G.H. Mosson is a graduate of the Johns Hopkins University Writing Seminars program, an employment litigator, a former Baltimore City Public School teacher, and a local activist. We (Maysa, a senior at Johns Hopkins University and Marcus, a sophomore member of Writers in Baltimore Schools) had the pleasure of interviewing G.H. Mosson on reflections of his writing, both poetry and legal writing, their intersections and their differences. We learned about his anti-war activism during the Iraq wars in 2002-2003 and how his passion for poetry took a political turn at that point. He also spoke on living in Baltimore and the impact it has had on his writing, especially compared to the time he spent in bigger cities such as New York and Washington D.C.
From 2003 through 2010, he founded, edited and published several issues of a journal Poems Against War: A Journal of Poetry and Action, which explored causes and effects of war through poetry, and visions for better tomorrows. The journal included U.S. poets from around the country, such as Antler, as well as Baltimore’s own Ron Williams, Marcus Colasurdo, Rosemary Klein, and Riot Folk singer Ryan Harvey. It also favored poets who didn’t just address issues, but wrote out of their own lived convictions and experiences. The journal was distributed and sold through select independent stores, and at rallies, events, and activist readings. The series is currently archived at the University of Wisconsin, Madison library, and closed with the anthology, Poems Against War: Bending Towards Justice (Wasteland Press 2010).
This interview took us through a journey of different stages of G.H. Mosson’s experience as a writer and activist and how those two roles merged at certain points. We discussed the purpose of writing, of art and its intended effects.
Here is a sampler from Poems Against War.
What was your experience like doing a Masters in Writing Seminars at Johns Hopkins? Why did you choose Hopkins?
Well, I came to Hopkins in 2003. At the time I was in DC. I was working as a business writer. I was also active against the Iraq war. I worked a 6:30AM to 2:30PM shift and was especially busy in 2002 and 2003, doing a lot of organizing protesting activities in the afternoons and also writing. Coming to Hopkins was truly wonderful for my writing. I got a teaching fellowship and was modest in my living habits. When I came to Hopkins and moved here in late July 2003, it was the last year of the MA version of the MFA program here. I still engaged in some organizing activities. I was connected with some separate antiwar protest groups. Here at Hopkins, I was focused on formal poetry, metrical poetry, and writing mostly in the sense of stanzas. I was really coming here with a particular focus on meter and just a time to write. It was fabulous. I ended up teaching as a lecturer for a year, so I ended up doing two years here. It was truly wonderful.
You are originally from New York, right? Why did you specifically come to Baltimore?
I came to Baltimore because of Hopkins. And when I came to Baltimore, I really liked it. It was a sophisticated place but was affordable and slower paced, all while still being a city. By being affordable, I could live life here and devote time to writing. I don’t think you can be a writer or artist without having that time.
What was the political climate of Hopkins like when you were here? Were you more focused on your writing than activism here?
I was only in the MA program so I didn’t really interact with the larger Hopkins community. Within the program, there was not really any political activity that I saw. I brought in a few political poems for the workshops. They didn’t go over so well. I do think that there is a bias in academic literary communities in U.S. against putting politics into art. I think there is this presumption that politics makes art temporary or yelling versus subtle. Those are both incorrect because anything we put into our art is temporary. Everything in our lives is temporary. The political situation is just as temporary or lasting as the poem about a grandmother or poem about feelings. For artists to make art out of it, or painting or poetry or fiction, they have to take that moment and turn it into something that lasts for generations.
A challenge of any art is how are you going to communicate. Yelling is okay sometimes, but it’s still the challenge every artist faces with every subject. Artists have something to communicate but they don’t necessarily want to be yelling it. A good poem that does some yelling but is also subtle is Allen Ginsberg’s America: “Why can’t I walk into the supermarket and buy what I want with my good looks?” he says. It’s kind of funny but also quite the human predicament. Of course, there’s humor in that he probably didn’t have good looks. Many face that. If you unpack that joke, we all have to work for a living and therefore face all the dilemmas that come with work. The other part of that line, just to get into a line that resonates, is that he’s also showing his own foibles. He’s saying why aren’t we existing in the Garden of Eden so to speak? Why can’t I walk into the supermarket and get what I want with my good looks? Why doesn’t the fruit just grow off the trees and fall into my lap? Why am I exiled from the Garden of Eden and have to work and labor for my sustenance? He’s also saying that’s what I want. There’s a pride in the line. Who is he to get a free lunch? Who am I to get a free lunch? There’s a part of us all that wants a free lunch. When you unpack that line, he’s talking about the human desire for a free lunch, in other words, human greed and even desperation. These emotions and conditions are something that we all have to deal with, and are at the bottom of the today’s and tomorrow’s problems. That line captures it all. I think it’s a great example of lasting art because it’s lasted long enough. He wrote that line in the 1950s and I’m here in 2016, still thinking about it.
How does your poetry relate to your career now as an employment litigator? What does an employment litigator do?
They do a wide spectrum of things. Specifically, an employment litigator is going to court for people who believe they have been wronged in very specific, legally actionable ways. Or, an employment litigator works for the companies and employers to defend or advise them on various civil rights laws. The most famous would be the 1964 Civil Rights Act, which says that discrimination in the workplace is illegal based on gender, race, national origin, ethnicity,religion, and/or color. There are various workplace laws, including the Family Medical Leave Act and Americans for Disabilities Act. There’s local and state laws. For the most part so far, I represent employees that have been fired, or have problems at work, and come to me with situations that are never quite totally clear. I can help where the problems lend themselves to a legal solution. Within employment law, there’s also a wider spectrum of what people can do. People can work for the state, administer unemployment benefits, write regulations, write employment handbooks, and also advocate for policy changes.
Before you began your masters at Hopkins you were doing business writing. Was it always part of your plan to go to law school or what made you transition to law?
No. Around 2008, I previewed a law class and it seemed like a good idea. It did combine my concern for justice and civil society with my love for writing and, at that time, advocacy. Advocacy occurs through political activity as well as teaching. I taught a bit between coming to Hopkins in 2003 and when I went to law school in 2009. It doesn’t mean that it’s some sort of perfect career solution. It was a risk. I took a gamble.
Do you think it was a profitable risk?
I hope so. It was definitely a big investment of my time and resources. I also got a fellowship to go to law school. But that doesn’t make up the years of non-earning. Thinking about the law, I do think writing has to carry its own weight. It has to persuade and be important just based on being what it is. Legal writing is important because it’s communicating something essential about how the law applies to other people. It’s much more readily effective.
One of the reasons my art became connected with activism was because I used to do them separately, but in Fall 2002 and onward, I just didn’t have the time. Between doing grassroots organizing and vigiling at the White House, I was doing all sorts of protesting against the Iraq war. There were marches on Donald Rumsfeld’s house. I had no time to write anymore after work, so I eventually started writing about what I was doing or what other people were doing. It was a leap for me, even though (now looking back) it makes total sense especially in context of American poetry. I mean you go back to Walt Whitman and Langston Hughes, you go back to Allen Ginsberg which is not that far back, Philip Levine who just passed away, Adrienne Rich who just passed away. These people write about America on the broadest spectrum: personally, emotionally, socially, politically, as experience, as witnessing, as reporting, as analysis. For me it was this period when I didn’t have time to write that helped me make that connection. As you noted, I founded a magazine, Poems Against War. I published the first issue in May 2003 so that would be two months after the Iraq war began. It was actually just to get other people’s voices out because they weren’t out. I can remember when there were newspapers that really had an effect before the internet. Yet The Washington Post put anti-Iraq war marches in its Living Section, but never in the front News Section. You can go back and research that, isn’t it crazy?
It was very disturbing. That’s one of the reasons that I decided that my art had to speak to what I was doing, not just politics. The anti-war movement in the media was being erased as it was marginally and thinly covered. In my poem, “Poem for the Living”, it’s a 5-to-6-part poem. Some parts of it - there was a vigil in the White House, I wasn’t the only one there. I was there and so were other people. There was a part where there was a call not to work the day war began. I didn’t go to work the first full day the war began. It began in the afternoon / evening of March 19, 2003. I called in sick the next day. That’s an ethical call. That’s also a personal choice. I didn’t go to work and I didn’t tell them why. Still, they weren’t happy with me calling in sick. In a small way, I risked losing the job and ethically, I felt I had to make that risk to stand for peace and justice. Ideologically, if twenty million people had gone on strike to end the war we would have ended it.
When I was here at Hopkins, I worked at a downtown coffeeshop on Friday afternoons and Saturday mornings. There was an anti-war march right after war began around April 2003. This march was another big march with 50 or 60 thousand people. I came back to work that weekend. I worked on a Sunday and the march was on a Saturday. On the front page of NY Times, it had a march in a small town in middle America, a pro-war march. Fifty or so people were pictured decked out in American flags, but the paper said there were 2,000 people who marched in the small Midwest town. The 60,000 people who were in DC circling the White House were not even pictured. It was really a false representation of what was happening in our country.
This makes me think about the uprisings last year with Freddie Gray. It was either not represented or misconstrued. The media would say all these hoodlums and thugs are out here. First of all, compared to other riots there was not even that much damage done. There were literally reporters walking right in front of protesters saying “I don’t know why they’re out here.” I was thinking, why don’t you just turn to the people and ask them why they’re here? It was so absurd.
Now to another question, you taught in Baltimore public schools for a year. How was your experience with that and did it influence your writing in any way?
I taught a little bit of English, a little social studies. I ended up teaching in a middle school where the students were reading very below grade level. It was a good and difficult experience. Going back to everything we’ve talked about and the connection among art and policy and politics, the social choices we are making: In education now and specifically the year I taught in 2007 in Maryland they were just implementing this hour by hour curriculum for the teachers in all the core curriculum areas such as English and Math. That is going on nationally. It wasn’t possible for me to conceive how to teach that curriculum in the way they were saying I had to teach it, to students who needed more rudimentary things and something much more connected to where they were and what was going on. I ended unable to really teach that curriculum. In my experience, the troubled students who were older than a typical 7th grader, were really looking for a way out. If we had a robust vocational program for them, the trouble that seems to bedevil the school system would disappear.
What is the trouble? Maybe reading another short story doesn’t meet the needs of students who are living in crisis. Since then, I’ve never met a teacher who said education is knowing as much information as possible. Education is knowledge and the ability to use it to make choices, to think for yourself, to think critically. Reading a hundred short stories or memorizing an extra 500 vocabulary words are all good but that’s not education. I’m very passionate about education still.
How would you differentiate between your formal and informal writing (for work versus poetry)?
I think art speaks for itself. It has no other purpose. It’s not communicating information like a magazine article. It’s not getting someone to cease and desist their unlawful activity like a letter from a lawyer. It’s not an indictment for a crime or a summons to appear at a court. It just speaks for itself compared to a piece of journalism or a magazine article.
Formal and informal writing. I don’t know if I would distinguish between them in that way.
Do you find any difficulty in switching from a creative flow to writing articles about policy or practicing law? Or do you feel like they are two separate spaces?
I feel like they’re totally different spaces and they’re not integrated for me personally. I went to law school in 2009 so I’ve worked in the legal industry for six or seven years now because I interned and then worked as a law clerk throughout law school. I do think the precision that I practice in my writing in my legal work has made me think more logically in my art.
[Shows us his journal.] You might not say this is political. I’m just looking at my writing. You’ve asked how it has changed. This is from March 7th, 2016. This is just a draft called Heart Boxes. In terms of form, when I was here at Hopkins ten or so years ago, my forms were more metrical. I was thinking more meter and organization of language, but here - I’m actually really happy about this - it’s kind of more rhythmical and thinking more through repetition.
Here’s the first part:
Go where the light
Go first to the light
Go to where light approaches you
Open slow. Peek. Expect blindness.
Did you expect mountains, trees, a horizon?
Did you expect other people there?
You could see how that’s political if you want to.
Well the personal is political, right? Since you pulled out your journal, I assume you journal regularly. Is there a specific time that you journal?
Right now I try to do it in the morning before the day begins but sometimes it’s just when I can. I have kids too so on the weekends it might be when I have them doing something and I can get a cup of coffee and journal. I started writing in a diary last summer. It’s been years since I’ve done it. I think it’s actually really good because sometimes I don’t have poetry to say or to write about or to rewrite, but I usually do have something to say about what happened today. It keeps the writing going.
What inspired you to write your first book, Season of Flowers and Dust?
Most of those poems were written first in the 1990s, revised further, and published in 2007. It’s a nature-focused book. It’s just inspired by nature. Nature is beautiful.
Do you still write about nature?
I still do. . . .
Do you think your poetry has influenced communities in terms of activism? Is there a certain effect you hope for in your poetry or do you think art just speaks for itself?
I always felt and said to myself and maybe to some others that you can’t be so arrogant to expect to know the effect of your actions. I just have to do what I think is right, what I think needs to be done and let it be. I did what I think needed to be done, but I wasn’t protesting the Iraq war as a symbol or to have my voice heard.… I mean a lot of people thought we could stop the war from happening. We thought if there was were enough people out there and we showed enough dissent the war wouldn’t actually happen. When we lost, we thought, we can’t allow everything to be erased and for this just to become the new norm.
The government went to war, at best, with a slim majority of the population supporting them. It ignored reasoned debate and deployed inhumane approaches to conflict. We have to do much better, really. Clearly it’s not over. Not in this country. It’s not even close.
I think it depends on younger people, the next generation to learn from not only what’s gone on before, but to learn from what’s happening right now, and what they feel is correct. People who are 16 to 26, that’s a different vantage point and felt time. Nobody can speak for you or know what it’s like from your perspective in history. And you can look at what’s happened and maybe push it forward and do better or at least just keep it moving. There’s a lot of victories too. War is a serious problem in the 21st century and global warming is a serious problem in the 21st century. The free trade agreements are also another problem. But if you look at the history of free trade agreements, it has seriously been slowed down by activism. That’s a victory. In the same way, the widespread election tampering in Florida and Ohio that occurred in 2000 and 2004, respectively, has been pushed back. That’s a victory, but voter access is an ongoing struggle.
Does the process of critiquing and editing other people’s work speak to your work or inspire you in any way and what is it like to be on the receiving end of critique?
I like it. I’m always interested in it.
When you’re writing do you have a particular audience?
Anyone who reads.
Is there anything we haven’t asked about that you want to share?
Art is creative journey so art takes us onward. I do think we have an obligation not to be blind, to observe as artists. What are we going to put out there? Is it going to be positive? Is it going to be negative? If it’s going to be negative is it for a purpose or just negative? Is that okay? People have different opinions on that. I think for artists, writers, painters, musicians - these are great questions to ask, to live, to explore, to come to conclusions about. My work really changed. Seasons of Flowers and Dust is all nature poetry. In 2002 and 2003 and onward, I wrote much more politically. My writing in the last few years has changed again.
From 2003 through 2010, he founded, edited and published several issues of a journal Poems Against War: A Journal of Poetry and Action, which explored causes and effects of war through poetry, and visions for better tomorrows. The journal included U.S. poets from around the country, such as Antler, as well as Baltimore’s own Ron Williams, Marcus Colasurdo, Rosemary Klein, and Riot Folk singer Ryan Harvey. It also favored poets who didn’t just address issues, but wrote out of their own lived convictions and experiences. The journal was distributed and sold through select independent stores, and at rallies, events, and activist readings. The series is currently archived at the University of Wisconsin, Madison library, and closed with the anthology, Poems Against War: Bending Towards Justice (Wasteland Press 2010).
This interview took us through a journey of different stages of G.H. Mosson’s experience as a writer and activist and how those two roles merged at certain points. We discussed the purpose of writing, of art and its intended effects.
Here is a sampler from Poems Against War.
What was your experience like doing a Masters in Writing Seminars at Johns Hopkins? Why did you choose Hopkins?
Well, I came to Hopkins in 2003. At the time I was in DC. I was working as a business writer. I was also active against the Iraq war. I worked a 6:30AM to 2:30PM shift and was especially busy in 2002 and 2003, doing a lot of organizing protesting activities in the afternoons and also writing. Coming to Hopkins was truly wonderful for my writing. I got a teaching fellowship and was modest in my living habits. When I came to Hopkins and moved here in late July 2003, it was the last year of the MA version of the MFA program here. I still engaged in some organizing activities. I was connected with some separate antiwar protest groups. Here at Hopkins, I was focused on formal poetry, metrical poetry, and writing mostly in the sense of stanzas. I was really coming here with a particular focus on meter and just a time to write. It was fabulous. I ended up teaching as a lecturer for a year, so I ended up doing two years here. It was truly wonderful.
You are originally from New York, right? Why did you specifically come to Baltimore?
I came to Baltimore because of Hopkins. And when I came to Baltimore, I really liked it. It was a sophisticated place but was affordable and slower paced, all while still being a city. By being affordable, I could live life here and devote time to writing. I don’t think you can be a writer or artist without having that time.
What was the political climate of Hopkins like when you were here? Were you more focused on your writing than activism here?
I was only in the MA program so I didn’t really interact with the larger Hopkins community. Within the program, there was not really any political activity that I saw. I brought in a few political poems for the workshops. They didn’t go over so well. I do think that there is a bias in academic literary communities in U.S. against putting politics into art. I think there is this presumption that politics makes art temporary or yelling versus subtle. Those are both incorrect because anything we put into our art is temporary. Everything in our lives is temporary. The political situation is just as temporary or lasting as the poem about a grandmother or poem about feelings. For artists to make art out of it, or painting or poetry or fiction, they have to take that moment and turn it into something that lasts for generations.
A challenge of any art is how are you going to communicate. Yelling is okay sometimes, but it’s still the challenge every artist faces with every subject. Artists have something to communicate but they don’t necessarily want to be yelling it. A good poem that does some yelling but is also subtle is Allen Ginsberg’s America: “Why can’t I walk into the supermarket and buy what I want with my good looks?” he says. It’s kind of funny but also quite the human predicament. Of course, there’s humor in that he probably didn’t have good looks. Many face that. If you unpack that joke, we all have to work for a living and therefore face all the dilemmas that come with work. The other part of that line, just to get into a line that resonates, is that he’s also showing his own foibles. He’s saying why aren’t we existing in the Garden of Eden so to speak? Why can’t I walk into the supermarket and get what I want with my good looks? Why doesn’t the fruit just grow off the trees and fall into my lap? Why am I exiled from the Garden of Eden and have to work and labor for my sustenance? He’s also saying that’s what I want. There’s a pride in the line. Who is he to get a free lunch? Who am I to get a free lunch? There’s a part of us all that wants a free lunch. When you unpack that line, he’s talking about the human desire for a free lunch, in other words, human greed and even desperation. These emotions and conditions are something that we all have to deal with, and are at the bottom of the today’s and tomorrow’s problems. That line captures it all. I think it’s a great example of lasting art because it’s lasted long enough. He wrote that line in the 1950s and I’m here in 2016, still thinking about it.
How does your poetry relate to your career now as an employment litigator? What does an employment litigator do?
They do a wide spectrum of things. Specifically, an employment litigator is going to court for people who believe they have been wronged in very specific, legally actionable ways. Or, an employment litigator works for the companies and employers to defend or advise them on various civil rights laws. The most famous would be the 1964 Civil Rights Act, which says that discrimination in the workplace is illegal based on gender, race, national origin, ethnicity,religion, and/or color. There are various workplace laws, including the Family Medical Leave Act and Americans for Disabilities Act. There’s local and state laws. For the most part so far, I represent employees that have been fired, or have problems at work, and come to me with situations that are never quite totally clear. I can help where the problems lend themselves to a legal solution. Within employment law, there’s also a wider spectrum of what people can do. People can work for the state, administer unemployment benefits, write regulations, write employment handbooks, and also advocate for policy changes.
Before you began your masters at Hopkins you were doing business writing. Was it always part of your plan to go to law school or what made you transition to law?
No. Around 2008, I previewed a law class and it seemed like a good idea. It did combine my concern for justice and civil society with my love for writing and, at that time, advocacy. Advocacy occurs through political activity as well as teaching. I taught a bit between coming to Hopkins in 2003 and when I went to law school in 2009. It doesn’t mean that it’s some sort of perfect career solution. It was a risk. I took a gamble.
Do you think it was a profitable risk?
I hope so. It was definitely a big investment of my time and resources. I also got a fellowship to go to law school. But that doesn’t make up the years of non-earning. Thinking about the law, I do think writing has to carry its own weight. It has to persuade and be important just based on being what it is. Legal writing is important because it’s communicating something essential about how the law applies to other people. It’s much more readily effective.
One of the reasons my art became connected with activism was because I used to do them separately, but in Fall 2002 and onward, I just didn’t have the time. Between doing grassroots organizing and vigiling at the White House, I was doing all sorts of protesting against the Iraq war. There were marches on Donald Rumsfeld’s house. I had no time to write anymore after work, so I eventually started writing about what I was doing or what other people were doing. It was a leap for me, even though (now looking back) it makes total sense especially in context of American poetry. I mean you go back to Walt Whitman and Langston Hughes, you go back to Allen Ginsberg which is not that far back, Philip Levine who just passed away, Adrienne Rich who just passed away. These people write about America on the broadest spectrum: personally, emotionally, socially, politically, as experience, as witnessing, as reporting, as analysis. For me it was this period when I didn’t have time to write that helped me make that connection. As you noted, I founded a magazine, Poems Against War. I published the first issue in May 2003 so that would be two months after the Iraq war began. It was actually just to get other people’s voices out because they weren’t out. I can remember when there were newspapers that really had an effect before the internet. Yet The Washington Post put anti-Iraq war marches in its Living Section, but never in the front News Section. You can go back and research that, isn’t it crazy?
It was very disturbing. That’s one of the reasons that I decided that my art had to speak to what I was doing, not just politics. The anti-war movement in the media was being erased as it was marginally and thinly covered. In my poem, “Poem for the Living”, it’s a 5-to-6-part poem. Some parts of it - there was a vigil in the White House, I wasn’t the only one there. I was there and so were other people. There was a part where there was a call not to work the day war began. I didn’t go to work the first full day the war began. It began in the afternoon / evening of March 19, 2003. I called in sick the next day. That’s an ethical call. That’s also a personal choice. I didn’t go to work and I didn’t tell them why. Still, they weren’t happy with me calling in sick. In a small way, I risked losing the job and ethically, I felt I had to make that risk to stand for peace and justice. Ideologically, if twenty million people had gone on strike to end the war we would have ended it.
When I was here at Hopkins, I worked at a downtown coffeeshop on Friday afternoons and Saturday mornings. There was an anti-war march right after war began around April 2003. This march was another big march with 50 or 60 thousand people. I came back to work that weekend. I worked on a Sunday and the march was on a Saturday. On the front page of NY Times, it had a march in a small town in middle America, a pro-war march. Fifty or so people were pictured decked out in American flags, but the paper said there were 2,000 people who marched in the small Midwest town. The 60,000 people who were in DC circling the White House were not even pictured. It was really a false representation of what was happening in our country.
This makes me think about the uprisings last year with Freddie Gray. It was either not represented or misconstrued. The media would say all these hoodlums and thugs are out here. First of all, compared to other riots there was not even that much damage done. There were literally reporters walking right in front of protesters saying “I don’t know why they’re out here.” I was thinking, why don’t you just turn to the people and ask them why they’re here? It was so absurd.
Now to another question, you taught in Baltimore public schools for a year. How was your experience with that and did it influence your writing in any way?
I taught a little bit of English, a little social studies. I ended up teaching in a middle school where the students were reading very below grade level. It was a good and difficult experience. Going back to everything we’ve talked about and the connection among art and policy and politics, the social choices we are making: In education now and specifically the year I taught in 2007 in Maryland they were just implementing this hour by hour curriculum for the teachers in all the core curriculum areas such as English and Math. That is going on nationally. It wasn’t possible for me to conceive how to teach that curriculum in the way they were saying I had to teach it, to students who needed more rudimentary things and something much more connected to where they were and what was going on. I ended unable to really teach that curriculum. In my experience, the troubled students who were older than a typical 7th grader, were really looking for a way out. If we had a robust vocational program for them, the trouble that seems to bedevil the school system would disappear.
What is the trouble? Maybe reading another short story doesn’t meet the needs of students who are living in crisis. Since then, I’ve never met a teacher who said education is knowing as much information as possible. Education is knowledge and the ability to use it to make choices, to think for yourself, to think critically. Reading a hundred short stories or memorizing an extra 500 vocabulary words are all good but that’s not education. I’m very passionate about education still.
How would you differentiate between your formal and informal writing (for work versus poetry)?
I think art speaks for itself. It has no other purpose. It’s not communicating information like a magazine article. It’s not getting someone to cease and desist their unlawful activity like a letter from a lawyer. It’s not an indictment for a crime or a summons to appear at a court. It just speaks for itself compared to a piece of journalism or a magazine article.
Formal and informal writing. I don’t know if I would distinguish between them in that way.
Do you find any difficulty in switching from a creative flow to writing articles about policy or practicing law? Or do you feel like they are two separate spaces?
I feel like they’re totally different spaces and they’re not integrated for me personally. I went to law school in 2009 so I’ve worked in the legal industry for six or seven years now because I interned and then worked as a law clerk throughout law school. I do think the precision that I practice in my writing in my legal work has made me think more logically in my art.
[Shows us his journal.] You might not say this is political. I’m just looking at my writing. You’ve asked how it has changed. This is from March 7th, 2016. This is just a draft called Heart Boxes. In terms of form, when I was here at Hopkins ten or so years ago, my forms were more metrical. I was thinking more meter and organization of language, but here - I’m actually really happy about this - it’s kind of more rhythmical and thinking more through repetition.
Here’s the first part:
Go where the light
Go first to the light
Go to where light approaches you
Open slow. Peek. Expect blindness.
Did you expect mountains, trees, a horizon?
Did you expect other people there?
You could see how that’s political if you want to.
Well the personal is political, right? Since you pulled out your journal, I assume you journal regularly. Is there a specific time that you journal?
Right now I try to do it in the morning before the day begins but sometimes it’s just when I can. I have kids too so on the weekends it might be when I have them doing something and I can get a cup of coffee and journal. I started writing in a diary last summer. It’s been years since I’ve done it. I think it’s actually really good because sometimes I don’t have poetry to say or to write about or to rewrite, but I usually do have something to say about what happened today. It keeps the writing going.
What inspired you to write your first book, Season of Flowers and Dust?
Most of those poems were written first in the 1990s, revised further, and published in 2007. It’s a nature-focused book. It’s just inspired by nature. Nature is beautiful.
Do you still write about nature?
I still do. . . .
Do you think your poetry has influenced communities in terms of activism? Is there a certain effect you hope for in your poetry or do you think art just speaks for itself?
I always felt and said to myself and maybe to some others that you can’t be so arrogant to expect to know the effect of your actions. I just have to do what I think is right, what I think needs to be done and let it be. I did what I think needed to be done, but I wasn’t protesting the Iraq war as a symbol or to have my voice heard.… I mean a lot of people thought we could stop the war from happening. We thought if there was were enough people out there and we showed enough dissent the war wouldn’t actually happen. When we lost, we thought, we can’t allow everything to be erased and for this just to become the new norm.
The government went to war, at best, with a slim majority of the population supporting them. It ignored reasoned debate and deployed inhumane approaches to conflict. We have to do much better, really. Clearly it’s not over. Not in this country. It’s not even close.
I think it depends on younger people, the next generation to learn from not only what’s gone on before, but to learn from what’s happening right now, and what they feel is correct. People who are 16 to 26, that’s a different vantage point and felt time. Nobody can speak for you or know what it’s like from your perspective in history. And you can look at what’s happened and maybe push it forward and do better or at least just keep it moving. There’s a lot of victories too. War is a serious problem in the 21st century and global warming is a serious problem in the 21st century. The free trade agreements are also another problem. But if you look at the history of free trade agreements, it has seriously been slowed down by activism. That’s a victory. In the same way, the widespread election tampering in Florida and Ohio that occurred in 2000 and 2004, respectively, has been pushed back. That’s a victory, but voter access is an ongoing struggle.
Does the process of critiquing and editing other people’s work speak to your work or inspire you in any way and what is it like to be on the receiving end of critique?
I like it. I’m always interested in it.
When you’re writing do you have a particular audience?
Anyone who reads.
Is there anything we haven’t asked about that you want to share?
Art is creative journey so art takes us onward. I do think we have an obligation not to be blind, to observe as artists. What are we going to put out there? Is it going to be positive? Is it going to be negative? If it’s going to be negative is it for a purpose or just negative? Is that okay? People have different opinions on that. I think for artists, writers, painters, musicians - these are great questions to ask, to live, to explore, to come to conclusions about. My work really changed. Seasons of Flowers and Dust is all nature poetry. In 2002 and 2003 and onward, I wrote much more politically. My writing in the last few years has changed again.
This interview was conducted by Maysa Elsheikh and Marcus Mckeever.