The Poetry Closet: Robert Lashley
I don’t want the Nobel prize.
I want to be like my Uncle Moe.
It’s June-month on the little rock…
mostly covered with water and since it’s the last Sunday of the said time period there’s another episode of The Poetry Closet. I don’t got much to say about life in the physical Poetry Closet, other than that I got my second vaccine shot and was out of it for a few days. Meanwhile volume four of my ‘nights since’ project got printed and a couple of boxes of books are on their way to Portland-town. Ah! And I got my copy of Robert Lashley’s new book Green River Valley and got to attend the book release zoom—so that’s the highlight of the month. It is quite a good and beautiful book published by a gem of a small press—Blue Cactus Press. The book is a poetic hymnal, poems that leap off the pages and make you sing them, a tribute to life, all of life, in the best way that poetry does that. Yeah. Get a copy.
You may notice a trend here—I really like the poets who I interview for this column, as poets and as people. I got to meet Robert in the Before-Times when I had the chance to perform at Bellingham’s Alternative Library and was in town for a couple of days. Before the show we sat at a coffee shop and time passed too quickly. Next time was in Portland for Robert’s feature performance at Wordlights. I remember making sure I got myself a copy of the little chapbook Robert had before the show and the thrill of having the three poets, whose work I enjoy and who enjoy each other’s work, perform features that night. May those times come again. Now one of the poets that night was none other than Sam Preminger and knowing that we both would love to ask Robert questions we decided to figuratively cram into the tiny closet and share today’s episode. So just imagine three poets in a tiny space, drinking good coffee and chatting as though our time is limitless.
Here's The Poetry Closet Episode 5 with
Robert Lashley
(and Sam Preminger)
Igor Brezhnev: What is your “poetry closet”?
Robert Lashley: I first have to talk about what I need on my desk. There is always good juice, good coffee, quality fried food, or some sweets. There are always notes I took on books while taking public transportation, as well as books I need to read to help me in a specific project. When my laptop is closed, I'm reading something. When it is open, I am either writing, putting on music for someone, or in various states of cannabis trying to make someone laugh or smile. When I am seriously working, I put in 4-8 hours a day, in 40/20 minute work rest intervals.
I use facebook as an extension of my big mama and mama’s kitchen table. Those were the only places where I found stability and solace as a child, and all those places had...good juice, good coffee, quality food, books, and music. I look at my routine as a daily act of homage to them as well as extension of their traditions.
IB: What are your hopes for your latest collection, Green River Valley?
RL: Call me crazy but I think I've obtained them? I wanted a book that readers recognized as a progression in my career as a writer, and I got that. I wanted work that my Community and communities outside saw as genuine quality, and I got that. My most desired goal is to be an elder, to pass on the tremendous knowledge that people gave me. With such a great press in my hometown, I'm on my way to do that. I'm not a hermit or 100 percent into the Clifford Sill anti-fame thing, but the only thing I've really used my expanded profile for is to take nice trips, eat food, do great shows, pay forward what I learned, and hang out with friends.
I think of my Uncle Moe, the most fluent poetry scholar I ever knew. I learned everything from the “Canon” to an extensive history of African American poetry. However, he could talk about poetry that could draw you in, that could make poetics seem exhilarating. That’s what I want to be as a poet. I don’t want the Nobel prize. I want to be like my Uncle Moe.
Bob’s Bar-B-Q Pit Nightscape
The side fryer crackles
against the evening ice currents.
The wind’s benign razors
straighten a city block
as a Sunday night line forms.
Hambone, hambone where you been?
Under uneven December spice clouds
the table is the unseen star.
Constellations of the side fryer
appear, then disappear
by the smoker’s sodium sky.
Hambone, Hambone, where you been?
Beside the inside cook’s alchemy
the wall painting mirrors.
Blues and yellows coordinate
with rack Sunday dresses.
Red and gray lapels
make priceless the Sunday bests.
Tones illuminate in watercolor witness
shape, movement, and rite.
The procession braces from another
blast. They rub their hands in the ice
drafts
to get their daily meat and bread.
They put their palms toward each
other then in and out of their pockets
in a glimpse toward home in the concrete.
Hambone, Hambone, where you been?
All around the world and back again.
Hambone, Hambone, what you do?
Fixed you a sandwich. Eat some food.
Sam Preminger: The language and form you evoke in Green River Valley is often reminiscent of authors such as Eliot, Yeats, Pound, or H.D. — all white modernists who held heavy sway over American poetics. What led you to want to apply these approaches to a body of work focused on contemporary Black experience?
RL: There is a lot of truth in this question, but it doesn't cover the entire waterfront of my style as a poet. Hilltop and greater Black Tacoma had so many mythologies forced down their throat by the media, government, and the general pacific northwest public who would come to the neighborhood to extract something from it. Because of that, I had a burning desire to create poems that completely centered my neighborhood, ones that avoided easy slogans and the prescriptions of spokesmen, ones that didn’t tell you but just were.
So yes, I consider myself a modernist, and yes a lot of my language is influenced by the general masters of the form. But what I would add to your question is a second look at my poems would show that I am not the most deferential student of them. I would also recommend some more modernists to re-read, those I have more kinship with than Eliot, Yeats or Pound (I like H.D). There is W H Auden, Margaret Walker, and Delmore Schwartz; lyric poets who had as much referential depth as Yeats and had more of an empathy toward the human condition. There is Sterling Brown and Melvin Tolson, who had a Hurstonian sensibility in that they saw nothing about black life that wasn’t worth great art. Most importantly there is Gwendolyn Brooks, who’s constantly used the long poem to turn Eliot’s effete prejudices and pretensions on their ear, and made her Brownsville as vital a block as any place in the literary world.
SP: Thank you for that expansion and education. While reading, I also noticed that an atmosphere of loss and of cold haunts this collection. What ghosts followed you through its construction? Have those ghosts taken their leave since the publication?
RL: The ghosts are the people I knew in my old black neighborhood as I saw it. Hilltop is far from being majority black anymore, and there are people who are fighting to retain its culture and history. My poems are my quiet contribution to that movement, my way through aesthetic construction to both say goodbye to my neighborhood and it’s ghosts and keep them from being erased.
Why Uncle Moe Played the Washboard When He Had Health Problems
Consumed by the silences
between his descriptive verbs
he seeks pattern if not sound
the repetition of motion,
sameness in step beyond
the notes and figures of sorrow songs
a self-same order in ivory soap and metal
beyond his affected scales.
It is motion, intimate in fiber, cleanliness,
King James and the James cook whip
subside from the worries of his mind.
In his hands and the birchwood,
in the wood chips and his elbow grease,
Cypress lays down classmates
weevils and wilding thug are cropped
in a time and tempo greater all his.
His washboard is the reify
of the failure of words,
the sum of his landscapes, pressing
of his synonyms,
the margins of the delta at the feet of his syllables,
a region toward home that gives a sense
in circumference
to routine-fated days.
IB: What was your experience working with the Blue Cactus Press?
RL: Really wonderful. I read and appreciated Christina Butcher's work from afar, but when I picked up Still Clutching Maps at AWP I was floored. I was also floored when The Art Of Naming My Pain came out, as I am a huge fan of Kellie Richardson's work. And having them publish Gina Hietpas’s superb poetry collection, Jonah Barrett’s groundbreaking collection of speculative ghost stories, and Esther Vincent’s upcoming poetry collection further convinced me that I made the right choice to sign with Blue Cactus. That Tacoma has a press that covers the gorgeous mosaic of its city and has modernist writers who can reach the boulevard is something that still makes me giddy thinking about it.
Christina and Kate Threat were perfect editors to try to get my traumatized funeral brain back into shape. I felt like an interactive fighter trying to get the rust off, and like two great trainers, their critical eye helped me slowly sharpen my technique. I feel I have a wonderful future with them.
SP: ‘The OG’ becomes a mythic, almost biblical figure across your latest collection. How did the idea of ‘The OG’ arrive in your mind? How do you view their place in the book’s cosmology?
RL: In the aesthetical lens of repentance and forgiveness. When I wrote the poems that made my first collection (2014’s The Homeboy Songs) I had to get the blood out of my mouth in regards to the violence I experienced from folks in “That life”. To paraphrase James Baldwin, it was the first collection I had to write before I could write anything else. I won't apologize about anything I wrote in it. I had to alchemize the visceral cuts in blood in the art oh, so they didn't have a bunch of power over me.
I also knew, however, that I had to grow and process from that pain if I was going to progress as a writer. I knew too many people that were just caught up, that were wounded pre-teenagers either trying to find a parental figure or faced with terrible choices. I have an intimate knowledge behind some of those terrible choices because the cost of my refusal to be a part of that life was that I was forced to give head to two Piru’s on a regular basis. I felt so deeply for DMX, who was forced to smoke crack at the age of thirteen. Though we had different experiences, I knew what it meant to have a walking death sentence forced upon your brain.
So when I wrote about the Idea of the ex OG as redeemer, I wasn’t forgiving those two young men who forced themselves on me, nor was I forgiving the homies who would beat the crap out of me for being “soft”. What I was doing was to pay homage to the brothers I knew who were making a complex climb toward the light. I know a lot of brothers fortunate to survive being swept up by the game, who came out on the other side bereft of a debt they owe to their community. Was it their intention to run it up when they were younger? No, but the bill is still there, and there are layers to their noble efforts to make it right with the community. Through the alchemy of art and poetics, I was trying to honor the complexity of their experiences with the complexity of mine.
SP: These poems also routinely gesture towards the divine, asking questions of a god, imagining the life of a god, imagining what it might be like to be a god. This gets me wondering about the poet behind these words — if you could, would you want to be a god? What would be your domain?
RL: I honor Jesus, Buddha, Allah, and the many complex streams people take to come to the brook of their own spiritual truth. I sneer at god. I sneer at a white god. I think God is a crappy white father of a black son. God is the kind of white dad my mother punched in the 6th avenue BGO parking lot in 1987 because he couldn’t shut the fuck up about his militant child. His son’s a good brother, though.
You know god didn't raise his son up after three days. It's not his MO. It wasn't his MO in the sick ass last books of the old testament. It wasn't his MO with Mary (You know god needs to be pistol-whipped for the "virgin birth story"). You know the circle of Isis saw Jesus' momma, boo (Mary Magdalene), and the rest of the sisters in so much pain, then rose up from Egypt and pulled a 48-hour shift to summon their magic to have the brother get up and live a little while longer. You know god saw his son around the block and jacked the credit those sisters deserved to make him look better than he did ("Oh yeah, bro. I did it. I raised him up to show his sacrifice. MY NAME IS KIDDDDD....").
SP: How has your faith maintained these past few years? Did the writing of these poems factor in?
RL: I’m really trying to make peace with the spirits (outside of the aforementioned white god) Because of my episodes of self-harm, I have a rotten ticker. I take furosemide and metolazone to get the water that leaks out of my heart, and I have more yesterday’s than todays. I will never believe in organized religion, but I work every day to make peace with the spirits of the harm I have done to myself, and the poems are an extension of that.
Treatise on Metaphor in the Wright Park Wading Pool When the Proud Boys Are in The Area
The metaphors of the wading pool double.
Agonies of the gravel floors still call the south
in juxtapositions of fleeing and relief.
Exuberances in generations of pools
washed clean by god turned blind
are only invisible to the nihilist.
The sundials of church hats
become walking shadows
children’s runs to the water flash
are new then ancient.
Elders under the gray metal sprays
still dream of creeks without black bottoms.
No, dammit, no. I will not leave my pen.
I will not love the wound more than the mind.
I will not render my sense of the fantastic
into an altar for my scabs.
There is never a time to abandon the mind
under the northern Jackboot.
There is no time to abandon the mind.
I will write, dammit. I will write.
IB: What are the best, the worst and the weirdest moments of your poetry life?
RL: There have been times when I had more highs in a month than people had in their own lifetimes. Getting to know Jack McCarthy and his circle. Making so many people in my community proud of me and being a part of it-and my state’s history. Breaking down doors in being the first black poet in the state of Washington to have a bestseller. Connecting with so many weird, wonderful people in Boise, Ann Arbor, Columbus, Cleveland, Manchester, Boster, Worcester, Northampton, Portland (Maine), Charlotte, and Orlando. Experiencing how gracious and decent a person Lindy West was. However, I can hear Jack in my head tell me that I should pick opening for Sister Elder Selemah Joan Morris for the Western Literature Association Border Songs festival in 2014 — her literary witness to what she saw in first nation schools is something that every thinking person should read and respect, and it was the honor of my literary life that she wanted me to open for her.
The worst? Having my Mother, Uncle Mike, Uncle Robert, Aunt Willa, Aunt Essie, and my Elder Den Mother die in a short span while so many rage-o-holic social justice and anti-social justice poets were writing stories on facebook and online magazine about how I was this clubbable black conservative who wasn’t forwarding the cause. My life consisted of going to and from hospital and hospices, doing anything I can to take the pain of losing so many people, so fast and so many “activist” poets were saying that I was a token and an ornament who never challenged white supremacy.
The weirdest? Dealing with those aforementioned poets while also being doxxed by the proud boys/put on a local government watch list for being in Tacoma against Nazi’s and Disconnect white power.
SP: The book often returns to the biblical Ezekiel; a person said to be a prophet, and specifically, one who spoke about the difficulty of getting into heaven. Is Ezekiel, in the mind of this book, a gatekeeper? How else might the poems be thinking of him?
RL: I always found Ezekiel to be the prototypical cruel con artist with pretensions of piety. Huxley once said something to the effect of the truest thrill of the authoritarian was the ability to do heedless violence and get away with it, and you can see his archetype in literature from Eliot on the right to Baraka on the left. So I like to fuck with him in my poems.
SP: Many, if not all, of the poems here orbit the idea of ‘the river’. What, to you, does the river of this book embody?
RL: I see it as an inverse of Camus’s Sisyphean hill. Where Albert found meaning in human-kind pushing that boulder up, a lot of black folks in the Tacoma work to beat the manifestation of the blues in the seductive finality of the water. In many ways, the river is the finality of the great migration, the reminder that we don’t have another place to escape to.
SP: What were the hardest lines to write in the book?
RL: The last two lines to the LL graffiti poem. She was the best friend I have ever had. If she didn’t see me with a razor blade and semen in my mouth when I was 14, I would have died. I knew her from the bus and the gangster girls who would sit around me so that bullies wouldn’t kick my ass, but she saw me behind the big tree that is still at hillside terrace as we speak, with OG tom-dawg’s cum in my mouth, A sleeve with a razor blade in it, and my feet going to the trash weed abandoned shed that was once there, she knew that I meant business.
That day she took me to her grandmother’s house, got Safeway fresh-squeezed orange juice and vodka and taught me to drink it to get the taste of semen out of my mouth quickly. In the last months I was at that housing project she was my block mother (even though she was only two years older than me). Two years later, we crossed paths again at a church camp and she was my first sexual experience that I count. 12 years later, we got into an unbelievably complex, unbelievably sorrowful relationship, and one year after that six-year relationship, she died of a heroin overdose in Atlanta. One month after that, I almost died of a drug and alcohol overdose in Bellingham.
That poem and the last two lines are me processing the guilt of not being able to save her. We drank too much alcohol and did way too many drugs and it took something away from my health, yes. But she helped me face truths about myself that helped me keep living. She didn’t treat me like an unclean freak or prey for being a survivor. She didn’t demand the truth of my life from me, then run away when I told her. I was someone who ate my way out of being fuckable to my father, and she was one of the first people who ever told me that I was beautiful, that I didn’t need to lose 100 pounds and face night terrors that drove me to the point of suicide to be worthy of love. And I miss her so much. I haven't been the same person since 3:17 PM April, 7, 2014. I am trying to be better. I can’t tell you how hard I have been trying.
IB: What do you hope for your poetry to do in the world?
RL: To only connect, and make people feel less alone.
IB: What's next for you in your poetry life?
RL: To only connect, and make people feel less alone. Thank you for your questions.
The Poetry Closet is a semi-regular column of poetry and discussion, curated by Igor Brezhnev. You can reach Igor with inquiries, comments, and other messages pertaining to the closet at nailedpoetrycloset@gmail.com
Delve into the previous Poetry Closet, here.
Robert Lashley is a 2016 Jack Straw Fellow, Artist Trust Fellow, and nominee for a Stranger Genius Award. Robert Lashley has had work published in The Seattle Review of Books, NAILED, Poetry Northwest, McSweeney’s, and The Cascadia Review. His poetry was also featured in such anthologies as Many Trails to The Summitt, Foot Bridge Above The Falls, Get Lit, Make It True, and It Was Written. His previous books include THE HOMEBOY SONGS (Small Doggies Press, 2014), and UP SOUTH (Small Doggies Press, 2017). His latest book THE GREEN RIVER VALLEY, was released from Blue Cactus Press on June 17th, 2021
