Author2Author: Thomas Sayers Ellis & Lyrae Van Clief-Stefanon, pt. 3

Having learned what Lyrae's working on, Thomas asks to see more...

Thomas Sayers Ellis: I would love to see a new stanza, here and now, from one of the poems in Open Interval, perhaps an example of your "bogarting," a term I love. Will you share one with us and talk about how "bogarting" works there. (This kind of technique is discussed at length, with examples, in Zora Neale Hurston's Characteristics of Negro Expression. I've got Madd Love for verbal nouns.)

Lyrae Van Clief-Stefanon: Bogarting is a term I heard and used as a kid that's shifted and reshaped itself for me as I got older. (To go Humphrey, apparently the term comes from Bogart's tendency to have a cigarette hanging from his mouth as he spoke, a cig from which he’d rarely to never actually take a drag.) The first way I remember it is in terms of talking with a group--"He be bogarting the conversation"--which meant shoving one's way in and taking over. It's got connotations of stealing, and being sly about it--"she bogarted my seat"--and hogging--"look at you, bogarting all the cookies." It's used (as a drug reference, particularly) to talk about someone holding on to something that's supposed to be passed along or shared. For me, in terms of identity, it came to mean making a place for one's self, regardless of invitation or reception, insisting on one's self.

In some ways, the academy is the biggest Bogart going, particularly in terms of poetry. I feel, especially as a kid who grew up marking and remarking upon bogarting--and that's my authority, I authorize myself from out of my own experience-- I feel I can come in and snatch it (poetry). Say "that's mine!" Say "gimme that" but/and then, just take it. Transform the academy's bogarting theory and practice (mythology is not for you, black girl, sit down and be quiet, we'll tell you who you are and when/where/if you can speak, here's the language you are allowed, the rest is reserved for us, here's your culture, here are your allusions, etc.) into my own bogarting theory and practice. To borrow from June Jordan's "Poem about my Rights":

"I am not wrong: Wrong is not my name/ My name is my own my own my own/ and I can't tell you who in the hell set things up like this/ but I can tell you that from now on my resistance/ my simple and daily and nightly self-determination/ may very well cost you your life"

As for a stanza from Open Interval, I have a bop in there called "Bop: The North Star." (And I have to say I'm a terrible bogarter of the bop form, because I think it's perfect for doing just this work.) Anyway, the poem refers to my experiences teaching poetry this semester at Auburn, a maximum security men's prison located in the town where Harriet Tubman eventually settled and had a house. In it, I take myself to task for, among other things, being "part of" the academy, and for not knowing the stars, a skill that could have saved my life in Harriet's time. And I bogart a line from Edward Snow's translation of Rilke's First Duino Elegy as the refrain. Here's the last stanza:

At the prison at Auburn I cross the yard. Inmates whet tongues against
my body, cement sculpted, poised for hate —pitch compliments
like coins--(wade)-- their silver, slickening --(in the water)--
uncollected change. The guard asks Think they’re beautiful?
just wait ‘til they’re out here stabbing each other.
Oh, Harriet, the stars throw down shanks:
teach the sonnet’s a cell, now try to escape.

Yes, the springtime needed you. Many a star was waiting
for your eyes only.

I've always been interested in re-serving lines of (reserved) poetry, in giving lines back in the context of my mouth, my having spoken them. That's what bogarting's about for me. I'm a nut about epigraphs. Everything's in conversation with something else. (Black Swan was in a lot of ways a meditation on another line from the first Duino Elegy: "Beauty is nothing but the beginning of terror.") Like you, I'm interested in escape routes and new literacies, places to live within the poem.