In 1970, Bob Dylan released Self Portrait, his tenth studio album. It was met with poor reviews and disdain from fans, the long history of which is well-documented online. Curiously, Dylan made a choice that alienated fans, whether intentional or not. The opening track, “All the Tired Horses,” does not feature vocals from Dylan at all. Where had the dynamo gone? Where was the “Rolling Stone,” the Dylan of “Corrina, Corrina,” the young man “Blowin’ in the Wind?” What did he mean, foregrounding a voice, a choir of voices, that didn’t belong to him?
Around the time Dylan’s song was released, a young Kiowa-Caddo man named Tommy Cannon–popularly known as T.C. Cannon–returned from the Vietnam War and painted two horses under an ochre sky. One red horse, one blue. He named the piece All the Tired Horses in the Sun. Cannon tragically died eight years later, just a few months before his big opening show at the Aberbach Gallery in New York. While his life was short, Cannon was a prolific artist, known as both a painter and a poet. Was his painting a response to Dylan’s song? Inspired by it, surely, but carrying the message forward somehow? Transforming it?
Finally, in 2018, a year before being named United States Poet Laureate, Joy Harjo was commissioned to write a piece for a book about Cannon. She wrote “All the Tired Horses in the Sun.” The piece has to do with Harjo’s Mvskoke identity and issues faced by Indigenous communities; perhaps, the piece has something to do with not just Cannon’s painting, but Dylan’s as well.
Artists respond to the world around them; the world is filled with artists. How do we make sense of intertextual connections like those presented here? I don’t have an answer. We engage with art, think about it, are moved by it, and in some cases, make art in response. We keep our minds open. One avenue of entry that often proves to be interesting, if even as basic exploration, is the use of one work to frame another work. This is sometimes called a lens. So let’s use the Harjo poem as a lens for viewing the Cannon painting, and then listening to the Dylan song.
The poem begins with “Forever.” Harjo creates a landscape with anaphora and end-stopped lines. Readers have the sense of a weary propulsion. A tired procession of family, “my cousin. Auntie. Uncle. / Another cousin.” The poem opens in the center, and the subject is complexified. Up to this point, we are given context through the title, made to think of family members like horses in the sun, and then: “Vending machines and pop. / Chips, candy, and not enough clean water.” So we are handed food insecurity. Harjo’s choices are very intentional. The harshness of the end-stopped lines, the word choices having to do with junk food, and the absence of enough clean water paint a picture of a landscape that is difficult; it is hot, dry, “waiting and tired.” The final line of the poem is a call to action: “Go water the horses.” We the readers have the ability to positively impact our communities.
Applied to the Cannon painting, Harjo’s poem provides the figures with further meaning. The two animal shapes are so close to one another that they touch. The blue from the horse’s coat is echoed in the lighter-toned saddle of the red horse. Their heads are down, likely to indicate that they are grazing. This is a family, pressed down under the weight of a sky that takes up two-thirds of the canvas, a hot ochre with marshmallow clouds. The saddles indicate these are working animals. It wouldn’t be a stretch to link a working horse conceptually to the grim reality of Indigenous dispossession in our American history. So we have the sense of hot work, with one’s family, in an open landscape with no space for shelter.
To my eye, the Dylan song–stay with me, I know it’s odd to go backward–ties the three works together. Making a lens of the poem makes the song quite simple, and in my opinion, poignant. There are only two lines of lyric in the song:
“All the tired horses in the sun, / how’m I supposed to get any ridin’ done? Hmm.”
If we apply the connotative landscape we have built by working backward, we have a picture of the horses in our minds. They are family members, moving through life under a hot sun, without enough clean water. Our families are working, the sun can be oppressive, and there is not enough. There is never enough. How can an artist–existing in a political landscape like the one inhabited by Dylan and Cannon in the 70s, the one Harjo has inhabited throughout her long career–rationalize the act of making art? How do you unpack the choice to be creative when there are so many practical problems in the world that need fixing? And how do you grapple with becoming a symbol–as Dylan was–for something you may not want to stand for?
Simple: you focus on what you have to. You make the art. There’s no sense in hand-wringing.
O-Jeremiah Agbaakin, a Nigerian poet, recently published his poem chapbook The Sign of the Ram in the New-Generation African Poets Chapbook Box Set series, Tisa, — an African Poet Fund (APFB) project set up for “poets who have not yet published their first full-length book of poetry.” Agbaakin, alongside ten other poets, features in the 2023 limited-edition box set. You can purchase The Sign of the Ramhere.
In early days of writing poetry as a law student at the University of Ibadan, Nigeria, Agbaakin had not initially considered himself a ‘poet,’ even when he found his works in the pages of blooming literary platforms springing up here and there. Thinking about his journey of what he considers “self-confidence,” he’s thankful to have been nourished by the kind and warm support of friends and family. When he set out with publishing his poems first on social media like every other writer of his time, he had his “impressionable” non-writer friends and family believing he’s “the next Wole Soyinka and that the Nobel prize is finally coming home,” an endeavor that labors under the burden of great expectations.
When I first stumbled upon his poems published in the “World Rhyme and Rhythm–an anthology through their Briggite Poirson Poetry in 2016,” I was immediately smitten by his keen eye for detail and profound understanding of theology, human relationships, and behavior, and they weave together with such empathy and insight that make his poems feel destined, imbued with an almost prophetic quality. From “Isaac’s confession,” “Tenebrae,” “A thesis on language,” the speakers in Agbaakin’s poem are often on quests for self-discovery, not through outward ambition but through a deep desire to understand their social standing. They yearn to understand their place in the world, engaging in a constant dialogue with society and its reflections.
His poems are published in The Tems Review, Beloit Poetry Journal, Cincinnati Review, Colorado Review, Denver Quarterly, EPOCH magazine, Guernica, Kenyon Review, POETRY Magazine, Harvard University’s TRANSITION magazine, Poetry Daily, Poetry Society of America, and “places where my favorite poets at the time have been published.” Agbaakin is currently pursuing a PhD in English with Creative Writing concentration at the University of Georgia.
I recently talked to Agbaakin over the email about his new chapbook, the story behind his poetry, and how he knew writing was the one after a string of trials with his lawyerly dream. Our conversation has been edited for length and clarity.
Photo credit: O-Jeremiah Agbaakin
This interview was conducted over email by MAR Assistant Editor Aishat Babatunde.
Interviewer
Congratulations on your first published collection! How do you find the experience?
O-Jeremiah Agbaakin:
Thank you, Aishat. The experience has been cathartic for two reasons. One: it was a kind of release from some anger about a familial crisis which coincided with the period I was becoming more aware of my artistic vision. Two: it was a dream come true. I will focus on the second reason right away. I would say the feeling of both excitement and catharsis is no longer as familiar, like a vivid dream fades away upon full waking. When Siwar Masannat, the managing editor, reached out in January 2022 that Chris Abani and Kwame Dawes had selected the chapbook for publication, I couldn’t believe it. I’ve always wanted to be a part of the African Poetry Book Fund family. I had read many of the chapbooks from the series such as Warsan Shire’s Our Fathers do not belong to us, Gbenga Adesina’s Painter of Water, Ejiofor Ugwu’s The Book of God, Leila Chatti’s Ebb (among others); and even the full-length poetry collections like Clifton Gachagua’s Cartographer of Water. APBF has been and is doing a vital project of publishing, archiving, and promoting contemporary African poetry. Who wouldn’t want to be a part of that, right? Thanks to the generosity of previous authors under the series, I was nominated to submit a short manuscript sometime in 2018. I had no quality body of poems I was working on at the time. They rejected the manuscript. I think it was a karma for submitting such a mediocre work that they didn’t nominate me the following year! It was the year I wrote “Good Friday” , the poem which I think is very important (unknown to me at the time) to The Sign of the Ram. I emailed APBF to ask if they had nominated me but their email didn’t reach me (haha) but seriously my submission/contact email address had been deactivated by the University of Ibadan. They said they had not nominated me! The following year, they nominated me. I submitted; they rejected it! They asked me if I was interested in being nominated the following year. I said yes and submitted and they accepted it! I’m saying all these to express my gratitude to Kwame Dawes and Chris Abani for the trust and support they gave the tiny book. I don’t want to take my blessings for granted. They helped promote the chapbook boxset extensively with readings at the Africa Center in NYC and a virtual reading with Woodland Pattern book center. It is not often in the literary industry that publishers organize that level of publicity for a chapbook. Today, I don’t feel that way (elation) about the chapbook anymore. I feel like the speaker in The Sign of the Ram is now alien to me. It is a 2018 version of the speaker in my current poems; which means sometimes I am embarrassed by his audacity and vulnerability despite the mask of the persona of Isaac that I used! I am focusing whatever energies on my first full length poetry collection. One wonders what and how a future version of the speaker is going to look at the current speaker in my poems!
Interviewer
How has your experience in the US influenced your writing, if at all?
O-Jeremiah Agbaakin
This is an important question, one that I have mooted a response to so many times informally and formally. It’s also a tricky question because it assumes that the place (one moves to) automatically influences the art that’s produced; and therefore, if a Nigerian writer were to leave and start living outside of the country, their writing ceases to be Nigerian. While these assumptions are valid, it reduces influence to a cannibalistic process where the artist consumes everything in his immediate environment and the environment consumes the artist, spits out the artistic vomit to something alien or at worst, amorphous, all to the chagrin of the fundamentalist bemoaning the loss of an authentic native (substitute for Nigerian/African) writing. There has been much thought-provoking critical writing against the death of Nigerian literature. To their hubris, they believe their jeremiad is original; but its’ not. As long as people will not stop migrating (regardless of the motives), the discourse surrounding the authenticity of native art will not cease. All this to say this didn’t start today. Pius Adesanmi wrote about this issue in 2005, almost the same time the idea/movement of Afropolitanism was taking roots in African literature. It’s a deja vu for those that know history. Interestingly, this is what happens to the creatives who leave home. In a bid to stay ‘original’, the writer turns inward to nostalgia and memory. But that memory is fraught. It is unreliable in its recollection. The place called home doesn’t wait; it changes, such that memory as a literary expression is now foreign to the experience. Anyway, my short answer is that America has influenced my writing in the way that I hope I have described. Yet, it has allowed me to stop taking things for granted. Critics have not examined the problem of books and access to books back at home and how that limits the wide range of influence available to new creatives. Here, it is easier to obtain both historically important works and contemporary African books here than back home. Also, the themes that I didn’t pay attention to in Nigeria are starting to force their way into my creative interests.
Interviewer:
You have a background in law. When did you realize you fell in love with poetry more? Did your legal background influence your poetry in any way? Are there surprising connections between law and creative writing?
O-Jeremiah Agbaakin:
How bold of you to imply that I fell out of love with law! Haha. The last time someone asked me last year– I think it was Maggie Graber during a poetry reading in Oxford, Mississippi– I told her that I didn’t have an answer for the question and if I found one I would reach out to her. I said that because it was a live interview and I couldn’t think on my feet for an appropriate and honest response. With you, I have an advantage of mulling over the question longer (Gotcha!). But really, this goes back to the previous question on influence. No experience is immaterial to any artist. One of the ways by which I determine the maturity of a poem I am working is by asking myself: has it, i.e. the speaker and the poem undergone an experience (vicariously through me of course) commensurate with the ambition of abstract language? Does it possess any wisdom that one often gains through a process by which the experience is aware of (and even documents) its own prior inexperiece? You need to go through the fire to be able to have a language for some kinds of writings. I am in that stage where the experience of being trained as a lawyer (without one year of Nigerian law school and call-to-bar experience that I am sure you know about!) has yet to present itself as a conscious material in my work, as a project; or even where it may exert some influence, I am unaware of it; which means that it doesn’t matter what I say now. The influence may just be outside the threshold of perception, but it is potentially there or not. I don’t think my writing would have been different if I had studied English or architecture or anatomy! But maybe in the future, I would produce a work that explores that intersection between law and art or raid all the knowledge I have gained from studying law for five years, the way M. NourbeSe Philip, the Canadian writer and poet used her training as a lawyer to write the haunting book, Zong! about the Zong massacre. I knew I always wanted to do creative writing even before I started studying law at the University of Ibadan. If you remember correctly in our last interview with Tell! Magazine I have always inhabited the world of story-creation (and later on, poetry) since I was very young. Do you remember our interview on Tell? And to what degree do you think you have grown as a journalist and brilliant book and culture commentator?
Interviewer:
Absolutely! It’s fantastic to hear from someone who remembers our chat on Tell. I may not recall the specifics after so many interviews, I do appreciate our interview on Tell! magazine.
O-Jeremiah Agbaakin:
As for how I’ve grown, well, I think anyone with a curious mind keeps evolving, you know? I think the more I delve into different stories and the more I’m let in on people’s personal experiences, the richer my understanding of the world has become. Maybe my writing has matured a bit, hopefully in a way that keeps things interesting!
Interviewer:
Earlier, you argued against the idea that a writer who leaves Nigeria loses the ability to write authentically Nigerian literature. What are your thoughts on the counterargument that perhaps a writer’s physical distance from their home country can lead to a more critical or objective perspective on their society, in a different way that enriches their work?
O-Jeremiah Agbaakin:
I think I started taking my writing more seriously after that interview! It’s like “look I made it” moment for me at the time (haha). Growth is scary. It is unpredictable. You think you know it all now; wait for a couple of years! That is my guiding principle whenever I try to express an opinion on something. But the fear of growth shouldn’t stop one from sharing an opinion or thoughts. It is better that one has the opportunity to be wrong now and grow through it than one to have no opinion at all. This is a good counterargument. My opinion on the idea of alienation of the Nigerian writer both physically and psychologically is that it is inevitable, as inevitable as migration. The writer must do with it whatever they see fit with their condition. One’s work will not automatically enjoy the benefits of distance (such as clarity, foresight, objective perspective, and so on) by that virtue of removing oneself alone. It’s like going to the mountain, doing nothing, and expecting the rewards. The ascent is only an element of the process. You must scream at/on the mountain to test the timbre of your own echo and carve a voice out of it; you must sit and pray before transfiguration can happen. You must be disciplined to not be carried away by the relative ease you have now found and forget the condition of your life, which although is now past and lost (lost because it’s severed from place, time and one’s psyche). You must also climb down from the mountain. Contrary to conventional wisdom, the descent is harder than the ascent. You need patience unless one may be stuck on a plateau to find that the landscape has changed. It reminds me of the speaker in Safia Elhillo’s ”origin story” from her January Children collection whose grandmother upon her physical return to the homeland tells her to “shred dill / by hand she means to teach me patience she calls it length of mind”. Afterwards the grandfather reminds her ”it is time to come home”. I guess I’m speaking too much in metaphors but that’s the best way I can respond. Staying away from home can create a disconnect between the writer and the temporal realities of home, yet it gives the alienated writer the opportunity to be free from the clock(work) of the society’s psyche. I think it was Charles Simic that quipped that it is the ambition of lyric poetry to stop time. If that is true, then the alienated poet can hold on longer to that momentary pause.
Interviewer:
In your poem “towing // or the book of isaac I” (published in The Temz Review), there are elements that seem both personal and observational. Can you talk about how you navigate the tension between memory and observation in your writing, particularly when it comes to capturing the speaker’s blackness?
O-Jeremiah Agbaakin:
This one is tough because that’s a really old poem (written in 2018 and published 2019 I believe) And your question suggests that I still navigate the tension between memory and observation the way I navigated it “Towing…”. Talking about growth, that will not be the case! At the time that I wrote the poem– and this is true for all the poems I was writing at the time– I wasn’t aware that there’s tension between memory and observation in writing that poem. But the very nature and the relationship between memory and observation is fraught with tension. One deals with sensory data captured instantaneously while the other is a matter of data retrieval and the subsequent iteration and reiteration of data. One lives in the moment, the other lives in the past and desperately wants to live in the moment. But the moment even the present is reproduced in words or strokes of color, it ceases to merely be a matter of observation. Now that I am more grown, I try to play the role of a mediator between the two. I honor memory; I remind the present it, too is a vapor. So there really is no tension. Because the moment will also become a vapor, I must live in it. I must write about my immediate environment . I have written about Oxford, Mississippi. During a hang out with one of my professors, Beth Ann Fenelly and other new students in January 2021, I shared the fact that James Meredith, the first Black student to attend the University of Mississippi, travelled to Nigeria to continue his education in Political Science at our alma mater, University of Ibadan. Seeing the reverse-parallel between us, she challenged me to write about that. I didn’t! (In my defence, she didn’t state in what genre I should write it!) Instead I wrote about the 14-year old black boy, George Stinney jr., the youngest person to be executed by the electric chair in the United States, in my poem, “Devotion” , one of the poems in The Sign of the Ram. What tension can possibly exist in writing a poem like “Towing”? I was not Black at the time in Nigeria the way I would now be considered black in America. The speaker in the poem is Isaac, who is an object of near-sacrifice the way black bodies are in the history of civilization. By using the persona of Isaac, it becomes easy to collapse collective memory of a cult figure in Abrahamic tradition and a racialized body/site of violence with an active observation of an event of being on the road at the time I wrote the poem.
Photo caption: Agbaakin reads from his newly published chapbook to an audience at the University of Georgia.
Interviewer:
Do you see a role for African writers in the diaspora to bridge this gap in access to books back home? Perhaps through advocating for increased literary resources or even incorporating those limitations into their work?
O-Jeremiah Agbaakin:
I think it will be unfair to task the nomadists with solving all the problems with our literature. The problem of the dearth of literary resources is on an institutional scale, and requires an institutional solution. I think this is one of the innovations of the African Poetry Book Fund Libraries. Currently, they have libraries in six African countries. That is a huge stride! Despite the pessimism of many critics about the death of Nigerian literature, there has been a renaissance in the system of support. I think Kanyinsola Olorunnisola (whom we both know) wrote about this in his essay, “Our Literature has died again” where he declared himself among other japa writers the nomadist movement. This is a more interesting term than Afropolitanism. Anyway, he lists the plethora of prizes, journals, editorial fellowships, grants, seminars and so on that are actively promoting Nigerian and African literature at large. Like I have mentioned, the government has to involve someone. The scale of the solution must match the scale of the problem. I have chosen to be optimistic. We, writers in the diaspora and at home can be the impulse that sets the wheel in motion. If not us, who will?
Interviewer:
Given your experience living in liminal spaces, how do you define your relationship to Nigeria?
O-Jeremiah Agbaakin:
It depends on the time of the day, seriously! (Haha). It’s a frustrating relationship, really. I hate that the country has created and sustained the conditions that would make a majority of its youth want to leave in droves every year. Now my generation may want to think that they are in exile, but that is not entirely true. I think it was in Teju Cole’s Open City where Julius in his interaction with Farouq said something along the line that we are not in exile if we can always return. To quote directly, Farouq says: “To be a writer in exile is a great thing. But what is exile now, when everyone goes and comes freely?” If I am in no exile, then what/where am I? The question is important because what I am defines my relationship with my native land. Clearly, I still don’t have the mobility capital of the Afropolitan; which is why I don’t identify as an Afropolitan, to answer your previous question. Yet, I (this is true for many of us) have a unique set of circumstances that is close to being in a state of exile. If I have to travel outside of the United States (to Nigeria of course), I have to renew my expired VISA; to go through the humiliating immigration process again. You are reminded that you’re an ‘alien’ anytime you apply for an opportunity that requires an American residency. I have defined my relationship to Nigeria as that of being a Nigerian. For all the respect that Nigerians command worldwide, the country itself commands none. Therefore, I am proudly Nigerian but feel nothing for the country itself beyond the feeling of frustration. I am not sure if I have experience living in liminal spaces. Some days, you feel fully Nigerian, Your voice comes to you unchanged. Other days, there is a great sense of spatial disorientation that you even feel it physically in your body. I guess it’s the same experience as speaking English. English is our language. Where we are right now (the place, the culture, the history) is a kind of home. If not? Then what is it?
Interviewer:
What is your writing process like? Do you have a specific routine or preferred environment for writing poems?
O-Jeremiah Agbaakin:
I am a very slow writer. I envy many of my friends who are able to write a poem at a go. I write lines that add up over time and when I have a coherent draft, I take forever to revise it. Writing is like planting for me. My best planting season is sentimentally in April where I have a better structure. I write a poem a day for the whole month, then trash like a half or three quarter of the poems and revise the rest for the rest of the year. Outside of this ritual, I don’t write a routine. I prefer writing while on the bus or while I am walking. In the past, this is what I did during the revision stage: I take the poem on a walk until it’s forced to say something of its own accord, not what I have written into its medium. Now, I walk to get the writing out.
Photo Caption: A copy of The Sign of the Ram.
Interviewer:
Can you share a poem from your collection that resonates with you personally, and tell us a bit about its inspiration?
O-Jeremiah Agbaakin:
All the poems in the chapbook resonate with me personally because I poured my heart into them. It is a collection about being vulnerable and confronting the alienation between a father and a son, told through the lens of the sacrifice of Isaac. The story has been told many times in Christianity and Islam as a testament to the faith(fulness) of Abraham. It is a story of man-divine relationship, while largely devaluing the man-man dimension of the story. Talking of liminal spaces, it is a story of the liminal space of awkward silence between a father and a son on their way back from the foiled sacrifice. If the two patriarchs were to talk as one mortal to another, what would their conversation be about? There is the subject of forgiveness, which inscribes itself as a divine virtue. Another question is that what about the conversation between Isaac and God during the whole episode, without the appositive insertion of Abraham? Was Abraham God in that moment he took full control of his life and the language used to mediate or excuse the exercise of tyrannical power? In what ways do men in patriarchal societies embody the voice of God to abuse their own power and cause violence? I think that is the broader question I was asking in The Sign of the Ram.
Anyway, if this chapbook had only one poem in it, that poem would be “Good Friday”. I feel that is my most authentic poem ever. I have not been able to reproduce the moves I made into my other poems, especially the compact structure, the wirework of allusion, personal history and communal memory embedded, and so on. It starts with a dialogue with a divine son and a divine father who sucks at snake charming; father as in God. The snake as in the serpent. It takes the risk of being iconoclastic but (let me tell you) it becomes less irreverent when I tell you that the father is also a physical father and the speaker is a physical son. One day, a spitting cobra (Sebe) entered our living room while my brother and I were watching a movie at midnight. The electricity had been coming in a low current for a few days. One midnight, the bulbs shone brighter (because people were sleeping and not using their home gadgets) so my brother and I decided to watch a movie that we’ve been burning to watch. I think the title is Sekeseke (boundage), Yomi Ogunmola was the main character. You can guess where this anecdote is going: if we weren’t watching the movie that night, there’s no telling what the snake would have done undetected. Anyway, the snake slithered away when it saw that it was exposed. My father said we should leave the snake. That it was not coming back! The other men in the house (it was a family house) insisted that we hunted the snake down. Lo and behold, the snake was slithering back into the house again. I don’t remember much else from that night but my father’s psyche was interesting. If we had listened to him… yet, maybe he could have been too tired after a hard day’s job, or maybe he’s just pro-animal rights (haha). We never had this conversation till date so we are still living in a liminal space about that incident.
Interviewer:
What are some of your favorite things about being a poet? What are some of the challenges?
O-Jeremiah Agbaakin:
Easy one. I use a mask, to cast the shadow of a truth! The truth is difficult, too bright and stark to look at so sometimes it is better to look at it at an angle (Dickison’s tell the truth slightly?) or wear goggles, or like me, wear a mask! By mask, I mean the persona of other mythological (and often Biblical stories). That is my signature move that finds antecedence in my beloved Peter Weltner, among many other poets. The mask allows me to blend private ethos with a more universal mythos. Which is why I love it when other poets go into their poems with a raw face. How do you do that? I don’t consider myself too interesting to expose myself in my poetry. Yet, there are moments I feel naked when I read my poems and I get it. The feeling comes with a sense of satisfaction that I am the only one privy to a fact in the poem, and that comes with its own catharsis as well. The most important thing is that my language must take control of the poem. This reminds me of what Jessie Nathan said of Richie Hoffman’s: ““All technique, no passion, a critic said” of Canadian pianist Louis Lortie, “but,” writes Richie Hofmann, “that was what I liked.” It’s as if what moves the poet is not the feeling directly, but the way that feeling emanates from the completeness of its subordination to the craft.” At the end of the day, we are not special. At the end of the day, our suffering is not special but it is ours. The greatest pleasure I get as a poet is when a revision goes well. It is when the poem finally speaks! Another favorite thing is when I am able to finally document a childhood experience, a haunting into an artistic language that doesn’t call attention to the experience itself but ruptures the temporal prison where they used to be. It was not that I forgot those things, but that before I knew I was a poet, I didn’t know what to do with them. Thank God I am a poet. The greatest challenge of being a poet is how do you live outside of the impulse to literalize every single experience that’s happening now? How do you live in the moment without trying to make meaning out of it? It is almost like going to a vacation in paradise with a camera. If you don’t capture it, you can’t remember and write it as it was; but if you write it, you are not enjoying the beauty viscerally. It’s hard! But sometimes, I deliberately forget that I am a poet. That helps.
As BGSU is abuzz with excitement for the total eclipse, we at MAR can’t help but consider how the moon has been reflected in literature, more specifically, poetry.
The moon has been an object of curiosity since the beginning of time, with many cultures regarding the moon as a symbol of power that holds the essence of life and time, and the ways of the earth in its clutches. Cultures including the Greeks, Egyptians, Mayans, and Chinese worshiped the moon and associated many deities with it. The moon has consistently appeared a female deity due to similarity with the menstrual cycles and its fragile appearance when compared to the flaming power of the sun.
Thus, with these associations, the moon in literature has been a divine source of female fertility, love, purity, romance, beauty, mystery, madness, and power. The history of the moon’s symbolism, its glowing appearance shrouded in darkness, and its continuous cycle of changing appearances have given writers a lot of freedom to display a variety of emotions and themes. Poets and writers such as Emily Dickenson, Shakespeare, Percy Shelly, Ted Hughes, and more have used ideas behind the moon to express raw emotion, change, and death.
Eclipses are not as commonly written as the complete focus of a poem of piece of work, yet many poets mention eclipses to once again signify change or the tense relationship between two people or ideas. A beautiful example of these themes expressed in poetry is by the American poet Ella Wheeler Wilcox (1850-1919):
In that great journey of the stars through space
About the mighty, all-directing Sun,
The pallid, faithful Moon, has been the one
Companion of the earth. Her tender face,
Pale with the swift, keep purpose of that race,
Which at Time’s natal hour first begun,
Shines ever on her lover as they run
And lights his orbit with her silvery smile.
Sometimes such passionate love doth in her rise,
Down from her beaten path she softly slips,
And with her mantle veils the Sun’s bold eyes,
Then in the gloaming finds her lover’s lips.
While far and near the men our world call wise
See only that the Sun is in eclipse.
Wilcox here uses her expression of the moon and the eclipse to express intimate love and change. As an activist, Wilcox also makes social commentary within this poem, noting that men at times only can acknowledge the masculine energy that they relate to (the sun), missing the beauty and the effort of the opposite sex (the moon).
So, as we prepare to celebrate the eclipse, I encourage you as readers and writers to find your own favorite examples of the moon in poetry and ponder how the author uses the moon to carefully craft their narrative. Eclipses are more than just a special phenomenon, but a chance to express so much emotion and power within our own works.
Jose Hernandez Diaz is a 2017 NEA Poetry Fellow. He is the author of The Fire Eater (Texas Review Press, 2020) Bad Mexican, Bad American (Acre Books, 2024), The Parachutist (Sundress Publications, 2025) and Portrait of the Artist as a Brown Man (Red Hen Press, 2025). He has been published in The Yale Review, The London Magazine, and in The Southern Review. He teaches generative workshops for Hugo House, Lighthouse Writers Workshops, The Writer’s Center, and elsewhere. Additionally, he serves as a Poetry Mentor in The Adroit Journal Summer Mentorship Program.
I really fell in love with the poems in Bad Mexican, Bad American. The poems in the first section are largely in verse and the rest of the collection’s three sections have poems exclusively in prose: How do you view this book’s relationship between the poems in lineation and the poems in prose?
The first section, in linear verse, tends to be autobiographical poetry about my real life growing up first-gen Mexican American, back and forth between Northern Orange County and Southeast Los Angeles. There are a few prose poems in the first section, however, that are not entirely autobiographical.
The rest of the book is written in prose poetry, often surreal, often absurdist, often with Mexican and Mexican American imagery and/or settings. As far as why dual or varied aesthetics/forms? I like to play the blues, Ranchera, psychedelic and Mariachi. I try not to put limits, borders, or boundaries on myself.
Bad Mexican, Bad American feels very close to the poet but also, at other times, feels distant. How do you view the relationship between the poet and the speaker in this collection?
Yes, some of the poems are more confessional, personal, autobiographical. Others are more surreal, absurd, and existential. I contain multitudes as Whitman said.
I thought about separating the books into separate collections: autobiographical linear verse and prose poetry, but then thought: no, I’ll mix it up as it is a closer representation of my complex self and my hybrid aesthetics… more representative than if I split the books into only showcasing one style or aesthetic. Plus, I hadn’t really seen such a varied voice or aesthetic in other contemporary poetry books, so I thought: why not break boundaries and be different/innovative.
You had The Fire Eater (Texas Review Press) publish in 2020 and Bad Mexican, Bad American (Acre Books) publish this year and two collections, The Parachutist (Sundress Publications) and Portrait of the Artist as a Brown Man (Red Hen Press), forthcoming in 2025: How has this success and exposure impacted your writing?
I have been more calm lately in terms of not feeling as much pressure to write. Trying to balance my life out more, not just as focused on the writing. Teaching more. Going to more readings. Early on I felt more pressure to have a book published and out in the world. Now, I want to enjoy being an author with various books out and on the way and no pressure to produce. Can take a deep breath and enjoy the fruits of my labor.
The first poem of yours I ever read was “The Jaguar and the Mango” from the January 2020 issue of Poetry Magazine which is a prose poem. Why is the prose poem the perfect form for this sort of personified exploration in the poem?
I think it is the perfect form for condensed writing and you can still get a scene or an angle of storytelling in. Sometimes we just need a window into a scene not the whole backstory and inner monologues. We sometimes want to fill in the blanks on our own. Minimalism, haiku, short stories, have always been fascinating to me for their brevity and intensified mode/power of expression.
Your chapbook The Fire Eater is all prose poems and Bad Mexican, Bad American is primarily prose poems. What is it about the prose poem form that keeps you returning to it?
It hasn’t gotten old to me. I still love writing a vibrant prose poem. The discovery, spontaneity, freedom, The associative leaps. The imagination, The pace of it, musicality. The voice. The persona. The art of condensed writing.
There’s a lot of discourse surrounding the composing of poems in lineation and poems in prose. Do you feel that the form dictates how you approach writing the poem?
For me: my autobiographical work tends to be primarily in linear verse while my fictional or surreal work tends to be in prose poetry. Not always, but generally this is how it works for me.
After drafting a poem, how do you approach revision?
After getting the first draft on the page I will go back and read it to myself until I get it just right paying attention to line break and form if it’s a poem, specificity of imagery, do I need more description, or less description, musicality, titles, awkward moments which need to be blended in a seamless way, and overall wow factor, does the poem leave me wanting to read it over and over in awe..
Your publications range from first issues of magazines to well-established journals, what advice do you have for emerging writers who are submitting their poems to literary magazines/journals?
I like to have a range of submissions and publications. Would be a long and boring wait if I only submitted to the heavy hitters. It also feels good to be part of a journal’s early issues and help get them off to a good start. This is a poetry community and oftentimes you can connect more with smaller journals. With that said I like to be in fancy journals like anyone else, can’t deny it, so I always send out to dream journals as well even though they require more patience and perseverance.
My advice: prolific writers are always prolific readers first, rejections don’t always mean bad, talent is important and worth ethic but also we must have the ability to bounce back in the face of constant rejection and knock on doors to places we might feel like are too big for us or we’re imposters for trying to get into.
Bad Mexican, Bad American is a collection that challenges its readers, but it’s also a collection that allows the reader to have some fun as well. When you’re reading a collection, what is it about the experience that makes a book spectacular for you?
I love getting pulled into the language, storyline, imagery, voice, persona, politics, struggle, humor, craft of it, passion of it, duende, Kafkaesque quality, deadpan, codeswitching, Spanglish, barrio poems, hood poems, surrealism, gritty realism, honesty, vulnerability, empowerment, love.
For writers soon to be leaving MFA programs, what is a piece of advice you wish you had coming out of your MFA program?
The book publication process is a marathon not a sprint. Time will help the process. Patience is difficult but a virtue. Time also allows for fresh eyes with revision. Enjoy the small victories along the way. Don’t compare yourself to other writers though this is hard to avoid. Treat others how you want to be treated. Call your parents, if they’re supportive, on the weekend.
Han VanderHart is a queer writer and arts organizer living in Durham, North Carolina. Han is the author of the poetry collection What Pecan Light (Bull City Press, 2021) and the chapbook Hands Like Birds (Ethel Zine Press, 2019). They have poetry and essays published in The Boston Globe, Kenyon Review, The American Poetry Review, The Rumpus, AGNI and elsewhere. Han hosts Of Poetry Podcast, edits Moist Poetry Journal, and co-edits the poetry press River River Books with Amorak Huey.
Your book, What Pecan Light, explores the intimacies of a speaker’s long and winding relationship to the American South. It seems that the poems fluctuate between love and criticism quite fluidly while pausing at many different points in-between. What made you decide to write an entire book on this subject?
I love that you entwine love and criticism in your question—I think of Iris Murdoch (via Simone Weil’s) “just and loving gaze”—there is no love without justice, or justice without love. Poetry does this work so well: holding the tenderness and the anger together (for example, the collected work of June Jordan, which I’ve been reading the past few months). I think the answer to your central question of what made me write a book on the topic of the south and my family’s relationship to it is that I couldn’t not write this book—it is an account-giving, in the old, congregational sense of the expression, where you stand up in front of you community and you tell your story, and where you have come from, and where you are now as a person.
Coming from a small, rural town myself, I really enjoy the speaker’s fascination with life on the farm. Why do you think your poetic imagination is so drawn to this particular landscape?
The late Louise Glück wrote, “We look at the world once, in childhood. The rest is memory.” That young, pre-frontal cortex is so open to the world—to image, to love, to harm—to learning how to move through the world. Environment ALWAYS gets into our poems, no matter our age, but the growing mind’s early impressions are an Ur-impression of the world—almost a platonic ideal, not in the ideal or positive sense, but in their importance in how we read the world. I grew up in an isolated, rural environment, locked into my mother’s back-to-basics world while my father was deployed overseas. Writing What Pecan Light is definitely a version of Diane Seuss’s “building a bearable myth.”
What does your process look like when writing poetry? Do you consistently use a certain space, how many drafts do you go through, etc.?
Chaotic and varied, ha. I was born under a new moon (Cusp of Energy: Taurus/Gemini), and I am happiest when I bring a variety of energies to my writing. I joke (but it’s a serious joke!) that the best thing you can do for your writing is something else. Go garden. Go spend time with animals, music, baking. The poems will come to you more willingly this way, if you don’t hunt or stalk them. I often write on my phone, in the notes app (this method results in saved poems, as I’m impossible at remembering physical drafts). I try not to be too precious about writing time—I do it when I feel like it! I don’t experience writers block, which I suppose is something writers who force themselves to sit in a chair experience. I don’t think writing should be forced, or painful; I think it should be pleasurable.
Who would you say are your strongest literary influences and why?
Like which writers a reader might see in my poems, or who I like to bring up in every conversation? Haha. I adore Iris Murdoch, an Irish novelist, philosopher (and sometimes writer of very mid poetry—forgive me, Murdoch). Murdoch was genderqueer, and deeply invested in human desire and self-fantasy; you know a Murdoch character is intensely in their fantasy-comfort when they quote Saint Julian of Norwich’s “all will be well, and all manner of things will be well.” Murdoch impresses me by richly detailing the impotence of that comfort, in a human life—no, it will not be well! But we can still “find something good and hold onto it like a terrier” (from her novel, The Good Apprentice). I also love Simone Weil (“it is better to say you are suffering than that the landscape is ugly”), and Wittgenstein (“a word’s meaning is its use in the language”), and basically many of the ordinary language philosophers. For poets, I’m deeply attached to C.D. Wright, Linda Gregg, Carl Phillips, Diane Seuss—all of them paying great attention to both recklessness and restraint.
What is the best advice you could give to beginner writers, especially in this unprecedented age of AI and collapsing humanities departments within higher education?
Find your community; build the spaces you need. Your peers are the support who will keep you going, who will be there for you. The world is big, and various, and having non-transactional relationships where you make art together, at the end of the day, is what will sustain you and keep you going. Isolation is the death of artists.
How has co-running a press affected your writing? Do you ever feel hindered by having to read so much of other people’s work? Or do you think it keeps you inspired and curious?
River River Books has brought a greater understanding to my own manuscript submissions—I see my work as one among many. I think more (because this is a never-ending process and cycle in a writer’s life!) about the times I have falsely concluded my manuscript was “done,” when no—it was not. It is hard to be patient with one’s own writing—but you can’t force bloom a book, and you shouldn’t want to. Oscar Wilde said there are two tragedies in life: not getting what you wanted, and getting it. But there is a real inspiration in working with someone you admire and respect, and Amorak Huey is probably the greatest inspiration to me, along with our beautiful press authors.
If you could change anything about the current professional writing world, what would it be and why?
Do I have to choose between healthcare, or childcare, or job stability? Doom-jokes aside: we are somehow creating out of scarcity—we are somehow loving each other through forced competition, hierarchy, and gatekeeping. In some ways, we have never had such great access to information and art—think of everything we can stream! from a sonata to a French film to a museum talk or poetry reading—at the same time as such economic stratification and polarization between working and professional and upper classes. We can’t act like these things do not affect our colliding artistic communities—they do, at every level. Every $30 press reading fee financially prohibits some poets from submitting their work—so let’s start with that: making these fees optional, as we do at River River Books.
What has been the biggest challenge to your success as a poet so far?
First, I would ask what you mean by success—a book? A community to make art with? I think the biggest challenge has been the lack of parental leave after giving birth (I was back in class a week or so postpartum, and I should not have been, but the department pressure was real, and birthing bodies are supposed to act like they never birthed) and the lack of care for years as a chronic pain sufferer. Artists are best able to make art when their bodies are cared for and when their bills are paid.
Why should people in today’s world take an interest in reading poetry?
We see how profit reduces our bodies and our labor to numbers: to hours, to datapoints. Poetry refuses to be reduced: it subverts capitalist values, it thrives especially against censorship and political oppression. I think there IS something deeply populist about poetry, and when the academy tries to rarify it or keep it ivory-towered, they lose the heartbeat of poetry. Poetry is for the people the way graffiti and street music and parks and libraries are for the people. Eugenio Montale wrote that all you need for poetry is a pencil and paper, and he was right.
What are you currently working on? Can we look forward to seeing anything new from you soon?
I finished my second poetry manuscript Larks—largely about my sisters, trauma, birds, Ovid’s telling of Philomel—and am mostly finished with my third manuscript, Thou Wast Mild and Lovely—erotics and art and the geneaologies of desire. I’m hoping Larks finds the right press home this year!
Tell us a little about “Of Poetry Podcast”.
Of Poetry Podcast has been a space of abundance and friendship and craft for me—I began it in summer 2021, as a way of supporting other poets with books published during the pandemic. It has grown and flourished and transformed, and I’m so grateful for the way it expands my own thinking about poetry, and brings the gift of other’s poetry to me. It is a community space in a way I could not dream of, and recently reached 10,000 downloads across listening platforms (Apple, Spotify, Google, etc).
