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The Daily

July 23, 2021
At Work

Procrastination, Pressure, and Poetry: An Interview with Kendra Allen

By Lauren Kane

Photo: Clara Lee Allen. Photo and cover courtesy of Ecco.

Kendra Allen told me that when she feels stuck writing, she starts hitting the space bar to get things going again. This refusal to get bogged down by hesitancy or fear translates into her writing, which has a sonorous and raw vulnerability. Allen sees herself less as a capital-W Writer and more as a person in the world, using language to work out how she feels about family, death, and pop music. Our conversation took place on a phone call between New York City and Dallas on a July afternoon. Allen’s energy is infectious even from a distance, rigorously turning over ideas with me about everything from lyrics to reincarnation.

Fittingly, the word essay—to try, to ascertain, to weigh—originates not with formal constraints of prose but with experiments in ideas. Kendra Allen’s 2019 essay collection, When You Learn the Alphabet, is a fearless attempt by Allen to weigh her themes—family, inheritance, identity. Her debut poetry collection, The Collection Plate, published earlier this month by Ecco, revisits much from the essay collection but also moves into territory farther afield. Some of the most ambitious and captivating poems in the book are from a series based on Lonnie Johnson and the invention of the Super Soaker. Sometimes a poem, with its title politely positioned in the header position, won’t get started until the very bottom of the page. Rereading those poems now, I feel the weight of that space and am right there with Allen, mind whirring brightly as she taps the space bar, waiting for the words to come.

INTERVIEWER

You recently wrote a recommendation of theMIND’s album Don’t Let It Go to Your Head for The Paris Review Daily. In the recommendation, you mention that you had just met a deadline for your manuscript, and then you listened to the album and had a moment of thinking, Now I need to rewrite everything. How often is music this essential to your writing?

ALLEN

I literally would not be writing anything if I was not obsessed with reading lyrics. I think that’s what sparked my interest in creative writing. So many of my greatest memories are me in the car listening to a specific song or me buying a CD and just replaying it over and over and over. The artist I wrote about, theMIND, has a song called “Atlas Complex,” and I was thinking about the line where he says, “I told you everything, gave you everything, you always wanted me naked, and now I’m telling everything, I’m changing everything, I hope this honesty saves us.” I would hear something like that, and I would want to write it. I would create prompts out of song lyrics. So music has sustained me with something to write about. I can always find a line in any song and make a prompt out of it and apply it to my own life.

INTERVIEWER

The recommendation also mentions that you finished your manuscript at 2 A.M. Are you a procrastinator?

ALLEN

Oh, a hundred percent. I’m procrastinating as we speak. As soon as you called, I was procrastinating. I’m not a writer who can set a certain time every single day when I’m going to sit down and write ten pages. That’s just not how I’m wired. I need pressure or I won’t do anything. I will sit at the computer and have intentions of opening up the document, but then I will look at emails. I’ll get on YouTube. I’ll try to read a book. I procrastinate on reading, too. I’ll try to read, and I’ll just get distracted. I’m not the kind of person who has to go outside and clear their mind to do things. I’m more likely to sit in a room and drive myself crazy until I’m stressed out to the point where I’m like hours away from my deadline. And then I just pump it out. I need stress. That’s weird. I need to work on that. I don’t know why I need stress.

INTERVIEWER

Do you do a lot of revision, or does what comes out feel like the finished product?

ALLEN

Oh no. Never the finished product. I’m a big, big revisor. My revision process is more eliminating than adding things. I think with my first drafts it’s kind of just whatever comes out of my head. It’s not supposed to be good. When I get to that fourth or fifth draft, I can sort of see whatever I’m working on shaping itself and revealing itself to me. A lot of times when it reveals itself, I’m taking things out instead of adding in because I don’t need to say everything I’ve ever thought about what I’m writing. I’m learning that as I go. So when I’m revising, I’m saying, Is this necessary? Is this three essays in one essay, and what do I need to take out? Or is this poem just trying to sound cooler or smarter than what it is? When I see the bare bones of the piece, I’m like, I could have said this in maybe three or four sentences instead of three pages.

I have a better time revising poetry than I do with essays. I feel like having fun when I’m writing poems. Not in the first draft, but when it reveals itself, poetry gets to be fun. But with an essay, I put so much pressure on myself because it’s so many words and it kind of throws me off. And so I just have to strip everything away.

INTERVIEWER

Do you work from notes?

ALLEN

When I have something good, yeah. I realized there’s a pattern. Like, all of my stuff that I think is good—not good to the public but good to me—has been the product of me waking up at 2 A.M., writing a sentence down, going back to sleep, waking up forty-five minutes later, writing a hundred sentences down, going back to sleep, and then sort of copying and pasting it all into a Word document at a later date. Like, a way later date. And it’s been like that since I started taking writing seriously. That has been my main process.

INTERVIEWER

The Collection Plate is a perfect title for a collection of poetry. I want to hear you talk a little bit about what the image of a collection plate means to you.

ALLEN

I grew up in my great-uncle’s Baptist church, so I was thinking about the things that we are given and that we give away. I’ve seen people take things out of actual collection plates in church. [Laughs] With this collection I also wanted to think about water and what it takes away from us. So I was just thinking about things that water has taken out of and from me, whether that’s tears or sweat or spit.

I’m a person who will pick a title and try to write a complete thing around it just because I don’t want to change it. I feel married to it. It’s so crazy! [Laughs] With The Collection Plate, I started with the title and was like, This encapsulates the whole aura of where I’m at mentally right now, and I just wanted to write around it.

INTERVIEWER

When you say it captures where you were mentally, do you mean that you felt a lot of giving or taking from the poems?

ALLEN

I wrote most of the first drafts of these poems in 2019, and that was just not a good year for me. There was a heaviness on me, and I turned to poetry. I couldn’t write essays. My mind wouldn’t allow me to do it, and so I turned to poetry not thinking that what I was writing was going to be a book. I was just doing it because I couldn’t write essays. Sometimes with essay writing I feel like it’s a lot of overexplaining. Like with detail. Well, that makes no sense—the point of writing is to have detail. But during that specific moment when I was just solely writing poems, I didn’t want to do the essay thing anymore. I was like, Okay, I tried it out, and I tried to take risks, and I’ll come back to it later. What can I do with poetry that I haven’t discovered before? I wouldn’t define myself as a poet because I don’t know enough about poetry. I didn’t take classes on it. I’ve been in poetry workshops, but I don’t know a lot about structure and all the names of the different forms and things like that.

So I was going into writing poetry with a clean slate, and I think that served me because I didn’t have so many rules set in place. I could go to the page and think with my poems. When I was writing, I wasn’t thinking, I want to structure it this way. It just comes up. It does the work for itself if you put the work in, if that makes sense. Like, if I’m talking about a swimming pool, I’m not going into it trying to form a structure where it looks similar to the lanes of an Olympic pool. It just sort of came out like that and I wasn’t really aware of it. But I think now I’m at a point where I don’t want to keep doing things by accident. I want to do them on purpose.

INTERVIEWER

Do you think, in a way, poetry is nonfiction?

ALLEN

I think poetry is fiction and nonfiction. I think we assume it’s nonfiction. But some of the poets I’m obsessed with, a lot of their stuff is not even happening in their lives. It’s just imaginative. It’s blending truth with fiction and creating new worlds. A lot of my poetry is personal, and so I’m like, Oh, everybody’s just writing about what’s happening to them, their lives. But what could happen if we did this, or what shouldn’t have happened, or how can we do it differently?

I think with poetry, it’s easier—it’s not easier—but it’s like, I think that’s when it sort of shifts from truth to like this fantastic imaginative world that doesn’t lend itself to one genre. If that makes sense. And it doesn’t even matter if it’s true or not at that point. It’s just about the feeling of it.

INTERVIEWER

Is intuition a large part of how you like to do things? Like you said, you’re not coming to a poem with a form in mind, a sonnet or whatever, but rather feeling your way as you go?

ALLEN

If I’m assigned an essay to write, it’s very hard for me. That’s when the procrastination comes in and I’m just sitting there for three days straight with three words on the page because it’s just not clicking for me. If it feels forced, that’s what causes me to hit the space bar, that’s what causes me to sort of break a line or a sentence up in a random spot and try to create a double meaning. But music is involved in that, too. I listen to a lot of rap, and I’m always thinking of rappers I love who do double entendres and things like that.

INTERVIEWER

In both When You Learn the Alphabet and The Collection Plate, one of the main themes you like to return to is your family. What keeps drawing you back to them as subject matter?

ALLEN

I think it’s because my family members are like characters. Literally, I’ve always said if my family got a TV show, TV would shut down, and not in a good way. As in, we can’t have nobody on TV no more because this is crazy. This is wild.

My family is just full of stories that nobody got to tell. And you could see that weight of not being heard or not being seen. I didn’t really learn that until I got past twenty-five. A light went on and it was like, Okay, we’re all a part of one another. There’s so much to talk about, and it’s not being talked about, and I always want my family to see themselves in my work. If my auntie reads something, I want her to be like, I’m glad you said that because I’ve been trying to tell people and they weren’t listening. Or my granny, who was like, Thank you for telling a part of my story. It makes me feel like the stuff I reveal about myself is worth it.

INTERVIEWER

Do you think that’s connected to being raised in a religious and spiritual environment, where there’s so much storytelling? I’m thinking of the family superstition about death coming in threes, which comes up in your essays and in your poetry.

ALLEN

I grew up in a very spiritual, religious place, but I didn’t feel that spiritual or religious in it. I think that’s why I lean so much on trying to unpack it now. For example, my mama told me people die in threes, three people at a time, and I would just take it. Then I’ve seen it happen, and then I’ve seen it happen again. I just became very content with the concept of death. Me and my mom always talk about death. We talk about our own deaths. That’s when I feel the most in tune with my spirituality. I think about endings all the time in my work. Like, I could write the ending, but I don’t even know how it’s going to start. I just know how it’s going to end.

I will probably always write about the same thing, a subject, until I figure it out clearly for myself, because I’m not going to want to talk about something else, not when I haven’t even figured this out. I don’t care if it takes me writing three more books about the same thing. I promise I won’t make it boring, but until I can figure something out, that’s always going to be what I go back to and lean on.

Lauren Kane is the assistant editor of The Paris Review.

Read Kendra Allen’s poem “The Super Sadness! Feels Like Anger, Which Feels Like,” which appeared in the Spring 2021 issue.
July 22, 2021
Melting Clocks

& Other Stories

By Eloghosa Osunde

In Eloghosa Osunde’s column Melting Clocks, she takes apart the surreality of time and the senses.

Eloghosa Osunde, At the Beach in Your Dream, 2020, mixed media.

If you really think about it, we were all raised inside a giant dictionary. Society as we know it is simply a collection of shared definitions. Who is normal? What is beauty? Who is a criminal? What is a woman? What is a man? What is good love? What is sex? What is fair? Who is holy? What is evil? The more you agree with the definitions you’ve been given, the more you belong. The more you belong, the farther away you are from punishment. And you want to be safe in this scary place, don’t you? So you do what you’re supposed to do, and you avoid what leads to suffering. You don’t want to be lonely either, do you, so you believe the rule: there’s nothing but nothing for you outside the defined lines. You’re told this from when you’re little, that your questions will put you in trouble, that you are and will always be too small to challenge a meaning. You’re just one person and this is how it works: society decides, you obey. But is that true? Seeing as many of us are alive on the outskirts of definitions, seeing as that’s the address that saved some of our lives, the place where we watch our safeties spring out of the ground, it’s clear that whatever was defined can be redefined. Whatever was written by a person for a people, can be edited by a person or a people. We’re proof. What is society, anyway? It’s an anthology of someones. We make it up. We have always made it up.

Art making is my strongest argument for redefinition, because nothing shows you the lie of impossibility and the multiplicity of worlds better than a body of work standing where once there was nothing. You don’t know how to turn Something into Something Else? Listen to what a remix does to a song: how in African Lady, an ADM remix, TMXO lays Masego’s music over a Lagbaja sample, rubbing two worlds against each other until they spark a three-minute-fifty-seconds long fire. Listen to the Red Hot + Riot album made in honor of Fela’s music and enter the rooms that appear when Meshell Ndegeocello, Manu Dibango, Sade Adu, Kelis, Common, Tony Allen, and D’Angelo are invited to the same house party. Or watch Janelle Monáe’s Dirty Computer and notice the world you hold too tight become subsumed in an alternate reality, another now. Watch the Greek film Dogtooth and remember how you were taught to see; see how every manipulation has its genesis in language, how language reshapes the cornea and whatever stands before it. Read The Memory Police by Yōko Ogawa and register what feels familiar about the premise; where have you seen that before? It’s strange, isn’t it, to know that what we remember is also a collaboration. Find all five remixes to Rema’s “Dumebi” [Vandalized, Major Lazer, Henry Fong, Becky G, Matoma]. All these unalike branches, growing out of the same tree. You think language is set in stone? Listen to a Nigerian talk a person to the fringes of their own English using pidgin—a genius composition. Strict binaries and genre are real until you watch DJ Moma play a New York club or DJ Aye play a Lagos night. Technically a thing like that should be impossible—continents ejecting you onto the same dance floor, that voice meeting this synth, the low wail of a bass guitar free-falling through the deep grunt of an ancient drum: jazz meets Afrobeats meets house meets alternative meets grime meets highlife meets soukous—but there you are, all of a sudden, thinking, Wait, who said these things can’t belong together? Read More
July 21, 2021
The Moon in Full

Thunder Moon

By Nina MacLaughlin

In her monthly column The Moon in Full, Nina MacLaughlin illuminates humanity’s long-standing lunar fascination. Each installment is published in advance of the full moon.

Henry Ossawa Tanner, The Good Shepherd, 1902–03, oil on canvas, 30 1/4 x 36 1/4″. Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons.

Tootsie Roll Tom showed up at all the Little League games in the town where I grew up. Soccer games, too. He kept Tootsie Rolls in his pockets and in a small canvas satchel he wore on his shoulder. He arrived on his bicycle and kids surrounded him as he pulled the Tootsie Rolls from his pockets and his pouch and placed the candy in their eager palms. He was well loved in the town. In the town there was also a psychiatric hospital, formerly known as an insane asylum. My mom called it the loony bin, and she was not the only one. The rumor was that Tootsie Roll Tom lived there. He lived there but was not secured to a bed in a room with bars on the windows; he was allowed to ride his bicycle around the town, and wave at everyone he saw, and give candy to the children who crowded around him like hungry, happy little goslings. He had an open, friendly face. He was not too tall and he wore his socks pulled up. The town honored him with a day named after him, embodying a spirit of warmth, welcome, and generosity that the town fathers and mothers wanted to celebrate. The state shuttered the psychiatric hospital almost two decades ago (where did the patients go?) and a redevelopment project might turn the asylum to condos. The rumor was—I heard it in middle school from one of the older middle schoolers—the rumor was that Tootsie Roll Tom was in the institution, if he was, because he had raped his mother.

It’s rumored that emergency rooms and psychiatric wards are more active at the full moon. It’s rumored that crime spikes. It’s rumored that people get a little crazed and don’t know what to do with their bodies. You’ve heard these rumors. From bartenders and nurses and nursery school teachers. Maybe you’ve felt it your very self. I saw a neighbor on the street and asked how she was doing. “It’s the full moon, you know,” she said, “so I feel completely demented.” It made news that a town in England put more cops on patrol on full moons. Sylvia Plath knew: the moon “drags the sea after it like a dark crime.”

Of all months, I suspected July, with its thick sour heat, its stewy dead light, must have the most crime, and the full moon in July, the big Thunder Moon, must be one of the crimiest times of the year. Sticky-thighed July, when walls of heat press in, shortening tempers, contorting perspective, squeezing the pouches that hold the dark urges where pressure builds like a blister until dark ashy oozings seep from apertures otherwise pinched. July is the month that crouches behind a tree in the dark, having soaked for a year in sour milk, all its flesh molded and rotting. It waits for you to pass by the tree then pushes itself against you, its slick, rotting skin on your skin. No knives, no guns, just a stinking all-wrongness and you can’t get the smell off. Read More
July 20, 2021
Comics

Remember Me and You

By Lizzy Stewart

Lizzy Stewart’s debut graphic novel, It’s Not What You Thought It Would Be, reimagines visual storytelling through a series of interconnected vignettes that each employ a unique illustrative style. From black-and-white sketches to full-color drawings, Stewart’s stories are linked by feelings of uncertainty and acceptance as friends and strangers alike confront the many ways in which expectations rarely match up with reality. In the below excerpt, two longtime friends meet up and recall the simple pleasures of their adolescence.

Read More
July 20, 2021
Redux

Redux: Mouth Is Boss

By The Paris Review

Every week, the editors of The Paris Review lift the paywall on a selection of interviews, stories, poems, and more from the magazine’s archive. You can have these unlocked pieces delivered straight to your inbox every Sunday by signing up for the Redux newsletter.

Robert Pinsky.

This week at The Paris Review, we’re thinking about mouths and the breath. Read on for Robert Pinsky’s Art of Poetry interview, Shruti Swamy’s short story “A House Is a Body,” and Helena Kaminski’s poem “Face.”

If you enjoy these free interviews, stories, and poems, why not subscribe to The Paris Review? You’ll also get four new issues of the quarterly delivered straight to your door. Or, choose our new summer bundle and purchase a year’s worth of The Paris Review and The New York Review of Books for $99 (that’s $50 in savings!).

Robert Pinsky, The Art of Poetry No. 76
Issue no. 144 (Fall 1997)

In Poetry and the World, I wrote: “Poetry is the most bodily of the arts.” A couple of friends who read it in draft said, Well, Robert, you know … dancing is probably more bodily than poetry. But I stubbornly left the passage that way without quite having worked out why I wanted to say it like that. Sometimes the ideas that mean the most to you will feel true long before you can quite formulate them or justify them. After a while, I realized that for me the medium of poetry is the column of breath rising from the diaphragm to be shaped into meaning sounds inside the mouth. That is, poetry’s medium is the individual chest and throat and mouth of whoever undertakes to say the poem—a body, and not necessarily the body of the artist or an expert as in dance.

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July 19, 2021
Arts & Culture

The Mournfulness of Cities

By David Searcy

Edward Hopper, Hotel Window, 1955, oil on canvas, 40 x 55″. Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons.

I am puzzled by the mournfulness of cities. I suppose I mean American cities mostly—dense and vertical and relatively sudden. All piled up in fullest possible distinction from surroundings, from our flat and grassy origins, the migratory blur from which the self, itself, would seem to have emerged into the emptiness, the kindergarten-landscape gap between the earth and sky. I’m puzzled, especially, by what seems to me the ease of it, the automatic, fundamental, even corny quality of mournfulness in cities, so built into us, so preadapted for somehow, that even camped out there on the savannah, long before we dreamed of cities, I imagine we should probably have had a premonition, dreamed the sound of lonely saxophones on fire escapes. What’s mourned is hard to say. Not that the mourner needs to know. It seems so basic. One refers to certain Edward Hopper paintings—people gazing out of windows right at sunset or late at night. They’ve no idea. I don’t suppose that sort of gaze is even possible except within the city. You can hear the lonely saxophone-on-fire-escape (in principle, the instrument may vary) cry through Gershwin. Aaron Copland. You remember Sonny Rollins on the bridge (the structure varies, too, of course). So what in the world is that about? That there should be a characteristic thread of melody, a certain sort of mood to sound its way through all that lofty, sooty jumble to convey so clear and, as it seems, eternal a sense of loss and resignation. How in the world do you get “eternal” out of “saxophone” and “fire escape”? It doesn’t make much sense. That it should get to you—to me at least—more sharply, deeply, sadly than the ancient, naturally mournful, not to say eternal, sound of breath through reed or bamboo flute.

Not too many years ago, as I began to wonder about the mournfulness of cities—its expression in this way—I brought a recording of Aaron Copland’s Quiet City concert piece to my then-girlfriend Nancy’s house on a chilly winter evening. She had friends or family staying, so we slept in the front bedroom, which, because of its exposure or some problem with the heater, was quite cold. So I remember all the quilts and blankets and huddling up together as if desperate in some Lower East Side tenement and listening to this music break our hearts about ourselves, our struggling immigrant immersion and confusion in this terrible complexity. The lonely verticality of life. And why should sadness sound so sweet? I guess the sweetness is the resignation part.

I’d like to set up an experiment to chart the sadness—try to find out where it comes from, where it goes—to trace it, in that melody (whichever variation) as it threads across Manhattan from the Lower East Side straight across the river, more or less west, into the suburbs of New Jersey and whatever lies beyond. This would require, I’m guessing, maybe a hundred saxophonists stationed along the route on tops of buildings, water towers, farther out on people’s porches (with permission), empty parking lots, at intervals determined by the limits of their mutual audibility under variable conditions in the middle of the night, so each would strain a bit to pick it up and pass it on in step until they’re going all at once and all strung out along this fraying thread of melody for hours, with relievers in reserve. There’s bound to be some drifting in and out of phase, attenuation of the tempo, of the sadness for that matter, of the waveform, what I think of as the waveform of the whole thing as it comes across the river losing amplitude and sharpness, rounding, flattening, and diffusing into neighborhoods where maybe it just sort of washes over people staying up to hear it or, awakened, wondering what is that out there so faint and faintly echoed, faintly sad but not so sad that you can’t close your eyes again and drift right back to sleep. Read More