Exploring the Black Erotic: An Interview with Luther Hughes on A Shiver in the Leaves
I’ve always thought of Luther Hughes as a keystone in our contemporary poetic moment. There are few as dedicated to the good work of celebrating others as Luther, and I’ve been both grateful and inspired by their commitment to accessible literary spaces. I’m just trying to be like Luther when I grow up.
So, when their debut full-length, A Shiver in the Leaves, finally arrived in the world, I jumped at the opportunity to read, to, as I saw it, return my reading of it to the literary landscape in a small model of the love Luther shares each month. I am delighted to report that I found among those pages the same compassion and care Luther shows others is alive in their work. It is this profound love that guides, complicates, and uncovers surprising revelations in a precious consideration of race, belonging, nature, and desire.
–Diamond Forde
Diamond Forde: Luther, you take no language for granted. A Shiver in the Leaves startles, its narrative eye both wounded and wounding. One of the central themes of the book, what Carl Phillips described in the Foreword as the book’s instinct to “plumb the depths of what it means to be Black at all,” surprised me in its unerring mark on the seemingly intrinsic relationship between Blackness and death.
In the opening poem, “Tenor,” the speaker confesses, “I have wanted / nothing / to do with blackness / or laughter / or my life.” And in the titular poem when the lynched man speaks, “Like you my beauty takes the kingdom of blackness,” the collection opens a lexicon of “black” that is both kinship and destiny—we live in a world where blackness alone is enough to condemn us to death.
Still, what I admire most is that, in this same poem, you push for a new narrative where “everything black around [us] lives”—a connotative understanding of Blackness that privileges life, survival, and resilience, even in its impossibility: “I know he is dead, nothing will change” you write in “A Shiver in the Leaves,” “but still I whisper in his ear, / Breathe. I want you to breathe.”
Luther, I can only scratch the surface of all of the definitive explorations of blackness you unravel here. Tell me, has writing A Shiver in the Leaves evolved the ways you write about and through race? How do you think A Shiver in the Leaves defines, or redefines, Blackness? Or is “definition” even the goal at all?
Luther Hughes: Wow, thank you for this. If I’m being honest, I didn’t set forth redefining Blackness when I sat down to write these poems and then when shaping the book. However, to me, Blackness is somewhat undefinable in the sense that it is so expansive. This is not to say that it has no boundaries or that anyone who isn’t Black can and should access it. I think because in America, Blackness is so inherently bound to “American-ness,” that as a society we forget—whether consciously or unconsciously—that Blackness is a tangible and real thing; “Blackness” to a lot of people is “supposed” to be for “everyone” and at the same time it’s not the “status quo.” These things, I think, and others is what makes Blackness almost hard to define or creates multiple meanings—which I love and also loathe when it comes to non-Black people trying to access it and also disregard it. Nevertheless, in A Shiver in the Leaves, these complications or my own hangups on Blackness comes through in many poems and because I have a hard time placing Blackness, it makes sense that the poems in the book also wrestle with it. The line you mentioned in “Tenor”— “I have wanted / nothing / to do with blackness”—is important to have in the first poem because it’s my real and honest feelings; there have been times that “Blackness” and “blackness”—conflating the two here now—have been hard to reckon with for the many reasons I listed above, but also because as a queer Black person, I’m often forced, encouraged, or expected to disregard my Blackness and my blackness (dark thoughts, anger, etc.).
Diamond: I have to say the voice you’ve created here is so intimate and so vulnerable. Your engagement with the erotic reminded me of Anne Carson’s triptych exploration between lover, beloved, and obstacle.
To (grossly) paraphrase Carson in Eros the Bittersweet, there’s no desire without an obstacle, no yearning without a boundary the lover and beloved must cross.
It seems to me you complicate that dynamic, instead imagine the obstacle as something passed between bodies as easily as desire.
In lovemaking, we lay our burdens at another’s altar awhile. Sometimes the exchange is love-honeyed, like the homeworld of “Making the Bed.” Sometimes the exchange is just necessity, like in “The Dead are Beautiful Tonight”: “He wants another hallelujah / in bed with me and I don’t blame him. / Our lives are so ridiculed with pining.”
Luther, is desire an obstacle? Or, in another way, what do you imagine is the greatest obstacle to the speaker’s own fulfillment of desire in a poem like “The Dead are Beautiful Tonight?“
Luther: I’ve never thought of desire as an obstacle. Because my history with desire is complicated given rape and molestation at various times in my life, I’ve always thought desire was just there no matter what. Now, of course, as I got older, I realized that desire can lead to unhealthy and dangerous experiences like rape and molestation, and can also lead you down a path of curiosity that ultimately might not be good for the body, the mind, etc. However, I like desire and I like how my body responds to it. I like what desire leads me to think. I like how desire expands my thinking on the world and how the world should interact with me, and I with it. I like what desire leads me to write or do for the sake of writing. Not to say I only act upon desire so I can knock out a poem or two, but I like that I can lean on those experiences to write through other things like suicidal ideation or love or nature or anything else. With me, desire, also isn’t just about sex either. Desire is a strong want for something or someone. In the book, I desire beauty. I also desire death. I desire resilience. I desire peace. And because I think of desire as multifaceted, I wanted to write a book that complicated desire beyond sex, while also still saying, “I like sex, and I wanted to have it a lot.”
Recently, I did an 8-week workshop about sex poems and each class, I strived to remove the idea that sex poems offered a theoretical approach to sex and desire; I truly believe that a “successful” or interesting sex poem doesn’t offer theory, but instead offers insight—it’s not often why sex is important or not, but why the speaker or situation is happening, and how. I enjoy writing about desire and sex because of the “how.”
Diamond: I loved the depth of influence Seattle carried in the collection, Luther. It felt complex. In one instance, Seattle threatens—a woman hurls slurs at a bus stop. In another, the mountainous landscape feels like a cage. Then another, the city “begs me to live.”
There seems to me a resonance in the complexities of the Seattle landscape with the speaker’s relationship to America post 9/11, a topic explored in the latter portion of the book. Can you speak more to what motivated Shiver’s layered exploration of belonging?
Luther: It’s funny because I never considered myself a poet that writes about home and belonging, but obviously the book says otherwise, lol. Anyways, I think what I wanted to accomplish by writing about Seattle in the ways that I did—acknowledging it as a place of trauma and also swooning over its beauty—is that home is a complicated place for many people, myself included, and this idea of wanting a home or somewhere to belong is as complicated, maybe even more so if the place you want to belong to is riddled with personal traumatic and historical history. And, while the book seems to be “anti-American” as it explores the different ways America has treated people wrongly, specifically Black people, it’s also outlining a sort of care for America—the speakers in this book wants to live and belong to a place that recognizes them as who they are without threat. It’s—well—complicated. In fact, I haven’t fully thought about this until now and am still thinking about this, which I think is evident in the ways home is addressed; the speakers haven’t settled on how they feel about their home and where they belong.
I also found it fun to wrestle with these things and explore Seattle’s charm—its landscape and cityscape. I’ve said this in a lot of other interviews, but Seattle really is beautiful because of how nature and the city collaborate.
Diamond: Also, can I say how much the poem “(Black)Boy, Revisited” floored me? The formed engagement with the search engine was handled so deftly. When the first section of the poem turned to imagine how the search suggestions might read after your own death, Luther, I wept.
You captured so succinctly another manifestation of how anti-blackness lives inherent even to technology; how an innocuous search tool governs blackness, whittles Black life into a handful of boolean terms—the poem is as devastating as it is insightful.
I wonder how you saw yourself engaging with form in the book? Whether other tools of technology influenced how you approached writing, and how much you think we should consider technology as a factor in illustrating the internal and external landscapes of gay Black men?
Luther: That poem in particular was actually the last addition to the book; however, it wasn’t the last poem written. It’s a poem that was written many, many years before the book was even picked up for publication and as I finished my edits, I remembered the poem and immediately saw that it was needed in the book. Another reason I included the poem was somewhat because of what you’re saying. I needed a poem that add some surprise and some structural differences, but also a poem that directly talks about my possible death and how people might “research” my untimely event. As weird as it sounds given the book is very vulnerable, it wasn’t enough to say, “I want to die,” I needed to directly place myself somehow in the things I’ve been talking about throughout.
When I think about how technology plays a role in the book and ultimately in how people learn about Black death, I think about where I fit into this phenomenon of “research” or learning about these events that are specifically tied to violence and police brutality. I mean, like many Americans and possibly just people across the globe at this point, I researched killings and murders and read articles and listened to clippings and watched videos and immersed myself in this for many years thinking this was the way to go about writing about these deaths that were obviously affecting my life and my own mental health. So, I, too perpetuated the discomfort of Black people seeing other Black people murdered for the sake of knowledge. And at the same time, I wanted to reshape this in my book, which does use technology as a way to think about these things. I’m thinking of, for example, the poem about Trayvon Martin or the poem about 9/11, in which there are speakers who consistently rewatch or re-listen to deaths. It was, however, important for me not to necessarily rehash so much of these deaths and killings within the poem but focus on my own feelings about those events. It was important for me that I wasn’t retriggering people.
I also want to point out that technology is also a benefit. And it allows those under attack to be seen and heard and creates a space for collective knowledge. This is also the case, I think, for how people learn more about themselves, who they are, and who they want to become.
Diamond: Finally, Luther, thank you so much for ending the book with tenderness. In the final moments of the collection, you extend a literal and metaphorical hand to your audience. I can’t help but be taken with how much tenderness such an act takes.
You have shown, Luther, just how tenderly you can hold your audience. How can your audience hold you with tenderness right back?
What I mean is, if you could ask one thing in return from your readers, what would it be? What do you think could be exchanged in the landscape between reader and poet?
Luther: This is such an interesting question—I absolutely love it. I think what I want from my readers is one, their time, care, and attention and think about what it means to “attend” to poetry from queer Black poets. I also want readers to walk away with some sort of inspiration to be vulnerable to and to be tender and understand or think about both as an act of healing if they feel they are ready to do so. Vulnerability is great when you’re ready and it can be detrimental if you force it before so. I think I want people to walk about with wanting more time with who they are and who they want to become. I want people to just live.
About Luther Hughes
Luther Hughes is the author of the debut poetry collection, A Shiver in the Leaves, (BOA Editions), and the chapbook Touched (Sibling Rivalry Press, 2018), recommended by the American Library Association. They are the founder of Shade Literary Arts, a literary organization for queer writers of color, and co-hosts The Poet Salon podcast with Gabrielle Bates and Dujie Tahat. Recipient of the Ruth Lilly and Dorothy Sargent Rosenberg Fellowship and 92Y Discovery Poetry Prize, their work has been published in The Paris Review, American Poetry Review, Orion, and more. Luther was born and raised in Seattle, where they currently live.
About Diamond Forde
Diamond Forde’s debut collection, Mother Body, is the winner of the 2019 Saturnalia Poetry Prize. Forde has received numerous awards and prizes, including a Pink Poetry Prize, a Furious Flower Poetry Prize, and was a finalist for the 2022 Kate Tufts Discovery Award from Claremont Graduate University. A Callaloo, Tin House, and Ruth Lilly Dorothy Sargent Rosenberg fellow, Forde’s work has appeared in Boston Review, Obsidian, Massachusetts Review, and more. She serves as the interviews editor of Honey Literary, the fiction editor of Nat. Brut, and she lives in Asheville with her partner and their dog, Oatmeal.
