Interview with poet Terry Blackhawk

Terry Blackhawk is the founding director of InsideOut Literary Arts Project in Detroit and award-winning poet. She is the author of five books of poems, most recently The Dropped Hand and Escape Artist.


From your collection, The Dropped Hand, there is a poem “Everything about Elephants” with a complex, layered narrative. How do you construct a poem like this? How do the layers arrive in a poem like this; are they chosen deliberately beforehand, or is it more associative?

I would say the process is more associative, with the triggering event (in this case the elephants) leading the way as the poem opens and unfolds.

In “The Dropped Hand” you have constructed a poetic sequence using both numbers and titles. Why do you title the sequences? How does a poem determine this type of transition?

I pared the sections down to 12 because of the numerology of it. I mean, some personal numerology. The mix of 3 and 4: three as a spiritual number, four being the number of completion, of endings. (Someone told me this once…I’m not sure where it comes from, maybe Jungian symbolism.) The four corners of the coffin appear in the poem. I am also one of four siblings. I really like the little sub-titles; they slow down the poem and sound notes that I want the reader to savor. I also think the segments capture the disjointedness of grief.

The speaker of the poem “Here. There. Here.” plays with a sense of time in a unique way, both structurally in the title of the poem with the periods in between words and in the poem with the all capitalization of certain words. Why these choices in a poem?

This is a somewhat comic poem, for me. The guessing game that I now need to play with my stroke-disabled father being analogous to the guessing game of learning to read, and the capital letters being the text of my first reader, which add to the irony of my father’s map-hopping. The rhythm of the poem is deliberately choppy. I used the period to separate and give a sense of finality as well as humor in the title.

In your collection Body & Field, the poems “Pegasus” stands out because of its unique use of white space. Can you explain your aesthetic in this piece? Is a choice like this based on lyricism or content, or both?

I wanted this poem to give a feeling of flying, the flying of a young child in her unconscious sexuality, and the mythical flying horse. The press actually ‘dropped’ a couple of words when the book went into print and so the stanzas are not exactly as I wanted them to be. There are 3 or 4 “widow” words that got misplaced typographically.

I’m not sure if there is a difference between lyricism and content, rather I feel that form and content need one another. Sometimes finding the form will help push the poem forward. It’s been a number of years, but that may be what happened in this poem. That is, you get a pleasing stanza arrangement, for example, and then write toward that.

Other poems in this collection, such as “Birthing the Minotaur” are ekphrastic. How is writing in response to art different from other subject matter?

I’m not sure that ekphrastic writing is really all that much different from other subjects. It gives you some ready-made imagery (this is giving away a secret!) or content, if you delve into the artist’s life as I did in the Emily Carr sequence in Escape Artist. The artwork – or rather your experience of it -- can be so rich and absorbing. You might want to look at my essay in Third Mind (from Teachers & Writers Collaborative) on ekphrastic writing. One of the key ideas in ekphrastic work, for me, is ‘entering’ -- that is, one makes an imaginative entry into the work, or into one’s meditative experience of it. In that way, one ‘enters’ any subject, to explore it and figure it out, and make something out of it.

I am interested in how you generate content as a poet? Your poems read as both lyrical and linear narratives. Where does the material for your poetry originate; do you ever struggle with where to get material?

It’s hard to say where poems come from, although I will say they often come from peripheral places, not from something one looks at head on.

Can you talk about your InsideOut Literary Arts Project, which brings writing to schools in Detroit. What is the mission for a program like this, and what, if any, is the impact of this project on your poetry? Also how is this project beneficial for post MFA graduates?

InsideOut’s mission is to bring the pleasure and power of poetry to young people in classrooms in Detroit, primarily. Our website www.insideoutdetroit.org gives a full picture of this work. We believe that poetry has a special power in reaching young writers. I have written some poems out of the experience of teaching, because the classroom is such a creative place…when it’s not too exhausting!…but being an administrator and grant writer has pulled me away from my own poetry…or at least it has driven my poetry underground. InsideOut is a founding member of the national WITS (Writers in the Schools) Alliance, which is a growing movement that has the potential for offering employment to writers with MFAs.



Be sure to catch Terry Blackhawk's reading Wednesday, March 26, 2008 at 2:30 pm in the Wick Poetry Corner on the second floor of the KSU library.