Poet in Camden: An Interview with Andrea Walls
Andrea Walls, a Philadelphia native, is the author of Ultraviolet Catastrophe, a chapbook from the grassroots, Thread Makes Blanket Press. She is a VONA and Hedgebrook alum and has been published in H.O.W. Journal, Kweli Journal, Callaloo and was first runner-up in Solstice Literary Magazine’s First Annual Contest. She is a Pushcart Prize nominee and has recently finished her first full collection of poetry, The Black Body Curve. She currently lives and writes in Camden, New Jersey.
I met Andrea back in 2009 at my first Voices of Our Nations (VONA) summer writers’ workshop in San Francisco, California. Priestess of the common space, rabble provocateur, hollerin’ rep of the hometown (at any time you were liable to hear “PHILLY!” booming across the halls) & champion of those who teeter on the brink of defeat. Four years later, she’s sitting at my dinner table with her nth cup of coffee for the day and a steaming plate of rice, eggs and butternut squash. There are cookies baking in the oven. We’ve been kickin’ it for a couple hours but my son will be home from school soon, which means Andrea, aka Aunt Philly, will have to be shared. So we get on with it.
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C: Tell me about how you came to poetry, or rather, how poetry came to you.
A: I grew up in West Philly where people are poets in the natural way they talk, without being celebrated about it. But my first intervention with “poetry” was Sonia Sanchez. She came to my high school and I was in the library eavesdropping on her talking to some students. She just blew my mind with what could be said. She represents poetry in motion for me, the way she embraces you in every way. It was a moment in Philly where everyone was there. Toni Cade Bambara, Ntozake Shange with Colored Girls. Her ability to be raw and healed and healing and falling apart all at once. Then Amiri Baraka came and Etheridge Knight, and Gwendolyn Brooks. Poets were in bookstores, cultural venues, parks. Once you got turned on to it, you couldn’t avoid it. The Black Arts Movement came to where you were. It found me where I was and talked about shit that mattered to me in a language that I could understand and it helped me confront the realities that I could not articulate.
The first poems I wrote were many years later, though poetry was always my go-to place when I felt bad or good or complicated or confused. Seemed like a poet was always giving me a framework for my internal angst. The first poems I wrote were for the brothers who didn’t make it out, who weren’t there anymore. People who shared moments with me just sitting on the stoop even though they were into whatever they were into that ended up with them becoming murderers or murder victims. Refugees to the prison system. I guess I started writing for them so the part of them that wasn’t a murderer or a murder victim could be saved somehow.
C: Who have been some of your most influential poets?
A: All the ones I’ve mentioned earlier. But also in terms of a whole body of work, Audre Lorde is my intellectual poet of choice. She stimulates my sense of inquiry and ability to be self-critical and critical of the culture. But the poem that taught me what poetry could do is Robert Hayden’s “Those Winter Sundays” (http://www.poets.org/viewmedia.php/prmMID/19217). That was the poem that taught me to love my father in the complication of what it means to be in a family. How you miss the most important things about each other even though you’re there every day. And Nikki Giovanni, she changed my life. The stuff she would say! Like, “If you ever get your hands on any money, don’t buy stuff. Buy an experience.” I took that with me when I was going out in search, you know, of life.
C: Do see a lineage between you and Walt Whitman (who also lived in Camden)?
A: Yes, living in Camden, I relate that sort of sense of the roving reporter you get when you read some of Walt Whitman’s stuff. For me he celebrates subjects that don’t always seem that poetic if you consider what gets published and what seems presentable as poetry. So I feel a certain Walt-iness in the things I’m working on – finding dignity for people who don’t seem “poetic” and are often talked about like a collection of pathologies.
C: As poets, I suspect we have special porousness to places and people – a particular sensitivity and sense of responsibility. As witnesses, participants, channels through which the spirits move. How did you come to be a part of Camden and to identify with it?
A: In the way that all poor places seem to do for me. And when I say poor I mean that as less capital resources. The fact of that, not the quality of the people who inhabit the space. The way Camden is spoken about as a dangerous, impoverished place that is refuted by my experience of the place. Those labels are not about making people who live in Camden safe. The people who use that language want to make it safe for trespassers. When you read about how dangerous it is, it’s never about what we’re danger for, it’s how we endanger them. How they are endangered by our very existence in a way that makes them ashamed to witness us.
I find in Camden that the people who have seemingly the least amount to share have an incredible capacity for generosity. When somebody shares their last cigarette with you while you’re waiting for the bus, when they don’t know where their next cigarette is going to come from and they are addicted to cigarettes, that’s an amazing act of generosity to me. And I see that everyday. The whole bus collectively moving together to help out a young mother with her babies and backpacks and unwieldy strollers, and nobody is making snide comments. I’ve been accused of being idealistic about how meaningful those kinds of incidences are, and that’s possible but if that’s what I’m guilty of, then I’m okay with that. I’m okay with seeing the best in people who have the least.
C: I completely agree. Actually, I don’t believe that’s idealism. I believe that’s recognition. And I relate as someone who lived for a while in the Downtown Eastside in Vancouver, which is spoken of with so much derision and contempt, and whose residents are fighting gentrification that is being inflicted upon them with terrifying speed and intensity. Gentrification meaning “uplifting” people to a point where you should be afraid of your own human funk, your own human need. Which leads me to my next question… Poetry isn’t just a craft. It’s also an industry. One that is driven by American values of competition, individualism, careerism, hierarchy and upward mobility as personal motivators for poets to participate in empire-building, where white people still hold the reins. What does it mean for you to be a poet in one of the most criminalized, othered, demonized cities in the heart of the empire?
A: To your average onlooker poetry looks like a waste of time. It’s invisible until it has torn down the house. It’s the river that makes the canyon. I think we get conditioned to think that we have to wait to have enough resources. To be amply employed. To have health benefits, to be… To be okay. Before we can be poets. But it works the other way around. We have consumed so much rhetoric about what we don’t have and what we’re supposed to do to correct that lack that we don’t even know our own minds!
I keep coming back to that Audre Lorde quote, ”The difference between poetry and rhetoric / is being ready to kill / yourself / instead of your children.” Poetry is not romance, unless your reality is all romance. But when your reality is pushing back the machinery of poverty every day and being exhausted by that process and afraid constantly that it’s going to collapse you, you have to wake up and say, “Shit. The only thing that is going to hold back that destruction is if I do my job as a poet and stop giving in to the fear of producing an imperfectly crafted demand that this shit has got to stop.” And to say it, however rough the poem needs to be.
C: You are a huge advocate of the creativity of poor people. What does creativity born of necessity, of extreme struggle, have to offer our world today?
A: Poor people are creative because they’re desperate and they need to be. The electricity is off and you don’t have any heat and you haven’t eaten and your kids can’t read or do math and you have to respond in some way that saves your life. You can’t teach that in school, that deep down I-need-to-come-up-with-some-shit-or-I’m-gonna-die. I wasn’t there at the birth of jazz but it was probably someone banging the fuck out of a piano out of some real need to not be smashed or quashed or disappeared. It has that kind of tension when you listen to it, that sound that comes from holding on that tightly or letting it all go. From making something that wasn’t there before because what was there was killing you. And then we try to pretend like art school is where creativity comes from. I see all these documentaries about people taking other people’s experiences and then repackaging it because they were the person who knew its market appeal and then selling it back to the originator who can’t even pay their rent! I see the value of learning new ways to solve problems but creativity is about survival and poor people are the ones always trying to figure out how to survive another day.
C: Can you tell me about the soap poems in Camden?
A: I just started seeing these soap epitaphs on the backs of car windows. No matter where I was in the city I would see Rest in Peace, insert name, some little saying and the dates. The dates were indicative of short lives. Young people. And it was a more present experience of the violence and the disappearance of young people in the city than when I hear statistics of how many people per capita are victims of a violent crime. It was a personal, urgent, paltry yet magnificent gesture at the same time. What do we got? We got soap. We gon’ write something in soap that says we were here. And it’s so temporary because you know it’s gonna rain or you’re gonna get your car washed and it’s gonna be gone. The way that we vanish and the way we say we were here vanishes too. We’re so vanishing. And that expression just really moves me. The quality of our vanishing, and the fact that we’re trying in some small way to represent our existence.
Being that close and that far, standing on a corner and then somebody’s attempt at recognition goes by me at a stop sign and what am supposed to do to answer that call? It’s not like reading a paper. I can’t possibly interpret statistics in a way that makes me know I’m supposed to do something. It’s beyond me, personally. It feels like I’m being manipulated by statistics to put some legislative point somewhere down the line for someone’s election, a tougher DA or something that’s gonna smother us even more. But when I walk by a graffiti tag on the curb that wasn’t there yesterday that says Rest in Peace, Homie, that makes me feel responsible to the author.
C: I think the question what are “we supposed to do?” IS the difference between poetry and rhetoric. We have all these “lenses” to organize what happens around us into narratives, theories, agendas, answers to generate profit out of whatever horrific thing just happened or to just make ourselves feel better. Formulaic, almost knee-jerk responses. To bomb or not to bomb. To rally or not to rally. Most of us don’t know how to be, how to live with and probe that question: w hat are we supposed to do? Which is really a question about the nature of our agency, choice, and power to shape the world we live in.
A: Yes! We just get habituated to responding, without addressing the actual event, the actual need. I’m afraid we are losing our capacity for particularity: the particular response to the particular question. And I think this is what poetry is meant to restore.
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For more Andrea Walls, check out -
“In a House on Fire,” in Callaloo: http://muse.jhu.edu/login?auth=0&type=summary&url=/journals/callaloo/v035/35.2.walls01.html
“Third House Down from the Corner Behind the Red Door,” in Solstice: http://solsticelitmag.org/content/3rd-house-down-from-the-corner-behind-the-red-door/
