Turning Night’s Music into a Song of Both Mourning and Celebration: An Interview with Tatiana Johnson-Boria
Turning Night’s Music into a Song of Both Mourning and Celebration: An Interview with Tatiana Johnson-Boria
Interview completed on March 29, 2024
Diamond Forde: From its first poem, “Heredity,” the book shapes its foundations in a lineage of hurt, one that shapes the boundaries and interworkings of family, alongside the boundaries and interworkings of community.
What I want to praise in these early poems is the directorial eye, which shifts the reader curiously away from the poet; I say “curiously” because Nocturne in Joy is your first full-length, Tatiana; I think most debuts are, naturally, internally-focused and speaker-oriented, and while the “I” is present in these first pages, the poet is withheld for a greater meditation on the father, primarily, the mother, secondarily, and their shared influence on each other, the family, and the speaker alike.
Can you tell me a little more about the decision to open the book in “heredity,” as well as listing any strategies, techniques, or decisions that you feel could influence your readers’ engagement with the complexity of the family unit or the book’s speaker early on?
Tatiana Johnson-Boria: It’s interesting that you use the word “directorial” because I have a background in filmmaking that has heavily influenced these poems. Bits and pieces of these poems have been screenplays and then short stories and then poems again. When I approached ordering this book “Heredity” was originally at a completely different part of the book. As I was thinking about the arc of the collection, especially in relation to personal, familial, communal, and ancestral grief and joy, I thought (surprisingly) about the Bible. I thought about the underpinnings of religion in my family and how it’s often been wrapped up in violence, harm, and fear. “Heredity” felt like the “creation” story of my life and my understanding of lineage, trauma, and fear. Many of the origins of these experiences occurred so far before my existence, so I attempted to write a poem that was outside of the present, while cognizant of everything that has happened before, even the things I know nothing about. I didn’t realize this poem was doing this work until deep into the editing process. At one point I remember just trying to read this collection with this poem at the start and thought: “Ok, this is where it belongs.”
Diamond: The book’s titular poem, “Nocturne in Joy”, is a heroic crown—a feat in and of itself—and defines the book’s entire second section. I would argue that as the book progresses, the poems become more formally and structurally ambitious, exploring erasure, pantoums, white space, and more. I want to ask a two-part question here, one that focuses on the book and poem’s title, and another that focuses on the book’s relationship to form.
The first asks about the role of the nocturne, or a song or poem inspired by and set during the night. While reading the book, I couldn’t help but turn to Ed Hirsch’s meditation on the nocturne in A Poet’s Glossary, reprinted recently on the poets.org website. Hirsch writes, “One could make a good international anthology of the modern poetic nocturne, which is frequently a threshold poem that puts us in the presence of nothingness or God—it returns us to origins—and stirs poets toward song.”
I think that this poem, and this book, exists within that intersection—between the invocations of “nothingness or God,” the same sort of existential existence we ascribe to Blackness, to be both evidence of death and of life, and what it means to deliberately declare “joy” in that liminality. How should we read the night song of this poem (and this book) alongside joy? What is the importance of that reading?
The second question, is how does the decision to write “Nocturne in Joy” as a heroic crown, play into some of the epic-making already started in the book’s first section. How are we encouraged to see the building of a hero across these sonnets? Who is the hero, as you see it?
Tatiana: Thank you so much for bringing that Hirsch definition into this conversation. That definition has been something I’ve returned to so many times in crafting this collection. I am so obsessed with “thresholds” or the moments between moments, or maybe liminal space? I’m intrigued with things on the precipice of transformation. I’m also so into origins and finding out what has happened. Oftentimes I simply cannot find out what has happened. I always felt so lost in trying to figure out why my family was the way it was. And “Nocturne in Joy” is reflective of that journey of trying to figure it out. I think this poem is a way to engage with the gaps and ability for ourselves to reclaim and remake ourselves. It’s a way of shifting power, especially when reckoning with trauma. When Hirsch says the nocturne “stirs poets towards song” I think about joy. I think maybe my “song” is “joy” and maybe every poet has their own that their nocturne is bringing them towards.
In terms of the structure, I never EVER thought I’d be able to write a crown of sonnets. Until I learned that sonnets, like any form, can be played with, expanded, upended, etc. Danez Smith’s “crown” and Terrance Hayes’ sonnets really showed me what was possible with the sonnet form. I think the story of “Nocturne in Joy” can only be told in a sequence and over the time that a crown of sonnets allows for. I think the hero in this crown is a child who was born into dysfunction and must seek out their own grounding. They somehow find it, not solely because of their will, but because of something beyond them. I think the hero or speaker in this poem is my childhood self, but I hope that readers can see themselves in these sonnets as well.
Diamond: I want to continue the conversation around craft. In particular, I want to talk about a poem that appears in the book’s third section, “Craft Talk: How to Write a Poem about Your Own Death.” What I admire about this poem is how it situates the above as a collective and diasporic experience, a necessity (“demand”?) to elegize Black death, but the expectation to make something beautiful out of it, an expectation that the poem refutes again and again—“There is nothing / beautiful about / our death.”
I want to celebrate this poem’s resolution, but I also want to ask the ways you see this poem speaking toward your experience as a poet. What external expectations do you carry (or are expected to carry) to the page? How do you write around (through, above, below) those expectations?
Tatiana: I wrote this poem in 2020 during the height of the pandemic, and around the time of the deaths of Breonna Taylor, George Floyd, and so many others. I felt like my poems needed to speak to this, but sometimes I feel betrayed by what poems can do. They can make things that are utterly terrifying and disturbing, beautiful; just for the simple fact that they are poems. This poem is my own struggle with that. How I wanted to almost grab a poem by its neck and say: “Help me write something that is honest and not beautiful.” Maybe it was my rage that guided this poem? I think I’m working in and against the expectations of being able to reconcile violence against Black bodies in a world that continues to perpetuate that violence. I think this poem allowed me to talk directly to my understanding of craft, to the concept of poetry as an art, to people who don’t see the urgency or stakes of writing poems for survival. I am writing in and around the expectations by asking questions of others, of myself; by not letting myself get away with acknowledging the truth, even when it’s horrible.
Diamond: I want to turn to an interview you did with writer K Slade on The Sundress Blog; in particular, to your discussion of Simone Leigh’s work, an artist you discovered after the book had already been written, but who you felt very much in conversation with all the same.
In the interview, you quoted Leigh from her exhibit “Sovereignty”, stating: “To be sovereign is to not be subject to another’s authority, another’s desires, or another’s gaze, but rather to be the author of one’s own history.” You continued your meditation of the previous by discussing the merit of repositioning Blackness outside of its conflict with White supremacy; I agree. How can poetry help us redefine Blackness (outside of resistance)? How can poetry help us redefine history?
Tatiana: The art of poetry, for me, allows for the ability to be uninhibited. It allows for dynamism and multidimensionalism. It breaks the binaries that we often live by in our society. When Blackness is solely positioned against whiteness, there’s the danger of the vast universe of being a Black person, to be minimized. It’s interesting because I had a reading recently where someone asked me a question (and I can’t remember the exact words, so this is a rephrasing) if writing about Blackness is also flattening. It felt like they were viewing Blackness as one dimensional and I think that writing poetry can be a space not only to counter that narrative, but to dismantle it at the root. It’s unfortunate for anyone to view Blackness as flat and without dimension because there is no one way to be Black and there is no one way to write a poem. Because of the inherent ways poetry breaks expectation and convention, Black writers can use it to write about themselves and express themselves in a variety of ways. This act can also help us reclaim our identities and the intersections that live in and through us.
Diamond: The final question is one that I return to often because it’s a question that asks all of us to look to the future, a question that is especially important in a conversation grappling with Black history.
What’s next, Tatiana? What projects (or celebrations of rest) are moving you forward from this moment? What can you imagine the future holding for you, as a woman, a writer, or human occupying the world?
Tatiana: Thank you so much for this question. My son just had his first birthday meaning I’m coming up on my first anniversary of becoming a parent. It’s been such a beautiful and challenging year. All I want to do is rest and try to be more present day-to-day. My son is changing so much and I want to soak in all of his evolutions. In the midst of finding space to be present and to rest, I am also writing. I’ve been working on a memoir/nonfiction project for four years (maybe longer) about my relationship with my mother, her schizophrenia diagnosis along with my journey becoming a mother and my PTSD diagnosis. It’s been a heavy thing to write about, but also freeing in so many ways. I’m hoping it’ll find a home with a publisher someday. Lastly, I’m always writing little poems or lines in my notebook or Notes app. I’ve been thinking some much about Black mothers and caregivers, I wonder if there’s a poetry collection brewing inside of me about that.
About Tatiana Johnson-Boria
Tatiana Johnson-Boria (she/her) is the author of Nocturne in Joy (2023). She’s an educator, artist, and facilitator who uses her writing practice to dismantle racism, reckon with trauma, and to cultivate healing. She’s an award-winning writer who’s received fellowships from Tin House, The Massachusetts Cultural Council, The MacDowell Residency, and others. Tatiana completed her MFA in Creative Writing at Emerson College and teaches at Emerson College, GrubStreet, and others. Find her work in or forthcoming at The Academy of American Poets, Ploughshares, Kenyon Review, among others. She’s represented by Lauren Scovel at Laura Gross Literary.
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.
