“I Am an Experiment of Love”: An Interview with KB Brookins
“I Am an Experiment of Love”: An Interview with KB Brookins
KB Brookins is, without a doubt, a go-getter. With their award-winning debut collection Freedom House out with Deep Vellum, and their forthcoming memoir Pretty on the horizons, Brookins graciously takes a moment of our their busy schedule to sit down with me and discuss juggling multiple projects, learning how to rest, and the national disdain for the American South. In our Zoom conversation, Brookins and I also discuss how imagining a future for Black folks is an act of love, and the unspoken contract between poet and the audience.
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Diamond: Hello, Honey Listeners, I am Diamond Forde, and I am here with the ever-incredible KB Brookins, right—very excited to be here with you, KB. Thank you so much for giving me your time today.
KB: Of course, and thank you, you know, for asking me to be here. You know, I love your work and I love what Honey Literary does, so happy to be a part.
Diamond: I appreciate you. Okay, so I wanted to first start off by discussing that good, good work, KB. In particular, your poetry and all the recognition it’s deservedly receiving. I’m very excited about that. Freedom House is dropping so soon, so soon—it’s about three weeks away from the time of this recording—and I want to make sure I make space, first and foremost, to ask how you feel about your book journey so far. I mean, just last year you dropped your chapbook How to Identify Yourself with a Wound, and Freedom House—which is already winning awards, Honey Listeners—will be your first full-length collection, and I use the word first deliberately here, since I know we have so much more writing coming from you, including a forthcoming memoir, Pretty, which I know I will probably already be teaching in my classroom one day. Right, so this is definitely the era of KB and we’re all here for it. Meanwhile, you’ve been putting language to task out here. So how do you feel at this stage of your writing journey?
KB: Yeah, I mean, I appreciate you for asking and putting it in those things—because from the outside looking in it can look very like, “Ah, shit is happening for you,” and I’m like—I’ve been writing poetry since I was 15. Right? And you know, I’m 27 now, it’s been a very, like, on-and-off upward battle. Right? Cuz it’s like I had to, for a lot of years, fight impostor syndrome, which I’m sure like most writers are familiar with, like, what am I doing, why am I doing it, do I even know what I’m doing enough to make something be so bold as to make a book--
Diamond: Hm.
KB: And, I really had to for a long time with no recognition, with no guidance, have confidence—
Diamond: Mm.
KB: --and I guess that’s kind of like born seemingly out of nowhere, right? I’m lucky to on my journey have had, like, teachers and friends that have kind of encouraged me when the literary world wasn’t encouraging me yet. Right? So, you know, having these things now that I dreamed of having for years is really awesome. You know, I’ve dreamed of having a book. I’ve dreamed of having an NEA. I’ve dreamed of having publications at certain places. And I think it feels good because I know it took so long for me to get there. It took a lot of defining and refining my voice, finding my literary and world, local community, and it also took, really just believing even when it doesn’t make sense to most people. Right? Because it doesn’t make sense, especially in this economy. These conditions. To be like, I want to be a writer. But I had to just do it, you know? And I’m glad that, after all of this time, it’s happening. I feel like I’m in my 2015 Lizzo moment where it’s like, man, I been out here grinding for a minute. She’s another one of those artists where, she was out here for a minute, and I knew her before the fame and fortune of it all. So, I’m happy to be here, but I know very much that there’s still a lot for me to do, so I’m just happy in the moment and just looking toward whatever the future holds.
Diamond: Do you have a sense of whatever you want to achieve, book-wise, in the future? Do you have some projects on the horizon?
KB: Oh, absolutely. I’m a verbalizer, so it becomes real. But I know that I have this memoir coming out next year, Pretty, which you mentioned. Memoir on Black transmasculinity, which not a lot of things, at least in the memoir-world, exist like it, so I’m interested in just to see how that's received. And I'm going to put as much energy, and promo, and performance-wise behind it, to make sure that it's successful. I have another book that I'm working on currently that I'll be sending out, you know, in the coming years—once I get it to a place where I feel completely good about letting it go, if that makes sense.
Diamond: That makes sense.
KB: Yeah, and getting other eyes on it. It's not quite there, but I know it will get there. And I’m also just curious about other genres. You know, this summer I’ll be doing a short fiction workshop for the first time with American short fiction, just to see what that might bring about. I’m also reading up on screenwriting and being like, “Oh, if I wrote a screenplay—a feature or a pilot—what would that look like?” So, I’m in the moment right now where I, like, have a draft of something else and I think I need the draft to sit in order for me to have fresh eyes on it in the months later. So, while I’m in that place where like, I don’t have a “project”—I’m going to just be curious about other genres, read a lot, and see what I gain from that reading.
I’m reading a lot of amazing books right now. So yeah. That’s what the immediate future holds. I also have—and I’m kind of like veering into the art world and doing an exhibition based on Freedom House that will debut at a local gallery here in Austin, we’re I’m based, next year. That’s also exciting and something new, so I’m just trying to embrace trying new things at the moment.
Diamond: I love it. I love, too, how much of our conversation so far has featured thinking about work, and effort, and time, and all of the kind of pots you’ve been constantly putting your hands in, but also—time. This is your particular moment, your Lizzo moment, but it doesn’t undercut the work you’ve done to get here, and it doesn’t undercut the work that you’re going to be doing after. I really love how much you’re underscoring that.
In the vein of work, I also wanted to turn and think about rest. Just like being bold is a skill that we have to practice, rest is also a skill we have to practice. So, my question for you, is how do you maintain that intense and vibrant productivity but also rest—acknowledging that productivity isn’t always easy, right? In terms of that we always have these obstacles keeping us from being productive but, at the exact same time, if we don’t create space for rest, especially as a Black, queer, trans writer, if you’re not creating space for rest it can be even more exhausting. But at the exact same time, if we do rest—that can also seem precarious, right? So, like, figuring out—when do I be productive? when do I rest? is a constant kind of battle, and I wonder what sort of skills do you practice in maintaining rest?
KB: Right. That’s an interesting question. I’m thinking about it. For a long time, I feel like I wasn’t deserving of rest, almost. Because I grew up in a household where you have to work twice as hard to get half as much. I have old school parents, and they instilled that in me. And I had to, you know, lovingly be like—okay, this is not serving me though. Because if I’m tired all the time, if I’m, you know, frustrated about my circumstances, then I don’t know if I’ll be putting good into the world, in a literary sense, or in a person-sense. I feel an allegiance to my friends, my partner, my community, and I can’t really like put good into the world if I have all of this residual frustration inside me because I’m working too much. And, you know, I feel like life for me is just all about balance. I have to have—unfortunately for me, I don’t know if you believe in astrology, but I’m a Virgo, right? And when I tell people that they’re like, oh that makes sense.
[KB and Diamond laugh]
KB: Because I am, admittedly, very work-oriented, and I have my specific schedules that I like to maintain. But also, within those schedules have to schedule in unstructured time, and time to just do something that’s not going to advance me monetarily or anything like that. Just advance me as a person. So, I have over the past year or two years, become kind of a hobbyist where I have things that I do that I don’t feel pressured to be good at. Like, I love roller skating. Am I good at it? Can I do the whole dancing and jumping up stuff while I’m roller skating? Absolutely not. But I can solidly stay vertical without falling. [laughs]
Diamond: That counts!
KB: Exactly. I love to roller skate! I love to swim. Am I a good swimmer? No, but I can float, and I can hang out on a floatie with friends.
Diamond: Yes!
KB: Not going to be Michael Phelps-ing it at all. Not going to do laps with you. But I will just like, hang out in some water.
Diamond: Yes!
[KB and Diamond laugh]
KB: I like to do walks around my neighborhood. Luckily, there are lots of trees. And I have been, essentially over the past two years or so, been trying to learn more about my environment. Because I feel like because I work so much, and I come from a working-class background, I did not feel like the environment was mine, or I didn’t feel like I had access to the environment, really. Or that’s not something that’s important to me, but it’s become increasingly more important because we as humans have an allegiance to take care of what takes care of us. Right? Which are other humans as well as the environment. So, I’ve just been learning a lot because I’ve somehow come across the gays who really love the environment in my city that I live in. And just learning a lot from the people around me. And also, just like taking walks and not just zoning out the entire time. Like, looking and stopping when I see a tree, or when I see a bush, or when I see something that I like. And taking the time to, like, learn about it. I have this app—it doesn't always work, so this is not an ad, but I have an app called iNaturalist, and sometimes you can take pictures of things and it will tell you what kind of tree it is.
Diamond: ooh!
KB: Yeah, yeah—it’s really cool. And it will give you its best guess, but usually it’s pretty accurate. Um. So yeah, usually, I will stop and do that kind of stuff. I really try to plug in times to chill and do stuff that makes me happy, even if it’s something I can’t monetize or I can’t make into, like—I used to be the kind of person where everything I do, I have to be good at it. If I’m going to start jogging, I have to be doing half-marathons in the next year. But I can’t live life like that. I got to have stuff where there’s absolutely no pressure around it, and it’s just something that gives me joy. That’s part of my rest currently. I also just have a stand-in date-time with my friends and with my partner because it’s important to me to always be like nurturing those relationships. I’ve seen a million—a million—romcoms where, you know, guy gets left by girl because he just stopped paying attention, right? I think even you know, outside of the archaic romcom form, that happens in friendships as well. That happens no matter the gender of the people involved. I don’t want anyone to ever feel like I don’t care about them. And how I show care is through curiosity and quality-time. I try to have that standing appointment with me. Call my parents. Once a week call my grandma, so she can just, like, ramble—she loves to do that.
Diamond: Yeah?
KB: [laughs] So yeah, that’s rest to me. Having things where I don’t feel like I have to put on my armor. Oh, I’m this supposed-to-be-good writer, you know. Because then I bring all that pressure to the page if I don’t have enough time to just be regular.
Diamond: Mm. I love how much of your rest is defined by care and care for your community. It makes so much sense hearing you talk about rest and thinking about how much I felt love coming off of the page whenever I engage with your work. Is it okay if I talk about love a little bit with you, KB? Because I am the love professor at my university. I’m constantly making my students write love poems and think about love poems and read love poems, and it’s kind of corny, but it’s also true.
KB: Mhm.
Diamond: And when I read your work, KB, I can’t help but fall in love with the love in it, right? And I mean, June Jordan kind of tells us we need to be paying attention and asking ourselves, when we engage with a writer, where is the love? In particular, who is the writer expressing love for, right? Who is a part of their community? And in a recent interview you did with James O’Bannon for The Normal School, you discussed Afrofuturism. And in particular, it was in works like “Black Life circa 2029,” right? And in that interview, you acknowledged that poem was part of an attempt to manifest a realistic future, and I loved that you took the idea of “realistic” to task even in that interview. I really want to encourage our listeners to go and check out that interview with The Normal School that you did, but I also want to highlight what an act of love that poem is, even of itself. That the idea of creating a future is an act of love, right? An act of love that starts with the Self and pushes outward and builds community. So again, even when you’re talking about rest, it starts here and pushes outward, right? Do you see love as a motivating factor in your writing, KB? Is love an important element of writing?
KB: Yeah, I think it's a craft element of literary creative writing. I have to love the form enough to write into it, right? I love poetry. I love what it does. The fact that we're always in a conversation with history we're writing poetry. Who knew Willy Shakes---I don’t think he was thinking about, you know, in 2023—people are going to be writing sonnets. You know? But we are. And when the Epic of Gilgamesh, Homer’s Odyssey or the Iliad happened, I don’t know that they foresaw that we were still going to be talking about those things thousands of years later. I love that poetry is a form that honors history, and I’m always going to be doing that, and I always want to be doing that in my writing—and I think that’s an act of love, acknowledging what has happened before you.
One thing, I was having a reading with Roger Reeves, who is an amazing writer, love his work, he’s also my professor in grad school, and he said out of the poems I read at that reading, “You keep bringing up the word lineage. What does that mean to you?” And I think it’s like—well, in any poetry collection you can chart words that get repeated, and I know in Freedom House, “lineage” is one of those words. I love the people who had to do the things they needed to do in order for me to even exist. And I acknowledge those people, those poets, those Black people, those trans people, those Black queer and trans people—you know, I have to acknowledge them to say, I’m not coming out of thin air. I am an experiment of love that happened because people before me had the foresight to want to see a version of themselves in the future. And in “Black Life circa 2029,” I’m really trying to say, though that poem starts out deceptively simple, I’m trying to say that I want people in the future, even if I never get to meet them, to know that I love them and I love them enough to want to see a future without police and without the circumstances that I live in, because I don’t want my future or my present to be the Black trans teen that lives in 2029’s future. I think it’s like—I take my role as an artist, which artists are supposed to reflect back what is seen or what could be seen and what has been seen, I take that role as an artist very seriously. And I think I can’t really step into that role without starting with love, really.
And I think we should all be, even when we're writing about Black abjection, and even when we're writing about, like, hard shit. Like, one thing that Freedom House is, is like an exploration of like, really, you know, subjects that shouldn't be so politicized because it's just like, Okay, we need to treat people well. The ways that we treat people well is like going to reproductive rights, you know? Stop speculating about trans people and saying ignorant things, right? Like, stop, you know, brutalizing Black folks based on silly shit like the way that we look, right? They feel like very simple things to me, and I talk about those things, and it gets to be heavy, but I have to also weave into that like—I'm saying this because I love you, you know? And even when I'm in conflict with people in the book and in life, I'm saying, like: Once we get over this, we're going to be closer. We're going to know how to love each other better.
So yeah, yeah--I think that love is necessary and it's like required in the work that we do, in the work that creative writers do, in general.
Diamond: First off, and I might be misremembering this but “I am the evidence of love” is going to live in my body forever now. Thank you so much for that gift. But I love how you are thinking of poetry as this medium of love that can reach into the past and the future. I think that that is both stunning and apt, but also if I can kind of argue this, I think of this as the hallmark of you as a Southern writer. Because I think as Southern writers, we are constantly navigating this landscape as a landscape of violence at the exact same time as we’re navigating it as a landscape of familiarity and home. There are ways that this space can be both danger and safety for us, and in order to reckon with the South we have to reckon with it’s lineage of violence while also reckoning with its potential as a kind of haven, a future, as a space where—I’m not going to have any kids but—my kids’ kids (my metaphorical kids’ kids) can thrive and grow. And so, I want to ask you a little bit about the ways Texas shows up in your writing, and all of the complex ways it does that, and all the complex ways that it has to navigate anti-Southern narratives. There are a lot of ways in which we root, in a kind of national idea of the South, we root it as this landscape of racism as if racism doesn’t exist everywhere.
KB: Right.
Diamond: We forget all of the activism that happens here, that a lot of the activism begins here in the South and moves upwards, right? So, I guess what I’m trying to underscore is the survival here, the kinship here, the same things I think you’re trying to underscore in your work—so, first, if you could correct any misnomer about the South, this is the platform, this is the moment. Anything you want to correct right now, what would it be do you think?
KB: Yeah, um. Geez, I’m like, do you have two hours?
Diamond: [laughs]
KB: There’s a lot that I would like to correct. And I’ve attempted to correct in poems and prose—preaching to the choir almost. If I could talk to someone, a group of people that have anti-Southern sentiments—because they very much exist in publishing and spaces on Twitter and various social media platforms and life—I’d say that we are not who represents us in the legislative sphere. Overwhelmingly so. Texans want trans rights. Texans want the issue of guns to not be an issue. Texans, overwhelmingly—and you know, I’m not just shooting this from my ass, you can look this up—there’s a minority of bullies who have overtaken our legislative sphere. It’s no coincidence that the largest cities in Texas are all Democrat. And I’m like, not riding for Democrats. I want that on record. There are many things I think they can do better. But Dallas, Houston Austin, San Antonio, and a lot of its surrounding counties are all progressive, right? So, the places with the most people, all progressive.
Also, there’s just a wide spread of misinformation. And a wide spread of people who are scared to make their voices heard because the opposition is very punitive. You know, if you want to see something scary, diabolical, something that you thought was outlawed in the 60s, go to Harris County jail. Shit is fucked up there. And just two weeks ago, a group of people, whom I know and love, were at the Texas capitol because we’re currently in a legislative session—Texas has legislative sessions every two years to pass statewide laws. Just two weeks ago, there was a group of—I wouldn’t even call them “protestors,” just people—were wanting rights for trans people because an anti-trans bill was being heard and they put up a banner that was like, “Let Trans Youth Live” or something like that. And they were banned from the capitol. At least one person was banned from the capitol, and another was tackled. One person who was seen on video, literally just standing, and actually trying to diffuse the situation. Even when we’re just present in public space with people who oppose our humanity, we—I really hate when progressives in New York or L.A. or Chicago, various places where there political body looks different from ours, post things like, “Why are y’all not doing direct action? Why are y’all not doing x, y, and z?” And I’m like, you don’t actually understand what it means to feel like you might die, maybe. Because someone who refuses to see you is right in front of you while you’re telling them, calmly a lot of times, to actually see you. People who have taken an oath to represent you refusing to do so, right?
In Texas, you have to—in order to have your opposition registered in the state, you have to do something called “drop a card.” You have to go to the Texas capitol, be on their Wi-Fi, and put your name and address, etc., in to say you oppose a bill. They know that that cuts off most people from being able to publicly register their opposition. Because literally anyone who doesn’t live in the city that I live in, which is Austin—which is where the capitol is. Literally anyone who doesn’t have a car. Someone who doesn’t have technological devices. Can’t do that. And that is most of the state. So, like, the opposition is very powerful here and, understandably, a lot of people have slipped into apathy here. Like, I’m not going to vote because it doesn’t matter kind of sentiments. So, I would just want people to know, Greg Abbott, Ken Paxton, Dan Patrick—all of those legislators does not represent all of who’s here. They don’t even represent a majority of who’s here. Greg Abbott won his election before the last with 23% of eligible voters, which means it was a very low turn-out situation. He is in power simply because he has disempowered everyone that opposes him.
There’s a large percent—I know it’s the same thing in Tennessee—there’s a large percent of Black people who can’t vote due to having a criminal record and those records are often unjustly given. It’s a whole bunch of shit that people just don’t know and I’m really tired of people talking out the side of their neck—which is a very Southern saying, I sound very old right now—but about who we are and what we represent as people. Because despite all of the issues that exist in that big, white building that is a couple of miles away from me, I love the people that I have come to know. I have lived in multiple Texas cities, I have really only lived in Texas, and I know that there are good people with good intentions, and there are really creative organizers who are organizing and making spaces happen as I speak to you right now. I think some of the most beautiful drag, for example, exists in Texas. I see creativity that I think is born out of chains, like out of breakdancing in a strait jacket, you know? I think we make do with what we have, and I think that brings a lot of creativity--that we shouldn’t have to exist under, I want to make that super clear. I believe Texas could do better with giving people rights, and Texas could do better funding the arts, but you know, I’ve made some shows happen with $50 and a dream—
[KB and Diamond laugh]
KB: It’s looked better than some shit I’ve seen as I’ve been visiting LA or New York or whatever. I don’t know why those states even as, you know, nonunderstanding as they are. Cuz I’m like, I’ve heard things about NY, too. And I don’t want to look at all New Yorkers based on what your legislative body looks like (which is very overwhelmingly, like, pro-cop and anti-houselessness) [laughs] so like, you got problems, too. I wish we could—it feels very similar to that of like...I feel like we’ve made lots of progress but the North, overwhelmingly Northern sentiments feels the same as like, “Y’all letting slavery happen in the South and doing nothing about it.” So, yeah, letting the South be nuked by anti-trans, anti-Black, anti-DEI in general, so that’s anti-people with disabilities, anti-poor people, like all of that, and we need y’all to be louder.
So, if I could say things to people who have misconceptions about the South or Texas, I would just say come visit. And you would know that some of those thoughts y’all have about who we are and what we stand for are wrong. And I would also say, instead of criticizing, you should join us in the various fights we have because we need your support, we don’t need your judgment. I don’t think that’s useful, and I don’t think that’s going to change anything, but we do need, not even—we need monetary support, and we need physical bodies showing up to make stuff happen. Because the minority opposition is so loud, anything helps.
Diamond: Thank you for that because I think you’re right. So much of this systemic oppression and tools of oppression erase the individual. And a lot of these anti-South narratives are again erasing individuals, the individuals who live here, who thrive here, and who are doing the good work. Thank you so much for making space for that.
I want to talk a little bit about those systems of oppression in a second, especially as they appear in academia because I know you’re still getting an MFA, right KB?
KB: Yep!
Diamond: Okay, so I want to talk about that in a second, but before we get there just quickly—for anyone who is looking to have more nuanced conversations about the South, are there any Southern writers you would recommend to them?
KB: Absolutely. Kiese Laymon, a really great Southern writer. And has lived in Mississippi, now lives in Texas, so we’ve officially stolen him.
[Diamond and KB laugh]
KB: Me, obviously. I would say Diamond Forde—
[Diamond laughs]
KB:--who is an amazing writer. It’s some really cool stuff happening. Akwaeke Emezi. I think, in a way, we’re living through a real literary Renaissance as it pertains to Southern writers. There are a million but those are the ones who immediately come to mind.
Diamond: Okay, thank you so much. So, let’s talk about that MFA though. [laughs]
KB: Let’s talk.
Diamond: And let’s talk about it at a slant, slightly. Because one of the things I really wanted to express my joy about is the ways that you queer form. In particular, I’m talking about “Curriculum Vitae.” The fact that you have a whole ass poem that is also a CV, wow.
[KB and Diamond laugh]
Diamond: Right? It’s such a power move to me. And not just in how it flexes your poetic [stumbles] prowess but also in how it implicates academia in Black and trans erasure. Because universities and university-adjacent structures still are the cornerstone of writing and writing success. We think you can’t make it unless you have the MFA, you need the connections, you need the exposure, you need the workshops, you need these things. On top of that, university presses are still a big part of the way we are looking at publications. So, the university is still integral to this idea of writing and writing life, and I’m not saying it’s impossible to have a writing life and be outside of academia, but I’m going to say it’s significantly harder, right?
KB: Right.
Diamond: So, what I love about “Curriculum Vitae” is that it’s an academic form. It’s literally the resume of the academic professional, means the “course of one’s life” but its very nature is contingent on erasure. I’m asking you to give me the course of your life, but only the parts that seem academically relevant. Already you’re asking me to whittle, to cherry-pick, to think about and value my own experience, in particular, experiences as a Black, trans person, and I want you to think about the values of these experiences and the value to generate capital... and I resent that. I resent having to think about myself in those terms. But even in the idea of creating an author bio for myself, I still have to think about [laughs] the professionalization of my Black ass experiences.
So anyway, my longwinded way of saying I love your CV poem, KB, and I like how it speaks to life at the “margins,” things that are pushed aside and devalued because they’re not considered academically commodifiable and because you’re repositioning that into the form, you’re saying “No, this does have value.” So first, thank you for creating that poem, and second, how have you learned to work with or against the commodifying and compartmentalizing practices of academe? Especially as you’re getting an MFA. And second, what advice you might have for other BIPOC writers thinking of getting that writing degree?
KB: Right. Meaty question.
Diamond: Mhm.
KB: I would say that I don’t think it makes me better than anybody, but I am very grateful that my poetic practice didn’t start inside the academy. The first writing professor, the first two people that introduced me to poetry were both from slam, spoken word, which I think still informs the way in which I go through the conferences and universities of it all. But I think they wrote poetry because it saved them, and they taught poetry because they saw the value of the educational level it could bring into one’s life, introduced that to youth because they knew that it could—we were at very vulnerable parts of our lives. In middle school, you still are figuring out how to apply deodorant in ways that make sense. You’re still figuring out a whole bunch of stuff and that was such a brittle time for me as a queer person in such an anti-queer place, just figuring out what being a person meant, so---I started that way and I started writing poetry just to connect with my friends better and to talk about things that I felt like I couldn’t talk about in regular speech. And because I saw that being displayed for me through teachers and also my friends, writing out, I don’t know, queer relationships. It wasn’t something that we felt empowered to talk about outside of poetry, and we didn’t feel empowered to talk about what was going on at our respective houses either. So, it’s kind of an avenue for, I wouldn’t say codeswitching, but just a different way to speak. I still feel that way.
I turn to poetry when I feel like I need to say something that I can’t say in any other way. I turn to poetry to get to know myself a bit better. Have you ever written a poem and you were like, I just didn’t know I felt that way? [laughs]
Diamond: Yes.
KB: Like I didn’t know it was that deep to me. [laughs] And I like that I can come out of the other end of a poem being like, shoot, I thought I was going to sit down and write about my dad, but I ended up writing about something totally different than that. And I don’t know—that is very valuable to me, and I have a document that just sits in my Google docs of why I write—for me—and why I share that writing with others.
I think it’s really important for BIPOC writers, no matter where you’re going, whether you take the avenue of the academy or not, to really keep those things close to you.
I’m a very mission driven writer. And I think it helps to have purpose, it helps to have intention behind what you do. Because it really can—checking your Submittable account, all of the MFA applications, and writing for the workshop and not for you—it can really just sweep you up and cause you to lose focus on what’s actually real. And it’s fine if it changes over time, but keeping at the forefront: what am I doing, what is my purpose here? I think is really important. Because when you start writing for prizes instead of your person, than I think it can get to be really volatile.
Poetry didn’t start in the academy, despite what people would like you to think. Homer could not read. And I'd like to think that academics today would not consider Homer a poet. It’s just very interesting how we’ve veered so far away from, like, the roots of what this is—
Diamond: Yeah.
KB: —and in some ways it’s like, oh these were necessary changes and in other ways I’m like, we’ve really lost the plot here. I think we’ve lost the plot when we require someone to have a degree in order to be a valid poet. And we’ve lost the plot when we require someone have a letter of recommendation, have some kind of in—I hate when it’s more like who I know versus what I’m doing on the page, right? People can think I’m nice, but what am I really doing?
And I’m going to lead with love. I’m going to be nice. But it can be very soul-killing. Especially as a BIPOC writer in a place that is not very reflective at any level. Whether it be publishers, editors, agents. It is not very reflective of who we are. That’s why spaces like Honey Literary and Muzzle Magazine and other things had to exist. They had to exist to dispel the idea that, dang, am I white and rich enough to be a poet? I started thinking that years back when I was really disillusioned with the fact that people weren’t really like understanding me and understanding what I could do if I wasn’t—even that potential. You want me to be in a place that I’m not.
Yeah—it helps to have other people around you that get it. Because I am glad that I am going to an MFA now, I tried this already. I was trying to go to an MFA right after undergrad, but I really had to figure some shit out before it made sense for me to be there. And I’m glad I realized that at the time because I think my writing would have been worse if I stayed. I was not in a place where I could discern what feedback is useful in a workshop space, which is the pinnacle of most MFAs still. I wasn’t in a place where I could discern because I didn’t really know those ‘why’s—I got lost. I had those ‘why’s but I forgot about them in an MFA. So, when I got feedback, I couldn’t discern between what is writing that is just you telling me to write like you and what is feedback that is you telling me to be more like me. To refine who I am. Because there’s a difference in how useful that feedback is.
I had to do some more living. I had to figure out my shit. I had a gender crisis really hardcore around that time, too. So, I was like, I don’t even know who I am, so I can’t just be writing poems. I’m not the person who can write poems when I’m still going through it. I have to have some foresight, first. Not that I’ve figured everything out because if I come to the page thinking I know exactly x, y, and z, then it’s not going to be a poem that surprises me. Therefore, it’s not going to surprise anybody else, right?
Yeah, I just had to really find—because after I left that program, I then, you know, went to, and started doing a community-based women and BIPOC writers monthly writing group. It was just people inside the academy, outside the academy, just coming together and wanting a space where we could be ourselves. And it was BIPOC only for a while. And that really is a space that helped me get to a book like Freedom House. Finding other people...
I think it’s really important to have an identity outside I am a student. [laughs]
Diamond: [laughs] Mhm.
KB: That is advice that I would also give. Make sure that you have a sense of who you are outside of what a piece of paper tells you that you are. Even outside of this program, once I finish it, I’m not going to be a master of anything. I’m going to still be a student. I’m going to still be learning about the ins and outs of poetry. I’m going to still be learning from the poets that I read, and the poets that I have in my life, and the people that I have in my life.
So many of those poems, including CV [“Curriculum Vitae”] is that I’m trying to show you the work that we don’t find valuable. I feel like—and this is something that I learned from Kiese, listening to the writing that happens around me. Sometimes, especially Southern Black grandmas just be saying super poetic stuff.
Diamond: That’s hilarious.
KB: [laughs] If you listen long enough, you’ll catch it--you know? Just make sure to always be listening. Make sure—in the city around you, is there an open mic that you can go to? Can you do things outside of your program if you decide to do that? And if you don’t decide to do that, don’t let anyone tell you that you’re less of a writer because of it. Because there are community spaces that exist to support non-MFA writers. Truly, I only just—I felt like that kind of path that I’m trying to take required, unfortunately, that I have an MFA, and I wish it wasn’t like that.
Honestly, truly, I love the professors I have been able to meet. And I have been able to meet other colleagues that I find enjoyable, but I wish that more writers could take whatever path they wanted without feeling like they have to make a pit-stop at a school.
And I wish that people could get funded better without needing to ask as school for development funds, but you know I would talk forever if I talked about that too much.
[Diamond and KB laugh]
Diamond: And I would probably listen, to be honest. I would just listen.
KB: Overall advice, make sure you got your purpose. Why do you write? Why do you write for you? Why do you share that writing publicly? And make sure that you know what you’re getting into when you go into these programs. What is the local city like? What will you gain, or want to gain, and will you find it at that program? Can you find it in the surrounding area? Making sure you have an identity outside of being a student, and making sure that no matter what you got your people, that you find your people, because everybody at the MFA not going to be your people. That’s just—I’ve just never heard of anybody, any BIPOC writer leave an MFA and be like, everybody in my cohort, everybody in this program is my people.
Diamond: [laughing] Nah.
KB: A white, literary majority white system at the university and otherwise. So, find our people.
Diamond: Alright. I would listen to you all day, I swear. But I want to ask one last question. And like the last one, it is kind of a meaty question. But it is tied, I think, to a little bit of the individual, a little bit about what we’re doing on the page.
But in a recent Twitter thread you talked about having a student reach out to you to ask about the meaning behind one of your poems, and you ended up encouraging the student to draw their own conclusions instead. There’s a lot of nuances to this decision, something that you unpack in the thread, but if it’s okay with you, I want to offer a small anecdote [laughs] on my experience as both a reader--[stumbles] writer and professor, and what I feel about the necessity of close-reading because this is the thing that you were really encouraging that student to do, is to close-read.
So, my students are obsessed with saying the right thing in class. I’m still unclear about where this pressure stems from. I know there’s probably multiple answers—we could debate all of the contributing factors around why my students are concerned about saying the right thing in class, but that’s not fruit. But in discussions about identity, if my students feel like they are outside of the identity or the identity is outside of the scope of their own experiences, they just clam up. They won’t conjecture; they won’t recall, right? I know this isn’t the first time you’ve been asked to engage with a Black, queer experience. Can we make connections to other things that you’ve read--nothing. And despite my best efforts to remind them that the silence can be read as harmful, that the silence can be read as a disengagement, they’re so scared to say the wrong thing. They’re scared to engage closely.
They want me to tell them the answer. They want to listen; I will say that. They are very eager to listen—I love that about them. But I feel like they’ve taken the lesson about learning to listen to literally or too sincerely. And they don’t really think about listening actively. I don’t think they understand what listening means. Where we think about it as this passive activity—no, listening is really active.
And I think that’s the tie between listening and close reading. Both of them are asking you to be active participants. What I’m saying is like, I want my audience to participate in my poetry. I want them to listen to me actively. I feel like that’s their role, their responsibility. And at the exact same time as I expect my audience to be responsible for this active listening, it’s my job to make sure I’m giving them something worth listening to.
KB: Right.
Diamond: That I’m basically paying off their act of participation on the page. I don’t want my audience to deep dive into every single one of my poems, although that would be nice, but just some of those poems aren’t that deep, but the poems that move them, the poems that make them trust me, that make them want to reach out to me and ask me questions about them, that’s the one, that’s active participation time. That’s where I really want you to engage, where I want you to make guesses on the possibilities of language, to trust that I’ve done the work for you to piece together and now you do, it’s time for you to do your part, to participate, to engage, to take risks. Be weird with me for a second.
I don’t know. That might be really revealing [laughs] of the kind of weird pressures that I hold myself to. I’m really confused about why Virgo is not in my chart, but here we are. Instead, I want to ask you, KB, do you think there is a contract between the writer and the audience? And if so, what are you aiming to give your audience? And what can your audience give back to you in return?
KB: Right, right. I mean, so I think a lot about poetry, and what it gives and how that might be different than creating nonfiction or fiction. I think one thing that is different is, like, poems ask more from the reader I think, in general, right? They ask you to mull over often, like, shorter lines, shorter syntax, but very exact syntax, and diction, and simile, and metaphor, and, like, figurative language times ten oftentimes.
Well, I'm also a teacher—and I mostly teach intro classes: the classes that people got to take to graduate, like British Lit, World Lit, stuff like that—and one thing that excites me when I see it, is someone really putting together a good analysis because they’ve looked at the context and they’ve looked at the text, and they put those things together, and they are really, like, looking closely at what's happening. And I think that's such an important skill to learn in life. And no matter where you go into, whether it be engineering, etc., if you're going to look at something in front of you, let yourself sit in those feelings that it’s giving you, and be able to look closely in order to draw, you know, conclusions. Almost have a level of fail-ability.
Poetry in academic writing, I think, especially things like queer theory, have similarities in that things can be speculative. You’re allowed to be speculative, right? And I don’t think it’s—it’s one answer, you know. Especially because—some of my poems are, I ate this sandwich, and I loved it—
[Diamond laughs]
KB: there’s multiple things going on and I don’t want you to get so hung up on what I say. So, when people reach out to me, it’s like: so, I’m the author, but like, if I could disrespect myself for a moment—how I feel doesn’t matter. Like, I want you to be able to come away with your own things based on texts and context and make sense of all that. And mix into all that, how do you feel based on what you read? And then you tell me what I’m doing.
I don’t know if you’ve ever had this experience where someone is explaining your poem to you and you’re like, oh, that’s interesting—I didn’t even know I was thinking of that or was I think of that? I don’t even know if it matters because I’m just happy you got something from what I wrote.
And, like, there are those occasional wild miscategorizations. Like, I think people are really scared to approach Blackness, so they’re like—ahh, this is like a BIPOC thing and I’m like, I’m talking specifically about Blackness. Or like, when I’m talking about transness, and they’re like ah, you know, queerness blah blah and I’m like, nah—I think I’m talking about transness in particular. Not talking about all the L, G, B, and Ts, I’m talking about the T, and it’s okay to say that, and if it intimidates you, it’s okay to sit with why that might be. I think it’s useful, right? And it’s necessary to be able to sit with how you feel.
And close reading allows you to sit with how you feel. Allows you to look closely at what you’ve read. And allows you to then be curious enough to search out context. Because sometimes I find that students are way too quick to Google something.
Diamond: Yup.
KB: And I’m like, you actually don’t need to do that for most texts. You could just read the text, right? And sit with and trust yourself. This past semester, one of the things that students were reading was a text from Frederick Douglass. And one of the texts we gave them was like contextual observations, but also you don’t have to look that up.
And they were like: ?? What does that mean?
And I was like: what do you know about 1920? You know something about that time in the US. I know that y’all took US history in high school, all of y’all, so be confident in what you know. Poetry allows people that freedom to do that. I want people, when they engage with my poems, to trust themselves to know that I have hand-held you in various ways: I think my line breaks are me holding a reader’s hand often. My form is me telling you what I bring into the room. Like with the CV, and using the form of a CV to talk about things that are often hidden labor, the labor of being Black in America, and the labor of surviving a Black, queer childhood—I’m giving you what you need. You just got to trust yourself as a reader.
So, often I’m trying to tell students to believe in yourself a bit more, right? You don’t need AI. You don’t need Google.com a lot of the time. You just need yourself. And you need the text that is sitting in front of you.
So, I think the contract is like I’m giving this literature to you because I trust in you as a reader to take what you need from it—if that makes sense—
Diamond: Mhm. That does.
KB: Because I think I was really touched.
This last year, I did a program with the Academy of American Poets because I won this prize with the academy last year with this poem I wrote called, “Good Grief,” which is also in Freedom House; it’s about—I hate giving aboutness—but it was about me riding on the heels of the 2021 Texas winter storm [having trouble making out this moment]. I got letters from students and they’re like, I know a thing or two about climate change, so this made me think about this hurricane that happened a number of years ago or this made me think of my mom who I’d lost—I like that you explore grief in this way. Like, you get what you need from the poem, and you’ve got to trust yourself enough to get that. Because I wasn’t even thinking about that when I was writing this poem. I was thinking about my own specific experience, but the specific speaks to the universal if you let it.
Diamond: Mhm. Mm.
KB: So those are my thoughts!
[KB and Diamond laugh]
Diamond: Thank you so much, KB, for donating your time and your love and your passion for poetry, for writing in general. Thank you so much for giving me your time today. I really appreciate it.
KB: Of course, and I appreciate you for this thoughtful, incisive questions.
Diamond: Of course. All right, thank you so much for joining us, Honey Listeners. I look forward to reconnecting with you all again soon. Please check out Freedom House if you haven’t already gotten a copy.
KB, where can we get Freedom House?
KB: Anywhere you get books, you know. Bookshop.org allows you to support your local indie bookstore, and I really would implore people to do that. Suggest it at your local libraries. You know, get it wherever you can. If you get it specifically from Deep Vellum, if you get a physical copy, you also get a free e-book, so that's a bit of an incentive to get it straight from the publisher, but I am super happy if you get it from wherever you can.
Diamond: Alright, thank you so much, KB. I can’t wait to have my physical copy. Thank you so much, have a good one!
About KB Brookins
KB Brookins is a Black queer and trans writer, cultural worker, and installation artist from Texas. KB’s chapbook How To Identify Yourself with a Wound won the Saguaro Poetry Prize, a Writer’s League of Texas Discovery Prize, and an ALA Stonewall Honor Book Award. Their debut poetry collection Freedom House was called “urgent and timely” by Vogue and won the ALA Barbara Gittings Literature Award for Poetry. KB’s debut memoir Pretty releases on May 28, 2024 with Alfred A. Knopf. Follow them online at @earthtokb.
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.