The Brooklyn Rail

The Natural Order of Things, Donika Kelly’s third collection of poems—after the acclaimed Bestiary and The Renunciations, both mesmerizing in their candor and tonality—extends her singular voice and clarity into insightful meditations of identity, ancestry, and joy. Kelly excavates personal histories—hers, others’—and weaves them into a sumptuous subsummation of love and the senses. There’s bravery and relief in leaving behind what no longer serves us—something I’ve been thinking a lot about in my own life—and Kelly’s poems reclaim and reframe her history into a restorative and generative present.

In her poetry, as in this interview, Kelly’s intellect, soulfulness and tenderness shine in ways both delicate and incendiary. The Natural Order of Things is Donika Kelly at the height of her powers.

Mandana Chaffa (Rail): Can we talk about the bookends of the collection, “Brood” and “Suicide Watch: Spring”? “Brood” flattened me in the best possible way: “My chest is earth // I meant to write my chest is warm / but earth will do / to exhume a heart … Did you know I was alive the whole time // I was alive in the ground but torpor // But torpor.” These lines echo fables of dormant protagonists, from Sleeping Beauty to The Fisher King, and the question: “Whom does the Grail serve?” What a profound way to plant your intentions, both for the collection, as well as yourself.

Donika Kelly: In May of 2011, millions of cicadae emerged from the ground in Nashville, where I was living at the time. I was totally grossed out but also fascinated. I’d lived in Nashville for three years without any awareness of the life, dormant, beneath my feet. I’d had no idea what their emergence would look or sound like. I could only experience their nymph carapaces clutching the pine boards of the fence or brick wall. Their bodies white and soft at first, red eyed, then hard and iridescent. The sound! The duration! Because their emergence went on for so long and was so strange to me, so unexpected, my experience of Brood XIX lodged itself in my mind as a kind of core image, one I would draw on for the next twenty years.

“Brood” feels like the correct opening, an orientation toward what I hoped my life could be.

The life cycle of these insects resonated with me, and became one way that I eventually came to understand my own journey into myself. For over half my life, maybe nearly two thirds of it, I’d been dormant, muted, but I’d mistaken that feeling for being alive. The first time I fell in love, I had a glimpse of the surface, the light. Years later, when I met and fell in love with Melissa, what else could I do but clutch the pine bark and hope my wings dried safely in the night air before scrambling into a tree to sing and sing for her. All of which is to say the most earnest thing: love brought me out of torpor and into myself.

Rail: And then the last two lines of “Suicide Watch: Spring”: “that I’m happy, sometimes, to be alive. / That such happiness could have happened at all,” which imagines a successful hero’s quest, moving through various physical, mental, and spiritual challenges to reach a fully-integrated self. When did these two poems originate; early or later in the creation of this collection?

Kelly: These poems were written within a year of each other, very much at the beginning of the beginning of my relationship with my wife. There was no collection on the horizon beyond The Renunciations, whose poems were making the most noise in my life at the time.

I do love the idea of the hero’s quest here, because at around the same time that I’d written “Suicide Watch: Spring,” I’d also written “The Catalogue of Cruelty.” I was on a mission, in writing the poems that would later find a home in The Renunciations, to save myself, to get shed of a narrative that had trapped me—muted me, as I said earlier, disoriented me from myself. And it was working. It worked.

Rail: Within the pillars of these two poems is a deeply intimate exploration of identity, memory, politics, and origin. Among multiple rich veins, the one I must ask about first is love—all over my notes, I’ve underlined, bolded, and scrawled “love.” The full expanse of love—certainly the Greek concepts of agápē, érōs, philía, and philautía—is seeded everywhere. Embracing and exploring love feels like such a radical act in our current environment, and such a necessary one. Did you always mean for this to be a book of love poems?

Kelly: Thank you for this question! What a wonder to be seen. I love writing love poems so much, and I’ve written a lot of them.

When I was putting the book together, I had four discrete sequences of love poems—love for my family’s cadences, poems charting the beginning of the beginning of my relationship with Melissa, love poems for my friends, and love poems for this steady, big-feeling-love that Melissa and I have cultivated. The sequences were so obviously in conversation with each other, and I felt excited by the challenge of tuning the poems to each other to shape a book.

This is a somewhat naïve statement, but I don’t feel that love is a radical act. It’s one of the easiest things I know how to do. I do know what you mean, of course, but for me, love is like breathing: automatic and necessary. Maybe what’s radical is noticing I am breathing, which is noticing I am alive. The question then becomes: how do I shape a life where my breaths are deeper, the air cleaner, more nourishing? That is, how do I shape a life where I can love more healthfully, more fully, where I can make the very matrix I’m living in?

Rail: The political and the personal are entwined in this collection as they are in our lives. One example is from “Sixteen Center”: “Last week, an insurrection, / yesterday, the second impeachment, / and this evening of slurry and wind / that makes the old dog wary, I call / my grandpa, my mama’s daddy, to ask / why we called his parents’ land 16 Center.” As the societal desecrations continue, I also find myself speaking to my beloved parents and other elders about the past, the past before I was even alive, when they were children, as a way to ground myself, and perhaps remember that as a human race, we survive in our stories.

Kelly: My elders are such a gift to me. My maternal grandparents and great-aunts and uncles grew up under Jim Crow in Arkansas and many of them were able to make lives that on the surface are modest but hold such richness. I could talk about many of them, and there are poems in this book and the next that do so. I want to focus on one of my great-aunts, who I’ve been thinking about lately. I spent a lot of time with her from my teens into my thirties. She was a Black woman with a disability whose aspirations and goals were often pulled out of reach over and over again. Still! She had a house she was proud of, she was a pillar in her community, a mother in her church, an anchor in my own life. I didn’t always like her, but I respected her deeply. When she died, the willingness of her hometown to help us, her family, spoke to her impact. Most people don’t care about a tiny town in southwest Arkansas, but she did, and she changed it for the better.

Can I do that? Can I live up to the standard she held for her own life, to be of service, to be connected to a community I call my own, even if the impact is small?

Rail: “Every moment I have been alive, I have been at the height of my powers” is another blockbuster that seeds a number of other pieces, where you write: “Whichever direction I walk is north, / cardinal.” This is such an arresting image: north as a physical and spiritual practice, this idea of elevation and expansion and what it implies literally and figuratively. Are you as far north as you need to be now? Or is that a quest that you’re still on?

Kelly: As a Black person with deep Southern roots on both sides of my family, I’m sort of fascinated with the idea of “north,” how it’s imagined, where it’s located. It seems to me “north” is more an idea than a place, and one that disappoints as much as it delivers on its promises of a higher quality of life. Before I left Nashville, I’d lived in the South for about eighteen years. I’d gone to high school, college, and graduate school there. My family is still there. But once I left, I immediately knew it would be almost impossible to return because of the politics and my withering relationship to my family. Years later, I moved to Brooklyn, and I spent a lot of time in Manhattan. Even though that’s one of the easiest places to be oriented, it took me much longer than it should have to know which way was north. I often walked strongly in the wrong direction and for too long before I realized I needed to turn around.

So, I was poking fun at myself a little bit when I started writing the poem, but I was also grappling with what it meant to be so far from home, and adrift. What would I carry? Whose voices moved with me? What stories and smells and places?

Rail: In the same poem there’s this: “For years now, / I have been an only child: my brother and sister, / their beautiful children, alive in the South— / to which I can never return. For years now, / I have been an orphan: my parents—neither / one of them themselves as I recall them—alive / in the South, to which I can never return.” Those last six words struck my heart deeply, and it’s especially moving that though you can’t go back—to who you were there, the parts that weren’t allowed to bloom—in this collection, through this collection, you’ve elected to bring in the South—the ancestors, the stories, the sounds—with this first-person narration. This is a remarkable reframing of the self, a powerful, intentional “I.”

Kelly: I’m more than myself, if that makes sense. My work, in the abstract, I’ll say, is something my family has always supported—or if not supported, they never sought to thwart my making poems. Undergirding the poems are the ways that my family saw in me such potential, even if none of us knew what that potential might bear out.

I also really love the way my family talks, especially my mom’s family. Arkansans have a way with words. My grandpa once said, “Wrench around and wrench it off,” and none of us had a clue what he meant, which in the end was something like, “Reach around and wrench it off.” I’m so interested in how “reach” lives in “wrench,” and so “wrench” lives in “reach” but is also always wrench. He also says “hiking” like “hacking,” and that seems right to me too.

I’m interested in more than pronunciation, how our tongues bend vowels, but also the figures we make. I come from a long line of image makers, and in a way, in these poems, I wanted to show I wasn’t special but rather one voice in the chorus.

All of which is to say, while I don’t feel that I can return to the South, I can carry some intricately rooted aspect of it with me wherever I go.

Rail: I love author’s notes, and it was fascinating that in addition to inspirations from workshops, visual art, musical performances, and commissions—and of course, your circle of talented friends—a number of these poems came from student prompts or class collaborations. We’ve talked about this collection and its provenance, but I’d also love to know more about how your work as an educator impacts your poetry.

Kelly: I keep using this phrase, I know, but teaching is such a gift. I love working with young people, especially those in the undergraduate years. They help keep me elastic and curious. I feel a responsibility to model curiosity for them, to foreground one of the pillars of my practice. In so doing, I get to practice being curious about them. Another important pillar in my practice is de-emphasizing any single poem. I tend to prioritize the poem over, say, the book, which keeps the stakes nice and low. No single poem has to be good. I try to meet my own standard when I write, and the practice of aiming in that direction is pleasing on its own.

In teaching, I’m invited to put language to what has mostly been intuitive in my own writing. Why would I use a couplet instead of a quatrain? Why invert the syntax? What are the benefits of figurative versus and alongside descriptive language? Who are the poets who can show us some ways of making a poem that I find instructive?

That I get to do this as a job is wild to me. It’s so fun and has been fun everywhere I’ve taught. The undergrads at Iowa are pretty special, though, and there’s enough room in the curriculum for us to play and generate poems and be artists together.

Rail: There’s so much to plumb in the new work that I didn’t want to focus too much on your first two remarkable collections, but I’m curious about what Bestiary and The Renunciations might have settled or released that allowed the space and air to explore all that is in The Natural Order of Things. It feels like they were part of your journey north, along with the friends, lovers, and ancestors that populate these poems.

Kelly: Oh for sure. Bestiary is a bit of an overture. There are lots of beginnings, many trailheads mapped out. The love poems, the poems about having been abused, the poems in which I explore my fear of being like my family, my father in particular, are all topics I return to.

The Renunciations is such a hard book, a sad one, too. When I was writing those poems, I felt like I was fighting the big boss in a video game. I’d done all this work in therapy, nearly two decades of work, to get vulnerable, to get healthy, to practice intimacy, and so armed, and finally, I had to look directly at the most awful part of my life and decide what I wanted to put down and what might be worth keeping. Getting to the other side of that journey, that investigation, was a relief, but also was a kind of reset. Once the dust settled, I could see more clearly the shape of the life I wanted to live, which I had been moving toward obliquely.

I will say that a substantial number of poems in The Natural Order of Things were written alongside the poems for The Renunciations, but I knew they didn’t belong in that collection. They deserved their own space.

Rail: There are three “The Bone Museum” poems in the collections, which provide ample close-reading joys. Might we go a bit aslant, though? There are so many connotations of “bones,” let alone “museum,” and all that entails: museum as a place to observe, museum as a space of the nonliving. What about bones as a sense of architecture? The architecture of a poem, and of a collection. How much did the forms change from your initial inception to the final product?

Kelly: I really like this set of questions. At one point, I’d toyed around with titling the collection The Bone Museum, but it didn’t fit the energy of the poems that found their way into the collection.

In the last five years, I’ve spent a lot of time in natural history museums, which are places full of bones. I find bones unsettling and, I suppose, compelling. They’ve certainly been a recurring image across my writing life. I don’t really like skeletons, but I am drawn to natural history museums as material and ideological repositories. The metaphor of the museum felt fruitful to me too. To put a museum poem alongside a poem about playing dominoes, to let the domino poem become a kind of hall in which my familial language lives, was an intentional move, a way of saying these idioms deserve preservation.

Structurally, the manuscript changed shape at least five times, with the biggest shift happening after a series of conversations with Melissa. She really wanted my family poems to come first, but I couldn’t see how to make it work. The pickle was conceptual. I’m not close to my family, and so why would they come first? Eventually, I understood that there was no pickle, that the language of my family was the safest, most secure line to them, that the cadences and impulses we shared formed the scaffold of my poetic practice. Once I figured that out, the arrangement of the collection felt more dynamic, the movements less discrete.

Rail: Another perspective of bones are burial grounds, an excavation of where and how and all the stories that preceded us, lived and died before us, that are somehow still in our genetic makeup. “I didn’t come for the bones / but for the ripple of kinship, // a call borne through current.” The exploration of family lore is a powerful thread of this collection, Donika, and I’m especially taken with all the different “voices” you employ. There’s almost a channeling in how you capture the tones and cadence of the South, these almost liquid word fragments that are rooted in a particular place and time. “The season I learned to be still, to pass / a piece of time with remembering—a comfort / to remember now, to make present, for a little while, / to bring her, as from a great distance, closer.” Would you talk about what one might call the Miss Juel poems?

Kelly: Thank you for the opportunity to talk about my great-grandma Juel. She was one of the best people I’ve ever met, and I loved her so much. She was a tough lady but also so, so soft. She often repeated herself, a kind of repetition that settled into refrain, if we talked long enough, which we often did that one summer each night as we were falling asleep. I could call my sister right now and say, “I talk short,” and my sister would finish, “like the Reed side of my family,” strong emphasis on that long e in “Reed.” I don’t know that I ever met the Reed side of my great-grandma’s family, but I knew they didn’t mince words.

I wrote this poem my first winter in Iowa, the snowiest one I’ve experienced so far. I was tired of writing about winter. I wanted to be warm. I wanted to write about summer. Where was summer? Arkansas. And who did I think of with warmth? My great grandma, her land, her house, where I was always and easily welcomed. Just like that, I got to be with her again, through her language, her cadence. I got to be young again and lost, which in turn helped me make more sense of my present feelings of being lost on the plains of Iowa.

Rail: “Oh, / it was meant for sea, would settle / for river, as you were meant for me / though we settle for time, for time.” The ecopoetics of The Natural Order of Things are lush, verdant, sensual, honeyed, and often afloat; with oases of water built throughout, as way of escaping containment, or landlocking. Would you talk about the role of nature in your practice and your work? (Fancifully on my part, if this collection was a season, I’d say it was mid-summer.)

Kelly: This is a lovely question. I hadn’t thought of a season for the collection, but there is a movement through spring and summer, when the leaves are at their most green, their heaviest, and what they do to the light. I would love for this question to evoke that coming into full leaf.

I’m not a hiker or an outdoorsperson, but I do like to be in nature. I’m delighted by lots of creatures from chipmunks and pigeons to the more charismatic fauna like humpbacks, pelicans, and California sea lions. My delight stems primarily from how their worlds do not center us. They do as they have been doing for ages, or they take advantage of or find a niche in our constructed world. They relate to each other and their environment. If they know something of us, they tend to be wary (not pigeons; pigeons really don’t care about us, which I respect), and if they don’t know of us, they react as they would to any animal our size. I take great comfort in routines and cycles that pre-date human existence and could extend beyond. We are a part of the world, we are of it. Though we are a painfully consequential species, we are not the center nor are we the most important beings on Earth.  

One notion that began to emerge as I was putting the book together was that I wanted to move away from anthropomorphizing the not-human. In the poems I’m writing now, I’m trying to move as if alongside. To move not figuratively but descriptively, fully in myself, using more than sight to be with what or who I’m with.