“What is the opposite of devastation?” Dawn Lundy Martin asks in Instructions for The Lovers (out now from Nightboat). Her answers are both thorough and tender, having been conceived through the course of the COVID-19 lockdown. Martin writes of a “horny contentedness” found outside of heterosexual monogamy; the “sensation of one’s own vernacular background” as resistance to grammars of subjugation; her sister’s arm draped around her, and the “worlds in that drape.” Moments of pleasure and precarity are seamlessly placed together, as Martin points towards all the possibilities of “loverness.”
We consider some of those possibilities for “loverness”—and political community, sociality, and shared desire—in our conversation below.
—Dante Silva
Dante Silva: What does it mean to be lovers?
Dawn Lundy Martin: “Lover” is a both a specific and an expansive or metaphorical term across the poems—“Lovers” as intimate, bodily, sexual, romantic, karmic connection and “lovers” as aspirational, a quality of being with other humans that opens up any possibility for loving, especially in the current geopolitical moment. So much around us is devastation and death as we emerge from the COVID-19 pandemic and the murder of George Floyd, and now, as we are mired in the connected realities of the brutal mass murder of (at this writing) almost 40,000 Palestinian people and the monumental displacement and starvation of 3.9 million people in Somalia, and 7.3 million in the Democratic Republic of the Congo. Cornel West says, “Love is a form of death. And you have to learn how to die in order to learn how to love.” I don’t know what he means by this. But what I take from it is that sacrifice is at the heart of loving and necessary for any great bounty even if that great bounty never comes. “Lovers” is catapulted into being by that inextricable relationship between death and love and service in loving, which is a tenderness in seeing and simultaneously a getting on one’s knees. Loss, of course, is inevitable. And yet, the aspirational possibilities of “lovers” writ large, are borderless, are reverent reverberations across time and space. “Lovers” also, of course, means lovers. Humans involved in the messy puddles of desire, pain, and ecstasy.
Dante Silva: You’ve said that Instructions started as a collaborative project with Toi Derricotte. Could you say more about that collaboration?
Dawn Lundy Martin:
Backstory:
First, I adore Toi. We met over 20 years at the Cave Canem Retreat for African American Poets, which she co-founded, and later were colleagues and friends at the University of Pittsburgh, and even later I held the Toi Derricotte Endowed Chair in English, a singular honor I can only describe as devoted in its reverent reverberations.
Our collaboration came about because Jennifer Franklin, who is Program Director at the Hudson Valley Writers Center, asked Toi to participate in a unique chapbook series called the Conversation Series Chapbooks. In it, a woman “master poet” invites a woman poet from a younger generation to collaborate, and the two write alternating poems that are somehow related, even loosely, and then conduct an interview with each other—“the conversation—about the project, in specific, and craft and poetry, in general.”
My back was up:
I will say that if it had been anyone besides Toi who choose me with whom to partner, I’d have been offended by both the designation of “master poet” (was I not a master poet?) and all the language surrounding the invitation. I’m also barely a “woman,” but it’s alright. I was just pleased to see what Toi and I might make.
Generativity & poetics:
Toi sent the first poem to me; I sent the second to her. We went back and forth like that without pressure, allowing for the poem to come however it came. Toi’s first poem, “Questions About My Birth,” felt wildly experimentally to me. At the beginning the poem seems like a transcript of her actual birth certificate. Then it goes off, as poems do, elliptically in different directions that the reader doesn’t expect but mostly in unlineated language approximating prose. The poem made me lean into the lyric in a way that I’d tried but failed to resist in previous poems. I just let the lyric wash over, you know, because Toi’s poem makes use of the un-poem to make a poem. We entered each other’s imaginations. My poetics shifted inside of this direct intertextuality.
Dante Silva: I was at your launch the other evening (which was so lovely, of course), and was struck by your use of the phrase rage poem. That rage poems can exist in the collection, one with lovers in the title, seemed incongruous; these are near opposite affects. What happens when you place them together?
Dawn Lundy Martin: Perhaps the only human experience approximating love’s tremendous quaking is grief. The rage poem is also a grief poem. Even though I have experienced racism and the relentless societal centering of whiteness all my life, there are times when I am reminded so profoundly of how everything in this country operates in order to maintain white privilege that I’m caught off guard. Startled. Blindsided. But also, mesmerized. These are the conditions in which we’re forced to exist. Being lovers, on the other hand, is a radical choice, especially given the conditions or our time and place, how they stress and corrupt the body. Boundless, immersive, boundary-less loving, which requires immense imagination, by the way, does not destroy the racist, sexist, homophobic conditions and the generative actions of their human soldiers, but it does allow for temporal and spatial agency and adjacency. Existence in another sphere, while also being inextricably “here.”
Dante Silva: I believe you used the phrase rage poem to refer to a particular poem about the university and all its discontents. I’m curious as to how you work with, and against, the university as institution. Where else can we work? How else can we come to know what we know?
Dawn Lundy Martin: The university is inherently a white supremacist arm of the regime, still wedded to the racist scientific thought of the Enlightenment. The university claims, however, to be a gentle friend of black people, queers, pregnant people, the unrecognizably gendered, and any of us deemed by its central framework to be “other.” The university speaks in the patronizing voice of a father who has no real time for, or interest in, children. Its actions, as we’re seeing very clearly in this moment, are to support the nonsensical ideologies of the regime because the regime is capitalist at its core. The regime does not have ideas. The regime has operations.
What do we do? Where do we go? We occupy those spaces that delegitimize our creative and intellectual capacities with our rogue and unruly epistemologies, and we go into what Fred Moten calls the “the downlow lowdown maroon community of the university, into the undercommons of enlightenment, where the work gets done, where the work gets subverted, where the revolution is still black, still strong.”
It’s my perspective, though, that we need to stay on the move. There comes a point for most of us where a particular institution’s shape-shifting, its commitment to maintain itself as is, becomes untenable; as my dad used to say when he was about to rain holy hell down on my brother, it becomes a world of hurt. When that hurt becomes rage, we turn against ourselves, eat our own organs, so we must pack our shit up and go.
Right now, I teach at Bard College, a small liberal arts college where my entire focus is on working with phenomenally smart, ambitious, delightfully weird students with capacious imaginations. There’s a loving in this exchange between us and an intimacy—a touch without touching—that makes me hopeful. In the classroom, time fractures into glittering fronds when we read poems closely and open ourselves up to knowing differently. Meaning making operates in an entirely unfamiliar sphere. It’s almost as if, should we believe it, the work of the imagination can be a discursive intervention— it itself the downlow maroon community where the work gets done and other work subverted.
Dante Silva: I understand you’re working on a memoir at the moment, and am interested in the relationship to the past that exists in Instructions. The past appears through repeated behaviors (“Hey, firestar, I used to say”), laments (“To waste years half alive”), remembrances that are presented, and then contested (“Memory fixed— / —and / then splatter”).
What is the relationship to the past here? How might it interrupt the present?
Dawn Lundy Martin: What utterances call for particular forms/genres? When do we reach the edge of one genre and enter another? The poems and the memoir traverse the same autobiographical territories and move back and forth through time, frankly, but obviously the memoir is in sentences and less elliptical in its logic making. It stretches. There are scenes. There is expanded reflection. I always think, I am not writing poems. I am writing poetry. When I’m writing memoir, which for me is essayistic, I’m thinking a lot (probably too much) on the page. The intersection between poetry and memoir is at the point in the approach when the genre exceeds itself. Perhaps the real question is: when does one reach the end of genre even when the approach to the genre is already outside of it?
Dante Silva: What has changed in your poetic practice since starting on the memoir, and since your previous collections? What might change?
Dawn Lundy Martin: Instructions for The Lovers will be the last book of poems I write until I finish When a Person Goes Missing, the memoir. The change is that I’m shifting my entire attention to prose, which is now my poetic practice.