~ Delta Poetry Review ~
Junious Ward's Interview by Susan Swartwout
DPR: You’ve been
quite a force in Slam Poetry (congratulations), earning both
National and World titles. Other than the obvious enhanced physical
performance aspect of Slam Poetry, what makes it different from a
common stand-at-the-lectern poetry reading—for both poet and
audience?
JW: Thanks! I worked really hard, and perhaps had a
great deal of luck, to secure those titles. It's funny, I recently
facilitated a workshop titled “How to Give a Poetry Reading” to a
mix of spoken word artists and poets who work more traditionally on
the page, and I commented that many of the same techniques apply
whether it’s a stand-at-the-lectern poetry reading or if it’s a
20-minute set of performance poems. So much of what I’ve learned as
best practice for poetry readings has been informed by my time as a
spoken word artist and from poetry slams. I guess what makes the two
different at a 20,000-foot level is the active, real-time engagement
with the audience. In a poetry slam I am trying to move, motivate,
and affect the audience in some slight or profound way. I also want
the audience to feel that they are part of a journey. I want the
collective audience to become, for a few minutes, one individual who
cannot look away from the mirror I am holding up to them. That’s the
20,000-foot level, but if we zoom in . . . that’s really the same
thing I’m trying to create during a poetry reading. Yes, it’s true
that slam poetry tends to have more physical performance that can
convey thought and emotion in a way that the page sometimes cannot.
It’s also true there are things like lineation and enjambments that
work wonderfully on the page but don’t necessarily translate to a
physical performance. There are intangibles that follow each medium,
but by and large I personally find poetry slams, spoken word
performances, and poetry readings to be equally enthralling.
DPR: What are some of
the things you accomplished as Poet Laureate of Charlotte, NC, and
in your work as Program Director for BreatheInk?
JW: Some days I feel like I’ve accomplished a great
deal during my term as Poet Laureate. Other days there’s a little
voice questioning if I could’ve done more. And just about every day
there’s a separate voice saying hey,
why don’t you try this program, why don’t you do this thing, did you
know about this grant? But I do
sometimes grant myself opportunities, like the one I’ll take here,
to shut those voices down for a moment.
With the help of Goodyear Arts, Charlotte Lit, and West Trade
Review, I was able to start a year-long fellowship for a Charlotte
poet that has also branched into opportunities for cohorts of poets
(we are in our third year of the program). I was also able to
initiate a creative writing program at the Mecklenburg County
Detention center (which is being run wonderfully by Shane Manier of
Guerilla Poets). Working with BreatheInk I was able to establish the
first Youth Poet Laureate position for our city (Vanessa Hunter has
been outstanding in this role and is completing her term this
Spring). Using funding from the Arts and Science Council, I’ve held
monthly workshops at the University City Regional Library, each
being facilitated by a Charlottean poet, followed by Office Hours
where I meet with, provide feedback, and answer questions with local
writers. Thanks to funding from the city, I was able to host a
professional development seminar with spoken word poets that
addressed writing, performance, and business acumen. Additionally,
thanks to funding from the Academy of American Poets, I was able to
work with BreatheInk and Mecklenburg County’s Office of Violence
Prevention to offer an innovative workshop series to at-risk youth
aimed at stemming the tide of gun violence in our communities.
I was also able to visit many schools and teach in different places.
Being Poet Laureate has afforded me some really cool opportunities.
But the things I’ve listed here, during the times I allow myself to
look backwards, are the things of which I’m most proud.
DPR: Your latest book of poems, Composition, should be a poetry textbook, it’s so rich with novel contemporary forms and experimentation. I especially love the concrete birdform of the poem “Black Rapture,” but many other poems are presented as erasures or chemical compounds or fill-in-the-blanks or prose poems.
Charles Olson described the notion of organic, intuitive poetry as
different from historically patterned and rhyming poems. How do you
approach constructing these shapes of your poetry? How do the poems
emerge as the shapes they are?
JW: First of all, thanks so much, that’s so kind!
The original version of what became
Composition started as a chapbook that
dealt with identity and race with a decidedly more head-on approach.
I was having a conversation with Ross White in 2019 about form and
experimentation, kind of a what-if conversation. What if I played
with form, combined form, broke form . . . what if the result was
that each poem became a metaphor for the collection itself? That set
me on a year of research on particular forms to decipher what each
form brought to the table. I would use that information to decide
when or how to break a form. I’d rewrite different poems in
different forms to figure out which actually served each poem best.
Because of my extensive history with performance poetry, I was also
very interested in how the poem “performed” on the page. Meaning I
was actively thinking about the use of white space, the use of
concrete poems. With erasure and blackout poems I was actively
thinking about how to create additional nuance for the reader. There
is a performance version of the "Black Rapture" poem, for example, and
a key part of that performance is mimicking flight. In the book
version, each page of poems is in the shape of a bird at a different
stage of flight, so when you flip the pages rapidly the bird appears
to be flying (incidentally, there is also a small, black silhouette
of a bird at the opposite margin. So if you flip the book in the
opposite direction, that small bird flies as well)!
I’m saying all this to say that I’d like to think a poem of mine
emerges as the shape it is because that’s the shape the poem
demands. But I also know part of it is the result of my really
thinking intentionally about how to enhance the reader’s experience.
There’s a balance there that I’m aiming for; I’m never choosing a
shape or a form based on the idea that “oh, this might be cool,” but
I do give myself permission to try something that might not work,
and I also hold myself accountable if it doesn’t work. I’ve learned
to trust that the process of experimenting will lead me to a new
answer or back to an old answer, but always to the right answer.
DPR: In
Composition,
you include photographs with legends that include the page number of
the poem to which they relate (brilliant effect! Thank you, too, for
the notes section of the book). So this is a chicken or egg—or an
egg inside chicken, always already—question: What are your processes
for paralleling image and poem, since some are personal and some are
historical?
JW: When I was growing up my parents had an
encyclopedia set. Today’s generation may not appreciate (or even
know) what that means, but it took an entire bookcase to house that
set. As a kid without internet, without cable, and without a tv in
my room until I was a teenager, I used to read constantly. But I
wouldn’t just pick up a random encyclopedia and start reading. Some
of the sets had an index of photos in the middle of the book and
each photo had a reference to the book and page number where you
could learn more about that topic. So my first interest would be
sparked by a photo of a large, green caterpillar that looked like a
leaf, or a side-by-side comparison of a mallard and a wood duck.
That was my entry. With Composition
I wanted to create an alternate way to engage the manuscript other
than just the table of contents alone. I think the added benefit, or
at least my goal, is that it gives the reader a chance to engage
with me personally, not only in the mode that was important to me as
a child but also the invitation to see my actual family and actual
photos of how I grew up.
My process for paralleling image and poem had a lot to do with
storytelling. I wanted this index section to tell its own story, to
have a narrative of sorts. I wanted the reader to be able to read
the annotations and feel a story building, but I also wanted the
visuals to build, to travel time, to invite the personal. In my
mind, at least, even the historical images tell you something about
me.
DPR: Your poem
“Homecoming, Rich Square, NC” describes several first-time
experiences of picking a cotton boll—by Northern Blacks visiting the
South, by the speaker of the poem, and by the speaker’s
mother-in-law. My Louisiana white-kid first-time dealing with bolls,
which the teacher brought to class, involved only extracting the
difficult seeds as a history lesson about Eli Whitney, but none of
the traumatic back and blood work of actual picking. You also
mention earning a lousy $8.58 for picking a higher-than-your-head
bag of cotton as a kid, seeking extra income. How does cotton
(still) affect Southern society in the 21st century?
JW: Picking cotton as a kid is a core memory for
me. At that age I really didn’t comprehend much about slavery or the
history of cotton, I was there because my mom, brother, cousins, and
other kids I knew from school were there. I remember having to be
careful to not get pricked. I remember wearing Perdue gloves (these
were gloves the workers wore at the big Perdue factory nearby. They
were a distinct shade of off-white with yellow trim and had a kind
of knit texture). I remember how tall the burlap bag I was using for
collection stood next to me. But mostly I remember anticipating the
payment. Waiting and waiting, forever it seemed. I was just sure I
was going to go shopping for new clothes, maybe a video game! I was
so disappointed. Growing older I could start to reckon with the
history of cotton, the history of what it might mean to descend from
slaves who may have worked the same field, from sharecroppers, from
farmers.
There’s a man in the Roanoke Valley, near where I grew up, named
Julius Tillery. He’s a 5th generation Black cotton farmer (in fact
he has a business called Black Cotton). Think about that—5th
generation on that land!
As for how cotton still affects Southern society today, this is a
wide, wide question, and I’m not sure I have the expertise to answer
it. But I do think it's certain that Black folks have a complicated
historical relationship with agriculture. For folks that didn’t grow
up in the South, often their only understanding of cotton is its
relationship to slavery. But for me and many Southerners, cotton (or
tobacco, or corn, etc) is just across the street. It's part of the
landscape, part of the culture. It is both a viable avenue for
making a living and, perhaps, a physical reminder of the
unthinkable. I think cotton’s effect on Southern society today is
more about the reminder than the plant itself. We are still
reckoning, in different ways, with how to celebrate the present
without denying the past.
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