Staff reader C. Rees talks with NER 45.3 poet francine j. harris about sonic mapping, the human and the humane, and the poet’s responsibility to the endangered.
C. Rees: All of your poems in this latest issue of NER, but especially “Pretty Soon the Lilies,” strike me as sonic blooms. From line to line—within lines and phrases, inside your strange or doubling diction, down to the phonemes, in near and full rhyme—the sonic impulse seems to want to pile and sprawl. This music mapped a lyric terrain that felt at once surreal and tangible, even as it dawned with strangeness. What presence does music, strangeness, or place have in your poetic practice? What is the composition of a poem like for you—from encounter to drafting and further?
francine j. harris: Thank you for this question and for noting some of the elements like “doubling diction,” “strangeness,” and “music mapping.” I simply find myself nodding (headbanging) to your thought here. First and gratefully, all of your questions are minding and instructive and insightful. I learn from your queries, and I hope I can honor the way in which you invite me to think more deeply about my undertaking.
Whatever it is we think defines poetry, there are a number of elements I feel make up my execution of the genre. For me, sound is one of those elements. I see the poem as an attempt at music. Music informs, particularly somatically—even as it’s an impossible model. Much of what we understand about music is a combination of sounds. Acoustic, solos, a cappella sort music, one sound at a time. On the surface, it might be argued that poetry works this way since it is unaccompanied, linear, organic, and uses a particular set of mechanics (as single instruments do). But if we presume that truth in this kind of function in language, we must accept a monophonic end product of language. Poetry, in other words, would simply be a rise or fall and linear singularity in sound and words.
Yet, we know this is neither how language works phonetically, nor is it particularly how language works if you take into consideration resonance, echo, subtext, and reverberation. As a writer, I think I try to take this on. One way I think about this is by thinking about what gets added or lost in music accompanying poetry. Much as I love a good Gil Scot Heron poem or reminisce about The Last Poets, the addition of music—particularly where the music is predominant—dampens the feature of language I find most compelling. It makes of poetry an ambience. It treats it as a single instrument. The language becomes peripheral to the music, and while it can be pleasant, it loses its reliance on silence.
In silence, the acoustics of language resound. Language is harmonious, discordant. It has rests, crescendo, tone, pitch and volume. There are symphonies of sonic pattern and stress pattern. There are beats. There is duration and resonance. Reverberation in diction and imagery. There is also the role that comprehension plays in processing the sort of melodic effects, and of the meaning. As a poet, I am always interested in this kind of music. How patterns lay upon patterns, how the sound vibrates, the shadows language cast (a concept I borrow from Terrance Hayes).
The other part of your question, however: I’ve come to understand that I must engage somewhat defensively—or at least at the risk of being defensive. I write strange because I feel strange. I am strange. I am estranged. I am perplexed, most days, frustrated even. I participate in society and community and institutions, and I find its conventions both comforting and maddening. I have different language each day because language is the only way that the strangeness can amass and take shape as some kind of communique. Amiri Baraka called the “diluted formalism of the academy . . . anaemic & fraught with incompetence & unreality.” I love thinking about this hurled insult partly because of how diluted the kind of “doubling diction” you talk about is, and partly because no one will understand the incompetence that Baraka is talking about unless they are capable of understanding marginalized people—Black people—as a people who can be failed by empire, colonialism, and canonical ritual of verse.
Harryette Mullen said that “to be Black is to be innovative,” and Fred Moten says that Black art “is a perpetual cutting, a constancy of expansive and enfolding rupture and wound.” The wounding here makes me think about what the poet Aase Berg says of outsider poetry, that it is “a flesh-scream with markedly underdeveloped scar formation.”
Language, I think—or rather the formation of language, or more specifically the sound and sense of language—the music in other words, which can certainly be thought of as a kind of mapping of sound—of how language forms is an attempt to quiet the disquiet. We speak and write to make beauty and even if we make an art that “splits when you step on a frozen puddle,” as Claes Oldenburg wants for in his dadaist manifesto, we make art because we want to add the missing ingredient, the missing sound.
Still as Moten says, that effort to heal, to salve, to add, to intervene “neither sutures nor is sutured to trauma.” For where some might yearn for a poetry, or even aim to write toward a poetry as a way to heal, I think the ideal of healing suggests you can phrase a poem in a way that will return something to its original state, a kind of smoothing over, or vanishing of conflict, pain, and difficulty.
I think outsiders know better. We know we can never go back, never go home. We are forever scarred and we will never look or sound the same again. I think of poetry as an attempt to scarify—to mark, to narrate, to tribe, to brag, to brand, for whatever reasons we create a record of trauma and brutality and find it compelling, I want at the heart of the poem. And I answer it this way because I can no longer pretend that any strangeness in my sound or imagery or diction is traceable as an execution of craft, with any particular set of constraints and decisions and parameters. Which is funny, given that I teach these things. These ways of thinking in hindsight about what I have done. Still knowing that if my poetry is strange, it is because the usual forms of conveyance are anemic, incompetent, and not nearly as beautiful as the scarred discordant sound of poem.
CR: So much is in these pieces, and little is like (“ . . . like a gingko tree / that sheds everything all at once,” “. . . they look like petals over the horizon,” “Easy, like a garter snake, beneath the grass . . .”). They often feel as though the poetic elements (voice, line, music, etc.) are fiercely departing from human (as well as lyric and formal) conventions. Do these poems occupy a metaphoric region? Places more literal? Neither, or both? These days, what kind of metamorphoses have been budding in your poetry?
fjh: I had to return to the poems to hear what you are hearing in them, which I think is to say I think some of this is just intuitive for me. I’ve been sitting with your questions for awhile. Now, after the election, I hear the question differently. Maybe I see the poems differently, too—a bit.
I wish we believed that the experiment, or even divine purpose, of humanity was tending and caring for the planet. I wish we understood the point of dominion the way most parents do—we are bigger and stronger and smarter than other species; we have control over the elements so that we can maintain and provide and care for them. That’s a pretty utopian thought about humanity and ecology.
But in thinking about whether the poems move away from humanity, I actually think of my poems oppositely. I often write toward possibility for humanness. The closer I think, in other words, we feel to the slug or the rat or the garter snake, the more likely we are—supremacist species that we seem to be—to care for it as part of our ecosystem. My concern is that we as a species will never be able to grasp the concept of ecosystem, and so I fear this gesture will always be seen as dark and surreal, and probably even morbid.
But technically—yes. I love the transformative properties in poems. And the power of balance between simile and metaphor and declaration is an act of transformation. To my mind, it is one of the key elements of poetry. Without it—in some form or another—I generally can’t think of the poem as done.
CR: I sense a weediness in these new poems—a scavenger sentiment, maybe; the affect of the generalist (“a beta species . . . or scientific slut . . .”); a bottom- and filter-feeder ethos; an emergent eco-lyric. The “experts” in these poems seem a dying-off species, untrustworthy and uniformed. Teeming is the word that kept wriggling up from my brain as I read and reread each poem. Like a vacant lot, or stretch of trashy riparian shore, or a glimpse of a coyote slipping into a sewer grate. They dwell in a (human) polluted (human) landscape, an ambivalent terrain that, despite furious intention, shiver with the living and the non-living.
fjh: There was a couple years there where I became fascinated with weeds. It was when I was back in Detroit and in a landscape where well-maintained yards and lawns would suddenly drop off next to an abandoned house or yard. And I think what happens in that is that the seeds of landscaping get blown into those yards and create interesting meadows of urbanity—one filled with weeds and wildflower and probably some hybrids. Weeds can be really beautiful of course and some of them, even in their thorniness, are so lush and foreboding. I loved that the weeds would become a kind of deterrent to people and larger animals. But yes, the weeds also work as shelter for the brave loners who trek through in their hunt for scraps and seclusion—either structural or organic. I wish nature didn’t bother us so much. I wish we weren’t afraid of it. Didn’t feel the need to tamp it down and tame it. It’s not all our fault, of course. You can’t live amongst thorn and detritus and filth without shortening your life span. But there is a way that the beauty of the weeds invites us deeper in. A kind of awesome façade that hints at the beauty and function beneath. So maybe it’s a kind of Detroit impulse?
CR: What is the role of the nonhuman in your work? Are these poems trying to get away from the human? Get at it? Transform it? What is metamorphosis to you? Do you consider what you’ve written as, in some part, eco-poetry? What, if any, is the use of eco-poetics in the Eremocene?
fjh: There are certain poets who I think write primarily as a way to connect themselves to the earth. I love to think about Galway Kinnell’s poetry in this way. I will never be convinced that climbing inside the bear and eating of the bear’s inedible and vulgar essence is simply metaphor or a move for the ars poetica. It’s not to say the metaphor isn’t there, or perhaps the allegory. But I mostly think about his want of nothing more than to climb inside the actual bear, to dig out a space to exist in its hulking, dead mass. Sometimes I like to think of Kinnell finishing that poem in his garden and then reaching down to eat the dirt. The poet Alexis Pauline Gumbs has this kind of immersive relationship with the sea in her poetry. Natalie Diaz creates a kind of mimetic, structurally immersive and imbibed lyric relationship with a river in Postcolonial Love Poem. I find it interesting—troubling—when poets get discussed for their relationship to natural elements, such as the sea, when they are not actually writing about the sea, or even toward seaness, but are simply writing in proximity to the sea. M. NourbeSe Philip’s Zong, for example, seems to me to be a book of seaness. It is, at heart, an investigation of where human cruelty disrupts and assaults seaness. To me the work of the poet, as I’ve said, is to get their living somehow next to the endangered parts of our universal and shared existence.
In her gorgeous and dense book, Phantom Pain Wings, translated by Don Mee Choi, which I highly recommend, the poet Kim Hyesoon writes: “As a living organism, I interact with things that surround me. I have an animal body that’s connected to the natural world, as well as to my body that imagines. The imaginary experience doesn’t leave the sensory experience alone.”
I think of this last point in two ways. The imaginary experience won’t let the sensory experience be. And the imaginary experience will never abandon the sensory experience. It is the fruiting body of the poet. We bloom. And rot.
francine j. harris has authored various collections of poetry, the third of which, entitled Here is the Sweet Hand, won the National Book Critics Circle Award and was a finalist for the Kingsley Tufts Award. Her second collection, play dead, was the winner of the Lambda Literary and Audre Lorde Awards. Originally from Detroit, she has received fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, the MacDowell Colony, and the Cullman Center for Scholars and Writers at the New York Public Library. She is professor of English at the University of Houston and serves as consulting faculty editor at Gulf Coast.
C. Rees (they/him) is a queer Pennsylvania-born poet, writer, and New Writers Project alumnus living in Austin, TX. Their work has appeared in Apocalypse Confidential, Bat City Review, Shore Poetry, Territory, the Action Books Blog, the Fairy Tale Review, the Bellingham Review, and elsewhere. Their writing excavates the intersections between trauma and disrupted landscapes, toxic masculinity and queerness, violence’s contamination, memory, and complicity.