With several poems in Trophic Cascade I remember wondering if maybe I had the start of an long essay or a short story, but again the drive toward distillation and compression pushed the thoughts toward single poems, and toward a constellation of independent poems connected by proximity and affinity. Together they can be seen as a whole picture, but their individual autonomy is a key part of their viability. There is a sustained narrative, a defined set of timelines, recurring characters, and chronologically developing dramatic situations throughout the poems, but the book is, as I said, a constellation. I think of that book as a novel-in-verse. I sat down to build an outline with one such brainstorm, and when I stood up again I had a poem that turned into one of the first in the constellation that became Suck on the Marrow. Say I formulate an idea that feels like the makings of a novel. Yes, more than once I’ve had the impulse to write a novel, but I am more inclined toward the compression of poetry. Did you ever think you were going to write novels?ĬAMILLE DUNGY: I’m going to tackle the final part of that question and see where we go from there. How have you tended to think or feel about narrative, about storytelling, as you write poems? Your work often seems to draw on a narrative impulse, even as it complicates or evades or subverts any sense of traditional storytelling. JESSE NATHAN: Your writing is so compressed and lyrical and musical, but also glimmers with accounts and encounters and fables. “Ars Poetica after William Carlos Williams” goes like this: A series of “Frequently Asked Questions” runs through Trophic Cascade, interwoven with a series of “Ars Poetica” poems, poems both homage and response, self-instruction and self-definition. Smith Blue, like her most recent collection, Trophic Cascade, moves us back to the intensely personal, and also to the contradictions of the interior-to the quarrel with the self, as much as the life of a young mother. “Almost Like They Wanted It” dramatizes how “Anyone she chose could be shucked like surplus property tomorrow,” how a Black enslaved woman might give her body but save her heart-“Because she knew if she set her sight on nothing she’d get nothing”-would make “quick work of pleasure” and “she showed him”-her lover, another enslaved man-“the dark coils areoling both her breasts and all the ways / she bent and lifted, bent and lifted, steady, strong.”īy the time she finished Smith Blue in 2011, the poet was a professor at San Francisco State University, had a child of her own, and had edited the iconic anthology Black Nature: Four Centuries of African American Nature Poetry. You would be hard-pressed to find poems that combine eros and violence in a more devastating fashion. Her persona poems are gorgeous, visceral inhabitings of lives far removed-but not so distant, in the end-from Dungy’s own life as a modern Black woman in this country of contradiction and bigotry. In Suck on the Marrow Dungy demonstrated her skill at bringing forth a world, imagining the lives of a group of enslaved and free Black people in nineteenth-century Virginia, Philadelphia, and elsewhere. That poem is called “Before My History Classes.” History spurred Dungy’s second collection, too, which departed from the personal and confessional mode of her debut. Someday you’ll be more careful what you wish. She snapped the sheet, a warning, kissed my head. They’ll be dressedĪnd acting just like they did when they lived. Why should I sleep? I told her, When I die The Bible, and what Heaven held in store. There where the fragrant cloud-nest drives Slicks the breeze where sage spices sundrench In her spare, instructive lyricism you hear Rita Dove, Louise Glück, Robert Hayden, Ellen Bryant Voigt, and sometimes the blues-even the bleeding, burning stream-of-consciousness of Toni Morrison’s Beloved: The sonnet hasn’t likely seen so much variation in one book since Ted Berrigan’s iconic collection. Dungy’s grandfather was a preacher and her father a doctor, and the poems in the first book draw on her personal story in a genius sequence of sonnets and sonnet-like poems. So it is that her first two collections’ titles read like instruction manuals-wisdom won by experience, and directed at the self as much as anyone else: What to Eat, What to Drink, What to Leave for Poison appeared in 2006 and Suck on the Marrow in 2010. Not that sweetness doesn’t thrive on this earth, too, but that it must contend with immense forces of nihilism, racism, and plain meanness. One of the many compelling things about the work of Camille Dungy is the fact that it offers a lyric record, book by book and poem by poem, of the pain of learning that the world is a violent and unforgiving place.
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