Born and raised in South Carolina, poet Justin Phillip Reed came to St. Louis to attend Wash. U.'s MFA program, where he served as Junior Writer-in-Residence. His work has appeared in African American Review, Best American Essays, Callaloo, The Kenyon Review, The New York Times Magazine, Obsidian, and elsewhere. Reed is the inaugural St. Paul de Vence James Baldwin Writer-in-Residence, and has received fellowships from the Cave Canem Foundation, the Conversation Literary Festival, and the Regional Arts Commission of St. Louis.
In his debut poetry collection, Indecency (Coffee House Press, 2018), which launches tomorrow at RKDE, he wrestles with self-perception, intimacy, and placement. Poet Luther Hughes and Reed sat down together to talk about the book, St. Louis, and artistic influences.
I am really taken by the title of the book: Indecency. It's very stark and almost suspicious. So, I'm curious, what does it mean to you to be "indecent?"
My relationship to the word begins, as do most things in my life, with my momma. Her bedroom was at the "back" of our house. If ever we'd have company come over unannounced and she were unprepared, she'd call out through the bedroom's cracked or closed door, "I'm not decent!" She'd be in the middle of rest or recovering from the day or week, and here comes another demand for attention and action.
For me, indecency is akin to vulnerability, which runs the spine of the book. I tend to call the poems "little rooms," not unlike Momma's, where the threat of intrusion is thoroughly felt. The nation-state is always on the threshold or coming down the hallway with its violent systems, demanding that you get dressed and perform the striptease of citizenship and be consumed and shut up about it. I think you're right to be suspicious: you, the reader doesn’t know who is in each room or what kind of state they're in, and you in turn may not be trusted there, for good reason.
The title felt right when I realized how much time the poems' speakers spent in confines, recovering or disturbed or detained there, contending with the exterior agents of oppression and control, living a life shaped by even the threat of those agents… Overall, the book asks this exact question of its reader.
I like what you say about the poems in the book being "little rooms," because I was thinking a lot about why the book wasn't placed into sections. Especially because there are, at least at times, subtle movements from the speaker's interpretation of themselves to how the world interprets them. Still, I think these poems work seamlessly together, specifically because of this idea of "rooms," performance, and intrusion. Your mother saying, "I'm not decent," seems to directly translate into "I'm not able to perform right now" and thus stays inside her room. In this, I think of each of the poems in Indecency attempting to "stay inside." But, of course, they can't remain inside. They eventually must perform. And quite literally, because they are poems, they are performing. There's a push and pull effect that can't be avoided, and the speakers of these poems seem to be constantly wrestling with this.
This gets a little at the vulnerability of the book. In the poem, "Snowfall Throws Its Pretty Noise Upon a Weary Sameness," a poem I take partly to be about denial and repression, there's a line that says, "Someone should acknowledge / how impossible this notion of doing is becoming / but I'm not the one." And there are many other moments in the book where the speaker announces some sort of impossibility or the action (inaction?) of becoming something else. Can you talk more about the idea of becoming or more so the desire of transformation?
I think that for me to speak on the desire for transformation would be to also say something about queerness (and about Blackness, with its inherent queerness). It's about the knowledge—a bodily intelligence, that is—that the world, as it is, is insufficient, that it's always somehow failing to catch up with my existence. It's really that I need transformation of at least two kinds: of the intersection of time and place that deprives my life of its possibility, and of myself to make me worthy of that imminent other world.
But the lines you mention also have something to do with the incapacity that depression can produce, and we don't talk enough about how state-sanctioned violences kind of create a clinically depressive miasma beneath which we still have to live the rest of our lives, the expected storybook parts that include the normal, un-bulleted mortality of the people we love and have to prepare to live without. And about utterance: sometimes the body simply rejects elocution, and sometimes a lie is softer labor.
—"that the world, as it is, is insufficient, that it's always somehow failing to catch up with my existence." Yes, yes, yes to this. I don't think I've accessed the language necessary enough to articulate my own restlessness in thinking about how I am able to move in a world—hell, even my own backyard—that has not been designed for me. Also, really thinking about what I, myself, need to do for my own growth in order to maintain a sort of peace or understanding. I think you've explained it pretty spot on.
I am thinking about the way the people in your poems deal with self-acknowledgement and how many of them relate to violence, or at least the oscillation between violence as violence and violence as pleasure. Both of which tend to tie to an “other,” whether that be white people or police officers or a supposed beloved. At times there is great clarity between these two, albeit, cliff sides of the same canyon. The richness of your prosody highlights this for me.
But, before I get into prosody, I want to talk more about the different violences throughout your book and how they operate. How has violence shaped or re-shaped your poetry? What about violence inspires you? And does your perception of violence counter your perception of the self?
I don't find violence especially inspiring. It doesn't give me breath. I do think violence has a way of flattening the noise of niceties and nuisances and momentarily illuminating the landscape, a bit like a lightning strike. At least that's how it seems to me. But to liken violence to clarification doesn't seem accurate or responsible. Perhaps it can only make confusions more distinctly unclear. I'm only 28 years old right now, and while I think the United States has been at war for most of that time, I've never witnessed those fronts of the boldest atrocities. I have merely been present for a few of the unnamed ones—those of the subtle, more mastered, domestic sort.
I perceive of the relationship between violence and the self the way you might think of a barrier or, maybe better yet, the body in water. As a person, I contain the potential to cause violent harm. Violent harm also shapes my settings, the exterior and the interior. Anti-Blackness and queerantagonism have a lot to do with who I've had to become, where I live, how I move, who I know, who I don't engage with. That violence is in me as well as outside of me, and I'm permeable. I get to endure the simultaneous dangers of fighting it to the point of utter exhaustion and of taking it in to a degree of such familiarity that only the difference between what's inside and outside is flesh, in which my will is the will of the violence that moves me.
Anyway.
The violence Indecency's speakers commit is mostly in their complicity. Otherwise it's the violence that is projected onto them, which of course plays out as though tangible. The case may be different in the next book.
You mentioned being present for a few "unnamed" violences—"domestic," and I know there are a couple of poems that take place or touch on living in St. Louis, a city that has its own history of violence, barriers, and gentrification. I'm speaking mostly to the poem, "Gateway," a poem that is literally divided by the bind of the book—it's almost like the book itself is causing harm to the poem. The speaker in this poem is, what I assume, walking down Delmar and taking in what they see and recalling histories. The poem is then followed by "About a White City," a poem in which I take to expand on the idea of recalling memory, experiences, terror, etc. The ending lines—The truth, daily work. // The past is // suddenly ahead. // Stand it / it utters questions"—announces the speaker's entrapment. Everywhere they go in this city, they are reminded of what was and what has happened.
Can you talk about how environment plays a role in your work? And maybe more specifically, how has living in St. Louis these past few years effected your work?
I appreciate this question because it makes me check in on how well I have or haven't been doing my work. As a writer who enters a space as a documentarian of the places, people, and experiences I encounter there, I'm obligated to be a responsible participant in its cultures, and to be accountable to the communities that receive me. I moved here in 2013. While writing Indecency in St. Louis, specifically, it was important for me to keep in mind that I didn't arrive to a blank page of a city but came in more like a small diacritic on the edge of a dense volume. This is a place that speaks for itself and has been speaking. I was both lucky and determined to build relationships outside of the university setting that taught me a lot and demanded from me a lot more; I had to grow up. I had to make space in myself for nuance and for multiple narratives. "Violence, barriers, and gentrification," yes, but also celebration, persistence, creativity, and radical, grassroots acts of communal care—and it's really these later brilliances that seemed to make those exclusionary, sociopathic practices of redlining, forced displacement, resource deprivation, and narrative erasure (to say the least) all the more egregious.
I think of "Gateway" and "About a White City" as personal documents of haunting, which is another thing I think St. Louis does well, for better or worse. It's a heavy place, as I find it. It's easy to feel like an asterisk here—a riddled intersection of other lives, some of people who are physically available, others lingering in the stories of what a block of buildings used to be, others in whatever stadium or riverfront business is forthcoming, or who was on display at the World's Fair, or what will become of the surge in charter schools and rezoning. To say another thing about the body's permeation, it's sometimes as if—no, truly it is like this—the awareness of what's been done in a place utterly disregards how I'm supposed to think that time moves: those affects, and effects don't rest but continue as though immediate and in progress, and what's harder is to witness people in that same place who do not have this awareness. If I'm not careful to counter it, it can breed loneliness, which I think was the primary mode of most of the poems in the book.
I resonate with this a lot. Especially what you said about coming to a city and understanding that it's not a blank page. I think it's important as artists, and honestly as persons of queer black bodies, to engage with the community in which we move to. Also, being attentive to the many narratives that this city holds and has held long before moving here. It's funny to me that I didn't begin, necessarily, writing about my hometown, Seattle, until I moved here. It's even funnier that a lot of my poems that use nature as a vehicle use St. Louis as a catalyst—the trees, the birds, the insects, etc. For some reason, I didn't anything of these things until I moved to this city. The same can be said for my attention to how my body moves through the city, crowds, and how I interact with people on a day-to-day basis. Not saying that St. Louis, I guess as I'm interrogating my own poems right now, serves as an inspiration per se, but I—and I think is what you're saying—can't ignore or disregard St. Louis' many histories.
I remember moving here and being very lonely, but I think this was because I came to city knowing only two people and felt completely alienated from the community; I didn't know how to engage with it outside of the university. I'm definitely still trying to understand these things myself.
But, "haunting" is an important distinction from what I used earlier—"entrapment," because it's not that the speakers in your poems are trapped and can't escape, but they are indeed haunted. I love this distinction and I want to know how you're able to write about being haunted. Even more so, how do the many forms your poems attune to this haunting? Poems like "Portrait with Stiff Upper Lip," where the form is a side view of a person, seem to be doing more than just the work of visual art. I'm taken to words and phrases like "apes’," "whipped," "prison," "MY MOM WOULD BE SO PISSED (LOL)," "soooooul," and "i've never had with a really hot BLK guy," that highlight a common or stereotypical black experience. Having these things make up a "portrait," makes me think that this speaker is more or less haunted by these experiences. And, at the same time, am made from these experiences.
At the same time, I'm thinking about the poem, "Orientation," where the form is based off the sculpture, "Black Steel in the Hour of Chaos," by Rashid Johnson. Both poems in some way expand and complicate—in a good way—the black experience. Can you talk about what informs your form and how these forms also address these themes: being haunted, loneliness, etc.?
These poems aren't so complex as they regard form. They are (to use the term folks recognize) concrete poems. They operate by presenting a visual shape of some subject with which their contents are concerned. With "Orientation," it's a representation of a sculpture—which is also representational—of crosshairs. Its content is thematically concerned with the intersecting precariousness of being a young Black "boy" (i.e., endangered) who is also sexually divergent / queer (i.e., endangered). "Portrait with Stiff Upper Lip" is a bit looser with the concrete arrangement because the text purposely distorts the shape of a head in profile, and vice versa. The portrait becomes more anonymous, more abstracted by the rambunctious typography.
Besides their visual announcement of the same formal genre, what ties these two poems together is that, first, they both arrived out of my thinking through the case against Michael L. Johnson; second, they both assume the utterances of other speakers as their text. One of my lasting interests is the physicality of utterance: how what's spoken can construct and damage a version of the self, how these manipulated breaths we like to assume "may never hurt me" actually do have affective weight, and can lodge in the body like a stress point or splinter or blade, and can cause the body to react as though the material of the assault makes no difference.
So, it's like a haunting, yes, but in this case it's also like projection. What might begin by seeming immaterial (the reel gets going, there are points of light, the sounds erupt out of silence, all of these signs of artifice entering) will, with enough continuous buildup, not easily release you (an hour later there is only the relationship between your senses and the messages they receive from brilliant images on a flat wall and stereo voices, and the world where remains the rest of your body, even the chair it reclines in, is now the secondary experience).
It still isn't popular in the U.S. to talk about the realness of obloquy. Folks believed in Humphrey Bogart and High Plains Drifter for too long. You'd think we're supposed to be armored tanks.
I'm very much interested in "the physicality of utterance," and what you said about obloquy not being a popular topic in the U.S. Especially in relation to your poems because a lot of the time the speakers aren't necessarily speaking outright but are speaking internally in response to what's around them. But, their response or their tone is very critical. I'm not sure if it's good or bad, and quite frankly I'm not sure that even matters. But there are moments in the book where the speaker is basically back-talking their environment. I honestly love it. I'm thinking a lot about that workshop we facilitated during The Conversation on playing the dozens, or how to roast somebody in poems. Some of your poems are literally roasting people. However, at the same time, there's this breath of vulnerability where on one the hand I am shaken still by clarity—like by the line, "Dear fellow / gay-ass nigga, who loves on you these days?" from "To Every Faggot Who Pulverized Me for Being a Faggot." On the other, I am wooed by the prosodic movements of lines like, "a wasp's nest of white men begins at daybreak," from, "I Wish I Knew How it Would Feel," where the speaker is roasting white men by calling them wasps and simultaneously allowing us entry into a possible fear, being that wasps can cause harm.
There's something that both poems—and also most of your poems—do in this book and this is switching back and forth between high and low registers. That is, going from a highly lyrical speech to a more colloquial way of speaking. And vice versa. For example, the poem, "Exit Hex." A line I personally love, "Girl, I guess there's glamour in it," I'd consider a lower register of speech. But, that quickly switches with, "Night slid / the street lamp's haloed cantaloupe behind me"—a higher register here. For me, this highlights the constant ebb and flow between the interior and exterior. Because each speaker is always on the move, whether physically or mentally, the registers cannot settle. But, can you talk more towards this and about how you're able to weave these registers together so, what it seems like to me, seamlessly?
I wanna move away from thinking of register in hierarchical terms. That's a trap, and usually a racist and classist one. And while it might be more appropriate to think of the distinctions of the "lyrical" mode—as opposed to the "prosaic" or "conversational"—even that is a binary I'd like to trouble. Who gets to say what kind of language is or isn't for singing? How do you (well, not you, my friend, but the proverbial "y'all") know there isn't music and poetry in the sentences my friends and family exchange? Shakespeare wrote whole sonnets into the dialogue of plays that were riddled with dirty jokes and whose audiences included the Queen and the plebeian. I'm over it. I mean, we can talk about the "lowness" of Girl, I guess there's glamour in it—a sentence that composes a line of trochaic tetrameter, features alliteration (which, distinguished from consonance, conventionally occurs on the accented syllable as shown here), and juxtaposes the versatile Black fem vernacular shade of "Girl, I guess" with the classical English "glamour," both of which cast doubt or façade ahead of whatever they modify—or we can accept that code-switching is and has been an intuitive impulse and fundamental way of communicating for this country's Black and poor people long enough for us to, as you say, weave seamlessly.
Maybe it's just that the language itself cannot settle, cannot properly or adequately express because, one, it's language and therefore always in motion, and two, this is not my mother tongue. I have no mother tongue. Could be that.
And I think your poems do this, right—trouble the binary between these hierarchical terms, "high and low register," and even "lyrical" or "prosaic." In very similar ways, I think Dawn Lundy Martin does in her work. It's important that you raise these questions—problems, even—because as you say, is there not music and poetry in our day-to-day conversations? There is, right. And I think what gets in the way, or speaking for myself at least, of using these vernaculars is how can we do so and what does it mean to do so. I think a lot about the conversations between Langston Hughes and Claude Mckay here, where Hughes condemns McKay for "writing like white poets," and McKay condemns Hughes for "performing a stereotypical blackness." Both sides intrigue me, and I can't quite put my finger on necessarily why. At least not yet. But, there is something in that line, "Girl, I guess there's glamour in it," because like, say, Gwendolyn Brooks does in her poetry, there's a handle on poetic craft mixed in with, as you described it, Black fem vernacular that can sit on the same line as something classical like "glamour." This also takes me to artist like Kehinde Wiley who remixes classical art by using Black people. Something about his work and that line, gets at, again, that statement about every day conversations between our family and friends being music, being poetry, being art. It's like you said, "language itself cannot settle," and even that is what's happening here in this one line. And I think we (the proverbial, here) can, or should, both accept that code-switching is and has been a thing for Black folks and at the same time interrogate it. Or, maybe it's I who loves to interrogate it. Lol!
But I'm glad you brought up Shakespeare and I'm glad that got me to Gwendolyn Brooks, Dawn Lundy Martin, and Kehinde Wiley, because I do want to know more about your influences. And, because I know you, I know you read a myriad of things that seep into your work. At the beginning of the interview, you talked about your mom being somewhat of a catalyst for the title, Indecency. Who else has influenced you or taught you about what it means to be indecent? Other writers? Art? Music?
It's always daunting to try to answer the question of influence because it's so expansive, sometimes subconscious, and always at the mercy of memory, which is uneven.
I'm influenced and inspired by the indecencies—which, here, I might read as the subversive or corrective strategies of craft, or the inexplicable singularness—of many artists: the grammars of francine j. harris; the formalism of Phillip B. Williams; the formal exhaustiveness of Lo Kwa Mei-En; the discontent of Nina Simone; the stamina of Dante; the sonic and lyrical versatility of Deftones; the restlessness of Khadijah Queen; the revelations of Lucille Clifton; the compression of Timothy Donnelly; the joyful codedness of Parliament; the quiet work ethic of Aaliyah; the confident utterance of Oscar Wilde; the tenderness of Carl Phillips; the traversals of Jay Deshpande and Tomas Tranströmer (more envy than influence); the audacities of Anne Carson and Kara Walker; the textual performance of Douglas Kearney; the re-vision of Mary Jo Bang; the surgical line of Frank Bidart; the queer range of Missy Elliott; the magic of my great-grandmother…
And of artists I've met here in St. Louis I should sing. I get life from Addoley Dzegede's patient craft, Jen Everett's Black gaze, Treasure Shields Redmond's virtuosity, Shine Goodie's talent for connection, Jacqui Germain in general, Victoria Donaldson's musical encyclopedism, Pacia Anderson's grounded care and stage presence, Cheeraz Gorman's generous warmth, Joss Barton's intellect and necessary defiance—I could go on.
But one should also acknowledge the influence of those people, ideas, and systems they have to work against. So, hey, y'all, I acknowledge you.
On May 12 at RKDE (2720 Cherokee) Justin Phillip Reed, Aaron Coleman, and WU-SLam join forces for "Indecent Threats," a launch party for Indecency. The show happens at 3 p.m., and is free. Go 2720cherokee.com for all the details. You can order Indecency directly from Coffee House Press, or find it at your favorite local independent bookstore.
