In late spring 2007, I was admitted into a Hurston-Wright Foundation workshop, where I shared my first efforts at lines I’d call poems with MQR Assistant Managing Editor monét cooper and several other writers. There, workshop leader A. Van Jordan excavated the kernels of conceits and quiet music underneath all our noise. On our last of five days, Van took me aside to assure me I had the makings of a career as an artist, that the decade I’d spent as a newspaper editor would serve me well. I will forever credit Van; Terrance Hayes and Tracy K. Smith, who led workshops in the subsequent fortnight at the Callaloo Workshops; and Nikki Giovanni, who invited my application to Virginia Tech, where I completed my MFA over the succeeding three years, with changing my life’s trajectory, setting me on the path I’ve been pursuing ever since.
After becoming the first Black male tenured professor in the University of Texas-Austin’s English Department, helping build the graduate creative writing programs at Rutgers University-Newark, and directing the Zell Writing Program at the University of Michigan-Ann Arbor, Jordan serves as the Humanities and Sciences Professor of English and African and African American Studies at Stanford University and co-director of its creative writing program. He is also the author of five poetry collections that reframe apocryphal but underexamined historical events, deftly contextualizing their relevance to the present day in which they emerge.
Van and I reconnected in April to discuss his latest masterwork, When I Waked, I Cried to Dream Again. Its title comes from a monologue from Caliban, one of William Shakespeare’s most terrifying characters of the African diaspora, who is living on a deserted island. I venture that when scholars look back on Van’s oeuvre, this book will be his magnum opus. Its sweep astounds. Just as I felt safe 17 years ago in the Howard University classroom where our journey began, this book’s readers will find themselves less lost in the sea of emotions we have all been nearly drowning in over the past decade and a half as images of police brutality continue to assault our consciousness. The heady, heavy freight of it all comes into stark relief as Jordan’s calm, steady voice whispers, “It’s OK. I got y’all. It’s time.”
This conversation has been edited for length and clarity.
L. Lamar Wilson (LLW): Let’s start at the beginning. Why The Tempest, and why now? What about that Shakespearean work—canonized as a comedy because technically no one dies, particularly the dramatis personae of Caliban and his mother Sycorax—felt right for what you want to articulate about our chaotic American moment that’s devolving every day more into tragedy than comedy?
A. Van Jordan (AVJ): We are living in a tragedy, you’re right. There are too many dead bodies on stage for this to be a comedy. And so, I felt the need to write about the tragedy, the tragedy I feel bearing down on me. It took me a long time to finish this book, and if Jill Bialosky at Norton hadn’t written to me, asking what I’ve been working on, I probably would still have this book in a Word doc on my laptop. I’ve just been in meditation through the language for some time. I don’t know how to say this really … I mainly didn’t know how to write about what I was feeling and about what my loved ones were expressing, so I just kept writing until something snapped into place. I don’t think I have anything more intellectual or smart to say about that. I was just writing to organize my thoughts and feelings.
LLW: Let’s revisit the beginning. Your title recalls Caliban reminiscing about a bygone time on his unnamed island with the play’s never-seen villain, his mother, before the arrival of Prospero and other colonizers, and you dedicate this fifth collection to your beloved mother, Bessie. This book seems as emotionally vulnerable as your debut, Rise, and your third collection, Quantum Lyrics. Throughout the rest of the collection, we meet Tamir Elijah Rice and his mother, Samira, and other meditations on unbreakable mother-son bonds that unfold off-stage, as it were. To the extent that you can, share with us what about these bonds’ truths—which defy time, space, and the supposed finality of death itself—resonate with you in your own present-day tempest as a caregiver of an aging matriarch and practicing artist/harbinger of your close-knit family’s herstories?
AVJ: This comes down to love. Caring for an aging parent teaches you a lot about love and about your capacity to love. In my case, my mom has Alzheimer’s, so I can cook her a wonderful meal, help in the bathroom, bathe her, sit with her for hours, and I may never hear thank you. Obviously, I knew I loved my family, particularly my mother, but it made me think about how often I did something for someone I loved, anticipating the acknowledgment of what I did. That’s not really how love should work. Now whenever my mom has a moment of lucidity, usually, the one phrase she finds is “thank you,” and it breaks me down every time.
I don’t have kids, but I realized that this is what a parent does for you throughout most of your youthful life: They care for you without a thank you. They feed you, and you just expect to be fed; they provide a home for you, and you call it your home. Now, I’m talking about a healthy relationship between a parent and a child. A parent can’t love a kid if they can only provide for a child who is grateful. A child can’t even conceive of what a (good) parent does. How could they possibly express their gratitude until they realize how hard it is out here in these streets?
So that’s a relationship that transcends what we usually have in mind when we think about love. There are so many pressures on being Black in this country. … Having a loving family—having love in our lives, period—is one way we cope with it. George Floyd just became emblematic of what has always been present. It was one of the most powerful moments—more powerful than the assault on Rodney King—bearing witness to the murder of George Floyd, and hearing him, a middle-age Black male, cry out for his mother. That’s a bond that, I felt, needed a spotlight.
Sycorax is present but invisible in The Tempest. We know that Caliban, like us all, must have a mother, and it’s his mother’s love and power and memory, and the comfort of a space he called home, that he reflects upon with his two ne’er-do-well invader/guests, Stephano and Trinculo. That love is what keeps Caliban moving forward.
LLW: Before moving on, I must pause to give you your flowers. While your peers and comrades have gotten their due for inventing the gigan, the golden shovel, syncopated sonnets, the duplex, and popularizing the American sonnet, you haven’t gotten the praise you deserve for your formal acumen, particularly reinventing the definition poem and innovating the persona poem for our generation in the way that Frances Ellen Watkins Harper, Paul Laurence Dunbar, Fenton Johnson, Sterling Brown, Langston Hughes, Robert Hayden, Ai, Jayne Cortez, Yusef Komunyakaa, Rita Dove, Marilyn Nelson, and Patricia Smith have done for their respective ones. I didn’t think I could love a definition poem of yours more than those I still study and teach in M-A-C-N-O-L-I-A, but “asterisk” throws down a gauntlet for what we can expect from this collection. What about the tension between these two forms—one so seemingly fixed, the other requiring deft, imaginative leaps and introspection—keeps you returning to them, and why are they so apt for what American poets must do to respond to the frankly terrifying ineffable we face daily?
AVJ: Man, thanks for saying all of this so deftly in your question … I receive it. Listen, when I write, I’m always experimenting with how to say what I can’t say when I’m walking around in this world. There’s very little that I can say as honestly in person to other people that I can say in a poem. I mean, I could say it, but most people wouldn’t be able to handle it. There are things that I might say to you, now that we’ve been friends for so many years, that I wouldn’t say to most people. I trust that you know where I’m coming from. Most people wouldn’t be able to deal with all of me, neither the love nor the fears nor the courage nor the anger. As Jack Nicholson’s character in A Few Good Men said, in most cases, it’s appropriate to tell people that “you can’t handle the truth!”
Form always allows me to contain my emotions in a frame that people can take in. People can’t hold an emotional purge without some parameters. I know I can’t. I need and enjoy having a container to pour it all into. I think of it like stretching a canvas and framing it so we can see this splatter of brushstrokes and color better.
LLW: Beautiful, just beautiful.
Framed by Hayden’s take on how white supremacy alienates America from its democratic project, you divide this collection’s ekphrasis into four sections. In the second, “Such Sweet Thunder,” you stage mind-blowing sestinas in a “three-way collaboration” with photographer Malick Sidibé and filmmaker Cauleen Smith, with whom you made the 2006 film I Want to See My Skirt. (Might the section’s nod to Duke Ellington and Billy Strayhorn make their orchestra a fourth collaborator?) I’m obsessed with “Woman in Sunglasses and Newsboy Cap,” whose speaker divines, “The camera appears / to know more than I do.” Those lines bring to mind “The Synchronicity of Scenes,” your 2007 essay on documentary poetics. In it, you conclude:
“[W]e don’t think inside a scene in a poem in the way we do inside a scene on film. Yes, they are different art forms, and a poem requires a reservoir of patterns and forms unlike those in film. … From film, we begin to orient ourselves in the movement from scene to scene not simply because of the grammar of film as an art form, but for some other reason: Film, like poetry, answers questions of how we behave, move, interact with others and anticipate outcomes of natural phenomena, because it mimics how we hope—especially once we understand where we are and what’s happening in the scene—elements in our lives will make sense as the focus sharpens.”
What has your work in front of and behind the camera of this section’s quiet confessions brought into sharper focus? What have you learned about documenting the musicality of Black bodies-in-thrall and the craft of (un)making poems and film that you didn’t know when you wrote “The Synchronicity of Scenes” (fresh off winning the Guggenheim), or even when you completed your last book, The Cineaste, also an ekphrastic response to film, a little over a decade ago?
AVJ: When I wrote “The Synchronicity of Scenes,” I was much more in craft-talk mode, which I’ve tried to move away from over time. I think it’s useful to speak in concrete terms, but I also think it doesn’t always leave enough room for thinking more philosophically, more nuanced, about a subject. Since then, I still believe the poem is as much a visual art form as film. To think of it otherwise doesn’t really serve the poet.
That’s not to say that the poem is the same as film, or that film is the same as poetry. No. What I mean to say is that the poem has its own relationship to the image that we don’t always respect in the way that we respect—largely because we don’t understand it as well—that relationship between the image and the making of film. Few people question the utility, for instance, of either an image system or of context in film, but I hear it all the time in poetry. You sit in a workshop, and everyone is looking for the easiest, most logical edit of a poem. Rarely do we try to find the edit that takes the poet on a longer, more difficult journey, even though those journeys, once you arrive at the idea of your destination, are the most satisfying.
Now, and this is me being grumpy, people read so much scholarship that they don’t think in workshops; they just spew jargon. But if you’re reading a poem and you’re not learning how to think in some new way, something is wrong. The poem, especially a lyric poem, will have its own, singular image system, each one a new intellectual engagement. That’s to say, there’s no one way to read a lyric poem. You can’t read Rilke the same way you might read Komunyakaa, and you can’t read Komunyakaa the same way you’d read Glück. Each offers a new way of thinking. It happens in film as well, but the poem is the most agile art form when it comes to image. The tragedy is that we don’t always embrace that.
LLW: Yes, yes. Now, a bit more on persona: Besides, maybe, Komunyakaa and Tyehimba Jess, I argue that no Black cisgender male poet since Hughes and Hayden has been able to inhabit and honor the Black femme and queer voice and POV with the respect and verisimilitude you render across your oeuvre. In When I Waked, I Cried to Dream Again, you are in full stride, especially in “Woman Ascending a Staircase” and “ ‘Masked Man’ in the Mirror Before the Dance.” From whence come the courage and freedom to go wherever a poem must in an era when we Black poets far too often can misstep, in pursuit of the ruse of “representation,” into terrain that identity politicos expect us to play?
AVJ: I don’t know the answer to that generous question, Lamar. I don’t know if I do what you say, but I receive it. … In general, I meet people in this world on a spiritual level first. I don’t mean religious—I think you know, I love God but I’m not big on church—I mean I get a sense of people’s spirits, and I try to act accordingly. That may sound a little crazy, but it is what it is. There are some people I want to get closer to, and some people I try to steer clear of, based on what vibes they give off. But those vibes can define you. And once you tune into them, part of what I love is when I meet authentic people who are different from me; I make mental notes on what makes someone strong or what makes someone vulnerable or how different any one of us can be depending on the circumstances. Have you ever known someone who you thought was a badass, and then they were put in a crisis situation, and you realized that they weren’t so tough; they simply hadn’t been faced with a challenge so they exuded false confidence? Well … note to self.
As I walk through the world, I just try to be that space where people can be authentic. I never want to put anyone in a situation where they have to tamp down who they are to be around me. That’s just not what I was put on this Earth to do. That’s why I stopped going to church. … I don’t know if that’s an answer, but I think that’s all I got on that one.
LLW: It’s certainly an answer, and we are grateful to you for letting us just be our authentic selves in your presence and atomizing on the page in these personae what you see and hear.
Among the many mic-drop moments in this book’s hybridity is Section Three, where we discover short fiction in the form of an allegorical play. Suddenly, we’re forced to revisit the imagery in “Airsoft,” “Fragments,” and “suspect” from Section One and to return to the scene of the crime that is the 2014 murder of then-barely-12-year-old Rice in Cleveland, a city less than hour from Akron, where you grew up. In this section, you show that racism stalks and haunts the progressive Midwest as readily as it does the rural “Deep South” that birthed me. How did you find the formal invention of this section? What about the second-by-second interrogation vis-a-vis our protagonists do you hope keeps “the words rushing after [Rice], and after the next boy”—and after readers/viewers who otherwise might passively engage with narratives of Black death?
AVJ: “When I Waked, I Cried to Dream Again,” above all, is an attempt to show a relationship between generations of precarity, between the Black body and encounters with police. Whenever I’m pulled over by police or have an interaction with them, I never know how it will go. So, I become the 16-year-old version of Van driving for the first time: I turn off the ignition, pull out my I.D. and registration before the cop gets to the car, and I hold my hand with the license and registration out of the car, and my other hand at 12:00 on the steering wheel, in plain sight. I doubt most middle-age white guys in their 50s driving a Volvo X40 go through this routine, but I know I have to. So, I conceived of this piece during those long car drives between Ann Arbor, Michigan, where I lived during the pandemic, and Ithaca, New York, where my wife lived at the time, and drives to Akron, Ohio, where my mom lives. During those drives, I got pulled over more times than I had been stopped in my entire life as a driver. More than once, the cop would approach my car already amped up in anger. I must add that of the four times I had been pulled over, I only got one ticket, which I contested and had thrown out. (But that’s another story for another time.)
The point is, once I would drive away, I could not just go on enjoying my drive and the rest of my day. It was always stress-inducing, and it brought up earlier encounters with police when I was younger—cops pulling me over for minor infractions; cops following me around malls and department stores, pulling me into back rooms to question me and to search me; and the time when a cop pulled a gun on me.
I thought of the dialogue of Shakespeare’s plays and the dialogue between the young and the old in these oral history projects that are archived at the Smithsonian, and I wanted to create something that could hold all of that without—hopefully, without—being preachy. I think it would’ve been harder to convey the emotion I wanted to get at if it had been written as nonfiction, but, you know, I wanted it to look like nonfiction, while holding the space for emotion that we find in a poem. When one generation speaks to another directly and the younger is listening deeply, there are very few moments more beautiful in this life.
LLW: The greatest gift of this collection to scholars, I posit, is your incisive critique of Shakespeare’s audacious, if problematic, representations of colonized and enslaved Black characters. You don’t stop at standard-bearers The Tempest and Othello; you inhabit the unrepentantly monstrous barbarian, Aaron the Moor, as you simultaneously honor Ira Aldridge, arguably the most respected inhabitant of these troubled men to step onto the Western stage, and your troubled paternal grandfather. How has it proven useful for your growth as an artisan of language to investigate the terror abjected onto these Black men of the Western and African diasporic canon and explore their transgressive pursuit of love and prosperity across racial and class boundaries—and thus expose our limited capacities to imagine them and their progeny as worthy of happy-ever-afters or, at least, of after lives that involve contemplating their own childhood dreamscapes?
AVJ: Aaron the Moor in Titus Andronicus is a beautifully conceived character. Let’s get that out of the way, first. In many ways, he’s a more well-rounded villain than Iago is in Othello. Iago is jealous of Othello, primarily, because he’s a Moor with more respect than white men. Scholars contort themselves to talk about Iago being passed over for the rank that Othello entrusts in Cassio, but the level of Iago’s villainy doesn’t match his actions. In the early 17th century, Shakespeare can’t say it’s strictly because Othello is Black, but he brings in enough language to make it clear that the Moor’s skin color vexes Iago as much as anything else.
In Titus, the injustices against Aaron and his lover Tamora mount with his revenge. Unlike Iago in Othello, we have no question as to why Aaron sets his wheels of revenge in motion; we are simply uncomfortable because 1) We see that Aaron takes it to the deepest levels of subterfuge possible, essentially talking his enemies into murder, cannibalism, rape, self-mutilation and amputation. He’s an early modern version of Jigsaw. And, 2) once again, his Blackness just ratchets up the tension.
So, to finally answer your question, people primarily want revenge because they want their happiness back, and some believe this is the only option. On the other side of that equation, when no crime has been committed against someone and they want to hurt others, seemingly for no reason, they want to steal the joy of others when they believe the only way for them to have what some joyous person has or joyous people have is to take theirs. We can apply this to the forming of this nation and to any struggle we’ve had within it ever since.
But Black people have been in defense mode for so long that we often forget that part of our offense is simply holding on to joy in ourselves, creating beauty and bringing it forth in the world, not handing it over to someone who wants to oppress us. That’s what Aaron the Moor really represents: what happens when you take mechanisms for joy away from someone. And the career of Ira Aldridge is another model of how we’ve learned to persevere by embracing beauty.
LLW: You end the book challenging readers to break away from the litany of bad news assailing us and break a sweat together in a Soul Train linedance. When was the last time you were able to get on the good foot with chosen kin amid these pandemic times of isolation and distancing? And, as for dancing brilliantly in verse goes, what’s next? What haven’t you mined yet that you aim to discover as you transition officially to OG status in this game, not because of your age but, rather, your success at “making it new” every damn time?
AVJ: Ha! How do I respond to that, man? Those are two questions and a healthy dose of encouragement that, no matter how long you’ve been out here doing this, we all need. So, thank you for this question, for all these questions, and for the deep read of the work and for being on this journey with me for so long.
Now, I can answer this two-parter in one answer. I can barely remember the last time I danced in a setting with my family, but the most vivid memory of it was at a cousin’s wedding at which, for the first time in my life, as far as I can remember, I watched my parents dance together. And, I mean, they were dancing like no one was watching, and I realized this was not their first dance. I also realized that other family members had been there before, watching them dance; I just wasn’t hip. It messed me up and blessed me at the same time. I realized they had this inner life as a couple that I hadn’t been privy to. Of course, I knew this, but this was a moment so emblematic of that that I could only sit in witness of it—if that makes sense.
I’m working on a series of essays now that deals with loss and how we spend time with one another in ways that we take for granted, which has been on my mind a lot lately. I wish my father were still here to sit with me and to watch television, which I never could sit still long enough with him to do to an extent that satisfied him. If he were here now, I’d sit with him as long as he wanted, and we wouldn’t have to say a word. I’m in that place now with my mom, who is in the last stages of Alzheimer’s disease, and she isn’t really communicative now. My mom would watch comedies and laugh deeply throughout the show, and later, throughout the week, she’d throw out some joke from the show, using it to tease me about one thing or another. She had a great sense of humor. Those days are gone. I sit with her now, and she’s in her own head, struggling to make sense of it all.
So, I think about the times we watched TV together or went to movies together and how we developed a cultural lexicon out of that, and how we would talk later about what we experienced together in silence, a passive intimacy that I miss. I miss that as much as I miss watching them dance.
L. Lamar Wilson is the author of Sacrilegion (Carolina Wren Press, 2013), a Thom Gunn Award finalist, and associate producer of The Changing Same (PBS/POV, 2019), a Rada Film Group collaboration. He’s published widely, including in This Is the Honey (Hatchette, 2024), Bigger than Bravery (Lookout Books, 2022), the Academy of American Poets’ Poem-a-Day, The Nation, New York Times, Oxford American, and Poetry. Wilson, an Affrilachian Poet, has received fellowships from the Cave Canem, Civitella Ranieri, Hurston-Wright, and Ragdale foundations. He teaches creative writing, African American poetics, and film and gender studies at Florida State University and Mississippi University for Women.
