giovanni singleton
is a writer who is always seeking to find new lands where her ideas can root and new seas where they can sail. Award winning Poet and editor, , visual poet, and prose writer, giovanni singleton is a writer who dares to be herself. e.e. cummings once wrote “To be nobody-but-yourself—in a world which is doing its best, night and day, to make you everybody else—means to fight the hardest battle which any human being can fight; and never stop fighting.” As you will see she thoughtfully and full engages with questions about her work, writing and the writing process. At the end of the interview there are some links so you can read and hear her read some of her work.
“It is pleasurable and exciting to enter the work as if into a laboratory, a space/place for exploration, to take root and fly.”
Tell us a bit about you as writer, your accomplishments, goals, genre(s)
I am a poet, writer, teacher, and founding editor of nocturnes (re)view of the literary arts, a journal committed to experimental work of the African Diaspora and other contested spaces. My debut poetry collection Ascension,
informed by the music and life of Alice Coltrane, received the 81st California Book Award Gold Medal. I was selected for the Poetry Society of America’s biennial New American Series, which recognizes recent first book poets.
Work in process includes hybrid writing projects library of dreams and the blues of things unseen. A visual art project titled AMERICAN LETTERS: works on paper, inspired by African American spirit writing, sacred sound, Tibetan meditation practice, and the study of Japanese language and calligraphy is forthcoming from Canarium Books in 2017.
I live in a small town in Marin County, California where I watch deer, wear pearl earrings, study acoustic ecology, create knitwear inspired by imaginary geographies, take naps, listen to avant-garde jazz, and watch foreign film especially Nordic noir. I collect bookmarks and enjoy figs and Greek style yogurt. In “writing” as in life, my “goal” is liberation perhaps by quietly provoking and infusing every present moment with honesty, clarity, fearlessness, and compassion.
“My biggest challenge as a writer is also my biggest challenge as a human being…”
My biggest challenge as a writer is also my biggest challenge as a human being: to be fearless, to be unafraid of showing up for the work at hand irrespective of the internal or external “peanut gallery.” That said, there is also the challenge of commitment to making time to actually write. For me “space” is not so much an issue as I believe I’ve managed to create an empty room in my head where only creative energy can reside. The light in this empty room is powered by heartbeats. This empty room is the opposite of the “junk room” or “spare room”, a common badge of honor in the U. S. My empty room is also different from a “waiting room” in that it is not empty in anticipation of fullness. The empty room in my head is actually always full, but writing the fullness down, externalizing it, is where having to pay the bills of daily life comes in. The empty room in my head increases and decreases in size depending on where in the world I’ve found to lay my head and body down and to rest, literally and metaphorically.
You are often called an “experiential” or “avant-garde” poet. What does this mean to you?
I think you meant “experimental” but I think “experiential” definitely is a part of that for me. Labels do not mean much to me beyond a way for folks to organize things. “Avant-garde” or “experimental” has become synonymous with “difficult”. But I would suggest that its existence, its breath if you will, depends on where the line is drawn and who is doing the drawing. If it’s up to me, I’d take a giant blackboard eraser to the lines, the check-boxes, etc. Names call things into being but labels, labels can make things even smaller than names. Fortunately, there’s the enlargement posited by the existence of Spirit. But then that’s not so handy for ego, marketing, and/or the awarding of prizes, right?
“In “writing” as in life, my “goal” is liberation…”
Nonetheless, I actually enjoy the materiality and sound of those categories though I am less enthusiastic about “experimental” in the medical sense. Haven said that, in terms of my writing, I appreciate Douglas Kearney’s use of “experimental” as a “process rather than as an aesthetic.” It is pleasurable and exciting to enter the work as if into a laboratory, a space/place for exploration, to take root and fly. And yes, too “experiential” in the sense that I like to explore things first-hand rather than search for permission or legitimacy. I think it can be challenging at times to trust oneself. I am interested in writing as a vehicle for liberation. What a precipice but mercifully, in this regard, there is a long, healthy lineage of this across artistic disciplines.
I know you are using your dreams as the core of a new book. What are the challenges you find in trying to open dreams, which are usually very personal in symbolism and intent, to a large public?
Thank you for this question. The idea for the new book was actually not my idea at all (though there is some “dream material” in my debut collection Ascension) and it is still a challenge to get on board with it as a worthwhile endeavor if for no other reason than that people’s dreams are usually uninteresting to other people. And to be honest, some of my own dreams have bored me to the point of putting me to sleep; a gesture, I guess to return to the “Well” for something more “interesting.” It’s true that everyone has dreams that tend toward the personal. I think it is also a widely held belief that dreams are the domain of the mundane and writing about them is an act of complete and total desperation. I think I certainly dream out of a particular kind of desperation. But the fact that everyone dreams helps, to some extent, in opening up the very personal.
Dreams are where I feel most alive. One of my favorite Tibetan Buddhist dedication prayers written by Chagdud Rinpoche reads in part:
May I clearly perceive all experiences to be as insubstantial as the dream fabric of the night.
One aspect of some meditation practices is realizing the impermanent nature of what we commonly cling to as “reality” or “waking” life. Realizing the “true”, impermanent nature of reality lessens attachment and thus lessens one’s suffering or at least that’s one idea that has been accomplished by many great Buddhist masters. I think dreams are greater than we are. I need to believe that and it has held me in good stead on many occasions particularly when faced with some seemingly impossible challenge. One can awaken inside of dreams. They are a valid space, unencumbered by the body, by big-headed know-it-all consciousness, in which to become more human, more connected, more capable of working for the benefit of others.
So it’s like the Maya Angelou dream (http://www.inquiringmind.com/Articles/fromdreamcatcher.html) that I wrote before her passing. It all seems quite plausible, to me at least, and yet it was merely a vehicle to help me remember “The Four Noble Truths” that form the foundational teachings of Buddhism. I, with open eyes, complained mightily for years about always forgetting one of the Truths and about the fact that it’s never the same one that’s forgotten.
MARTIN LUTHER KING
Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.’s “I Have a Dream” speech is also extremely important to me in both its personal and universal message. I once had it memorized and I would always linger on the word “dream.” I believe some dreams via their messages, can be universal. For example, one of the most powerful dreams I’ve ever had (meaning I have it many times, remember it, and sometimes spontaneously repeat it aloud to myself) features Angela Davis. I was wearing a purple bellbottomed tracksuit and of course the pants had a wide, white stripe going down the sides. And as much trouble as my southern debutant self has with the fact of perspiration, I was tasked with climbing a mountain. In her role as coach, Ms. Davis presented me with what I thought was a profound teaching: “Some people have no problem accepting things that they have not yet earned.” Ms. Davis was the messenger that (and universally enough) was apparently needed in order to get my attention but she was not the subject of the dream.
Perhaps dreams contain the ability to make the impossible seem possible. I suppose too that maybe dreams come because I really need the help, the help to stay here on this planet. Maybe dream is my walking stick, my medic alert bracelet, my guardian. This stuff, I’m sure, is not unique to me. To dream is to awaken.
You are an editor, poet and prose writer. Do these skills overlap or collide?
These skills absolutely co-exist for me as they have for many writers. Many writers, including Allison Joseph (Crab Orchard Orchard), David Henderson (Umbra), Al Young (Love, Loveletter), Naomi Long Madgett (Lotus Press), Ishmael Reed (Conch, I.Reed Books), Dudley Randall (Broadside Press), Amiri Baraka (Kulchur, Yugen, The Floating Bear with Diane DiPrima, and Totem Press with Hettie Jones), Haki R. Madhubuti (Third World Press), and Nathaniel Mackey (Hambone) have also edited literary journals and/or books. And I think there is also a book about Toni Morrison’s ground-breaking editing career at Random House. A note: The aforementioned list contains writers/editors who could and are usually considered to be of African descent though the content of their publications were not necessarily so defined.
But back to the question at hand. Editing opens me up to seeing things differently—something that I apparently resist doing in my own work. Editing gives me courage to be more flexible and open to change. Poetry helps with precision in prose. Prose sometimes provides a story for a poem. The prose is still relatively new and I admit that so many words can be daunting as my poems tend toward the spare. But again, I’m not so interested in the labels particularly as they, like many labels, are pushed to their limits at some point and then necessitate the creation of new ones. There is a holistic dynamic rather than a separation, at least in the creation phase. I feel fortunate enough just to write.
Who are you reading this month?
This month, I am reading a lot of cross-disciplinary work in preparation for teaching a poetry workshop that focuses on developing a personal, poetic soundscape. Otherwise, I am revisiting anthologies of radical African American poetry. In my stack is Every Goodbye Ain’t Gone: An Anthology of Innovative Poetry by African Americans edited by Aldon Lynn Nielsen and Lauri Ramey
, Natural Process: An Anthology of New Black Poetry edited by Ted Wilentz and Tom Weatherly, Dices or Black Bones: Black Voices of the Seventies edited by Adam David Miller. N. H. Pritchard’s The Matrix: Poems and his Eecchhooees along with Lucille Clifton’s Collected Poems are read regularly. As I color outside the line, I am also “reading” Tibetan and Kundalini yoga mantras, Alice Coltrane, Mahalia Jackson, Pacific Ocean waves, Clara Ward, black tail deer, Nina Simone, wild turkeys, and James Brown.
Links:
for ordering Ascension:
for nocturnes (re)view:
“Joyful Noise: A Conversation with giovanni singleton”
recent review of Ascension at the Poetry Foundation:
prose excerpt from library of dreams manuscript:
first appearance of visual poems from AMERICAN LETTERS: works on paper:
ancient poems but they’re still online
Videos:
Lunch Poems featuring giovanni singleton
Marin Poets Live featuring reading & conversation
A Bit more about who Giovanni singleton is:
My work has appeared on the building of Yerba Buena Center for the Arts and in North American Review, Zen Monster, Inquiring Mind, Callaloo, Poet Lore, and anthologized in Angles of Ascent: A Norton Anthology of Contemporary African American Poetry, What I Say: Innovative Poetry by Black Writers in America, Among Margins: Critical & Lyrical Writing on Aesthetics, Kindergarde: Avant-Garde Poems, Plays, & Stories for Children, I’ll Drown My Book: Conceptual Writing by Women, Hick Poetics: An Anthology of Contemporary Rural American Poetry and forthcoming in Poetry, Letters to the Future: BLACK WOMEN / Radical WRITING, and Quo Anima. In 2012, three parts of AMERICAN LETTERS: works on paper were included in “Beyond Words: A Fusion of Poetry, Visual Art, & Jazz” at the Smithsonian Institute’s American Jazz Museum in Kansas City, MO.
I am the recipient of a New Langton Bay Area Award Show for Literature and have been a fellow at Squaw Valley Community of Writers, Cave Canem, and the Napa Valley Writers Conference.
I’ve taught poetry and literature at Saint Mary’s College and Naropa University. I have been Writer-in-Residence and held visiting professorships in Creative Writing at CalArts, Sonoma State University, and most recently at New Mexico State University. I have also given presentations on editing, visual poetry, and publishing at high schools, colleges, and conferences such as the American Literature Association, Crossing Borders: Bay Area Women Publishers, AWP, Spelman College, Cal State L.A., and Woodland Pattern Book Center.
Currently, I teach at California College of the Arts and serve as Coordinator of Lunch Poems, a monthly poetry reading series at UC-Berkeley under the direction of former U. S. Poet Laureate Robert Hass. I also teach at museums and schools in the San Francisco Bay area through California Poets in the Schools.