Sinking Teeth into
Life: An Interview with Aracelis Girmay
by Tara Betts
Aracelis
Girmay is such an amalgamation of life's dramatic
angles. Think Minnie Riperton and La Lupe, Morrison and
Marquez, students in the Bronx writing their first poems
and the violence of Darfur. Such combinations give you
insights into Girmay and her work. Her first book TEETH
was released on Curbstone Press in 2007. As the
onslaught of the holidays buried us both, we were able
to meet briefly and talk a bit about writers, music,
where the sparks of poems emerge, teaching as well as
her two books and new work.
Girmay is the author of TEETH and the children’s book
Changing, Changing, for which she created the collage
illustrations and the words. She is a Cave Canem fellow
who has received grants from Toor Cummings Center and
Watson Foundation. Most of the time, Girmay is teaching
creative writing with younger writers, after receiving
her MFA from NYU, she returned to her native Santa Ana,
California where she taught with the CARE Project. In
New York, she continues to open minds to the power of
words with Community Word Project and Dream Yard,
Teachers & Writers Collaborative.
Her work has appeared in Ploughshares, Indiana
Review, Callaloo, 42opus, Bellvue Literary Review,
the Gathering Ground anthology, The
Progressive’s website and previously here in
MiPOesias. Girmay and some of her Dream Yard Prep
School students appeared on “Bill Moyer’s Journal” on
PBS with special guest and friend Martin Espada.
In spite of her busy work schedule and the attention
she’s now garnering for her first book, Aracelis is
soft-spoken, humble and connects various joys with
awareness. Such connections allowed us to easily step
into a conversation about her process and
accomplishments.
When did your writing become a presence in your life?
I remember being three—-loving to hold a pen or pencil
in my hand. The physical sensation of scribbling or
drawing or leaving some trace of the hand-done on a
piece of paper. It was always such a gift. That wide
open paper. I write this because I think, for me, the
physical act of writing has always intrigued me, and in
some ways, I wonder if that’s not the first clue---the
fact that I immensely loved the steady or wild focus of
sitting at paper. I definitely loved to read. Loved
books. I especially loved the act of listening to
stories being told---and telling stories, writing
stories. The moment writing broke open as a power in my
life was when I read Toni Morrison’s The Bluest Eye.
Blew my mind. That’s the first time writing kicked down
a house and announced itself as a mighty, powerful thing
I should pay attention to--- I was so heartbroken and in
love with her writing. I thought, Ooooh, something’s
changing. Something’s changed in me after living with
that book. It was as though a new and wild and hungry
and gracious and keen animal had revealed itself in the
core of me---and it would be this organ to walk with
always. An essential part of the body.
How did you feel when you got the red typewriter as a
younger Aracelis? I'm asking because you teach and I
know you understand those small, important moments of
affirmation teachers can provide.
My Aunt Pat gave me a red typewriter in 7th grade. I
still remember the great reveal. I think she’d inherited
it from her bank job, and it had lived in her garage for
several years. By that time, she knew I loved to write.
I remember her in her cool Ohio saunter—-small but
tough--and she lifted the plastic sheet it was under and
took it off of one of the garage shelves. I was in love
with its color. The giant bulk of the machine. We drove
it home, and for months, I only wrote using that
machine. All kinds of poems. Stories. Most of them
really sad, I remember. God.
And I suppose Aunt Pat was a teacher. (I’m thinking
about this in the context of your questions---and I’d
never thought of her in that way—-but she was. Is.) I
remember feeling noticed, supported---that she had taken
note of a deep and quiet interest of mine, and that it
was serious enough for her to bestow (it was a
bestowal!) with this heavy machine. It all felt so
official!
I so loved the clack, clack and slide across. The smooth
black roller. The piano-like fingers of the metal
slamming their lettered heads onto the white page. So,
so beautiful.
It's clear when I look at poems like "Ode to the
Watermelon" and "Ode to the Letter B" that it feels like
a homage to Neruda, the subject of one of your favorite
poets Martin Espada. The influence of both writers is
so clear in TEETH. I find myself wondering, who are
some of your obvious influences who have a quieter
presence in your poems?
Oooh! I love this question. My obvious quiets—--with
Teeth. Nazim Hikmet, Gwendolyn Brooks, Lucille Clifton,
Garcia Marquez, Audre Lorde, Adrienne Rich, Kamau
Brathwaite. My friends. The newer poems in the book were
certainly influenced by Frida Kahlo & Hayden Carruth.
That’s a strange sentence. But it’s true.
The scope of the poets you just mentioned is
international and broad, but so aware of the amazing
possibilities of daily life. The title poem of TEETH
says so much about celebrating and assertion of beauty
and strength. Could you talk about why you chose that
poem for the title and what it says about the other
poems in this collection?
When I think of ‘teeth’ I think of the possibilities of
a mouth. How this hard and sharp and tearing things come
out of the gums. The pain of growing them. The evolution
of two (or more!) sets of them. The fact of the
congregation of them. The fact that the teeth can be a
fence around the yard of the inner mouth—-which might
make the tongue a dog. Teeth are a clothesline. The
teeth, when you smile, can be white flags that say There
is peace here between us. I love you! Or---the teeth, if
bared with the proper expression, can symbolize fight,
bite, might, fright, the intention of flight. Eating.
Each of the poems are infused with, informed by a
violence and a hope. Sometimes these are the very same
thing, and sometimes they are not.
Your sense of repetition is so natural like you're
speaking to people on the page. Does it ever seem like
it could precariously become too repetitive? How do you
work your way around that possibility?
I’m not sure that I’ve worked my way around that
possibility. If I’ve reached excess or not reached
excess. I will say, though, that I revise, revise,
revise like crazy! I am interested in tautness and
lushness. I’m interested in nearly reaching the tipping
point of my senses through language. I’m interested in
reaching the tipping point and falling over. In
resisting the tipping point. In withholding. All of it
is an interesting relationship: the idea of excess,
tolerance, cadence, pitch in relation to language.
I’m not really answering your question---except to say
that I go through several drafts. I revise for a very
long time. The poem experiences several bodies in that
revision. There are times when repetition soothes me
into journeying down into a poem---and later on, I
remove the scaffold of the repetition---once I feel
safer in the speaking. There are times when repetition
is haunting and levels the land---makes me stand longer
in the horrific. I try my best to honor what the poem
wants to do. I try to honor what my own intention is,
too. Sometimes the two are at odds. Sometimes not.
So many of your poems begin with an image that
becomes richer or a person that we see shifting layers
of themselves at different angles for the reader to
view. Do you tend to approach your poem from a visceral
picture in your head that keeps haunting you or do you
hear it? How does a poem start to emerge into
consciousness for you?
It’s all so mysterious to me. Sometimes the poem comes
as happening---thing I’ve witnessed on the street, in my
memory, in my ear. Sometimes the poem starts with a line
that comes from somewhere and I don’t know what it
refers to yet, or where it’s going. Oh. But it haunts.
It often sings. And I work that poem out from its
generous beginning to see what it will be---sometimes
that original line stays, sometimes it morphs, sometimes
disappears into the everything of the rest of the poem.
I find that I’m no good at demanding what a poem talks
about. If I’m needing to write about some specific news
and I don’t feel ready, that poem will still come out no
matter how I try to shift my attention. I could start
writing about a banana & the poem’s still going to go
back to the matter that’s really at hand for me.
Is there clue that lets you know when to follow an
image into a poem?
I suppose the most exact way for me to answer this is to
say that the closest thing to ‘clue’ is the body.
Sometimes the body kicks, flinches, lopes, stutters in
response to another thing. I pay attention to that. To
that visceral shift of mood or energetic being that
happens when I see something or something. This is the
sonic clue, the imagistic clue, the true clue that
propels me into a place I explore. These are the moments
when I feel so utterly compelled to figure what it is
I’m responding to. To say. To work inside of this frame
is magnificent---to ask the body, What is it here that
moves you? And to try to figure, to answer---this is
one of the learnings that a poem pushes you into----or
pushes out of you. Beautiful.
Poems like "Arroz Poetica" and "Palimpsest" address
politics without flinching. Although these poems
provide a forceful presence, there's so much love in
this book with poems like "For Estephani Lora…", "13"
and "ISH". Please talk a little bit about the
complexities of writing poems that are pointedly
political, especially if they are stroked on a canvas of
love.
There’s a poem in Teeth called “Jacaranda”---I wrote it
for my Uncle Carl. In that poem there’s a line that goes
“But tell me a story that did not begin with love…” I
mean that challenge sincerely. Can you really, really
find a story whose roots---at some point---do not come
from love, some relationship to it?
When I say that, I mean to say that we are such
emotional animals. We are, in our various cultures and
minds, these animals who feel and think and respond and
live. I believe that love is water-like, in the way that
it is a major, essential element in our constitution as
human beings. Each poem in this book, is really a love
poem. Yes. And each poem is a political poem. How could
they not be so? In my own life---in this country, every
thing---the body, my breathing, my name, my family, my
country, my job---all of it is political. Using the word
love is political. I suppose the complexity is not in
writing political poems or love poems. The complexity is
1) writing a poem at all, 2) trying so hard to be honest
and to explore the wreckage and glory-ragtime of a heart
honestly, 3) being fresh, genuine, taking risks in the
writing so that something new and of matter is revealed.
One of your poems that's not in TEETH that I've been
intrigued with appears on the Fishousewebsite, and
it's called "samuel johnson". Please talk a little bit
about how this poem came about and why Mr. Johnson is
the subject you chose to address.
I took a Regional Cave Canem workshop with the brilliant
Thomas Sayers Ellis, author of “The Maverick Room.” The
class explored the notion of a Black aesthetic and
issues of race and behavior in our poems.
Thomas gave us each exercises to specifically challenge
our own comfort levels and behavioral patterns in poems.
He asked me to write a poem to the inventors of the
English language. He also said that my poem should offer
a suggestion, issue a threat, and should be written in
short lines.
I created “samuel johnson” in response to this exercise.
First I wondered who I’d address the poem to---the
English language has evolved so tremendously over the
course of centuries. It’s an amalgamation of several
languages, cultures, ‘renditions’---who will I choose to
be my ‘inventor’. and then I began to explore the notion
of race and language---and the idea of English as a
changing language in the context of preservation and
political campaigns championing and un-championing the
idea of Standard English. I thought back and I thought
back, and I arrived at the doorstep of Samuel
Johnson---the man who was commissioned to author A
Dictionary of the English Language in the 1700s. This
dictionary is known to be one of the most influential
dictionaries in the history of the English language.
What strikes me about the notion of creating
dictionaries, is that their creation necessitates a form
of standardization of language. The creation of a
dictionary is an invention of language. I chose to
address the poem to him.
I wanted to write a poem that would threaten the idea of
a language as a fixed tool. I wanted to rejoice in the
notion of sonic capabilities that make
cross-cultural/cross-lingual journeys. I wanted to talk
about the history of the English language in the mouths
of Black people the world over, especially the nation
over. The implications of my mouth speaking English. The
various things I hope to do with it. The various ways my
personal reference points of Blackness & ‘ness’ are
infused in the language. I think of Chinua Achebe’s
quote about the English language--- “And let no one be
fooled by the fact that we may write in English, for we
intend to do unheard of things with it.” That’s what I’m
saying to Samuel Johnson. But I’m not assuming that he’s
fooled---or that anyone’s fooled. I’m just saying, Look!
Look! Look how our histories are everywhere we are. A
parade of sounds and ghosts and names follow us into
every room. Yes. Where I come, Africa comes. I’m very
serious.
That makes me want to say “Suggest! Issue the threat!”
How do you think teaching young writers has impacted
your writing?
Teaching young writers has been a major part of my
education as a writer. My goodness. The practice and
articulation of process that is required when teaching
the young ones is something that has forced me to
articulate my intention as a writer. Everyday, too, I
witness how writing is the study of energy-transference.
I see how the kids come in with their pieces, and they
lay it out there---on the line, I mean. They say. They
push. They write their truths so earnestly, so rawly.
and I see how their peers react. I see how these pieces
move us to deep laughter, to tears, to questions.
Everyday I witness how writing impacts community---how
it is a thing that saves, that requires meditation,
creativity. It is the antithesis of hopelessness. It is
the practice of reaction and constructivism. I see my
kids meaning to change the world with their poems,
meaning to make people fall in love with them with their
poems. I mean---my kids believe in writing. I believe in
writing. To have this intense relationship founded on
the basis of this belief, this love---it is a complete
blessing in my life. They remind me to lay it on the
line, to take risks, to say. I love them for several
reasons. I love them because they are at all. I love for
their brilliances. I love them, too, because they are so
fierce and alive in their work---which tells me, too, Be
fierce! Be alive in your work!
I know that these are the reasons why I love to teach
and consider teaching so valuable. It’s a tool for
empowerment, transformation and hope.
What direction is your work taking now that you've
sent your first collection out into the world?
I’m working on more poems. Poems as they come. Poems
involved with all kinds of world.
I’m also looking back at a collection of short stories
that I wrote a draft of several years ago. Revising.
Looking again at what was grown there. The stories are
about an older woman named Doña Parcha---her family,
Puerto Rican politics, the loss of her husband, the ways
in which she maintains culture and hope so far away from
home. It’s a funny group of stories. And serious, too.
Very different from my poems. The world of them. I’m
interested in spending time really exploring some
sketches of essays that I’ve been gathering for some
time.
What brings you the most joy these days?
My sister. Walking my dog. Spending time in the
sun-drenched, light box of my kitchen. Watching the snow
fall. Reading. I just ordered a copy of Black Panther:
The Revolutionary Art of Emory Douglas and it is
stunning. I ordered it for my sister’s birthday. It’s a
collection of his posters and work for the party, and it
brings me joy. I think of the work they did as a
collective---making change in the communities, making
things happen. I think of his drawings and collages and
how the people feel powerful and alive. What else brings
me joy? The music of Cibelle. The Metres. Also,
imagining swimming in the sea again one day.
~
Aracelis Girmay writes poetry, fiction, & nonfiction.
Her picture book, Changing, Changing, was
published by George Braziller in 2005. Her debut poetry
collection, Teeth, was published by Curbstone
Press in 2007. Originally from California, Girmay
teaches & lives in New York. Photo credit: Ariana Fields
Tara Betts is a writer and educator.
This Cave Canem alum's work appears in several anthologies
and journals, including Gathering Ground, Obsidian III,
Callaloo, and PMS. In addition to performing and
reading her work across the country, she is a lecturer at
Rutgers University in New Brunswick, NJ. For more
information, please visit
www.tarabetts.net. Photo credit: Rachel Eliza Griffiths
Aracelis
Girmay is such an amalgamation of life's dramatic
angles. Think Minnie Riperton and La Lupe, Morrison and
Marquez, students in the Bronx writing their first poems
and the violence of Darfur. Such combinations give you
insights into Girmay and her work. Her first book TEETH
was released on Curbstone Press in 2007. As the
onslaught of the holidays buried us both, we were able
to meet briefly and talk a bit about writers, music,
where the sparks of poems emerge, teaching as well as
her two books and new work. 
