Reginald Dwayne Betts Interviewed by Paris Review

Rachel Eliza Griffiths met Reginald Dwayne Betts at the 2006 Cave Canem Retreat and, in the introduction to her interview with Betts (newly published at Paris Review), Griffiths remarks that she "will always remember first seeing Betts clearly, the sound of his laughter, the bold light in his dark eyes, the shuffle of his Timberlands." But their Paris Review conversation starts with a word (or words) on erasures, "a tool to remove the superfluous?" wonders Betts, guiding readers through his application of the technique to demystify the jargon of court documents. Picking up there:

What if I tried to find the rhythm, the poetry, the character, the story, the person? If I allowed the document to actually be a voice of the person writing it? That’s what I attempted to do.

For me, this says a couple of things. It represents the attempt of the state to physically remove you, but then it also represents the attempt of people to reassert their existence. Those two things get to exist as one. In the same way that these two things are happening, there’s this fight against erasure. I think that’s what the poems end up mimicking. Even though the portraits on the cover represent that erasure, they also represent the existence of something underneath. It’s pushing back against that.

 

INTERVIEWER

I wonder about the relationships between men, particularly fathers and sons, in the book. How does a father meet his son’s awareness of who he is as a father, beyond what the father is prepared or able to say?

 

BETTS

It’s fascinating how you write a book. You consciously weave certain things in. Then some things are unconsciously woven into the book, both because you write one poem at a time but also because the motivations for each poem exist within the world of that poem. They subconsciously transcend the world of that poem and go to other places.

For instance, in “For a Bail Denied,” there is a defense attorney who is sort of acknowledging that he is not this kid’s father, but at the same time the poem admits that fatherhood is far more complex than we give it credit for. While he’s not the father, he feels responsible. He has a duty to the child beside him. He’s trying to figure out what that duty is. But also, the prosecutor, who is a man and who is also black, has a duty to this child, too. This is a world in which two people ostensibly have competing duties.

The kid has another interest. He says, “I did it. I did it. I mean, Jesus,” which is to say, How do we deal with responsibility? We have a huge conversation around criminal justice reform where we aren’t even reckoning with what it means for our young people, or the people whose care we are charged with. They need to find ways to become who they will be in the world and to own who they have been. Then, in that poem, you have a mother who was there but not given real agency. I was trying to figure out how to acknowledge the presence of the mom and the lack of voice that’s often required of the mom.

When you represent a juvenile, a parent has to be there. Typically, it’s the mom. And we don’t even need to turn this into a conversation about the myth of absent black fathers. People say that, and I’m like, Well, go to court and let’s talk about what we actually see in court. Let’s not talk about the myth per se. Let’s say, What do you feel like in these particular moments?

Read more at Paris Review.