December 2023

Caesura Presents…Tennison Black

Tennison S. Black is the author of Survival Strategies (UGA Press 2023) which won the National Poetry Series. Their work has appeared or is forthcoming in SWWIM, Hotel Amerika, Booth, Wordgathering, and New Mobility, among others. Black received their MFA at Arizona State University. They are the Managing Editor at Sundress Publications and Best of the Net and are the editor of the anthology on contemporary disability, A Body You Talk To. Though Sonoran born, they live and work in Washington State.

Website:  tennisonblack.com

Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/PNWwriter

“Learning to Name Our Monsters”

 

John:

Tennison, thank you so much for joining me. I’ve read Survival Strategies twice now in a week…that’s how rich and emotionally complex it is. And I can see how it won a coveted spot in the National Poetry Series.

As each poem seamlessly connects to each other yet is equally strong when read alone, I was wondering how you achieved this arduous balance. Did you go into this project knowing that the poems would all tie together or did you simply notice recurring themes, images, and locations and began to weave them together? And how long did it take you from inspiration to completion of the manuscript?

Tennison:

Hi John, thank you, truly, for spending time with my work.

This project was, at one time, a ninety-something page long poem. One poem. I’d become enamored of the epic long-poem in grad school and took some of my disparate pieces, bits, and bobs—some string and cactus wax—and a ton of new writing and wove it all into one long poem. That was my graduate thesis. But over time I started to break it apart, to pull out pieces for submission purposes, and in the work of editing and re-visioning what I had—with the intention of letting things stand on their own so they could go out in the world instead of staying buried in this one long poem, some of those oddments became poems and some got tossed entirely and whole new poems were added.

From thesis to winning the NPS, it was four-years. And ten years from my first Yuma poem which was in 2012 and isn’t even in the book but it was in my grad school app in which I said I wanted to write about this history. Which is to say the project was never inspired in a flash as in “I’m going to write a book about my history in the Yuma desert and it will look like this and have hybrid elements,” but it was more of an evolution.

All this to say it was a process to form the arc of the book but also to form the arc I needed to travel to write it. I was awfully fragile when I started writing this. I had decades of things I needed to deal with but had never had time to face. So both the work and I had to evolve in order for it to work. But if you’d said that to me at the outset, I’d have chucked it, so I’m kind of hesitant to say it in case some poet gets discouraged. But it did happen, whether I intended it to or not. And healing feels good, eventually.

To the evolution of the book though—“The Mother and the Mountain,” in the form it’s in today, was re-written in various forms over a dozen times and I never felt happy. I threw it out. Rewrote it and put it back. Tore it apart and rewrote it into many poems. I couldn’t find the rhythm, so we danced until we came together, that piece and I. And when it found its final form, the rest fell into place. The day I knew that piece was finally done, I printed out the poems and reordered the book and I swear I felt a click. Which sounds trite but I don’t mean mythically speaking, just that I felt the arc when I put the last poem down, and I could see how each connected to the next and I said out loud, “That’s it, it’s done. This time it’s going out and it won’t come back.”

 John:

Wow, what a story! A few times I’ve tried to compose longer poems too, around chapbook length, but always end up cutting them up into individual pieces. I admire your tenacity and understanding that we need to listen to our poems instead of forcing them, to find that rhythm and dance along with our poems.

So, how did you know when a poem is complete? And what’s your usual composition process? Do you tend to start with a stark image, a strong emotion, a personal experience, a single strong line?

Tennison:

Oh wow, that’s such a hard question for me. I knew when the book was complete but it took years to feel it. But there was moment where I knew it was done. Knew like I swear I heard a “click.” But this was my first and every project is unique, so will I know again? I don’t know and the thought that I might not kind of scares me if I’m being honest. But poems are something else entirely. Sometimes I think I know one is done because I want to be done with it. But then I think of it later and go tinker or break it apart and try to rework it. Which is all to say that I don’t think I do know when a poem is really done. I have a better sense of “this one goes in and this one is out.” So maybe the pieces I select as being “done" are those I feel an urge to include or that I like them more. There’s always some poems that I look at with a side-eye and wonder why they exist, and what to do with them.

Now that these particular pieces are in this book and it’s printed, I guess they’re immutable in some sense, but up to that point I didn’t really know in any sure sense that they wouldn’t change again except that I knew the book was done therefore the poems must also be done.

Compositionally speaking I don’t have a set process. Oh I so wish I did. Some poems come from a phrase or a word and some from an experience or a fact. These poems in particular came through a process of identifying my traumas from this time and trying to pull them out of my body. And in that process I learned to name things I never got to know the names for, or learn about the flora and fauna of the area in which I grew up—so that instead of seeing them as monsters I could start to understand the region and move out of my activated child’s mind and into an adult sensibility with understanding and caring and I tried to record some of that experience, some of that healing because I think millions of people have those same traumas. Theirs may not be desert related but many people understand the complicated parental and family relationships that plague you, that you bury and hide but that keep coming up.

In the work I’m doing now it’s been very different, though. It’s less trauma focused and more experiential—less about healing and more about exploring my own processes and seeking to understand why I’ve made the choices I have because as a neurospicy person I struggle to understand how I felt that drove me to make choices when I now think I could’ve done better or at least different. And my current process reflects that, “why did you do that?” sense of beginning in most of the poems.

John:

Thank you for such a poignant and vulnerable answer. I’m so struck by “I learned to name things I never got to know the names for…so that instead of seeing them as monsters I could start to understand….” This description of your life and process is an essential theme in this collection, where you’re “comfortable being called by a name” and “Mama would try a name on me.” There’s this consistent sense of the importance of naming, of agency. Yet, you often return to how naming relates to womanhood, especially with lines like “taking with her the names of the women who had preceded her.” How do you see the power of naming relating to the power (and historical lack of agency) of women?

Tennison:

Not just women. You know? It’s everyone (and everything) that has faced subjugation and being the property in one respect or another of someone else.

When my eldest kids were growing up, I realized I wanted an entirely new surname. I was deeply uncomfortable in my relationship with my own father, and I wanted a name not just all my own but a name that I could give to my daughters that didn’t come from a man—one that came from me and was uniquely us. A matrilineal line. So I changed my surname. But I’ve also legally changed my first name twice. I make no secret of my discomfort with names. I couldn’t if I wanted to—names are so public. Even when I was a child though I would get to where the name I was using felt off or constricting, and I’d pull out a new one from somewhere inside and tell everyone they had to use that now. When I say all of my life I mean from toddlerhood. I was maybe one and a half or two when I did it the first time.

So what you’re seeing in those pages is my ongoing struggle to understand naming, and how it relates to me, my relationship with myself, and my relationship with the world at large. I don’t know about power. I mean, we say it, so off-the-cuff, right? “Names have power.” But do they? It’s certainly a trope in many stories and we all seem to believe it—or at least accept it as fact but I’m not sure I agree because I’m not sure we've really worked out all there is to work out in that, yet—we’ve all just accepted it without interrogating it. And I think that’s part of why I still struggle with names. I don’t even know if Tennison will be my final name. I just don’t know.

But I do know that most of us have agency now, to choose for ourselves, and that’s a really good thing—even if some of us can’t seem to get entirely comfortable, whether we chose it or not.

John:

Your beautiful answer resonates throughout the collection, especially in the following lines from its first poem: 

Because you can’t imagine the glory of a jackrabbit
on the run at full-tilt fleeing the dusk-fired coyote
across a dirt road until you’ve seen it and you can’t
know yourself until you know who you’re rooting for.

This idea of taking “sides” as an integral part of one’s self-identity speaks to the struggle you mentioned. In another poem, you reference our need to “be absolved.”

How do you use ideas such as guilt, cultural grief, and even an underlying eco-message (“Deserts don’t miss people when they leave”) without every coming off as didactic or preachy? Is it, at least partly, your focus on imagery to explore, rather than state, the poem’s deeper intent? Is it related to your empathetic, instead of judgmental, approach?

Tennison:

Have I managed to avoid didacticism? I know that I tried to remain plain spoken and honest as I see it. But I also know that the work lives its life out there in the readers. So I definitely can’t claim to have “done it” or to have done anything really successfully. I can say that I tried with all of my heart to hold the mirror steady. I tried to let the place and the people there reveal truth. And I tried to let it unfold in candor rather than hiding from discomfort. Was I successful though? I don't really know but I do know I will keep trying in future works to grow and do more and better. I’m not a hero and I don’t expect to be lauded for things better said (and regularly said) by others. If I have echoed anything of value in this attempt, it’s just that, an echo of something that should have been listened to long ago.

As to judgment—I know I wasn’t successful at avoiding judgment. I know that because I feel judgment in me when I think about the ways that certain people, the environment, and animals have been abused and mistreated by cowboy culture and the indifferent malaise of colonial thinking. I feel judgment when I consider my own complicit role and that of my family. I feel judgment when I look on the ways that some people in the region live when compared to others. And I feel judgment at the ongoing maltreatment of vulnerable people. So I’d be misrepresenting myself if I accepted the idea of being non-judgmental in this work when I know that I’m deeply and unwaveringly judgmental in many ways, especially of cowboy culture. I tried to be fair and to be kind. I tried to look through lenses other than my own. I hope it’s balanced. I do see where I could have been softer, gone easier. But I’m just not ready, yet.

That quote you pull out is, to me, the single most important thing I say in the work. Throw the rest out and keep that if you’re only going to keep one thing. We have to know who we’re rooting for in order to know ourselves. It’s not easy. And we’re often clumsy in it, but like moments of indecision and knowing your choice once the quarter is in the air, we learn about ourselves as soon as we choose. It might be the only way to know who we really are.

John:

It’s interesting, and perhaps telling, that we both feel these lines define the collection’s overall perspecitve, heart, and motivation.

I know this is going to be a difficult question, but if you had just two poems to share from this collection with the world, which would they be and why?  

Tennison:

This is hard not because I can’t choose two poems to love but because it would change depending on a number of factors. Not the least of which is the day and my mood.

Today I’m appreciating “I was Born for Rainy Days But” and “Here I Am” because combined with “Under the Only Tree for Miles” they look at the dilapidated road, and the journey I took to get to the end of that story—If I actually am at the end of it.

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