A CONVERSATION WITH MARCUS WICKER
by RYAN SHARP
Marcus Wicker is the author of three books of poetry: Dear Mothership (Ecco, forthcoming, September 2026), Silencer (Mariner/Ecco, 2017)—winner of the Society of Midland Authors Award—and Maybe the Saddest Thing (Harper Perennial, 2012), a National Poetry Series selection. A 2023-2024 Harvard Radcliffe Institute Fellow, his honors include a National Endowment for the Arts Creative Writing Fellowship, the Poetry Society of America’s Lyric Poetry Award, a Pushcart Prize, a Ruth Lilly and Dorothy Sargent Rosenberg Fellowship, as well as fellowships from The Fine Arts Work Center, and Cave Canem. He is a Professor and the Orgill Chair of English at the University of Memphis, where he teaches in the MFA program.
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Ryan Sharp: I am beyond thankful to not only have been blessed to get a sneak peek at Dear Mothership, coming next month through HarpersCollins, but also to be graced with the opportunity to be in conversation with you.
I can’t help but note how each of your collections are project-driven. Your debut collection, Maybe the Saddest Thing (2012), has as its scaffolding the sonnet-esque “self-dialogues” and the “Love Letter to…” poems. Silencer has the titular “silencers” as well as the “Cul-de-sac Pastoral” section—which I have read was the initial focus of the collection before the murder of Trayvon Martin and the subsequent acquittal of his murderer. Dear Mothership, too, is deeply project based. The “Dear Mothership” heroic crown of sonnets stands out, deservingly, as the collection’s engine, if not heart, but the collection boasts other repeated forms and thematic constraints. I’m wondering if we might begin our conversation of Dear Mothership here, through first discussing the role projects play in your writing process and the curation of your collections.
Marcus Wicker: Thank you, Ryan. That gratitude extends both ways.
It’s true that I like a good series. Once I latch onto a mode that stokes my curiosity and sense of play, it’s pleasing to exploit a form from various angles. I find it comforting to know that I’ve given a subject my full range of creative attention. Much of my writing sets out to praise the things that sustain me and make sense of emotions and reactions to the world that I have a difficult time vocalizing in real time. Keeping two or three series going at once means I have access to a surplus of recurring images, ideas, and touchstones I can use to draw connections between serial poems and my more disparate material when I sequence a book.
I wrote the first bit of Dear Mothership during the winter and spring of 2020. I was distressed by the constant stream of political vitriol I couldn’t stop experiencing as I was doomscrolling and reliving via cable news. I was angry and grieving George Floyd, Ahmaud Arbery, Breonna Taylor, and the long-distance loss of my grandfather. Being stuck in the house with my sorrow and my fixations and my worries in the middle of a pandemic was particularly noisy. My mind was full of static. I didn’t have a lot of words in me, let alone poetry. But I feel most like myself when I’m writing, plus I was expected to produce something during my first ever sabbatical in the fall, so I needed to find a way back into my work.
That summer I found a little calm in anything spacey or vaguely Afrofuturist, especially music—
Spillage Village’s Spilligion album, Parliament’s Mothership Connection, Sun Ra, and OutKast’s ATLiens. I became obsessed with “American Journal,” a Robert Hayden poem about an alien arriving in 1970s America and examining the human condition. In part, I was attracted to the piece because it uses strange, fragmented diction and repeated white space that sounds nothing like the conversational narratives I’m accustomed to reading and crafting. Everything about it spoke to my pandemic attention span.
Under the influence of OutKast and Hayden, eventually I started to wonder what an extra-terrestrial from the planet Stankonia who landed in 2020 Atlanta would say about the way that humans treat one another. The first persona poem I wrote was an American Sonnet that follows up the Andre 3000 line, “Alien can blend / right on in / with your kin / look again” with “at the lamb’s blood / & your first born / at the ship’s log / of your manifest destiny.” I was equally surprised and thrilled by this combination, so I wrote another sonnet that sampled the last line of the previous poem and yet another OutKast lyric. Eventually this process, which I sustained over three years through much personal strife and healing, became a travelogue that remixes a heroic crown of sonnets. I’m sure we’ll talk more about the sequence, but I’ll say upfront that the design was one of necessity. I needed to see the world and my work through a weirdo lens. I needed to write in a clipped, high lyric tone because I’d become estranged from my pre-pandemic voice. I needed to write short poems that borrowed from music and quieted my mind to write anything at all.
RS: Your response hits home on several levels, but it particularly reminds me of Aliah Sheffield’s 2021 viral hit “Earth is Ghetto.”
And, yeah, let’s dig into the sequence. As a fan of persona poetry and formal innovation, I am thrilled by the “Dear Mothership” sequence. In the “Notes & Samples” section, you describe your remix of the heroic crown as “The Break Beat Crown” with “The point [being] to splice disparate rhythms and subjects, whole and partial phrases, to produce fresh ideas and music, as with a sampled song.”
When one writes sonnets—or, more specifically, a sonnet sequence—one is engaging with several traditions. In this case, we might consider the recent trend of Black US poets riffing on the sonnet and sonnet sequences, including Jericho Brown’s “duplexes” in The Tradition (2019), Terrance Hayes’s American Sonnets for My Past and Future Assassin (2018), and Tyehimba Jess’s “syncopated sonnets” in Olio (2016). Could you speak a bit more about your play on the heroic crown and how you see it in conversation with these other sonnet traditions and trends?
MW: Ayeee! Way to come through with the music rec. “Earth is a Ghetto” missed me in 2021, but I just watched the music video and it could have been my theme song when I was writing Dear Mothership.
All three of the writers you’ve mentioned are poets I deeply admire and continue to learn from. Reading an “American Sonnet” by Wanda Coleman or Terrance Hayes always puts me in the mind of modal jazz, in that its musical foundation relies on straightforward, single scales over extended periods, as opposed to the frequently shifting chord progressions one associates with traditional jazz, which I liken to the rhyme schemes and meter of the Petrarchan and Shakespearean sonnets. Like modal jazz, the American Sonnet’s conventions (box-shaped, 14 lines, and a volta) grant soloists the maximum amount of improvisational freedom, making the form an ideal entryway back into my creative practice. One of the poems in the sequence is a contrapuntal that splices videos of the January 6th insurrection with Reverend Raphael Warnock’s senate runoff victory speech. I reread Tyehimba Jess’s syncopated sonnets after writing the first half of that polyvocal poem. In Olio, when read across columns, the syncopated sonnets reclaim different but uniquely connected narratives of Black exploitation and minstrelsy in a seamless chorus. I’m using the form to mark the fragile hope of Warnock’s Georgia victory during a violently divided era, rendering the convergence of two events deliberately discordant.
In a heroic crown of sonnets (redoublé), a poet writes fourteen interlocking poems that reference one another, repeating the last line of one poem as the first line of the next. The sequence ends in a 15th “Master” Sonnet made up of the repeated 14 lines of the preceding poems in the same order in which they originally appeared. It’s an enterprise that requires a good bit of planning, but I needed to work more loosely than that. So when I broke the crown’s pattern by writing a third and fourth sonnet that required new first lines, I decided I’d fix my mistakes at a later date and charge ahead. I had a feeling the redoublé’s shape and challenge would keep my momentum jogging if I could come up with a version of the crown that continued to feed off improvisation (or freestyling) and leverage sampling as a generative tool.
The Break Beat Crown requires a poet to be in dialogue with another artist by way of epigraphs, quotes, rejoinders, concepts, challenges, etc. My goal was to reuse at least a fragment or echo of every last line (in and out of order) as part of a first or last line anywhere in the sequence. The more I did this, the more I created what sounded to me like loops and scratches, like backmasked ideas. As an homage to hip hop’s two turntables, I committed to submerging two hidden sonnets into the crown. This provided further sampling opportunities. The 15th poem (I call mine the Mother Sonnet) culls and remixes at least fourteen repeated fragments from first and last lines, adding new words as connectors where needed.
While designing the form’s conventions, I was reminded that in a nation known for working overtime to silence the Black voice and stifle the progress of its nonwhite citizens, improvisation remains a spontaneous mode of protest, allowing marginalized artists to speak more freely. The duplex deploys the repetition of the sonnet, ghazal, and blues, creating what Jericho Brown has called “a house with two addresses,” a form that’s representative of a hyphenated identity and multiple addressees. I was thinking about this when I realized my crown would alternate between travelogue and a series of journal entries written to a mothership. The rules and OutKast lyrics coupled with the ATLien’s persona allowed me to inhabit new language and insight around neighborliness, isolation, money, and art as I chronicled my speaker’s reality in various settings—lounging at Piedmont Park as the symphony plays Tchaikovsky, watching Rashid Johnson’s “The Hikers” in a small screening room at the High Museum of Art with a lone Black stranger, eating his feelings in a parked Cadillac Eldorado spaceship behind Stankonia Studios. I can’t prove it, but I think writing “Dear Mother(ship)” over and over again brought me temporary relief from some of the loss and weariness I was feeling. It created unexpected moments of openness and vulnerability, so that in some of the epistolary sonnets, there’s a blurring between the ATLien’s persona and the highs and lows I was experiencing in my own life.
RS: Your articulation of what persona enables you to engage with that straight-up lyric might not allow for is very illuminating. Along with the catharsis you describe, persona affords the polyvocality you explain well here, especially as you begin to get at the permeable boundaries between the different registers that include, at least, the ATLien persona, OutKast, the other sampled speakers, and you the poet. This polyvocality lends to the sequence’s palimpsestic qualities. There are so many overlapping and interwoven layers of text, context, and subtext evoked through OutKast, Hayden, the movements for Black lives, the COVID-19 pandemic, etc.
Critiques of racial injustice are a theme that runs through the rest of the collection, and your larger oeuvre, yet I am curious how the alternative vantage point(s) the various modes deployed in “Dear Mothership”—persona poetry, epistolary poetry, the Break Beat Crown, etc.—impacted your excavation and processing of these topics?
MW: When I’m drafting a poem, I try to let my subject matter legislate its structure, whether that structure is a received form or an invented framework. For example, I set out to write an invective sestina juxtaposing a vivid COVID hallucination with a months-long customer service dispute over a faulty television and the replacement TV that arrived with a cracked screen. I thought using end words like “screen,” “empty,” and “static” could help me cycle through loaded images and antic phrases to shed light on my outsized emotional response (which was large!). What I got instead was a poem tracing my Covid case back to the TV repairman who brought me the busted replacement, who looked a lot like my cheerful, God-fearing best friend from college, who’d died several months earlier. That invective became an elegy, and the white moth of death that fluttered delirious circles around my body as I fever-sweated through the guest room sheets—that hallucination became my friend, returned to me, as the Black Moth of Light.
Part of my project with Dear Mothership was to cultivate a habit of ecstatic play. For me, writing in various modes is a little like shaking a Magic 8 Ball and hoping you’ve asked it a question that yields the gentle lift of a thoughtful horoscope rather than some self-conjured curse. In many ways, I’m still trying to understand how the poems have altered my perspective, my mind, my way of being, my heart. I think I’ll probably have to live with the book publicly for a while to find out.
RS: The sense of the ecstatic runs throughout the collection. Its formal and linguistic play is evident from the jump in “Self-Portrait with Mixed-Up Sports References.” That said, I would love to hear a bit about how that particular poem came to be the poem that opens the collection.
MW: Many of the poems in the first section, “No Takebacks,” contain swaggering, openhearted observations about the news, inheritance and family, money, and my struggle to maintain friendships during lockdown and beyond, while the rest of the world craved digital intimacy via Zoom. The vibe is: “I’m going through it, I’ve been through it, and I’m too tired to pretend; so let me dig into my feelings while I’ve got the steam.” That, but funny, too. Beginning with an epigraph from Atlanta hip hop duo Earth Gang—“I’m so good at missing calls that I’m perfect this year”—“Self-Portrait…” introduces both the confessional and the sound of my thoughts: heavy slant rhyme, repetition and refrain, an enjambed bounce.
RS: Indeed! Another specific place where this dynamic shines through is in the next poem, “Toilet Paper Invective with Self-Flagellation,” where the opening riff on toilet paper gives way to an exploration of “the invisible / door hinge that swings uneasy between me & / most of my loved ones.” Could you break down the formation of the collection’s other sections?
MW: In the first section, the reader is introduced to the ATLien through a series of prose poem prologues that are titled with a question. For example, “Why Did You Come Here? How?” Questions like “Surely you must have thought about destroying us at some point, no?” get more incisive in “Static,” the second section, while other poems carry forward the above-mentioned themes with more of an emphasis on the interior (personal weather). Section three shirks realism, the “I,” and moves entirely into the speculative realm with the Mothership (Break Beat) Crown.
The final section was written over the last few years, when I was ready to step away from persona and be more vulnerable. The speaker ends the opening poem by surrendering his sword, his ill will for this timeline, in order to open himself to the possibility of joy. That doesn’t happen immediately or completely. There are poems about my partner and I struggling with infertility and pregnancy loss, then another elegy for my college friend, Ray—except this one dismounts in an ode. There’s an end of summer love poem, and a proposal for reparations in the form of light (“Fuck the moon. Give us / the lightness”). I was literally trying to will myself into the light when I wrote the section’s title piece, “How to Continue to Love the World Despite Years of Impediment.” I don’t think it’s a spoiler to say I’m still figuring that out, but I did learn some things during the long and difficult making of the book.
RS: And then there is the “Coda,” which contains the collection’s final poem, “Welterweights.” Thinking of how “Self-Portrait…” and it serve as bookends, it is interesting how they both build from sports lingo. Yet, whereas “Self-Portrait…” announces, and invites the reader into, the aesthetic environment you are establishing, “Welterweights” sends the reader out on a personal, intimate, and hopeful note. I am wondering if we could close with a discussion of that trajectory, particularly as it culminates in the beautiful “Welterweights.”
MW: Good eye, Ryan! And thank you so much for reading the hell out of Dear Mothership. The sports terminology was purely coincidental, but I bookended the poems to highlight an arc that begins with distance, confusion, and disgust, and ends with cautious optimism. The kind of hope that only comes from surviving hardships and learning that what will be will be—regardless of the way one processes (or doesn’t) their grief. Maybe optimism isn’t the right word actually. I sequenced the book to end in an understanding that the being matters; and we only get but so much time to love on our people and acknowledge life’s rare moments, even when they might end in tragedy.
“Welterweights” is set in an ultrasound room, the site of two previous deep wounds for my partner Emily Skaja and me. During our third pregnancy, we started calling the fetus “The Dot” so as not to jinx fate by assigning a name. At each appointment, I’d write down the heartbeat and use that three-digit number to play the lottery—a ritual to mark our journey and the crapshoot conception had become after years of misfortune. At our 20-week visit, Dot’s heartbeat was 147, the cutoff for boxing’s storied welterweight division. After we left the office and I bought my ticket, it dawned on me that we’d already won the lottery because we’d fought through a terrible thing and kept going. When I wrote “Welterweights,” I thought it might serve as a cathartic alternate ending—a poem to share with Emily before slipping it into a locked drawer. But nineteen weeks later, our son August was born. Musically, a coda can arise from inside the music that’s already been playing, carrying its themes toward an unexpected end. Looking back, that poem feels less like an epilogue than a resolution we couldn’t yet hear.
