A. H. Jerriod Avant was born and raised in Longtown, Mississippi. His first book, Muscadine, (Four Way Books, 2023) received the 2024 Mississippi Institute of the Arts and Letters Poetry Award. A graduate of Jackson State University, Jerriod has earned MFA degrees from Spalding University and New York University. He’s received scholarships from the Breadloaf Writer’s Conference and Naropa University’s Summer Writing Program. A former resident at the James Castle House and Vermont Studio Center, Jerriod has received two winter fellowships from the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown. His work has appeared in Boston Review, Pinwheel, Callaloo, Virginia Quarterly Review, Obsidian, Yale Review, and other journals. Jerriod’s work has also been produced in collaboration with the Emily Harvey Foundation, the Highline NYC, and the Kitchen Lab. Jerriod is the 2024-2025 John and Renee Grisham Writer-In-Residence at the University of Mississippi.

Cate Lycurgus, Interviews Editor: I hope I haven’t read too much into it, but want to begin by asking about your title, Muscadine—those southern, thick-skinned grapes that give way to a syrupy sweet, and the most dulcet of wines—which grounds the collection in a particular place and way of being in the world. How did the title come to be and how do you see it framing the ways readers enter your collection?

Jerriod Avant: Muscadine. It’s not a title I came to easily. There were others filling in, even after the contract was signed. I needed to think and feel long enough to find the title that felt most right, the one I felt had the right ring to it. While preparing for my comprehensive exams, I considered how the other titles I’d come up with seemed to fail the manuscript in ways I didn’t feel like I could afford. I wanted to be sure the title signaled a strong sense of place. I needed the title to engage taste and smell for those familiar with the grape and perhaps a sense of mystery for the people who often stop and ask me what a muscadine is. I also wanted the title to point to the way language is held together in the manuscript, and the way language is intentionally undone in the manuscript. Thinking about the way we grew up consuming these grapes straight off their dusty vines, and how I saw the adults take the grape and make muscadine wine, I realized these two modes had much to offer the experience of the grape, thus, the experience of the manuscript and the embodiment of language. Subconsciously, Muscadine became a symbol of what has stayed and remained abundant, in light of all the personal and communal loss the manuscript is busy with.

CL: And the book explores so much—so much loss and grief, but also belonging, but also deep-rootedness that seems requisite for survival. I tend to bristle when people ask what a book of poems is ‘about’; and find what the book is ‘of’ much more telling—what atmosphere and ground it comes from. Immediately here I think of a “sun that aint never heard // of mercy,” that teenage attitude like “the juice of a ginger root,” or the carpeted hallway of a family home, shrunk “the same way that grapes give up their smooth skin while drying.”

The collection’s speaker describes particulars of this world even if sometimes those particulars remain private. For example, in the first poem “Pride” we read how “Vernice // takes nine specific pills / between spoons of grits // and long sips of an instant / coffee I love…” Readers don’t know what sort of kinship or exact aches, what kind of instant coffee, etc., but can imagine cascading ailments, can definitely feel the speaker and Vernice’s connection, though not invited in, exactly. How do you walk the line between private and public in these poems? You mentioned the title (and book) as evoking both familiarity and mystery, so I wonder what influence your ideal or imagined audience had in balancing these?

JA: I think privacy is key to many of the poems in Muscadine. Writing to, through, and about family can be difficult given the potential to overstep boundaries of what’s mine to share, publicizing private matters/feuds and the possibility of offending and putting familial relationships in jeopardy. These are some of the things I force myself to consider in the process. I think what helps me tow that line between what’s private and public is the way our material worlds can tell much, if not all, of what one needs to know about a relationship or circumstance, or at least what the poem aims to reveal. The material world populates these poems with textures and information that work both singularly, and collectively to enliven and build the world these people love, are bred by, and are beholden to in ways that span time, place, history, and lineage. I think I’m most in love with the tangibility that comes with prioritizing our material worlds inside the poem. Little else can bring our poems alive the way these materials can.

I enjoy and prioritize thinking about people in my poems. Most times they’re family, consequently southerners, or the people adjacent to and much like them. Their existence, and the way we live our lives drives my need to scatter and stud my poems with their names, our habits, breakfast scenes, and humorous moments that get pulled out of deep pain. I want them to see our intimate and vulnerable moments in these and feel the value, sustenance, and human connection the poem wants to pull from the experience, even if the most private and exact details of those moments aren’t named. My imagined audience sort of works as a strainer for what the poem wants to, must keep private, and what the poem wants to bring into the light. Saying too much can feel gross and negligent, which is never my aim. So I try to get as close as I can to that place that’s a “no-no,” without touching it. Close enough to sense it. That’s where I lean heavy into the materiality of the space or circumstance. The fact that Vernice is my mother is less important to the poem than calling her by her first name (which is something I’d never do with my mouth). The nature of the ailment, is less important than the ailing, and it is much less important that we’re sharing coffee, but more important that the instant coffee satisfies us.

CL: The particulars are crucial to indicate importance, and so telling, in terms of relationship. In “Rocks,” for example, we have the speaker with his uncle who now needs a feeding tube, driving home on a gravel road “the county came to grade last week.” The speaker “think[s] the full trip back // with him and forth in a / sway” but the two do not say what they really mean, either because of “a throat / filled with rocks the // oncologist say the oncologist / can’t move” or because the speaker wishes he “were // not this nephew behind / this leather wheel.”

The gravel road of the piece, mirrored in its hitchy line breaks and spacing between words, reinforces silence; both the concrete details and poem’s form say so much about not only the relationship but also the struggles of (poor) health, of communities suffering from neglect. Muscadine’s poems contain or perhaps stem from so many silences, often masculine ones, and yet they seem to both hold them and name them, perhaps by recasting language. How do you think about silence in your pieces? And how (are) poems uniquely suited to transform it?

JA: Wow. I think about how what’s not said feels in my spirit and in the situation/relationship between those who want to communicate better and are communicating in the ways they know how, especially when that communication feels insufficient. Breath and spacing help me indicate this. The acoustic environment of the situation helps provide deeper context as to what barriers are making communication difficult both in a tangible way and metaphorically. There’s so much silence and I think it just happens to be that most of the people I mention in Muscadine are men our family has lost.

In “Rocks,” Uncle Noodie is in no shape to speak clearly even though he tries. I admired him so much for this, which encouraged me to try harder to decipher it and understand rather than disregarding it as negligible. It was a delicate and painful time for him, yet he still manages to squeeze morsels of language through. In some other poems like this one, where medicine, circumstance, geography, power, race, education, and history all seem to come together in way that make finding a time to bring up certain topics can be explosive or otherwise hurtful, that silence is indicated structurally by the caesura, and the short lines, which tend to read quietly, in short bursts or morsels.

I believe poems are particularly suited for recasting language and maybe transforming silence. It’s almost similar to the way the material world can tell us so much without any language being involved. A dinner plate licked clean tells us either the food was delicious or someone was famished, or, the person dining didn’t want to disappoint the host/chef. If we take what little is said and build around that, think deeper into it, within context, we can sometimes hear a lot of what’s not being said, I feel. What’s being avoided or put on the back burner for later, or tragically, never. I tend to manipulate the language in my poems to help capture or locate a feeling or emotion that is often wound impossibly tight, too tight for language to unfurl. Feelings I may not have the language for at the time, but maybe I can put together a sentence or phrase that feels as frantic as I’m feeling or as confident as I’m feeling or as sad or alone as I might be feeling at the time.

CL: My goodness, I can’t think of a better wordless example than what a licked plate says. Sometimes what we feel or know or must convey happens without language; then other times a different sort of language does that work. I’m thinking of many relationships of my own, where so much passes solely through the lexicon of a ballgame, for example—saying the one thing that actually says another. In some of the pieces in Muscadine, you take this a step further, even, with a number of palindromes that move beyond pure denotation and progress by a sort of sonic riff. In “All I Eat” we read:

…ball buy feast by bills ball by lead by splay buy all sweaty halves
crawl why cheat why steal crawl why speed why stay why stall steady math
all I eat I kill all I need I say I already have…

Can you share some about what type of work language is up to in these, and then more broadly how the palindromes operate alongside and change how we read the other poems?

JA: This take on the palindrome privileges the vowel structure and largely the metrical description of the original, and most grammatically correct sentence. The vowels that make up the first sentence will forge themselves into every other sentence, in the same order. There’s usually about 6 or 8 individual lines with the same vowel structure that gets reversed because of the palindrome’s structure.

The original sentence came to me in a moment where I was watching cancer move through my family one after another and another. One of the burdens for me was trying to hold onto the memories at the same pace they flooded my mind and became all we had. The cumulative grief dizzied me during the grieving process. It was just after my mother’s last biopsy where we learned her ovarian cancer had returned. I was with her at the biopsy and the week after, but had to come back to Rhode Island with this in my stomach. Being so far away at the time made me feel helpless as things continued to point in the direction of loss. I felt like I had to move someone out of the space of my head in order to fit and remember the family member I feared I’d lose next. So, when I say in the original sentence “the dead I keeps alive in my head are dyin’ again” I mean to point to my failure to properly grieve a recently deceased loved one for having to, in such quick succession, make room and move on to begin grieving the most recent loss. It’s the compounding and cumulative nature of this grief that I mean to carry through the resonance we hear vibrating that vowel structure. Given the energy embedded in the vowels, I take those audible vowels, the vowels we hear, not necessarily the vowels we see, and make the other five/seven sentences from the framework of the vowels in this original sentence—a sort of sonic and lexical riff.

The intention is to sit with an emotion and pull out the sonic effects these emotions can cause on language. It feels like a constant drone and/or accumulation of grief and loss on loop. I imbue each line with my natural linguistic impulses as a southern Black speaker of English to omit certain phonemes and make other substitutions, omissions and modifications that help gather a voice. The dialectal choices I’m making intend to carve the sonic landscape of my most native, natural speaking voice. I think there’s something interesting about how the vowels provide a canvas to play and experiment. The way my long southern vowels might complicate a normally stressed or unstressed syllable, which ends up also affecting the metrical description of a line of text, is part of the aim here. The craft elements of the poem have to be adjusted to deal with the way I’m trying to arrange words for sound. This also, quite audibly, disrupts and disobeys grammar largely, and linearity in ways, which is for certain, a second fold of Muscadine’s aims. Sonically, the palindromes display my creative impulses on language and begin to cohere in a necessary and original new language system influenced by my southern history. Some of the palindromes are quite exact from line to line. Others vary, the way second lines of blues songs do. Plurals, homophones, shifts in cadence and stress, dialect, tempo, each stand a chance to have a profound effect on what we hear, down to the phoneme. It’s a fun exercise for me. I have increasingly been offering audiences to listen as lightly or intently as they’d like when I read them because even though little sense can be made because of the restrictions on vowels and meter, some sense still tends to leak through and find a way out, in fun and surprising ways.

CL: We’re not (never) done with grief. I want to return to this and also sonic riffs, but first, let’s linger: I love that idea of gathering a voice. Since our own is not really one-note but rather a chord—a collection of voices who’ve spoken in our own ears and made us who we are—perhaps that get-together requires us to speak up, in turn?

Especially when this is seen as transgressive—you use the word “disobey,” and I think of the early piece “Felonious States of Adjectival Excess Featuring Comparative and Superlative Forms,” which begins, then concludes:

my mo’favoriter           and mo’better                is my most favoritest

is mo’simpler this way…                     the most thievin’est

be the most brokest      cause the most thieved from      be the most oldest

so becomes      the most richest           who also be      the most fundedest

and that makes me      the most confusedest           when I’m in the most

keptest buildings      that be           mo’kepter           than all the most

time keepin’est kats           they keep in the back                up keepin’‘em.

Given that a felony is “graver than a misdemeanor” what is at stake in moving beyond convention to a (terrible pun!) more avant garde language, one that speaks truth to power? Does this necessitate a type of reaching back or bridging across? How does fun or play make this possible?

JA: I think what’s at stake is possibly losing readers who prefer language that obeys and abides. I think there’s a risk of the work being thought of as debased, and I’m totally okay with these as risks because a poem like “Felonious States…” works in at least two ways. First, those of us who break the -er/-est rule of English in our most natural speech (to whatever frequency), might see and hear ourselves in the poem in ways that comfort, soothe and sound off in familiar, pleasurable, and amusing ways. It creates a space, a world, where the speaker can be “wrong” and be right the whole time because of the intentionality of the conceit. I also imagine the poem might make some people, whose language is wound impossibly tight to grammar rules, uncomfortable, disoriented, or otherwise frustrated. Depending on the reader’s relationship with language and poetry, or what they believe constitutes them, these frustrations can sometimes be a lovely side effect of the poem. The poem almost wants to egg these risks on by habitually crossing the line and breaking this rule about 42 times. The poem’s commitment to this mirrors my own commitment to voice and the chorus of speakers that have helped develop my own.

I think you’re right about fun and play making events of language like this possible. I remember sitting outside in Longtown, mumbling the first lines during summer 2017 and thinking, I wonder how long I can keep this up, and wondering what I’d be able to communicate through this narrowed set of tools and broken rules. I knew leaving punctuation out would get rid of the distractions they can cause, and open the poem up spatially, while depending on the caesura and phrase for breath and pause. Filling in these gaps with mo’ + -er and most + -est did become a kind of game or puzzle I felt driven to put together. It’s obviously an exaggeration of this sorta grammatical sacrilege, but through the exaggeration, the excessiveness, comes a kind of clarity that gets spelled out. Each time I’ve read it people in the audience laugh at the beginning and near the end at a particular word, but throughout the poem, I can feel and hear people struggle to contain their laughter or smiles, and that feels a lot like a community’s being built in the room. On the other hand, it feels like lines are being drawn.

CL: There is something so powerful about being seen by a poem—I think that’s how most come to poetry, at least initially—by encountering a speaker who seems to see us. And possibly see that the rules were made for breaking—isn’t 42 the answer to the universe?!

But in all earnestness, with verse and life both, it seems that those who have not only survived but ultimately thrived have often done so with a narrow set of tools and broken rules (promises). Reading an essay just yesterday, I learned that punctuation didn’t enter standard usage until the Middle Ages, meaning—so much poetry (scripture, even!) relied on phrase, line, pause, on being interpreted by breath. Personally, I think of both spacing and punctuation as direction for how I would voice the poem—as a score on the written page. You use caesura for great emphasis, too—even in that first poem we read:

…
Look      how I hunger where

there is no hunger. Look
how Pops left before we

thought he was done. Listen,
how the voice      of a dead man

can live. Pack me      a bag
I can fit      in my heart.

How do you think about the relationship between the poem we see on the page and the poem breathed in the room? What (is there) the difference between distraction and direction? Does commitment to breaking rules require more precision, in other ways?

JA: Apparently, 42 is the answer to the universe. That’s funny. I wasn’t aware of this as a thing but looked it up and found Douglas Adams.

On being seen by poetry, this is actually how I got here. Late in high school I read Blues for All the Changes by Nikki Giovanni and it showed me it was okay to think about and express what we find displeasing, and to play and have fun even when the subject matter might ring contrary, dark or hard. I still remember the initial feeling of that and have held that permission-giving feeling close after all these years. It stained me in the best way.

I believe punctuation can get in the way sometimes, be a distraction, or at least feel a bit stale, compared to the breath and pause caused by the white-space breaks I use for caesuras. I think it gets closer to what’s happening with my voice during the delivery, than what various types of punctuation can offer. The surprise that happens with great images in the poems we love, I think works with breath too. “Look           how I hunger where      there is no hunger” could be three sentences, or one sentence with a comma depending on how you deal with it. I wanted it broken up because when I speak it, the phrases and caesura do the work of surprise, the hesitation that goes into certain utterances. The emotion wrapped up in the way we say certain things, is able to breathe and be felt this way. It allows the natural rhythm of my speech to be realized. Many times I don’t talk in full, unbroken, flowy sentences. My brain likes for it to come out slow and choppy sometimes. So thinking about the poem and caesura as a kind of score on the page is quite accurate and relieving, that we can treat language like music. It feels like the poem is giving directions for the pace and breath I’ve intended for the poem, a score to how I imagine the poem vocalized. I think the more I find what works for conveying a voice in a poem, the more rules I find necessary to break and the more precise I have to be with word choice, where to place the caesura, even which poems require these craft choices and which ones don’t.

CL: Or because it rings contrary—people often ask me about the ethics of a beautiful poem, one that feels good in your mouth, when the content is anything but. I can’t speak for everyone, but I often need the music to bide the bruising moment.

And when listening to you read, I do hear the pauses—I can’t recall a reader more faithful to the line and caesura. At the same time, many of Muscadine’s more familial poems have traditional lines and couplets whereas less narrative, less overtly personal pieces use the field more. I read the pauses in these as proceeding with caution, perhaps given the threat of violence, or ways we can miss it by not looking close. In the poem “Polistes Carolina,” which details red wasps nesting in the speaker’s house, we have some of the caesuras you mention. Also in “Field of View,” a piece that describes a familiar rural space—its summer corn tasseled, its cerulean sky—and tries to name it, that stop-start rhythm allows the speaker to revise:

…in a country store
in Panola County           its name      Cherokee

for cotton           near a river’s hurt imitation
of a bigger river           the Anishinaabeg call

Gichi-ziibi           I stare at a           palpable amount
of           theft in my address      I ought to

apologize for      the camera’s sittin’      back
above my nose      the registered cerulean

filling the sphere           the lust           at having
been granted      such ancient sky

In this piece the spaces allow our lens to shift; forward and back in time, close to chest, then sky-high as the private recalibrates to the societal. How does form determine or reflect a poem’s intimacy? How do you begin to know what shape a poem will take on the page as you draft or revise?

JA: This has me thinking about how fractured our histories are and what it means to string together sounds, images, people and landscapes that make up those histories. The relationships between all those things are where I find much to make intimacy from. I think in “Field of View” I’m using the caesura just before and after I name important names, nouns and verbs, giving them more weight in my decision to name them. It’s as if I were aiming for the most accurate and precise word and phrase to come next. That intention is in part what I think helps the poem’s intimacy.

When I think of intimacy I think of hesitation. I think of the way vulnerability (in knowledge or experience or lack or guilt) can cause a person to pause and consider deeply, the next word or phrase. This kind of care, this desire for accuracy, imposes a certain level of intimacy onto the poem. For me, I feel the craft choices we make outside of choosing to write into received forms are what contribute in large ways to the intimacy a poem is able to achieve. Things like pacing, prosody, image choice, dialect/diction have helped me achieve intimacy.

I feel like I only begin to know what shape the poem will take on the page, when the lines start to reveal their nature, or the stanza or energy of the poem. As my craft decisions accumulate, especially if they are repetitive and many, the poem’s shape comes alive across the page. I begin to see how one or more craft decisions, applied several times inside the same poem, will have a cumulative effect on the poem at hand. This happens in “Ode to a Pronoun,” “The Mistaken Identity of Some Verbs,” “Felonious States of Adjectival Excess Featuring Comparative and Superlative Forms” and “A Midnight Cool” to name a few. Their forms were revealed to me as the poems progressed and as my craft decisions governing those poems accumulated. I didn’t have a vision for the shape of these poems as I entered them. I think that would’ve done me and the poems a great disservice as the poems know what shape they want to take much better than I do.

CL: This is so interesting—the way you associate intimacy with hesitation, especially since fear can also result in hesitation (and prevent intimacy). The key seems to be persistence: continuing the sonic riff, letting the pause hang before the word or name, perhaps even not fearing what might result from that intimacy—what anger or hunger or grief might surface.

In re-reading the collection, I’m struck by how many confessions or secrets the speaker lets us in on, how much hovers unspoken below the living in these poems, until the speaker clears his throat, begins. The poems are also saturated with animals (deer, wasps, pigs, fish, etc.) and ghosts, none of whom have the same power of speech, despite a powerful presence. How did (or do) you think about the ways these companions, often in vulnerable states themselves, enter poems and speak through them?

JA: These are the companions I think I call on to speak to our human relations to the natural world and what, if anything, we can learn from it to make relations between humans more humane and less animalistic. “Polistes Carolina” is kind of a hate poem. It takes living with red wasps hanging near an entryway to understand that one of you has to go in that situation cause only one of us is paying the mortgage. I use waste cans of wasp spray keeping one particular entryway clear, but recently I’ve discovered a less murderous spray but one that keeps them from nesting onto the home. I think that poem wants to say much about home, invasions, shared spaces and how spaces do or don’t become shared.

I feel like the poems tend to pit the human capacities for empathy and tolerance against being able to coexist and share reasonable space with local wildlife. But also documenting my own tolerance/intolerance or breaking point, at least. I think it’s important to know that we are not here on earth alone and that the wildlife deserves just that, its life to be wild and not murdered for it.

I was working on a poem that I think mentioned a jaguar or some other fairly exotic animal and my thesis advisor at the time asked me if there were jaguars in Mississippi. I said no, cause I didn’t think there were and he advised that I cling closer to the animals and wildlife native to that place, and then I discovered and turned my eye to these rich relationships we have with wasps, deer, fish and pigs that really bring the experience of living in Mississippi alive. I think about the armadillos who come in the evenings and at night to dig holes in the yard and how much of a nuisance they’ve become. An old farmer told me once that barely chewed Juicy Fruit would fix our armadillo problem.

It’s a dance you learn to navigate better the older you get and the longer you live in a place. The tolerance becomes more tolerant and space and boundaries begin to clarify themselves in ways that don’t require human life and wildlife to clash violently.

CL: I want to return for a moment to intimacy, given what you say here about sharing a door with these wasps, about living alongside. It seems one wonder of poems is that they do—through compression or lineation or various leaps or suspension of time—lend themselves to intimacy; even as they are sorts of shared spaces, crafted to be seen (or read). And it may take years of living, as you mention, for intimacy to lead to empathy but—do you find these two tethered in your poems? How (or does) this interplay operate differently than in other art forms?

JA: I do find that intimacy and empathy are sometimes tethered in my poems. That said I don’t believe intimacy is outrightly tethered to empathy. That’d be horrible to have to know someone deeply, intimately before we can show empathy towards them.

For the poems, sometimes it takes a bit of research to get to know the poem’s subject and research can look many ways, it can be days lived, it can be Google searches for scientific names and habitats. It can be the careful observation of a nest or hive that fuels the knowledge in a way that enlivens and activates the poem with the kind of contact that you only get when you live with or near wildlife.

I don’t feel this interplay is specific to poetry. Although similarly to poetry, my photography practice causes me to dream, recast, and study my subjects and my relationship to them. Whether that subject is me, another person, an object, a scene, I’m always grabbed by the desire to know the subject in the image deeply or be struck in some other significant way by it. To make something from intimacy, almost guarantees the emotional transfer found when we empathize and trade places with others. My attention and desire for that image and emotional transfer, is similar to the way I negotiate this interplay in poetry.

CL: It’s interesting that intimacy often implies a certain familiarity; yet striking photos or haunting poems often, for me at least, make the world and my being in it feel startlingly strange. Or perhaps startled into the something I didn’t realize I knew. But then know—intimately, at the core—how the strange is a part of me, too. Or conversely, how the familiar can reach us in a strange form or shape. If you were to meet someone for whom poetry was unfamiliar or strange, what first poem (of yours or others) would you share?

JA: I love it when I learn I’m carrying strange around in a new way. Or in a way that I don’t recognize or know like that one window of Johari’s. For someone who felt unfamiliar or strange about poetry, I would first share Claude McKay’s poem “If We Must Die” which feels like a classic punching up kinda poem. It always fires me up and gets me going. A poem of my own I’d share with someone for whom poetry was unfamiliar or strange, is probably “Pride” because I think it lays bare the conditions of the poem and what’s at risk for the people in it.