Finding Fugitive Places
Roger Reeves
in conversation with Jason Myers
We have been fans of Roger Reeves long before he ever agreed to serve as the Guest Judge for this year’s Starshine and Clay Fellowship. From the publication of his debut collection, King Me, by Copper Canyon in 2013, Reeves has enthralled us with one of the most distinctive, captivating, and compelling voices in contemporary literature. His much anticipated second collection, Best Barbarian (W.W. Norton, 2022), was on the shortlist for the National Book Award, a finalist for the Pen-Voelcker Award and the Griffin Poetry Prize. He received the 2023 Kingsley Tufts Poetry Award, and also recently received a Guggenheim Fellowship.
Reeves is an associate professor of English at the University of Texas in Austin, where he lives with his partner Monica Jimenez and their daughter Naima. We corresponded over email and will host Reeves and this year’s Starshine and Clay fellows at our Wonder Festival in Jackson Hole, Wyoming, this June.
Jason Myers: You call the writing gathered in Dark Days “fugitive essays,” which calls to mind the old spiritual “Steal Away.” One of the recurring themes and calls in this book is the need for people – particularly Black people, Native Americans, and other folks who continue to be bamboozled and brutalized by the State – to find places apart in which they might think, sing, dance, pray, prophecy and poemify; in short, live. How does writing afford such places, and in your teaching how do you lead your students into such fugitive places, such liberated and liberating spaces?
Roger Reeves: Writing offers me the opportunity to truly try out my tongue, my sound, my sense of world, which is really to say, my sense of language. So much of the world is made of language. God said let there be light, and there was light. Our parents naming us, and some of us re-naming ourselves. Writing allows us this opportunity to name and call forth–to hail ourselves into being. And, anytime, one might be calling to oneself in an unsanctioned manner, one is considered fugitive and profligate.
I lead students to “fugitive places” and fugitive language through putting what I believe to be fugitive art and language in front of them. In the Spring semester, I taught a class at the University of Texas on Black ecstaticism and poetry. We read Will Alexander’s Refractive Africa, Harryette Mullen’s Muse and Drudge, as well as literary and cultural criticism by Fred Moten and Ashon T. Crawley. All of it either explicitly or implicitly trafficked in ecstasy and, for me, that’s a type of fugitivity. What I also asked students to do was to bring in anything that seemed ecstatic and fugitive. One student decided to write a final project on the spice pepper and ecstasy. Another wrote a series of poems that thought about sampling. What I hope to do is to help students tune in to the way there are so many examples of fugitivity before us in the world.
JM: I love that in the last of your “Letters to Michael Brown,” you acknowledge that “I keep mistyping live as love,” and in the preceding paragraph you refer to the limbs of “love oaks” [emphasis mine]. Who doesn’t want to have some love oaks surrounding them! What are the trees and other living things (thinking of Lucille’s poem “the earth is a living thing”) that most readily and enthusiastically conjure a sense of love?
RR: I love this question, Jason. No one has ever asked me what most readily and enthusiastically conjures a sense of love. Here is one: water moving over slate-like rock in a creek bed. Specifically, I’m thinking about this waterfall crossing in the greenbelt near my house. My daughter and I go there some time and just sit and talk beneath the junipers, pines, and live oaks umbrellaing overhead. While the water and the creek bed are not love themselves. They conjure that for me. Something about the quietness of it feels exactly like love.
JM: Your essay on Michael K. Williams made me think of Ross Gay’s riff on dancing in Inciting Joy. He quotes his friend the poet Patrick Rosal as describing the moves on a dance floor thus: “we went free.” Tell us about your itinerary for freedom. How do dance and poetry help you get there?
RR: Dance and poetry are so important to me, partly, because I was forbade to do them as a child. Not so much the poetry but the dancing. I was raised in a Pentecostal household where dancing was not allowed because it reveled in the body, in the carnal. And as someone trying to be Christ-like, we were supposed to eschew the carnal. However, at my pre-school, the teachers would put on records–Michael Jackson, the Beastie Boys, Madonna–and I would dance. And, I loved to dance until my mother found out. And let’s just say after that, I didn’t do much dancing until I went to college. However, I knew there was something there–something in the dancing. Anytime someone forbids something, know that there’s something there they don’t want you to have, something that could possibly free you.
I have taken that same sort of position with poetry. Anytime, I hear: “a poem is not supposed to contain x” or “a poem shouldn’t use abstraction” or “a poem shouldn’t have deer in it or sound oracular”…..I immediately begin to explore, play in what I allegedly shouldn’t. I don’t do it to be reactionary. I begin to explore this territory of abjection because often there’s usually something profound in what the adjudicators of taste and propriety swear off. I think about how Black poetry was often denigrated as “political poetry” and therefore not serious or rigorous. However, what was actually being opposed was Black poets searching for freedom, decrying the ignominious position of their marginalization in America.
Poetry is the place where we risk the vulnerability of sounding like ourselves–collectively and individually.
JM: There are many tender evocations of your childhood in the Full Gospel Church of God, especially in “Reading Fire, Reading the Stars.” At the same time, you make clear you are not raising your child in that religious tradition, and that this is one of the reasons why reading poems aloud with your daughter has been an important spiritual ritual. For readers who have yet to encounter this book, tell us how you think about the sustenances you received in the church, and how they differ from the sustenances of poetry, the arts, scholarship?
RR: The breath of what is considered beautiful and free is wider in poetry, in the arts than in the church I was raised in. In the Pentecostal church, dancing wasn’t allowed (unless it was for the Lord). The flesh was to be rejected or inured. The arts and poetry celebrate the carnal, the mortal. There’s divinity in pleasure, in desire, even in lust. In the arts, one never needs to be above the body or outside of oneself. One’s obsessions can drive the car as opposed to being hidden in the trunk of it.
JM: Dark Days concludes not with your words but still images from a cinematic moment you have just described: an exquisite, ecstatic kiss shared between the actors Saint Suttle (what a perfect name!) and Gertie Brown. These images, which hail from 1898, really transport us into a place of reverie, joy, and profound pleasure. What art – and what besides art, e.g., a mountain, a meal, a conversation – has been transporting you of late?
RR: Honestly, listening to jazz musicians think, which happens when they play. I’ve been listening to Samara Joy, Cecile McLorin Salvant, and John Coltrane quite a bit–all very different players. But my God, they're geniuses. Also, I have been transported by the thinking of Duke Ellington, Ambrose Akinomusire, Jaco Pastorious, Anita Baker, and McCoy Tyner. Music offers such diverse and nuanced way of inhabiting breath and form, which are the building blocks of poetry.
JM: “Something Good,” the essay about that kiss, contains the refrain “Loose, free, and scattered.” This phrase feels valedictory, and for some reason this made me think of the fact that Elizabeth Bishop has on her gravestone the closing lines from her poem “The Bight”: “All the untidy activity continues/awful but cheerful.” Hopefully you won’t need to choose any words for such a purpose for a long time, but are there particular phrases from this book, or Best Barbarian, which you’d especially like to be remembered for?
RR: “There is no definitive narrative to escaping, to freedom. It is–only is.” These are the last two sentences of an essay called “Through the Smoke, Through the Veil, Through the Wind.” In other words, get it–freedom–how you get it. Just don’t hurt anybody in the process. And maybe do–if they’re getting in the way.
