of memory, like what is the symbol and what is real, what is an image and what is an object, am I supposed to have an emotional connection with a passage or is it more there to decorate the poem to set a scene. It was blurry and at times I knew something violent was happening but I couldn’t say exactly what it was. Maybe three poems later, I would think, “Oh, wow, okay, now I realize.”
I think your book is in part about the need and want to say the thing despite the difficulty of saying it, so that only part of the recollection is still there. Throughout The Renunciations, that concept was both fascinating to me and jarring, and I felt immersed in it, which is pleasing, but because of what the poems are about, I felt like I wasn’t supposed to be there, yet the door kept opening. So many doors kept opening. I never felt invited and I never felt pushed over, bullied, attacked. I felt like you as the book’s author kept saying, “I am writing these poems. It was your choice to open this book. You bought it.”
DONIKA KELLY
I tried to set out some hints of what’s coming, you know, like, “Well, we aren’t there yet, but we’re going to get there. We are approaching the trauma.” I appreciate what you’re saying, that’s helpful to hear, and I appreciate your attention to the poems. I think about the messiness of recollection as well. I think the reason I value collections of poems so much is their ability to take up more time and more space, to create an experience out of juxtaposition and accretion. Something can happen in an earlier poem and acquire new resonance when referenced later. Poems can bear fruit next to each other that they may not bear on their own, and that feels really exciting to me. The sheer length of time people must take to read a book of poems and move through it is also part of the experience.
I felt that effect in Mutiny as I was reading it, where I thought I understood something at the beginning of the collection, and then I got to the poem “Interlude: Sasa and Zamani,” which is so explicitly about time, and it just changed my understanding and refocused the project of the book for me. Can you talk a little bit about that poem and then maybe how you see time working in across Mutiny?
PHILLIP B. WILLIAMS
Well, for one, there are no sections in the book. It just goes straight through. I call it an onslaught. I think I told my editor Paul Slovak that, and he’s like, “Yeah, that makes sense.” To have a break in a book called Mutiny doesn’t make sense.
You know, so many books have sections, and sections can be useful, although I never know when I am writing if the sections mean anything except as a marker of time for the reader, bookmarking the amount of time you have spent in a book. It makes sense to have those landmarks, but I didn’t want landmarks in Mutiny because I didn’t want to offer the reader space to breathe. Instead, I wanted the book to successfully transition without section breaks from one reality to another, from a place set in logic to another place located in myth, for the poems to act as hinges that hint at what is coming next, for the poems to echo one another, to give a warning. I’m hoping that readers will see the subtleties of the surreal pop in after poems that are very much about race and the body, and then for the surreal to disappear and for the erotic to replace it, and then for the erotic to disappear and for the family to come in. And these topics sometimes merge too. The book flows more organically through it all. I don’t think time operates in this book in a way that we traditionally think of time. I think it has a loop, and the interlude poem, “Sasa and Zamani,” is one that speaks to that.
The interlude poem also lets folks know that there’s a father who’s haunting probably all of the poems. There’s an idea of a king, a patriarch, in all of the poems, but “Interlude: Sasa and Zamani” connects that with the father of my upbringing. The one that I had to imagine most of my life because he wasn’t there for a lot of it. The one that I love and miss now, even though there was, I would say, utter hatred as a child, as a teenager toward him.
DONIKA KELLY
Toward the end of the collection, the grandmother emerges as a character, and there’s something so tender about the time you spend with the grandmother at the end, both in terms of the length of the poems and the speaker’s memories of the grandmother themselves. It feels fuller, that depiction of missing someone. Some of it is just having space. The speaker is like, “I’m going to take the space.” We have these several poems. It’s not just one. I think that’s true also about the father in the collection as well. It’s like we’re returning to him through the speaker’s grief again and again, and I think that models for us what remembering can be, that it’s not just like, “Oh, I remember this,” but it can be a practice of sitting inside of something for as long as we can.
I’ve been thinking a lot about my great-grandma in the pandemic. I loved her very much. She was very wonderful. There’s something that’s happened in the last three or four months where she feels so present to me, and so when I was reading the last few poems, like “Final Poem for Grandma Elizabeth’s Cancer” and “Shame,” I felt those poems in a different kind of way, and I think part of that is just the time that we are in the poem, that I’m in the poem.
PHILLIP B. WILLIAMS
I want to talk about your use of, or non-use of, form, because the only one I recognized was the sonnet but I kept thinking there were also nonce forms, other patterns. And you also have these erasures that I am tempted to say are erasures of some poems in the first book, is that true?
DONIKA KELLY
No. They’re erasures of letters that we wrote, like in real therapy. But not from the first book.
PHILLIP B. WILLIAMS
Wow. I was like, “Oh, this is interesting.” It is not less interesting knowing that they’re letters. It’s revisionary. You revised something that you had written before in order to get what you need from it. How were you thinking about those erasures in conversation with other poems, perhaps the sonnets, but also the other poems that have names missing, where the names are whited out?
DONIKA KELLY
I think of those poems as redactions. Like, I’m withholding all of this information and all that I’m giving is these maybe five or six or ten words. That’s all that’s available to the reader, setting the tone for what will follow in the section.
The sonnet-like poems are love poems. They’re about the end of the marriage. Yes, the relationship is ending, but it doesn’t mean that the love has completely fallen away, and the familiar sonnet form feels like such a good container for that.
I think the sonnet is the only traditional form in the book. When writing poems about abuse, what is the form for that? I wouldn’t want to write about abuse in a recursive closed form where I’m going to have to keep returning again and again to a moment, when in the process of this writing what felt important was to move through with it. I would think, how can I move through this space, how can I get to the center of what has so shaped my life? As a result, a lot of those poems are way longer than I would write otherwise.
When I was doing work in therapy, once I realized that I was writing these poems, that I have to write them, I was like, “Okay, I’m going to talk to my therapist. We’re going to do some pointed, intentional work here.” I went into therapy after I’d made that decision, and I said what I would prefer to do is take those memories, chop them up into little pieces, burn them, take the ashes, put the ashes in a coffee can, bury the coffee can in the earth, and then salt the earth. That would be my preference.
Instead, what I’m doing is I’m going to write a bunch of poems about it, because that’s my process, that’s how I’m integrating memories that I would actually rather not integrate. Those poems are searching and long, because in them I try to figure out how to assimilate, how to take in, how to digest and integrate this information, how to make it make sense when it doesn’t make sense. There isn’t a container for childhood sexual abuse.
So I think that in a lot of the poems, I’m searching. They’re in regular stanzas and I really like a couplet and I really like a tercet and I find them very comforting, but sometimes that is not what happens. With love, I think I know the form—a love poem, even a poem that’s about divorce, is also thinking about love. It’s like a sonnet, that’s great. But that other territory that feels uncharted continues to feel uncharted.
PHILLIP B. WILLIAMS
For the poems in uncharted territory, how did you know when a poem was finished?
DONIKA KELLY
Ultimately I write the same poems over and over again to see what works, what makes sense, and only save some of them. For the poems about abuse, I wrote a lot of those poems around the same time. I have a document of childhood sexual abuse poems. That’s the title of the document, “Childhood Sexual Abuse Poems,” and it was written over the course of a year. I remember writing the last poem, which I want to say is “Apologia,” and I just went to sleep, I just fell asleep for sixteen hours, I was so tired. And then I was like, “Oh, I’m done. Great, I don’t have to read any more of these poems. Great job.”
That was a relief in a really big way. I guess that’s making me wonder a little bit about your writing process, Phillip.
PHILLIP B. WILLIAMS
It wasn’t fun. I’m not proud that I wrote all those poems in 2020, during the pandemic. It was chaotic, overwhelming, and I was also trying to teach. And I was going through depression, my body wasn’t working, the city was shut down, and I couldn’t go anywhere. I was in a neighborhood where one of the hospitals, which was less than a mile away, had become a COVID-only hospital. So I had to really be careful about just walking around.
If I had to get a poem down, I got it down. They were revised. I just revised incessantly and quickly. Normally that takes a while for me. I can put a poem away in a drawer. But I didn’t want to do that. I wanted to look at it, turn it around, turn it inside out, flip it, or rub it down.
I have a question for you. What I want to teach students about poetry is how to write the thing you want to write about, with a balance between what you want to say and how you could say it, a balance between the urgency of the content and the demands of beauty, the demands of craft, whatever fits within your definition of beautiful, your definition of something being crafted. Can you speak to that balance in your poems? Do you have any conflict at all with that?
DONIKA KELLY
In 2013, having finished the poems for my first book, Bestiary, I asked myself, “Well, what do I want to do now? How do I want to write? What are the things that I find really interesting and exciting? Who are the poets who I find interesting and exciting?” I remember saying to myself and to anybody who would listen at the time that I want my poems to sound like what would happen if Gwendolyn Brooks’s poems and Sharon Olds’s poems had a baby. I wanted the poems to be clear like earlier Brooks, I think, I wanted the reader to feel they knew what was happening most of the time, but I still wanted there to be music. That was really hard. I have my internal standards of excellence for my poems. I have a high bar for my poems. A lot of the poems that I was writing in trying to figure out how to do this weren’t necessarily clearing that bar, but I was writing towards it.
So to answer your question, yes, it was very much a struggle to figure out how to be clear about something that I didn't necessarily want to be clear about, that it felt better to hide. Sometimes when I read “From The Catalogue of Cruelty,” I ask myself, “How is this a poem?” And by the time I get to the end, I’m like, “Oh, okay, yes, it’s a poem.” But in the beginning, I’m just like, “This all feels like a very—this happened and this happened and this happened…” and it isn’t until the act of drafting and redrafting that the magic hopefully comes through. There are a few other poems where I would also ask as I was writing, “Are you a poem? I’ll come back, and we’ll see if you’re a poem later.”
Thinking about your question about form, there are so many forms in your book. You said earlier that the easy mutiny would be no form. And so what does it mean to be mutinous inside a form? What did you come to in that? What does it mean to be mutinous while writing a sestina? Who among us is still writing sestinas?
PHILLIP B. WILLIAMS
Who’s still writing these? Other than someone like Patricia Smith, who in writing them writes beyond them? I had a conversation—I don’t know what year it was, I did a reading in DC; Venus Thrash had invited me to do a reading. And I had this concept of mutiny, even then, even though I wasn’t writing to it yet, but I was always thinking about it.
One of the things that I shared with Venus is how the poems are actually pretty tight, relatively neat. What she said to me is, “That is a form of mutiny.” So in this book called Mutiny, we get something that we’re not expecting, something that seems in contradiction to the wildness that we expect. Not everything’s on fire.
DONIKA KELLY
And to be clear, things are on fire. You are actually setting things on fire. You are like, “Here’s the match. Here’s the kerosene.”
PHILLIP B. WILLIAMS
Yeah, I don’t want people to read our conversation and think Mutiny is a gentle book.
DONIKA KELLY
No. It is not a gentle book.
PHILLIP B. WILLIAMS
It is not a gentle book, but I felt when Venus Thrash told me that, which I thought was very wise, it resonated with me to continue doing what I was going to do anyway, which is keep the couplets and tercets and quatrains as they were. It rhymes a lot! The book is so rhymey. It rhymes all over the place, especially with the penultimate poem, “Mastery”: ABABCDCD and ABBACDDC. It’s doing that every stanza for twenty-seven stanzas. Why do that?
I needed a pattern to go back to because the poems wanted to spiral out of control, and though that is attractive to some readers and writers, it is not attractive to me. I am someone who can keep going. I needed something that would allow me to stop. So the only poem that I think even comes close to wanting to be utterly out of any formal system is “Black Joy,” with its three very long stanzas—I think, one stanza doesn’t even have punctuation. There is no patterning. But that’s the one instance when I relinquish control.
DONIKA KELLY
When I read my students’ writing, you know, it’s interesting and I’m engaged, but I ask, “Where’s the control?” I’m like, “Don’t you get into poetry for it to control things? As a writer you get to control so many different things, so why aren’t you controlling all the things you could control?” That makes a lot of sense to me, the need to have control, the poet as a governor, the act of writing poems as a way of giving shape to experience and thinking.
PHILLIP B. WILLIAMS
I feel like Thief of the Interior, my first book, was full of control, super methodical, four sections that each did their individual thing. People say it’s a wild book but they have no idea the calculations that went into it. I didn’t want to calculate a damn thing, but again, I am a person who needs some restriction. If I’m hearing you correctly, we might be opposites in workshop. When my students bring in something, I ask, “Can you blow something up? Can you flip this? Can you move this? What if you didn’t have any pronouns, what happens then?”
DONIKA KELLY
When I’m talking to my students about their poems, it really does depend on if it feels like what they’re doing is constraining too much or if it’s just like a little baggy. I ask, “Is this what you want? Because if you want something different, I can help you do something different, but if this is what you want, then that’s okay, because it’s not my poem. It’s not mine, it’s yours.”
PHILLIP B. WILLIAMS
When someone closes The Renunciations, is there anything at all that you would be happy that they’ve taken away from reading?
DONIKA KELLY
Oh, there would be so many things; if they read to the end, I would be grateful. My hope is that readers, if they’ve experienced some kind of sexual trauma or abuse, know that they aren’t alone. I think that’s the big one, because there are poems that have done that for me, there are books that have done that for me, where I’m like, “Oh, this isn’t—I’m not by myself in this.” My hope is that I’ve taken enough care in the construction of the book—because I was taking care of myself at the time, I was taking really, really good careful care of myself—that the care is legible through the speaker and that it extends to the reader, that folks don’t feel like I’ve thrown them into a space without thinking about them.
I’ve tried to be really careful in the framing of the poems that deal directly with abuse, that they don’t come at the beginning. It’s not like, “Oh, you open the book, and it’s page one.” That’s not the experience, but it’s one of first getting closer to something, then here we are, then we’re on the other side and we’re actually okay. And by we, I think I mean me, and also the speaker. We’re okay. There’s still work to do, but we’re fine. Those are the things that I would hope that someone takes away.
Can I bounce that question back to you? What are you hoping folks will carry away, or will feel at the end when they close the book?
PHILLIP B. WILLIAMS
Maybe one or two things. One, especially, being that every emotion that we can feel is important. Therefore, if there’s anger involved, we should honor and see that. We should deal with it carefully, but we should honor and see it, which is why the book is the way it is, because for once, I just let myself honor and see where I was, which is why that poem “Black Joy” is named that. I felt like every time I turned around, I was told I had to do everything other than feel what I was feeling. I wake up in the morning, and people are like, that’s black joy. Absolutely not. I am miserable. I don’t appreciate the reframing. I don’t acknowledge it. I don’t want it. I am angry…
DONIKA KELLY
…and I am not magic.
PHILLIP B. WILLIAMS
I am not magic.
Also, you can’t project something that has become so much a consumerist project onto me. It is only joy if it is mine. I do not want to share it with you because you forced me to when you’ve asked me to perform it for you. I want people to really know that you can be wherever you are, tread carefully, we need to take care of ourselves, and that goes for joy as well, but anger exists for a reason.
There is always a way to take something, rearrange it, and maybe find yourself in it. I’m speaking particularly about this work that we do when we call ourselves poets and writers. If you want to write about grass in a particular way, just do it and see what happens. The “final” poems are absolute—I’m writing them hoping that I don’t actually write about those things anymore.
DONIKA KELLY
We’ll see. I’ll be on the lookout for the moon in your next book.
PHILLIP B. WILLIAMS
The moon is going to pop up, but it’s going to be a pearl.
DONIKA KELLY
Phillip, it was wonderful to chat.
PHILLIP B. WILLIAMS
It was beautiful to discover that you and I don’t agree on so many things.
DONIKA KELLY
We believe in control. That’s what we believe in.
PHILLIP B. WILLIAMS
We believe in the soul?
DONIKA KELLY
Control.
PHILLIP B. WILLIAMS
In control? You more than I do.
DONIKA KELLY
You’re the one with the sestina.
DONIKA KELLY is the author of The Renunciations and Bestiary. She is a Cave Canem graduate fellow and a founding member of the collective Poets at the End of the World. She is an Assistant Professor at the University of Iowa.
PHILLIP B. WILLIAMS is from Chicago, Illinois. He is the author of Mutiny (Penguin Poetry) and Thief in the Interior (Alice James). A recipient of the Kate Tufts Discovery Award, Lambda Literary Award, and Whiting Award, he currently teaches at Bennington College and in the low-residency MFA program at Randolph College.
