A Gratifying Conversation with Douglas Kearney

Photo credit:; Douglas Kearney

Douglas Kearney is an American poet, professor, performer, and librettist. Douglas is a Howard University and CalArts alum. Kearney teaches Creative Writing at the University of Minnesota–Twin Cities, where he is a McKnight Presidential Fellow. He has published seven books, most recently: Sho (Wave Books, 2021), a National Book Award, PEN American, and Minnesota Book Award finalist, Buck Studies (Fence Books, 2016), the winner of the Theodore Roethke Memorial Poetry Award, the CLMP Firecracker Award for Poetry, and silver medalist for the California Book Award (Poetry).

His work is widely anthologized, including Best American Poetry (2014, 2015), Best American Experimental Writing (2014), Teaching Black: The Craft of Teaching on Black Culture and Literature, The Creative Critic: Writing As/About Practice, What I Say: Innovative Poetry by Black Writers in America, The BreakBeat Poets: New American Poetry in the Age of Hip-Hop, We Are Meant to Rise: Voices for Justice from Minneapolis to the World, The Future of Black, and Conceptualisms. He is also widely published in magazines and journals, including Poetry, Callaloo, Boston Review, Hyperallergic, Jacket2, and Lana Turner. His work has been exhibited at the American Jazz Museum, Temple Contemporary, Los Angeles Contemporary Exhibitions, and The Visitor’s Welcome Center (Los Angeles). Kearney received the OPERA America’s Campbell Opera Librettist Prize, created and generously funded by librettist/lyricist Mark Campbell. He has had four operas staged, most recently Sweet Land, which received rave reviews from The LA Times, The NY Times, The Wall Street Journal, and The LA Weekly, and was named Opera of the Year (2021) by the Music Critics Association of North America. He has received a Whiting Writer’s Award, a Foundation for Contemporary Arts Cy Twombly Award for Poetry, residencies/fellowships from Cave Canem, The Rauschenberg Foundation, and others. I had the pleasure and honor of asking Douglas what one of his favorite operas is and how he would describe his creative process, and so much more.

UZOMAH: What about poetry and writing makes it art?

DOUGLAS: I’d say that poetry and writing are art because—you know what? TBH I don’t really care.

U: What is your favorite opera and why?

D: One of my favorites is Wozzeck by Alban Berg. It’s a really bleak and darkly humorous social critique based on a Georg Büchner play. The part that messes me up is the ending. I think the title character drowns while a heedless little girl is playing, saying “Hop. Hop. Hop.” That juxtaposition is just grim.

U: Can you discuss your recent LP Fodder, and your working relationship with frequent collaborator Val Inc?

D: Fodder is a live recording of the incredible sound chemist Val Jeanty and I in Portland. Val and I have collaborated several times over the last eight years or so; we first met as part of a band organized by the genius poet/vocalist/sound artist LaTasha N. Nevada Diggs for a concert honoring Sekou Sundiata. We have a thing we say to each other: “Pull Up.” It basically means that we’re about to hit, so we have to get ourselves into a zone where we can find portals. I feel like I can go anywhere Val wants to take me. Fodder is the result of conversations with Jeff Alessandrelli of Fonograf Editions who invited me to do a poetry album. I didn’t want to do the studio thing, and it turned out Jeff didn’t want that either. So: I had to work with Val! She’s my live kin. In execution, Fodder is like most of Val and my collaborations: I send her the set. She composes some rhythm ideas that may act as foundations. But truthfully, we don’t rehearse. We do a soundcheck and then have to keep ourselves from getting wide open during that! Fodder is in some ways a fairly aggressive album, but it’s the kind of aggression you get when you’ve been wounded, and your partner has your back.

U: Your recent book of poetry Sho (Wave) came out earlier this year. What was the inspiration behind it? Do you have a favorite poem from the book?

D: Sho was a surprise in that it came after a discarded and unfinished manuscript (Actors, Not Real People) and an in-progress manuscript called I Imagine I Been Science Fiction Always. This would be December of 2018. When I realized I wasn’t trying to finish Actors, I dug through my files to find another project. My wife had put me on a manuscript-free diet, so I was hungry! I had a lot of the core of I Imagine. But as I was digging, I found a bunch of loose poems—I tend to work in series, so these loosies had been under my radar—and they seemed to work together pretty well. That was Sho. So it didn’t really have a collective inspiration, but they constellate through my interests in performance and violence. I wouldn’t dare claim a favorite poem, but I do the title poem at most readings.

U: How do you use your role as a professor to find ways for your students to find their voice on their path as writers and poets? 

D: I am pretty transparent about my own journey and processes, my practice and interests. I feel like if I show students what took me years to learn, they get a head start on things. That being said, I want people to honor their interests and the traditions that have guided them. I like my students to be honest about their ambitions and to gain a sense of what they experience when they’re writing through process statements that accompany their drafts. What surprises them about a line or prosodic scheme? What constraints feel generative? When are they bored in writing a poem? I like reading these statements as they give me insight into what they want their work to do and/or how they feel in their work. I believe it helps many of them find out more about their own poetics.

U: How do you see the role of a poet, and what does that role mean to you?

D:  I think our first job is to work language over. Sometimes that’s polishing. Sometimes that’s distressing. Sometimes it’s rearranging. Language is a cognitive technology—syntax makes certain modes of thinking and understanding possible, so that first job is doing something even before we get to content! I tend to see my work as a practice of unsettling. For some of us, life feels unsettling on the regular, so maybe that’s like Br’er Rabbit and the briar patch. 

U: What are the similarities or differences between how a poet uses words to describe an event and how an artist uses colors to describe something visually?

D: Now, this feels like it might be a sneaky way to get back to the first question, lol. The truth is, I don’t know that there is always a correlation if what we’re talking about is description. Or maybe what I mean is, I don’t know if I think about my poetry primarily as description. I’m trying to make poems that are themselves events to be described. I think that words and color are both tools that could find themselves in poetry or painting. But I’ll stop being thorny about it. I think it’s more interesting to think of how well words may synthesize the techniques of painting and what happens when they reach the limits of that synthesis. That excites me.

U: How has writing helped you find your place in society? 

D: What an interesting question. I think writing has led me to some professional success. That allows me and my family to participate in society in a particular way. I think my writing re-reminds me of the way I am “placed” in society, not exclusively in terms of class. And since in many cases in the U.S., race is more salient than class, I think writing makes me dissatisfied with how I’ve been placed in society, while re-re-reminding me of how many people have been “placed” even worse.

U: What makes up a complete poem?

D: That varies from poem to poem and poet to poet. Sorry. If I said anything else, I’d feel like I was bullsh*tting.

U: What about performing makes it a poetic form?

D:  Well, a poetic form speaks to some really specific things that I’m not certain align with performance because performance strikes me as a mode and not necessarily a form. Which is to say you can perform a sonnet or a duplex or haiku; but those performances aren’t compellingly different in the way that poetic forms are different. So, I’m going to take a leap at redirecting the question. I think performing can be most poetic when the performer is as alert to themselves and the stimuli in the performance space (the room, the audience, the activity in the room happening at the same time as the reading) as that performer is alert to themselves and the stimuli when they are writing. This means that the performer is responding and perhaps not simply reciting. That seems more poetic to me.

U: How would you describe what a librettist is to someone who knows nothing about the opera?

D:  Librettists write the words the people sing. Sometimes we create the story as well, but many libretti are adaptations of already existing stories.

U: If you could describe your creative process, how would you?

D: Usually, I try to find a syntactic approach that captures a relationship between sound and sense in such a way that they support each other, assuming that tone and timbre are also held in that relationship. Once I get that down, I can often start getting a draft done pretty quickly. I actually really enjoy revision because I think approaching a draft with a revision strategy in place (not just generically “make it better”—because my tastes change) allows me to amplify what excites me about the draft. I feel like revision that dulls a draft is bad revision, not revision in general. But to each their own. When I identify what I find compelling about that draft, I do things to accentuate that. I mentioned “distressing” earlier, like adding “wear and tear,” I tend to do that, making the whole joint sonically and sensibly thornier or more “double-jointed.” Then I revisit, tuning every bit of sound I can within an inch of it becoming garble. Presto.

U: What is the most important trait that all writers, poets, performers, and artists should have?

D: I'd say curiosity. "What can I make this ________ do?" is a great start.

For more information on Douglas's work, please visit his site. Also, find him on Facebook and follow him on Instagram.