Survival Strategies: Poems by Tennison S. Black is the latest winner of the National Poetry Series to be published by the University of Georgia Press and has just been released.
Adrienne Su, author of Peach State, selected Black’s collection for the NPS and had the following to say about it:
“The Sonoran desert, invoked through saguaros, scorpions, jackrabbits, coyotes, and cowboys, is nearly a character in these fierce poems, which chronicle the poet’s return to a place that ‘has been trying to kill me since I was born.’ Recurring images of place, along with a unifying narrative, give Survival Strategies the texture of a repeating form on a large scale, as the boundaries between the landscape and one family living in it begin to dissolve. This oneness reaches its crescendo in an original fable, ‘The Mother and the Mountain,’ which begins: ‘My mother was a bajada. That is, an alluvial fan that settled at the base of a mountain.’ Alive with hard-earned understanding and affirmation, these poems are for everyone who ever tried to leave a formative place of pain but found that person and place could never be fully untwined.”
Below is a conversation between Su and Black in which they discuss how Survival Strategies came to be.
Adrienne Su: Few poets know where a manuscript is headed until it’s most of the way there. Survival Strategies feels of a piece, a book that was meant to be a book, which is one of the things that drew me to it. Can you talk about how you found its shape?
Tennison S. Black: I strongly feel that I walked out into the night with a vague idea of where I wanted to end up armed with nothing but a pocketknife and a headlamp. Then I became deeply enamored of the long poem (still am) and so wrote my MFA thesis as a 90-page long poem that mimicked a hike in the desert—straying into washes, tripping over fauna, gazing at the mesas. And some of those stanzas are in the collection today, but obviously this is not a 90-page long-poem. So then in the years since the MFA, I started to rework it, and singular poems began to suggest themselves out of the meandering long-poem. Of course, I wrote many more, and it started to take on a new form overall. Naturally, I sent it out a lot, and it came back, sometimes with feedback or with “so close, please send us something else”—and I kept reworking it.
And then, suddenly—really suddenly, like one day I was working on it and I felt that I’d reworked something vital, there was a significant shift, in my body, in the work, in the air, so I printed it out and sorted things very differently than I’d done before. I found connections I’d missed and some poems that had never met each other snapped together like lifelong friends. And after another few weeks of polishing, one day I knew it was done and I wouldn’t change it again. I don’t know how, and it sounds really hokey, I get that, but it’s the truth—I knew it was done just like you know when a puzzle is done. There was no other way for me to arrange the book and no other form it could take, not with me as its author, anyway.
Many writers find it difficult to write about where they came from until they’ve been away from it a long time. In Survival Strategies, this relationship is especially complicated. Could you talk about your connection to Arizona and how it has evolved in your writing?
For decades after I left, when someone would ask me where I was from I would say “all over,” because, well, I did, later on, go on to live in 9 other states besides Arizona. Ten if you count NoCal and SoCal as different states and sometimes I think we should, culturally, at least. So I rationalized it with myself that it was true, I had lived all over. But the truth was, that I had a lot of shame around how I’d grown up, and with whom so I didn’t want to tell anyone where I was from. Now I know, of course, that I wasn’t ashamed of the people so much as I carried the shame I’d learned from them, and it dogged me.
In order to really write about that life, though, I had to go back, something I’d done a few times and only received fresh trauma so a part of me was scarily hesitant to ever go back. But I had to go back and try to reconcile my memories with the reality in front of me. To check myself, I think.
And at first, all that came from the topic was pain. I was angry and I was hurt and it poured out through the irrigation gate. But as I began to rework what came forth, I began to find that I loved to explore—not the memories, but the desert. To learn about the snakes that had scared me as a child, the cactuses that had been companions to my childhood imaginings. The coyote, whose cries used to make me want to crawl out of bed and go find the kits I could hear—and the javelina, the roadrunners, the horses. And little by little, as the flow ebbed, I started to fall deeply in love with the desert of my birth—and to release some of that shame I’d carried around for most of my life.
Woven through Survival Strategies are many repeating images, including saguaros, rattlesnakes, Gila monsters. What are some of the rewards and challenges of the use repetition in a book of poems? This could be on the level of the poem and on the level of the book.
Place figured so deeply in my pain. I fully blamed the desert—not like the pain lived there but like in my body I was so sure that it was the desert that made my father mean, that bred the cruelty into which I felt I’d been born. As if there were old pop bottles and an afternoon to kill, I took aim at the desert with my anger and hatred and blame.
You know that school of thought that teaches that if you smile you can make yourself happy? I had a similar idea about squinting into the sun. As if the squinting mimicked an angry face and could make people aggravated or aggressive. I’ve thought this since I was a child because my mother’s eyes were relaxed, and the people around her, too—which is not to say she was perfect but she wasn’t the old cowboy who seemed to make sport of belittling me. Anyway, the squinting into the sun—and my child’s mind didn’t differentiate between that and, say, people who live in other sunny places—there’s no logic in a child’s mind, and I carried that idea forward, that if we’d lived somewhere other than the desert, he’d have been loving toward me.
Anyway for me, the desert became the thread of love in the healing I was working toward. So that whatever it was, whatever pain or aggravation or fear I was working out on the page, there was the desert. The thread of which might be different where it occurs, but yet it’s still the same desert. I didn’t want to lose that thread.
So repetition, for me, in this work, became a healing note. In the way that when learning to meditate you bring your mind back, when my mind would drift to the hatred and the cruelty and the traumatic events, I came back to the desert. I remembered that I got to be born into the actual, literal, sunniest place on Earth. And that’s something. I remembered that Cesar Chavez was born 45 years and a few miles from where I was. I remembered the women who picked me up time and again in the dirt and who held my hand and who loved me momentarily when I needed love so desperately. So the repetition, far too often, is me trying to come back to feeling grounded in space rather than drifting in the trauma.
And the reward for that was that I finally learned to love the place I’d once hated and to find pride under the shame. And in my practice, it became a place of refuge, instead of pain.
One of the things I most admire about your collection is the strength of its voice. Even when describing terrible events, the voice is measured, which heightens the intensity. Is this something you consciously craft? How did you get to that place as a writer?
It means so much to hear you say that. I remember for so long feeling like I’d never find my own voice. Like everything I wrote was blue label in some way.
I mean here’s the truth: I’d never set foot on a college campus until I enrolled at 38 and didn’t know anyone who’d ever gone. I dropped out of high-school—twice. Became a teenage mother with two kids I was raising on my own before I could drink about it. And then a third in my thirties so by the time I got to college—which I only enrolled into because my daughter saltily told me she didn’t need to go to college since I’d not gone and I’d ‘turned out fine’—I was something of a murmuration. There was a lot of backstory to me by the time I started.
It’s not easy to find your own voice. You have to sort of accept that you’d rather lose a reader for being yourself than gain one for being something other than yourself. And the process of learning to highlight that which makes you the most insecure is maybe one way to get there.
All my life I’ve felt self-conscious about my spoken vocabulary. There’s no refinement in my speech. Or my movement. I lack grace. No one will ever mistake me for an ivy-league educated person or invite me to speak at Harvard, I promise you. And that used to embarrass me. It still does at times when I really want to sound less gritty than I am under the nice clothes. And there are several other areas where I once struggled with shame but for me, now, finding my voice means abandoning the shame and walking into what I am with arms open. That way, at least, it’s real. I don’t consciously craft the voice, but I do consciously shove the shame and fear aside and do my level best to stay inside my own truth.
Writing about injustice – whether personal, political, or both – is complicated, a dance in which one is trying to win a reader over to a point of view while trying not to make the reader feel defensive or explained to, even as the writer has something burning to be said. In your poems, I sense hard-earned restraint, self-questioning, a long interior settling of scores. Could you give us a glimpse of your own process, when it comes to reckoning with both social and individual wrongs?
Complicated is such a beautiful and tender word for how it feels.
There’s so little in the way of justice in this world—and in the face of that, I feel utterly powerless most of the time. I want so much more for us humans. I don’t believe we have to spend our time like we do, nor that we need to treat one another (or the planet) how we do. But all I have is my too-small voice and some paltry inadequate words.
But I kind of love that you see my restraint here because I truly felt I’d shown considerable control when I didn’t want to—what my heart wanted to do was spray the page with fury.
The very idea that some people think it should be illegal to leave water in the desert for people crossing a colonized border that shouldn’t exist in the first place just galls me. Colonialism appalls me. The genocidal history (and present) from which I directly benefit infuriates me.
Listen though, there are so many thousands of beautiful activists out there doing work that’s valuable and lifesaving. And more of us need to listen to them.
In so many ways I’m still the otherwise quiet child who screamed and pointed, and I do mean screamed, when my stepfather tried to pocket the salt and pepper shakers in a restaurant because my mother had admired them, and my stepfather wanted to impress her. He did end up leaving them on the table, but I don’t think he ever forgave me for the embarrassment. (Which is not to compare or equate stealing tableware and colonialism.) Just that I am a screamer when I can’t think of what to do, so showing restraint isn’t really my nature.
Grace in the face of wrong continues to elude me, I’m afraid, and maybe screaming about it is all I still know to do.
This is going to seem like a tangent but just thirteen days before I learned that the manuscript had won, my father died. For decades I’d wondered how I’d handle that—how I would feel when it happened. Numb? Relieved? Sad? Would I mourn? I’ve been mourning him since I was in middle school, so how would it be different? But I never dreamed it would come then, and certainly not as this work came to the place it did. He was intricately tied up in this work and my thoughts around cowboy culture and colonialism all of which figure in this work as I struggle to reconcile the disparate parts of my experiences.
Anyway, no one wanted me to speak at his funeral, so I wasn’t invited (to speak or to attend) and the obituary I wrote wasn’t used because it upset people. But I felt I had to attend anyway. He was my father. So you can imagine the tension when I asked for the mic in the open speaking portion of the service. All of this is to say that what I said then, essentially, was that he hurt people. He wasn’t kind or generous, or even loving. All of which was handed down to him, as he handed it down to us. And that I hope what he was can be buried with him as those touched by him take forward not those things but the drive to do better. We have to do better.
It’s my hope that this work reflects that, however inelegantly.
Which is to say that I don’t manage it very well. I’m a fighter and just get mad and lose all of my ability to communicate. See also: the child is still screaming. But the thing is that I could not write about the place of my birth without including the things that have left their indelible marks on the terrain and the people. We could empty the pockets of the entire 1% and it wouldn’t be enough to make up for the harm we’ve caused. And I still feel like that little girl who can only scream. My father was a proud racist. My mother, in her attempt to veer from the course worked all of her life to be colorblind and raised me into those ideals. Which is why I say we have to do better. We have to be better. We have to step into seeing the realities of the people around us. We have to be willing to sit in the discomfort and to admit the truth. But more than that we have to be willing to acknowledge how much we benefit from those systems today.
I am not everything I want to be, but I am, brick by brick, dismantling my own stuff and doing the work. And I could no sooner have written this work and left out those parts than I could have left out the saguaro.
But like I said, I have a lot of challenges around language and I’d really prefer that people look to the inspiring activists who have done so much to educate those who will listen. For those who want to do the work but don’t know where to start, look to the writers of color and listen. That goes double for when you feel all squirmy and like you want to deflect. Shhh. Listen. And let go of any notion that you’re not part of the problem.
Who are some of the poets you’ve found most valuable to your own work and life? In what ways have they influenced you?
Theresa Hak Kyung Cha changed everything I thought I knew about poetics so she has to come first, always. And then Leslie Marmon Silko blew that wide open and taught me the value of documenting the world as we experience it. Sandra Cisneros showed me how to love a complicated mother on the page. Alice Notley is my idol for raw intelligence and boldness—this say it like you see it woman is an extraordinary poet. The late Eavan Boland is my deepest secret aspiration. But most of all I have to say that the poet that has most touched my life has been Cynthia Hogue. With her guidance I’ve become more confident and trusting of myself within my work, and that alone is worth everything. I honestly cannot think of a better or more important gift to give someone and I am forever in her debt.
What do you think is the role of poetry outside the literary world?
Insert a heavy sigh here. One in which I lean back in my chair and rub those little hairs on my chin or scratch at my head or rub my nose.
In my deepest fears I worry it’s got no bearing at all. That’s my GenX nihilism showing. There’s that moment when you sit down in the airplane seat and the person next to you asks what you do and so you say “Oh, I’m a poet” and they stare at your eyebrows. Apparently only 10% of my age group even reads poetry so that’s not good, I think.
Once I was in a pool in Bali and the hotel owner came by for a chat and asked what I do and I said I was a poet and he wanted to know if he’d read any of my work—first of all, how would I know, right?—but also, I just laughed and said I doubt it. Mainly because well, what are the odds?
But okay, look, I tell myself when I start down that path, that it doesn’t have to be a blockbuster to matter. Because what matters more than any reader or any impact something may or may not have beyond the author themselves, is the impact on the author. And if one person or one million people read it, it still doesn’t matter as much as what it did to and for the author.
And no one is more outside the literary world than the author. Or at least that’s my hope for myself. All of which is to say that poetry is the gift tag on the box of the universe. And some people head out into the universe and never read the tag and that’s okay, but others do read the tag, and take the sentiment in. There’s room for both. And while I wish there were more tag readers, it matters more to me that people are writing tags so I can find my way around the gift of the universe because I’m a little lost and not sure what we’re supposed to be doing.
At the heart of Survival Strategies is a long prose poem, “The Mother and the Mountain.” I admire its interaction with the surrounding shorter works, how they inform and enliven one another. When in the process of writing the book did “The Mother and the Mountain” come into being? Did you work on it simultaneously with the shorter pieces?
Poetry contains an inordinate amount of reduction. Some of that is fair and necessary for concision, voice, or even language play. But some subjects can’t be thus reduced to a single poem or a series of poems without also shedding their form as subjects—or at least that’s how this played out for me. Yet it’s not something I wanted to move to an essay either, or to a story. It belonged to this work. So, I can tell you that I wrestled, rearranged, struggled, broke and remade, and otherwise formed this piece for the better part of three years. Along the way, I came to see that my earliest attempts had an element of force to them rather than an unfolding. In letting it have space, I let it breathe, and then it finally clicked into place. When I started sending it out, I was worried that this long section might prevent the work from being picked up because it’s so different from what you usually see in a debut collection, but it was important to me to give my mother that space. And that’s what I mean when I say no one should be further from the literary scene than the author—because ultimately, that can’t, shouldn’t, mustn’t matter to the whole. You have to do what works and is right for the work as you see it, and for me, that meant giving this section room and letting it breathe out into the rest of the work and trying to be honest about how I saw my mother’s love for her father play out in our history.
Reading your manuscript, I was drawn to the energy of your language: “Roadrunner are … whip-quick / as they taunt the rattler, daring it to strike” (“Survival II”), “My clothes crack when I take them off. / The dirt of the desert breaks under boots” (“An Unquenchable Desire”), “mesquite smoke and steam rise up from red coals lined with / wet burlap and the waft of burning hair” (“Like a Dead Dove’s a Doll”). Could you let us into your process a little? How consciously do you employ devices such as alliteration, consonance? Do you think it’s a natural result of the habits of reading and listening, or does it take overt effort, or both?
This is part of my struggles with spoken vocabulary. I tend to coin words because I forget the “correct” names and describing them comes more quickly to mind. For example, in my house we don’t say tape measure, we say “have you seen the zip-zip?” And my kids, having grown up with the way I speak, think nothing of it and will get the tape measure but if you ask them what other people call it, they have to stop and think about it a moment to find the right term.
When I was a kid I used to make lists of words, lexicons, grouping hem into categories based on sound. I remember one I worked on for a long time with words like destiny, serenity, affinity—and it wasn’t enough for their suffixes to match, they had to have the same feel, the same vibe, the same colors in my mind to make it on the list.
Much of this work was, for me, an effort of trying to get out of my writing voice and into my actual speaking and thinking voice. Not that I speak in couplets! But the word choice is similar to my speaking voice in many cases. In my common speaking voice I use wordplay, internal rhymes, assonance, and other devices just to delight myself but also to make myself comfortable in spaces. Always have. But the difference between now and back then is that I stopped trying to hide it. I was so afraid to “sound stupid” that I kept my “weirdness” as I called it, to myself and those who lived with me. From simple rhymes and songs I spoke to my kids, “Should we go to the store or lay on the floor? We’d have to get out the door to get to the store.” To complex phrases trying to express myself. And for what it’s worth I still keep lists of words in my phone. As I’ve aged, maybe, I’ve started to value the very things that make me a little bit strange, and to let those things come out more, and even to turn up their volume because I’m honestly pretty exhausted from keeping my weirdness under a lid—and I think there’s some in this work, and even more in my more recent works, so it’s working, at least a little. In another ten years my kids might not let me out in public. Hmm, that’s a good goal.
Do you have advice for aspiring poets?
Uh oh, I’m trying to learn not to give unsolicited advice because I’ve come to see unsolicited advice as criticism—and that’s not how I want to show up in the world. That said, I’d first say to not read this part if you’re not into unsolicited and horrifyingly general advice. Because if I had to give advice, I’d want it to be personalized so this is the most generic truth I have in regard to writing: Stay inside the work and be yourself. It’s an unfortunate reality that most of us have to have second (or third or fourth) jobs to support ourselves, so I think it helps to know that and to not be fooled by the myth that writers get rich from bestselling books because in most cases, that’s not at all what happens and you’re not a failure if it’s not the case for you. The only real reward is the work so make it count toward what you want and need, not what you think the world wants or needs—because for every minute you spend worrying about what the publishers are into right now or dreaming about how this could be your big break, you suck ten years off the life of your work, like Count Rugen. I’m kidding! But I do think it detracts from the work and acts like bumpers, pushing you in directions that may be anathema to the work. So stay in it, don’t look up and around, just stay in it, and take what makes you weird, and figure out how to turn the knob for that setting up as far as you can—not for weirdness’ sake—but so that the work is uniquely yours and could only have come from you.
Survival Strategies is available for purchase from your favorite local bookstore. (If they don’t have it, ask them to order it!) You can also purchase it from any online book retailer or directly from the University of Georgia Press here.
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