One might not expect a collection of poetry with subject matter as diffuse as a lynching and the board game Clue to hang together. But Nicole Sealey’s second book, Ordinary Beast, manages to perfectly blend the heartbreaking and the hilarious — often in a single stanza. A timely and haunting meditation on love, gender, race, and the body, Ordinary Beast is already receiving high praise, landing on NPR’s most anticipated Poetry Books of 2017 list and Publishers Weekly‘s Top 10 Poetry Books of 2017.

When she is not writing, Sealey is the executive director of Cave Canem, an organization that cultivates and supports the work of black poets, with its fellows going on to win, among other awards, the Pulitzer Prize, the National Book Award, and the NAACP Image Award. Sealey credits the poets she has worked with through Cave Canem with keeping her on her literary toes.

I spoke with Sealey during the harried days before her book launch about the importance of accessible language in poetry, self-care, and the many meanings of love. The following is an edited transcript of our conversation. —Amy Gall

The Barnes & Noble Review: I remember seeing you read some of these poems last year, and I was struck by how different it feels reading them by myself. There’s something simultaneously more intimate and lonelier about not having you, the writer narrating the experience. Do you feel like you write for both the page and the stage? What are you most attuned to when you are writing a poem?

Nicole Sealey: I remember that reading and I hear you. I think, though, listening to a poet read her work at a venue and reading a poet’s work alone at home are two very different experiences. In the former, the poet is much more aware of the once abstract idea of an “audience” and, accordingly, curates a “set” of poems. In between poems, that poet may engage the audience in a back-and-forth and provide backstory for specific poems. At home alone, however, a reader gets none of that; but, what she will get is a chance to sit with the work at length and, in so doing, sit with herself and her own thoughts at length, which can feel lonely.

Without thought to how poems will eventually be shared, I just try to write the best poems I can, given my limitations as an imperfect person. To me, a poem is a translation of thought and experience into something capable of being shared and, to some extent, understood — no matter page or stage.

BNR: I’m always fascinated by how poets approach the overall structure of a book and how they know when a collection is done. What was the process of working on this collection like for you?

NS: My approach has always been poem by poem. Making a poem, in my opinion, is less daunting than making a book. Had I been writing towards a collection, I probably would not have completed Ordinary Beast, and if I had, it would be a very different book — one that doesn’t reflect my natural associative way of thinking.

About her way of writing, poet Adélia Prado said, “Who am I to organize the flight of the poem.” Not only do I agree, but I would also apply this attitude to the overall structure of the book and knowing when it’s finished.

BNR: When you are writing poems like “Legendary,” in which you reference Venus Xtravaganza, Pepper LeBeija, and Octavia Saint Laurent, from the documentary Paris Is Burning, is the narrator of those poems purely a persona, or is it also your own voice? Do you find that poetry gives you an opportunity to slip into characters or fictive voices, or are you most often writing from your own experience?

NS: Those poems are a combination of personae (not Xtravaganza, LaBeija, or Saint Laurent, exactly, but my limited and loose impressions of them) and myself. I’m not as wise or as charismatic as they were, so I knew early on that my voice would have to do. Who am I to speak for anyone anyway? Voice for the voiceless is a phrase that floats around whenever poets write from a perspective other than their own. I don’t subscribe to that, because no one is without voice.

Though poetry does provide me with the opportunity to slip into characters, those characters, if not myself, are fictional — ones I’ve invented based on real people and for the purposes of specific poems. Poetry also allows me to slip into and out of character, my own character. By nature, I’m a classic introvert. With the “Legendary” series, however, I allowed myself to be a bit of a show-off, a showman. It felt good!

I always write from my own experience — I have no other choice. Even if I were to imitate a poet, the style might be theirs but the voice would still be my own. Everything I write (or think or do) is influenced by what I’ve seen and experienced across my thirty-seven-odd years.

BNR: You thank the reader in your dedication and speak to the reader in your work. Do you have a reader or audience in mind when you write? Who do you imagine them to be?

NS: I do, yes! I’m so thankful to my readers. There are millions and millions of books in the world. That readers pick up Ordinary Beast is a great blessing that shouldn’t go unmentioned, so it doesn’t. Plus, the book is a conversation between readers and myself, so why not talk directly with them? That’s the least I can do as an active participant in the conversation.

I hope my audience is anyone/everyone who reads — the more the merrier. I don’t have a specific “audience” in mind so much as a person I envision during the writing process. My computer screen might as well be a mirror, because I imagine someone who looks like me — a black woman. I’m comfortable in her company and am able to be myself, whatever myself is at that moment.

BNR: There is a line in “Cento for the Night I Said, ‘I Love You’ “ where you say love is “not a heartbeat but a moan.” To me that conjures a sense of love that is intense but fleeting. What do you think love is and did writing this collection change or influence your concept of love?

NS: The average person’s life isn’t that long, if they’re lucky about seventy-nine years. Of those years, exactly how many are filled with love? Love is fleeting because life itself is fleeting. And, there are many kinds of love — romantic love, as you know, is different than familial love.

Love is indescribable. If I had to describe the romantic love about which “Cento for the Night I Said, ‘I Love You’ ” is referring, I’d say that it is an admixture of ecstasy, duende, negative capability, and desire. The line, “Love is like this; / not a heartbeat, but a moan,” I think, best describes this admixture.

Merely living has made me think more frequently and critically about love, which is probably the case with most people. With Ordinary Beast, I was able to continue my exploration of the abstraction. I still don’t have any answers, but at least I know what questions I’d ask if ever given the opportunity for definitive answers.

BNR: Bodily pain is so present in these poems, particularly the ways black bodies are misrepresented or trapped or violated. How do you approach writing about difficult subjects? How do you take care of yourself in that process?

NS: I take care of myself by actually approaching the difficult subjects head-on. If I didn’t, I’d be a passive participant in my own life. I couldn’t live with that. That wouldn’t champion equity, nor would it cultivate creative risk. Instinctively, I want to live and be as happy as possible while doing so. I want the same for those I love. I want the same for those I don’t know. For those who’ll exist long after I’m gone.

One only needs to open her eyes to see that there is an active, one-sided war against black and brown people in this country, in particular, and in the world at large. Though black pain is a theme in Ordinary Beast, so too is black history, black resilience, black excellence, black power, black joy and black love. All of which sustains me.

BNR: How has your role as executive director of Cave Canem influenced your approach to your work, and how the heck do you find the time to write?

NS: My role as executive director doesn’t influence the way I approach my creative work — though it does affect the regularity of it. Given that there is much to learn in my new role, I haven’t had much time to write. My first day was January 2, 2017. I suspect this will be the case for at least the first year of my tenure.

Now, my time as a Cave Canem fellow and former workshop participant, on the other hand, has made me a craftswoman and diligent reviser. These poets do not play — they bring their A-game at all times. To roll with them, I’ve had to learn to do the same.

BNR: Who are your poetic influences?

NS: This question always gets the best of me because I end up forgetting someone. All that to say, forgive my memory, as I attempt to name a few of my poetic influences in alpha-order: Catherine Barnett, Lucille Clifton, Andrea Cohen, Martha Collins, Brigit Pegeen Kelly, Yusef Komunyakaa, Li-Young Lee, Larry Levis, John Murillo, Marilyn Nelson, Sharon Olds, Willie Perdomo, Carl Phillips, Patrick Phillips, Sylvia Plath, Shakespeare, Patricia Smith, Tracy K. Smith, among others.

BNR: What do you hope for or imagine the future of black poetry to be?

NS: Black poetry is poetry. Black poets will continue to write. My hope for the field is that it expands further, that it welcomes the contributions of poets of color.

BNR: What is your favorite thing about language?

NS: My favorite thing about language is its accessibility, which is one of the things I value most in a poem. At its best, language clarifies, or at least attempts to clarify, one’s thoughts or feelings on a subject. What a great gift we have!

The post “Not a heartbeat, but a moan”: Nicole Sealey appeared first on The Barnes & Noble Review.

The Barnes & Noble Review http://ift.tt/2wjuKB1

Eight months after his inaugural, Donald J. Trump’s presidency is rotting before our eyes. Back in July — and who except nostalgists remembers July? — one poll found that only 25 per cent of Americans were certain he’d complete his first term. Another 30 per cent guessed he “probably” would. Meanwhile, slews of defenestrated and self-defenestrated White House staffers are no doubt already scrambling to publish memoirs, or maybe just get therapy.

This leaves the premise of Jeremi Suri’s The Impossible Presidency: The Rise and Fall of America’s Highest Office looking sharper than it might have if the 2016 election had come out differently. President Hillary Clinton could easily have been almost as unpopular as Trump is by now, but she’d still have been striving to simulate the placebo effect of business as usual. Glass ceiling or no glass ceiling, she’d have been less of a break with tradition.

In ways Suri can’t have anticipated — his book is patently a long-mulled study, not a post-election quickie — The Impossible Presidency is a useful reminder that our complacent definition of “normal” presidencies owes more to custom than innate structural resilience. Most Americans’ idea of the chief executive’s importance in shaping the country’s priorities and gestalt isn’t codified in law. Nor is it enshrined in the Constitution. It’s an accretion of power grabs by the job’s more aggressive holders that culminated, in the author’s view, with Franklin D. Roosevelt’s eager lunge for every available lever in sight.

Since then, Suri argues, the all-encompassing FDR model of presidential bustle and clout has calcified in the public’s imagination. Long before the Marvelverse took over America’s multiplexes, many of us were unconsciously prone to greeting each new inaugural as the latest reboot of a venerable superhero franchise. Meanwhile, the way Suri sees it, the office’s responsibilities have grown too complex and its latter-day confusions too intractable for any of Roosevelt’s successors to truly measure up to the secular-messiah (or master-mechanic) image.

All the same, virtually every president since 1945 has either wanted or felt goaded to somehow handle everything — to function as both “Dr. New Deal” and “Dr. Win-the-War.” In FDR’s original formulation, those roles were consecutive, not simultaneous. But first the Cold War and then the post-9/11 Global War on Terror fused the two permanently.

Trump entered office with the same capacious idea of his bailiwick, coupled with a surreally vainglorious overestimate of his gifts for the job. But beyond his lack of the crudest grasp of the mechanics of government, he’s proven himself temperamentally incapable of abiding by the tactful rituals that keep Oval Office hubris palatable in a democracy. Those two glaring flaws could end up turning Hurricane Donald into the “anti-leader” (Suri’s term) who demolishes our collective acceptance of a presidential supremacy that he thinks is as boundless as he is reckless.

Even in its conventional, pre-Trump editions, first-among-equals status wasn’t the Founders’ notion of the chief executive’s role. He — in those days, “she” was unimaginable — was a cross between a figurehead monarch and an exalted janitor, which right now doesn’t sound too bad. Delineating how we got here from there is the main value of Suri’s work. While good biographies of individual presidents are easily come by, engrossing studies of the office’s evolving nature and reach are rare.

Even so, he isn’t the first political scientist whose worthwhile insights end up falling victim to his preordained schema. The Impossible Presidency is neatly divided into the “Rise” (George Washington, Andrew Jackson, Lincoln, and the two Roosevelts, which makes sense) and the “Fall” (Kennedy and Lyndon Johnson, Ronald Reagan, and Clinton and Obama, which makes less). Aside from the misjudgment of treating JFK/LBJ and then Clinton/Obama as conjoined twins, which is wrongheaded coming and going — it’s bad enough to get Cary Grant mixed up with John Wayne, but not knowing the difference between William Shatner and Leonard Nimoy is unforgivable — too many intervening figures are left out because they don’t fit Suri’s argument.

The MIA Woodrow Wilson defined our world role as a moral policeman, with grimly mixed consequences. The MIA Harry S. Truman invented the national security state. The MIA Dwight D. Eisenhower made brisk use of that new apparatus abroad while successfully — that is, soporifically, which was sly of twentieth-century America’s least-recognized political genius — reverting to the Mount Vernon ideal of an above-the-battle, non-activist, reassuringly humdrum POTUS otherwise.

Then there’s Richard Nixon. Any book on the modern presidency that neglects Nixon’s transfiguration of reflexive respect for the office into permanent suspicion amounts to a high school production of Othello minus its Iago, the two roles Nixon fused into one. In hindsight, “Every Othello his own Iago” was practically Nixon’s own, perceptive translation of E pluribus, unum.

Even so, Suri’s choice of decisive figures in the “Rise” category is hard to quarrel with. Washington is the inevitable starting point, since he invented the job as much as Frankenstein’s monster did his. Without any mandate to do so from the Constitution’s Article II, Washington decided he was responsible for setting national priorities above and beyond Congress’s parochial concerns. More crucially, he also established the executive branch as the sole arbiter of the United States’ embryonic foreign policy, the requirement for Senate approval of formal treaties aside.

When Jackson’s turn came, he rewrote the unwritten rules. Suri accurately calls him “the first populist president, with all the brutality and prejudice that entailed.” Brushing aside the polite fiction that presidents should stay above quotidian political hurly-burly, which had grown increasingly tenuous anyhow from cranky John Adams on, Jackson played to his base, convinced that his “strong powers to act on behalf of popular causes” had few limitations other than the (selectively defined) public will.

But if Jackson was the rough-hewn antithesis to Washington’s austere thesis, synthesis arrived a generation later in the gaunt but wily shape of Abraham Lincoln. “For Jackson and Lincoln,” Suri writes, “an energetic president represented partisan democracy.” Yet Lincoln’s rhetorical genius — not for nothing is the chapter devoted to him called “Poet At War”– managed to reconcile Jacksonian ferocity with neo-Washingtonian loftiness. That’s why it’s easy to underrate the revolutionary effect of his recasting of “the Union” as a mystical be-all and end-all.

Although the two Roosevelts are dealt with separately, Suri’s claims for each one’s distinctiveness overlap: an early sign that his thesis is getting the better of him. If TR was “the first commander-in-chief to think globally,” FDR is characterized as “the first global president.” Perhaps two different things if you squint hard enough, these formulations are nonetheless indicative of Suri’s increasing strain in concocting important-sounding “firsts.” The difference is that Teddy comes off fairly well, while Suri seems exasperated almost to the point of stammering at how FDR set “impossibly high . . . near impossible . . . unrealistic expectations” for his successors.

In other words, he’s being set up as the explanation for why every presidency since 1945 represents the “Fall” in the book’s subtitle. No wonder Eisenhower’s missing, since he governed successfully for two terms without showing any interest in mimicking either FDR’s busy-bee activism or his role as inspirer-in-chief. Instead, we zoom ahead to the New Frontier. “Built for the Great Depression and the Second World War, the presidency Kennedy inherited was not ready for the diffusion of superpower responsibilities,” Suri claims.

This seems a little berserk after fifteen solid years when confronting the Soviet Union while avoiding nuclear war had been Kennedy’s immediate predecessors’ main task, with an escalation of bristling and entrenched Cold War bureaucracy to match. But Suri’s JFK is “stymied, distracted, and often despondent,” as unlikely as the last of these, in particular, sounds. At the very least, his ability to conceal being down in the dumps right up until Oswald shot him was remarkable.

From there on, the cogency of Suri’s argument deteriorates as the reader’s interest dwindles. Among other oddities, he gets hipped on using each president’s daily calendar as evidence they were too swamped by trivia to contemplate the big picture, which is on a par with evaluating a new car exclusively by checking out its windshield wipers. He frets about JFK frittering away his precious time during the 1962 Cuban Missile Crisis by attending to his routine ceremonial duties, apparently unaware that Kennedy’s insistence on maintaining a façade of normality was intended to gull the public into thinking nothing was wrong until he got good and ready to tell us we might be facing World War III.

At the same time, Suri faults Johnson, for instance, for his “ambition to do more of everything,” both domestically (the Great Society) and abroad (Vietnam). Reagan gets high marks early on for ignoring the chaff of “day-to-day responsibilities” to focus on “a few simple, deeply held, and widely shared aspirations,” but he too becomes “scattered and over-scheduled” and then “overcommitted and uncertain.” (Whatever Reagan’s failings were, uncertainty wasn’t among them.) Then he turns out to be “flexible and adaptive” once Mikhail Gorbachev comes on the scene.

Suri does his best to affect ideology-free dispassion. At least on the surface, he’s evaluating how his subjects wielded power, not their goals. Still, you do notice that the presidents who exemplify the presidency’s “Fall” comprise four Democrats and only one Republican, who gets off relatively unscathed compared to the others. Besides Nixon, another of The Impossible Presidency’s glaring GOP omissions is George W. Bush, who exemplifies both disastrous presidential overreach (as in our Iraq quagmire) and fumbling presidential inadequacy (as in Katrina) better than either Clinton or Obama.

But it’s the latter two who co-star in the final chapter, as if their tenures somehow represent two halves of the same botched presidency. How so? Well, both were “ambitious climbers” — actually a major point they have in common with George Washington, but never mind — and Toni Morrison did famously call Bill “our first black president.” Suri quotes that line as if it wasn’t regally fatuous nonsense. Besides, both were raised by strong mothers, the pretext for his peculiar — or, at the very least, peculiarly phrased — claim that “these two men feminized and blackened the presidency.” Suri even seems to blame them, not their political opponents, for “the destructive focus on the personal [that] undermined leadership.”

He also can’t resist the urge to be prescriptive, at whatever cost to his own frequent intelligence about the untidy way circumstance makes hash of such formulas. “After Donald Trump,” Suri writes, “improved national leadership will require remaking the office, the larger governance of the United States, and the expectations of the public.” The giveaway there is the abstract “will require,” without any clue as to what agency might create such a consensus. He’s just telling us what would happen if he ran the zoo.

“The office needs new boundaries,” he adds, contradicting his own book’s vivid evidence that transformations of the presidency result from dynamic individual temperaments, not institutional reform or popular pressure. As perceptive as The Impossible Presidency often is about the executive branch’s past, Suri’s guesses about the job’s future aren’t any better than anyone else’s — aside, maybe, from those of us who decided on Election Night 2016 that guesswork is a fool’s errand anyhow.

The post The Impossible Presidency: The Rise and Fall of America’s Highest Office appeared first on The Barnes & Noble Review.

The Barnes & Noble Review http://ift.tt/2frkRu6