The Brooklyn Rail

Nicole Sealey’s impact on the literary arts is indisputable. Creating community in poetry—she’s a former executive director of Cave Canem—is one of her superpowers and her talent is matched by her generosity toward other poets. The eponymous Sealey Challenge—which just celebrated its sixth year—enjoins practitioners and regular readers alike to commit to the pleasure of revisiting favorite poets and reading those new to them every August. Her new book, The Ferguson Report: An Erasure is a commanding act of visual carving that deconstructs and rebuts the bureaucratic folderol of said report—and the brutal actions that led to it—to create a new verse that foregrounds a distinctively different declaration.

Our conversation about The Ferguson Report, erasure, and of course, the transformative powers of poetry, follows.

Mandana Chaffa (Rail): A book-length poem intimates a narrative that is in some ways similar to a novel; one could make a good case for The Odyssey, or any of the poetic epics being as much a story as a poem. Did you always imagine this as a book? When you were shortlisted for the Forward Prize for pages 22-29, it was already an excerpt of a longer work, but did you initially imagine it as a book-length poem?

Nicole Sealey: I had no formal plans for the collection whatsoever. When I began reading and rereading The Ferguson Report, I didn’t do so with a book in mind. Even after I had begun erasing the document, instinctively, I thought nothing of it. I don’t publish everything I write—some poems are just for me or to get from one idea to the next. Imagining individual poems as belonging to a larger body of work is, at least for me, debilitating. I take the one foot in front of the other approach to poem-making. When I think beyond the poem at hand, I get ahead of myself and in my own way. It wasn’t until months into erasing, after having erased much of the report did I think: “this might be something.”

Rail: “An Erasure”—with that definitive indefinite article—underscores a multiplicity of configurations. Foremost, “An Erasure” speaks to how people of color are continually eliminated from society, history, and life itself. And literally, the book could have had hundreds of versions. How many iterations did you have of these pages, and what was the process for finalizing what went into the poem? Did your work on later pages lead you to revise the early parts of the document? Similarly, did the continued murder of unarmed Black men and women since Ferguson, since you started this project, call forth a different shape than originally anticipated?

Sealey: If you look at any of the published excerpts, with the exception of one published earlier this year, you’ll find that they’ve all been reworked. I probably revised each 20 times or so, which could be an underestimation, before finally landing on language that best captured what I was unknowingly after. Words that would have been ideal were often absent, so I had to seek out alternatives. The more time spent within the document, the more possibilities there were. And, as time passed, I, unfortunately, had new images from which to draw. Section six, for example, “pages fifty to sixty-four” from the collection, alludes to the murder of George Floyd, which occurred almost six years after Michael Brown’s. It begins: “As for men lying / facedown in the street, / knees on their necks, / their hands behind / their backs, laboring / like babies on their bellies…”

Rail: I’m a bit of a purist when it comes to poetry—give me the hard copy, the broadside; pdfs have their uses, but poetry needs to be held in the hand, perhaps the way one allows a cup of tea to warm their palms, or imparts one’s own warmth to a snifter of an adult beverage.

Especially in the case of this book, there are decisions that shift the reader’s understanding of language, and specifically, the language you decide to foreground.

Please talk about what went into the decision to allow the entire report to flicker through—and I was thinking a lot about apparitions overall—so that there was little open space. The visible text is small, slender and fragile, almost overwhelmed by the fields of translucent, crossed-out gray of the original text, the government-speak. It wasn’t easily readable—as the actual report shouldn’t be!—and there’s a significant optical impact. I felt I was struggling to see what else was there—to make sense of it all—and of course, there’s no sense to be made of what happened (and keeps happening). There’s also the conflict between the lack of breath in the grayed-out untext, and the open silence between the concise foreground words.

There’s something remarkable about you—a poet—saying no, this accepted language isn’t working. Ordinary language fails in talking about this incident, this gerund of destruction that keeps happening.

Sealey: When I was shortlisted for the Forward Prize, I had said that “[the honor] means a larger audience for this work. A larger audience for this work means more eyes on The Ferguson Report. More eyes on the report means more conversations about biased policing. That is the hope.” That still is the hope. That readers of The Ferguson Report: An Erasure might be compelled to read the damning, triggering document.

Though I was not at all surprised by the document’s findings, I did not realize just how shamelessly, how cavalierly these “service” systems operate, which made striking through blocks of text all the more satisfying, as if very slightly undoing harm. That said, I would not have been able to access the words for and worlds of this collection on my own, in any other verse form, using any other source material. Such is a function of poetry… not necessarily to provide answers, but to provide a kind of articulation.

I appreciate the term apparition applied to the “grayed-out untext,” as anti-Blackness can be spectral. It haunts us and only those open to the reality of its existence can feel/see it.

Rail: I’ve read the report, and especially in a more detailed manner after reading this book, but the dryness of it—the facts and figures are soporific and like kindling—is insulting when considering the acts therein. Even the Wikipedia entry offers more flavor. Worst of all, the focus is on the police force and supposed correctives. Michael Brown is only mentioned five times in the report, and that’s deeply painful.

Sealey: The document’s dryness reads removed, but its findings are conclusive. I wonder if this method of presentment is more persuasive to those who might not otherwise believe in anti-Blackness’ spectral-like presence at times. The Department’s Ferguson Report is, as we know, all facts. By erasing sections of the document and introducing lyric, I am able to present those facts as well as what they incite in me. My intent was to make the body less theoretical and more physical. To make violations to bodies less theoretical, more physical. Hence the steady mention of body parts.

Rail: I re-read their conclusion several times: “Our investigation indicates that Ferguson as a City has the capacity to reform its approach to law enforcement. A small municipal department may offer greater potential for officers to form partnerships and have frequent, positive interactions with Ferguson residents, repairing and maintaining police-community relationships…These reform efforts will be well worth the considerable time and dedication they will require, as they have the potential to make Ferguson safer and more united.”

Your response to that conclusion is this book, but I do wonder how you might rewrite this underwhelming, rage-inducing last paragraph.

Sealey: The same day the Justice Department released the report detailing biased policing and court practices in Ferguson, it also released another report about the shooting incident itself. It found no legal basis on which to charge Darren Wilson, the white cop who shot and killed unarmed, 18-year-old Michael Brown. While the former document describes an environment of anti-Blackness, the latter (again, released the same day) concludes that Wilson did not act outside of the law on August 9, 2014. In my laywoman opinion, the incident report actually corroborates The Department’s report documenting anti-Blackness within the Ferguson police department. So, instead of rewriting, which implies revision, I would start again, from scratch:

“Our investigation indicates that Ferguson as a City has the capacity to reform its approach to law enforcement. A small municipal department may offer greater potential for officers to form partnerships and have frequent, positive interactions with Ferguson residents, repairing and maintaining police-community relationships…These reform efforts will be well worth the considerable time and dedication they will require, as they have the potential to make Ferguson safer and more united.”

Rail: I’ve read that you began erasing The Ferguson Report in order to further engage with its findings, and in some ways, this book feels rather more like three-dimensional figurative work than writing. Rather than words on a page; or paint on a canvas where one adds to create meaning, in this case, much like sculpture, you’re paring away to see what might be revealed. And there is another interesting friction: the report itself has plenty of words, but very little of value is revealed. You’ve taken something that is the opposite of poetry—the opposite of justice—and shaped it into something new.

Sealey: That’s kind of you to say, Mandana—thank you. I’ve been thinking a lot about the visual aspects of this collection, so I really value the comparison to sculpture. Instead of blocks of stone or wood, my material is blocks of text.

The words in the collection are not always made explicitly clear… Readers piece together the words to make meaning possible—metaphorically stepping back from The Ferguson Report: An Erasure, creating distance between themselves and what is read in order to see the bigger picture. The language that surfaces then is akin to the small dots of color that form the larger images of pointillist paintings.

Rail: Ordinary Beast is six years old, and a collection I still turn to often as your poems are less seasonal than perennial. As I was reading The Ferguson Report: An Erasure, I thought of how it shares DNA with the following excerpt from “Hysterical Strength”:

my thoughts turn to black people—
the hysterical strength we must
possess to survive our very existence
which I fear many believe is, and
treat as, itself a freak occurrence.

Would you discuss lineage when it comes to your poetic oeuvre? Might we also talk about your other poetry endeavors? It feels really evil of me to even dare ask about what you’re working on, especially after completing this, but perhaps I can come at it slant and ask what you’re doing when you’re not working in language?

Sealey: Ha ha ha—not evil at all! I am working on talking out of turn, a collection of personal essays recounting my years as an arts administrator—the last two and a half of which as one of only a few Black women executives. Needless to say, I have seen some things. The essay collection is as much in conversation with Ordinary Beast and The Ferguson Report: An Erasure as the two poetry collections are with each other. All of it speaks to my obsessions, those subjects that preoccupy my mind.

Rail: You also talk about reimagining reality, perhaps an alternative one through this erasure, and it’s another bitter pill that nearly ten years after Michael Brown’s death, that there’s seemingly no end in sight to such murders. How do we contain, and memorialize such systemic oppressions? How do we choose to talk about them, and what do we choose to remember? I’m thinking of another one of your poems, “In Defense of ‘Candelabra with Heads’” which also considers an alternate future:

I ask, “Who can see this and not see lynchings?”
[…]
A hundred years from now, October 9, 2116,
8:18 p.m., when all but the lucky are good
and dead, may someone happen upon the question
in question. May that lucky someone be black
and so far removed from the verb lynch that she be
dumbfounded by its meaning. May she then
call up Hirschhorn’s Candelabra with Heads.
May her imagination, not her memory, run wild.

Sealey: The final line of The Ferguson Report: An Erasure, “anything you say can and will be,” reminds me of “may her imagination, not her memory, run wild.” Each reads as a prayer prayed or a wish made—

I am also reminded of Carrie Mae Weems’s “It’s Over—A Diorama,” an installation that amasses photos of and offerings to Black victims of police violence—candles, flowers, balloons and teddy bears together recreate neighborhood memorials associated with such loss. I would like to think that, like this particular work of Weems’s, The Ferguson Report: An Erasure attempts to memorialize the dead and console the living.

Rail: Reading poetry aloud is one of the great thrills of the genre, in any form, in any language. There isn’t a poetry book I read that I don’t also read aloud. Reciting from this erasure is remarkable; one is unable to perform with the “normal” breath and sonic expectations. As visually complex as this book is, the aural demands and constrictions also shift the reader’s experience, dare I say, the reader’s embodiment of sometimes awkward pauses, of being forced to inhabit a structure of someone else’s doing. And I don’t think I could ever read any of the pages the same way twice.

How were you thinking about the lyric, and the sonic, with this book?

Sealey: This work means to be meddlesome. Anti-Black police violence does not/has not let up, so the lyrical and sonic movements of The Ferguson Report: An Erasure should be just as incessant and insistent.