10 QUESTIONS for Meredith Nnoka

My first “real poem” was sort of a lengthy rant about the intersections of poverty and race in the U.S.—complete with shifting locations, perspectives, etc. Despite its now-outdated cultural references and overly ambitious project, I’m still oddly proud of it: it was the first time I felt like I got a poem right.

Home base for me is in the cadre of black male poets who’ve gained prominence over the course of my lifetime—Essex Hemphill, Terrance Hayes, Jericho Brown, Tyehimba Jess, etc. But recently I’ve tended to come back most frequently to poets who work with the subjects of love and loss (I’m thinking of Marie Howe and Craig Arnold, specifically), or people I know and love more generally (Laura Eve Engel, Henry Hoke, Jenny Johnson). In terms of prose writers, I’d probably cite Kevin Quashie’s book The Sovereignty of Quiet as the one that made me consider more carefully things like the interior lives of my characters, the power inherent in speaking for others, and the ethics of writing persona/research-based poetry.

Mainly education: I taught creative writing (songs and poetry) and ESL to high school students, both in the U.S. and for a bit in France, before settling into my current graduate program at UW-Madison.

Tons of things, but probably most strongly either a folk singer or a therapist. Poetry wasn’t really on my radar until college.

The two poems featured both appear in my recent chapbook, A Hunger Called Music, which is basically a short of history of black music told through persona poems. Music history is sort of my first love, and it was an actual dream to put my weirdly encyclopedic knowledge of black music to use through poetry. For “Race Music,” which is in the section on 1950s R&B, I felt I needed to talk about that genre’s most obvious tension—i.e., that most of that era’s greatest hits were either written by white songwriters or stolen from the original black artist by white producers and then given to white performers. For “Interview with Berry Gordy,” which appears in the soul section, it made sense to try and crack the emotional veneer of/give voice to one of soul music’s major tastemakers, particularly one who was skilled in the art of speaking on behalf of his company, alongside the voices of actual performers. So you could say that in both poems I wanted to address gaps in the chapbook’s arc, but also that I wanted to give a fuller picture of that portion of U.S. history.

Recently I’ve been writing a lot about my parents’ house in rural Maryland, off the Chesapeake Bay. When I think of looking outside, no matter where I am, I think of that water, and to that end it’s become an easy referent in my writing.

I usually listen to music that either evokes the feeling/time period I’m trying to capture in the poem or that includes interesting vocabulary I can pull from. When I was writing about black music, I listened pretty exclusively to the genres I was writing about—from sources such as the archival Lomax recordings (back to the idea of white producers stealing from black singers) or the Motown canon—and try to recreate that mood on the page. I felt like that attention to detail and tone, more than anything else, kept me honest. Now that I’m not working with a particular focus, most recently I’ve been listening a lot of solo women with guitars: Devon Sproule’s album I Love You, Go Easy, which is basically an album of really tender wordplay; Julien Baker’s quietly graceful album Sprained Ankle; and, nearly on repeat, Karen Dalton’s song “Something on Your Mind.”