Roger Reeves discusses political poetry in the American landscape
Roger Reeves sat at a booth in the Sheraton Hotel, his hands whirling as he named his favorite poets. His eyes cocked upward, he quickly bulleted off a long list: Robert Hayden, Gwendolyn Brooks, Terence Hayes and so on — his answers both fast and forceful. Later that afternoon, the same energy would be displayed at the first Raymond Carver Reading of the spring semester.
Reeves’ work has been published in magazines such as Poetry, American Poetry Review and Tin House, and his first book “King Me” was named one of Library Journal’s “Best Poetry Books of 2013.” The book, which he read from at the Raymond Carver Reading Series on Wednesday at 5:30 p.m. in Gifford Auditorium, examines issues of love, masculinity, poverty, class and race relations through Reeves’ intense descriptions. Before his reading, Reeves sat down with The Daily Orange to talk about his craft, the tensions in America’s political landscape and more.
The Daily Orange: You are often coined as a socially-engaged or politically-engaged poet. Do you view yourself in that way?
Roger Reeves: I think to be politically engaged is to be a love poet. I think you love people if you are politically engaged, though, you can also hate people and be politically engaged — i.e. Donald Trump. He hates a lot of people, but maybe it’s just his public persona that hates people. But yeah, I view myself as a politically-engaged poet, as well as a poet that is interested in other things — interested in nature, interested in the collision … If we think about the fact that people are being lynched outside in trees. Like to me if I am writing a lynching poem I am writing a nature poem — I see myself as a nature poet as well. And when I am writing an elegy, writing an elegy is the highest form of love, so I am a love poet. So I feel like I am a nature poet, a love poet, a socially-engaged poet, a politically engaged poet — but I don’t see these things as being mutually exclusive but really see them intersecting with each other. It is really hard to just be one type of poet, because the world doesn’t exist on one plane.
The D.O.: In a speech you gave for Poets and Writers Live in Chicago in 2015, you spoke about when poets write on tragedies they are “rendering violence anew.” Can you delve into that a little more?
R.R.: You have the initial event — let’s take Emmet Till’s Lynching, let’s take Eric Garner’s choking by a police officer in New York. And what you have there is the instantiation of violence that happens. How I construct it on the page is not actually how it happened — that’s my construction of it. So I am using language to remake something that I have seen via recording, so how you might write it is very different than how I might write. So therefore I am in some ways making violence through the linguistic making of this sentence or the poem. So it becomes my violence then. So I have to think about what I am doing with that violence. I could romanticize it, I could make it a tragedy, I could do something in between — you have to have a very ethical approach to it. Because what are we doing? Are we celebrating that violence? We know that violence is horrible. We don’t need a poem to tell you that you shouldn’t choke people in the streets. You don’t need a poem to tell you that — or maybe we do. Maybe someday needs that poem, maybe we do need, “don’t choke black people in the streets poems.” But I do think we are rendering violence anew because we are revisiting that violence, re-killing that person anew.
The D.O.: Your poems are being taught in classes at Syracuse University, and something that comes up a lot is your density and intensity of your images. What do you think that adds to your work versus something that students may view as more “accessible?”
R.R.: I think it is accessible because you can see it. It’s so funny — we talk about accessibility in poetry, the language there is pretty plain in a certain sense, but what I am asking you to do is think about the juxtaposition. And I think when you live in different places or when you see America with different eyes, you start to see the juxtapositions for instance when you can stand next to extreme poverty and extreme wealthy. I would be in places in Rio de Janeiro, and you would see children huffing from discarded bottles. They would break off caulking, and they would take dry ice and activate the caulking and get high off of that. They were like 8 years old and you would see them next to clubs that people would come out after a night of partying … You have all these instances when you have two different things next to each other, so I am interested in putting them together and starting some type of conversation. So the density is actually because life is dense in that fashion. But are we paying attention to that density?
The D.O.: Students often have a pushback when they read poetry in a formal setting — they say they don’t “get it.” How do you respond to students who say they don’t “get it?”
R.R.: You know what is really funny about this? I challenge somebody to listen to a rap song for the first time, any rap song, and tell me exactly what is happening. They can’t do that, but they feel seduced to listen to it again, they feel seduced by something. I think that you should just read twice — we are thinking about poems as information, we are thinking about it like, how do I build this desk? But that’s not what’s happening. The implicit pedagogy of a poem is how did I better understand something that seems un-understandable, what is difficult. Poetry is interested in the difficult. I would say to students if they are listening to rap, they can understand poems …