An Interview with Karisma Price: Litany and Listening in “I’m Always So Serious”
Last year, I had the privilege of chatting with Karisma Price about her debut book, I’m Always So Serious. I’m So Serious, a three-part exploration of Blackness, community, public and private history—dazzles with its smart lists and carefully crafted personas. In our conversation, Price explores a connection to her New Orleans (and New York) community through landscape, repetition, and persona. Together, Price and I discuss why learning to listen in poetry is necessary, the movie In the Mood for Love, and what it means to take the greater risk of “tell[ing] the emotional truth.”
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Diamond: Thank you so much for this stunning book, Karisma. You give the poems in I’m Always So Serious an intense, cinematic quality, especially early on. I’ve decided it must be because of your lists. You work the hell out of a good list, Karisma. The books’ first three poems are all lists: “Self-Portrait,” the first “I’m Always So Serious” poem and “Things that Fold.” This rhetorical mode, paired together with the ways those three poems define and introduce us to speaker, family, community, and more, really had me thinking about litanies, in particular, their tie to prayer.
I don’t think the first three poems in the book are meant to be read as prayers, but they do have the power of creating reverence. It’s that reverence that made me feel like I was reading the set-up to something almost biblical. And how that reverence works both through and against loss! As the speaker says in Self-Portrait, “...something so dark you have no other option but to call it / precious;” that’s the landscape through which we first approach family, self, community, etc. There’s darkness and preciousness here. Can you tell me a little more about the instinct to make these three poems the opener of your book?
Karisma Price: For me, particularly with the “Self-Portrait” poem, this book is essentially a very revised version of my MFA thesis. You know, a lot of poems have been put in, taken out the order, rearranged—even the title is different. In my first year in the MFA program, I took a class called, First Books, where we would read the first book of a poet and then we got to ask them questions. And when we were starting our analysis, I don't know if it's true or not, but this is what my teacher told me: Usually, we put a lot of focus on the first and the last poems of the collections. And in the first poems, typically, we were taught that a lot of the book’s themes are going to be in that first poem, and we're going to see them echo throughout the rest of the collection. So, for me to open the poem with the “Self-Portrait” poem, the repetition, “As this, As this,” I feel like a lot of the important themes in there are the references to family, to New Orleans, to the speaker’s self-criticalness but also criticalness in observations about the world. I feel like a lot of the themes that I really wanted to stand out were in that poem, so I use that almost as a little appetizer for what's to come.
“I'm Always So Serious,”—again, I was going to say that's about Blackness, but I feel like most of the poems are.
[Diamond and Karisma laugh]
Karisma: You know, on Saint Charles Ave. in New Orleans we have very beautiful mansions. I wanted that poem to show literal feelings, but also, it's sort of a dream-like poem because it is talking about dreams and all the different versions of the speaker-self. For example, when you're out in the world– you're different from when you talk to your parents than when you talk to your friends– there's a different side of you. And I feel like showing different sides of, I guess, being—if that makes sense, the speaker could be the maid, the midwife, mechanic, all of that. So, all the different ways they can be, but it still wouldn't be enough to be in this giant mansion on St. Charles, in this very expensive, rich neighborhood. So, I guess I’m talking about inequality in a poem that's set in New Orleans. I have that poem talking about the houses with the “heartbeat running from what's behind it with the whip” because that area, especially Audubon Park nearby, used to be a sugar plantation.
Diamond: Hmm.
Karisma: So, I was meditating on the fact that it is a very beautiful neighborhood. I go to that park, you know. It's not that I avoid it or anything, but I deal with a lot, I think you can talk a lot about the history of a place, and its constant changing. And I feel like the houses are an example: they're very beautiful, older houses. Don’t quote me on this, I'm not sure if those are the historically protected houses where it's like, oh, you can't change this or this house, but it does represent a long history—
Diamond: Yeah.
Karisma: —of people in this city and the history of the city and the people that come and go. So, I felt that writing about architecture, and a house could show the history of a place, both past, present, and possible future.
“Things that Fold” is about Katrina. I wanted us to open– not just with the three poems– but the entire first section of the collection with the speaker. You get a one-on-one friendship with the speaker. They're guiding you before you get to sections two and three, which open up to more voices and more experimental forms. So, I wanted the speaker to feel grounding. Those three poems focus a lot on place and family and existence.
Diamond: That makes sense. You said, I think a phrase that might be a misremembering, but like the expansiveness of being, right? I really love that. And in particular, I was wondering if you think that might be influencing the lists that happen in these poems, too.
I talked a little bit about, like, the listing, in the first three poems, and how much that reminded me of the litany, not just in terms of the fact that we're kind of listing something, but there is a sort of reverence to it, right? There's a kind of, almost, prayer instinct or magic in the ways that you're listing, right? So, my question was how might the qualities of the litany (and whether that's the catalog, the prayer, or the reverence) inform your definition of community in this book?
Karisma: Oh. To answer a piece of it, I really like list poems. I sometimes get tripped up that there has to be a subject in the sentence, and I’m just like: let’s get to the predicate. I talk about this in another interview, if I can remember what I said—there’s a poem later in the book called “And,” which is also a listing poem, and I was talking about how, to me, as someone with anxiety, that listing—there's so much focus on that constant recurring, the repetition—repetition is very important to me—but to me, poetry is almost a prayer in general. When you write a poem, you’re very meditative—you sit and you talk with yourself or an extension of yourself, the speaker. It’s like a call-and-response to yourself.
With a family growing up in the Baptist church, what we do with music and repetition, songs and chants, I feel like a litany is important because it feels almost like a lullaby. It eases the reader in. You know that this is going to repeat and repeat, so there is some sense of what's going to happen, but there is a slight change. So, you are comforted in this way, but at the same time, I'm going to continue to give you something new, the repetition means something different each time as well.
So, with the litany, it almost feels song-like, it’s prayer-like, but I also just like listing the thing as it is sometimes. I don't feel like revving up—just here you go. I love a good list.
Diamond: Same, same, same.
So, you mentioned growing up in the Baptist church, right? And one of the next questions that I had for you, well, two questions that are engaging with “Buck Jump” in particular.
Karisma: Yeah.
Diamond: So, this question is about spirituality. Another reason I read this book and started thinking about prayer and reverence is because of how the book uses form. You explore a wide range of forms in this book, including an invocation of screenplay formatting in one poem, Hayes’ Golden Shovel in another. In the second section of the book, in particular “Buckjump” which you wrote, according to the book, “for the souls of the enslaved buried near the sugar cane fields in West Baton Rouge Parish” I want to, first, applaud the technical accomplishments in this poem! Through its use of consonance, white space, and even parallelism.
For those unfamiliar, parallelism is a sentence structure that uses syntax to bring attention to the relationship between ideas or objects. It’s a common feature in ancient poetry, Hebrew poetry in particular, which is why parallelism is a common convention in the Bible. You use antithetical parallelism in Buckjump, which is to say you use syntax and repetition to bring attention to the differences between an idea or object. For example, you write, “Everything left of the slaves: sugar. / Near the sugar, everything left.” Obviously, through repetition, we are meant to invoke a connection between these two lines. But where one line has a reductive instinct (reducing the enslaved into a legacy of sugar) the next line has an expansive instinct (they become “everything” instead).
There’s a spirituality to this work, not just in its use of spiritual conventions but in its return to and honoring of our ancestry, our history. Do you see spirituality—and that's however you define it because I know that spirituality has a kind of a broad stroke—do you see spirituality as a guiding force in this book and in what ways?
Karisma: Hmm. [pause] I'm going to say yes. A lot of the time, not all the time, but for me, sometimes spirituality is connected to music and the idea of sonic play. So, I would say yes, spirituality in regard to that, but also in regard to hoping for the best at the same time. I didn't realize until in revising—yeah, God is mentioned a lot in the book, too--so I do feel like there's this idea, this representation of a possible hoping-for-the-best or wanting. Whether it’s met or unmet, this want--this desire for things to get better—
[The connection disrupts here on our Zoom call. Karisma and I reconnect, and I catch her up on what she was saying.]
Diamond: So, one of the last things that you were talking about was that there is this kind of hope present in the book. That regardless of whether or not it is met or unmet, there is still this existence of hope and desire kind of, present. So, the question was, do you see spirituality, however you define it, as a guiding force in this book, and if so, in what ways.
Karisma: Yeah, that music! I think that's it. Poetry to me is a form, it feels like prayer, meditation, so whatever I said, I think that was it.
Diamond: It was a fucking fantastic answer, really. I was like, mmm. So, do you want to go ahead and jump into the next question, then?
“Buckjump” is what I would describe as a polyvocal poem. The poet picks up voices between the frequencies of living. It teaches us to pay attention to the supposed static. In an interview with Four Way Review, you said that “As poets, we have to be good listeners.” How do you practice listening in your writing, and what do you think good listening looks like in poetry?
Karisma: Oh, how do I practice listening?
Diamond: I think you're really good at listening in your poetry.
Karisma: Thanks! No, I appreciate it. For me, I feel like it’s a witnessing to things. I feel like a lot of times, growing up I was really shy, so I would just watch and observe a lot. I feel like I'm more articulate on the page than in person. So, for a listening poem, I feel like I like to listen as a person. I don’t talk much. I do more of the listening in conversations. So for me, just being aware of people and what they have to say because, I don't know, I'd like to be listened to and taken seriously, so I feel like I really want to do the same for other people, and because I'm writing not just about myself, but about cities, families—whether that's blood lines, you know, Black-people-play -cousins—Greek mythology, all that stuff.
It's not me, especially with persona poems, or when I include other people's voices in poems. You have to let go of yourself because it's not about you. So, I feel like the only way to accurately do that is by listening. But also, if me and you were at the park and something happened, and we both wrote a poem, the poems are going to be different even though we’re watching the same thing. So, I feel like I’m doing a disservice if I just center my voice because I don't think it's accurate to have one voice.
We see through the multitude of things, particularly colonialism, when things happen, there’s always a group of people that say, oh this is what happened. It’s like that proverb– I’m going to butcher it– but until the lion can talk, the hunter will always be the historian. Or something like that. But it’s like, you usually get one viewpoint, and I just don’t think that is accurate.
Sometimes, there is only one—well, I don't know if I believe that. I don't think there's only ever one viewpoint or one witness to something. Maybe it's just one person that speaks up. But I do think it's important to have as many voices as you can in the room because, as a poet, it’s not your job to just talk about yourself. Some of the poems can be about you or what you see through your eyes or whatever. But the poem itself is smarter than you. It needs to be better than the poet, and the only way to do that is to de-center yourself.
Diamond: I love that. I love that instinct of thinking about listening as like a tool of like checking the ego, but also, like, the colonial ego, right? Because I think we're all constantly and implicitly given route to these kind of colonial instincts, right? And so, like, thinking about listening as a kind of part of the process to unrooting that, seems really apt to me. I really love that. And I'm really glad that you brought in the persona poems as well because that question was deeply rooted in the engagement with the second and third sections, in particular, because of how many personas were there.
And as I was reading through these persona poems—you just kill these persona poems. And that’s why I think that listening is in your wheelhouse as a poet. I was wondering: you did this interview with your mentor and teacher, Terrance Hayes. And you both kind of talked a little bit about the difference between persona and realness.
So, the question that I want to ask you is, is there a greater risk in trying to portray the emotional truth over the factual truth (especially through persona)?
Karisma: That’s a good question. I do think emotional truth is sometimes more dangerous, but I’m going to still do it. It’s very vulnerable. I wrote a song two days ago. I watched In the Mood for Love for the first time a couple of days ago, and there's so much longing.
So, I wrote a song from the perspective of the character, and oh!… I'll give you the general plot without spoiling it. You find out in the beginning that a young man and a young woman in Hong Kong in the ‘60s are both looking for a room to rent for them and their spouses. They’re neighbors, and they become close because they realize their spouses are having an affair with each other.
Diamond: Oh! Okay! Sounds like an opportunity for a big poly family to me, you know?
[Both laugh]
Karisma: It does, but they weren’t in on it though.
Diamond: Yeah, the lies and deceit. [laughs]
Karisma: The woman’s like, “hey, my husband and I are looking for a room. He travels a lot, so it’ll mostly be me.” And then the man's like, “hey, I'm looking for a room. My wife works very long hours, so for the most part, it's me.” So, they become neighbors, but they realize, “oh, the husband isn't going on business trips” and “oh, the wife isn't working late at night.”
Diamond: Oh, no.
Karisma: Their spouses are having an affair with each other. So, they get really close. They're like, “how could they do this to us?” They don't have a physical affair, but they get really close, and they're trying to figure out why their spouses betray them. I think, over the course of the film, they have this very deep emotional bond. They’re basically having an emotional affair. They’re like “How could they do this to us? Oh, that'll never be us.”
So all that to say, I wrote a song about that. And it’s obviously not about me. I’m not married. I’m not out here having an affair. You know, for the record. But the idea that you can still feel those feelings…
Let me pivot back. When a songwriter is writing a song… if someone writes a song and then Beyonce sings, even though Beyonce may not have written the song, she's still going to sing it with all that emotion because it becomes her song when she puts her voice to it, and persona is all about voice. Even if it's not about you specifically, you still have to make a connection to that person. There's a reason why you chose that person, or place, or whatever noun.
You know, I have the James Booker poems. I have a poem where I make the characters from If Beale Street Could Talk the characters in The Odyssey. There is a specific reason why a writer chooses that person, why you have to use them as a vessel. The writer’s feelings project on another event or person.
When I was first writing poems, I only wrote persona poems because I didn't want people to learn about me because I was afraid people would be very judgmental. Obviously, I've gotten over that. I wrote a book.
[Diamond and Karisma laugh]
Karisma: But I really like persona poems because that's how I started off, and it takes a lot of convincing to make the voice sound real. Like, we both know it's not really them speaking, but it has to feel like it. You’ve got to do all these acrobatics to make the voice feel like them, even though it is you, and we know it is you. It's like when you're acting in a movie. We know that they're not really with spouses out there having an affair. They’re actors pretending to be these people, and through the use of set design, makeup, cameras, we know this is an actor, but for those two hours, this is So-and-So.
So, I feel like it might be a greater risk [to tell an emotional truth in poetry] because (and this is just an opinion) but as writers, actors, whoever—we can be our most truthful when we're not ourselves. Because you get to put on a mask. You're honest when you put on a persona, and for some of us it may take the pressure off. Especially when you’re thinking oh, well, they're looking directly at me, so I have to watch what I say. It opens up more room for playfulness and imagination, and with that comes risk. Because when you feel free, you probably feel more honest.
And people are going to be like, oh, well, this isn't about this person, but they wrote it from this person's perspective—I wonder why, what connection do they have to this person? How does that connection work? It’s a greater risk because I’m saying all of this, but I’m saying it under the guise of someone else, so I have to be convincing twice.
So that was a long answer. Hope that you can get something to grab out of that. [laughs]
Diamond: It was a great answer, though. Because you're making me really think hard about personas in like a different way because I'm used to thinking of the persona as the mask we put on, but as I'm hearing you kind of unpack it and go through it a little bit, there is a part of the poet that also becomes the mask too, right?
Like what is the poet’s investment in this character? What's the poet’s stake in this character? In a way we're also kind of putting a mask of ourselves on to another character at the same time as we're donning their mask. So that kind of reciprocity of masking—I'm going to be thinking about that for a long time.
[Diamond and Karisma laugh]
Diamond: So, my last question, Karisma, is what’s bringing you joy these days? How do you practice joy when you need it the most?
Karisma: Ooh. I think I need better practice when it comes to joy.
[Karisma and Diamond laugh]
Karisma: I was telling my friend last night, sometimes I feel like I'm waiting for this big thing to happen. You know, like anything else, it's a decision: joy is a decision, love is a decision, all those things. I mean, not that you can just do one thing, and it just works out perfectly, but it is a purposeful act. So, to bring myself joy, I want to take the time out to watch more movies and TV shows. When I watched In the Mood for Love a couple of days ago, that was the first time in a long time I was able to just sit and stare at something. Because I work: teaching and working on writing, I can’t just give my whole and undivided attention to something else even if I want to.
I noticed, recently, when I'm writing something or doing work, I have something on in the background, and it's something I've probably seen a hundred times, and it's like: when can I just sit and put my full, undivided attention on something that's not writing, for the time being. So, joy for me, is experiencing someone else’s creativity for a change.
Also, I really like bubble tea. So, bubble tea. [laughs] Bubble tea is great.
[Diamond and Karisma laugh]
Diamond: Thank you so much for giving me your time, Karisma. I really appreciate it.
Karisma: Yeah, thank you. Thank you for having me. Thank you for sitting down to have the interview– it's been great. You know, the book came out in February, Valentine's Day, and it's been getting much more attention than I ever thought it would. So, I'm very happy. I'm always happy to talk to somebody who likes the book.
About Karisma Price
Karisma Price is an assistant professor of English at Tulane University. A poet, screenwriter, and media artist, she is the author of I'm Always So Serious (Sarabande Books, 2023). Her work has appeared in publications including Poetry, Indiana Review, Oxford American, Four Way Review, Academy of American Poets Poem-A-Day Series, and elsewhere. She is a Cave Canem Fellow, was a finalist for the 2019 Manchester Poetry Prize, was awarded the 2020 J. Howard and Barbara M. J. Wood Prize from the Poetry Foundation, and is the 2023 winner of the Stanley Kunitz Memorial Prize from the American Poetry Review. A native New Orleanian, she holds an MFA in poetry from New York University, where she was a Writers in the Public Schools Fellow.
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.
