The Brooklyn Rail

I remember the circumstances under which I met Omotara James, because they were singular, or at least as singular as annual miracles can be. It was the 2017 LAMBDA Literary Writers Retreat for Emerging LGBTQ Voices (#IYKYK).

There at the LAMBDA Retreat, I suddenly knew the importance of being one in a queer cohort of literary mavericks—not because I had no prior interest, but because, even in New York City, it had just never happened. As it claims, LAMBDA was and is still premier in that way. It was essentially Brigadoon, but with more singing, because it was definitively gay, not just by proxy. The week there was heart-melting. And turns out, I like poetry.

That is because of my fellow fellow Omotara. When she reads, whether on Zoom, on stage, on the radio, or on the page (I’ve experienced all of the above) the clouds crack open and the goddesses smile upon you, especially your plight. Omotara’s work says you’re not alone. But more importantly, for any plebes like me, Omotara does the genre of poetry justice—and then some. When she reads, there’s nothing cartoonish, nothing overly kinetic, yet you are moved. And she is unyielding. Typically, giving such accolades to an artist begs for a rebuttal about some dearth that inevitably lies elsewhere, but there are none. No gotcha. I love her work, and love reading it even more.

Songs of My Softening, a new collection by poet Omotara James, is a clear pronunciation of the pristine spaces in which you are seen. Equal parts hurt and joy, in her poems’ many iterations, the throughline is that they are unwavering in their truths, a feat when Omatara’s life experience is so specific—her talent, her race, her gender, her sexuality, her size—she is speaking of you. You are complicit in every direction—every entry an ear and a prayer.

Like the dedication page, simply reading: “To my mother, who made sure…”

Specific, yet universal, if not infinite. And if you’re Black, infinity². In the poem “Having No Grief to Speak Of” James holds our hands through the reclamation of innocence never actually lost, while yes, acknowledging there’s grief: “…For it, I made of myself a world / and swelled / Bearing it alone, I laboured, / squealed, heaved … I cleaved myself from it, for freedom / is the birthright of every being…”

I spoke with my friend Omotara about the abundance of innocence in all of us that’s never lost to our notoriously ongoing grief, about the intent and service behind her work, and how she’s not just here for your entertainment.

Ricky Tucker (Rail): When I read or hear your work, I immediately think of the self that needs healing, or attention, or any part of us that just needs to be properly addressed. Self-care. You were saying something a second ago about selfishness versus…

Omotara James: Oh, well you know, the language of understanding is always going to be co-opted, misused, and misrepresented. I hear people who are going through a period of intense introspection, or at a crossroads say, “I’m going to be selfish.”

It’s okay to be selfish, but I feel like there’s an edge on that word “selfish,” which means I am going to do something for myself that’s going to put a strain on someone else, or…

Rail: Impose.

James: Yes. So to me, that’s what selfish means, rather than when you’re acting from a place of… There is no one word for it. If it’s self-regard, being self-possessed, or having poise, more than anything, it’s about intention, right, which is at the heart of any journey. Whether it’s a journey for sobriety, or to attain your highest self. The point is that you’re looking toward the truth. You’re making a commitment to yourself. So there’s a difference. Selfish is like there’s no goodwill.

Your practice of taking care of yourself, that generosity, is going to translate into the work of your relationships. And I think the same is true about writing. When you show generosity to your practice, you cultivate toward trying to put yourself in the best position where you can be prepared to discern, learn, recover, and restore some kind of fundamental truth.

Rail: I love you.

James: Thank you.

Rail: But yes, what you’re talking about is… it’s a harmonic. It’s like a pitch-perfect word-harmonic. And it’s often that in the instant gratification of a live reading you get to hear the perfect pitch you’re hitting. Like a tuning fork, your words strike and everybody responds to it. They don’t even have to say anything for you to feel it, but often it comes in a nod, a smile. And then you’re like, “Oh, this is my key.” And then you thrive.

James: Listen! I used to sing, and when I sang, my voice teacher, Mrs. Kern, would say, “You know, you are your own instrument, so you have to be able to calibrate it.” We have to be able to understand the raw materials of our own lives in a way that is in service. This means, yes, there needs to be some kind of psychic calibration, emotional resonance, and understanding.

When I’m at a reading, and I hear something like your “tuning fork”, I have a visceral reaction in my body, because my body is calibrating some kind of truth—whether I understand it intellectually or not. It resonates on a physiological and emotional level, which is what inspires me to want to intellectually investigate what’s happening textually.

Rail: Yes.

James: We’re always investigating and observing.

Rail: To your point, what you just said you experienced at readings, I experienced at your LAMBDA fellowship reading… Sometimes we come into these things with a perception of what we think is going to happen… often the non-fiction snob in me is like, “Okay, poets….” I grew up in a community of people in recovery, so there weren’t a lot of parties, but more talent shows, and poetry slams, and maybe due to oversaturation, I have only in my adult life ever snapped ironically. You know what I mean? A lot of the off-the-beat rhythmic readings rang as insincere, you know?

But then at the LAMBDA retreat in LA, we did cohorts and readings based on genre.

James: Yes.

Rail: The night we went to West Hollywood, and you read, I was torn apart. I was not ready! I was crying at a poetry reading, which was well beyond my belief system. Part of it was that physiological thing you were talking about. Your physicality was so well paired with what you were saying, and by no means were you animated. You weren’t performing, were you? You were pure, and you were still. And you demanded clarity, and you extended that. And it wasn’t just me who reacted that way, it was everybody. I was with Evan James and Ted Kerr, two close friends in my genre (nonfiction) and we all came away torn up. We also had an eerily apt set of palm readings that night, so we were too through.

And a childhood friend from sixth grade randomly did a show with you, and when your name came up, we were both like, “Oh my God, Omotara is amazing!”

Your craft is just so well-honed and self-aware. I haven’t even asked a question yet…

Tell me about your relationship with spoken words.

James: You know, I’m going to say this, and you might not believe me, but I have never considered myself to be a spoken word poet.

Rail: Yeah, I don’t think I’d call you that, per se.

James: Having never attended a poetry slam, I don’t know enough to be able to critically differentiate between slam, spoken, or page poetry. Plus, this really goes to the heart of who I am, growing up, existing in-between spaces and within overlapping spaces, I have a lot more to learn culturally about these different poetry spaces. I am very much still the outlier, and my writing reflects this.

After my MFA, I investigated it more as I met people who came from a background of slam poetry. I didn’t know if it was slam or spoken word; I still don’t truly comprehend the difference; the only thing I could think of was the HBO show Def Poetry Jam. It was exciting to see contemporary poets and performers who weren’t white take the stage. There was an electric quality to the exchange of energy between the performers and the audience. And although it was clear that some poets were working toward subversion, I and many others were giving the audience a reason to clap, or what they wanted.

Rail: Which is fine… but—

James: I felt like, is that what poetry is? Is it about giving people what they want? And then people clapped. There was something about that exchange that felt fraught to me, like someone’s there to entertain you, right?

So, the first thing about my work is that it’s not meant for entertainment. However, I obviously have no control over how it’s received. The reason that I write… it usually begins with some kind of consolation, and the person who I’m usually trying to console is myself.

Rail: Word.

James: Or someone that I love. That is usually where my poems come from. And when I say consolation, I mean that in the biggest sense of the word, which means, I want the speaker of the poem, I want them to know that whatever it is that they are experiencing, there is a witness to it, that there is someone who is there to hold space for an experience that has been long erased or was never recorded. So the nexus or the impetus of my wanting to write a poem is to remedy some kind of erasure. That’s the first thing.

When it comes to performance, I take great pride in it.

Rail: Good. You should.

James: Yeah, I do, because I want people to really feel like they are able to connect with something, even if it’s just in private, even if it’s just for them. That’s what the poem does. It slinks beneath the surface. It’s like a valentine that you slip into someone’s book bag or pocket. Then they put their hand in and they look at it later. And they’re like, “Oh, my gosh!”

Rail: Loved.

James: Something that stays with them. And even if, during the performance, so to speak, it makes them feel a little uncomfortable or slightly unwell, that’s fine.

The gesture of the poem is that it opens up something inside of you that you will consider later in the day, later in the week, later in your life. It unlocks something, not confirming what you already know that allows you to clap.

And in my process, I take a lot of pride in the music, which is why I write at all times of the day, but also at night. It doesn’t matter how late it is, I will be, like, belting the poem into my computer at full volume so that I hear it. Actually, with technology, sometimes the voice gets forced. On Microsoft Word, there’s this feature under the review tab where you hit the button, and it’ll read the poem for you. And of course it reads it in this robotic computer voice, which is underwhelming. But even then, it’s good to hear your poem read in another voice, even if it’s a monotone robot. It allows me to hear what is hitting, where the music of the poem is, where the rhythm is.

So, “I write to console,” is another way of saying I write the blues.

Rail: One hundred.

James: That’s tension that I am playing with, you know, because rhythm suggests continuity. It’s the heartbeat. It’s life. It’s going forward. And blues is, you know, looking back. But I like to try to subvert that idea of looking back, by also staying in the present moment and expanding the present moment into infinity.

Rail: The first poem in the collection is that which you just described. But the title alone…

James: Which one?

Rail: “Having No Grief to Speak Of.” It transcends time, ephemeral yet constant because it is a blessing. It’s a wish. A hope, yet commenting on the fact that we have all had some sort of grief. It’s expectant in its perfect present construction. Both a lament and a consolation. It puts me in five places at once, and some of them are time, and some of them are just my body.

James: Yes, because you know, the thing about grief is that on the one hand, it never leaves us right, and as a collective, we kind of all agree on that, this eternal nature to grief.

But where I’m trying to place the emphasis, maybe by negation, is that the same is true for innocence.

Rail: Yes.

James: I think about William Blake, the kind of understanding of innocence and experience, that something has to happen for you to leave one realm to go into the other. For me, I viscerally just can’t accept that construct, because it makes space for so much patriarchal erasure. And, as you know, a woman in a patriarchal society, especially a Black woman, the idea of my innocence is being mandated by things beyond my control. Right? But also as a woman, as a Black woman, as a fat woman, I have an aversion to being quantified. As if something as pure and as spectacular as innocence could be quantified by our experience. That does not authenticate my experience or perception. Every time I feel a new grief, I feel a new innocence right?

Rail: Man. Absolutely.

James: Let’s think about the times in which we are living right now. Okay, the wars, the genocides, the police brutality, the brutality of the state, the brutality of person-to-person road rage. There are so many reasons to cry, right? Of course there are reasons to come together, to fight, to practice liberation, to practice joy. However, as Vievee Francis states, as writers, we are more willing to investigate our violences (all this grief and pain) because pain is self-reflexive. Yes, pain indicates the wound, but that means it indicates its own counterpoint too.

It’s like when you burn yourself. It’s not because you know the skin is already dead. It hurts because you’re so alive. My innocence is unquantifiable, it is abundant. All of these things, all of these forces, are conspiring to make me smaller, to make me believe that this life force inside of me is so small and quantifiable, and I don’t have a choice but to throw up my hands and say, “Okay, there’s nothing I can do.” As if I have no agency, but every time, I am reminded that, “oh, my gosh! I have so much agency!” I have so much aliveness inside of me, and I think that is part and parcel to the vision of this book.

I used to think that I did not write praise poems, but through this book and through the process of writing, I’ve learned that I know exactly how to write about praise. You write about it from the perspective that you see it. I’m writing toward connection because I love this world. I am of this world, and I belong to this world, and this world belongs to me. That affirmation is where these poems begin.