Olu Butterfly Woods is a working artist and mother, among many other aspects of herself, living in Baltimore. With a degree in mechanical engineering, she has revolved to an original calling of creating thoughtful art that has led to her land in Baltimore as a base for her travels. In her time in Baltimore, she has worked as an innovative artist and writer, bringing international perspective and an authentic dynamism to the communities with which she has been involved. Projects past and present include Poetry for the People Baltimore (P4PB), a poetry community-service organization, open-mic/jam session, Organic Soul Tuesdays, youth workshops, and tours both collaboratively and independently, including with the Sankofa Dance Theater and band Fertile Ground. Her first book, Revenge of the Dandelions, was published in 2002 and she is currently working on her second book. I was able to catch up with her and ask a few questions last week at the Reisterstown Rd. library.
Much of your work is focused on performance-based poetry. Do write with performance in mind? Is there a difference between writing poetry to be spoken and poetry to be read – which, if either, do you think is more powerful?
I write for my audience, so that’s true probably for a lot of writers whether it’s to be read or to be listened to. Right now I’m actually in the process of writing a book, and even within that I'm going through and working on making it more rigorous with my voice in it. So I think that even if it’s on the page, I want it to exude me. So that’s one of the things that I’m requiring of myself even in the writing.
You have a lot of experience with dance. Can you tell us a little bit about how you see the power of movement as its own poetic language; what might it be able to express, or augment, that textual or spoken poetry cannot? Maybe not explicitly, but is there a way that you think that translates into your writing?
That’s interesting. I kind of don’t consider myself a poet, meaning that I’m myself and sometimes it looks like this and sometimes it looks like that. So if I am onstage, I’m not afraid to use my body in various forms, and I really enjoy multimedia presentations – so whether the work is with visuals or movements, in collaboration with others, with music, that’s sort of my favorite way to present my work. Even my book is actually a collaboration with a visual artist. In terms of dance, I do West African Ballet. So, do the rhythms affect my cadence and things like that? Possibly, probably.
So, you are working on another book now, and your first book, Revenge of the Dandelions, was published in 2002. Could you tell us a bit about your process of compiling and/or creating a body of work for these books? What were and are some of the surprises that came out of publishing your writing?
The processes are very different. I wish I were more prolific, meaning it’s been a long time and this is only my second product. I was supposed to be working on a CD in between, but instead I ended up working on people [she gestures to her children]. So, the process for the one before was very interesting. I didn’t feel that I was ready to publish a book, but it was originally supposed to be part of a compilation. I was going to be in an anthology with other women writers. Everybody else was in New York, and it was kind of the brainchild of a friend of mine who was going to edit it, and that way we would only be responsible for a small sliver of things and also the business of it would get worked out that way. But then, I ended up collaborating with someone who said ‘No, we’re going to publish your book.’ So they provided the support and the resources, but they were into music, so they didn’t really have any experience in publishing. So in some ways, even though it was published and it was funded, it was self-published in that I had to figure out some things on my own. And, you know, there were a lot of bumps along the way. Somebody stole my manuscript at the Baltimore Book Festival, which was very interesting, all my music was in there – and that wasn’t a space where I thought I had to watch my belongings so closely. Only part of it was on a computer or something, the full manuscript didn’t live on a computer anywhere. The lucky thing was that the person who was doing some editing assistance, he was supposed to be on a tour of Europe but the hadn’t left yet. So he had the physical copy, and I had to retype some things. That was a blessing, but it was a very interesting journey.
What I’m working on right now, this was a book that was conceived a long time ago. So it’s not new, but of course you don’t want to just take your old poems and throw them up in the air. So, reevaluating the original concept – because it’s a concept piece – Afro-future, Afro-fantasy poetry, along with the visuals. Not all my writing fits within that theme. So that has meant looking through, there are some things that naturally came from that. Obviously I wouldn’t be doing a book like that if I didn’t have material that fit that. So there were some things that naturally fit in there, and there were some things that I put in, as well as writing some things towards it, but making sure that the old things fit me now, as I’m producing it now. So that has been a process. I finally just assembled a working manuscript; it’s definitely not in its final space at all, but to at least give to the visual artist to figure out how we’re going to put it together.
I read that you previously lived in both Philly and DC. What led you to land in Baltimore, and how do you see this city as a space for creating art?
I used to live in St. Croix, Virgin Islands. So when I came to Philly there was a lot to adjust to. That kind of city is a whole different vibe. I think my perspective at this point would be more through traveling, when I look at Baltimore. Of course, the different places I’ve lived have affected who I am, but my perspective on Baltimore, as an artist, comes from being blessed to travel while living here. Within the United States, places like Atlanta have greatly influenced me. My work here, in New York, and then traveling internationally to places in Europe and Africa, and the Caribbean.
When I look at Baltimore as a city for art – I’m actually making a playful documentary on that now; it’s called Already – it’s about doing art here. But one of the things is that a lot of people complain about things in Baltimore, but they’re not unique to here. You know there’s just certain things that go with being an artist in spaces that are not necessarily respectful of humanity or are not necessarily respectful of art. So for example, going to London, there are a lot of big artists definitely compared to Baltimore City, but the local artists envy what we have here because they feel like there is more space for independent local artists versus there, where if you weren’t big you didn’t have as much of an option. So being able to see what some of the values are here, the fact that it’s situated on the East Coast in a very unique place which is not just part of Baltimore’s art history but its history in general, its unique role from the Civil War on through to commerce, and ideas exchanging, and being able to travel very shortly in any direction and hitting another city. There’s Philly, New York, Richmond, DC, I can have a career even in connecting those cities together. So I know a lot of artists who definitely make that a big part of their reality, which is a benefit of being here. And the fact that Baltimore is very authentic and not really very impressed with very flashy things or big things, it's kind of like ‘what have you done for me lately?’ – that’s what people want to know. And I feel like it’s very intimate, the reality that you can travel twenty minutes pretty much anywhere. It’s a big/little city thing. So being an artist here, how place affects my art?
Yeah, or maybe just how you see the artist community in Baltimore. Actually, a question that came up in another interview was whether or not there is a place for such a term as the ‘Baltimore community’ or ‘Baltimore artist community’ or is it not as singular as that?
Yeah it definitely is not singular, but as somebody who has worked in the past to be a uniting entity – I used to have an organization called Poetry for the People, and we used to do something called the People’s Poetry Awards. That was born out of that wanting to unite people. We went to a conference in Atlanta about building scene, and one of the things that we talked about was these people that had this divisiveness, you think that what you’re doing is so important – it’s kind of like cereal companies fighting and people just decide to eat eggs and bacon. They don’t have to choose either of those choices and you just kind of turn them off with that sense of division. So that was one of the ideas, it was about bringing things together. It was a lot of really wonderful work, because there’s a reason why things are separate – meaning, I don’t think there should be one place where people can go hear poetry, they need the different spaces to breathe and live. And then, to kind of open people up to the different definitions of poetry, because here’s the academic community, here’s the hip-hop inspired community, and going from poetry that originally was oral, then back up to what poetry is now and what it should do for people and trying to connect with different communities to different levels of success. One of the things that we would do is that we would come up with these five categories and we would go to different venues, so we had to do a lot of research and relationship building to figure out what were all the different things happening in the community, happening in Baltimore, but that work was very good and fruitful. To get to know people who I would never know otherwise, and to connect with them. So we don’t do that anymore, but it was a good experience in trying to bridge all these different genres and communities, erotic poetry, slam poetry – all together in one room. And I realized that there were some similar and different challenges among those different communities.
So going off of that, Poetry for the People could be considered a grass roots project - you were voted Best Grass Roots Poet in the Baltimore City Paper in 2002. Can you tell us a little bit about how you define the term “grass roots” in the context of your poetry specifically, but also perhaps within a greater context of poetry in Baltimore and the poetic community at large?
That’s kind of funny, because I think that people are trying to figure out language for what it is that I do. For example, my degree is in engineering, it’s not in language. And that was kind of on purpose, meaning that I chose to cultivate another side of myself – and taking creative writing in college was an interesting experience, originally I didn’t want writing to by my profession because I didn’t want to ever have to do it, if that makes sense. I didn’t want it to be corrupted, which is kind of why I got out of engineering too, it felt corrupted.
So grass roots – people have struggled to classify, I understand the need to classify, I understand the human need and the capital, marketing driven need to classify things like music and art and poetry. So, I think that grass roots was a way to do that. Some people will say for performance-based, things like spoken word or slam poetry. I wouldn’t consider myself either one, but not in a bad way, I don’t think it would be an insult. A ‘spoken word’ category isn’t exclusive to poetry. Some people felt that it was inelegant, as poetry started off as an oral tradition, before there is writing there are many more traditions and cultures that don’t write and they all have poetry. Being able to define what you do, because I’m an independent scholar and I’m not sanctioned by anybody. I would say that I’m sanctioned by my community, so that’s where grass roots comes from. If I am able to put out a book it’s because the community has said ‘we want to hear what you have to say’, it wasn’t a publisher saying ‘I deem you worthy’ or getting a degree, or coming though an institution.
Was there a moment that you really decided to pursue writing/performing? After going to school to study engineering what, if there was something specific, made you turn your energy back towards artistic pursuits? Or was it more of a natural progression?
Yeah, I mean, I definitely have evolution revelations. I don’t know if they’re moments, so much as sometimes there’s a recognition – that okay, this is my life or this can be my life. Writing is something that I did without anybody making me do it, that’s why I was saying I kind of always wanted it to be that. You know, I’m an engineering major but on Friday nights I’m like ‘Yes, I can write.’ That was exciting to me to do in my spare time. Life is very different now, I have to write – but I still like it. But the idea that I could actually do that with my life – I had some similar revelations with teaching. I had a very horrible first year being a public school teacher, but even still, I remember watching some movie and the revelation that I’m supposed to be a teacher. Like I couldn’t avoid it even though I stepped away from that. And partly, that was because I couldn’t conspire with the system that is Baltimore City Public Schools. Even after that, though, I still had this revelation that this is supposed to be part of my life. So yeah, at some point writing evolved into that as well. I couldn’t bring myself to write my statement - I was supposed to be applying for grad school, for engineering. Everything was a lie, I couldn’t bring myself to say it. So I just thought I needed to take some time. I was working at Hopkins as a research assistant at the time, and the professor kind of guaranteed that I could go there for grad school. I think I really wanted to go to Georgia Tech, I did an internship there, I did and internship at NASA, there were a lot of things that were possible, but I just couldn’t bring myself to write my statement. So that was one clear thing that it was not moving forward. I ended up teaching, and through a friend of mine who was also in my science scholarship at UMBC, I kind of casually ended up selling CDs for them. I’ll say casually because he was a bio-chemist who was also a trumpet player. So he also defected into the arts, out of being turned off by the medical industry as well. In the end, things kept pulling me to writing. The whole time I was in my dance company, I was writing. So I still intend to use engineering – I don’t know, I’m a complete person and I use myself every day, however you want to look at it.
I write for my audience, so that’s true probably for a lot of writers whether it’s to be read or to be listened to. Right now I’m actually in the process of writing a book, and even within that I'm going through and working on making it more rigorous with my voice in it. So I think that even if it’s on the page, I want it to exude me. So that’s one of the things that I’m requiring of myself even in the writing.
You have a lot of experience with dance. Can you tell us a little bit about how you see the power of movement as its own poetic language; what might it be able to express, or augment, that textual or spoken poetry cannot? Maybe not explicitly, but is there a way that you think that translates into your writing?
That’s interesting. I kind of don’t consider myself a poet, meaning that I’m myself and sometimes it looks like this and sometimes it looks like that. So if I am onstage, I’m not afraid to use my body in various forms, and I really enjoy multimedia presentations – so whether the work is with visuals or movements, in collaboration with others, with music, that’s sort of my favorite way to present my work. Even my book is actually a collaboration with a visual artist. In terms of dance, I do West African Ballet. So, do the rhythms affect my cadence and things like that? Possibly, probably.
So, you are working on another book now, and your first book, Revenge of the Dandelions, was published in 2002. Could you tell us a bit about your process of compiling and/or creating a body of work for these books? What were and are some of the surprises that came out of publishing your writing?
The processes are very different. I wish I were more prolific, meaning it’s been a long time and this is only my second product. I was supposed to be working on a CD in between, but instead I ended up working on people [she gestures to her children]. So, the process for the one before was very interesting. I didn’t feel that I was ready to publish a book, but it was originally supposed to be part of a compilation. I was going to be in an anthology with other women writers. Everybody else was in New York, and it was kind of the brainchild of a friend of mine who was going to edit it, and that way we would only be responsible for a small sliver of things and also the business of it would get worked out that way. But then, I ended up collaborating with someone who said ‘No, we’re going to publish your book.’ So they provided the support and the resources, but they were into music, so they didn’t really have any experience in publishing. So in some ways, even though it was published and it was funded, it was self-published in that I had to figure out some things on my own. And, you know, there were a lot of bumps along the way. Somebody stole my manuscript at the Baltimore Book Festival, which was very interesting, all my music was in there – and that wasn’t a space where I thought I had to watch my belongings so closely. Only part of it was on a computer or something, the full manuscript didn’t live on a computer anywhere. The lucky thing was that the person who was doing some editing assistance, he was supposed to be on a tour of Europe but the hadn’t left yet. So he had the physical copy, and I had to retype some things. That was a blessing, but it was a very interesting journey.
What I’m working on right now, this was a book that was conceived a long time ago. So it’s not new, but of course you don’t want to just take your old poems and throw them up in the air. So, reevaluating the original concept – because it’s a concept piece – Afro-future, Afro-fantasy poetry, along with the visuals. Not all my writing fits within that theme. So that has meant looking through, there are some things that naturally came from that. Obviously I wouldn’t be doing a book like that if I didn’t have material that fit that. So there were some things that naturally fit in there, and there were some things that I put in, as well as writing some things towards it, but making sure that the old things fit me now, as I’m producing it now. So that has been a process. I finally just assembled a working manuscript; it’s definitely not in its final space at all, but to at least give to the visual artist to figure out how we’re going to put it together.
I read that you previously lived in both Philly and DC. What led you to land in Baltimore, and how do you see this city as a space for creating art?
I used to live in St. Croix, Virgin Islands. So when I came to Philly there was a lot to adjust to. That kind of city is a whole different vibe. I think my perspective at this point would be more through traveling, when I look at Baltimore. Of course, the different places I’ve lived have affected who I am, but my perspective on Baltimore, as an artist, comes from being blessed to travel while living here. Within the United States, places like Atlanta have greatly influenced me. My work here, in New York, and then traveling internationally to places in Europe and Africa, and the Caribbean.
When I look at Baltimore as a city for art – I’m actually making a playful documentary on that now; it’s called Already – it’s about doing art here. But one of the things is that a lot of people complain about things in Baltimore, but they’re not unique to here. You know there’s just certain things that go with being an artist in spaces that are not necessarily respectful of humanity or are not necessarily respectful of art. So for example, going to London, there are a lot of big artists definitely compared to Baltimore City, but the local artists envy what we have here because they feel like there is more space for independent local artists versus there, where if you weren’t big you didn’t have as much of an option. So being able to see what some of the values are here, the fact that it’s situated on the East Coast in a very unique place which is not just part of Baltimore’s art history but its history in general, its unique role from the Civil War on through to commerce, and ideas exchanging, and being able to travel very shortly in any direction and hitting another city. There’s Philly, New York, Richmond, DC, I can have a career even in connecting those cities together. So I know a lot of artists who definitely make that a big part of their reality, which is a benefit of being here. And the fact that Baltimore is very authentic and not really very impressed with very flashy things or big things, it's kind of like ‘what have you done for me lately?’ – that’s what people want to know. And I feel like it’s very intimate, the reality that you can travel twenty minutes pretty much anywhere. It’s a big/little city thing. So being an artist here, how place affects my art?
Yeah, or maybe just how you see the artist community in Baltimore. Actually, a question that came up in another interview was whether or not there is a place for such a term as the ‘Baltimore community’ or ‘Baltimore artist community’ or is it not as singular as that?
Yeah it definitely is not singular, but as somebody who has worked in the past to be a uniting entity – I used to have an organization called Poetry for the People, and we used to do something called the People’s Poetry Awards. That was born out of that wanting to unite people. We went to a conference in Atlanta about building scene, and one of the things that we talked about was these people that had this divisiveness, you think that what you’re doing is so important – it’s kind of like cereal companies fighting and people just decide to eat eggs and bacon. They don’t have to choose either of those choices and you just kind of turn them off with that sense of division. So that was one of the ideas, it was about bringing things together. It was a lot of really wonderful work, because there’s a reason why things are separate – meaning, I don’t think there should be one place where people can go hear poetry, they need the different spaces to breathe and live. And then, to kind of open people up to the different definitions of poetry, because here’s the academic community, here’s the hip-hop inspired community, and going from poetry that originally was oral, then back up to what poetry is now and what it should do for people and trying to connect with different communities to different levels of success. One of the things that we would do is that we would come up with these five categories and we would go to different venues, so we had to do a lot of research and relationship building to figure out what were all the different things happening in the community, happening in Baltimore, but that work was very good and fruitful. To get to know people who I would never know otherwise, and to connect with them. So we don’t do that anymore, but it was a good experience in trying to bridge all these different genres and communities, erotic poetry, slam poetry – all together in one room. And I realized that there were some similar and different challenges among those different communities.
So going off of that, Poetry for the People could be considered a grass roots project - you were voted Best Grass Roots Poet in the Baltimore City Paper in 2002. Can you tell us a little bit about how you define the term “grass roots” in the context of your poetry specifically, but also perhaps within a greater context of poetry in Baltimore and the poetic community at large?
That’s kind of funny, because I think that people are trying to figure out language for what it is that I do. For example, my degree is in engineering, it’s not in language. And that was kind of on purpose, meaning that I chose to cultivate another side of myself – and taking creative writing in college was an interesting experience, originally I didn’t want writing to by my profession because I didn’t want to ever have to do it, if that makes sense. I didn’t want it to be corrupted, which is kind of why I got out of engineering too, it felt corrupted.
So grass roots – people have struggled to classify, I understand the need to classify, I understand the human need and the capital, marketing driven need to classify things like music and art and poetry. So, I think that grass roots was a way to do that. Some people will say for performance-based, things like spoken word or slam poetry. I wouldn’t consider myself either one, but not in a bad way, I don’t think it would be an insult. A ‘spoken word’ category isn’t exclusive to poetry. Some people felt that it was inelegant, as poetry started off as an oral tradition, before there is writing there are many more traditions and cultures that don’t write and they all have poetry. Being able to define what you do, because I’m an independent scholar and I’m not sanctioned by anybody. I would say that I’m sanctioned by my community, so that’s where grass roots comes from. If I am able to put out a book it’s because the community has said ‘we want to hear what you have to say’, it wasn’t a publisher saying ‘I deem you worthy’ or getting a degree, or coming though an institution.
Was there a moment that you really decided to pursue writing/performing? After going to school to study engineering what, if there was something specific, made you turn your energy back towards artistic pursuits? Or was it more of a natural progression?
Yeah, I mean, I definitely have evolution revelations. I don’t know if they’re moments, so much as sometimes there’s a recognition – that okay, this is my life or this can be my life. Writing is something that I did without anybody making me do it, that’s why I was saying I kind of always wanted it to be that. You know, I’m an engineering major but on Friday nights I’m like ‘Yes, I can write.’ That was exciting to me to do in my spare time. Life is very different now, I have to write – but I still like it. But the idea that I could actually do that with my life – I had some similar revelations with teaching. I had a very horrible first year being a public school teacher, but even still, I remember watching some movie and the revelation that I’m supposed to be a teacher. Like I couldn’t avoid it even though I stepped away from that. And partly, that was because I couldn’t conspire with the system that is Baltimore City Public Schools. Even after that, though, I still had this revelation that this is supposed to be part of my life. So yeah, at some point writing evolved into that as well. I couldn’t bring myself to write my statement - I was supposed to be applying for grad school, for engineering. Everything was a lie, I couldn’t bring myself to say it. So I just thought I needed to take some time. I was working at Hopkins as a research assistant at the time, and the professor kind of guaranteed that I could go there for grad school. I think I really wanted to go to Georgia Tech, I did an internship there, I did and internship at NASA, there were a lot of things that were possible, but I just couldn’t bring myself to write my statement. So that was one clear thing that it was not moving forward. I ended up teaching, and through a friend of mine who was also in my science scholarship at UMBC, I kind of casually ended up selling CDs for them. I’ll say casually because he was a bio-chemist who was also a trumpet player. So he also defected into the arts, out of being turned off by the medical industry as well. In the end, things kept pulling me to writing. The whole time I was in my dance company, I was writing. So I still intend to use engineering – I don’t know, I’m a complete person and I use myself every day, however you want to look at it.
Caroline Preziosi is a student in The Writing Seminars at Johns Hopkins University.
