Photograph by Bao Phi
Doug Kearney
At only 8 years old, Douglas Kearney began thinking about the intricacies of language.
On his parents’ bookshelf in their Altadena home was a book on language and dialects titled Success with Words, a guide to English usage, diction, figures of speech, American dialects, and grammar. Along with the standard interactions with poetry that kids encounter through Silverstein or Suess, a young Kearney immersed himself in how a culture can shape a language, and how an individual can push that language to create meaning.
A few decades, a slew of awards, and seven published books later, Kearney’s 2021 poetry collection, Sho, is nominated for a National Book Award. Sho considers how language becomes another part of personal performance as it revels in the subtext of African American vernacular. In the title poem “Sho” (that in itself plays with multiple meanings: the concept of a “show” as in spectacle, to “show” as in reveal, and is a twist on sure, as in the slang “fo’ sho’”), Kearney writes with grisly imagery of a speaker at a lectern sacrificing themselves for an audience clapping away: “Bloody / purl or dirty spit / hocked up for to show / who gets eaten.” The poem raises the uncomfortable question of a performance turned exploitative. Who is the poet expected to be under a largely-white gaze, and how much does he need to give of himself for entertainment’s sake? What does it mean to be a “Black male poet” in post-George Floyd America, after a supposed year of racial reckoning? Burdened with reiterating America's history of racial atrocities, retelling personal trauma, and having to explain white supremacy to white people. In another of Sho's haunting poems, “Manesology” (written “after Charlottesville but before it, too, shit”), Kearney repeatedly brings up “The Problem” the wearied speaker is being asked about over the phone, a stand-in for racism, as if it could just be explained away: “Always calling and calling, / still ringing and ringing, / we are tired and done / and hold all that we own.” Throughout Sho, Kearney sends up the hypocrisies and contradictions innate to our performative culture.
Some of the poems in Kearney’s Sho are 13 years in the making, spanning as far back as 2008, while others were written more recently when he made Minnesota his permanent home in 2018. “Sadly, you don't need a current event to write about police brutality or racism,” Kearney says. It’s what he refers to as “the changing same.”
When read and listened to, Kearney’s words come off the pages of Sho with a disjointed tempo and rhythm, not so different from the pace of a hip-hop song. Kearney calls this “drum machine prosody,” a way of thinking about creating sound outside of conventional patterns of rhythm in poetry, and writing words to the tempo of a work. In the poem “Fire,” he uses this rhythm and homophonous words to depict religious devotion: “What I owe / to the blood what flowed— / What we oh we owe alive— / that body by that Spirit—”
Kearney isn’t just a poet. He’s a University of Minnesota creative writing professor of three years, a librettist, and, at his core, a word player. I hopped in a Zoom room with him, where he was speaking from his Rondo home one November morning, to talk about the National Book Awards, the performance of language, double-jointed syntax, and how we all participate in “languaging the world.”
I’m sure there’s some nerves brewing ahead of that November 17 announcement date. So let’s get a temperature check: How are you feeling leading up to the announcement of the National Book Awards finalists?
This is gonna sound corny or maybe disingenuous, but I am really excited that the book has made it this far. People have been strongly supporting my work for a long time. It's a wonderful thing to be among the finalists, but I just feel like it's a wonderful thing to be in a community with so many writers, to have more people reading the work or thinking about the work is very exciting.
Poets of a certain generation don’t like to talk about prizes or ambition, so I think it’s important that I say ‘Yeah, I’d be hype if I win.’ But you know, the genuine fact of it is that it's in the world, people are reading it, people have been reviewing it, and that's been just exciting.
I know some writers deeply value these awards and others flout them and say they don’t matter. What is your own relationship to awards?
I'll be the first person to tell you I grew up, you know, wanting to be a people pleaser. I wanted that sticker, that gold star, and prizes are one of the ways that kind of present that to us.
My poetry has sought to oftentimes put me into a position where the kinds of things that would make people feel like ‘Yay! You did a great job’ —a lot of my poetry is designed to short circuit that. To not make certain kinds of overtures, to comfort or to put people at ease.
But in 2008, I received the Whiting Writers’ Award, and that prize paid for the IVF procedure that brought my two kids into the world. I received a couple of grant writing opportunities, and those helped us purchase a home. I'm not gonna say that prizes don't matter to me—they have changed my life in many direct ways. But it's hard for me to think that in writing certain kinds of poems, that they are immediately going to be in the lane for possibly winning prizes. I just make the stuff that I feel like making, and I make it in a way that I feel good about and that my friends who are close readers will be excited about.
You originally came to Minnesota in 1999, then left and returned a few years ago. What made you come back?
I found the artist community here has a kind of coherence—it doesn't mean everybody's making the same work, but it means that there is a sense that you can go to a place in the Twin Cities and find a lot of artists doing interdisciplinary, intersectional work and grappling with it, trying to make something happen of it.
So how did you get into poetry? What was the first encounter you had with it?
Some of my earliest encounters with poetry that calls itself poetry would probably be something like Shel Silverstein’s Where the Sidewalk Ends or A Light in the Attic. Maybe even before I was reading that, Marlo Thomas had that big 1970s project called Free to Be You and Me, which is a collection of poems that was turned into an album that many famous performers of the 70s sang on, and I was listening to it on my Fisher Price music player.
And then there were the kinds of rhetorical traditions that lead to stuff like rap and hip-hop, like barbershop talk with the way my father and mother would talk to each other when they felt like signifying or when they would code shift. But I did know pretty early on that I loved language, that I was deeply fascinated by language.
There's a book here called Success With Words. And in it you have things like a section on Boston urban dialect, or different figures of speech, or Indo-European words that we still use. This book was on my parents’ bookshelf and I just one day started reading and learned that a culture could decide that when they said this, this is what it was going to mean—and that to me was just really powerful. I didn't know how languages came to be, but I began understanding how vernacular could take an existing language and sort of flip it and change it. I was looking at that book maybe when I was 7, maybe 8.
If I'm thinking about poetry, what I'm thinking about is how far can I push this language? What can I make this language do? Sonically, cognitively, digitally?
How did you push language and toy with words to create your poems in Sho?
One of the things that I've been working on and thinking through is a formulation that I call double-jointed syntax that riffs on the idea of “broken English.” When I was a kid, people would say, ‘Oh, your finger’s broken.’ No, I'm just double jointed.
So, if I think about what might be called broken English, the easiest one to think about is double negatives, like “I ain't got no money,” right? What if instead of thinking about that as “Oh, the poor speaker just doesn't understand that all they need to say is ‘I don't have any money,’ and then they will be fine.” What if it's not a mistake, but an amplification? I really don't have any money. I don't have money so much that I don't have it twice.
When I think about how language is being pushed in this collection—because unlike a lot of other collections, there are these layered text or visually layered poems—it's how much can I make syntax feel double-jointed? And what does that double jointed-ness reveal about what the writer is thinking or how they think?
What was the decision behind putting Sho as the title of the book?
So in the title of the manuscript there is a line that goes “A Negrocious show of feels,” and for a while that was going to be the title. And then I spoke with Rebecca Wolf who helped me publish my two other books and she proposed just Sho as the title.
But Sho then allows for several things to happen: Sho suggests a performance, like a show. Sho also suggests a phonetic exaggeration of Black vernacular, which means for sure or certainly, so it's like “fo’ sho’.” So I liked both of those things intersecting and I liked that neither one of them, “sure” or “show,” gets to have it. I also liked “show” as a verb, as in I'm going to reveal to you these things. But I love this idea of performing a certain kind of language or a certain kind of understanding of language as being the battery of this title.
In regards to the triple meanings of the title, as well as the various ways you turn words on their heads in the collection, what is the objective of this wordplay in your work?
I've mentioned signifying a couple of times today and that's essentially like using rhetorical misdirection to preserve your safety, or to create a space of safety, even as you're speaking among people who might wish to harm you. It's a kind of linguistic mastery that hides itself from the people you don't want knowing that you've mastered language in this way. And so that's a really rich part of the of Black diasporic tradition. It’s an aesthetic system that has basically crossed from speech to writing to music to visuals to style.
So to me, I want readers to be suspicious of language. I'm interested in constantly reminding people of our participation in the realm of making and extracting meaning, reading, talking, writing. That is what wordplay does for me: it reminds me of the kind of activity of meaning making.
I like creating a sense of the kind of a sonic environment and sometimes a very overtly visual environment. But I'm most excited about people thinking about the activity that they're participating in when they are making meaning. Whether it's by holding one of my books and reading it, or reading a billboard or quoting a song, we are actively participating in languaging the world.
This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
