IN WHICH TIME EATS ITS OWN TAIL

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Kameryn Alexa Carter (00:01):

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Hi friends, this is Kameryn Alexa Carter, founding co-editor of Emergent Literary. It's my pleasure to include the following interview with poet Dani Janae in issue eight, as our conversation was so prismatic. Her publisher describes her debut book of poems, Hound Triptych as "an experience in the richness of the lyrical and an invitation to gaze into the unfettered chaos of the psyche and the heart and sit with them unflinching." I couldn't agree more.

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‍Dani Janae is a black lesbian poet and journalist from Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. Her work has been published by Longleaf Review, Swim, Rhino Poetry, and South Florida Poetry Journal, among others. She posts on Substack at No Skips, Fig Widow, and Ask A Queer Doctor, and she can be found at danijanae.com. While you're here, please make sure you bask in the rest of Issue eight as well on our website and follow us on Instagram @emergentliterary. Thanks and talk soon.

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‍Kameryn Alexa Carter:

Hi, everyone. I'm here with poet and editor, Dani Janae. And I wanted to start by asking you about utterance because I'm thinking about particularly section three of the poem, Hound Triptych, and then I'm also thinking about "Birth Myth" And I'm wondering if utterance for you is a kind of making or unmaking, a kind of naming or unnaming. How do you feel like utterance is functioning not only within the book itself, but also for you in your process?

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Dani Janae (01:55):

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Yes, that's a really great question. I love that. I think utterance for me is definitely a naming for sure. I think that for me, I was obsessed with that process of naming to begin with because of being an adoptee, you have the name that you're given by your biological family sometimes, sometimes not. And then you get renamed when you're in foster care through the adoption process, things like that. So I think the utterance has been very much a process of naming, especially things that for me felt unnameable for a long time. So in the third section of pound triptych, I have this line that's like, you can decide to believe in the truth of only what can be spoken. And I think that for me, that line is about just what we were talking about, naming and making as well. For me, language is so tied up in that process of naming and making.

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‍ I really like to think about what it must feel like and be like to make yourself from, or make the conception of yourself from the remains or the ashes of what has come before you. So I really wanted to play with that in the book a lot. And you also mentioned, I think, “Birth Myth,” which is one of my favorite poems in the book too. And for me, in that poem, I'm really playing with making something out of nothing because I didn't know what my mom's first story was. And I know I have friends that are non-adoptees that they can tell you. My mom was in labor for however many hours. It was like this for her. It was painful. It was all these things, and I just didn't have that. So I wanted to write a story for myself so I could have something to hold onto in that regard.

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Kameryn Alexa Carter (04:12):

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Yeah. Thank you so much. That's given me a lot to think about. I think I'm also thinking about form in two ways. One, there are so many beautiful enjambments and caesura in this book, particularly enjambments across the stanza break that I really love. And so I'm wondering how space is functioning for you formally in this book. Is it about breath? Is it about pace? Is it about doubling meaning in some way? Just curious about how space functions for you.

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Dani Janae (04:53):

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When I first started getting into poetry, it was definitely very much about breath, but as I've gotten more into finding my own voice and prap and things like that, it's definitely become about creating surprise. That's one thing that I love about poetry is when a line breaks somewhere or there's an engine somewhere and you're reading along and you expect the next word that you think is going to come to come and it's something completely different or something that is adjacent to it or rhymes with it. And I love that that is a part of poetry that I'm really drawn to and that I try to replicate in my own work. So when I was doing Engameth and Breaking Lines, I wanted to create a space where people wouldn't necessarily know what was coming next. And sometimes I also feel that is fun, but also sometimes you have to give the reader what they're expecting as well and write what you want to say in the way that it's playing.

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‍ At least for me in this book, it was very much like sometimes it was fun to play around with language and other times I just had to say the hard thing. So yeah, I really like that question about enjambments. And yeah, I've also been thinking a lot about space as kind of protection or cushion. Yeah. So I'm trying to think of a poem that has placed with that a little bit.

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One of my favorite poems of the book are the "Go Ask" collection of poems. I think there's three of them in there, and those poems use space a lot. There's a lot of weird linebreaking, a lot of indentation that is offset and interesting. And I like that I did that because I wanted there to be, like I said, cushion around the words that were there because some of those words are sharp and barbed and they are speaking into existence, something that is really hard for me to talk about, hard for people to hear about, and I wanted there to be some sort of softness there too.

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Kameryn Alexa Carter (07:24):

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I love that answer. And I love the "Go Ask" poems. I actually have a question about one of them. You have this line in one of them, the one on 65, "There is a lesson to be had at the bar swirling in bisexual light." And I just adore that line. And the book explores queerness in a really deft way, moving from burgeoning sexuality in childhood, but also the way that desire presents itself in the speaker's relationships and adulthood. And I'm thinking particularly also about the narrative about Jessie and the snake. And so I just want to know if you can talk a little bit more about how queerness affects your sensibilities as a poet.

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Dani Janae (08:14):

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Yeah. I think that, well, for me, queerness is such a huge part of why I started writing to begin with. I had a teacher in elementary school that I had a crush on that introduced me to poetry, and just that act of her introducing me to a form that I'd never heard of before that was something new and something exciting really expanded my world a lot. And I also, in the poems that are in the book, and then writing in general, I always try and bring a queer sensibility because I think in one of the ... In "Adoptee Log Number 9," I talk about coming out and adults making everything about sex and my relationship to body and desire in that way. And that's something that I wanted to deconstruct for myself, but also for readers as well, because queerness is so much more about who you're sleeping with.

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It's very much about turning what we know on its head and making beauty where there is none, I think, in my opinion. So with queerness in the book, I wanted to, one, just tell a story of my journey with sexuality and desire, but also to position it in relation to my perception of and desire for getting to know my biological mother. And I think that those desires are linked in some way.

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There's also a line in one of the poems about how what we learned from our mothers is how we want somebody to touch us and just learning gentleness through that first relationship, that first connection with the mother and how that informs the rest of the relationships that we have with people for the rest of our lives. Yeah. I really like that about "Adoptee Log Number 9," especially the part with Jessie and the Snake. That is a real story, but it is also, it's so much allegory tied up in it for a lot of reasons. I think it was kind of a dance for me to try and get that allegory across without being too heavy-handed, especially since it was in a setting where Christianity was present, and I wanted to talk about that as well without doing too much. But yeah, I love being queer.

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‍ I love queer people, and I wanted the book to be a celebration of that, as well as a place where queer people could come to read and feel that they were safe.

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Kameryn Alexa Carter (11:15):

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Yeah, absolutely. I'm thinking about J Halberstam has this idea that queerness is more than a way of sex, it's a way of life. And what you're saying really makes me think about that. And I also think there are so many ways to queer the text itself. Even thinking about what you're talking about with the element of surprise, there is something very subversive and non-normative about subverting the expectation. And so I think part of that is part of the way of life of queerness.

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Dani Janae:

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Totally.

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Kameryn Alexa Carter (11:52):

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It's really interesting that you talk about it that way. I love that. So there's a moment in "Adolescence 1" where you call back to the cage that's presented at the beginning of the book,

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And it makes me think about the organization of the book. I guess this is another formal question, and I'm curious how the organization came about. Did it come about in the process of writing? Did it come about in the process of editing? Because you have, like we just mentioned the adoptee logs, so you have several series across the scope of the book, and I want to know, did those series come all at once? When did you realize that there were going to be recurring poems in the book? And also in terms of the sections itself, when did you realize it was going to be a triptych? I'm so interested in the process of that organization.

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Dani Janae (12:50):

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Yeah. So with this book, I worked with a different manuscript that I had written a few years ago. So some of the poems that are in this book have survived the editing process with that, and others are brand new. The adoptee log poems are all brand new because they specifically talk about my search for my mom in the year 2022, I think I started. No, 2023 is when I started, and the poems from earlier versions were when I was looking for my mom in 2010. So I think that the organization came through editing very much. So I worked with ... Well, I'll say first, I knew that it was going to be in three sections when I started writing the adopted log poems, which are very much just a daily charting of the process of trying to find my birth mother. So it was like I talk about things as mundane as going to the mailbox to check the mail or going to the post office to drop off a letter and things like that.

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So when I was writing those poems, I knew that they were going to be in sections, but I didn't know which sections they were going to be. And then when I first started putting the poems together, it was very much beginning, middle, end. And I worked with poet Rosebud Ben-oni on reorganizing it and helping me align it and things like that. And she was the one that told me to put Hound Triptych as the first poem in the book because I think it was in the final section actually, and she was like, no, this is the first poem. And once I reorganized it that way, I was definitely like, yeah, that's where it should be. And with that, I freed myself from this idea of linearness, having to have the poems follow a strict timeline. So instead of just being beginning search, middle search and end search, it became very much organized by theme, I guess I would say

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So the first section for me is very much about the language of adoption that I grew up with, which is what my mom would say about me and my brothers, what society at large says about adoption as a process. And then the middle section is deconstructing some of that as a starting point. And then the last section is reckoning with post-deconstruction, but also during deconstruction because the last poem of the book is me still grappling with all that stuff, especially around my birth mother and the story that I heard about her when I was growing up. So I wanted to not be so rigid in the way that the book was organized and have these big guidelines for how it should unfold. It does, to some extent, follow structured timeline, but it also plays with that a little bit too.

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Kameryn Alexa Carter (16:19):

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Yeah, that's so interesting in terms of time and linearity, especially because I feel like there's a lot of talk now about time that isn't linear. So is time cyclical? And so I'm curious where you fall on that argument. I think we've, especially as Black poets come to a point where it's like, okay, haunting is not a negative thing. It is something to grapple with, but it's kind of an endemic part of being Black in America. And I'm also just thinking about the ways that Black people honor people that are either passed on or that are just not in our lives anymore. And so I'm just curious about time and I'm really seeing in the book the way that you are manipulating that linearity. Do you feel like there's a cyclicality to it? Do you feel like there's a simultaneity to it? Yeah, I'm curious where you fall on that.

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Dani Janae (17:28):

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Yeah, I'm thinking right now that definitely cyclical, which is where the ouroboros comes from too. And the second one, I think I say something about coming back to my mother, again, like a hand moved back to 12. And yeah, I think that for me, this journey of finding family and finding myself has been very much cyclical in the way that I revisit things, hauntings that were a big part of my childhood or my early 20s and things like that. And I just find myself looping around these questions about selfhood and reconstruction, deconstruction. And I used to think about time as a wave, waves ebbing and flowing and things like that. But with this book, I definitely reorganized it in my mind. I think about how some historians would talk about ... I'm thinking right now of the 2020 pandemic and how it was sort of running parallel to the one that was in, I think it was 1919 and how history repeats itself in that way.

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And I think that the things that I am interested in also circle back to me in the ways that sort of align with that mode of thinking.

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‍ Yeah, the ouroboros poems were really very much about that, but also I really did want to also think about connection in the way of birth and rebirth and the sense that obviously I was born now separated from my mother, and then through writing this book, I've come back to her, and that to me is a circle. Yeah.

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Kameryn Alexa Carter (19:58):

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Thank you.

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Dani Janae (19:59):

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Yeah, thank you.

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Kameryn Alexa Carter (20:02):

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I want to ask you about freedom because there are so many ways that the poem "Hound Triptych" really asks the reader questions about the way they view freedom and liberation. And also there are cages in the book. There's a lot of ways in which the book seems to be grappling with freedom and unfreedom. And this is a fraught question because there is so much unfreedom in the world right now. And I think that we're all struggling to really redefine what that can look like and what a world that is freer can look like. But I guess I just want to ask you, what's been making you feel free or free-ish lately?

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Dani Janae (20:59):

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That's a really great question. Lately, it's been very much prayer as a mode of connection has been making me feel very free. I should say I don't have a connection to Christianity or any of the Judeo-Christian religions in that sense, but I just pray to what I feel is something bigger than me, which can be the universe or the solar system or this tree that's outside my window or the era that moves the world. I find so much of what I pray to is nature related and grounded in nature and not necessarily a capital G God that found in text, I should say.

‍ The prayers make me feel very free, also because there are set prayers that I know that I've learned throughout my life that can be linked to religion and things like that. But also I can just come up with a prayer on the top of my head one day when I need something to pray about. If I want to pray for a friend who's suffering, if I want to pray for myself, for guidance, if I want to pray for people across the world that are in danger, I could just bring whatever language I have to the prayer. And that to me is a source of freedom as well. Just having a language that connects me to others and to things bigger than me is very freeing to me.

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Kameryn Alexa Carter (22:44):

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Do you ever feel like the practice of prayer and the practice of poetics dovetail? Do you ever feel like they're in conversation with each other? Do you ever feel like you're doing both at the same time?

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Dani Janae (22:55):

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Yeah, absolutely. Yeah. I used to write more pointedly with that in mind. I think in a lot of ways, the last poem of the book is a prayer. It ends with the action of praying as well. And in that poem, I'm praying for forgiveness to my biological mother. And I think I wanted that poem to be like that because one of the things that I struggled with and struggle with in the book is this idea of making people and making things a God. So my first God was really my adoptive mother, and that God was parallel to the God that I grew up in. Then the church was very punishing, very damnation and things of that nature, very a cruel God. And then through just living and getting older and getting sober and things like that, I used to make drugs and alcohol my God as well, just thinking about how that process of making an intoxicant, the biggest thing in my life led me to a lot of dark places.

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And then when I got sober and started working on this book, I was really questioning my idea of what God is and just having that as a part of poetry as well. And having that connection to poetry is I think a thing that ... I think some of my favorite Black poets are also poets that play with that idea of poetry as prayer, prayer as poetry. I'm thinking about Lucille Clifton right now, even Toy Derekot too. Yeah, I love that there is a lineage there that doesn't have to be about Christianity. It can be about finding that freeing language. Yeah.

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Kameryn Alexa Carter (25:09):

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Speaking of Lucille Clifton and speaking of lineage, I want to know, do you have, I call them patron saints, which is funny because we're talking about God right now, but even if you don't want to use that language, do you have poetic ancestors? It seems like Lucille Clifton is one of them, but who are some of your other poetic ancestors, either people that you feel stylistically in line with or just people that you feel like visit you, people that you feel close to when you're writing or inspired by?

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Dani Janae (25:42):

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Yeah, exactly. Totally. Lucille Clifton, Audre Lorde, sometimes Louise Gluck. When I was in college, I read Averno for the first time, and that book is very much about motherhood, daughterhood, and that relationship. So I feel like sometimes that her voice in that manner visits me sometimes and helps me to write about those things because she grapples with the difficulty in those relationships a lot in her writing. Sometimes Pat Parker, a lot of the Black lesbian poets that I grew up reading, I would consider my patron saints. And right now I've been really into June Jordan. Just her as a poet that cared so much about the world and on a global level, her work always inspires me to think outside of myself, I guess I should say. Yeah.

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Kameryn Alexa Carter (26:59):

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This is similar to that question, but I want to know in terms of community, how do you feel like you've been creating or are part of or have been receiving community right now? Because I feel like it's so crucial. And thankfully we were just at a big writer gathering, but even outside of that on the quotidian level, are there ways that you feel like you're really in community right now and how does that present for you in your daily life?

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Dani Janae (27:38):

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Yeah. There are two communities that I think of right off the bat that I talk about in the Acknowledgements section in my book, which is the first one is my writing group that I work with on Sundays sometimes. I have two friends from college, Cale and Deal. I'm so connected to the two of them and have been for the past 13 years, and they've seen pretty much everything that I've ever written since we graduated from college. They saw a lot of poems from this book, and just being in community with them in the sense that we're not just talking on the phone or having our weekly call. It's like I think about Cale and his daughters when I'm shopping sometimes and I'll pick up a gift or Deal and he's raising his younger sister right now. So I think about that relationship and how he's navigating raising her as a white person who is raising a Black young girl.

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And I also think about my sober community, and that's a really big community for me right now from the people that I got with in Pittsburgh to the community that I have here in South Carolina now. And then I have community all over because of just the nature of sober community is like you get connected to people one way or another and you find out that they're sober and then they connect you to their friends that are sober and just goes and goes and goes. And I find that both of those communities really feel me. And I like to think that I feel them as well in the sense that so much of my life before I met them or got into contact with them was a process of emptying, I guess.

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‍ Part of the book is also, I think I talk about in the book deconstructing narratives. And so emptying myself of these things that I was told about myself as a young person and then filling myself again with the love of my community and their words of affirmation and the words of love and things like that that and then pouring that back into them. And it's all very simple, like we were talking about before. So I think that that's where I'm feeling community right now. And on an even larger sense, I think about just what it feels like and what it is like to be, I hate the word marginalized, but I think it sort of encapsulates a lot of identities at once in the US, in other countries, across the world, other continents across the world, and feeling in community with those people, despite not knowing them or not seeing them because of a common fight, I guess.

‍ I think about right now, fascism is the word on everybody's lips, and I think that while it is pertinent, it's also one of those words that's kind of limiting. I think about how some people in the US especially have just started using that word when since the US has been a concept, it's been a fascist state, something about community in the sense of that, of a group of people across lines and borders trying to get free.

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Kameryn Alexa Carter (31:32):

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It's interesting what you say about marginalization because I've been feeling similar with that word, especially because I feel like when I think about margins and centers, I'm not necessarily interested in bringing the margin to the center, if that makes any sense. I'm more interested in how can we do this unseen? How can we do this underground? How can we do this in a way that isn't as palatable or visible to our oppressors?

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Dani Janae (32:06):

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Yeah, totally.

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Kameryn Alexa Carter (32:08):

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So I feel like it's interesting that tension of that word, because I think you're so right that it does unite a lot of different struggles, but at the same time, I think it kind of implies that we're trying to bring the margin to center in some way.

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Dani Janae (32:21):

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Exactly. I agree.

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Kameryn Alexa Carter (32:24):

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Thank you so much. This has been such a lovely conversation. I really appreciate chatting with you and congratulations on this amazing book. I'm grateful to have the opportunity to talk with you.

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Dani Janae (32:38):

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Yeah, thank you so much. It was great talking to you too.

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