Unconventional Ways of Knowing: Dawn Lundy Martin Interviewed at Best American Poetry

Dawn Lundy Martin, author of the excellent Discipline, has been interviewed for The Best American Poetry blog. Jericho Brown admits that the conversation might be a love-fest, writing "I hear tell that listening to some folks talk about going to Cave Canem can get as boring as listening to angels talk about heaven." But they discuss much more, including Martin's influences; her poetic lineage ("the black avant-garde, feminist experimental movements, and political intellectuals traditions"); the relationship between activism and poetry, and the shifts in her work between books:

Jericho: While your first book, A Gathering of Matter/A Matter of Gathering, often makes use of prose formally, I think of its poems as mostly written in lines. In contrast, your most recent book, Discipline, is most definitely a book of prose poems. Why did you make this formal decision for Discipline? What is your conception of the prose poem? What does it enable you to do that lines don’t? Is form shifting again in the work you’ve written since the publication of Discipline?

Dawn: For me, form emerges when language ends. I do not think of form as a framework or a device that comes before the concern of the poem (what it attends to)—as in “I’m going to write a villanelle.” I would never do that. When I studied with Myung Mi Kim—O, such a long time ago now—she introduced me to two phrases that at the time were revolutionary to my young mind: “the page as canvas” and the “tyranny of the left margin.” I started to think about what the poem would do if not hindered by convention. How would it act? And why would it act that way? The ways in which the poems act on the page, then, is mostly fortified by what wants to be said, and these acts become a part of the saying. But, it is a reciprocal relationship. When one is working in the form—the prose poem, say—the form itself begins to contribute to how utterance happens.

In Gathering, one question at hand was, “How does one speak bodily and psychic trauma if trauma has no language”?”. The poems are mostly lineated, but also, truncated in speech because this is the investigation. In Discipline, we are in the post-tramautic state. The body is running around doing all types of things sometimes without its own consent. It does not know its interior space. It’s reflective in a banal confessional way. The poem attends to the sentence here more directly in part because of these attentions. But, this may be an over-simplification.

Brown also asks about the origins and evolving of the Black Took Collective:

Jericho: Can you tell me what makes a poem experimental, and how your idea of that compares and contrasts to the other founders’ ideas? Because it is “a group of experimental black poets,” I have to ask, what kind of contribution do you believe black poets in particular make to the experimental tradition?

Dawn: I have no idea what makes a poem experimental. I don’t think there are a certain set of factors or approaches that define experimental poem. Perhaps it exists only in a liminal space? To experiment, I think, is to play, to not be bound by convention, to operate toward discovery, to be willing to fail—from the Latin experiri meaning “to test, to try.” I’m always talking to my students about “productive failure” because they get all caught up in making this perfect, polished, little darling of a poem. Experimentation is liberation from that notion. What it produces, I don’t know. I do think, though, that black poets and other poets of color often do a kind of cultural work in their attention to the experimental. M. Nourbese Philip’s powerful epic work, Zong!, about the slave ship “Zong,” for example, thinks through personhood in its formal attention to language, that gives us a new way to consider what it means to be a “non-being” or an abject body during Middle Passage annihilation. Or, the fragile reconstructions and disfigurings of Craig Santos Perez in his book from Unincorporated Territories [saina] where he enters the conversation about oceanic identity, making present, this forgotten place, Guam. Experimental poets of color are doing this kind of work, necessarily, in some ways saying that conventional means cannot attend to the matters of racial and/or national identity, rootlessness, or the effects of global militarization. Conventional language, to paraphrase Erica Hunt, re-produces conventional ways of knowing.

The interview also includes some pretty amazing photos of Martin and other poets. Read it all here.