Joshua Bennett is a doctoral candidate in the English Department at Princeton University. He has received fellowships from the Callaloo Creative Writing Workshop, the School of Humanities, Arts and Social Sciences at MIT, the Josephine de Karman Fellowship Trust, and the Ford Foundation. Winner of the 2014 Lucille Clifton Poetry Prize and the 2015 Erskine J. Poetry Prize, his work has been published or is forthcoming in Beloit Poetry Journal, Callaloo, New England Review, Women & Performance: a journal of feminist theory and elsewhere. Joshua is also the founding editor of Kinfolks: a journal of black expression.
His poems, "Clench" and "home force: presumption of death," appeared in Issue Fifty-Six of The Collagist.
Here, he talks with interviewer Darby K. Price about violence & the everyday stakes of social life, putting words in the law's mouth, and poems that shake us into action.
You had two poems published in Issue Fifty-Six: “Clench” and “home force: presumption of death.” Can you tell me a little bit about the origins of these poems?
Clench” emerged from my desire to think about my personal history of violence from an unfamiliar vantage point. I’ve been fighting since I was very young—indeed, the first time I can remember throwing a punch I was around six years old or so, and one of my classmates, Joey was his name, had chosen that morning to fill a tennis ball with a bunch of small rocks and hit me in the back of the head with it during recess. A fight ensued almost immediately. Even then I was not one to tolerate that kind of cowardly— though I can now admit also rather creative—assault on my person. The conflict was eventually broken up, and Joey and I went about our business for the rest of that school year, hating one another in a cordial sort of way.
This sort of thing was fairly common. Insults, or outright physical assaults of all kinds like what happened with Joey, were a central component of my growing up. The threat of physical violence, whether on the schoolyard or within the bounds of one’s neighborhood, was ever-present; it was something you learned to navigate, to contend with. “Clench” was my attempt to think about how my fist might feel about my choice to abstain from fighting, this social-philosophical practice that shaped so much of my thinking about the social world over the past decade, especially given that this abstention dovetailed with my matriculating at an elite private school in upstate New York in 2002; a shift that was most striking, perhaps, not only because it meant not only two hours of travel, and going to a school populated mostly by wealthy, white teenagers, but because no one there ever fought. And it’s not that this was a good thing necessarily. Only that the absence of this approach to making meaning, to resolving conflict in an impactful, absurd, dangerous, costly way, was strange to me. It represented a different way of thinking about the everyday stakes of social life: what you could say and get away with, whom you chose to harm, how.
“home force: presumption of death” emerged from a similar set of concerns. In turning “Stand Your Ground” law into an erasure, my goal was to alter the original document’s force of argument, to destroy and put it back together as a means of indicting its authors, its supporters, all those who praise the logic of private property at the expense of life itself.
As a reader, I was immediately drawn into “Clench,” a wonderful persona poem written from the perspective of a fist. There’s a tension established between the fist and its owner—the addressee—right away, a tension that shines through in lines like, “Who held you down/ when the whole world went/ spaghetti western & you/ were six bullets short of a coffin’s kiss?” Can you talk about the tension here between the fist and its owner, between violence and peace, between “pen or pot handle” and “the unrestrained/ fleet of bone”?
I think I addressed some of what you’re getting at in the previous question, but I’ll do my best to swerve a bit here without giving too much away. The speaker, a fist—and he’s also kind of a jerk, yes?—is trying to wrestle with its sense of having been abandoned, which is also to say, the fist in this poem is wondering aloud about what it means to be obsolete, and in this sense is contemplating its own mortality. The fist critiques the person that it ostensibly belongs to, in the sense of a deep, mutual belonging, a prolonged entanglement, but it is also pleading. It is also desperately clinging to relevance, and reminding its dear friend, its partner—I prefer these terms to the term “owner,” though I certainly understand its place in your initial question—of the world he only narrowly escaped, a world he would not have survived without the fist. Now, the former beloved has given his hands over to other labors, other forms of poeisis. That letting-go is an arduous, painful process. There’s shame, and blood in it.
In “home force: presumption of death,” you erase the legalese of a Florida Statute—the infamous “Stand Your Ground” law—and craft some beautiful and heartbreaking lines out of that language (lines like “it is necessary// to prevent the body, harm/ him, sing get over it.”) What were some of your goals in working with that language? What unique challenges does a poet face with erasure?
I’m not sure I set out with a goal in this poem other than to de-familiarize the original document while maintaining the (ostensible, unstable) position of its authors. I wanted to say what it was saying but in my way own way, on my own terms. I wanted to wrest sovereignty from the statute itself. I wanted to put words in the law’s mouth.
These two poems deal directly with violence, whether it’s an inner struggle to remain non-violent, or a codified, state-sponsored violence against people for whom “personhood does not apply”. What, in your opinion, is the role and capability of poetry in this context? In other words, how can poetry (and the poets behind it) respond to what seems like relentless violence and injustice around us?
I‘m not always sure that poetry can do what I want or need it to. I think often of Baraka’s expressed desire in “Blk Art” for “poems that breathe like wrestlers…poems that kill” and then wonder what I would want a poem, any poem, I write to make or unmake in the world if the poem had such capacity available to it, such breadth or speed or life. And maybe poems move people throughout the world every single day in ways that I can’t yet fathom. I’m almost certain that I wouldn’t be an educator right now if I had never heard a poem read aloud. The poetry of Margaret Walker and Lucille Clifton and Fred Moten and Greg Pardlo and Ai and Gerald Barrax and Robert Hayden and Thylias Moss and Gwendolyn Brooks (and the list goes on and on, spanning out into the ether) have utterly transformed the landscape of my inner life, and ultimately made me a much more thoughtful, skeptical, reckless human being. So perhaps we can respond to the injustice and violence of the world by writing poems that move people to the point that they are willing to risk death. If the poem can shake us enough that we are willing to give our very lives for one another, to risk safety and security for the sake of a more ethical set of relations, then we have done something very important though not, necessarily, exceedingly rare. I read Clifton’s “come celebrate with me” in my early 20s and I simply couldn’t go back. The same is true for Audre Lorde’s “litany for survival.” Once I reckoned with the central truths of the latter, that is, that “we were never meant to survive,” as well as those of the former—that, like Clifton, “every day something has tried to kill me and has failed”— I realized that I had to live differently. I had to give my life over to the work.
What are you reading right now—and/or what have you just finished reading?
Right now, I am reading For Malcolm: On the Life and Death of Malcolm X, an anthology of poems edited by Dudley Randall and Margaret Taylor Burroughs. I am also reading Ladan Osman’s The Kitchen Dweller’s Testimony. I just finished re-reading Ross Gay’s Catalog of Unabashed Gratitude, Martin Heidegger’s essay “What Are Poets For?” and Edouard Glissant’s Poetics of Relation. Oh! And “Unsettling the Coloniality of Being/Power/Truth/Freedom: Towards the Human, After Man, Its Overrepresentation--An Argument” by Sylvia Wynter, which I am always returning to in one way or another.
What writing projects are you currently working on?
I recently completed my first manuscript, The Sobbing School, which I hope to see out in the world in the near future. I’m also currently working on my dissertation, “Being Property Once Myself: In Pursuit of The Animal in 20th Century African American Literature” which I plan to defend the coming spring. It’s a scary, beautiful time right now as it pertains to the writing. I’m trying to map out two distinct, but related intellectual projects: one that is centrally concerned with giving sustained philosophical attention to black sociality, black suffering, and black imagination that usually takes the form of poems. Then there is this whole other thing, which shares those concerns, but takes the form of a dissertation which deploys extended readings of various novels and poems towards the end of thinking about why and how black folks have historically turned toward animal figures as a means of making certain arguments about black personhood, black ways of being human. So yeah. That’s most of what I’m working on right now: honing, sharpening, putting the poems and paragraphs in an order that has a compelling rhythm to it. In the end, it’s always also about the music. Always.