Therí Alyce Pickens is a poet-scholar working in Arab American Studies, Black American Studies, Comparative Literature, and Disability Studies. She has written two monographs: Black Madness :: Mad Blackness (Duke, 2019) and New Body Politics (Routledge, 2014). What Had Happened Was is her debut poetry collection. You can find out more about her work at www.tpickens.org.
Nefertiti Asanti: I see your debut collection, What Had Happened Was, driven by the stuff of Black conversation, so I’m curious. What conversations have you had with yourself about the collection while you were putting it together?
Therí A. Pickens: I’m really fascinated by how Black folks tell stories, and how they’re filled with so much complexity. Our telling of time and space is not just present in the narrative, but also present in how we are more creatively oriented toward the Western concepts of time we have to fit ourselves into. So the concept of phrases like mind you or the New Yorkers’ aight so boom—all of those feels so familiar to me. They also feel like really complicated reckonings with how time and space function.
I think one of the conversations I had with myself was how to be faithful to that on the page and how to make it feel real, not fetishized… The language I use every day [requires me to] code switch… because I live in Maine.
Being in conversation with people who use the language I’m more familiar with—Black language— in their everyday lives, felt like a really useful space for me to be in.
Some of the voices you hear are snippets of reality TV, snippets of internet memes, snippets of family, snippets from memories, snippets from random encounters.
The conversation I had to have with myself was how to remain faithful to that on the page.
NA: Reading What Had Happened Was, I was really struck and inspired by your deliberate use of language and the dialect available to you, which to me felt like the opposite of codeswitching, more like translanguaging.
I felt it particularly in the poem “Apostrophe to Inspiration,” which made me think of Octavia Butler’s words, “Forget inspiration. Habit is more dependable. Habit is persistence and practice.”
So I ask you, in the absence of inspiration, what habits have helped you sustain your poetry practice?
TAP: So I found that Octavia E. Butler quote when I was in her archive, which is really, really different from finding it in an interview or something like that.
Thinking about that, along with the ways that folks with disabilities are always understood as inspiration, that felt like the foundation of genesis for the imaginative world of “Apostrophe to Inspiration.”
I am also a faculty success program coach with the National Council for Faculty Development and Diversity. As a coach, I’m constantly telling people what their habit could be in terms of the writing.
I’m a big fan of consistency, just returning to the thing every day and seeing what it brings. Carl Phillips is one of my teachers, mentors; he has that habit of getting up to write every morning. Now, he gets up at six, as far as I know. I’m not about that life, but the idea of a steady state [to] return to has been really formative.
Also, writing eases some of the loneliness. Returning to an imaginative world, a world that is familiar, a world that doesn’t require that I code switch, always feels like the thing that sets me right for the day. So that’s part of the habit.
I also think about writing—the incidental experiences of writing, whether it’s my academic work or the poetic work, or, you know, anything else. I think about those incidental experiences as an accumulated knowledge.
For people who cook all the time, they know how to problem-solve in the kitchen. People who play tennis know how to problem-solve on the court if they’re any good. And I think about writing the same way: if I’m ever going to learn how to problem-solve in my writing, or edit it well, returning to it every day, and having the one day where it doesn’t work, and then the next day where it does… the one day where I need to have a conversation with someone and they give me exactly the thing I need—that’s what fuels the habit, the joy, all of those things fuel it.
NA: Reading your collection, I’m pulled by this theme of chronicity, and how it shows up declaratively in the poems, “Customary Calculus for Chronicity,” “Chronically Ill,” and the collection’s titular sonnet crown, “What Had Happened Was.” How does your creative process exist in conversation with chronic illness?
TAP: A chronic illness forces you to tell time really differently. Your time is sort of governed by all the things that chronic illness can kind of eat up.
Thinking about something as simple as a medication refill, for instance—your time is snatched from you by having to make that call, or having to be at the house to wait for it to be dropped off in order to sign for it, or having to answer those emails, et cetera.
There’s a constraint to the kinds of chronic illnesses that require everyday therapeutic intervention. An everyday therapeutic intervention can be something as simple as trying to get enough rest, and it can also be something as complicated as warm, moist heat for shoulder injury, or stretching every couple of hours at the desk, or self-massage at the end of the day. I think about the way the chronic illness just changes my understanding of time and the fact that chronology and chronic illness share a root feels like the best linguistic jumping-off point for thinking about them together.
In those three poems, I’m trying to work out what it means to tell time differently. “Chronically Ill” is surrounded by music, and how all of those folks tell time, and how they make time because they change the melody. I’m thinking about Lil Wayne’s flow: sometimes he’s rapping super fast. Sometimes he has this slow drawl, and that strikes me as also part of the time of chronic illness. Sometimes things are moving really rapidly, and then sometimes you are waiting in this bureaucratic slowness.
Other times it feels like things are fine, and then all of a sudden you get hit with something else—sort of like those shift changes or key changes.
In that poem also T-Boz is mentioned, and I think about the grit of her voice and how her voice changed after her surgeries, in part because she was intubated. It didn’t change much, but I could hear more texture in it. And so I think about how chronic illness changes the body.
My creative practice is thinking about chronic illness as a valid way of knowing things, a valid way of moving throughout the world, where that’s the lens through which you see or understand most stuff. It takes work to try to understand able-bodied people because their time doesn’t function the way yours does. They can guarantee states of being… like, ‘I will wake up at 7:00 a.m. and do this.’ I don’t have that life… I don’t know what kind of body I’m going to have in the morning with a chronic illness.
It takes work for me to imagine the kind of consistency that able-bodied folks often take for granted.
NA: I’m often struck by the fact that there are Black celebrities enduring chronic illness, and it is a footnote to their identity in the world. It also speaks to how two-dimensional people can become once they become a household name.
I really appreciate the way that you offered a look at these identities in a way that affirms aspects of who they are that we don’t often address.
TAP: Some of these women—Black women with chronic illnesses, who are in the public eye are just folks I love listening to. I think about Tamia. I think about Toni Braxton. T-Boz. If you understand addiction is a chronic illness, you also put Whitney Houston in that category. I think about them because I enjoy their music, and I keep wondering what it’s like for them to create art in the midst of all of this maneuvering of time.
Toni Braxton’s Pulse album is actually my favorite because it’s the one that she did after finding out about her heart being enlarged, as a result of some complications with lupus, if I have the story right. There is ostensibly a love song, and it’s a big, big ballad called “Pulse.” It’s so heavy. It’s got these “Un-Break My Heart” kind of vibes. But as she’s soaring through these notes, the thing she’s saying is, “I’m feeling for a pulse.” That is such a mundane aspect of being in the hospital. It is also such a beautiful metaphor for how it is you’re just checking to see whether or not you’re okay.
On the levity side of things, there’s her album with Babyface called Love, Marriage, and Divorce. My favorite song on that is “I Wish,” and it’s a revenge song. It’s in a minor chord I think, very simple piano backing, and one of the lines is, “I wish she gives you a disease.” This is like a cheating lover. Yes! You can be anti-ableist, and also just be pissed off that someone has cheated on you and you hope they get VD.
It is so honest, because if we expect nothing else from the Braxtons, we expect some honesty. Rest in peace, Traci.
I think about what Black women artists do, how they create art. Thinking a lot about how we’re surrounded by Black women who were incredibly vulnerable. Their stories, their art, their music—requires an attention to the creativity, the imagination of it, and how much they’re giving.
NA: What does it mean for you to engage the theme of chronic illness as an identity marker that can define the limits of a person—in particular—a Black woman and her body? And not even trifle with this “strong Black woman archetype” for a more true witnessing, understanding and declaration of one’s identity?
TAP: The strong, Black woman archetype exists in direct tension with the reality of the contours of the lives of Black women. Right now, I’m thinking about the election and what it meant to look at the demography of how people voted.
There’s now something going around, like an image of a Black woman sitting on a rooftop watching the world burn. There’s one that has a T-shirt on that says, ‘92%.’ That feeling of fatigue that a lot of Black women have really resonates with me because for the past, I’d say, sixteen years and not eight, every election season, Black women are asked to, “Save the United States.”
The idea that Black women as a collective are strong doesn’t bother me, but the idea that strength manifests itself individually, such that each of us would have the wherewithal to continue fighting immediately after election results that were so devastating to us and our communities feels like a slap in the face. Feels violent.
I watched some of the IG reels and videos where Black women publicly declared their defection from liberation movements by saying they were going to Starbucks and that their hopes for Gaza and their hopes for immigration were more nefarious in tone. The thing I thought was, I get why you’re angry but we don’t do collective liberation because we expect reciprocity. We do it because it’s the thing we believe in.
When I think about that strong, Black woman archetype, I think it forces us to believe that we could save the United States every election season. And it forces other people to believe that too. For people who were relying on Black women’s voter turnout to tip the scales toward Harris-Walz, they forget that there was an 8% in addition to that 92%. There were folks in other demographics who needed to come alongside and support.
When I think about that archetype, that figment of white supremacist imagination, I am also deeply concerned about the reality of Black women who live with chronic illness and how high the bar is for them to surmount. How high the bar is for them to live everyday.
I’m not trying to deal with this idea that I’m super strong. It feels inhuman. It feels white supremacist to me.
I think the collection is, in part, a clapback to that idea, and also wants to take seriously what transparency looks like. The collection is a telling of what one imagines, or what one feels, and then vulnerability, which is the sharing of the feeling itself.
I’m trying to hold all of that in tension, but also, I’m not interested in only responding to the strong, Black woman archetype because bees never argue with flies about why honey tastes better than shit. I’m just not having that conversation.
I’m thinking more in the vein of the creativity of Gayl Jones, author of the novel Corregidora. She disappears from public view and then comes out with three new books, and they’re all really good! They’re all in continuation of things that she starts with Corregidora. When Toni Morrison says, “we can’t write about Black women the same after reading this,” what better way to be in dialogue with other Black women, Black feminist and Black womanist traditions?
Also inasmuch as Corregidora is thematically beautiful, linguistically—what she does with language, what she does with the blues, what she does with repetition, and what she does with this character who loses language in the face of trauma—it is downright genius.
I think what we lose sight of with Black women—while we’re busy asking them to be strong, asking them to save the world, asking them to do all sorts of things in service of other people—is that the command of language, the interest in artistry, the desire for beauty is present and at a very high bar.
I’m trying to bring Corregidora into conversation.
NA: Several poems including, “Ursa Corregidora Goes to Junior High in the 1990s” are written from the perspective of children, and the children were not playing at all throughout these poems.
TAP: (laughter) They were serious children.
NA: They’re very serious children! These children were dealing with very serious things. I’m imagining them to be Black girls who are facing fucked up situations where they know they are not the problem, but they’re made to be the problem. I’ve been in a journey toward my own full-length manuscript where I’m thinking about children a lot.
I just appreciate the way that you were able to write Black girlhood, womanhood, not forgetting about the very real shit that children have to deal with because other people won’t deal with their own shit.
Particularly with “Ursa Corregidora… in the 1990s.” How often do we see Black girls defended? I just ate it all up. I want my niece to read this. I want the people in my life to see this. So, thank you.
TAP: Thank you. That one was maybe one of the easiest to write in the collection. I didn’t labor much over that one at all, in part because that speaker came to me so fully formed.
I was reading Eve L. Ewing. 1919 and Ghosts in the Schoolyard have been so formative for my thinking. There’s the “I saw Emmett Till this week at the grocery store” poem.
What if Ursa Corregidora was in my middle school? I’m just imagining this smaller version of her, who’s shy and has a lot of baggage she’s carrying, and no one’s gonna show up for her from her family. What does it look like for her to have a champion in an unlikely space and also a villain in an unlikely space or a space where they shouldn’t be?
It was like the speaker kind of tapped me on the shoulder and was like, ‘Psst… let me tell you something about this.’
That one was one of the easiest to write and one of the hardest to format because I wanted it in a tight, tight column. The poem needed to feel constrained. The tension in the poem needed to be also on the page. I wanted to lose the fidelity to moving with these luxurious lines to the end. The Ursa Corregidora poem is really close to my heart as well.
TAP: [Nefertiti], what was your favorite poem from the collection?
NA: My favorite was “Ode to Checking My Shit.” I love scatological work. I have Premenstrual Dysphoric Disorder, which is related to menstruation. Like period blood, poop is often the thing that people don’t wanna discuss or even consider. Maybe comically, but not seriously—this poem straddles both worlds. So many gems, particularly the lines “how I unload/these burdens,” “setting fire to some evidence/that I lived,” and “as doctors never ask/but I tell them anyway.” [The poem] makes me smile. Thank you!
TAP: There’s a history to that piece. I was reading Ross Gay’s Book of Delights, and he’s got so much in there about pee. If you listen to Lil Wayne, there’s so much in his stuff about pee. I’m like, ‘What is it with men and their dicks?’
I was reading Book of Delights while I was in the hospital for something, and I was like, “Oh, I feel like Ross would love it, if I just threw out the scatological thing and made it more internal.” I just started writing and I was like, “Oh, I don’t like these long lines,” so I started chopping things up. I also thought about Ross’s interest in long sentences, so the poem is written in one long sentence.
There’s all of this desire to make the scatological a space of discovery. I was a big fan of House, the television show, and it always felt like they figured out the thing that was wrong by accident, and it was usually something that they should have been checking. Someone’s loss of smell was the clue. Or looking at someone’s urine, or cleaning the bedpan. Someone has to empty that thing. There’s all of these bases of information about what’s leaving your body.
This poem feels like maybe something I could read to Ross Gay, and he would laugh. Making Ross Gay laugh is something everybody wants to do because his laugh is so infectious and also he’s the poet of delight. Making him delighted also feels like a poetic ambition.
Also, when I was ordering the poems, I was like, wherever it goes, it goes before the poem about washing your hands.
I feel like there’s something happening in the kind of divine inspiration of the collection… a confluence of imaginative possibility and work and play.
I’m so glad that you like that one. There are some I’m concerned will be my ugly stepchildren that no one will love.
NA: Thank you. I’m glad. I’m glad you wrote it. I’m just like: More shit! And blood, that is not blood of violence, right?
TAP: Mm yes, yes.
NA: With this collection about to be unleashed on the world, what conversations feel possible, or what conversations do you want to have and want to continue?
TAP: I would love it if folks could find something in the collection that resonated and for folks looking to the collection, maybe for comfort? Folks looking to be read, in that, “Black, queer reading is fundamental” kind of way, they could also find that. I don’t want the focus to be on how I, as a poet, put something or anything really autobiographical into the text. But rather that it’s a celebration of Black linguistic prowess and people can find something in it that speaks to them.
Once I realized that I was actually sending out ARCs and asking folks to do interviews for this, and it was after the election, I went back and I was like, “Is there anything in here that speaks to this moment? Is there anything in here that could comfort me?” The poem that I ended up falling on was the golden shovel, “Variation on a Theme.” I got to that line ‘we choose which monster murders us’ and felt that impossibility of June 2020 when folks were in the street with masks.
Then also the impossibility of dealing with the aftermath of an election—the build-up to it where there was no moral purity in choosing Harris-Walz because they were unequivocal on their support for Israel and, as a related aspect of that, an unequivocal support of genocide. Not just genocide in Israel with Palestinians, but also all of the other places where Israel has its fingers—Congo, Sudan. Harris-Walz was a morally impure choice, but it also felt to me like harm reduction.
I found something in that poem “Variation on a Theme” that spoke to me in the moment. That was when I felt like the collection had actually done something useful: when it could actually just speak back to me as its writer.
Nefertiti Asanti is a poet from the Bronx residing in Oakland, CA. Nefertiti is a recipient of fellowships and residencies from the Watering Hole, Lambda Literary, Anaphora Arts, Winter Tangerine, Museum of the African Diaspora, PEN America, VONA, and SeaSalted Honey. Nefertiti’s debut chapbook fist of wind won the inaugural Start a Riot! Chapbook Prize. They’re also a recipient of the 2023 SFF/Nomadic Press Literary Award. Their work can be found at Foglifter, Winter Tangerine, Santa Fe Writer’s Project, and elsewhere.