Cortney Lamar Charleston is the author of Telepathologies, selected by D.A. Powell for the 2016 Saturnalia Books Poetry Prize. He was awarded a Ruth Lilly and Dorothy Sargent Rosenberg Fellowship from the Poetry Foundation and has also received fellowships from Cave Canem, The Conversation Literary Festival and the New Jersey State Council on the Arts. Winner of a Pushcart Prize, his poems have appeared in Poetry, American Poetry Review, New England Review, The Nation and elsewhere. He serves as a poetry editor at The Rumpus and on the editorial board at Alice James Books.

Cate Lycurgus, Interviews Editor: I’d like to talk more about a number of the inventive forms you employ in Telepathologies, but first want to point to two—the “phobia” poems, and also ghazals—that appear often throughout the collection. What role does fear play, either in the impetus to begin writing, or in the unfolding of a collection? How does repetition work in conjunction with fear—to utilize, indict, exorcize?

CLC: Tremendous questions. I’d like, actually, to begin with the second one regarding the role of repetition. In my estimation, repetition is both the poison and the antidote for an uneasy, restless mind. The way a trauma recurs within the body, within the mind, requires constant salving. Herein lies a natural cycle, a chorus, a refrain. Repetition within the text, therefore, either serves to reinforce the feeling of living in and with anxiety or the effort and work required to free oneself from it, even if only for fleeting moments. So, keeping that in mind, I turn to your question of fear and its relationship to the form poems take throughout Telepathologies: because fear is a constant challenge to my peace of mind that must be overcome. Resultant of the racialized, frequently state-sanctioned violence that I and others like me may be subject to, the text bends at many points toward repetition, meaning perhaps the same words, as seen with the line endings in the ghazals; or serials, as seen with the phobia poems or the “How Do You…?” poems; or even something as simple as rhythm, something to nod one’s head to as if a familiar and intoxicating song. Fear is not only the reason why I might turn to write, but it fundamentally shapes the form the writing takes in ways I may not be entirely conscious of in the moment. And that’s okay, because the poem is the way by which it is revealed to me how I really feel.

CL: It’s interesting because a phobia is supposed to be an “irrational” fear or aversion, but as we move through these pieces, it’s clear the speaker is not talking about a window seat on Delta or a rainy-day book on the couch. Fear, while expressed by the speaker, more reflects the irrational and unjust world he inhabits; “Aviophobia: Fear of Flying,” for example, begins with “Aside from chicken, dipped in flour then fried, there is / an absence of wings here. Here: a hunger—dark, deep // south on the map of the soul.” It continues: “the crowd came, of course, eager / for the feeding. They cut off his undesirable parts—” and we move into the lynching of a black man. The final chilling lines (“…What they did to him was foul— // guilty or innocent, their lips licked all the same. We / never forgot the space between his feet and the ground”) upturn what we mean by flying, what we mean by becoming bird. Fowl.

This doubling of language happens both in the ghazals’ and phobia poems’ couplets, and also in “How Do You Raise a Black Child?” where lines like “With a belt / to keep their pants high. Not high all the time. On all-time highs / at all times until they learn not to feel and think so lowly of / their aims. To be six feet tall and not under.” Snippets of language undergo inversion and conversion. What is it about the rhythm of recasting that is magic? How do you think about the transformative power of saying and saying again? Does it operate differently for the writer and for readers?

CLC: I suppose that I don’t believe the recasting of words is magical so much as it’s necessary. In saying that, however, I certainly don’t wish to diminish the delight, simply on the level of language, that comes from the recasting of words you so wonderfully described (for both writer and reader), but I think this occurrence in my work is intuitive and derivative of marginalized people having to understand language’s multiplicities just in order to survive, to be able to tease out where the next danger might be coming from. Words have to be decoded and re-coded to be stripped of the violences that have been baked into the English language over the last several centuries; this process makes words, makes language purposeful to the project of building a safer world, or at least toward a safer world. This is my perspective as the writer.

Now, to the audience, I believe this “remixing” makes the poem (as art piece) and its message (purpose) less forgettable, less easy to gloss over. It’s pretty straightforward: repeating something increases the probability it will be remembered when most needed, and given what my work is largely concerned with, the stakes are too high for someone not to comprehend, in their heart even more than their mind, what is at stake. I recognize I’m competing against forces that attempt and succeed at pacifying the readers of my work, at least those who may not personally share the anxieties that dominate Telepathologies. That is why I must be even more insistent and why I also need to clue them into how language absolutely must change for a better world to come into existence. Actions and words may be separate entities, but they are not unrelated. Not by a long shot.

CL: The words must be multiple—I know that in writing from a place of chronic illness, one of my primary delights is in the play of language. There’s joy in how flexible it is, how the singing (lamenting?) can do so much work when the situation is unalterable. Similarly, I’m always confounded by the belief, especially among poets, that words don’t have the power to affect change.

Your piece “Spell Check Questions the Validity of Black Life” illustrates this perfectly; the poem features bold-faced entries naming Black Americans who have been murdered by or had their death sanctioned by the state, highlighting the built-in, pervasive attempts at erasure or ‘correction,’ and thereby the need for continual re-assertion of worth. For example:

[Rekia] Boyd: did you mean riskier?
          Of course. There may be nothing riskier than being
                    a black woman in America: because of who you
                              are, because of who you love, because….

[Tamir] Rice: did you mean tamer?
          As in, not twelve years old, but eleven? Ten? Nine?
                              Would that have been tame enough?

I can’t help think of Solmaz Sharif saying “it matters what you call a thing,” a person. Since the stakes are so high, I wonder how you approach the “tele-” aspect of “telepathologies,” especially when writing. What strategies do you use to bridge that distance, to diagnose correctly? Do you think of poems as diagnoses? As antidotes?

CLC: I believe that in trying to write through spiritual turbulence, the greatest asset to me has been time. Time, too, is a distance, perhaps the most important distance, and by turning my eye from the present moment toward the past, I’ve been able to sharpen the image of today for myself and for readers to, as you say, diagnose. Accurate diagnosis, after all, relies on the compilation of knowledge gained on an illness over time and these poems very much document what it is to live with (and under) illness—a social illness—and what its devastating effects are. This interpretation of the work was vitally important to me as I was putting the collection together, which is partly why each section begins with definition; the poems were meant to act as a sort of data in the study of the illness of anti-Black racism.

Extending from that point, it likely doesn’t surprise you, then, to hear that I don’t think of any of the poems in Telepathologies to be antidotes in any way, shape or form. The anxiety and the fixation on mortality and violence that characterizes the collection is not something that was expelled from my body with the writing of the poems but something it endures even now and likely will for the rest of my days on this earth, provided we, as a society, find no “cure” for what it is that ails me. Instead, the collection, as a summation of research (so to speak), illuminates how people live with the disease and guides us to where we may be able to provide treatment and therefore relief for those who hurt most, ultimately with the goal of restoring their mind, body and soul to a state of peace and eradicating the contagion: figuratively speaking, of course.

CL: Yes—the past definitely helps with a current diagnosis but does not necessarily move us toward cure. I don’t want to over-extend the metaphor, but say some are dying of lung disease. While a diagnosis doesn’t cure anything in itself, it may lead to a change in behavior that prevents further damage, either first or secondhand. I think of a poem like “How Did They Justify the Shooting?” where authorities “…Fetishized the size of his-her gun. / Invented a gun out of thin air. Gave quote to / their superior officer that the air was thinning. / Couldn’t breathe. Panic, attacked. Feared for / their life. Weighed their own life on a scale / against air, against his-her nothing…” This imagination probably does not come as a surprise to the victim and his community, rather to the bystander, to the jury, etc. And so I wonder if the level to which a poem “cures” comes down to who is being diagnosed, or who receives the news. Can you talk about the various whos you write to, or maybe who your ideal Telepathologies reader is?

CLC: I’d love to be able to say that I wrote this collection to shake up (liberal) White readers, that I intended for the verse to touch their hearts and push them toward some type of collective, corrective action to address this grand illness that poisons us all differently but undoubtedly. But what life has taught me, and what writing the collection reminded me, is that White people (as a construct) are going to do whatever they want to do and my words’ power is not invested remotely in compulsion but rather an earnest and artful persuasion, begging a choice be made to spare me (and the others I can stand in for) harm. And some will make that choice. And some will feel the words, but not make it. And some, maybe, will not feel a thing at all. Therefore, I couldn’t write these poems for that audience, though I knew they would read it, though I knew this poetry of mine would be called things like urgent and necessary, and those words are apt, yes, but more on a personal level it turns out.

These poems manifested as a means of channeling my own existential anxieties, to export some of the negative energy from my physical being where it wreaked untold havoc and have it live elsewhere. From the murder of Trayvon Martin onward, I was ensnared in dread, subjected to image after image of Black death, violent and insidious language, and a pervasive but predictable deficiency in human empathy in my national community. What I needed to accomplish, more than anything, was to time capsule the feeling of living, Black, in this moment; I needed to explain my suffering to myself and where it came from; I needed to come to terms with what the consequences of my suffering are to myself and others. There was never a moment writing these poems where I wasn’t envisioning some of me in the shadows, scared to death of dying the unnatural way under what feels, at this point, almost a natural law.

CL: If something is necessary for a writer, it’s usually necessary for others too. “Coming to terms” with consequences is such an interesting phrase—as if suffering could be settled, or certain life circumstances and consequences were in one’s control. Given that there are so many ways to export negative energy, or even so many modes of writing to do this, I wonder what aspects of poetry make it most conducive to serve as time capsule or mediator? Are there specific craft elements you fall back on?

CLC: I believe what makes poetry a ripe zone for the type of emotional processing you’re describing is that, despite whatever formal constraints we self-impose, the poem as a construct is nebulous and extremely flexible. The poem becomes the site where multiplicities held within our persons can exist most peacefully alongside each other. The poem becomes the site where understanding takes priority over judgment. The poem becomes the site where illogic (or, I suppose, a different kind of logic) is appreciated for rendering a more perfect portrait of humanity. So, with that being said, it makes an effective export of negative energy because it is a container that can morph to hold and carry whatever we bring into it.

This leads me to your second question, regarding craft elements and how they reappear over a body of work. In my particular instance, I think the thing that comes up most frequently is the use of negation or restatement: when something is said and then undone, or turned, in a way that creates tension and conflict. I believe this is my intuitive way of honoring the light and darkness in anything, most certainly a human being. Our lived experience, after all, is in flux, a constant journey between those two poles. It’s a somewhat repetitive existence, which is why I believe negation or restatement, which function in part due to repeating of something familiar, even if not exactly, tend to be things that I favor in my own writing. This is my assessment, at least, though I can’t honestly say that these decisions were always conscious on my part.

CL: So I recall a poem of yours “I Regret to Inform You That America Isn’t Real and Neither Are You,” which describes everything as imaginary, stating “…I was brought up by my imaginary / mother and my imaginary father alongside my imaginary / brother and my imaginary sisters…”, and continuing, “In these imaginary schools, after years of studying imaginary / history from imaginary books, there came a point when I was / taught about imaginary numbers, the first real thing that I feel / I ever learned.”

Use of this adjective and its entrance as a real concept calls into question previous perceptions of a mother’s “imaginary job” or father’s “imaginary blood.” And it’s through the boon of language (and math language; I love math!) we arrive at “i, certainly, is the square root of negative one… a negative multiplied by a negative is, / an entity precisely how you believed you were, but you were so wrong.”

And again, like you mentioned, a different sort of logic challenges our beliefs. I want to push a bit on what you said first though, about understanding taking priority over judgement. Is it understanding or not understanding—uncertainty—that must take priority? In the poem I just mentioned, belief in a certain world and self within it come into question, so how does this morphing container extend to questions of faith?

CLC: Well, I’ll say first that my comment on privileging understanding vs. judgment is speaking less toward comprehension or certainty and more toward acceptance of one’s state of being, which itself can be a state of uncertainty. The specific poem you mentioned (“I Regret to Inform You That America Isn’t Real and Neither Are You”) is very much coming to terms with the absence or impossibility of a certain world/self in a manner only a poem can, given it’s a body without a skeleton until deliberately given one. And what shapes this poem, what fills in its form, is the subversion of the language of exactitude (not saying mathematics is all about exacts, of course, but the general perception veers toward certainty rather than uncertainty if we think of these concepts as poles) whereby different logics converge in the form of the word imaginary.

In light of this, I feel your question on faith is an interesting one as faith is, in a sense, subversion, a reach toward an immateriality that frustrates the material reality we inhabit (by which I mean it implores us to imagine beyond what we immediately inhabit), something that comes from the frustrations of our existences. This, I believe, makes the poem a very natural sanctuary for matters of faith (or faithlessness as it were, the mirror) because a poem isn’t the place one comes to for answers or evidence as with scientific inquiry, but to ask about and argue aloud and newly render what is not allowable in other spaces, even within the space of the poem at times (thus, conflict); the poem then, I’d contend, is the slick admission of a sense of faith because it reaches for what it cannot conceivably touch and in the process comes to find itself, even if it cries out faithlessness, and it very well might, because faith isn’t a smooth drive. Rather, the poem, like faithfulness, is no act of resignation; by existing, it challenges the notion that we should resign and deems it worthwhile to do so in the face of the greatest resistance. This is what the poem is doing even if it doesn’t always win.

CL: Persistence despite resistance is central to Telepathologies, with both its underlying conception of faith, and also an underlying system that instills fear. In “…Everyday Something has Tried to Kill Me and Failed”, which begins “What might do me in is the telling of a white lie. / Having my gut confused for a knife block. / The structural failure of my body to process sugar…” and ends “…Cells / multiply themselves and build jails on top of dwindling bone. // They can mount their flag in my eye for all I know, but / all I know is that they haven’t yet: call it Jesus or dumb luck”, we see the dual resonances and strategy of restatement you mentioned earlier, but also a certain ambiguity as far as the divine or the happenstance. I’m rooting for and wanting to celebrate with the speaker, but the “yet” and that closing makes this precarious. Uncertainty is a given, but how does it operate differently, and enter poems differently, with regards to faith and fear? Are poems then also admissions of fear, in addition to faith? What role does community play, either explicitly referenced or implicitly with readers, in negotiating the two?

CLC: I’ve yet to read a great poem that is completely safe. Fear is a very natural element, spoken loudly or softly, within the poem; fear is what gives faith any importance as a concept, a mediating force within us and within our lives, and therefore, I find it most helpful to place poems on a spectrum whereby the poem may sit closer either to fear (or faithlessness that a desired resolution will materialize) or faith (trust that an ideal resolution is possible), but will not be without the other making its presence felt.

So, what quiets one and loudens the other? I think your question around community comes into play here. In my mind, fear or faith are things that are reinforced by experience or perceived evidence: it is easier to believe that things will work out if they mostly seem to unfold in a way that I as an individual am not alarmed by; likewise, if bad things always seem to happen to or around me, I may begin to read things less as a matter of possibility than of probability, and that will permeate through the many ways I touch the world, including the poem. I think of the presence or absence of community as part of that perceived evidence. Should I find myself with a deficit of concern from others, it will be easier for my mind, and therefore my words, to veer toward the dark end of the spectrum, to be characterized by projections of paranoia, anxiety and dread. Likewise, should I believe there is a body of people who will house my most vulnerable manifestation, it is easier to reach towards them and towards a more positive sentiment. Mind that I needn’t know this community intimately for this to happen, just that it exists in some capacity; if I can imagine the reader I want, I stand a chance against all odds, but some days are harder than others. Everything, fortunately or unfortunately, is fluid.

CL: Speaking of readers, say you meet someone who has never encountered a poem, ever. Or only had traditional grade-school associations with poetry. What one, of yours or anyone else’s, would you give her?

CLC: Well, I certainly wouldn’t subject someone to one of my poems! There are much better, richer places to start. My honest answer to your question, perhaps, is a bit cliché, but I give it only because it was instrumental in opening up poetry to me personally: Gwendolyn Brooks’s “We Real Cool.” The language itself is simple enough for anyone to tango with (it was for a much less savvy version of me), but it is far from a simple poem. It says so much in such little space, turning not one mirror on the world but several. It gives you sharp images and balances them against intoxicating sonics. I genuinely feel it gets as close to perfection as a poem written by a human being can get. There’s a reason why it’s the standard that it is.

CL: Thank you, Cortney!