An Interview With Phillip B. Williams
Writing poetry is not painful; it is an extreme version of thinking.
I was fortunate enough to share an email exchange with the recent winner of the American Book Award, poet Phillip B. Williams. Williams is the author of the poetry collections Thief in the Interior and MUTINY; both collections handle incredibly changed subject matter. His work explores the depths of the profound pain experienced by Black Americans, as well as the radical nature of Black joy. In speaking with Williams, I was able to ask him about the pain and tenderness his work is known for, as well as ask about his creative process.
Williams taught at Bennington as a member of the literature faculty from 2016-2022, for his first two two years as a visitor and thereafter as full-time faculty. He is a winner of a prestigious Whiting Award in 2017, the 2017 Kate Tufts Discovery Award and a 2017 Lambda Literary award. Williams was also a 2020-21 Fellow at Harvard University’s Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study.
Literary Bennington: In much of your work, you balance descriptions of love and violence or very tender images wrapped up in otherwise desperate locals. For example, in “He Loved Him Madly,” you describe a father “[crooning] around the house, the halls carrying his falsetto like a good beast.” (Which, what a fantastic line!) where in the same poem, you open with the line, “It had been watching you sleep in dreams of excrement and hard voices.” What is it you are trying to achieve with this juxtaposition?
Phillip B. Williams: Thank you for this question! What I wanted to do in that poem and in so many of my poems is write into the grotesque, finding a way to navigate the terrain of harsh realities without falling into the trap of valorizing them. On the flip side, I wish for my poems to show that there is beauty to all experiences, even the ones that are challenging to handle and especially the ones that naturally carry a sense of ambivalence. Rarely, are moments simply pure in either direction of beautiful or ugly, peaceful or challenging. How can we bear all aspects of reality and what would that look like in lyric?
LB: You use a lot of AAVE or ‘slang’ in your work. How did this become a part of your style or practice? Were there any reservations about taking on this voice with poetry? Any fear that the work wouldn’t come off as ‘respectable’ to white audiences?
PBW: I like to think that quite a few of my poems use multiple registers, what some may call elevated and colloquial. I typically write how I speak, and I often will speak in AAVE then flip into a more formal tone for emphasis. Sometimes it is the flip, where I am speaking without AAVE then will use AAVE to make the point, to push it. I see all ways of speaking that I use as belonging to me, therefore they belong to my poems as well.
I had been critiqued, not harshly, that poems should not switch registers. Often times it can happen and make for a speaker that is confusing to read tonally. I agree that one should be careful when doing it, but I don’t agree that it cannot/should not be done. Other than that, I have no interest in what people think, especially not about ‘respectability.’ My poems focus on Black culture, and I write poems for myself with the idea that the audience that needs the poems the most will find them.
LB: You make a lot of use of sound and vocalization in your work; for me, this recalled a sort of Jazz and mo-town sound aesthetic. What role does sound play for you? When do you find the poem changes into this non-verbal mode?
PBW: Sound initiates many of my poems. If not sound, then image. Eventually, the two meet. Rarely do I begin with an overall idea of a poem’s ‘aboutness.’ Those kinds of poems come as a response to something, usually a current event, and even then, I’m not always sure of what part of that event I am writing about. I’m interested in exploring questions and curiosities.
In a poem like “Mushmouf’s Maybe Crown” from my book Mutiny, I wanted to use words that began with the ‘M’ letter or sound in order to conceptually render the speaker un-mute, as in they are usually someone who is not allowed to speak or feels as though they have the agency to speak, and the ‘M’ sound to my ear sounds like someone sliding into speech, freeing themselves from mumbling. So, maybe sound is not necessarily non-verbal but hyperverbal? It says what words cannot say because pure sound is the most primal utterance.
LB: You write a lot about poverty, pain, and struggle. Do you find you try to distance yourself from these painful topics, or do you lean into them? Is writing poetry a painful process? What is the writing process like?
PBW: Writing is tiring. Writing exhausts me emotionally and psychologically, which impacts the body. I don’t necessarily seek respite from the material but from processing the information to write the poem. It is the translation of pain to poem that takes its toll on me. Writing poetry is not painful; it is an extreme version of thinking, and with anything pushed to and perhaps past its limits, it can wear on you. It’s why I keep cartoons and cooking shows on deck so that I can wind down when needed.
LB: Your mixing of Classical forms—such as the Epithalamium—with stories of queer urban life fascinates me. Is this a rejection of the classical, or an attempt to see marginalized peoples included in it? This mixing of “high” art and “low” subject matter actually reminds me a bit of Catullus, haha… is this a fair comparison?
PBW: I enjoy Catullus very much! I think this answer relates to your question earlier about AAVE. These delineations simply don’t work for me when writing a poem because the intersections carry the tension, the complexity of living, and the ambiguity that I think is often ignored in order for there to appear to be a right answer. I am neither rejecting nor including (as in marginalized people were once excluded) anyone or anything. By nature of me writing the form, I am being inclusive of the form. By nature of me being a Black queer writer, I am included in the history of the form. I’m also in constant wonder as to what is high and what is low in art. Who decides? How do they register? When do the boundaries intersect or fade altogether?
— Isabel Ruppel 25’
