I really try to have everything possible at my access and to lose my mind when I’m writing poems. JB: I don’t think I do very much navigating. I’m saying all of this to say that-as for singing-I can make poems work when I can look at them outside of myself whether or not they have my own personal experiences in them. How do you navigate that space? And what do you consider as you navigate it, and make from your own experiences and observations something that, as you put it, sings? But I think I didn’t quite answer this question myself, of what to do with the space between our real lives, our real fathers, and what we have put on the page. Those first few poems kill me, and I just think I want to get you to talk about them. It’s interesting, the way your collection also begins not only with fathers and violence, but with both of those as forces that can and do shape a country. Things that are more important than poetry. All of that became a lens with which to view love, and relationships, and responsibility. I think many men believe they have access to the truth, and wield it like a weapon because they’ve never had to actually reckon with who they hurt. He recovered from his surgery, against all odds, and among the many ways that I changed from all that, one thing I took away with that became reflected in the way I thought about what became this book was my relationship to the truth. I spent every night in the hospital with him and it didn’t seem important anymore to prove I was right, or to say whatever I was trying to say in those poems to the whole world, which I think was a version of me saying again, in a language I knew I was uniquely capable to speak “I am right.” A language that almost nobody I knew could speak to me in, and so nobody could address me in, or argue with me over. He was diagnosed with stomach cancer over ten years ago, and all of that stopped. We used to argue a lot, about practically everything, and I wrote about him much more than is reflected in this book. I think lots of us come to that wild discovery at some point: that we are repeating, word for word, something we once fought against. I write about my dad in that poem, and in general, because I think I became him. I remember being told at school I walked like a girl, and that led me to remember other times I had been told whatever was the way I might think or move or act if nobody were watching should be filtered into something I could be proud of. I remember being a boy and actively thinking about whether the way I walked was right, about whether I was moving correctly. Wilson: “The Way I Hold My Hands” was actually this failed idea for a poem I kept returning to about the literal way I hold my body and hands. Can you talk about how you came to the writing and revision of this poem? Now that your book is in the world, have you thought at all about the differences between your real father and the one you had to render to make these poems sing? How are they the same or different? It accuses the father while being tender toward him and the self. Jericho Brown: I am particularly impressed by the poem “The Way I Hold My Hands,” which seems a love poem to your own father that manages to make use of the erotic and of the images of touch itself. Wilson sat down to talk about influences, poetics, and more in their new collections, The Tradition and Fieldnotes on Ordinary Love.
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