Episode Description:
Today’s guest is Soonest Nathaniel. We discussed Soonest's extensive reading list and use of the library, as well as his note-taking practices. We also discussed his influences, college career, ambitions, spoken word poetry, Iowa traffic, and learning to write to impress girls.
Bio: Soonest Nathaniel (poet, spoken-word artist; Nigeria) is the author of the mixed-genre volume BURYING THE GHOSTS OF DEAD NARRATIVES (2022) and the poetry collection TEACHING FATHER HOW TO IMPREGNATE WOMEN (2018). The winner of the 2017 RL Poetry Award and many Nigerian poetry and spoken-word competitions, he was named a Langston Hughes Fellow at the Palm Beach Festival and served as the Poet Laureate for the Korea Nigeria Poetry Festival; his poems appear in Nigerian, US, and British magazines. He participates thanks to a grant from the Bureau of Educational and Cultural Affairs at the US Department of State.
Read Soonest Nathaniel’s writing sample: https://iwp.uiowa.edu/sites/iwp/files/Nathaniel_Sample_formatted.pdf.
Say the World: An International Writing Podcast is made by the International Writing Program. The hosts are IWP Director Christopher Merrill, most recently the author of ON THE ROAD TO LVIV (Arrowsmith Press, 2023) and IWP Communications Coordinator Mike Meginnis, most recently the author of DROWNING PRACTICE (Ecco, 2022). Additional research, transcription, and other support provided by Research Assistant Derick Edgren Otero.
IWP programming is primarily funded by the University of Iowa and the Bureau of Educational and Cultural Affairs (ECA) at the U.S. Department of State, with additional funding provided by organizations like the Doris Duke Foundation, as well as donors like you. If you’d like to donate to IWP, go to bit.ly/iwp-support.
Learn more about IWP at iwp.uiowa.edu.
Episode Transcript:
[music: "Gymnopédie No. 1" by T. Bless & the Professionals]
MM:
You're listening to Say the World: an International Writing Podcast. I'm Mike Meginnis, Communications Coordinator at the International Writing Program, and most recently, the author of the novel Drowning Practice.
CM:
And I'm Christopher Merrill, Director of the International Writing Program and author most recently of a book-length poem titled On the Road to Lviv.
MM:
This week's interview subject is Soonest Nathaniel, who is a poet, spoken-word artist and journalist from Nigeria, who has a beautiful voice, a wonderful performance style. And I think I heard him read the same two or three poems, like four times in the course of his time here. He would read a number of others, but there was sort of a core set that regardless of the circumstance, we would, we would tend to hear, and I never got tired of them. It was always interesting to hear how he would vary his performance for the room for the situation. So we're going to hear a little bit of that. We've had a lot of fun talking to him about his Iowa City experience, his love of the library here, and his somewhat eccentric note-taking habits.
CM:
Yeah, exactly. He showed us a very beautiful notebook, which in some ways resembles a commonplace book, a place for him to put down ideas for poems, overheard conversations, things that he's been reading, it was a catch-all if you like.
MM:
And it was color-coded.
CM:
Yep.
MM:
And it was, it was sort of a beautiful object to witness. And it really did—it made me think about what I do to keep track of the material that I'm wanting to write about, and it was a little bit humbling. Because what usually happens is I have an idea when I am supposed to be going to sleep or when I'm supposed to be doing anything else. And for lack of a better system, I write myself a panicked email, and I put in the subject line whatever I think is so important that I need to remember it later. And then it sits there until I wake up the next morning, or I happen to look at my inbox next. And then I get to sort of puzzle through what I thought I was doing. The most recent one I did actually, I have one that I wrote the other day. Did I delete it out of shame? The answer to that is usually yes. So I believe the note that I made to myself was, "It's normal for them," which, in the book that I'm working on, what I meant by that, I think, was that the characters should be treating the sort of fantastic premise as if it were sort of more—it's a thing to be taken for granted in their lives. And then I looked at that note later, and I realized that I couldn't do it. That it didn't make sense. That it would be like—it would require totally reworking everything to take that note, it was like, well, but I'm glad I sent myself that email.
CM:
Yeah, that's funny, because I have the same practice. If a line comes to me in the middle of the night, I'll send myself an email, and I have reached the age that I might not actually have any idea what it is I wrote in that—in the delirium of the late night, but Soonest's bnoteook made me think of long ago I did a profile of the wonderful novelist and nonfiction writer, Peter Matheson, and he looked at my notebook as I was taking down the notes, and he said, "So you, you write on both sides of the page." And I said, "Yes." And he said, "That's not professional." His way of writing, as he said, was: you take the notes on the right side, you leave the left side blank, so that when you read over the notes, you can make your additions on the left side, you'll have a much more clear understanding of what you're trying to do. And I thought to myself, well, actually what I do when I get off on a tangent, I just put it into parenthesis, and he said, "Not professional."
MM:
(Laughs) Just categorically not to be done.
CM:
Yeah.
MM:
He was confused that no one had told you yet.
CM:
Yeah. But one recurring theme in these podcasts is our interest in how writers do their work. And when I get together with other writers, it's really one of the things that we talk about is: How did you, how did you do that? What were your—what were your compositional strategies, if you will, but how did this piece come together? The creative process is always interesting, isn't it?
MM:
Yeah. I think with the sending ourselves emails strategy, I always think about the thing that you're supposed to do if you want to start lucid dreaming. The advice is to like, as soon as you get up the next morning, write down everything you could remember from your dream to sort of give your brain some training, and the idea that dreams are interesting, that they're worth investing some thought in, and to sort of put yourself in that place. And I feel like writing is kind of similar, where you get yourself in the habit of: I'm going to sit down every day or so, I'm going to write whatever my brain has kind of put together for me while I've been away from the office, so to speak. And, and there's just always something there, right? Like it just sort of, unless you're having a really bad spell, which does happen, there is always that work that your brain did while you weren't attending to it. It was sort of dreaming for you and putting together the story or the poem or whatever you're working on. And then you get to kind of discover what happened while you weren't paying attention.
CM:
Cultivating a daily practice is, in my view, one of the smartest things a writer can do at whatever age they are. But I'm also thinking that, just as he said, that I remember the, maybe it was in a Paris—the Paris Review interview that my namesake, James Merrill, wrote and said, "I'm always making notes for writing a poem. But when it comes time to write the poem, I can't find the notes." And I said, that's a quintessential poet's response.
MM:
Yeah. Well, it's funny, though, because I feel like losing the notes is part of doing it right.
CM:
Exactly.
MM:
Like I always do, the thing I do that is actually smart, versus my email system, which is like touch and go, is I do have a rule that if I have a good idea for later in the book, while I'm writing, I have to just go down to a new page and write it as soon as I can.
CM:
Yeah.
MM:
And my experience is that the odds of that material making it into the book are nil. They are like the thing that I'm most excited about every time I write them down. But they're totally worthless when I get to the moment where they would be integrated, but, sending my brain ahead to do that work and embracing that process of writing those notes does get me to come up with the better thing that I eventually do write instead.
CM:
I completely agree because what you've done is you've focused your attention on something and then, while you go back to the other work, that underground or subterranean work continues.
MM:
Yeah, it is. It is, again, it is that continuous sort of like setting some part of yourself on the project that you're not like consciously aware of. It's always the most satisfying thing in the world to just sort of find later what you set up for yourself sort of the treasure you buried without knowing it exactly. So, Soonest has a lot of treasure buried. He is a prolific poet, is my impression, and we're going to hear from him here in a second about some of his process of the people that he learned from and what he is hoping to achieve with his words.
CM:
Have at it.
[music: "Hazy Sky" by nuer self]
SN:
All right, I will start with "Origin of Sin."
"At ten, I will wake, a boy already drunk with the ashes of his father. Eyes inebriated, yet mind still sober enough to behold his mother playing pranks with a needle. Syringe to her right palm, in her left, cotton reeking of spirit. She divides the earth into an equator and sticks the needle in the upper left arch. Eyes closed in what seem like savoring the bliss of pain; she mutters a prayer beneath her bread, I assume is to the god of things lost; I assume it is to the god of things that never longed to be found. At fourteen, I will kiss a girl — who knits her own history. She cultivates a forest on her head, a thick forest where her broken spirit can be led away, left to stray like a scapegoat into the Azazel. She buries my head between her thighs; she warns that I will taste down there the essence of her father, a man who eats babies for lunch. She will have me weave a hair into one strong strand, there is a lone tree at the center of the forest she has cultivated; her locks will serve as rope from which her soul will dangle to freedom. At sixteen, I will fail to take off my shoes at the door of the shrine house; I will fail to enter the front door — of the votive temple with my back, I will enter the most holy place without knocking, only to behold behind the rendered veil, the nakedness of God. She could have my eyes gorged out, but there is always another way to pay for crimes not committed; so, at the hill of rags, I will leave my gown like a propitiation on the floor; I will burn my innocence upon her altar, and I will learn, there is — more than one meaning to light."
My name is Soonest Nathaniel. I am a poet, a spoken-word artist and digital journalist from Nigeria. I hail from the southeastern region of Nigeria. I'm from the tribe, one of the big three tribes in Nigeria called the Igbo people. We are in the East. But I was born in the western part, where you have the Yoruba people, which is a very major tribe, and whose culture have really traveled far and wide. And the culture also influenced most of the things I write too. And this is how I like to say it: so I am Igbo by blood, I am Yoruba by place of birth, and I am northerner, or Hausa, by marriage because I married a woman from the northern region. That's the three major tribes in Nigeria.
I studied maths and computer science at the Federal University of Technology over in Nigeria. But I think, second year into that study, I realized now, "No, this is not me, I'm wasting time." But you see, I had already stayed home three years. And if I had left in my second year, it would mean I had wasted five years. At least that's what my mother said to me. "You've stayed home waiting for school for three years, you're into your second year. If you quit now, then that will be five years wasted." So I had to stay and try to finish up; it was really hard. But this is how I coped within the university: I started off a journal and like a group called "Lyriversity." It was called "Lyriversity" because we thought of it as a school of the arts in a science and technology school, because that's all we did. So, "Oh, you love to dance, you love to sing? You love poetry, you love to write fiction? Come together, and let's form something."
And it was something real big because before I left school, I won my first major prize, which was the FUT Writers Award by the Vice Chancellor of the University. It was the first inaugural one. And from there, I knew, "Hey, I think there might be something in what I'm writing that people like." But of course, the craft wasn't great at the time. And so what I started to do was to study many of the writings I saw. It started from my mother though, who, when my father wasn't there for a while, started to give us books. Some of these books she never read; she didn't even know they were poetry at the time. Maybe one or two, eventually, she began to, you know, say "Oh, that was because I know that line." There's a famous line she has, which is, "There is no Frigate like a Book." It's one of her favorite lines, right? But she didn't, she couldn't really define that, oh, it was fully poetry. And then she was just giving me and my siblings the books, and then here we are just feasting on those things. And before you know it, they influenced my work because also, coming from some of my faith background, we in the church where we go, so you have the hymns. So I find a correlation between the hymns and the poems in the rhythms and the rhymes. So I knew, "Oh, this is something beautiful," and I started using that.
I like to say that the funny thing is, when I started to do poetry majorly, it was because I couldn't talk to the girls. (Laughs) So I wanted to look for a fantastic way to say hello. And there's a way I scribble. If I bring out my book, I kind of do cursive writing. So I had cursive writing on poems with some rhymes, and everybody be like, "Wow, that is fantastic." I never knew it was anything though. I never knew it was anything until I got into school. And then the first, you know, recognition came for it. And I'm like, "Whoa, I hope there is—there might be something I'm doing that people like." But one thing happened in school, which I like to always say what really brought me into the kind of poetry I do, which I have defined as African speculative realism—is that I saw a speculat—I was introduced to a speculative fiction or speculative poetry writer. And his name is Bruce Boston. In fact, he is one of the persons I want to see in the US this week. On this trip. I really want to see Bruce Boston. He's over eighty now. And he lives somewhere in Ocala, Florida if I'm not mistaken. He wrote a poem titled "I Build Engines." Believe me, I studied that poem for at least four years, one piece for at least four years. I was so fascinated with the way he wrote that piece that I'm like, "No, if I must write poetry, it has to feel like this."
You know, it's not just the normal way we just write: speculative fiction and poetry like to bring in things that are almost unbelievable, almost out of this world. But you know, he makes it feel that way that you can still connect with it. Sadly, what I was looking for when I was studying this poem, was to find the meaning. What was he trying to say with all these metaphors? And then you will not believe that in five years, all I could get from his first line: "I build engines from the lines of battles regardless how they are drawn." The only thing I learned was that regardless the circumstances, regardless the challenges, I'll do something great out of it. That was all I got! I mean, it's crazy because for five years I was trying to study everything, trying to find out what, what was he saying? And that was all I got, and, since then, he was the one who gave a blurb for my first book.
MM:
Oh, wow, that's awesome.
SN:
He gave a blurb on my first book. And sadly, I've not been able to even give him the book myself. At the time, there was no way I could send it to the US. I was way younger, I didn't know many things around that. So this was one of those things I really wanted to do, go now and give him and say thank you very much, you really set me on this path. I'm grateful.
CM:
Soonest, you described yourself as both a poet and a spoken-word artist, and I'm intrigued by what you imagined the relationship between your own poems and your spoken word performances. How do they shape each other? If they do.
SN:
They do shape each other. And this is how it works for me. Initially, I would, I would only go for performance. And when it comes to performance, you're only looking for the applause, the chairs. You're looking for things that are always very catchy, punchy punch lines, puns, you know, but this is where I try to now change what I do when it comes to spoken word, and poetry. I first go back to the page and write, in proper craft, metaphors and all the things that makes poetry tick. And because I already had a little edge when it comes to performing, if I write it very beautifully, well on the page, I'm able to, you know, translate that to performances, because I realized that some of the things earlier on I was writing, after have performed when people read them on the page, they'd be like, "What are you doing, man?" Because it's, it's trash. It's just beautiful because you know how to use the word. It's not, it's not very, it's not qualitative. People cannot sit with it and then take it in. But in the performance you are putting all the show, so the people are lost in the things and the way I gesticulate and the way you're saying stuff, that they're not really paying total attention to the words. But now when they go back to the work, I want them to not just live with what I've given them on the stage. I want them to go back and realize, "Oh, there are so many things we did not even hear on the stage." So somebody can think like this, which is what some of my great poets have done.
I mean, I was saying to him, I was saying to Chris, earlier on that I read a piece of his and he says, "Hey, there is no sugar in paradise." I mean, that is so—think about it, and the way we even think about it in faith. We don't think about sugar and Paradise. Right now it makes sense because when you know that, oh, maybe in a place of abundance. Oh, I could—and like explained it to me: in a place of abundance I couldn't find this, I couldn't find that. Sometimes it's not always happy or rosy when even somebody's wealthy, right? So so many meanings can come into that one line. First, I've given you the literal meaning of "Oh, in a place where there's plenty I couldn't find sugar." It's also in the place where there is so much abundance I couldn't find happiness. So many things that come through in just one line. And that's what I want to do with the work. I want you to look at that one line and maybe be stuck in that one line for two years.
CM:
You've mentioned Bruce Boston as a possible influence. What other poets were you thinking about when you were trying to learn your craft as a poet, which would be perhaps juxtaposed to what you were doing in performances?
SN:
I would go back home first. Let me start from the home. In Nigeria many people would say, yes, we all worship—we practically worship Wole Soyinka. So I really never call Wole Soyinka a part of my influence. We practically—I mean, I think the guy wakes up in the morning and worships himself. So we should just practically worship him. I'm just Oh, yes, that was—and he is so fantastic. In fact, when you were growing up, they want to compare you, and I say no, no, no, no, no, don't bother. Soyinka is on his own. I am just one boy trying to do something; he is a different breed. But when it comes to poetry in Nigeria, the person who really influences me—there are two persons. Sadly both of them are dead. The first person is Christopher Okigbo. Christopher Okigbo is so powerful. And I think what I found in his poetry was the spiritual connect—connections in his work. That is something down to earth—spiritual not necessarily had to do with, with all religions, not even just Christianity, even though he was trained as a Christian, but he had infusion of tradition. He had infusion of Western culture in his work, and that was very early. And he was so passionate a poet that when the Biafra War broke, Okigbo carried a gun, and he died in '87—no, in '67, in the war. He carried a gun to be on the side of Biafra. That's the kind of person he was. He was larger than life. The guy was larger than life in itself. You know, and very influential, very short books, small collection, but so powerful, you know, so powerful.
Then the next person is Esiaba Irobi. Esiaba Irobi is a playwright, a poet, and a novelist too. And he wrote that his last work that was a major work was The Cemetery Road, a collection of a play—a play collection, and the reason I love Esiaba is how much he infuses poetry into the play, into the drama. So you go into Esiaba's work looking just to see conversations alone, but you realize everything you're reading is just too poetic. And then the extra thing he does is what I like, and he connects the word Ginsberg does—oh, Ginsberg, I hope that's the way they pronounce it, Allen Ginsberg does—there's a freedom, especially when he's now writing his poetry, there's a freedom in which he operates. I mean, some of us, we did not use the F word in our, in our poems until God knows how we were very old. Because it was a taboo to use the F word where I come from, but people like Esiaba had already started. They could use the word, they could play with it, but use it in a very good way such that you will rethink what the word even means, in the sense. You go to the airport in Ghana. But their poetry also goes towards idioms. You know, it goes towards the African folklore, parables and all that. And they were very influential at the time, because it was not just what the whole world was writing, you know. They were writing from their roots, they were writing from their heart, writing their own story.
And that's what I wanted to do when I started, you know, honing my craft, and I did it myself. We didn't really have mentors, per se. So Bruce Boston was mentoring me via Facebook. He would give his feedback on one or two works. And then, you know, tell me one or two things, basically, that kind of thing. I think my first, my first workshop for poetry came in 2011, between 2011 and 2014. Within that period, it was the writer's workshop in Rivers state. Rivers state is in Nigeria. It's the oil-rich region in Nigeria, you know, and so that was where Obari Gomba taught me the rudiments of free verse. I used to be a rhyming point. In fact, you will still see in some of my work, the whole trying to rhyme, but trying not to force it. I tried to do the rhyme but this time not force it anymore. So Obari Gomba introduced me to, you know, free verse. And then we were brought up on British poetry. But in those workshops, we started to look at people like Langston Hughes. In fact, I wish I brought it, I wrote a poem—he wrote "I've seen rivers," right? And I wrote a poem, said, "I've seen faces," in which in the end, it says, "I've seen all these faces, sadly, I've not seen mine." That's where I ended that poem. So that was one of the things he made us do: he made us model the first poems we are writing after, you know, poets like that, just to bring us into free verse.
As you grow older, you start to look for your structures. Of course, not everybody can do the cantos; there are people who can really go to those forms. That's their way of writing. But there's a freedom in which—again, I like to go back to the fact that the first thing I did when I came here was to howl at the moon. Allen Ginsberg was the first thing I did at the bank of the Iowa River, and I'm building a poem around that, in which I say, "Hey," I was trying, I was there, and then the moon, I could see his face, and him saying to me, "Come." I'm trying to write a poem like that. There's a lot of, in fact, why am I even speaking? I wrote all the guys I want to see here and read. Yeah. So, Lord Weary's Castle, Age of Anxiety. I have a reading list. Trust me. I have a big list. A Stranger Inside, Conquistador—that's Archibald MacLeish—you have them, you have, I mean, Merwin is here. I came, I came for reading actually. That's one of the major reasons I came here.
MM:
For listeners: what you just heard is not remotely representative of the extensiveness of the list that I just saw in Soonest's hand. There are so many names and books on that—
CM:
Many pages.
MM:
Written longhand, carefully, better than I can write. And I know because you've talked about that. In every conversation that I have been a part of where you were present, you're talking about the reading. And for me, that's one of the really fun things about folks coming here, seeing the university library. We have this incredible good fortune of—on the one hand, there's the many libraries that the university has, especially the main library, and then there is, on top of that, the Iowa City Public Library, each within like literally ten minutes of the place where you're staying. It is easy to forget how incredibly rich that is as a resource, and you in your engagement with it have made it impossible to forget that because you're just so excited.
SN:
It's too beautiful. I mean, I have in my, I have in my bag, there's two books I borrowed. The third one is still in the house. This is where would I have seen Polish poetry, that's the point. I mean, this is willows right in my hand somewhere. I wouldn't have found this collection of postwar Polish poetry. It's not something I would walk into any shop back there in Nigeria, Lagos or Abuja, and see. So when I said I was coming to read, I knew what—I knew the reasons, and the point is, this is the only way I can get new metaphors. It is only reading so when I read, I write in my new metaphors here. That is the—that's part of my craft, in reading some of the lines I see are tweaked into something new, that they become my own metaphor. So it's, it's one of those things I do. Some lines are so beautiful, they, you know, bring up new thoughts in your head, you write them. So I'm always reading because that is where the metaphors will be. There's no other place, they don't just come. I mean, I was—I was looking at Frost, and he was saying something about how every poet must first read what has been there before him to know, so that he doesn't repeat. But of course, you can't also wait to read it all before you write the poems. So I'm not necessarily going to wait to read everything before I start writing my new poems. But I would always start off with that reading to inform whatever else I'm endeavoring to get into.
MM:
For the listener, this is an unusually visual interview. What we what we just now saw is Soonest's notebook in which these lines have been written. And again, lovely handwriting. And I was struck by the different colors.
SN:
Exactly, yeah, I was going to talk about that. My wife says this is the only place where I'm very organized. (Laughs) So she loves me so much. Because what I do is to make this book so beautiful that I always come back to it. I can't toss it away, if I lose this book it's like I've lost $100,000, I tell you. If I lose this book alone, and they're like, three or four of them, and I brought all of them.
CM:
Have you by chance made copies of them just so that, if you do lose them—
SN:
Now that you've said it, I need to do that. (Laughs) Because I don't know what I will do like, it's, it's, it's months, years of work. They are not yet poems, but I can tell you they are poem starters, they are poem endings, they are poem in-betweens. So there are things that are going to make up some of the poems you write, sometimes you start writing, and you realize, "Oh, this line actually fits into this thing." Because again, I've come also to the understanding that the poet is just the vessel by which the message will go out. So sometimes you are given some of these metaphors to drop here, so that when that poem is coming, you can pick from here and make it very beautiful. And what I do with these guys, too, sometimes I'm also—when I write, some of them are titles I want to work on. So this guy says "Semaphore." So, yeah, the more brighter colors are special stuff. I don't know if that makes sense.
MM:
Yeah.
SN:
Pick a color. Write in purple, pink, red—there are special stuffs that must come in somewhere.
MM:
You want to make sure that you don't miss that.
SN:
So once you are flipping the page, you can tell that, "Oh, there was a reason you did this."
CM:
So, two things I'm going to say. One, feel free to use the copier at the Shambaugh House.
(Laughter)
CM:
You don't want to lose something as precious as this. And secondly, a book that might be of some interest to you, David Wagner, American poet, went to the widow of the great poet, Theodore Roethke, and asked if he could go through Roethke's notebooks because Roethke would write every day. And what he was doing was essentially a kind of automatic writing. And Wagner took those, the best of that, and fashion them into new poems, but gave the—gives readers a sense of Roethke's writing practice. And it's called Straw for the Fire, and it's a remarkable book. So I think you have your own—
SN:
Struck by the fire?
CM:
Straw for the Fire.
SN:
Oh, Straw for the Fire.
CM:
Edited by David Wagner.
SN:
Oh, I'll have to check that out. Again, the other part of it is when I'm writing, there's a lot of paper. I don't do—so, that's funny—I say I'm a digital journalist who doesn't write first on laptops or something. It's always the paper. I, my wife says it's because I think I write [by hand] very well. So, because I think somehow I am in that school that believes that there's a connection between this guy and the page.
MM:
And "this guy," in this case, is the pen.
(Laughter)
CM:
A green pen.
(Laughter)
SN:
So it's—that connection is always there for me when I start to write, but if I go on the PC, somehow, I lose some—I don't know, it's maybe just me, just something about me and wanting to write. And then when I've written on the first page, which is the rough draft, I transfer to the next page, and then I use that one and I toss into a basket. So sometimes my wife wakes up at past midnight, and her whole parlor is full of white. So initially, it was going to be a problem. I think she talked to my mother and my mother said, "Man, he does it every time. He did it when he was with me. Don't worry. He will pick it up and put it back into the trash bin." And then she says, "Okay," but I think the one she had she cannot get over is that at that same time, twelve, midnight, I am walking around the house, and I am chanting these poems. She doesn't understand why I'm torturing her deliberately. But somehow those poems—there are forms that beg you to read them. Loud. There are poems that say, "You cannot be silent when you're reading me."
CM:
Well, it's interesting that you're walking around the house too. So walking is a part of the process.
SN:
Process, yes, it is. It is a part of the process, walking around, going around, because sometimes you might also see me do my hand, even when I don't know. And again, she says to me, I would love to just take a video so that people can see because sometimes back home, people don't regard poetry. They don't take poetry as—or maybe when they see the finished product. When I say, "Oh, I have been selected," or maybe I'm being published here. People think, "Oh, it's just that thing he does."
MM:
Well, in the United States, of course, everyone respects poetry, values it very much.
(Laughter)
SN:
My first fifty dollars from poetry came from America! I keep saying it, my first fifty—I never knew you could get paid anything from any poem.
MM:
That's actually news for us here too.
(Laughter)
SN:
That's my first dollar, like, my first fifty dollars, was on Rattle. I can't forget, right, two poems, you paid me for one piece. And I'm like, "Whoa, seriously?" But of course, you need to see that after that acceptance, I need to show you my Submittable and see how many more rejections. (Laughs) At some time I showed it online and people be like, "How did you continue writing?" We're talking over 300 rejections were talking. But for one grain, every other guy did not matter to me.
CM:
So how do you answer that question? And how in the face of a lot of rejection do you keep going?
SN:
Two things. One, I'm not writing for money. Two, I'm also not writing—I don't set out writing to believe that everybody will accept it. Because sometimes also, when you are rejected, you must know that you have to go back to the work. So you must take it as something that will correct you. Sometimes your work is good, is fine. But it's not for the audience. It's not for that page, it's not for that paper, it's sometimes you're not writing to the prompt, you're not writing to the team. So you must understand it, that, is getting this understanding. And then some people get sent over a thousand poems. How do you—how do you want one editor or two to go through a thousand poems? And sometimes they're just looking at the first two lines, three lines, or—and they're saying, "Hey, it's not going to work for me." You know, they can tell. I mean, that's the truth. If you start a good poem, you can almost tell, yeah, although some other poems, you need to give a chance to go straight down, maybe into the body, and then you feel where the poet is really playing into his strength, right? But if you have that whole competition, that whole set, the editors don't have all the day, all the time, all the energy to go through all that. So you must forgive them too. So in understanding that, I forgive myself too, because earlier on, I used to beat myself like, "You're a failure. You're not—you're writing terrible poetry." But of course, you grow out of it also with time, because you know, you are not in competition with anybody. You're just writing these things that came to you first. So you want to get better. So take every of those negatives as a reason to go back, send again. Of course, I have, I met a friend who says for every one submission rejected, he sends ten. (Laughs) That is his—that is his reply! When he gets one negative, send in ten of them. And then you realize that after this, you get one, that, you know, changes everything. Just one acceptance that changes everything.
MM:
We have a research assistant for this podcast, which I—he does a great job. And I want to, I want to give credit for this question, because it was asked in such an interesting way. The research assistant's name is Derick Edgren Otero. And the question was: "What does it mean to be a working artist to you? And what kind of work is poetry?" And that second part was the question that I really...What kind of work is poetry?
SN:
Whoa, okay. Again, I think I might survive this question. It's a very tricky one, but I think I might survive it in the sense that I have recently, I said to them, that I have decided that I want to serve forever in the temple of language. That is what I think poetry is: service in the temple of language. By this I mean, making people see the world differently with my work. To be the working poet is to continually hone your craft, regardless what age, regardless where you have attained. Blend also with the times to understand what the audience, immediate audience, will be able to engage with. I don't agree [with]—like, people like, "I need to take up the gun." Every poem is political, but it's not in the poet's place to enforce them. It's not in the poet's place to say, "You must do this." So the poet is just to bring it there, to say, "Hey, this option is also available. This is also on the table. You want to consider it?" And sometimes even if you're not a person who just sends a message, you might just want to say, "Hey, you can laugh!"
CM:
You talk about serving in the temple of language. You're the son of a preacher.
SN:
Yeah.
CM:
You've spoken about the importance of faith. Can you talk about the connection between poetry and faith?
SN:
Thank you very much. That question is very important to me too. Because my background and faith is very key. And so that's why I always say that my poems, I like them to go toward psalms, towards prophecy, towards parables, towards folklore, those kinds of things. Fate is very key to where I write from. But what I do is different from what my father does. My father is going for a straight ideology and preaching it to you. But I'm saying, "Decide for yourself. Do as thou will." But you would find in my works that I'm also still trying to make this world perhaps a little better. I'm trying, in my own little way, because that's exactly what my father thinks he's doing also with his sermons, right? He wants to make it a better place. He feels that something better than what we already have. "Oh, there's this great thing that has to happen," right? But I'm saying yes, all that, I believe what you're doing, I believe what this man is doing, I believe what that person is doing. But I think we can just choose a path. It doesn't have to be one path for everybody. But let's choose to do it rightly. Let's choose to do it beautifully. Let's choose to live peacefully. I mean, all the other themes—love, let's choose love, let's choose love against violence. All those things are the themes that, you know, I play around with—fate—come into my poetry, especially when it comes to, if I'm trying to teach with the work. If I'm trying to teach equality with a walk, if I'm trying to preach justice with the work. The way they will preach justice in the church is not the way my poems will preach it or speak about it. I'm going to use beautiful language so that when it gets into you—and that's why beautiful language is important—when it sinks in, the person can never stay the same. That is the problem with language. The moment the person takes it in, absorbs it well, you can never—it starts to work a kind of magic in your system that you can't stay, you know, you can't stay the way you were before. Because it's a new insight. It's something that you get so excited about.
MM:
I'm curious. What is one really interesting thing that you've learned in your time here so far?
SN:
Oh, well, I think the first thing is that we, we do not see the world different—We do see the world differently. Where we come from where—we are from various places. In fact, it reinforces why you need to be more open to new things. Because the world—there are certain things that we do back home that you realize, "Oh, it's going to be an issue." For instance, I've learned there's a way I will lift my voice, and it's a problem.
(Laughter)
SN:
Some people have almost cried! They thought I was angry.
MM:
Yeah.
SN:
But again, that is how we speak when we are excited back home.
MM:
Right.
SN:
Especially if maybe we're drinking and then we're having a—so we try to elevate to show, "Hey, we are very hyped and happy." But some people be like, "Whoa, he's shouting..." And I'm like, no, no, I don't mean it that way! You know, it's not, that's not, that's not what was intended, you know. So it begins to tell you, "Hey, there are things you need to just, you know, accept, understand people," and then meet people at that place. That's almost like a halfway, kind of, meet them and understand that this is where their understanding of where you come from, and where your own understanding of them, you know, meets. In the US though, when it comes to the study of, what I've experienced here in the US, there's a certain level of independence that I love. In fact, for the first time, and I'm, I'm proud to say it is very funny: I put my money into the machine at Target. And I'm asking, "Dude, you had better not keep my hundred dollars, man. Give me my change." (Laughs) Yeah, because, of course, we don't have such machines. I mean, I've not seen or used them back home, where I would just go to the machine and pay for what I have bought. And then I have no [unintelligible]. So, but everybody just goes, does their thing, and they move, nobody's waiting for anybody. Back home you would go to somebody and say, "Okay, this is what I bought, this is what I bought," the person calculates, gives your change, and then you guys might have a conversation for another ten minutes. But I also did it, I made sure, I went to the lady who was there. And then I'm like, "Okay, this time around, I'm not using the machine." Let's have a conversation. You know, let's have a conversation. I've missed the fact that you can say, "Oh, where are you from?" You know, things like that. I missed that too. So it's a fair balance too if you have that. Of course they kept one person there because they knew some people will not be able to use the machine right, which is very beautiful. Because they know, no, not everybody can just go and use the machine.
MM:
Well, and that Target is an extreme case. Like you know, if you go to the Hy-Vee, for example, that's, you know, like really close to my house. They have self checkout, but they also have the cashiers, like,
SN:
Hy-Vee, I think I saw that.
MM:
Yes.
SN:
At the Hy-Vee. Yes.
MM:
But that Target is like stressful for me because you go there and there's that bank of self-checkout things, and there's this one person watching you, and they don't say anything. Not unless you need help. They just kind of look on you and you're like, "I hope they're not judging me for how I'm handling this robot."
SN:
(Laughs) Initially, I felt like that the first day, but I'm like, okay, yes, I forgive myself. I can make mistakes. I'm human after all. I've not seen it [before]. Yeah, but in general here, especially in Iowa here, people have been really kind.
MM:
Yeah.
SN:
People have been generally kind because—zebra crossing, I like to make fun of that. We don't do zebra crossing back home. It doesn't happen that a car waits for you that way. It's not really the same. So I'm crossing, I'm like, "Oh, thank you." Because, in fact, somebody asked me, "Why are you thanking?" I'm like, "No, you have to! These people are stopping." Back home nobody will stop. They see some guy, vroom vroom vroom, and nobody's stopping. So I'm like, "Oh, thank you!" This is beautiful, like, come on. I need to say thank you. Because, I mean, nobody—back home? No, no, they're not gonna stop for you easily, you know.
MM:
Yeah, here don't stop in the way that I want them to, or they look like they're a little too froggy, I will glare at them. I will slow down in the crosswalk and be like, "Listen, buddy, you're waiting till I'm done." Because people, the thing that like—the issue that we have is like, if people don't do that, then they're so dangerous. That like, there's no trust, like you feel like they're going to completely run you over unless you establish like, Yes, I have the right of—
SN:
I am moving. Yes, I agree.
CM:
Some years ago, we had a writer here from Mexico who was given a ticket for jaywalking. And they are rather expensive. This was many years ago, and it was seventy-five dollars. And he was quite upset about it. But the reason we have tickets for jaywalking is because it's a university town. Students are walking against the light without paying attention, and they don't want anybody to get hurt. And he complained about it in our debriefing at the State Department, and somebody from the State Department looked at him and said, "Think of it as a cultural lesson."
SN:
(Laughter)
SN:
I think I've learned a bit of that too. I've learned a bit of that. Although sometimes I think I have beaten the lights. It's showing me a stop sign, but the Nigerian in me, or the guy who was born in Lagos understands that there is no car coming. Why do I have to wait till it turns? Why? You know? So I just go on the line, but I'm seeing the red aiming opposite me, you know, the hand says stop for US crossing. But I'm like, "Hey, car..."
MM:
You'd be right at home on the east coast. It's only in the Midwest that anyone even pretends to care. But like, I'm unusual in that I actually stop. Well, thanks so much. This has been a great conference.
CM:
It's really been fun.
MM:
Yeah, I knew we had to talk to you because you are such a generous conversation partner. There are so many things I wanted to ask about that we didn't have time for. And I just want to thank you for your time.
SN:
Thank you for having me.
CM:
This was really good.
SN:
Thank you very much.
CM:
Thank you.
[music: "Hazy Sky" by nuer self]
SN:
[Reading the poem "It doesn't take a penis."] I was born by a woman, who sits like a man. Her legs wide open without fear for what the prying world would see. And she will say, 'let them bear witness that this lady is endowed with an elephant-sized testicle.' My mother wears yucca fibers for sandals and rabbit furs for clothes. Her neck is adorned with shells, stones, bones, and dried berries; and she will say, 'dead memories too are ornaments.' On certain days she will place my head on her thighs and with affection in our eyes she will say, 'big ships drown in pools, ponds and puddles, it doesn't take a penis to impregnate a woman.' So at the school of her lap, I learned to castrate my fears in faith to fertilize the womb of barren dreams. Last night I heard her say, 'the open road never leads to death, it leads to a lake full of laughter.'
[music: "Gymnopédie No. 1 - DoGBeaT Remix" by DoGBeaT]
MM:
Say the World: an International Writing Podcast is a production of the International Writing Program at the University of Iowa. IWP programming is primarily funded by the University of Iowa and the Bureau of Educational and Cultural Affairs at the US Department of State, with additional funding provided by organizations like the Dorris Duke Foundation, as well as donors like you. If you'd like to donate to the IWP, go to bit.ly/iwp-support. Links to further information and additional credits for this episode are in the show notes.
