Jason B. Crawford : My Writing Day

Most of my best poems have been created in movement. My friends scold me for how I drive doggedly, one hand on the steering wheel, the other on my screen breaking lines. My favorite poems of mine have been written on my iPhone, using either the notes app or google drive, wildly screaming bars to myself in gut the silence of my car. I walk back and forth to the Starbucks on a thirty minute break hollering and mimicking my slam routine, thinking of how Jahmil Hill turned himself from a tree into a cross. Wondering what I will craft my body into on stage only to break the illusion when I walk off just a boy.

I often think back to my first time meeting Danez Smith and their way of melding voice with literature. Smith sat at Carla Harryman’s house for a homecoming for Jonah and performed “No chicken jokes in this movie. No bullets in the heroes. & no one kills the black boy. & no one kills the black boy. & no one kills the black boy.” A Jumbotron forming in their palms, telling a Black Movie and I am in awe. The demonstration of word and voice splashed together into a tidal wave. Later, I read Smith’s my president, a poem in which they create a new nation on their tongue and elect the loved ones they know as ever present to run their country with an iron skillet and flowing river. In both instances, I see them stretch a community across a page like a schematic of what work in this world is still to be done. In this work, I look for myself. Often, I find scraps of other poet’s voices in my poem, ideologies and small blessings. Someone once asked Smith how they write their voice so definitively in their work. InsertBoy, Don’t Call Us Dead, Homie, you hear them give a live reading every time you open their books.

Dr. Tara Betts explains vocal performance within slam on V.S Podcast. She states how she had to train her mentees ways in which their voices can be used as another tool to score higher in a bouts. In the car on my way to my first ever slam, we trade turns round robin style performing the pieces we think we will do at Rustbelt.  I open up about my poem Twerking in White Spaces and the experiences I faced during college being in a predominately white fraternity. It is mentioned that in certain placements of the poem, I should sound uncomfortable, others sound joyous, ending the poem in fear. I initially wrote the poem as a satirical take on black culture interpreted in white spaces as a replicable act or joke. It was written on my iPhone in the back of a wedding as I prepared myself for the inevitable moments where I would be asked to teach everyone the latest dances displayed in rap culture. The voice here and the way I presented on stage has a lot to do with the sudden betrayal or uneasiness I feel when a friend asks me how I perform my blackness.

The dictation of how I want the work to sound is most often my foundation for a poem. I do not sit at a desk and force myself to write. I do not have set hours each day or some ritual. I just work on a line that comes to me and see where it leads, often editing the work along the way. Everyone has a different method to what makes them tick. I can definitively say I read something or listen to it on Button and figure, “I could write this differently.”

Jason B. Crawford (He/They) is a black, nonbinary, bi-poly-queer writer born in Washington DC, raised in Lansing, MI. In addition to being published in online literary magazines, such as High Shelf Press, Wellington Street Review, Poached Hare, The Amistad, Royal Rose, and Kissing Dynamite, he is the Chief Editor for The Knight’s Library. Jason is a cofounder of the Poetry Collective MMPR, a group of poets who came together for laughs, bad memes, and nerd culture. He is also the recurring host of the poetry section for Ann Arbor Pride. Crawford has his Bachelors of Science in Creative Writing from Eastern Michigan University. His debut chapbook collection Summertime Fine is due in 2020 through Variant Lit.

Website: JasonBCrawford.com

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Twitter handle: @jasonbcrawford

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Sean Singer : Writing Day

I don’t write every day, but I’m thinking about writing constantly. I think about the poem for months, or even years. I think especially about the form, and trying to find which form fits with whatever subject I want to write about.

Writing poetry is also about developing the awareness of when poems happen, so you can be there to “translate” them into English from the mother language. Writing is above all the psychological struggle inside the writer to infuse inert and static objects, words, with energy. Summoning that energy is key.

Poetry is not like songwriting or music or theater. In those mediums, language’s counterpoint is music, other musicians, or actors. In a poem the only counterpoint is silence. Silence is part of the expression.

Poetry gets harder to do the longer you do it. It’s not like other things; driving or cooking or gardening, for example. Because both master and beginner writers are confronted with the same problem: filling a blank page with something. But the advanced writer can’t repeat herself and is held back by the continual loss of the dream when she was 17.

My writing day is choosing the become the person who becomes the writer. It’s not just about having the right education or technical facility with language. It’s not a specific repertoire or fulfilling of a set of expectations. It’s a way of living, a way of moving through the world.

Sean Singer is the author of Discography (Yale University Press, 2002), winner of the Yale Series of Younger Poets Prize, and the Norma Farber First Book Award from the Poetry Society of America and a Fellowship from the National Endowment  for the Arts; Honey & Smoke (Eyewear Publishing, 2015); and Today in the Taxi (Tupelo Press, forthcoming; and two chapbooks, Passport (Beard of Bees Press, 2007) and Keep Right on Playing Through the Mirror Over the Water (Beard of Bees Press, 2010). He runs a manuscript consultation service at www.seansingerpoetry.com

Jaime Forsythe : my (small press) writing day

I am walking down a moving airport pedway, or the centre of a rocking canoe, or the hallway to the baby’s room. It’s 4am and he’s awake for his third overnight feed. Nursing in the dark, I think of the truncated dream I was having mixed with the page I was reading before bed, a passage about drowning from Samantha Hunt’s novel The Seas. I scratch a few words on an envelope before landing back in my own bed, which feels like a raft. The words won’t make much sense in the morning but they’re there, some kind of proof.

I’d say I haven’t written anything in months, but that’s not exactly true. There’s a series of beginnings in the notes app of my phone; some notebook pages; lines entered in an epic collaboration on Google docs; an older poem fixed up to email to a friend as we trade drafts; documents scattered across my desktop’s night sky background. These fragments keep piling up whether I want them to or not, like the clumps of dust and dog hair and my own hair (falling out in handfuls, five months postpartum) that gather in the corners of my apartment.

My family is a month into quarantine due to the coronavirus pandemic. We try to remember to turn off the news when our five-year-old wanders into the room. The days loop relentlessly, contained and mundane. They also jolt me with déjà vu; elements of them (the world behind glass, the smell of bleach) have surfaced memories of a period of illness and isolation from years ago. Or yesterday. I remember a series of rectangles: a hospital room, its door, the door’s little window, the window’s blue curtain, my spiral notebook. I didn’t believe I would ever figure out my body or my mind and no longer wanted to try. Today I’m healthy, obscenely lucky. The five-year-old, out of school, eats his toast and looks out the window at the thick fog and raindrops. “Looks like it’s going to be a great day,” he sighs, content.

If I had an hour, I would write 20 lines beginning with I remember. Or maybe I would go back to bed.

My husband has just transitioned to doing his mental health care job from home. He closes the door to our bedroom and chats with a clientg about acceptance and commitment therapy over Skype while the five-year-old “practices bowling” in the hallway. I get the baby down for his nap and put a stop to the bowling, feeling guilty that we don’t have a yard, more space. I suggest we continue with Charlotte’s Web. My son gasps with his whole body when we turn the page and Charlotte has woven SOME PIG with her silk. Earlier, we were talking about the difference between by, buy, and bye. “I can’t believe there are only three kids’ books by E.B. White,” he moans. (We recently finished Stuart Little.) I say that writing a book can take a long time. I copy down a couple of phrases from the chapter (“a miserable inheritance” and “bloodthirsty”) for no particular reason. Later,wheat paste drips over the kitchen table as we make collages. Using scraps of paper printed with constellations, I wrap up a book I loved (Cluster by Souvankham Thammavongsa) to mail to a friend. My son and I chant and move to a video sent home by the school: dance when the words rhyme, freeze when they don’t. I can’t sing well but I sing all day long, the words to the songs my boys love.

From The Seas: “My mother is regularly torn between being herself and being my mother. Her internal argument is sometimes visible from the outside, as if she had two heads sprouting from her one neck.”

A conundrum: I no longer feel like myself when they aren’t with me, either. Two hours is the longest I have been away from the baby. He was born fast, with ninety minutes between the first true contraction and the moment a nurse helped me catch him myself. Through the pain, I knew exactly what I needed and wanted. I needed to get out of the elevator and into a delivery room, for no one to cross my path with a wire or needle or wrong touch; I wanted him. Somehow this was less than six months ago, and he has since doubled in size. Time accordions out and snaps back in on itself again.

When the baby wakes, the five-year-old insists on unzipping the sleep sack. The baby purses his lips and sends out something new and clear. “His first word!” the five-year-old cries. I explain it’s impossible, he’s too young. But it really did sound like hello.

While my husband cooks lunch I am on the floor with the rolling baby while the five-year-old watches a terrible show he loves. I look at Facebook. Several poets I know are generously sharing writing prompts and while I’m not able to dive into them, they spin like quiet tops in the back of my mind. These tops are both comforting and frustrating—frustrating because I can’t get to them, resolve them. At times, I think if I could rid myself of this back-of-my-mind buzzing, I would.

I text a friend while nursing the baby. This is a kind of typing I can do with one hand. From the bedroom-office, my husband emails me a poem by Wendell Berry, which contains the lines, in fear of what my life and my children’s lives may be and I come into the peace of wild things. I stand by the window with the baby, who tilts his head back and suctions his mouth onto my chin. We bounce peacefully like this for what feels like a long time. Our view is of another small apartment building, another window. The more I stay inside, the more disoriented I feel. Everyone jokes about not knowing what day it is, and I feel this too, but also, I’m encountering the sensory details of old memories I didn’t think I still had, several times a day. I don’t know if writing through these would be useful; I’d try, but my arms are full.

The end of the day unravels with crying and frustration from everyone. The five-year-old is annoyed with me; he wants me to read the names of Pokémon from his sticker book with the baby in my lap and my mind is wandering and I keep skipping names or mispronouncing them.  Sudowoodo, Politoed, Hoppip. The baby wants to nurse and then doesn’t, and, arching his back, howls. Holding him can be like wrestling. Later, after his bath, he glistens, plunges his foot into his mouth and beams. I try to imprint this onto my memory, block out everything else. Sometimes when I feel overwhelmed, I practice zeroing in, snip one thing out of its surrounding distraction and paste it into an imaginary collage. I wonder if I could manage to focus on a single thing more of the time—be less split—whether I would be a better parent, a better writer.

I’ve become a person who falls asleep after one page. It’s in this gradual way that I’m reading, for a second time, Sadiqa de Meijer’s The Outer Wards. I’m drawn to the way the poems make space for the grey uncertainty of illness, for mothering under duress—the way they acknowledge interruptions and let them in. I haven’t written today, and can’t see a day in the future where I will. I don’t know how much it matters whether I write another book or another poem. Then again, I wrote this. When?

It's April and a thin layer of snow accumulates in the dark.

Jaime Forsythe is the author of two collections of poetry, I Heard Something (Anvil Press, 2018) and Sympathy Loophole (Mansfield Press, 2012). She lives in Halifax/K’jipuktuk, NS.