Leslie McGrath | November 2020

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Marilyn Nelson, Dolores Hayden, Roger Sedarat and Kiki Petrosino

A well-written short story, a surprising essay, a poem that makes the hair on a forearm shiver: these are things of beauty and value. As writers, we want to read as many of them as we can, knowing that deep reading can make for good writing. When I’m moved by the piece I’ve just read, I’m curious about why the writer chose that subject, that form, and that method. I’m curious about not only the resulting piece of literature, but how and why it came to be. This is why I read and conduct literary interviews. A good literary interview gives a perspective on a writer’s personality, worldview, and writing process that readers can only guess at from a writer’s creative work.

Over the last fifteen years, I’ve seen a surge in poetry collections that employ historical research among the poet’s other tools. Some of these collections aim to tell a historical story in verse; others use research as a kind of allusive plaster skim coat of the imaginary world constructed by the poet; still others use the forms and features of research itself as scaffolding, allowing the poet to reveal what has been hidden in plain sight. This has been a thrilling turn in American poetry and has resulted in many powerful and highly-awarded books. I’ve begun to wonder if this new direction could be part of the reason why poetry has gained wider readership and a more enthusiastic response at readings and performances. But how does a poet approach research? It’s not often a component of MFA programs in poetry, as far as I know.

I’ve borrowed a reviewer’s tool, the omnibus review, in which a group of books is reviewed, sometimes with a common critical thread within a single piece. This omnibus interview pulls together the work of four poets: Marilyn Nelson, Dolores Hayden, Roger Sedarat, and Kiki Petrosino, all of whom have recently published fine poetry collections based on historical research. After reading a recent collection by each poet (the exception being Marilyn Nelson; I re-read four of hers) I developed a list of questions along these general lines, but tailored to each poet’s book:

What constitutes historical research in poetry?
How does a poet distill data into verse?
Does the research lead the writing or vice versa?
How does one make the decision to write in the voice of an historical figure versus a fictional character?
How should the poet acknowledge the research in a way helpful to the reader?

I sent the interview questions to each poet, who returned the answers when they were ready. The poets have not seen each other’s responses, so this should not be read as a conversation among poets. The differences among the poets’ intentions and research practices are as compelling as the areas of overlap. I’m grateful for their thoughtful responses and hope this piece will contribute to other poets’ craft knowledge.

Marilyn Nelson is the author or translator of numerous poetry books, including How I Discovered Poetry; The Fields of Praise; Carver: A Life In Poems; and Fortune’s Bones: The Manumission Requiem. Nelson’s honors include two NEA creative writing fellowships, the 1990 Connecticut Arts Award, a Fulbright Teaching Fellowship, a fellowship from the J.S. Guggenheim Memorial Foundation, the Frost Medal, the NSK Neustadt Award, and the Ruth Lilly Prize. She has served as the Poet Laureate of the State of Connecticut, a Chancellor of the Academy of American Poets, and Poet-in-Residence at the Cathedral of St. John the Divine.

Leslie McGrath: For more than two decades, you’ve been writing poems primarily about history and historical figures for a readership that includes children, young adults, and adults.

How did you start?

Marilyn Nelson: Shortly after my mother passed away in 1988, I started writing a work in her memory, which became The Homeplace (1990). That book is about my own family’s history, and my immersion in that particular history introduced me to the many pleasures of historical research.

McGrath: I was struck by how you characterized your work in this 2016 interview with Poets & Writers: “I write about history and what I have done for the last 15 or 20 years is to empathize my way into the imagined experiences of people whose experiences are not mine. But, informed by research and imagination, I have just taken a leap of faith and done that.” Would you talk about the importance of empathy as you gather historical information for your books?

Nelson: That passage from that interview probably grew from my describing an NPR interview I had heard with Jonathan Franzen, in which he said that if he had any genius at all, it was a genius for empathy; that his novels grow out of his ability to empathize with his characters. I was very much impressed by his saying that. I think empathy is important in anything we do, and I’ve felt it as a gift as I’ve written about characters who are not me. I suppose I felt this most strongly, most deeply, as I wrote in the voices of ancient Trojan women who came to life for me when I rendered Euripides’s Hecuba into contemporary American English. How I wept, writing as Hecuba, the queen of Troy, taken as a slave after Troy falls. I’ve felt similarly as I’ve written in other voices, closer in time to me, but similarly distant from my personal experience.

McGrath: What is historical research in poetry? Do the methods differ from writing a scholarly piece? I know that you travel a lot when researching these books. Would people be surprised by the kinds of places and experiences that you’ve found useful?

Nelson: I’ve never written a scholarly piece based on history, so I can’t talk to the question of whether the research methods differ. My scholarly writing, what there was of it, was based on literary research. I have done some research travel, thanks to grants from the University of Connecticut Research Foundation. Most—if not all—of that travel involved research into the life of George Washington Carver. I suppose one trip that might surprise people, a story I’ve told many times, happened because after visiting the Carver Museum at Tuskegee in Alabama, I was on a flight home when a terrible thunderstorm grounded all flights. I don’t know where we were, in an airport to wait out the storm, when I sat next to a pleasant and talkative young white man who wound up telling me the story of his life. It turned out that he was at that point a graduate student at the University of Nebraska, studying organic plastics with a professor who was the world’s leading expert on organic plastics. I told this young man that I had seen something at the Carver Museum that was identified as an organic plastic Carver had made, and that I had been wondering how I could write about that. He gave me the name of his professor and said I should talk to him. So a few weeks later I was in that professor’s office, telling him about Carver and being told books I should look at. And a few more weeks later, I was sending that professor drafts of two or three lines of a poem imagining Carver’s work on organic plastic, and the professor was responding with encouragement and correction, and now no one would know, reading those two or three lines, how seriously accurate their apparent simplicity is. (“...What would happen / if you made a resin of peanut oil / and added a little bit / of this nitric acid here, / some of that sulphuric acid there, / some alcohol, some camphor, / a little of this, a little of that? / Would the molecules form clusters / tightly bonded into one plastic / which could then be shaped and molded?”) Another research trip took me to Germany, to research the lives of three German women mystics. People might be surprised to imagine me in the cellar of the office furniture store where the foundations of the monastery where Hildegard von Bingen spent her girlhood still stand.

McGrath: You mention using both research and imagination. How do you find a balance between the two? Would you talk about the approach to history in Carver, where all of the poems’ speakers are others?

Nelson: I don’t know if I’ve found a balance, or whether such a balance is necessary or desirable. In the writing of Carver, I was so awed by the fact that Carver was a true genius, his intellect so far beyond mine, that I was afraid to try to write in his voice. Instead, I chose speakers more “normal,” real, historical persons who knew the story by experience, to tell each story illuminating Carver’s life and character.

McGrath: I have such affection for Sweethearts of Rhythm, in which you wrote about “the greatest all-girl swing band in the world” in an unusual way: through the instruments they played. How did you come to that perspective and did it allow you to say things differently than if you had written in the voices of the young women?

Nelson: My late brother, who was a musician, suggested it might be more interesting to have the instruments tell the stories. He said each instrument has its own character, and then he described them. The trombones always travel in a pack, slapping each other on the shoulder and saying, “I love you, man!” The trumpet tends to be a pushy loudmouth, etc. I loved that perspective. It was so much fun! I’m only sorry I forgot to include the clarinets. That oversight bothers me a lot.

McGrath: A number of your books have focused on history in Connecticut. One of the more recent, The Meeting House, was a request by the congregation of the First Congregational Church of Old Lyme to celebrate their anniversary—was it 200th? As in all your books, you don’t shy away from uncomfortable things—in this case, Connecticut’s fraught relationship with slavery and freed slaves. I know my own understanding of the history of Connecticut has evolved after reading your books. And I can’t help but think this has informed my view of what is occurring at this time in history. What is your wish for your readers?

Nelson: It was for their 350th anniversary. The church was founded in 1666; the book was published in 2016. It’s still not finished: it ends in 1910. I hope to pick up the thread again soon, and to write another twenty or so poems to bring the story up to the present. That church has changed and grown so much in those intervening years. I’d like to present its awakening and ever-widening empathy as a model for other mostly-white American churches. My wish for my readers? Empathy, I suppose. A humble willingness to learn.

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Dolores Hayden is a poet and historian of the American landscape. Exuberance (Red Hen Press, 2019, currently a finalist for the 2020 Connecticut Book Award in Poetry) is her third collection, following American Yard, and Nymph, Dun, and Spinner. Her poems have received awards from the Poetry Society of America and the New England Poetry Club, and appear in many journals and anthologies including Poetry, Yale Review, Southwest Review, Ecotone, Best American Poetry, Verse Daily, and Poetry Daily. Professor Emerita of Architecture and American Studies at Yale University, where she taught “Poet’s Landscapes,” former president of the Urban History Association, Hayden has won a Guggenheim and an ALA Notable Book Award. Her nonfiction includes Building Suburbia and The Power of Place.

McGrath: Your most recent poetry collection, Exuberance, explores the early 20th-century history of American aviation through the lives of historical figures. This is a lyrical sequence of persona poems in the voices of people who aren’t generally known to the public. What made you decide to write through the lives of these particular people rather than the usual suspects of the age (the Wright brothers, Earhart, and others)? Did you find them via research? And where did you look?

Dolores Hayden: I wanted to write about risk, money, and excitement. I planned to do a book about Wall Street in 1929 until I noticed bankers talked of nosedives and tailspins. They borrowed these terms from daredevil pilots, men and women who flew between 1910 and 1931 in the exhibition and barnstorming eras, so I decided to pursue the fliers and their death-defying stunts. I read biographies, newspaper interviews, and trade journals. I visited museums to study vintage aircraft, flight suits, and historic photographs. An illustrated guide to early aircraft sat on my desk.

Less well-known figures offer more possibilities for poetry. The Wrights’ activities have been recounted over and over, so I positioned the Wright brothers in a prologue, “Kitty Hawk, 1900.” The postmistress there describes them as two men who can’t get their first glider in the air for very long.

As late as 1910, most Americans had never seen an airplane, but aviation soon became a national craze. I chose a promoter, a parachute jumper, and seven young pilots as the voices for my book. Exuberance begins with “Champ” Pickens, who recruits “Birdmen” and “Birdwomen” to perform at air meets and state fairs. Lincoln Beachey flew under bridges and through buildings. Betty Scott was the first American woman to fly; Harriet Quimby, the first American woman to earn a pilot’s license; and Bessie Coleman, the first African American to earn a license. Ruth Law set distance records. Lock Locklear was the first to walk on the wings of a plane in flight and the first stunt pilot in silent movies, while Clyde Pangborn was a barnstormer who managed to fly the Pacific nonstop.

Competition among the fliers generated the persona poems. The men dominated the field, but I was equally interested in the women pilots’ achievements. To provide more technical details, I added “flying lessons” in the voice of an instructor.

McGrath: You are a Professor Emerita of Architecture, Urbanism, and American Studies at Yale as well as a poet. What parts of your historian’s skill set were most helpful to you as you started the project that became Exuberance?

Hayden: Nonfiction prose requires an argument supported by evidence. Poetry is far more intuitive, more dependent on the ear. Both history and poetry involve storytelling, and when I tackled a poetic sequence set in the early 20th century, Exuberance demanded understanding another time and creating lyrical voices within it.

Although I had researched the early 20th century, aviation was new to me. For Building Suburbia, I flew as a passenger in a small plane to study landscapes from the air. In that book and A Field Guide to Sprawl, I analyzed aerial photographs and landscape history. It wasn’t until writing Exuberance that I understood how important flying fields outside cities were to suburban growth, places like Huffman Prairie (outside Dayton), Dominguez Hills (outside LA), and Hempstead (outside New York), but growth is a topic for an article, not a poem.

The closest precedent for Exuberance was a shorter poetic sequence set in Cornwall, Connecticut, in the early 19th century. “Animal Feelings” portrayed a school run by Protestant ministers training Native Americans to become missionaries. I used the epistolary mode for a fundraising letter, a roster, a grading sheet, several love letters, and a newspaper editorial. It was amusing to write in the first person, present tense, but I worried over how to merge documentary and imaginative worlds. Did I have too many characters? How could I convey a political critique in poetry?

McGrath: What direction and advice would you give to poets who are not trained as historians or researchers who are interested in writing about historical events, places, and people?

Hayden: Poets might begin searching for models of lyric histories, Marilyn Nelson’s wonderful term for poetry about history. At the Portland AWP conference in 2019, Martha Collins, Martín Espada, Marilyn Nelson, Frank X Walker, and I took part in “Poets Claim American History.” We discussed lynchings in Cairo, Illinois; the Paterson silk workers strike; Black cowboys in Oklahoma; a slave who was part of the Lewis and Clark Expedition; and early aviators. Billed as a panel on craft and criticism, we drew an audience well over a hundred, but the event provoked more questions about the poems we wrote than about our methods of accessing and interpreting sources.

Susan Howe’s Spontaneous Particulars: The Telepathy of Archives praises research libraries and archives: “Here is deep memory’s lure, and sheltering.” Howe’s methods are intuitive: “Poetry has no proof nor plan nor evidence by decree or in any other way.”

I believe poetic intuition works best for a writer steeped in the ambiance of time and place, one who knows how to access and interpret sources for any project, whether poetry, fiction, or nonfiction. I start with broad cultural histories. Next, I narrow the subject in terms of people, places, and dates, searching for more focused biographies or journal articles. After framing a potential topic, I search for primary sources. Along with diaries, letters, and written records (including legal and business records), the possibilities include buildings, landscapes, artifacts, photographs, paintings, maps, and costumes. If nothing compelling turns up, I look for a different angle.

Personally, I admire poets who have exploited unusual primary source materials: Marilyn Nelson’s Fortune’s Bones: The Manumission Requiem begins with a skeleton in the Mattatuck Museum in Waterbury, Connecticut; Molly McCully Brown’s The Virginia State Colony for Epileptics and Feebleminded explores spaces in an institution; and Layli Long Soldier’s WHEREAS uses legal documents to trace the loss of Native American lands.

More ordinary sources can also be used very effectively. Tess Taylor’s The Forage House moves through many generations of family history back to slave-owning Virginia. Alice Oswald’s Dart captures the voices of generations of workers, fishermen, and naturalists along the River Dart in Devon, England.

McGrath: Would you talk about the research and writing of one poem in the collection, one that was particularly surprising?

Hayden: Richard Hamblyn’s delightful The Invention of Clouds: How an Amateur Meteorologist Forged the Language of the Skies, introduced me to Luke Howard, the first person to identify clouds the way we do today. I stretched out in a hammock looking at the sky for hours on end. I studied the website of the Cloud Appreciation Society.

The poem I wrote became the first of seven “flying lessons” in Exuberance, and in the process, I realized the imperative could set all the lessons apart and give variation to the book.

McGrath: At the end of Exuberance, you’ve included short biographies of the ten people on whom the persona poems were based, as well as an extensive Notes section, more extensive than I’ve seen in other poetry collections. What is the purpose of this factual thoroughness?

Hayden: Biographical sketches of one to five sentences allow readers to learn more about the historical characters. I placed them at the end because I wanted the characters to reveal themselves in the poems.

Endnotes expand a reader’s understanding and pleasure. My endnotes define a few technical terms and identify sources of quotations. Identifying quotations respects the original speaker.

As a storyteller, I want to engage the broadest possible audience. Poetry about history may delight friends and colleagues who don’t usually read lyric verse. I gave Kyrie by Ellen Bryant Voight to a public health specialist. The Trouble Ball by Martín Espada fit an historian making a documentary on segregation in baseball. Readers make the same connections for me when they send copies of Exuberance to the fliers in their families.

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Roger Sedarat’s poetry collections include Dear Regime: Letters to the Islamic Republic, which won Ohio University Press’s 2007 Hollis Summers’ Prize; Ghazal Games (Ohio University Press); and Haji as Puppet: An Orientalist Burlesque, winner of the 2016 The Word Works’ Tenth Gate Prize for a Mid-Career Poet. A recipient of a Willis Barnstone Prize in Literary Translation, his renderings of classical and contemporary Persian verse have appeared in Poetry, Michigan Quarterly Review, and The Brooklyn Rail. His most recent academic book, Emerson in Iran: the American Appropriation of Persian Poetry, examines Emerson’s translation practices and their influence on the American verse tradition. He teaches poetry and literary translation in the MFA Program at Queens College, City University of New York.

Leslie McGrath: Your most recent book of poems, Haji as Puppet: An Orientalist Burlesque, looks at Persian culture through the Western gaze and Western culture through a lens informed by both cultures. Would you describe how your main character, Haji, came to be?

Roger Sedarat: From my Persian tradition, I’ve always been obsessed with the Sufi poets’ tendency to perform their identity in a spiritual attempt to overcome the ego. As an Iranian American, I was equally intrigued with the play of persona back here in the States, from poets like Berryman to singer-songwriters like Dylan and Notorious B.I.G. Wanting to write in the space between Iran and America, I began experimenting with appropriating the Western Orientalist gaze of the Middle East. It felt uncomfortable, but less so in the voice of the character I came to adopt.

Growing up, my extended Persian family always called me “Haji” since as a kid I tended to ham it up: singing and dancing with these little shows I put on. I came to find out they’d based the name on an American movie, The Adventures of Hajji Baba (with the title song sung by Nat King Cole). That movie, in turn, was based on a 19th-century British picaresque novel, a rather racist depiction of the Persian culture. Haji is a stereotypical opportunist, a real charlatan. If he is with the mullahs, he will pretend to be religious, just to advance in life. As I began researching further, I learned from the comparative scholar Hamid Dabashi how the Iranian translator of the British novel into Persian actually re-appropriated much of the stereotype in his literary rendering. This got me obsessed with the Persian version of the English novel. Haji was really born in that scandalous attempt of the translator to reclaim his culture through literature.

McGrath: Haji is a fictional character living in the real world. What opportunities did this create and what limitations, if any?

Sedarat: Just the very name creates both opportunities and limitations. “Haji” has so much ambiguity, both in the East and West. The name refers to a Muslim who has taken the sacred pilgrimage (Hajj) to Mecca, but it’s also a horribly racist term used by members of the American military in the Middle East. With my early experiments writing in his voice, a very good journal to which I submitted some poems responded that while they really liked what I’d written, there is no way they could print something with racist implications. I don’t think they fully realized that as an Iranian, I was deliberately appropriating the Western gaze of the East! As a fictional character, there is something incredibly folkloric about him in Iran, maybe like Rip Van Winkle or even Huckleberry Finn in the American tradition. He ultimately carries a lot of cultural currency, which offers productive, and often creative, complications.

McGrath: The term “historical research” in poetry is less well-defined than it is in nonfiction. How would you describe it?

Sedarat: I best like Robert Frost’s description of how poets tend to research. He said something to the effect that unlike traditional scholars who uncover academic material with a ploddingly exhaustive linear method, poets often make the same kind of lyrical leaps in their research as they do in their verse. Of course, I’m speaking for myself here, as I know of many poets who for a given project must do more of the typical academic research. Sometimes, though, attempting to radically jump around varied sources, mining images or rhetoric by circling a given theme, ends up writing the verse in very unexpected ways. The research process itself becomes a kind of poetry.

McGrath: What are the main pieces of history and literature that you chose to highlight and how did you do this?

Sedarat: First and foremost, I focused on the 19th-century British picaresque novel, The Adventures of Hajji Baba of Ispahan by J.J. Morier. Then I turned to its adaption to 1950s Hollywood, juxtaposing its Orientalist depictions with current movies, TV shows, and songs about the Middle East. Of course, I also went back to Edward Said, then to theorists who came after him. Throughout the process, I kept trying to figure Haji into my literary reinventions, but felt especially controlled by his narrative in the existing texts, much like he himself seems to inhabit a fatalistic Orientalist universe.

My ultimate postmodern turn, wherein I presented Haji in meta-relation to my poetic reconstructions of his previous constructions, led me to the rich history of the puppet tradition in Iran. I’d never intended to go there, but that’s where research seemed to take me. Looking to Omar Khayyam on puppeteering, while putting together all I was finding on the Western gaze of the Middle East, ultimately led me to the unifying principle of the whole poetry collection, Haji as Puppet: an Orientalist Burlesque.

McGrath: During the course of writing the book, did you go down any rabbit holes in terms of your research? This speaks to the question of which drove which, writing or research.

Sedarat: As a folkloric character who to some extent has come off the page of the original story and into Persian culture, Haji couldn’t quite reconcile with all of the creative turns I wanted to take with what had previously been scripted about him. Years ago, before the publication of my first book (which featured earlier experiments with Haji), I gave a reading as part of the waiter scholarship at the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference. A rather established poet and critic came up to me afterwards, curious about what I was doing with Haji. As I went on to describe his background for several minutes and all of his iterations in the West and East, the acclaimed mentor started to look exhausted. He rightly told me that there was just too much going on around this character, saying I’d need to make some tough choices. He was right, in a way, meaning I had to choose what specifically to bring into the American verse tradition. Paradoxically, this meant trying to simplify an already overtly two-dimensional literary figure. In ways I’d never anticipated, stumbling on the history of Western burlesque shows, along with revisiting the ancient Persian puppetry, helped figure Haji into the right stylistic play for him. The research set the stage, so to speak, for Haji’s performance in my book.

McGrath: Is there any aspect of the subject of how poets use historical research in their work that I’ve not covered? Any stories, surprises, or advice?

Sedarat: I know this might sound cliché, but as in the creative work, leaving space for surprises with the research proved most important. Looking at visual depictions of Haji in different editions of the 19th-century novel helped inform my reinvention of him. Related to this, I found myself pushing into different disciplines like never before. Coming from an academic background in English literature, as so many poets do in the United States, I have a tendency to think of research as literary based. Sometimes it is, but the songs about Haji, previous performances of him, artistic drawings and paintings of him, movies made in his name, etc., these helped me just as much, if not more, than the original book. Studying the struggle of brilliant performers trapped in the limitations of racism like Josephine Baker did as much, if not more, for this collection than my years of studying traditional Persian poetry.

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Kiki Petrosino is the author of four books of poetry, including White Blood: A Lyric of Virginia, published by Sarabande Books. Her poems have appeared in Poetry, The Nation, The New York Times, and elsewhere. Petrosino is a Professor of Poetry at the University of Virginia. Her awards include a Pushcart Prize, a Fellowship in Creative Writing from the National Endowment for the Arts, and an Al Smith Fellowship Award from the Kentucky Arts Council.

McGrath: Your fourth poetry collection, White Blood: A Lyric of Virginia, is a look at that State, its history of slavery, and your emotional and genetic ties to it. There’s a wealth of poems rich with various vectors of history, from accounts of historic places like Jefferson’s Monticello to your own DNA results. How and where did you begin to look? Were you led to any surprising historical sources?

Kiki Petrosino: I started with my family’s oral history, which is the traditional first step in genealogy. My now-late grandmother had recounted stories of her early life in rural Virginia and in 1930s Washington, D.C., so I already knew some of the locations this book would address. My mother and I traveled to Virginia together a couple of times to visit various historical societies, museums, and physical sites. She also helped confirm details from my grandmother’s stories, since she’d heard them, too. There was, actually, quite a bit that we learned just from stories, and this was surprising because I had expected to spend more time in archives and libraries. On one of our trips to Louisa, Virginia, my mother befriended a group of old-timers at a local country store. When she asked about my great-grandparents (who had farmed nearby), the gentlemen had a lot of wonderful details to share. In just a few minutes, they pointed out nearby houses my great-grandfather had built; drew a map to the location of a family gravesite; and unanimously agreed that my great-grandfather was the best turkey hunter in the county.

McGrath: You’ve built a number of poems on DNA test results. Would you talk about the process of re-forming data into lyric poetry?

Petrosino: This past fall, I led an intermediate-level poetry workshop at the University of Louisville, and decided to teach a classic erasure text: Ronald Johnson’s Radi Os, which reconfigures Milton. In witnessing my students engage with this work, I realized anew how paradoxically freeing the constraint of erasure can be as a compositional practice. Johnson finds, within Milton’s text, space to contemplate, and enact, the strange magic of the creative process.

In my DNA erasures, I attempt to foreground the mysteries of heritage embedded within the analytical language we might use to “explain” our origins. The fact that an individual, microscopic segment of DNA contains within it a multitude of histories is straight up wild. The body—like the body of the poem—already knows where we came from.

McGrath: What is heritage tourism and how did you utilize it? Some of the most ambivalent and moving poems seemed to result from this kind of research.

Petrosino: Heritage tourism refers to the practice of traveling to places that represent the people, stories, and legacies of the past. In Virginia, where I now reside, tourists from around the world visit preserved Civil War battlefields, tour Thomas Jefferson’s Monticello, and interact with the “living history” interpreters at Colonial Williamsburg. I grew up visiting such places along the East Coast, and loving the sense of “living history” that these experiences foster. At the same time, I’m interested in how these sites address the complexities of pain—racism, oppression, and discrimination—that, often, undergird the beauty of the restoration. The tourist, particularly the tourist of color, ends up feeling “some kind of way” after a plantation tour, for example. I wanted to make poems to capture the emotions that arise after that particular experience.

McGrath: In the section of the collection entitled “Louisa” are a number of poems featuring the Free Smiths of Louisa County and the Butler family. How did you shape these characters? Are they entirely historical, fictional, a mixture? And do questions like this matter when reading a book of poems?

Petrosino: The figures of Butler, Harriett, and the Free Smiths are a mixture of historical and imaginary ancestors. Harriett and Butler Smith, mother and son, lived in Louisa County, Virginia, in the 19th and 20th centuries. They belong to that transformational American generation—born in the era of enslavement and emerging from the Civil War into freedom (itself, a fraught notion in this country). These Smiths left no written diaries or letters, but the few courthouse records I can find show a hardworking, incredibly tenacious family whose members built homesteads, farmed, and stayed together in rural Virginia, despite all the institutional barriers intended to prevent just that. In the poems, the Free Smiths merge into a collective voice which alternately assists and admonishes the genealogist. My hope is that the reader will sense, not only the evidence of historical research in these poems, but also the complex silences that make up their own kind of archive.

McGrath: In “Message From the Free Smiths of Louisa County,” the speaker seems to be talking through history to the reader about how literacy contributes to agency and ultimately to “true freedom.” Would you talk about how literacy of one’s own history contributes to true freedom?

Petrosino: In my family, I can measure the seismic impact of literacy across generations. After Reconstruction, African American families worked with the Freedmen’s Bureau to build schools in countless towns; there are pencil sketches of planned school buildings in Bureau records. In just a few generations, my own ancestors transitioned from farmers and (in the case of the women) homemakers to teachers, doctors, government workers, and, um, poets. We have gone from signing our names with an X to writing our own stories. Literacy enables us to receive the lessons of history, but in writing this book, I’ve learned that literacy can work two ways, kind of like a radio signal. I spent much of my research time trying to “read” my ancestor’s lives through the scant records of government, but at some point, I started looking at the land itself as my ancestors’ book. In working the land—clearing it, harvesting its produce, and burying their departed loved ones in it—my ancestors composed a message that I can read, generations later. Silence, too, is a text. In keeping back certain information from the oral history—the names of their enslavers, for example—my ancestors convey another aspect of their agency. They are teaching me what to keep, and what to let go. It is freedom to be able to read this way.

*

“The research process itself becomes a kind of poetry,” says Roger Sedarat, and this became blazingly true as I conducted these short interviews. Each poet approached their project as we all do, with certain hopes and intentions for the work, and each found both what they wanted and what they hadn’t been looking for. A conversation with a stranger on a plane, an old photograph album, curiosity about a family nickname, a DNA report, each of these was an opportunity for imaginative exploration. I suppose the answer to the question “what is historical research in poetry?” is less a list of actions than the understanding that anything the world brings us can become poetry.

Marilyn Nelson, Dolores Hayden, Roger Sedarat, and Kiki Petrosino are writing from the early part of the American 21st-century poetry collections deeply informed by history. And they’re by no means the only poets doing so. While contemporary American poetry can be seen as speaking with a more representative voice after a couple of decades of intentional diversification, it is also using the tools of historical research to broaden and re-shape its frame. Readers of poetry now encounter history made more vivid by poetry’s distillation and heightened language. At a time when American culture seems to be circling back to eras marked by fear and cruelty, our poetry is an urgent reminder that perspective and empathy are what will move us forward.

Leslie McGrath’s interviews with poets have appeared regularly in The Writer’s Chronicle. Winner of the 2004 Pablo Neruda Prize for poetry, she is the author of Opulent Hunger, Opulent Rage (2009), a poetry collection, and Out From the Pleiades: a picaresque novella in verse (Jaded Ibis Press, 2014).

Editor’s Note: Sadly, Leslie McGrath passed away after a brief illness in August 2020. As a valued member and friend of AWP, and a frequent contributor to The Writer’s Chronicle, she will be sorely missed.

 

Excerpt
from Carver: a life in poems

 

From An Alabama Farmer

Dere Dr. Carver, I bin folloring
the things I herd you say last planting time.
I give my cow more corn, less cottonseed
and my creme chirns mo better butter. I’m
riting to you today, Sir, jes to tell
you at I furtulize: 800 pounds
to the acur las March. Come harvest, well
it were a bompercrop. How did you found
out you could use swamp mock? I presheate
your anser Dr. Carver by mail soon.
What maid my cotton grow? It do feel grate
to see the swet off your brow com to bloom.
I want to now what maid my miricle.
Your humbel servint (name illegible

“From an Alabama Farmer” in Carver: A Life in Poems, published by Front Street.
Copyright © Marilyn Nelson 1997. Reprinted with permission from Boyds Mills & Kayne. All rights reserved.

 

Excerpt
from Exuberance

 

Flying Lesson: Clouds

Focus on the shapes: cirrus, a curl,
stratus, a layer, cumulus, a heap.

Humilis, a small cloud,
cumulus humilis, a fine day to fly.

Incus, the anvil, stay grounded.
Nimbus, rain, be careful,

don’t take off near nimbostratus,
a shapeless layer

of rain, hail, ice, or snow.
Ice weighs on the blades

of? your propeller, weighs
on the entering edge

of your wings. Read a cloud,
decode it, a dense, chilly mass

can shift, flood with light.
Watch for clouds closing under you:

the sky opens in a breath,
shuts in a heartbeat.

“Flying Lesson: Clouds” in Exuberance.
Copyright © Dolores Hayden 2019. Reprinted with permission from Red Hen Press. All rights reserved.

 

Excerpt
from Haji as Puppet: An Orientalist Burlesque

 

Faux Revolution, 2007

A poet caught in the performance of his life.
You think it’s so easy standing up for yourself
when the repressive regime you’re fighting
has less blood on its hands than a land proclaiming
idyllic freedom? Sure, he cried this 4th of July
as the band played ‘God Bless America.’
Later, at relative peace with hypocrisy,
as suburbanites slept in their beds,
he climbed out of his attic window
and onto his roof, shouting,
‘Death to the dictator!’ and ‘God is great’
as random fireworks rained overhead.
Dogs howled. Rows of houselights came on.
Folks emerged on their lawns in their PJ’s.
Finally, a heavy-set neighbor
in wife-beater and boxers yelled,

‘Hey buddy, you’re in Jersey! It’s a free country.
Now shut the fuck up and let us get some sleep!’

Here stands Haji, silenced on the stage.
Nobody even takes his picture,
the consequence
of being
in the wrong place
at the right time.”

“Faux Revolution 2007” in Haji as Puppet: An Orientalist Burlesque, published by Word Works. Copyright © Roger Sedarat 2017.
Reprinted with permission from Roger Sedarat. All rights reserved.

 

Excerpt
from White Blood: A Lyric of Virginia

 

Louisa County Patrol Claims, 1770–1863

I pry open the files, still packed
                   with liquor & strange brine.

Midnight seeps from the cracks
                  slow pulp of arithmetic. Four or five

or six at a time, the white men draw
                  along the Gordonsville Road, on foot

or on horseback, clustered close—
                each man coun

of each man’s tongue at the hinge
                of his own mouth. For ninety-three years

& every time I slip away to read
              those white men line the roadway

secreting themselves in the night air
                 feeding & breathing in their private

column. Why belly up to their pay stubs
                 scraping my teeth on the chipped flat

of each page? This dim drink only blights me
                  but I do it.

“Faux Revolution 2007” in Haji as Puppet: An Orientalist Burlesque, published by Word Works. Copyright © Roger Sedarat 2017.
Reprinted with permission from Roger Sedarat. All rights reserved.