Eve Ewing on Poetry & Empowerment in the Classroom

Today at Literary Hub, Eve Ewing speaks with Rebecca Stoner about race and social injustice in the classroom. Ewing is a sociology professor at the University of Chicago and is the author of the poetry collection Electric Arches, her debut; with Nate Marshall she runs Crescendo Literary, a community arts organization in Chicago. "I’ve always felt a little bit of a disconnect between what is reified by a certain traditional established literary set of institutions—what’s considered poetry and what it means to be a poet from that perspective—versus what I have understood and affirmed what it means to be a poet," Ewing explains. From there: 

RS: Can you talk more about your relationship with classical poetry? I know in Electric Arches you have a sestina, a sonnet, and Requiem for Fifth Period explicitly references The Odyssey.

EE: My alienation from those kinds of institutions doesn’t mean that I’m alienated from canonical poetry. I have always been someone who enjoys reading widely. In college, I read Elizabeth Bishop and Robert Lowell and Sylvia Plath. But I also read a lot of Gwendolyn Brooks, a lot of Countee Cullen, and Jean Toomer, and it was through these black literature classes I was able to find poetry in school that meant something to me.

For the book, I did want to challenge myself to write in form, at least a little bit. It’s not something that’s my natural inclination, therefore I think it’s an important intellectual challenge. Even then, for me it’s a little bit different. The sestina—on the one hand, it’s a sestina, but on the other hand, it’s recounting the story of feeling very alienated as a black poet among other black poets, being in residency in a faraway town, and feeling separated from my self. Even the sonnet is playing with the form of the sonnet. It’s a love poem, just one line repeated 14 times, expressing love through this action of leaving somebody cornbread on the stove. To me that’s the embodiment of love and care. The fact that it’s after Terrance Hayes—it’s entering into conversation with a more contemporary black poet.

I don’t have any sort of animus towards traditional poetry institutions. Actually, I have been pleasantly surprised and delighted at this stage in my life that there can be a little bit of a thinner boundary between us. But I feel grateful that, when I was coming of age as a poet, that I had other models, because otherwise I probably wouldn’t have entered poetry at all.

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