Writing poetry is just an extreme act of paying attention: A Conversation with Safia Elhillo
I found Safia Elhillo’s poetry as a fourteen-year-old baby poet, just starting to figure out what poetry even is, and I quickly fell in love with it, in awe of the way she balances all the tumultuous feelings that could be conjured up when we think of the word home, the vulnerability etched in the carefully crafted lines of verse. Five years later, I still feel the same way, so the opportunity to have this conversation was easily a highlight of 2020.
Safia Elhillo is a poet and author of The January Children (University of Nebraska Press, 2017) and the forthcoming Home is Not a Country (Make Me a World / Random House, 2021) and Girls That Never Die (One World Books / Penguin Random House, 2021). She is currently a Wallace Stegner Fellow at Stanford University. I sat down with her for a conversation about everything, from her beginnings as a poet to her current projects, from her ethos to her inspiration, and came away feeling in love with poetry all over again. I’m sure that you, dear reader, will feel the same way.
TASNEEM MAHER: How did you figure out you wanted to pursue poetry as a career and become a poet? Was there a certain moment in your life that determined or influenced that decision?
SAFIA ELHILLO: I don’t know that there was ever a moment where I made the decision like “when I grow up, I’m gonna be a poet.” I think it really was just a process of elimination. My version of taking a break before entering the serious world of work was to get an MFA in Poetry. It was the first time in my life where the only thing that was being asked of me was to read poems and write poems, and it spoiled me. It eroded my ability to be in the world where poetry wasn’t the main thing that I was thinking about. I mean, my job as a poet is just a string of poetry-related odd jobs. And I think the reason that I was even able to be okay with that uncertainty was that I was telling myself at first that it was just temporary. And then the years just started adding up and I sort of fell into it as a career. Because also, there was no conversation, at least for my generation of poets. No one was talking about all the ways that it’s possible to make a living as a poet. And I don’t know that it actually is—there’s no job security, and in so many aspects of my life, I’m so Type A that the fact that my literal job is this question mark every day...
It doesn’t fit in with your usual M.O.?
Exactly. I mean, I didn’t even know anyone to ask at that point like if I want to be a poet, what does that mean?
Because I guess most of the poets you knew would’ve already been in academia?
Yeah, so academia was the main path but, you know, [laughs] there are no more jobs. And even if I were to want to really double-down and say, “I’m gonna pursue a career in academia,” I would be arriving so late. There are people who have been training to be professors their whole lives, gunning for those, like, three jobs that are available, so imagine if I just showed up after the fact and was just like, “You know what? Let me get in line, too.”
My grandfather was a poet—there are lots of poets in my family but they all had “real jobs” so I always thought of it as: it’s part of your identity but it’s not what you do for a living. All this to say, I never decided—the decision was made on my behalf, I guess, just by circumstance, and I’m very grateful for it.
I know you were really involved in the slam poetry scene when you were at college so would you say that that was a big influence on it?
I think what the background in slam did for a lot of us is that it taught us that you’re not alone in it ever, and there’s also not a lot of hierarchy when it comes to who is teaching and who is learning. We’re all just kind of laterally in community with each other, so a lot of my poetry education comes from that. I later did go to grad school and get an MFA in poetry but what I’ve learned—as far as the really practical stuff that actually applies to my daily life as a poet goes—was just like, a friend or a friend of a friend who was talking at dinner once mentioned this thing and it stuck with me, and that’s literally how I learned to publish, how I learned about the MFA, how I learned about Cave Canem… All of it was because someone thought to mention it.
It was also really helpful when I got out of school and I started touring, because the main appeal of slam has always been such a community-oriented thing—you literally can’t throw a slam alone. You need people. And with College Slam, I was meeting people who were involved in campus student groups who had funding to bring in a guest poet or a guest speaker, so it was that early—it feels weird to call in networking because it wasn’t with any professional intention or skill set in mind, we were all just hanging out. So it really helped build those very early tours where it was like, “Who do I know in this city? Who do I know in that city?” It was kind of what built up my résumé for me in that we were all just inclined to help each other out because everyone knew that this was a struggle. I mean, if it weren’t for slam, I don’t know that I would have even known to start touring. I’m not particularly business-minded so I wouldn’t be able to sit down and say, “Okay, here’s my five-year plan,” you know? It was just like someone at like, Brandeis said, “Do you wanna come read?” and I was like, “Yeah, sure, I’m not doing anything this weekend.” So that’s how it started and it became a life.
You’ve also had very successful poetry performances. Do you remember your first show and how you felt during then?
This is early enough that I think I might be mixing two memories, but the first time I read poetry in front of people, a friend of mine had invited me to an open mic with her—we were both interested in poetry and we’d be writing poems and showing them to each other, but I’d never read mine aloud. So we went to this open mic that was at a venue in DC called Busboys and Poets, and it had an open mic on Tuesday nights, and without telling me, she signed me up to read. There was this moment where I heard my name being called where I was like, “Okay, I can either pretend I didn’t hear or I can just get up and do it,” and I think what helped me make the decision to just get up and do it was that I didn’t really know anyone else in the room and it’s so much easier to make a fool of yourself in front of people you don’t know. I was like, “I’m never gonna see these people again so… why not, I guess?” I don’t remember how it went—it was such a stressful, out-of-body experience—I don’t know that I particularly liked it, but I’ve been such an introvert my whole life so I think the sheer fact of doing something that was so outside my nature that I had maybe spent my whole life telling myself I couldn’t do and just having gotten it out of the way made the second and third and fourth times still seem scary but not impossible in the way that it would’ve seemed impossible before. And then after that, I started going to this open mic night, but it was on a Tuesday which was a school night, and I was still in high school. The compromise was my mom saying, “Okay, sure, you can go to this open mic but the whole family has to come.”
Oh, less easy now!
It was very funny and because the open mic was pretty popular in those days, it would sell out pretty early, so it actually took us a few attempts to be able to get my entire family in. I remember the poet Derrick Weston Brown used to work the door at Busboys and Poets, and I would bring my entire family and he’d say, “I’m so sorry, you need to start showing up earlier if you want to get all these eleven people in,” like, better luck next time, see you next week.
You said it was mostly self-publishing while you were doing slam but if I remember from my quick Wikipedia skim at some point, you had a couple of chapbooks published before The January Children.
So the first one that wasn’t me literally printing it out in the library was a chapbook called The Life and Times of Susie Knuckles, which I was planning to print out at the library. My friend, Caits Meissner, was running kind of a website called Well&Often and they were also thinking about starting a small press based on that. They asked me to do an interview for the site and in the interview, I mentioned that I was working on a chapbook. Then after the interview was published, Tishon [Woolcock], who was the other half of Well&Often, was like, “Hey, we’re starting a little small press through this website. Would you like us to publish your chapbook?” I didn't even know that that could be done and I said, “Are you kidding me? Someone else is gonna take over the printing costs? For sure, whatever you want, thank you so much.” And it was great. Because it was such a small group, we got to work on it together a lot, like the layout and the cover art and putting a book release event for it and stuff so it was really beautiful, really fun, and it has the added benefit of—the thing with that chapbook is that I was very proud of the poems at the time. I am proud of myself at that age for having written those poems… Do I love those poems now? No, they’re embarrassing. But the press ended up closing down, the chapbook is out of print, so now, it’s just this little time capsule that I don’t actually have to contend with in my daily life because no one has that book. Maybe my mom has a copy somewhere. But I got to start with a relatively clean slate––a lot of those poems were trying to do something very interesting but they were all first drafts, maybe second drafts. I think part of coming of age on the internet and being a Tumblr kid was there was a lot of transparency around the creative process. Everyone was posting their first drafts, and then you would post a second draft, and then you talk about what to change, but when it’s in a book, it’s like, “This is the first draft and now, no one will ever see what it looks like once I’ve actually finally fixed it.”
So that was in 2012—my senior year of college—and then in 2016, I had a chapbook come out through the African Poetry Book Fund that does a boxset every year that’s called New Generation African Poets. Every poet I’ve talked to since who has had a chapbook published in that series says the same thing: you get an email from Kwame Dawes being like, “We would like to invite you to submit a manuscript and this is when it’s due,” and the due date is like, ten days after that email, so everyone has these stories about scrambling to [put together a manuscript]. Luckily, at the time, I was working on my thesis for grad school, which was supposed to be a full-length collection. I wasn’t done, I wouldn’t have been able to submit a full-length manuscript but it was enough that it would fit the page minimum for a chapbook. I sent it over, it became a chapbook, and those exact same poems are also in The January Children.
So the MFA thesis became—or was—The January Children, I’m guessing?
It was most of The January Children. Right before the Sillerman deadline, I fully intended to submit my thesis and then I realized that my thesis was five pages too short for the page minimum. So then, again, I had to dust off poems that I had cut. I managed to squeeze out those last few pages, but it was a struggle. At some point, I was thinking, “Should I just be chopping up these poems and spreading them out across pages and say, ‘yeah, it’s totally on purpose’?”
I think they would’ve believed you, for what it’s worth. [Laughs] So how was the experience of writing The January Children for you?
I think working on The January Children spoiled me, because in one way or another, I could make the argument that it’s a book that I’ve been working on in some way my whole life, and so I got to feel like it was ready when it was done. It was also stuff that I had been thinking about my whole life and I knew what my questions were, I knew what my concerns were, I knew what my obsessions were, and just having the conceit of those Abdelhalim Hafez poems was like having a built-in prompt to follow every time I sat down to write. I never had the problem of sitting and not knowing what to write about, because I knew I was working on a project and I had that to guide me. And then I finished the book which I had never really accounted for. There was this really sad, silent moment after the book was done where I was like, “That’s it? This has been keeping me company kind of my whole life and now it’s not really mine anymore.” And for maybe a year after that, I didn’t really know how to write poems anymore. A lot of the poems that I was writing then looked like poems wanted to be in The January Children but didn’t make it.
I was worried that I wouldn’t know how to write a poem outside of the infrastructure of that project I’d been working on, so I didn’t write for a long time. Then I started doing little exercises in form for a while just to almost reteach myself how to write a poem without all the pressure. I was being much gentler with myself in a way that I think I needed at the time, and it helped get my sea-legs back a little bit and now… For a while, I was working exclusively on this second project that’s called Girls That Never Die but I keep having to pick that up and put it back down, because I know what I want it to be, and I know what I want it to do, but I don’t know how to execute that. Every time I finish a draft, it’s clarifying because it’s like, “Okay, now I have finished this draft, the way that this draft fails to accomplish what I’m trying to do further illuminates what it is that I’m trying to do.”
So trial and error?
Yeah… It’s helpful! It’s also really, really frustrating. I want it to be done but I don’t want to just publish what I have now because it’s not right. But The January Children was also a specific experience because it was a project book. I thought [Girls That Never Die] was going to be a book-length poem, and I tried to force it for a really long time—it is not a book-length poem, it is not even a project book, which means that it’s nothing that I know how to do, so in trying to coax out the poems that actually need to be in that book, I’ve tried to release myself from telling myself I’m even writing for the book, and now I’m trying to write what my friends call “loosies.” They’re just random little poems that aren’t for anything, and a lot of them do end up working for the project because I only contain so much, you know? I can only write poems about so many things, so my limited concerns and obsessions are going to show up in the poems so they are ultimately going to have some unity that works. But it’s so annoying. I really do finish a whole draft and it looks like a book, it acts like a book, and it’s not the book that I’m trying to write, and then I have to rip the floorboards out all over again so… I don’t know. And I know it’s not just me—I understand that a lot of people are perfectionists and they’re like, “No, it’s not quite right, I can’t release it,” but this literally isn’t that, it’s like…
It was sort of the wrong project all along?
Exactly. I also tricked myself for a couple drafts, because I know how to go through the motions of making something look finished even if it’s not finished. I fully tricked myself for a couple drafts and I was like, “Yeah, no, totally, this is a finished book,” and then I would read it and I would be like, “This is, at best, fine,” and I want a little more for myself than that so, uh, TBD on when that is ever going to be done—it’s supposed to come out next year but I really don’t think that’s gonna be the case.
I think it’s really interesting how we afford [writers] a pretty long pause between books for poetry because it’s not the same for fiction. But you have your new book, Home is Not a Country, coming out next year, so how does it feel to have this new release? Does it feel different from The January Children?
I feel like fiction, and in particular, YA, is just such a different creature and industry than anything I’ve ever seen. With The January Children, I never had a marketing and publicity call. They were like, “Thank you for the manuscript. Do you have any ideas about the cover?” I was like, “I would like for my homegirl to do the cover,” and they said, “Okay, your homegirl can do the cover.” I had a lot of agency and also, it was just a much smaller, much more straightforward process. With this… it’s the first book I’ve sold with an agent, it’s the first book that I’ve worked with a major press. There’s just so many more people employed to work on this book and it’s like nothing I’ve ever experienced. I know how to put a book of poems out into the world, or I used before the world [kind of imploded]. This thing about a major press and all of the horsepower available behind that is pretty terrifying but I also understand that it’s very cool and an honor and a treat and whatever.
I have never written fiction before. I for real cannot write a full sentence that I feel good about, which is the pleasures of verse, where all of the ways in which I am questioning my own sense of fluency, I can lean into in verse and then it becomes part of the syntax of the poem. So my not-knowing what the sentence is supposed to look like contributes to what I’m able to do in the poem. When I first had a conversation with Chris Myers (who runs the imprint called Make Me a World, which is publishing the book) about making a book for young people, he asked me, “Do you wanna write a novel?” and I said, “With all due respect, sir, no, but thank you so much.” And you know, I trotted out my little thing about how I don’t write prose, I am not a multi-hyphenate, I only know how to do one thing, so thank you so much for your interest, so sorry to waste your time. The thing is, he’s cool—he’s my friend now, we literally were just having breakfast, it wasn’t in an office in a meeting—so he was like, “Okay, talk to me about what some of your favorite books are.” And one of my favorite books of all-time is Autobiography of Red by Anne Carson. At this point, I did not know what a novel-in-verse is. I’d never heard the term until my friend, Liz Acevedo, released a book called The Poet X which is a novel-in-verse, which I may have thought she had made up? I don’t know, I hadn’t heard the term before. So I’m telling him about how I love Autobiography of Red, and I used to think of Autobiography of Red as a project book. I thought it was a book of poetry where all the poems were kind of about the same thing. So I thought that in writing The January Children, I was writing my own version of Autobiography of Red. Turns out I was completely in the wrong genre, didn’t even know what I was doing. Then he said, “Here’s the thing: your favorite book? That’s a novel, it’s a novel-in-verse, and as you can see, it is written in poems. So, how would you feel about trying to write a novel in verse?” And I was like, “Okay, touché. I hear you, I hear how I was wrong.”
Part of the reason I said no initially is not because I’m so snobby about only writing poetry or whatever, I just am a coward and I am not good at doing stuff that I don’t feel like I already know how to do. I am so afraid of being bad at something, and it’s not because I’m good at so many things, it’s because I picked the one thing and I worked really hard at it at the expense of everything else—I can’t do anything else. So here I was being faced with an opportunity to learn a new skill and at first, my dumbass said, no, thank you. But then the ethos of the whole thing came back into play where I was like, why is that all of a sudden I think that I am expected to do this thing by myself? Like, I have a community—literally, my friend just wrote a novel-in-verse. My partner is a playwright, he’s a narrative writer. I have people I can ask to teach me. Why am I suddenly so embarrassed to be like, “Hey, can you guys teach me what to do?”
Because that’s how I’ve been taught the whole time. It takes a village and the village really came through. My friends taught me to write narrative, and in a pretty short amount of time, but what helps with verse is that I still get to feel like I have all my tools with me. I got to bring my tools with me, I got to bring my interests with me, and I also knew that I didn’t want it to be autobiographical, because I’m also in the middle of writing this whole book about girlhood and whatever, where I am personally so sick and tired of my goddamn autobiography. I don’t know why, I don’t want to write that book, I’ve had enough. So I made up a character, and I made up some weird magical realism / time travel story, and I thought, thank God for this break from all my personal problems and concerns, this is a joy. And it’s not like the book is without its traumas or whatever, but they’re not directly mine because also, with poetry, and especially with the “autobiographical I,” there’s a real, big question about authenticity and whose voice and all that, so I never really get to make stuff up. There are poets who know how to do that but I don’t really know how to make stuff up when I’m writing poems, and that means that I’m only ever writing about like, four things. With this, I needed to make stuff up, so the first drafts are too much. I was so excited to make stuff up that it just had too many storylines in it.
My friend, Liz [Acevedo], and my friend, Clint [Smith III], when we were all living in DC, we used to go to Busboys and Poets and co-work together, and we’d read each other’s drafts, so they read an early draft of that manuscript. Also, I think early… 2019? 2018? Maybe it was this year? This year has been 25 years so I actually don’t know.
Who knows what time is anymore?
Right, but once upon a time, we did a week-long local writing retreat together where we would all go home and sleep in our own beds but then at 9 AM every morning, we would report to this little office on the GW campus and we would sit in there from 9 to 5 and work on our respective books and at the end of the day, we would each read what we’ve written and give each other feedback, and so the book got finished that way! It is my book technically, but it has so many aunties and uncles. I come from a community that’s very generous with their expertise. The philosophy is: if I know how to do something, then you know how to do it too. And so the reason that I wrote narrative is that my community knows about narrative.
So speaking of community, you’re very active in offering workshops and mentoring others and so on. What’s your ethos or vision with regards to community, and participating in and creating communities when it comes to writing?
I talk a lot about how I had all this lateral mentorship, and how my friends and I educated each other, but it was kind of for lack of another option where what I badly wanted as a young writer was a mentor who had been through it and could tell me, you know? What I did have, which I’m grateful for, is that we all had the same questions and we were doing detective work together to figure out the answer. But all I wanted was someone grown to be like, here’s the deal. Like, here’s how to submit, here’s how you whatever, like, here are the answers to your questions and if I don’t have the answers, I will help you get the answers. And I… longed for it—I still kinda long for it. There have been times where I have had teachers who meant a lot to me but that started to come later and usually for a pretty contained period of time. There’s this idea that you should be the person that you needed when you were younger, and what I needed when I was younger was community and mentorship, and especially, just easily-accessible, free resources. The reason I’m a poet is because it is free to be on the DC Youth Slam team, you know? It is not an expensive after-school program—it’s free. And so I have this idea that programming for young people should be free—or very cheap—and as much as I am able to, I want to be a free resource in ways that are still mindful of my time and my labor, so once I make a workshop and teach it, I’ll generally make those resources available on the internet. As much as I would love to be doing one-on-one meetings with whoever, there’s only so many hours in the day and I need a lot of them to sleep, so this way I still get to feel like I’m doing the thing that I want to do and that it’s not prohibitive to anyone who wants access to it—there’s a bunch of workshops on my website for free because what’s the point of charging for them? That way, I still feel like I’m doing right by my beliefs and also not overextending myself in the name of needing to look like a “good person” or whatever.
You’ve often said that you’re influenced by visuals, particularly fashion, so how does that tend to translate to your writing, especially because poetry sometimes can be quite a visual medium?
With fashion and poetry, I don’t know that they necessarily feed each other but I think maybe the impulse comes from the same place. But with visual arts, there’s all this thought around filling the well as a writer and as an artist of any kind, and poetry is like a system of images. And as far as my catalog of images goes, I have my life and the things I’ve experienced and whatever, but I also need more than just what I have lived through, so that’s where visual arts come in. I love weird shit. I love things that are not quite an exact depiction of the things that I am seeing day in and day out, because I think it helps train my eye. If writing poetry is just an extreme act of paying attention, so is looking at art. But I’m never coming up with anything in a vacuum. Everything I am making is a response to some kind of stimulus, and so I’m always looking to find—the word is inspiration but I think for me, it’s stimulation. If something stimulates something then it triggers a memory or an image or a thought or an emotion, and I follow it that way but I always need something to activate that for me, and I think music does that, too.
Okay, so the last question, looking to the future: what projects or ideas are you hoping to explore in the future?
I’m working now on a second novel-in-verse with my team co-work, Liz and Clint. So this one, there are some biographical elements in that it’s a sixteen-year-old Sudani girl who writes poetry but a lot of it is also pieced together from stories from my community; stories from my homegirls when I was growing up. There’s no magic and no time traveling in it. It is just regular-ass Washington, DC—so it’s different, it feels like a different muscle, but it also feels a little more manageable because magic comes with its own kind of logic. Time travel logic is hell. I don’t know why I did it to myself. I think I figured it out, but if I had known then what I know now, I would not have even touched time travel. I was like, “I need to give myself a break from all that,” because magic is like math, which I’m not good at. Now, I’m like, okay, let me take that completely off the table and just tell a story: here’s a girl: what happens to her? What does she want? What is the end goal? What gets in her way?
I am… again, just writing loose poems. I was at a panel a few months ago where the poet Louise Gluck was doing a Q&A and someone asked her a question, and she said a delightfully shady thing. She said, Look, if you had a childhood, you have a first book, like, what’s after that? I don’t think that The January Children was that—I mean, there are moments of my childhood in it but I don’t know that it’s a book about my childhood. I don’t think I’m a child in that book. Maybe I’m just now feeling like I am old enough to have some distance from my childhood. I’m about to turn 30—and so, I’m looking at those stories with new eyes. And also, the thing with having a weird childhood is that there is no point of reference for it being weird. I’m like, “This is just what it’s like,” and now that I’ve lived a little a little more life and met more people, I’m like, “Okay, no, it maybe is weird that I lived in all these countries,” you know? I’m visiting with my child-self a lot in ways that I never really had in my poems, and now, there are poems where I’m ages 7, 8, 9, 10—ages that I haven’t really touched. That’s been weird because I always think of myself as a person with a bad memory, so I’m really pushing against that to be like, “Surely you remember something.” Like, let’s start the poem and see if something triggers the memory and it comes up, and usually, it’ll be jolted by the most unexpected thing but it confirms that the memory is in there, I just don’t always know the password.
And it must be such a different perspective, revisiting that, because it’s almost like you’re a different self at this point.
It’s so weird because, for a lot of my life, I’ve internally felt like the exact same creature. I’m the same person—my setting, and like, body and eyebrow shape changes, but more or less, everything else is the same. I feel very deeply acquainted with my child-self in that I fully get her deal. We still believe the same stuff, we still have the same logic, but just the circumstances we were in were so different and so, it’s mainly putting my current-self into that old circumstance and having a new awareness of how that circumstance changed. And I feel like estrangement in this is usually the space that the poems come out of for me anyway, where I’m like, “Isn’t it weird that [blank]?” or “Wouldn’t it be weird if [blank]?” and that’s generally my guiding prompt.
I think that’s a really interesting place to start a poem—a place of confusion and wonderment. Anyway, I should probably leave you to the rest of your day. This was a… delight!
Thank you for having me and thank you for those really thoughtful questions—they were a lot of fun to answer.
Thank you! I’m glad I could provide something vaguely thoughtful. ◆
Tasneem Maher is the Personal Essays and Fiction Editor at Sumou. Find her here.