Interview conducted by Caroline Cherry Averitt and Annika Warrick
Transcribed by Caroline Cherry Averitt
In September of 2024, Arkana staff had the opportunity to interview poet Ama Codjoe, author of Bluest Nude (2022) and Blood of the Air (2020). Bluest Nude received the Lenore Marshall Poetry Prize, the Kate Tufts Discovery Award, and the Paterson Poetry Prize, and was a finalist for the NAACP Image Award for Outstanding Poetry. In addition, Blood of the Air won the Drinking Gourd Chapbook Poetry Prize.
Annika Warrick: Who would you consider to be your “mother tree poets?” And by this I mean, who would you consider to be your influences in terms of how you write and what you write about?
Ama Codjoe: Sharon Olds definitely comes to mind, a poet of the body, a confessional poet, someone who is a taboo-breaker in terms of the content of her writing. Both Sharon Olds and Terrance Hayes were teachers of mine at NYU, and there’s something about Hayes’s playfulness and experimentation–the everywhereness of his poet’s logic–that is super compelling and inspiring to me. Then there are people who I’ve never met, like Lucille Clifton, who I feel in lineage with. I really love the poet Brigit Pegeen Kelly. I love her strangeness. She’s also an ancestor. Then I would say, Diane Suess. I would put all of these people in this “wild poets” category. They’re people who give me courage and inspiration. I just want to chase after them and follow in their wake.
AW: How do you feel about ekphrasis, and specifically the reinterpretation of visual art, and how did that factor into Bluest Nude in particular?
Codjoe: I went to this art exhibit about the Black model that was in Harlem, it was called “Posing Modernity: The Black Model from Manet and Matisse to Today.” I got to hear the curator Denise Murrell talk about her research, and then I had the opportunity to walk through the exhibition. Afterwards, I bought the publication and read every single word. One of the texts Murrell referenced is by Lorraine O’Grady, whose epigraph is the first one that opens Bluest Nude. O’Grady was asking why Black art makers of different disciplines avoided the Black feminine nude as a subject for their artmaking. I thought it was a really interesting and deep question, and then I thought: What would it be like to make poems that are like paintings that are of the Black feminine nude in life, and also in art? And that’s what I set out to do.
Caroline Cherry Averitt: In addition to being an artist of the written word, you are also a dancer. You received an MFA in dance performance at Ohio State University. How does your background as a dancer shape your work, especially since your poems often have a connection with the body?
Codjoe: There’s something kind of inexplicable in terms of practice when you are an artist in dance because your body is your instrument. I danced from when I was three or four years old until my late twenties. As a practice, dance impacted my embodiment, and my ability to access the concerns of the body. I have a sense of the world that’s very informed with my experience as a dancer. That comes out in Bluest Nude when writing and thinking about dance and movement.
CCA: Your poem “Thirteen Ways of Looking” draws inspiration from David Hammons’s art piece “Close Your Eyes and See Black.” When you see art, how do you know it will become an influence in your work? Did you know when you first saw it? Did it live in the back of your brain until you needed it?
Codjoe: I love that question. I am usually snagged by something. I’m walking in the room, and then I’m like, “What is going on in that painting?” There’s something that just catches me. The making of the poem is a way to abide with whatever provoked me in the first place. I wrote “Thirteen Ways of Looking” while I was the poet-in-residence at the Guggenheim Museum in 2023. One of my projects was about accessibility and working with this program called Mind’s Eye for people who are blind or have low vision. An article I’d read said verbal descriptions of art shouldn’t be overly descriptive, that, essentially, the author should leave room for the listener to meet the artwork. I loved reading that because I think that’s what poetry does. Poems don’t spell things out, they invite the reader or listener to meet them. So I met with a group of Mind’s Eye participants and I shared a draft of “Thirteen Ways of Looking,” after the Kerry James Marshall painting called Black Painting. And I listened to the participant’s questions and reactions. It was very helpful for me to draft “Thirteen Ways of Looking” with that particular audience in mind.
AW: Returning to the same subject: Do you have a current work, visual art or a piece of music that you’re just obsessed with, or you feel like you’re lingering on?
Codjoe: Lately, I’ve been listening to a lot of Tori Amos’s early work. She’s a prodigy, and she was such a big part of my soundscape as a teenager.
CCA: Before it was published in your book Bluest Nude, your poem “Two Girls Bathing” appeared in Narrative. There were some significant changes between the two versions published five years apart. When do you know a poem is done and how can it evolve after publication?
Codjoe: Publication, even in the book form, is really just a snapshot of what the poem is doing at the moment. It may not be done. I feel like that’s okay. It’s like a living artifact that’s mutable. And it’s nice to be able to see an author’s progression in that way, right? For that poem in particular, I was really trying to push myself to describe more of the gestures that were involved in the scene that I was recreating. I got feedback from a mentor who read the manuscript and then I went back into the poem to add more detail. It’s like when someone invites you to look again at what you’ve made. But yeah, I don’t feel super precious about changing in public. I just think it’s evidence of where you are at the time.
AW: In the book form, do you feel like the poems have to exist more in context of what is around them?
Codjoe: Yes, I think what is around a poem influences it. If you look at the poems included in both Blood of the Air and Bluest Nude, you can hear how the meanings of poems shift slightly depending on their ordering. I enjoy considering how the poems speak to one another. It’s not just, “These are my greatest hits.” That’s not how I approach making a book. Instead I think of how the poems can be in dialogue with one another and how repetition, proximity, or breaking a pattern can offer a sense of wholeness to a text.
AW: I feel like it gives it that sense of impermanence, because poetry is so changeable and so malleable. Different no matter where it is. I had a recent experience like that where I wrote a poem and got it published, and then I finished writing a chapbook, and the version that ended up in the chapbook was very different from the one that got published. I was really surprised by how much it changed, even from that “finished point.”
Codjoe: I think that’s great.
AW: You approach form in many varied ways throughout Bluest Nude. What do you feel made you gravitate to those specific forms?
Codjoe: I think each poet develops their own logic around what a tercet might mean to them, or what a couplet might mean to them. For me, couplets are really useful when thinking about relationships—one person and a partner, one mother and a daughter. There’s something about the mirroring or the pairing or the coupling that, to me, makes sense. The tercet, for me, is something I turn to when I want to write longer poems, there’s a kind of waterfall quality, I think. It’s like an overflow that makes me want to keep writing. Quatrains, which I don’t use a lot, feel more like a box. But again, this might be idiosyncratic. I do think each poet should, through practice, be able to articulate the reasons for choosing one form over another. The “After the _______” poems in Bluest Nude were originally one long poem. During the pandemic, I self-quarantined in my mom’s house, and I wrote this long poem in many parts, each had a long, sonnet-like shape: it was called “After the Apocalypse.” Alice Quinn edited an anthology Together in a Sudden Strangeness: America’s Poets Respond to the Pandemic, and the poem was included in the anthology. The poem was also published in the Yale Review. It was in the world, and I, in the meantime, was trying to find a home for Bluest Nude. So, at first the manuscript for Bluest Nude existed without that poem in it. Then, a friend of mine, Jenny Xie, was like “Oh, I hope this poem is in your book.” And I was like, “It’s not in my book.” But then I thought, “Wait, is there a way to make it part of the book?” So, I looked at the long poem again, and I just separated the sections into stand alone poems, and then I made this blank (“________”) where the word “apocalypse” used to be. The poem was already a meditation on other catastrophes, a wealth of catastrophes, in some ways, and the blank provide the ambiguity I needed. It, too, was a form.
CCA: How do you think your work changed between Blood of the Air and Bluest Nude?
Codjoe: Blood of the Air was written at a residency in Memphis. I’d put together a first book manuscript and sent it out, and still had time in my residency. So, I thought, “What can I do with a month?” I decided to make a chapbook. I wanted to work in ways that I hadn’t worked before. I wanted to write a longer poem: that was one of the impulses for “Burying Seeds.” I wanted to write in a documentary poetics style, which was the impulse for “She Said.” And in general, I wanted to think about the mythologies of Black women. Then I sent Blood of the Air to the Drinking Gourd Chapbook Prize competition, and the manuscript won. Bluest Nude came together in a completely different way, but I suppose I’m always trying to give myself new goals and to write away from my tendencies and into new terrain.
CCA: Do you think you would want to change a lot from your first work to now?
Codjoe: I’ve heard stories about people who get their book, and then they’re revising as they’re reading to audiences. I don’t really do that. I think it’s useful for readers to be able to see a writer grow and change over time. And perhaps readers are the best people to discern those changes.
AW: What are you working on now and how has your work shifted since the publication of your last book? Or do you feel like you’re working on anything right now?
Codjoe: I’m always hoping to chase the same questions differently. In general, I fluctuate between reading, writing, sharing, and revision. Right now I’m in sharing mode: I have a lot of readings and workshops in the next month or so. I’m not in a rush about what will come out next. I’ve started on my third poetry collection, and I have a nonfiction project that I’m excited about.
AW: Do you have anything else that you feel like you wanted to add? Or: what would be some advice you’d have for someone who’s starting out?
Codjoe: The “read, read, read” is true, but let me just get more specific and ask: What if you read a book of poems every week for a year? That’s not a big deal at all. And it’s like 52 books. I really think that when I have had time to read deeply, I grow as a writer. If you’re interested in being a writer of any genre, I’d encourage you to read a book of poems every week.