AUDIO TRANSCRIPT

Poetry Off the Shelf: Salvation in the Dark

Helena de Groot: This is Poetry Off the Shelf. I’m Helena de Groot. Today, Salvation in the Dark. Vievee Francis is a poet’s poet. The kind of poet whose work other poets read, circle and underline, and draw from like a well. And so, while I was reading her work, including her latest collection, Forest Primeval, I wanted to figure out why her work inspires so many poets when they write. One thing is clear—Vievee Francis does not hide. Her pain is right there, on the page, as if to tell the reader, “You’re not alone.” In one poem, she writes, “Up from my wounds … comes a song, a melody to open yours.” She’s candid about both breakdowns and transformations. And she’s lived through her share of transformations. As a child, Vievee Francis moved a lot. Her father was in the military, and often had to transfer from one site to another: rural East Texas; Atlanta, Georgia—always somewhere in the South. Then, right after middle school, that age when you already feel like you may die if you don’t fit in, her family moved up North. Her father had gotten a job at one of the Big Three car companies, and they moved into a suburb of Detroit called Southfield.

Helena de Groot: How was that transition? Did you take to city life right away?

Vievee Francis: I think I’m an awkward blend of a city person with rural roots. And Detroit was so different than Atlanta. I had been living in Atlanta. We lived in Sandy Springs and in Decatur. And Sandy Springs was predominantly white then. And so, all we heard was, “You’re going up north to that dangerous city,” and all of this type of thing. So, I was a child and I was nervous, but we moved into a suburb that was predominantly Jewish. I didn’t even know what that word was or meant. And suddenly, all of the Smiths and the (LAUGHS)—

Helena de Groot: (LAUGHS)

Vievee Francis: —and the Greens and the Browns, you know, the naming was profoundly different.

Helena de Groot: Yeah.

Vievee Francis: And that alone, it actually put me into a state of elation, because I discovered in myself a love of exploring and learning, and my life was completely around the schools my parents put me into. They were definitely integrationists, and I was going to immerse or I wasn’t going to survive.

Helena de Groot: Huh. Yeah.

Vievee Francis: So, there were very, very, very few Black people where we lived. But we didn’t know anything about that.

Helena de Groot: Right.

Vievee Francis: My father just found a place where he thought there were good schools, and there were, the schools were superb. But we had kosher meals and we got the Jewish High Holidays off. So I went from a very typical Southern Baptist—and by that I mean white Southern Baptist background, because the schools I was in in Atlanta were mostly white—into this new community, which I think exhilarated and shocked and delighted and all of these other things, my family. However, not long after we moved into the house my father bought, someone scrawled [N-word] across our front door. And that broke the illusion for me. I thought I was going to a place where I wouldn’t have to suffer as I’d suffered racial trauma in the South.

Helena de Groot: Yeah.

Vievee Francis: And that that woke me up. And I can’t tell you I have any memory after that. I don’t. It traumatized me. And anything that happened shortly after that, I forgot.

Helena de Groot: Yeah, yeah.

Vievee Francis: But then I made two friends, Laura Finkelstein and Lisa Brasgould. And I speak with Lisa Brasgould almost every day right now. But sometimes we’ll go a year, sometimes we’ll go a month. But those two, I learned a lot from them. I learned about their own backgrounds. They helped me negotiate this new terrain. And my middle school had, as I recall, some Black families, but not enough. I had an instructor call me Kizzy from Roots, thinking that that was funny. And I had been so used to being called all sorts of things, that it wounded me, not because he called me Kizzy, but because I was North, and I had a really hard time trying to reconcile the fact that I could be harmed up North. Wounded. Perhaps not as much physically, but certainly as much or more emotionally. And the Black people who were—they were moving from Detroit into Southfield, but we caught the first of that wave.

Helena de Groot: Yeah.

Vievee Francis: My parents were conservative. I only wore dresses. I wasn’t allowed to wear jeans. And I had an accent that was for the northern ear extreme. If I were going to say Momma, it might have six syllables: Mooomma, you know. (LAUGHS) So I did what I—I had heard Sidney Poitier did this, and I don’t know if it’s true or not, but I would simply listen to Midwestern radio, and I would imitate the sounds. And I worked out my accent.

Helena de Groot: Wow.

Vievee Francis: But my younger sister is a speech pathologist with a linguistics degree and her masters as well, and she told me that to lose the accent I had, it’s almost impossible. And she gave me all these reasons. But I was going to lose that accent, and I was going to wear jeans and sneak out of my skirts when I got into school (LAUGHS)—

Helena de Groot: (LAUGHS)

Vievee Francis: —and my parents couldn’t see me, because otherwise I wasn’t going to survive.

Helena de Groot: Yeah. Yeah, totally.

Vievee Francis: Oh, my goodness. Oh, my goodness, the new Detroiters moving into Southfield, they’d beat my ass.

Helena de Groot: Yeah.

Vievee Francis: And the idea of being hit, struck by a Black person. And I kept saying things, I was very much, in some ways, an innocent, naïve. And I don’t say that with pride. I find those traits that do not serve one.

Helena de Groot: Yeah.

Vievee Francis: And I would just beg. And I kept saying, “But you’re Black, I’m Black, we’re Brown!” They didn’t understand what I was saying, because they didn’t understand the experiences I’d come from. And I would say, “There are white people who do this, we don’t do this.”

Helena de Groot: Yeah.

Vievee Francis: But I had no idea what we did in the North. And I’d built this fantasy of Black love. I wanted to be part of the Black Power movement. Oh.

Helena de Groot: Yeah.

Vievee Francis: On television, everyone seemed so together. But on the micro level, in these, in schools, in small places, humans are just humans. And here was this strange girl who only wore dresses, who had an accent. I couldn’t understand a word anybody was saying, particularly my own people.

Helena de Groot: Yeah.

Vievee Francis: The quick clip of the Detroiters’ speech, the urbanity of it, so many words I didn’t know. Like a patois almost, a shifting vernacular. It took years for me to gain a facility with it. Which is interesting because now, at Dartmouth, I talk to my students about not English, but Englishes.

Helena de Groot: Uh-huh. Yeah. Mm-hmm. I was wondering if we can get to a poem. And this was not a poem that I prepared to read, but since you mentioned that incident, it’s that poem where this Black boy hits your mouth because he can’t stand your accent. But I don’t know the title of it now—do you know which one I’m talking about?

Vievee Francis: Maybe it’s “Taking It”?

Helena de Groot: Yes, yes, yes, that’s 100 percent it, yeah.

Vievee Francis:

(READS POEM)

Taking It

for Gabby and Jen

I never remember the knuckles, though

his hand was bare, though their hands were bare.

I remember the impressions left on this skin, the

wilting and the welting. I don't remember the sound,

not one smack. I remember the falls, myself falling

to the floor or sidewalk, or against the brick wall

my head met after a push. There were many pushes.

Girls pushed but I punched. Pulled one

down by the hair and kneed her as my head bled.

Girls didn't punch until high school. I had always

punched. What kind of girl are you?

The kind who wants to live, I said, and I did want to

until I didn't anymore. But I wanted the leaving

to be on my terms, so I hit my father back.

He owned me like any good, country father. He

waited for a husband to tame what he couldn't corral,

to throw a rope like fingers 'round a neck.

When I missed a boy, fingerholds—I remember those,

and me making a fist wrongly, and punching

and I didn't mean to miss but to hit the line below the belly,

the beltline. W—— broke me in the snow

my first year North. I'm still afraid to say his name.

I wore shoes too thin for the weather (who had ever seen

such snow?) and had a Georgia lilt, like molasses

on a sore throat, sugared, raw, and he hated the sound of it.

He was black and I was black and I was so happy

to be in Detroit, and he aimed for my heart-

shaped mouth, my gapped teeth, my too-sweet tongue.

I felt the juvenile weight of him above me like snow after dark

falling steady and hard. I'm gone teach you to talk reg'lar,

and I stopped speaking at all. I kept my swollen mouth shut,

and a straight razor in my math book, and dreamt of a bat

cracking against his chest. A woman like me

with soft hands, not hands of the field, but

hands meant to stroke and soothe, needs a weapon,

so I studied The Art of War and watched boxing, and

where else was all this rage to go? Is this too dramatic?

Find another story. Find a lie. In love, body after body

fell beneath my own, though my own was broken,

and I made love like a sea creature, fluid as if boneless

though my bones would rattle if not for the fat I cherish.

Wouldn't you? And I grew to love the heavyweights,

myself with one in the ring. Imagine him punching

me, and punching me again, saying I'm sorry, so sorry,

to have to love you this way.

* * *

Helena de Groot: Thank you. You were surprised that in Detroit you were met with violence by Black people, by your peers, you know.

Vievee Francis: Yes.

Helena de Groot: I’m wondering if the surprise came from the fact that in, you know, down South, that didn’t happen, it was white people who were violent, or that it came from thinking, I’m sure that up North is different, because, you know, Black Power movement is real and all of that. Like, why were you surprised?

Vievee Francis: Because of the reasons you just stated. And because I was in so much trauma, I built a fantasy of salvation.

Helena de Groot: Yeah.

Vievee Francis: And it extended into Canada. So I was terribly angry with my father. He worked initially for General Motors there. And we lived, what, 20 minutes from the Detroit River, something like that. Then you cross the bridge, you cross the tunnel, which was easy then, and you’re in Windsor, which was a wonderland to me. That small city was a wonderland. But I went to Canada and found myself ... it’s a center, and I think they’re the descendants of … I have to look that up—it’s Harriet Beecher Stowe, Uncle Tom’s Cabin.

Helena de Groot: Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Vievee Francis: So the figure the novel is based upon, the descendants of that figure, they wind up in freedom in Canada. But two things, I thought of the Black Canadian as this angel-like figure. I’m like, “Oh, you’re from the people who ran.”

Helena de Groot: Totally.

Vievee Francis: You know? And “I’m of the people who stayed.” And of course, I’m not disparaging my family. I love my history. My personal history, I think is evocative and fascinating and a story of strength. But, I, again, I was young, I’d already been through extreme trauma, and I went to this museum area, whatever it was called, and I just started weeping, thinking about what it must be like to feel so free, to have freed yourself of those chains. And I think that was exacerbated by my being Texan, because, of course, the slaves in Texas weren’t freed for two and a half years after the others.

Helena de Groot: Right. Yeah.

Vievee Francis: And then my father, I’m like, “15, 20 minutes? And you can’t get across the river?”

Helena de Groot: Yeah.

Vievee Francis: “It’s the early ’70s, we can get across the river, Negro. Let’s go!”

Vievee Francis and Helena de Groot: (LAUGH)

Vievee Francis: I was constantly torturing my dad with “When are we going to Canada?”

Helena de Groot: That’s really funny. That, like, the promised land is always beyond, you know?

Vievee Francis: It is! And that’s my point. Oh, you’re marvelous.

(MUSIC PLAYS)

Helena de Groot: What I found so remarkable in many of the poems in this collection is the unflinching quality of them. This kind of willingness, almost, to not hold back. And talk about not just the violence that others inflicted on you, or on the lyric “I”, I should say, but also the ugly parts of oneself.

Vievee Francis: Yes.

Helena de Groot: Yeah, there seemed to be a decision almost to … look, and to keep looking. And I’m wondering if … if something happened.

Vievee Francis: Well, something did happen, which altered my trajectory. My husband took a job in North Carolina at the juncture of the Smokies and the Blue Ridge, about eight miles outside of Asheville, North Carolina. And so you are deep in the mountains. You’re so—oh, you’re in the Appalachians, for sure.

Helena de Groot: Yeah.

Vievee Francis: And I’d only read about that part of the country. And I’d been listening to bluegrass and old-time most of my life, because my parents loved it, which helped me when I moved there. And we were living right there on the campus of a small college that’s there, Warren Wilson College. And we were living in this old house. It was about 100 years old with this 100-year-old tree in front of it. And, you know, in the US, 100 years is a long time.

Vievee Francis and Helena de Groot: (LAUGH)

Vievee Francis: It’s all context, it’s all context. (LAUGHS) But the mountain, that forest, that was old.

Helena de Groot: Yeah.

Vievee Francis: And it was wilderness. It was utter wilderness. I remember looking out of the bedroom window and I saw all of this trash that had been strewn across the back forested yard. And I said to my husband, “Oh, these young people, did they have a party?” And I was just offended that these young people had this party and left this. And my husband looked at me and—he calls me Bunny—and he said, “Bunny, that was a bear.”

Helena de Groot: Oh! Oh, god!

Vievee Francis: And I said—I said, “A what?”

Vievee Francis and Helena de Groot: (LAUGH)

Helena de Groot: 30 years in Detroit, I never once thought about a bear.

Helena de Groot: Oooh no.

Vievee Francis: So, give me a robber, someone intent upon doing harm, and I can take that better than I can take a bear. I can’t reason with a bear.

Helena de Groot: Of course.

Vievee Francis: If one of the little cubs decides I’m interesting, I can only back away slowly. The mother bear is not going to think, “Oh, this person thinks the cubs are cute.” That’s not how mother bear thinks.

Helena de Groot: Yeah, yeah.

Vievee Francis: I took this river walk, it’s just a simple trail, and I remember the first time being able to walk it by myself because I was so terrified of the bears. And these are Black bears. These aren’t grizzlies. So people kept saying, “Oh, you don’t have to worry about them.” But I worried.

Helena de Groot: Yeah.

Vievee Francis: And I walked the trail and I thought I smelled bear, because you can smell bear before you see bear. And did not know I was capable of running that fast back to my car. (LAUGHS) I remember running back. But I knew I was going to have to face these fears, and I was going to have to do it by myself. So—and I’ve said this in interviews—the wilderness unraveled me.

Helena de Groot: Yeah.

Vievee Francis: Again, I found myself in a place I was not prepared for, but, again, I love immersion in new places. I have some theories around immersion and why I feel most people immerse poorly.

Helena de Groot: Okay, I want to hear it though.

Vievee Francis: Well, I think most people immerse poorly, particularly if they’re moving into an area where it’s a group they think they know. Or their filters are thick, or there are so many false ideas they bring with them. So they don’t leave any room to listen, or to see, or to truly allow themselves to experience something.

Helena de Groot: Mm-hmm.

Vievee Francis: And I found early on I needed to walk in as a blank canvas. If I didn’t break, if I didn’t allow the release of any rigidity of thought, I wasn’t going to be able to do it. So, I kind of had to open myself up, but it unraveled me. It shifted how I thought about nature, it shifted how I thought about America, it shifted how I thought about me. And it led to an exploration of the wilderness that was roiling inside of me, the forest within. And that led to these texts and allowing for my own complicity.

Helena de Groot: Yeah, this is so interesting to me, because … because of that unraveling, this is not something most of us are comfortable with letting happen, especially I feel like when you move to a completely new place, as you say, you may know what to do with a burglar in your house, but a bear is so different that all of your city smarts are out the window.

Vievee Francis: They were completely useless!

Helena de Groot: Yeah. And so how do you even allow that to happen and not build up a defense, where you kind of try at all costs to keep your habits and your notions intact? How do you not build that wall around yourself?

Vievee Francis: Because the wall doesn’t work. It simply doesn’t work. For two reasons. There are those who just when they see a wall, their impulse is to break it down. I’d rather break my own wall.

Helena de Groot: Yeah.

Vievee Francis: You know, I think I survive when I break my own wall. And two, if one doesn’t break one’s own walls down, I find it impossible to see the truth of the world around you. So it’s almost like a letting the self go, a part of the self go, and then another self develops or develops alongside or merges with that. And there are experiences that change you. Where you come out of them changed. Almost reborn, because I’ve had more than one experience where that’s happened. This time, I just let it happen.

Helena de Groot: Yeah.

Vievee Francis: And the nature, it’s so beautiful there. Great walls of rhododendrons that you just want to throw your body into.

Helena de Groot: Yeah.

Vievee Francis: And I do believe the mountains like that hold mysteries. They hold their secrets. And I had held my secrets. I started to, after three years, just relate to the mountains themselves, the landscape. I loved the people I met who were of those mountains, generations of those mountains. They were curious about me. I was curious about them. And they were nothing like the stereotypes I’d heard. And I didn’t feel fear. But every day I felt fear.

Helena de Groot: Yeah, yeah.

Vievee Francis: Every day, the experiences just came at me so hard and quick. And for some reason—it’s just different than adaptation—for some reason, my husband was able to adapt quite easily. But I think because there were so few Black people, so few, that even as I adapted, there were the constant reminders that I was other.

Helena de Groot: Yeah.

Vievee Francis: At the same time. But those reminders didn’t come from the landscape. The landscape swallows you, you know, so I let myself be swallowed … and, you know, I left longing to go back.

Helena de Groot: That is interesting. Yeah, I mean, especially because you said that you started to relate to the actual mountains, you know? What is that, how do you do that?

Vievee Francis: Well, it didn’t happen easily. But, I don’t know, you fall in love with the land itself, with the topography with … and now it haunts me. And I put that haunting in the book. Those rhododendrons haunt me. The creek beds haunt me, the waterfalls haunt me, the smell of those mountains and looking out and seeing mountains that are high and all around you. I’m not sure, but there’s a saying out there that if you’re in those mountains for five years, that you’ll never leave those mountains. And I think that may be true.

Helena de Groot: And do you feel like it changes your perception of time and your own place in it?

Vievee Francis: Yes. I was beginning to, because the pace is slower in the Southern US—and this is Southern US, but it’s also mountain US.

Helena de Groot: Yeah.

Vievee Francis: So, I definitely felt the pace as slower and people’s relationship to time, it felt as if there was time. Less a sense of urgency. And I don’t feel that in New England. In New England, and because I’m in an academic environment in New England, I’ll often feel like there’s no time at all and I cannot catch up with it.

Helena de Groot: Yeah.

Vievee Francis: At the end of 2019. I had a pretty major surgery, and I’ve been in recovery since. And the first time I slowed down in my life was that surgery, because I was unable to walk, and I had to be in bed all of the time. And reading was impossible. And I had to take—I took a brief medical leave from the college. And I realized that that was the first time in my life I ever fully rested.

Helena de Groot: That’s wild.

Vievee Francis: And then I realized that so many people in this world never get to rest at all.

Helena de Groot: Yeah.

Vievee Francis: But the Puritan work ethic—people talk about New York being busy, but I really think that the academic world in New England perhaps carries more than any place else or any other institutions, the Puritan work ethic. And the Puritan work ethic was to work yourself to death.

Helena de Groot: Right.

Vievee Francis: And anyone who didn’t work themselves to death, well, that’s just, that’s just being lazy, really. So I’m being sarcastic, because I don’t think that at all.

Helena de Groot: Yeah. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. But that is what is so interesting, too, because, you know, earlier when you said many people have a hard time immersing themselves in a new place, because they don’t know it and they don’t really challenge their received notions of it. But what happens when a new place ... you do know it, or you do see it, but you just don’t want to, because like, you’ve experienced that slowing down that you experienced in the mountains, and you’re not about to give that up again. Like, what do you do then?

Vievee Francis: Well, that’s what I’m trying to figure out now.

Vievee Francis and Helena de Groot: (LAUGH)

Vievee Francis: I think I’m trying to carve out space for being my fullest self. And my husband and I, we just bought a house about six months ago, maybe?

Helena de Groot: Congratulations.

Vievee Francis: Actually longer than that, because we bought it in the midst of the pandemic. I needed more space to walk and I couldn’t go to physical therapy and … so I feel like our home, that space is where time can slow down a bit. So Our New England Cape—we have a little New England Cape that’s white with black shutters, but inside I have these colors that are a cross between a jazz club and a soul food kitchen.

Vievee Francis and Helena de Groot: (LAUGH)

Vievee Francis: So I might have a pot of greens on the stove and playing some jazz in the living room.

Helena de Groot: Right.

Vievee Francis: I have an old fashioned record player, a Crosley from the ’60s, although it’s new, they keep making them, but it looks like that. And then I put on some jazz, and then time becomes more natural for me.

(MUSIC PLAYS)

Helena de Groot: There was one word that kept coming back throughout your poems, not just in Forest Primeval, but also in the book before, and that’s the word “dark.” I mean, your previous book is even called Horse in the Dark. And then one of two epigraphs in your current collection is taken, you know, from a poem by Michael Collier, “into wild darkness and wild darkness descending.”

Vievee Francis: Mm-hmm.

Helena de Groot: But your use of darkness doesn’t seem trapped in that dichotomy that, you know, we’ve inherited from Christianity, from the Enlightenment, where light is seen as the good thing, you know, progress, reason, all that, and dark is seen as bad, you know, crazy, or even evil. And so I’m wondering what darkness means to you and what it generates.

Vievee Francis: Well, those are the things I wanted to, push back against. Those are the things that I questioned myself. I hated the use of dark and light and black/white binaries. I couldn’t—I always found them to be quite false. So I use darkness in terms of darkness within, meaning what is unknown, but not what is negative. Just what is unknown. Just as if we wake up in the middle of the night and the home has no lights on, you get up and your eyes begin to adjust. And if there is any light at all, you use that light, but simply to find your way in the dark. But the darkness is not negative. In our sleep, that’s when we grow. In our sleep, that’s when we produce the chemicals that will help prevent Alzheimer’s. So many things happen dark sites that I think are good. In the evenings at a pub, that’s when we release our false selves and inhibitions fall away.

Helena de Groot: Yeahh.

Vievee Francis: Sometimes I like just being in the dark and reaching out and reaching around. Now that I know my house, I know where I can walk without bumping into something. And I like dancing in the dark.

Helena de Groot: Yeah.

Vievee Francis: So, people fear what is dark because they’re trained to fear what is dark. And also because we can’t see what’s coming at us, if something’s coming at us. When I decided to think more deeply on interiors and interiority. It was like moving through the dark. And accepting things as dark. And no, I don’t see things as bright and white as sites of salvation, or—

Helena de Groot: Yeah.

Vievee Francis: Yeah, and I think … because the sun is a trope in a lot of my work, but the sun as a symbol, it’s a personal symbol, not archetypal or collective, because, after having lived on the Texas panhandle where the sun bears down on you—I want to say cruelly, but cruel in its indifference to whatever is happening to you.

Helena de Groot: Yeah.

Vievee Francis: I think that may have shifted forever my ideas of brightness as the thing to move toward. And the sun in Texas on that panhandle, many Texas writers refer to it as a white sun, because it looks white. It blanches the land.

Helena de Groot: Yeah, yeah.

Vievee Francis: So I think that there, if I was thinking in terms of positive and negative in that binary, then it upturns, hopefully in my work. I love explorations of what is dark. So just the unknown darkness is the opportunity to face fears—received fears. And it’s mystery and desire and aloneness. Darkness that people leave you with. Horse in the Dark, it speaks to loneliness, it speaks to typically what that phrase means, having things happening around me that I’m not allowed to be privy to.

Helena de Groot: Yeah, yeah.

Vievee Francis: Or following, having to follow instead of lead. So darkness is ... I’m trying to find a word, it’s utterness. U-t-t-e r-n-e-s-s.

Helena de Groot: Uh-huh.

Vievee Francis: And I’m very drawn to it.

Helena de Groot: I’m wondering if you can read a poem from Horse in the Dark. It’s a poem called “You Can Pretend It Doesn’t Exist If You Want to But.”

Vievee Francis: Okay.

Helena de Groot: And I don’t know if you want to introduce it somehow, say anything about how it came to be, or, you know, whatever you would like to say before you read.

Vievee Francis: Well, initially, I drew these images from East Texas in the Piney Woods. My mother is buried out there. Though she was alive at the time when I wrote these. As a child, in my grandmother’s house, a house she built, I would look out at the tree line, and it would be so dark in those woods that in slight moonlight, the tree line would look purple. And I was terrified of those Piney Woods, going out there. I loved the farm. I loved going outside. But going into the woods, that was not thinkable. And when we did go into the woods, if my grandmother was walking the property line, and if she want me to walk it with her, but I didn’t want to walk the property line. I knew what those woods held.

Helena de Groot: Yeah.

Vievee Francis: But I’d go in there, we’d go with their fishing, and, my people were living all through those woods and then the people of the people they married were, you know, living around those woods. And there were always darknesses. Darkness in the corners, darkness in a closet, darkness under, you know, the big beds.

Helena de Groot: Yeah.

Vievee Francis: And darkness under the house. And in Texas, you know, a snake might make itself nice and comfortable under your house, in the cool, dark shade. So the darkness held surprises, you had to watch yourself.

Helena de Groot: Yeah.

Vievee Francis: Okay. I’ll read this now.

(READS POEM)

there was darkness there—and light, too—

but mostly the dark moving pine to pine

beneath the porches in the never opened

back closets, the stuffed drawers behind

the stove settled into its grease.

Lift the jars lining the pantry shelves and

there the dark will be and the fermented pears

in the bluet honey enough darkness to string

a bee box to draw the hounds “just so” dark

“listenhere” dark “watchyourself” dark

“I’ll be damned” “come and get it”

“bestleaveitalone” “hitch your skirt up”

belly lift and knees down darkness under

the skin where a tick burrows either way

for better or worse so it goes here it comes

no way around the darkness dark inherent

forever and amen ever.

* * *

Helena de Groot: Thank you. Yeah, let’s start with these rhetorical bits—“‘just so’ dark / ‘listenhere’ dark ‘watchyourself’ dark / ‘I’ll be damned’ ‘come and get it’.” You know, all of that. What kind of dark is that? Can you just talk about that a little bit?

Vievee Francis: I think ... I just remember the voices of place, the people who were dark skinned, many of them, some lighter, but I was darker skinned. Maybe, you know, I’d irritate my grandmother and her face would get this kind of look on it, which I would think of as the face where anything could happen, because she is not happy. And that’s “‘listenhere’ dark.” And then there’s the mysteries of desire. And I see that mystery as dark, so that’s “hitch your skirt up.”

Helena de Groot: Yeah.

Vievee Francis: And then, sometimes it’s best to leave it alone, and we can be down on our knees for any number of reasons. And ticks. Oh, I kept getting tick-bit.

Helena de Groot: Oh yeah.

Vievee Francis: And you’d have to hunt them, find them under the skin, right, under the dark skin. And my early understanding of the internal mysteries. I was using a kind of physical means of getting at it. But I knew eventually I was going to talk about the interior.

Helena de Groot: Yeah.

Vievee Francis: And then for better or worse, you know, marriage has its own mysteries.

Helena de Groot: Right.

Vievee Francis: But it’s inherent, and it’s, I meant to speak of it as almost sacred by the end of this poem.

Helena de Groot: Yeah, that end of the poem is really powerful, the way also you break up forever and ever by putting the word “amen” in there, you know, “forever and amen ever.”

Vievee Francis: Yes.

Helena de Groot: You know, the way that we always break up—I mean, maybe you don’t do this, but, you know, the way that in American speech, you know, we break up so many sentences with “fucking,” you know, like, “I can’t fucking believe,” you know, that this is happening or something like that.

Vievee Francis: Yeah. Yeah.

Helena de Groot: So I felt like it had like it shared syntactical rhythm with that, but then instead of having, you know, “fucking” be the thing that interrupts, it’s “amen.”

Vievee Francis: That’s interesting! I wasn’t thinking of it in terms of that syntax, but that’s exactly what I used. So, I consciously broke it up for a particular kind of rhythm. Well, you know, that really is close, because what I wanted was a particular intensity. I wanted to be adamant. You know, to put a point on it, which is what the word “fucking” does, it puts a point on it.

Helena de Groot: Right. Right.

Vievee Francis: So, yeah, that ... huh, very insightful. I have to say.

Helena de Groot: (LAUGHS)

Vievee Francis: But you said you don’t write poetry.

Helena de Groot: Oh, no, I don’t write poetry. No. And now, I won’t at all, because I interview all these poets and that puts the bar someplace unattainable now for me. (LAUGHS)

Vievee Francis: Oh my goodness. (LAUGHS) I don’t know if I agree with that, but I understand that sentiment, I do.

Helena de Groot: Yeah, yeah. I was also struck by how you locate darkness, you know, beneath the porches in the never opened / back closets, the stuffed drawers behind / the stove settled into its grease.” “Lift the jars lining the pantry shelves and / there the dark will be and the fermented pears.” I mean, it was so evocative of how I noticed darkness when I was a child in a way that I don’t now.

Vievee Francis: Mm-hmm.

Helena de Groot: I’m wondering if that childhood notion of this kind of dark is something that you’ve returned to or if that’s never left you?

Vievee Francis: It’s never left me.

Helena de Groot: Mm-hmm.

Vievee Francis: Never. I’ve written about this as an inability to kind of tone down my sensitivities. And I can’t tone them down. It feels—sometimes that feels exquisite, and sometimes it’s overwhelming. There’s a condition that some preemies have where they can develop over sensitivity to the world around them, so they’ll experience touch in a kind of hypersensitive way. Or smell or sound, and I don’t remember the term now. But I remember thinking, “I’m a preemie, maybe that’s why I’m having this trouble.” (LAUGHS LIGHTLY) But I do write poems about experiencing everything to the 10th degree.

Helena de Groot: Yeah.

Vievee Francis: And since I was a child, everything, I’m hyper sensitive to physical touch. Sometimes it’s unbearable, because I feel it so much. And even if, say, my husband is reading me poems, after four or five poems, I start to yell, “I’m overstimulated, I’m overstimulated!”

Helena de Groot: (LAUGHING) Yes!

Vievee Francis: And it happens with music, too. I have to be really careful what I’m listening to and then how much I listen. It takes a while to process all of those things.

Helena de Groot: Yeah.

Vievee Francis: So the sensations I had as a child, they remain. I love fermented pears. I’m not sure my grandmother was supposed to can ’em that way.

Helena de Groot: (LAUGHS)

Vievee Francis: She canned ’em that way purposely, and my father and I would haggle over who was going to get those jars of pears whenever we visited her. But they were in a pantry that was so dark in the back. And I was constantly trying to pull things back and around and see what was in there, to peer into that darkness.

Helena de Groot: Yeah, it’s so interesting that you mention also these other senses, because that’s of course, key, too, right. That we have in our current, you know, society or time frame or whatever we can blame for it, there’s such emphasis on sight, because that’s the only sense that can really perceive the difference between light or dark. So, you know, it’s all the other senses are already in the dark in a way, you know? We taste with our mouth and the stuff is inside our mouth in the dark, right. Yeah, when we are touched on our back or something, we’re again in the dark. But the perception is nonetheless for it. And that was something that also struck me in your work, like how the mouth and the intelligence of the mouth, you know, what it tastes, what sounds that can roll around in it. You know, how front and center that seems to be to you. And so I’m wondering like, how do you learn to trust it more than we usually do or how do you follow it where it wants you to go?

Vievee Francis: Well, I’m a sensualist.

Helena de Groot: Yeah.

Vievee Francis: And so that’s the first thing that comes to mind for me. I have always gotten into trouble for my mouth. So, I’ve had to learn to keep my thoughts to myself in different situations. But my face is really expressive, particularly around my mouth. So people always tend to know what I’m thinking or feeling. (LAUGHING) It’s challenging to have a poker face.

Helena de Groot: (LAUGHS LIGHTLY)

Vievee Francis: And, you know, like babies constantly tasting things to take their measure, I definitely never lost that either. So … (LAUGHS) But it’s funny because, I went to an HBCU, a Black college, historically Black college, Fisk University, and my mouth, my lips were not large enough for beauty. But whenever I’m in white sites, you know, of course, the lips are seen as oh, you know, very full.

Helena de Groot: Yeah, right.

Vievee Francis: And my lips are not pink, my lips are brown. And in literature, so much literature is centered around pinkness instead of brownness. And there’s just this, what I feel to be a deadly dichotomy between pink and brown.

Helena de Groot: Hm. Yeah.

Vievee Francis: And I think the mouth for me, it’s a way to understand the world, and it’s also a way to experience desire and it’s also a way to defend oneself, speaking out.

Helena de Groot: Yeah.

Vievee Francis: And I think about that more, because my way of speaking out is through my work more than through my speech. However, in the last nine years, I’ve been giving lectures and doing panels and different things around the country, and now those lectures are becoming essays. So, maybe I’ve been speaking out more than I realized. And I always see it in my own quiet way because I don’t do any social media whatsoever.

Helena de Groot: Yeah.

Vievee Francis: And yeah, I think somewhere in there is my is my answer.

Helena de Groot: I was wondering if maybe one way that you can also give your answer is by reading one last poem, “How delicious to say it.”

Vievee Francis: Oh, that was ... sometimes the process of writing is painful, is challenging, but this one, it took a while to write, but I really loved writing it.

(READS POEM)

How delicious to say it,

to allow it like hibiscus to wend over the tongue
where it opens at the gate, lending its red, unknowable
taste. What wonder the palate may embrace – in a flick
behind the teeth: loquacious, “liepschen, liepschen.”
Let us praise the labium that shapes such syllables, and
parlay of their attendant assumptions like a shuttlecock
struck back and forth over its simple backyard net.
Let us not neglect, but laud the mature mouth ready
for more than a dollop, the spoonful of lip, loon,
April, billow, or some simple pronoun. No. It wants jouissance,
Dostoevsky, provocations heating the exchange, say
chipotles in the chocolate. Consider the uvular awakenings
of the day, the throat stretched to signify its pleasure and release.
Your name spun through the wind-box, whipped up from the bass
of me. How I want to say it, and hear my own, again.

* * *

Helena de Groot: Vievee Francis is the author of three poetry collections, Forest Primeval, which won the 2016 Hurston/Wright Legacy Award for Poetry and the 2017 Kingsley Tufts Poetry Award; Horse in the Dark, which won the Cave Canem Northwestern University Press Prize; and Blue-Tail Fly. Francis is the Associate editor at the literary journal Callaloo, and an associate professor of English and Creative Writing at Dartmouth College. She lives in Vermont with her husband, the poet Matthew Olzmann. To read some of Francis’s poems and find out more about her, check out the Poetry Foundation website. Or … just check back in next time, for a second episode with Vievee Francis. This was not something we’d planned, it just happened. We were done with the interview, saying goodbye, and then we kept talking. And she told me about an issue that has nearly destroyed her. And I share more about myself than I usually do … so if you want, that will be up right after this episode. The music, as always, is by Todd Sickafoose. I’m Helena de Groot, and this was Poetry Off the Shelf. Thank you for listening.

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