Ama Codjoe is the author of Bluest Nude and Blood of the Air, winner of the Drinking Gourd Chapbook Poetry Prize. Her recent poems and prose have appeared in The Atlantic, The Nation, Orion, the Best American Poetry series, and elsewhere. Among other honors, she has received a Rona Jaffe Foundation Writer’s Award, a Creative Writing Fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts, a NYSCA/NYFA Artist Fellowship, and a Jerome Hill Artist Fellowship. She lives in New York City.

Cate Lycurgus, Interviews Editor: With a book that questions both seeing and being seen, that unflinchingly addresses the vulnerabilities our desire creates, that displays a Black (and blue) beauty and honors those who claim it—both through art-making and a refusal to be shamed—there are so many ways to begin. At the risk of simplicity though, I’d like to ask about the superlative title, Bluest Nude. In unexpected ways, blue permeates the collection as “piss in the dye pot that makes indigo blue,” or “blue of a record’s groove” or blue “as a habit, a river I stepped into” and “the blue you miss/because—though it almost/killed you—blue was,/for a season, your home.” It is more than a color, as these excerpts indicate, and so I wonder if you could speak about some of the ways you see blue functioning as it suffuses the collection?

Ama Codjoe: “Blue” is multi-valent: inherent in its languaging (read “the blues”) is mood, music, tone, idiom, emotionality, double meanings, chemistry, color, and—in a kind of bounce or reverberation—whatever the color blue evokes in a more personal symbology. Perhaps the occurrence and recurrence of blue in Bluest Nude, functions as a kind of tributary that flows to and from the river of the collection. And perhaps more than any other color, blue has been utilized by visual artists in career defining ways: Picasso’s blue period; Matisse’s cut outs; Yves Klein’s paintings, sculpture, and performance; Lorna Simpson’s recent large-scale paintings; and Carrie Mae Weems’s triptych Blue Black Boy come to mind. Blue is capacious and I hope the collection exploits this quality.

CL: I love the tributary description with respect to your work, especially because of how the blues ebb and recede depending on where the poems direct our gaze. And you’re right—blue is pervasive in art of all forms, and yet I’ve read that ancient texts actually make no mention of blue; that as a relatively rare (or later costly) hue, many peoples didn’t have a name for it. Which fascinates me on so many levels; the sky is blue, yet people probably referred to it differently, as a gradation of something they could call. So much of our understanding of the world depends on articulation, it seems—like we can’t know what we can’t name, or what we refuse to name we refuse to acknowledge, even about ourselves.

Your collection begins with Lorraine O’ Grady saying “to name ourselves rather than be named we must first see ourselves…” and your pieces relentlessly pursue clear-sightedness. In the title poem, we read:

Art is drawn on the cave of my body.
           There are as many walls inside me
as there are bones at the bottom of the sea.

It matters little how small I am in the pool
           of another’s eye. It’s awe or indifference
I crave. I want to be seen clearly or not at all.

How do you balance the desire for precision with acknowledging so much inherent mystery or ambiguity? In poems, how does the self as both subject and object complicate the naming?

AC: I’m wondering if there’s a precision of seeing that has little to do with what is being perceived. In other words, isn’t it possible to clearly see murkiness or ambiguity? A clear-sightedness does not demand anything from what is being perceived except that it be what it is. “What it is” is, of course, riddled with mutability, depending on one’s positionality as seer or seen, but I guess what I’m trying to get at is that the desire to clean the lens of the telescope or microscope is independent of what happens to be on the other side of the lens. The action of cleaning the lens for the benefit of self-looking and self-seeing is imperative to the effort of self-making.

The epigraph that opens the collection is gleaned from Lorraine O’Grady’s “Olympia’s Maid: Reclaiming Black Female Subjectivity” (1992, 1994). In the sentence immediately preceding it, O’Grady uses a phrase borrowed from the title of an anthology of Caribbean women writers; O’Grady writes, “We must be willing to hear each other and call each other by our ‘true-true name.’” It is possible that someone could call you by your true-true name and you not even know it’s your name—for someone to see you more clearly than you see yourself. It is also possible that you are in possession of your true name and others call you “outside of your name.” This range of possibilities creates the gaps, insights, friction, and intimacies I hope the poems in Bluest Nude, as a book-length experience, perceive.

To your final question regarding the complication of naming as both subject and object, I offer more questions: How does one, as subject and object or as self-reflexive subject, develop discernment and perception? Is who or what we see in the mirror ever independent from the ways others perceive us? Can the ways others perceive us and we perceive ourselves ever be free of how societal forces have shaped our sight? The eponymous poem utilizes juxtaposition, repetition, and a palette of blues to take up these questions.

CL: You’re right of course, yet we often use “I see” to mean “I understand”; in our language, even, the distinction between sight and in-sight gets clouded. Sometimes language is less than precise and, as the frictions in your poems suggest, possibly even dangerous. In the second section of the same poem, the speaker writes: “If I describe how / the officer treated / the young woman’s body, / I am also describing / the color of her body. / Let me refuse simile. / I do not wish to write it.” Here language could potentially bruise, could offer false names. And yet the attempt to voice is important; as “the yellow song / of a blue pain” the speaker writes “In every light, the fact of history / strips me blue. These are the conditions. The point is / to go on.”

Which these poems do, in such profound ways—“my body is a lens / I can look through with my mind,” we read, early on. And so, I’m hoping you can share some of the complications of language as a mode of inquiry as opposed to other forms of art? How does ekphrastic poetry help you address these challenges? What additional considerations do you make when writing alongside visual pieces?

AC: The question of language’s complications reminds me of a few lines from Nazim Hikmet’s poem “Things I Didn’t Know I Loved.” Using abstract paintings to describe photographs of the cosmos, Hikmet writes: “my heart was in my mouth looking at them / they are our endless desire to grasp things.” What feels most complicated about language as the poet’s medium is the redundancy and inadequacy of using language to satisfy “our endless desire to grasp things,” or as Rita Dove puts it, to express the “unsayable.” I love the impossibility of the endeavor as conveyed by Hikmet and Dove. This impulse drives me to the page.

The sentence “I do not wish to write it,” is a sincere refusal which is a power. The narrative of police violence, as an arm or extension of the state, persists, despite my unwillingness to detail it, and the brutal, unspoken image referred to by the poem’s speaker is an image many of us carry whether or not the speaker chooses to write it down. But to mark the wish not to write it—to write that, is a way of taking something miniscule—but muscular—back. A sliver of agency in an untenable ongoingness.

Writing in response to art feels true to how I live my life, how I “go on.” I love roaming the halls of museums and sensing the dimming of theater lights—hearing that particular hush. When writing alongside visual art pieces, there are many doors to enter: assuming the subject position of an object or figure in the work; describing what the artwork provokes in me (thoughts, memories, dreams, desires); describing the what of it (how it looks and what I perceive); writing outside of the frame of the artwork (about what’s around it)—the artist’s process, the historical context of a piece of art, the artwork’s relationship to audience . . . Often, I don’t know which door I’m entering until I’m already there.

CL: You enter these doors so effortlessly and variously. I think of “Posing Nude,” which goes outside the photo’s frame to its staging, and on to a larger exploration of remove and intimacy; of “Bathers with Turtle,” where a description of the piece mingles with the speaker’s own reflection; or “Poem After Betye Saar’s The Liberation of Aunt Jemima,” where the painted addresses the artist, voicing her volition:

Gonna burn the moon in a cast iron skillet.
Gonna climb the men who, when they see my face, turn into stony mountains.
Gonna get out of the kitchen.
Gonna try on my nakedness like a silk kimono…
Gonna purr beneath my own hand.
Gonna take down my hair.

There is muscle enacted by the speaker here, and elsewhere; often this muscle has to do with expressing one’s own desire—either in a personal context with a lover or mother, in societal or historical contexts, or in more metaphysical ones—however unsayable or insatiable it may be. Desire typically has an object—it is a transitive impulse—so how do poems engaging with someone else’s art clarify desire or complicate agency? What (if any) forms or poetic strategies allow you to approach the unsayable or unquenchable otherwise? What vulnerability is required in each instance?

AC: Let’s take “Poem After Betye Saar’s The Liberation of Aunt Jemima” as a way into your questions. The use of repetition and the use of persona come to mind when considering which strategies allow me to approach the unsayable. The poem is in the voice of the Aunt Jemima(s) portrayed in Betye Saar’s iconic 1972 assemblage. In this and other poems, I am most interested in persona that is near to me: a thin veil. The speaker’s desires are close to mine; the constraints of her life both diverge and brush up against mine. I want her to rest, I want her to experience a sexuality where her pleasure is centered, I want her to be free—even from the fight for freedom.

When I read this poem aloud, I often feel a surge of power. My voice becomes revved up by the repetition and agency of “gonna.” By speaking for/through Aunt Jemima, I’m able to claim desire as an advocate for Aunt Jemima and for women similarly abused—this is a role I can easily occupy, perhaps with less discomfort than advocating for myself, though I strive to be good at that too . . . But the mask is thin. I am still using “I,” speaking as if Aunt Jemima is me, so there, too, is the vulnerability.

CL: Often I think readers have an easier time either handling a persona radically different from the writer’s, or interpreting a strict autobiographical “I,” and yet that thin-veil place affords so much. With sexuality too, poetry has poles—vulgarity or complete omission—that are much more commonplace than the tender and quotidian sensuality you employ. Lines like “tucked inside her is what hangs // from my brothers like pockets turned / inside out” or “I watched as you covered my nipple / with your mouth. Desire made you / beautiful” or “I chose the feeling of waiting naked beneath the throw” or “a summer crush holds out his fingers for the other boys to smell…” have, for me, illuminated what I tend to shy from (on the page and in life) and highlighted the ways sexuality, desire, and their accompanying freedoms often come laced with shame. In individual pieces and across the collection, Bluest Nude helps readers un-learn, or maybe re-learn what it means to be a sexual being. Does writing about desire and pleasure come naturally to you, or do you have to (how?!) work at it? What role if any does form play as you craft lyrics of freedom, or permission?

AC: Writing about sexuality does come naturally to me. I’m often only reminded of how strongly it features in my work when faced with the challenge of choosing poems to read to, say, a middle school audience. Perhaps this characteristic of my writing goes back to the unsayable. Here, for me, unsayability has more to do with sexuality’s power, mystery, and grip than about what’s taboo. To completely re-contextualize a Steve Biko quote, “I write what I like.” I write what I want to write about and I write about what gives me pleasure.

Part of why writing about sexual freedom and unfreedom feels natural to me has to do with lineage. I have often thought about how lucky I am to have come of age in a time after Alice Walker’s reclamation of Zora Neale Hurston and in the wake of black feminist scholarship. As a teenager, I grew up reading Sandra Cisneros’s Loose Woman, Audre Lorde’s The Marvelous Arithmetics of Distance, Julia Alvarez’s Homecoming, the No More Masks! anthology edited by Florence Howe and Ellen Bass, and memoirs by bell hooks. Years later: enter Sharon Olds. Given the literature I claim as my inheritance, I don’t think twice.

I don’t mean to suggest that writing about sexuality is easy, that’s a different question altogether. In terms of form’s relationship to this particular subject matter, I wonder alongside you, Cate. I do think the longer poems in the book with numbered sections point towards the effort of the telling—towards instability, multiplicity, and conundrum: I’m trying to say (or ask) something and I need many attempts to say it; I turn the poem over and over again like a string of worry beads.

CL: I definitely worry-bead poems and lines before I write them down, but this process rarely appears on the page—I appreciate the transparent mind at work. You have a poem “Diamondback,” an origin story of sorts, where initially a “rattlesnake traveled the length / of [her] spine” before the speaker “ felt venom / rise in [her] ears” as she “rubbed [herself] / against a rock, / turning [her] skin bronze / and flawless.”

Both friction and possibility result from the communion of bodies here; so, too, in the juxtaposition of the first slaloming portion of the poem with the single block stanza opposite, in which this re-casting of desire continues:

After the __________, I yearned to be reckless. To smash
a glass brought first to my lips. To privilege lust over
tomorrow. To walk naked down the middle of a two-lane
road. But, too late, without my bidding, life cracked open,
rushed, openmouthed, like a panting dog whose name
I did not call—my lips shut like a purse…

The blank holds such weight, such mystery, but also possibility, and invitation to readers. In these pieces, is it the unsayable we’re witnessing, or an opportunity to collaborate? And what possibilities do animals, who speak in ways so different than our own, afford when approaching the inarticulable?

AC: Collaboration in attempt to say the unsayable. I think that’s precisely right. The blank, what’s in it, has changed for me during the process of composing and ordering the book. The reader (and I include myself here) is invited to bring their own history into the blank space as well as to rely on the words surrounding it. I think the weight and possibility you describe comes from collaboration in addition to context.

In Bluest Nude, non-human animals carry the human animal in their mouths. Even in what can’t be fully understood, translated, or communicated between and among species, there’s the compelling attempt of meaning-making. In the book, there is a series of transformations in regards to the non-human animal which I hope evoke a feeling state or that represent a kind of reaching across species for a language that is impossible, finally, to find.

CL: And so many transformations happen, perhaps in reaching that unsayable, perhaps in coming to terms with it. In one of my favorite poems, “Burying Seeds” (which I wish I could quote in full!) the speaker ends: “…I can see a cloud / turning into a horse and a plane that could be a star— / a star that might be a planet. It’s hard to tell from here, // wrapped in the caul of the present, fixed on this plot / of grass, with so many seeds buried underground, / and winter—forged into a circle—threatening never to end.”

Grief transforms us, perhaps in preparation for death to transform us. But in these poems, I’m struck by the way sexuality determines transformations, especially for women; many pieces distinguish girl from lover, mother (or non-mother) from ancestor even as they push against these labels or a linear transformation. How do you see your work as transforming the way women are seen or we see ourselves? What role does nakedness, either literally or in terms of an explicitly embodied lexicon play?

AC: Perhaps this is strange, but the question of my hopes for transformation remind me of the film Shadowlands. Anthony Hopkins plays C.S. Lewis, who, when describing prayer, says, “It doesn’t change God, it changes me.” My hope is that I am deepened, stretched, and stilled by the process of researching, writing, revising, and sharing Bluest Nude. On the brink of publication, I feel the urge to focus on why I write and not on what the book will accomplish in the world, which isn’t to say I don’t believe in literature’s transformative powers. I honestly haven’t given much thought to how Bluest Nude might transform the way women are seen or see themselves; I have thought of how my desire to share these poems with one person, one reader, at a time is a testament to my belief in poetry’s potential to connect, reveal, and resound. Certainly, this sharing feels to me like a baring.

CL: I completely hear that—I’ve stopped praying for specific things to happen and instead for ways of being because, to me at least, the former presumes I know for what to pray, that I can predict transformation. If you were to meet a reader who had never really experienced poetry before, what piece, of yours and/or another’s would you share first?

AC: That’s beautiful, Cate. Thank you for sharing. And I love this question. Lucille Clifton’s “Blessing the Boats” is a poem written on my heart and I love reciting it to others. From Bluest Nude, I’d share “Blueprint” the first poem in the collection. It’s a good example of a poem that is communicating through imagery, mood, and gesture. And I hope after spending time with the first poem, the reader would want to read more.

CL: I sure did—thank you so much, Ama!