In Retrospect: An Interview with Joshua Bennett, Author of We (the People of the United States)
This month’s “In Retrospect” interview is with Dr. Joshua Bennett, whose first collection, The Sobbing School, was a National Poetry Series selection and a finalist for an NAACP Image Award. In this series, we ask renowned poets to look back over their poems and collections, mapping out their poetic processes. We sought to hear about core writing practices and fascinations which have shaped Bennett’s body of work. In his most recent book, We (the People of the United States), Bennett “braids the personal and familial with the political and the cosmic,” according to the Poetry Foundation. Here, Bennett walks us through his life in poetry thus far, from early poems featuring pirates and giants to a current obsession with songs about the transcendence of love.
Frontier Poetry: What was the first poem, published or unpublished, that you remember writing? What aspect of it do you look back at and appreciate the most?
Joshua Bennett: I wrote my first poems when I was fairly young, maybe around four years old. The first poems I remember writing and memorizing were in Ms. McCormick’s 7th grade English class. What I look back and appreciate most about that time is the breadth of my interests as a poet, and how they changed, within that seven-year window: pirates and their magical rings, pensive giants, ancient kingdoms, the nature of love and hope, that sort of thing.
F.P.: If there is a poem you could identify as either the launch point, catalyst, or axle your first collection The Sobbing School spins around, which poem would that be? What did the process of writing that poem entail?
J.B.: Probably “X,” which is a poem that remains close to my heart. You see a range of my longstanding interests and obsessions within it: African American history, what we inherit from family, the wonders of New York City, state violence and how we survive it. The poem required what many of those early poems required, which was sitting still in my apartment in Washington Heights long enough to properly hear the music and get some of it down on paper.
F.P.: What lesson(s) did writing and publishing your first collection of poetry teach you that you applied to your next collection?
J.B.: Let the jargon and slang and sacred language of each one of your cherished worlds come through in the work. You’re inventing an audience as you go. Honor them. Both the readers who are already here and the ones you have not yet imagined.
F.P.: In terms of the evolution of your second and third collections, Owed and We (The People of the United States), could you briefly map out the stages your manuscripts went through, from a starting point to the final draft?
J.B.: Owed actually began with the “owed” poems, I think, and then the “Token” series and then the “Reparation” sequence. I built from there. We (the People of the United States) started with the opening poems about family, and the following months consisted of me returning to the desk to write at least one poem a week, though sometimes more, devoted to each state in the U.S.
With both collections (though this was certainly more so the case with Owed) I tested out the poems on the road, edited them individually for sound and sense, and then figured out what the cadence of poems would look like within the collection.
F.P.: What running themes or fascinations do you identify throughout your poetry, from your earliest poems to your most recent ones?
J.B.: I outlined some of these earlier, but I will add the following to that list: various species of birds, boxing, the western philosophical tradition, jazz, fatherhood, telekinesis, science fiction, the masks we wear, the history of technology, the invention of poetry, the image of two people dancing.
F.P.: Finally, as you are writing currently (or simply thinking, which is where writing starts), what is something—an idea, social issue, piece of art, song, etc.—that you are obsessed with?
J.B.: I’m not sure if I would count this as an obsession, but there’s a particular song I’ve been listening to on repeat these past few months: Nancy Wilson’s “(You Don’t Know ) How Glad I Am.” There’s something about the way she describes the physical qualities of her emotions in the lyrics (my love has no beginning / my love has no end /no front or back and my love won’t bend) that still surprises me each time. It’s elegantly written, and conveys something important about the ineffability of certain elements of adoration, the dimensions of love that seem to defy expression.
I hear echoes of this sensibility in another song, Patti Labelle’s “If Only You Knew.” In both examples, the work of art stands in for us as representation and representative. It reaches past the heights of ordinary language to transfer some of the transcendent feeling we experience in our beloved’s presence right back to them. And, in that moment of exchange, amplifies our joy.
