NER intern Murtaza Bugti talks with poet Ugochukwu Damian Okpara about dislocation, formal disruption, and navigating a poetics of tenderness in his two poems from issue 46.1.
Murtaza Bugti: Dislocation, both geographic and temporal, seems to be underpinning both “A Need to Pander” and “Alternate Reality.” I’d like to start with “A Need to Pander”—could you speak to the use of caesurae in the poem? The pauses create, both audibly and visually, moments of disruption. How do you see these pauses shaping the voice of the speaker, and how might they relate to the poem’s broader relationship with dislocation?
Ugochukwu Damian Okpara: You put it so well with the term “dislocation,” and when thought alongside the caesurae, it aptly describes what I intended to do in the poem. In a way, the caesurae make me think of a bone being dislocated from its original position. There’s so much pain associated with such dislocation, and the body’s dire need is to have things back in place. Sometimes we reflexively attempt to do it ourselves. It instills a kind of nervous desperation that can be ravaging. That desire is what drives the poem—a kind of pandering for the speaker seeking a lost paternal connection, where their queerness isn’t the thing that separates them.
On the other hand, space fascinates me—how we participate in it, how that participation shapes our existence. For queer individuals, it holds truer power that forces us to be conscious of our existence and the spaces we seek to enter. And this is especially important for me because I come from a country where queerness is often demonized and thought of as something to be ashamed of, as though by virtue you are unclean and unworthy of love. That active consciousness, I can imagine, impacts one’s sense of belonging. It is a kind of exile that begins psychologically, even before the geographic displacement takes place. The caesurae speak to those exiles and, as a result of their disruptions, heighten the speaker’s urgency in seeking a little nudge that puts all things in place, no matter how mundane such a nudge is. The reader is forced to participate in reconciliatory gestures—to make sense of these spaces or to read in a way that obliterates their rendering.
MB: Similarly, I am also drawn to the use of all lowercase text. It seems to be a grounding element in a poem that is otherwise mired in thematic conflict, with the speaker struggling to define the self and grappling with despondence and the hope of paternal tenderness. How did you land on this aesthetic choice?
UDO: When I’m making a poem, I like to be very deliberate with the form. I especially like the form to mirror the questions the poem seeks to answer. And because my poem deals very much with power dynamics, the use of lowercase is an extension of that interrogation. Despite the conflict in the poems, there’s so much pandering in the way the speaker engages in the subject of power. The lowercase functions to soften up that conflict and to highlight how willing the speaker is to negotiate their identity for familial connection. And I’m very much hinging on the word “willing” and not “negotiation.” I think when the lens pans to this desire to make yourself small, it shows the underlying conditions. In this case, the speaker’s inability to erase their queerness highlights how that aspect of their identity is not a choice.
MB: The feeling of hope seems to be most salient in “Alternate Reality.” The substitution of enjambments with slashes and the use of the speculative “suppose” creates a continuous flow of thought and imagery that seems to mirror the queer experience of negotiating identity and desire. What is your philosophy on enacting the queer experience through form?
UDO: Queer experience, like most other experiences, is invariably shaped by form. We could think of form as a system that orders our lives, be it the government, society, or the family. As such, it is quite important for me to think of ways to make form mirror the queer experience. In a system that seeks to oppress and dehumanize, subjects must find ways to negotiate their identity. It could be—as I’m noticing in the Nigerian media space—owning queerness through humor. That itself can be problematic, but I understand that it’s a kind of societal negotiation. With “Alternate Reality,” (which is from a series in my current manuscript), I was very much interested in how I could have this identity negotiation form the basis for the poem. The slashes make me think of “either/or,” and that works in conjunction with the suppositions to illustrate this negotiation that is dream-like and often cowardly against systems that seek to oppress. My hope for the poem is that it throbs at a reader’s core; that they understand that for some individuals, tenderness exists on the other side of an experience that isn’t physically tangible. That certain oppressed groups do not have the willpower to speak boldly for themselves, and for those of us who can, those of us with the resources, we can lend a voice to their struggles, and perhaps one day, they’ll be emboldened to speak up for themselves.
MB: Both “A Need to Pander” and “Alternate Reality” explore complex relationships between the speaker and figures of masculinity or paternal influence, as well as the tension between desire, tenderness, and alienation. How do you see a broader queer poetics functioning across these two poems, especially in how they reimagine familial dynamics and intimacy? In what ways do you want them to reflect a rejection or transformation of normative frameworks of family and identity?
UDO: Those are great questions. They call to mind a 2023 AWP panel I attended titled “Toward a Poetics of Tenderness: Hegemonic Masculinity & the Poetic Imagination.” During the panel, questions arose about the nature of a poetics of tenderness practice. Was it a poetics of power? What else could it encompass? The panel got me thinking about the ways tenderness works in my poems, especially within the familial space. At that point, I was still figuring out how to navigate a new project that explored how queerness impacts familial relationships, so I began to think of ways to reckon with such power, ways that embody a kind of intimacy where parties are not actively vilifying each other but are constantly working or reimagining new ways of being. It was important for me to seek inquiry in quotidian moments that embody intimacy, such as the speaker watching a father watch his son tie a shoelace, or in the reimagined moment of the speaker cutting his father’s toenails. I wanted the intimacy to do the work of tenderness and to carry the weight of this familial exile.
MB: Your full-length poetry collection, In Gorgeous Display, was published by Fordham University Press in 2023, and your chapbook I Know the Origin of My Tremor was released by Sundress Publications in 2021. Are you working on a new manuscript? If “A Need to Pander” and “Alternate Reality” appear in your next project, how do they resemble or differ from what you’ve already drafted or have in mind?
UDO: Both poems come from my current manuscript, “Excarnation.” With this project, I wanted to make something different from my debut collection, In Gorgeous Display, where the speaker sometimes reckoned with violence through beauty. Because this new work focuses mainly on the family, I was no longer interested in a show of strength. I wanted the speakers in the poems to give in completely to the conditions that separate them from their loved ones. And this “giving in” entails a kind of willingness to negotiate and to reach out.
However, across the full breadth of the manuscript, those gestures come from both parties. The poems work to illustrate that although queerness complicates familial relationships, love is not so clear-cut. There are nuances to it. It may linger in liminal spaces: Where love persists in unspoken gestures, where parents fumble toward understanding, and where the desire to bridge gaps never fully fades. Especially in cultures where queerness has long been demonized, and even now, with all the progress we’ve made in certain places, some cultures do not have the mainstream language to discuss coming out or speak of queer acceptance. But this doesn’t mean they lack the gestures for it.
Ugochukwu Damian Okpara is a Nigerian-born writer and poet. He is the author of the poetry collection In Gorgeous Display (Fordham University Press, 2023) and the poetry chapbook I Know the Origin of My Tremor (Sundress Publications, 2021). A 2023 Lambda Literary Fellow and an alumnus of both the Tin House Summer Workshop and Chimamanda Adichie’s Purple Hibiscus Trust Creative Writing Workshop, his work as appeared in Poetry, Michigan Quarterly Review, The Greensboro Review, and other publications. Currently he is an MFA candidate in poetry at the University of Mississippi. His website is www.ugochukwudamian.com.
Murtaza Bugti is a student intern at NER and a senior at Middlebury College (Class of 2025). He double-majors in comparative literature and German.