​AN INTERVIEW WITH DONIKA KELLY

​When did you first start writing poetry? 
 
I started writing during my senior year of high school. But later, I read Natasha Trethewey’s work in an MFA program, and A. Van Jordan assigned Native Guard. I finished and thought "This is a perfect book." The book let me know: "You can be clear in your poems." People can know what's happening. You can invite people into the feeling more clearly. That was really exciting. It took me a long time to figure out how to do it and it's something I'm still working on. But Native Guard was the pivotal book for me. I'd already been writing for five or six years and that was a big transition for me. 

Who inspires you?
 
Natasha Trethewey. She's the first poet I read where I understood what was happening. There is so much music in her work, and her craft is impeccable. There's so much feeling rumbling under the surface. Her work to me feels geologic—it feels like there's magma just under the poems' surface. 

And I’ve been reading a lot of Lucille Clifton, Carl Phillips, and Cameron Awkward-Rich. My close friend Destiny Birdsong's work also deals with big feelings in a way that is so much more direct and taps into feelings we're less likely to talk about. So, it's not magma—it’s lava. It has broken the surface. Her first poetry collection, Negotiations, came out last year. The feelings are challenging and I want to be brave like her at some point. But being brave like that might not be my vibe.
 
Your first poetry collection, Bestiary, was deemed a "remarkable first book" by reviewers and received ample awards and acclaim. Did you ever worry that your second collection, The Renunciations, wouldn’t live up to readers’ expectations?
 
I was very happy with Bestiary’s reception, but I also know nothing could happen with this book. People could read it and be like “Oh, I don’t like this as much as I liked Bestiary.” There are many ways that people could respond to the book that is outside of my control. What I have control over is writing the poems and making a book that feels good and that excites me. I did the thing that I know how to do—writing poems that felt good—and the work in The Renunciations feels like some of my best writing.
 
Your poetry is so urgent—it feels a life-saving. Do you find it necessary for you. as a survivor of trauma, to express yourself through the medium of poetry? Can you imagine turning toward another art-form instead?
 
There's a part of me that thinks, “No, poetry isn't necessary,” but that’s not how I've lived my life. I've lived my life as if poetry were quite necessary. It gives me a space to craft my way through an experience. I go to therapy—I've been in therapy for like almost twenty years now. I love therapy. Just talking. Talking about myself feels like very American—just to go in for an hour to talk about myself. But, in poetry, I'm translating those experiences into art. And the making of art feels important. It's one of the ways that I center my own experiences. I’m thinking: "How did I get here? How do I understand my relationship to myself? How do I understand my relationship to others?" I get to spend time with myself in a way that is curious and tender and gentle.
 
I'm not sure what I would do without poetry. I've written prose, but my prose is not very interesting. And I enjoy painting but, again, it's not very interesting visually. I feel like there's something about the mechanics of poetry that makes sense with how I think.
 
What's your writing process like? You mentioned just sitting down and asking yourself what you feel like writing today? Is it always as simple as that?
 
If I get the sense that I have something to say then, yes, I just sit down and I think, "What do I have to say?"

A while back, I had a two-week-long writing session where I did some asynchronous writing with a friend: we wrote for twenty minutes a day for two weeks. and that led to more writing. I wrote a group of poems that came really early but then in the second week I had to ask myself, "What am I going to do now?" And it was winter, so I thought, "I want to write about summer." And I wondered, "What do I think about when I think about summer?" And the answer was: my great-grandma. Then I thought, “Well, what's the feeling?" And it was just mush. I just loved her. She was just such a wonderful person. So I wrote a poem about summer, but that was a boring set up. So I dug deeper, asking, "What's the tension that complicates this?" That’s more what my process looks like now: I decide what I want to write about and then follow my own trail: What's inside of summer that I might actually want to explore?
 
Was there a specific process for writing the poems in The Renunciations, or was it a similar to that: just following your own trail?
 
It was similar for the later poems. But the poems about childhood sexual abuse: I felt compelled to write those even though I really didn't want to write them. I had to ask myself how to do so in a way that felt safe. Again, checking in with myself, figuring out what felt comfortable and doable. And I worked with my therapist. I knew that it was going to be difficult material to navigate. I asked myself lots of questions and then figured out like what felt possible.
 
In this collection, you take readers back and forth between the “then” and the “now.” Can you speak more on the structure of this book?
 
The book moves back and forth between those two strands and the section headers “Now” and “Then” are meant to help locate the reader in time and give the reader a sense of stability. I think of it as a two-strand twist: one of the strands is me writing about the end of my marriage, and the other strand is me thinking through the experience of having been sexually abused as a child by my dad and trying to understand what feels possible in relating to him. I wanted to understand how I relate to myself in terms of "What do I need to hold onto there, and what do I need to let go of?
 
What about the Oracle? Where did this image come from?

When I finished Bestiary, I decided that I was going to try to write poems where the speaker looked like me and not like a Griffin or chimera. The speaker was a person who was in a person's body, navigating the world. Which felt really scary. In Bestiary, it was either: a first-person poem is a persona, or I use the second-person "you" rather than "I" or "me." I decided I wanted to do something different going forward. 

The Renunciations' poems are primarily in first-person but, for some of the events, having a speaker who looked like me was still too hard. So the Oracle emerged. It felt like a safer persona with which to navigate some of the elements around the abuse.
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I also think that it gave me a way of thinking about my dad's history—a history I don't know very well. I was interested in the figure of the Oracle as a being that can see the future, which is also a way of seeing the present, which is also a way of seeing the past. The Oracle sits in time in a very strange way, and it emerged as a good strategy for navigating some of the experiences that cross decades. It’s also another way of me taking care of myself: it comes in as a buffer to navigate challenging scenarios.
 
Tell us about these apostrophes you have in this book. There’s a lot of “Dear (blank).” What’s the story behind this choice?
 
In the sections about the end of the relationship, I was drawing on a therapeutic technique of writing letters that you don't plan to send. It felt like a safe way to speak to someone I loved but with whom it was not possible to actually speak. There were things that I needed to say, and the epistles allowed me to do that.

My dad is not a person I talk with, and I don't want to imagine talking with him. But toward the end of my marriage, it was still possible to talk with my partner, and that felt like an important dynamic to hold onto. To remember that there's a person on the other end creates a sense of gentleness. I’m not writing into the void—there's a person who I once cared about who is on the other end of the epistolary poem.
 
What are you working on now? Do you have more to write on these subjects or are there other things on the horizon for you?
 
I don't see these two relationships as being the primary focus of my work going forward. This book is titled The Renunciations because I am doing some renouncing. I am removing some folks from the center of my life so that I can sit more firmly at the center.

These days, I'm thinking about whales. Cetaceans, broadly, so whales and dolphins and also the octopus. There's something about their evolution that seems so strange. Whales are the ancestors of deer. Deer are related to whales. That doesn't make any sense to me. How do you get from a deer to a whale? That's nonsense. I'm enjoying thinking about that and thinking about transformation through the lens of evolution and geologic time. I'm trying to talk to scientists and people are interested in this concept. I'm trying not to pressure on writing about poems about anything specific, but that is the direction I am writing into.

I'm also writing love poems. I love writing love poems. I've been writing poems for my friends and thinking about my friends and the women in my life, specifically. My partner now loves to receive them, so that's exciting. I’m always writing love poems for her. ⋆

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Donika Kelly is the author of The Renunciations and Bestiary, winner of the Cave Canem Poetry Prize, a Hurston/Wright Legacy Award for Poetry, and the Kate Tufts Discovery Award. A Cave Canem graduate fellow and member of the collective Poets at the End of the World, Donika has also received a Lannan Residency Fellowship and a summer workshop fellowship from the Fine Arts Work Center. Her poems have been published in The New Yorker, The Atlantic online, The Paris Review, and Foglifter. She currently lives in Iowa City and is an Assistant Professor at the University of Iowa, where she teaches creative writing.

Julia Medina is an undergraduate student at the University of San Francisco, where she will graduate in May 2021 and will then pursue her MFA in creative writing. Currently, she is working on her thesis, a work of fiction that explores an unreliable narrator's obsessive paradox between love and lust. ​​