2017 poetry alum Amanda Newell recently interviewed fellow 2017 graduate Nomi Stone for Plume. Read an excerpt of their conversation below:

AN: I’m interested in the ways in which your poetry contemplates the relationship between the self and the community and the ways in which community shapes identity. Your first two poetry collections, Stranger’s Notebook (TriQuarterly 2008) and Kill Class (Tupelo Press, 201), both involve a speaker who is welcomed, to some degree, into an “other” community—and in the case of Kill Class, she is observing a military community, but always aware of her difference. This requires a sort of double vision, no?

NS: I love this question of double vision, Amanda. My first two collections of poetry were yes driven by the charge of the insider-outsider position and also questions of identity: in Stranger’s Notebook, although I am Jewish and the daughter of a reform Rabbi, I spent time in a more traditional Jewish community in North Africa to press on the valves of something that I wanted to understand: what is faith, what is ritual, what is belonging, what is relationship to homeland, and why did these questions produce such friction for me? In Kill Class, I was doing my anthropological fieldwork for my dissertation, and I observed some US military pre-deployment training exercises in mock Middle Eastern villages around America to write about war.

Anthropology’s key method for fieldwork is so-called “participant-observation”—and the poems in Kill Class are poems of witness, poems of uneasy participation, and poems of complicity. I am not in the American military (observer) and I write to critique the military (critique); however, I am an American citizen. As such I am entangled (participant). This brings me to your question of  double vision, which paradoxically creates both twofoldness but also sometimes halfness. The so-called “field” was always elsewhere, and I was at its edge, working through self/other, here/there, field/life, work-self/ private-self, where one is perhaps often engaging with both, but sometimes only one at a time, and potentially occluding or sidelining the other.

My new collection of poems in progress, Fieldworkers of the Sublime tries to explode “fieldwork” beyond anthropology, pushing against the binary between Field and Life, and letting being-alive overflow in every direction. It is a book about awe, about fear, and also the ways we are each observers and participants in the sublime (through nature, science, the social world, and intimate life). It is a manuscript about love and my new marriage and queerness and desire and my attempts to overcome my own limits, as well as the thinkers (mostly anthropologists and philosophers) who shape my imagination.

The poems are also populated with marine biologists and octopus dissections, botanists and chanterelle-foragers— and my encounters with scientists and others I’ve become friends with on the island of Mull off the West Coast of Scotland, my wife’s beloved home. But this book is not trying to understand a particular community or a problem the way my other two were: it is instead a bid for an embodied poetics with fewer partitions and more encounters. My poems have become more capacious, letting everything in: the ocean and gooseberries of the island, but also the shopping malls and playgrounds of my suburban childhood—each spangling open through  conversations and memory and dreaming and feeling and loving and reading.

You can read the interview in its entirety here: https://plumepoetry.com/on-queer-poetics-writing-courageously-and-becoming-otherwise-an-interview-with-nomi-stone-by-amanda-newell/

William Burnside, a 2018 poetry graduate, was recently featured in Zocalo Public Square. Read an excerpt of “To Go To Belfast” below:

To Go To Belfast

Whether you’ve boarded from Liverpool or Heysham
or Stranraer, years later the journey is the same
along the Lough at evening, the chimney of the power station

in Kilroot, Carrickfergus Castle, white eiders skimming
the surface of the bay at Carnalea, the oystercatchers at Cultra
piping on the rocks, as you slide past the gantries at the yards

where David and Goliath tower like the spires
of a decayed cathedral. Here’s where I first heard
hexameters of Homer intoned in harsh Ulster accents,

Speak to me, Muse, about the many-sided hero who travelled
far and wide after he sacked the great town of Troy:
many were the cities he visited, the customs he came to know

Here’s where my grandfather built the Titanic.
Here there were two cathedrals rising in opposition
and two stories each told with a certainty dispensed

like a cheap drug, with hatred scribbled on the walls,
King William on his horse, Up the Rebels, to Hell
with the Pope, and one man’s hope was another’s

damnation. How could I not be tempted by the glory
that was Greece, lucidity and sanity, a golden mean between
opposing ills, Athens revered in the words of Pericles?

We are an example to others rather than imitators. Our
administration favours the many instead of the few; this is why it is
called a democracy. Our laws afford equal justice to all…

Read the poem in its entirety here: https://www.zocalopublicsquare.org/2020/10/30/william-burnside-belfast-poem/chronicles/poetry/

The LEON Literary Review recently featured “The Switch,” a poem by 2020 graduate Michael A. de Armas. Read an excerpt below:

The Switch

Yes it’s true you can break things,
I tell my younger daughter one night, who,
after crying in her crib in our room
without much result, turns the light switch
on and off and so makes her need known
to an entire city block, even boats out in the bay
see the wild flicker of her distress…

Read the poem in its entirety here: http://leonliteraryreview.com/2020/09/michael-a-de-armas-the-switch/

Perry Janes, a July 2019 poetry graduate, was recently featured in the LEON Literary Review. Read an excerpt of “Shooter” below:

Shooter

There are things I don’t know,
can’t know, and maybe don’t want to,
including what a man’s teeth look like
through a rifle’s magnifying scope. Tonight
a frightened anchor on the radio reports
a gunman stalking Interstate 96 firing
into backseats, windshields, drivers behaving
erratically, causing pile-ups. I’m sick of
God and his potholes, the many mouths
opening relentlessly, beneath…

Read the poem in its entirety here: http://leonliteraryreview.com/2020/09/perry-janes-shooter/

Poetry faculty member Amaud Jamaul Johnson was recently featured in LitHub. Read an excerpt of “The Fault Lines in Midwestern Racism Run Deep” below.

I moved to Madison, Wisconsin in the fall of 2000. My wife was starting a teaching position, and I was still trying to “find myself” as a writer. Money Magazine had recently named Madison the #1 place to live in the US, so this seemed like a great place to land. After leaving Compton for college, I crisscrossed the country, living in DC, New York, Atlanta, and Oakland. The Midwest was the frontier. I’ve lived in deeply segregated communities my whole life, but I rarely experienced being the only Black person in a room. For me, the opposite was true; the white world was elsewhere, in other neighborhoods or on TV. Wisconsin is a lovely state. We actually live in our dream home, a lovely Colonial. I bike and hike; I ice skate and cross-country ski; I’ve become an amateur sommelier of craft beer, but I’m also a kind of mascot, a pet Negro, that one Black body in the coffee shop, or at the private pool; I’ve become everyone’s one Black friend, the anchor of every “one drop” diversity initiative, everything short of a drummer. Maybe a year ago, I was out alone having lunch, and a woman approached me. She placed her hand on my shoulder and said: “I’m so glad you’re here.” I felt like Sticks walking into Arnold’s. I’m concerned that I exist to improve the political capital of my neighbors. Is the purpose of my life the cultural enrichment of a white community? Was that my grandmother’s dream when I left for college? 

Read the essay in its entirety here: https://lithub.com/the-fault-lines-of-midwestern-racism-run-deep/