Our poetry editor, Stephanie Glazier, talks with award-winning poet, Samiya Bashir about publishing, activism, grad school, whose work she admires, and everything in between.
STEPHANIE GLAZIER: So it looks like, over time you’ve become increasingly interested with the visual and experimental elements of performing poetry. How did this come about for you? Did something break open at a particular time? I’m thinking about your publication of videopoems like “Sometimes Kate Gorman Emails Me.” Can you contextualize the piece in your larger body of work?
SAMIYA BASHIR: It’s funny you ask about the Kate Gorman poem. Sportive play with medium and form has always felt necessary, but I mostly keep those bits to myself. Hidden. My “little weirdnesses” even seemed a little shameful, I think, until the flattening of canonical conformity finally felt just unsustainably stupid. Graduate school, and surviving it, helped force the issue too. School™️ is funny. School™️ taught that everything I’d ever done, written, been, known was wrong. Inappropriate maybe? Assumedly unstudied. Of course ill-considered, or un-. As School™️ confidentially invisibled my own very black, very queer communities of artists I felt a destabilizing faultline crack open. It aftershocked. And aftershocked. Comfortable in its lack of context or curiosity, School™️ often fell into a pedagogics joisted by fallacy.
When HOAX, a multimedia, multiplatform curatorial project based in London, jumped on the videopoetry I was quietly making, the response was an unexpected flood. More experimental work found its way into conversation and space coincident with a nearly nonstop schedule of stagings, screenings, and embodied readings in Portland and on the road. The “poetry reading” as a form has long felt tired to me. I want poems to live in 3D, as body, as hologram. I’m making poems right now whose prosody is haptic pulse. I’m trying to get the body to the poem, the poem to the body, as “nowly” as I imagine or experience it. I’m intrigued by where this allowance of the work to stretch and breathe and be itself might go. SG: Can you tell me about the experience of publishing your first book? I imagine it was meaningful for you to publish with a house devoted to Black queer authors. SB: The world has shifted so radically in so little time. In my 20s, most writers I knew weren’t getting graduate degrees in poetry. Writers I studied and admired often didn’t have them. They were writers. They wrote. That was my model. That’s what we did: wrote poetry; read poetry; lived poetry; sought and found more poets and artists; made and discovered meaning together. Do you know who was publishing black poets in the early 2000s? Near to nobody. Lisa Moore’s RedBone Press was groundbreaking when she launched it in the mid-90s, a time when so many women’s and black presses were closed or closing. But gay and lesbian bookstores, women’s and feminist bookstores, black and POC and radical and political and all manner of quirky bookstores still held on, thrived even, creating IRL spaces to find each other and each other’s work. RedBone Press sold out our books printing after printing, discovered new voices, brought foundational work back into print, supported and engaged its writers and its readers by taking the work them when equitable or even safe access was often hard to find. We operated through marketing and distribution models that prioritized building and sustaining community. Our books, journals, and periodicals were rarely reviewed, discussed, or even considered by the mainstream. But not only was it meaningful to publish in, with, and through them, it’s important to regularly question assumptions that mainstream publishing or even legibility should or could somehow be more meaningful. What does that do to our context? Is its complexity even considered? Respected? Studied or consulted so that the work can be really read? Not for the phonics, but for the work? |
SG: You seem incredibly active in the queer literary community: your work with Fire & Ink… How has your activism informed your work or shaped your life?
SB: I don’t know if I’d call myself an activist. At minimum, I am just trying to survive. But also, at minimum, I don’t just want to survive all by myself. But also, I’m not all that interested in “at minimum.” I’m trying to live my best, black-ass life. Whatever that is for you, I want for you too. In 2002, the first-of-its-kind Fire & Ink gathered hundreds of editors and publishers, writers and readers and booksellers and scholars and dreamers. In one corner you’d find Samuel Delaney meeting a starstruck writer from Florida working on his first or his 50th story. Individuals, communities, and caravans of black LGBT writers from London and Little Rock and Tobago and Seattle connected and shared work and resources and lives. Pressed together against the cavernous walls of erasure we shone so bright we began to palimpsest. From the first night of that first gathering it was clear that every bit of sleeplessness and debt, work and worry, was worth it. The 'poetry reading' as a form has long felt tired to me. I want poems to live in 3D, as body, as hologram. SG: Three collections in 13 years seems prolific to me with full-time teaching responsibilities. Do you feel like you have a good work/work balance—that is teaching and other work and writing?
SB: Well, full-time academic teaching hasn’t been the typical way I’ve supported myself. I’ve hustled as a freelance writer, magazine editor, communications strategist and project manager for arts organizations and nonprofits, universities and industry journals like the American Journal of Public Health. I’m still not sure which is more draining: writing for a living while trying to be a writer, or teaching writing for a living while trying to be a writer. [laughs] Reed is a demanding institution and just being a Black, queer professor is its own emotionally laborious full time job at a small liberal arts college. Sometimes I get sick; my body just shuts down. I made tweaks like limiting email, or managing my routes around on campus so that a five minute walk doesn’t take 30 minutes. But the other side of the same coin is why I love teaching too. I love spending my days working on and with poetry and art with smart, open, enthusiastic people, and my classroom is a place I can really be myself. Of course, just like with writing, moving all that through the body is a lot to sustain; it’s exhausting and it’s liberating. But balance? Work/Work? Nah. Work/Life? Not even close. Not yet anyway. SG: What queer institutions have helped you--I’m thinking of the Astraea Award (that no longer seems to exist) whose work you are admiring in the community right now? How do you feel yourself a part of the queer literary community? The people within institutions- SB: I’m sad to hear that the Astraea Lesbian Writers Fund is no more. For decades that $10,000 no-strings grant was one of the few significant awards available to queer women. So many winners, jurists, and readers felt its impact. Whose work am I admiring? Everyone’s! Seriously. The Lushness of Print, a pretty gag-worthy traveling exhibit of broadsides and prints, just closed its first run at the Poetry Foundation’s Chicago headquarters. The show celebrates the first five years of my collaboration with with Daniela Le Mar’s latinx-, womxn-owned and operated Letra Chueca Press on the broadside series I created through Reed. Institutions can be useful tools; it’s their relationships to people and communities that I don’t quite trust. And yet: imagine! For five years I’ve gotten to make thousands of handmade, letterpress prints for poets and writers I bring to campus. Not as honorarium; as gifts--for the writers and readers, the campus and community—like poetry! |
Samiya Bashir holds a BA from the University of California, Berkeley, where she served as Poet Laureate, and an MFA from the University of Michigan, where she received two Hopwood Poetry Awards. She was awarded the Regional Arts & Culture Council’s Individual Artist Fellowship in Literature in addition to numerous other awards, grants, fellowships, and residencies, and is a founding organizer of Fire & Ink, an advocacy organization and writer’s festival for LGBT writers of African descent. She has collaborated with a number of visual and media artists, most recently with Saar and Schlapp on Hades D.W.P., a forthcoming limited edition artists’ book.
Formerly a long-time communications professional focused on editorial, arts, and social justice movement building, Bashir now lives in Portland, Oregon, with a magic cat who shares her love of trees and blackbirds, and who occasionally crashes her classes and poetry salons at Reed College.
Formerly a long-time communications professional focused on editorial, arts, and social justice movement building, Bashir now lives in Portland, Oregon, with a magic cat who shares her love of trees and blackbirds, and who occasionally crashes her classes and poetry salons at Reed College.