I’m so excited for poet DéLana R.A. Dameron’s sophomore collection of poems, Weary Kingdom. The universal longing for home pulses with each poem. The voice is magnetic, the images laser-sharp. You trust this voice. You fall in love with this voice, just as you marvel at the speaker’s journey into Harlem as she connects, in her own way, with the Harlem of old, where artists roam the streets, where knife fights abound under moonlight.
Recently, I had the privilege of catching up with DéLana to talk about her new collection and her creative process. Here’s a teaser from Weary Kingdom.
The Perch
Let’s say a studio. A lone wide room where all living is done.
For example: the dining table by the fireplace
with four chairs; the zipped up body of the guitar case
by the radiator; three un-curtained windows
opening their mouths to a grey Harlem sky.
Let’s observe the boxes under the dining table—
how they spill across the floor their unshelved books.
Observe the unflowered vases; the bed unmade—one side
folded back, the other untouched. I know it.
Let’s say: everything is half-finished, half-started.
Let’s say a bathroom with a skylight—
clear tarp, tape covering the broken pane. The dishes
in the kitchen sink. Let’s say sunlight never reaches
the oven or dish rack & that makes you sad—
that your one cantaloupe will never ripen how you like it,
& you hate how you flip the switch & the cupboard
is flooded with 60 watts, & your apples must dream of orchards.
Pollen collected on the coffee table, let’s say it would be nice
if someone should join you: give reason to clear the air, to bend
your back over the broom. Let’s say in this room
of incomplete things, your journal isn’t open
to an empty, lined page. Let’s keep it written in,
brimming with verses or prayers.
This is home. Not magnolia & dogwood
& dandelion, but hardwood floors & butter-colored walls,
a pile of abandoned shoes by the door.
Abdul Ali: I'd like to begin with the idea of Weary Kingdom. What is the genesis of this project. What question were you trying to answer? And where did you get your title?
DéLana R.A. Dameron: The poems in Weary Kingdom point to a very specific point in my life, namely, the first four years or so living in NYC, specifically Harlem—the section called Sugar Hill—and what it meant to be trying to make a home in a region that was at once famous and foreign as well as famous for its ruthlessness towards one's attempt to transition successfully. Within that, I was an early-to-mid twenty-something with all of the trappings of one who was also trying to find love. &, I guess, my familiars (as they show up in How God Ends Us), the exploration of loss, faith, family with Harlem/NYC as the backdrop.
The title comes from an Emerson essay I read in grad school, at NYU, which (grad school) came significantly later than about 5/6 of the manuscript. In class with Yusef Komunyakaa, I wrote a poem, "Weary Kingdom" that Painted Bridge Quarterly later published, and slipped it into the manuscript. Later, as I was thinking about all of the poems together, I thought that “Weary Kingdom” was a stronger title, and created a whole world—a kingdom!—for the themes and poems to reside.
AA: Lovely. So much of the poems feels like a conversation the speaker is having with the City, a Person, or the idea of Home....did I get this right?
DD: I'd say many people populate the subjects the speaker is interacting with, or speaking about, through out. I think the occasions for the conversations, their underpinnings, are the hope for finding/creating a home.
AA: Speaking of home--there's a real tension between the Southern home where the speaker is from and the new home of New York City. Can you talk a bit about how this journey helped you reconcile these opposing geographic spaces when you write,
This is home--not magnolia & dogwood/
but hardwood floors & butter colored walls.
DD: That quote is coming from the first poem, "The Perch," which was—at the time of writing—a poetic mapping of my Harlem studio not long after I moved in. The journey to that apartment from my home in South/North Carolina (I moved to the NYC region immediately after undergraduate school at UNC Chapel Hill) was so fraught with uncertainties...Would I stay in the area...? Could I [afford to] stay?....Will the city eat me whole? Will I conquer it? Why am I even here? Do I like it? Is this where I am supposed to be? So many questions. Anyways. I don't think it has been reconciled. The book is Weary Kingdom after all. I don't think the speaker as she journeys through the book, through this time period in her life, in the city, in literally sending letters home (to the south) with the attempts to reconcile...but as I said, what I think Weary Kingdom is most successful—and I’m finding as I'm preparing readings and such—is that it is a time capsule of a very specific time in my life.
Which is also only the first 4.5 years of a 10-year life in NYC. And I would argue I'm still feeling many of those feelings, but now, from Brooklyn—which assuages a lot of the home anxieties (being married and having more housing security—if one can even imagine that?—
It certainly helps), but still does not reconcile my longing, desire, to return South.
AA: After reading the beautiful preface that Ross Gay wrote and your collection, I'm curious if you are clearer in your thinking about home? Is it merely about being South or not being South? Or is it more complicated than that?
DD: I think as I have some distance—years—from the writing of these poems, and now the idea of reading them, and others reading them, what I am seeing the idea of "home" that Weary Kingdom is attempting to hit at is a deep nostalgia about a place that one can never get back to. When I say place, I mean: place in time, place in family, place in a relationship. For the speaker, because she has not yet made too many memories in her new weary kingdom of NYC/Harlem, and all of her attempts to find her people are fraught with emotionally distant men while she herself is also emotionally distant, there is a search for an anchor. So, I looked South and back in time, while also trying to wrestle with the environment in which the speaker found herself.
AA: I am particularly struck by your poem "DeLana and I"? Can you talk a bit about the poem. I know you reference Borges. For those who may not be familiar with his work, what are you doing in this stand-out poem?
DD: In the book's time-capsule way, I hope it shows the wrestling I did with myself to both be a social/outgoing being— sharpened at the edges by NYC's grit—in NYC and a writer self, two selves I believed at times not able to exist at once. Elsewhere in the book, I talk about how NYC changes you. I still say it. My family will tell you. I became, externally, another person when I moved up here and I would argue you have to be to not be swallowed whole. I remember coming home (South Carolina is always Home...) and going grocery shopping with my mom, and I had cursed and leaned in to someone who was trying to get over on us. She was so mortified. Externally, I had/have become someone else. But inside, there is another weary kingdom, and that is the one that wants to document, that wants to remember, that yearns.
AA: May I ask what’s next for you? What are you currently working on?
DD: Recently, I had the pleasure of meeting and signing with a literary agent—a dream of mine I've had for some time! She will help me figure out my book life in a real way. I'm currently working on editing my novel, which I hope will be in people's hands soon, but I won't say more than that. I write in multiple genres, so here and there over the last 6 years, I have been writing essays while working towards a collection of those—but I've been feeling a churning in my body, a need to write about the last year of my life with my mother, who suffered a severe stroke and lost her speech and is paralyzed on her right side. I've been home (South) more times in the last year, than probably the last 5 years before that. And then, you know, poems as they come. Now that Weary Kingdom is out, I am preparing for a tour for the second half of 2017! I'll be all over. The current listings are on my website at www.delanaradameron.com
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