The Glimpse.
It's important to subvert tropes. It's really interesting. During this time of social media, body positivity, fat liberation, I feel that times couldn't really be more polarizing. The more space that is created socially, for people who are fat, super fat infini-fat, the more visceral and vitriol there is around our bodies.
Welcome to The Glimpse. I'm your host Camille Rankine poet, Omotara James is skilled at subversion. She's the author of the poetry collection Song of My Softening and her work has been featured in NPR's Morning Edition, the Paris Review and the Believer. She has received support from the African Poetry Book Fund, the Poetry Foundation, Lambda Literary and Cave Canem
Foundation. Omotara is our guest today on The Glimpse. In her debut poetry collection Song of my Softening, Omotara James carves out a hard earned way of knowing a way of seeing through the language we've been given to a clear understanding of self, of body, of being. Her voice and these poems moves with a surefooted and sensual grace through pain and shame toward abundance and a tender-truth
telling. Hers is an eye that doesn't shy away, she lifts what the world has hidden in shadow up to the light, and lets it shimmer. Welcome Omotara, thanks for being here.
Thank you, I'm so happy to be here with you.
Yeah, I'm really happy to be talking to you. I want to start off just by asking about your poems in general, as I was reading your book, I was thinking about this balance that they strike between vulnerability and confidence, and they can be really intimate at the same time unbowed and unbossed. channel, Shirley Chisholm. And I just wondered, like, how do you arrive at that space as a poet or as a person?
You know, I feel like I'm always trying to navigate a kind of balance and generosity in my life. So whatever is happening,
within my interiority, I tried to bring that to the work. And so I'm very focused on my process, which means I'm focused on what it feels like, as I'm perceiving the world, entering into the actual writing phase, I try to have a ritual, that book ends the process when I write, so that when I walk into the poem, I know that there's going to be a beginning, a middle and an end, There's a finite amount of time. And that gives me some kind of surety and confidence in my
process, knowing that, okay, I get to decide how it ends. And even though I don't know how it's going to end, I still get to decide. So it makes me feel some sort of power and control. That's so
Interesting. I feel like I see that in your work like that sense of power and control is so present in the poems and it's interesting, because that comes through even when what the poems are talking about might lack that control, like the actual scenario or subject your narrative, there might be talking about a lack of control, but the poems themselves feel in control of their of their matter if that makes sense. You know, I think that's really interesting how that power comes through.
It does that creates that delicious sort of tension, you know, between helplessness and control. And that's how I'm always
trying to strike a balance, what I'm always navigating. And I remember when I was I think it was a Breadloaf with Vievee Francis, one of my favorite American poets, and she told us that we should have a beginning and end to the writing process when we are writing about something traumatic, problematic, you know, because that grace that we give ourselves, we'll find it again, in the work.
Right? Do you feel like that process, that beginning, middle and end that process? Is that consistent for you? Or does it change depending on the poem and the work you're working on?
Hmm. It changes Yeah, it also changes depending on the time of day that I'm working, because when I work in the evenings, that's when I'm my least guarded self, my most open my most vulnerable and everything becomes a little blurry. Right? The boundary between being awake and being asleep, the boundary between what I remember and what I can't forget. So I'm trying to, on the one hand blur the boundary, and channel some kind of spiritual,
psychic energy. But also my intellect is also thinking along certain themes that I am certain concerns that I'm exploring.
Yeah, that's so interesting. That tension, that balance is so present in all these different ways. I think that's a lot of what makes poetry kind of electric, you know? Yeah, absolutely. All right. Well, let's hear a poem if we can. I'd love to hear you read the poem that you're going to share today.
Okay, absolutely. So I'll be reading from my debut collection, After the Last Calorie of the Apocalypse, or Prayer for the Clinically Obese. On the last day, let there be a fat inhalation of delight between the lap of our sunrise. As the tongue separates the doubt from the cream, let pleasure sift through the metal strainer of time. Only hours now, waiting for the thin people in my life to die. I read a magazine, have sex, smoke a cigarette, and ride the elevator
down to the lobby. We've only minutes now. Having nothing against them personally, unlike art, they don't improve much upon the original form. Why was I ever only awake to the past, my past selves asleep to what was plentiful. Exiting the lobby for the corner store, I pass an absurdity of them. Only seconds now, staunchly insisting their last instance be tailored to fit. Their paper lips fanning the tulle hem of my dress, red, for the rest of us, mere
moments away from freedom, from this fine tyranny. If only for a short while, as they begin to shrivel and wilt. Oh, mercy of the thin breeze. On this day, lovelies, we will be free when the food runs out.
Thank you. I'm obsessed with that poem a little bit.
Oh my gosh!
I love it. I love the way that you read it.
Thank you.
Yeah, it's so gorgeous. And I'm just thinking about like, the language of pleasure, especially that like immediately draws us in breath, sunrise, tongue, cream, sex cigarette. Like it feels so warm and languid in its opening. Can You talk about the choices that you made an image and language to create that feeling.
Yeah, you know, I wanted to begin the poem with a feeling of exultation of almost climax. And I was very aware that I wanted to begin probably in a higher register than I wanted to end. So I was thinking like, a gorgeous sunrise, a deep pastel, creamy, abstract, a Renoir sunrise, something that you just couldn't help but be drawn to, and compelled by something delicious. And I
wanted to begin with pleasure. And I wanted there to be slippage between the deliciousness that you see, and the deliciousness that you taste, right, and then we get into the body. So that's the tongue separating the doubt from the cream, which is like, Okay, what does that mean? We don't know entirely, but it's very lyric. It's very evocative. And certainly, as the poem continues, there's this
element, this thread of cruelty, right? And that's kind of underpinning the poem and I didn't want to point too overtly, to the what was happening outside of the speaker, like the exposition. I didn't feel that we needed a lot of exposition in an apocalypse poem. Yeah, we get it. There's a dissonance there. There's a dissonance between this excessive pleasure to all of a sudden, we're smoking a cigarette, and we're having a sex and we're reading a
magazine, which is really pedestrian. And then as we continue, the eye of the poem kind of opens out to everything that the speaker is just kind of walking through. And the cameras just kind of like following her. And she's the only one who's in focus, walking through this apocalyptic state, where thin people are just falling to the ground. And she saying, Yes, that's right. That's
right. And with every, with every single person that is obliterated, she is occupying more space, she's becoming more confident, she's feeling more liberated. And so there's this relationship between occupying space and a fat body and being liberated, and just being left alone, you know, not having anyone critique you too closely. And so that was how I began the poem. Yeah.
I love that. You've mentioned this idea, this element of cruelty, which one of the things that I really find myself drawn to is the voice of the poem in moments like that, with like, having done nothing against them personally, unlike art, they don't improve much upon original form. I just love that "eye" that just like, they're fine, I suppose.
I mean, it's funny. I thought that was funny. Yes,
Yes I think it's hilarious.I love that.
Thank you I'm a funny poet. People don't get that there's humor there.
I mean, I'm over here cracking up.
You know, life is so absurd. You have to laugh. And also to I did write this before the pandemic. So it felt just a little bit more fun to speak about an apocalypse before COVID-19. Right. Yeah. But it was this idea. You know, it was at a time where there
are all these like zombie movies. Yeah, there's all of this, you know, all of these fantastic apocalypses that were showing, but I wanted to reclaim that because depending on the life that you lead, and and how you're living and how you're in community, you might be facing the apocalypse every day, right? Yes,
absolutely. Yeah. Like there apocalypse happening for people all the time. Yeah, all the
time, all the time, and in ways that are more obvious and, and ways that are just smaller and more innocuous. So I just wanted to take it from high to low from, you know, grand, to mundane. Yes,
I think there is so much grandeur, that even the mundane elements of the poem, like magazines, cigarette sex, they're cast in this light, like this romantic light, you know, I just feel like this poem is doing a lot with reframing of language of image of body. And I, one of the things I love about that kind of casual cruelty of the voice is how it works to reposition the newness into something sort of withering and sad, you know?
It's important to subvert tropes. Yeah, um, and it's really interesting. During this time of social media, body positivity, fat liberation, I feel that times couldn't really be more polarizing, the more space that is created socially, for people who are fat, super fat, infini-fat, the more visceral and vitriol there is
around our bodies. So there are these extremities and the idea of seeing a speaker, just walk through them just cut through them with such, you know, poise and sense of self and being so casual about it. Yeah, that was very attractive to me to see a speaker, a fat speaker, framing the narrative, and not just solely being the subject of the narrative. Felt very important. Yeah,
yeah, I think that comes across. And another thing that I really enjoy thinking about that turn of power, and grace is that last line, the entrance of the word, lovelies, can you talk about that? Like how you arrived at that moment of address?
So while I was writing this poem, I was also thinking a lot about how I could condense, like the last few minutes of someone's entire life, and how to create that heightened sense of time. And in doing so, I thought, you know, when no one knows how they're going to go out, right, no one knows when their last day is going to be. And so I just thought the poem began in beauty and is ending in death. And also through that death. There is another beauty
being born. So we're beginning in beauty, and we're ending in beauty, but not in the same place. Right? Yeah. So it just felt really important to make sure that there are some love for those who are left last at the end of the poem.
And there's also something really hopeful, I think, when we think about, like, how many apocalypses we live through and a lot of people live through of taking that moment and spinning it around a little bit and thinking about what can we build? What can we gain? What how can we be freer? Yeah, I think there's something hopeful about it, even though it's about the end of the world.
Yeah. And that's why I wrote it in couplets.
I was gonna ask about that. I love a couplet talk to me about that.
couplet. You know, it feels like when you're writing a couplet, you're beginning somewhere and you're ending somewhere. It's like two hands holding. Yeah.
I always say that. It's like hand in hand skipping down the street. You know, I was just about to say that,
Oh, my goodness, Camille, you get me. Here. We're here together in this. Yes. Oh, my goodness. Never felt so seen. Yes. The Sisterhood. So yes. So there's this feeling of when I see couplets together, it's like, oh, okay, we're merely going along this poem. Right. So there's that lightness and that levity in terms of how it looks so kind of unassuming. But also, what this poem is saying is, death is coming, death is coming, death is coming,
death is coming. And we're going to be okay, for like, a few minutes. After all the thin people perish. It's gonna be good for a few minutes. And that's gonna be good. And also, you know, when you go back to the title of the poem, The first part is after The Last Calorie of the Apocalypse, right. But the second part is Prayer for the Clinically Obese, and that word obese and obesity, especially in the within
the culture and context of fat liberation. That is, you know, very much a slur because it is a word that is highly loaded, that's always used really pejoratively. There's there's no place where it's not used pejoratively. It's built into the word, especially when it's used clinically and those clinical spaces, those medical spaces, people who are fat are most vulnerable. And also the least seen. We're not taken seriously. And that's why we don't enter those
spaces. As much as thinner people, people living in thinner bodies would enter those spaces. Because there's more freedom there.
I was thinking about that inclusion of the Prayer for the Clinically Obese in the title. Just the coldness of that word, the accusation of it, and how the whole poem seems to sort of just laugh in its face almost sort of just it pushes right back against that. And seems to me, like just take the control away from
that designation and control that story and that narrative. It just creates such an interesting tension to me, that really informs the way that I understand and feel the impact of the poem itself.
I mean, certainly, this is a fuck you poem. Oh, yeah. I mean, there's there's no way around that. It's a poem that says my personhood is going to be asserted, whether you like it or not, and I actually prefer that you don't like that would bring me pleasure.
You don't need to like, yeah, yeah, right. I think that's what is so delicious about the poem that, you know, that sense of facing that title and pushing back and laughing at that title and saying, I'm I'm actually not, I'm not going about to take that on myself. Good luck. Good luck to you. No, I yeah, I think that's, that's glorious.
Thank you.
Thank you. And I think this is a good time to take a little break. Okay. Cathy & Peter Halstead: We hope you're enjoying The Glimpse. It's just one small part of the Adrian Brinkerhoff Poetry Foundation.
We're the founders Peter and Cathy Halstead. Our Cathy & Peter Halstead: goal is to make poetry more accessible to everyone. And we do that in a variety of ways. Through partnerships, our film series, this podcast, and our website Brinkerhoff poetry.org. We hope these works will lure you into a parallel universe. The way a Möbius strip brings you into another dimension without leaving the page you're on. Thanks for listening. Okay,
welcome back. So we are going to hear a poem that has inspired you.
The name of the poem is Tiara by Mark Doty from his collection, Bethlehem in Broad Daylight. Tiara. Peter died in a paper tiara cut from a book of princess paper dolls. He loved royalty, sashes and jewels. I don't know. He said, when he woke in the hospice. I was watching the Betty Davis Film Festival on channel 57 and then— At the wake, the tension broke when someone guessed the casket closed because he was in there and a big wig and
heels, and someone said, you know he's always late. He probably isn't here yet. He's still fixing his makeup. And someone said he asked for it. asked for it. When all he did was go down into the salt tide of wanting as much as he wanted, giving himself over so drunk or stoned. It almost didn't matter who, though they were beautiful, stampeding into him in the simple lavishing music of their hurry. I think heaven is perfect stasis poised over the realms of desire.
Where dreaming and waking men lie on the grass, while wet horses roam among them huge fragments of the music we die into in the body's paradise. Sometimes we wake not knowing how we came to lie here, or who has crowned us with these temporary precious stones. And given the world's perfectly turned shoulders, the deep hollows blued by longing, given the irreplaceable silk of horses, rippling in orchards, fruit thundering and chiming down, given the ordinary
marvels of form and gravity. What could he do? What could any of us ever do? But ask for it?
Talk about a fuck You poem. You know? I love this. I think I just want to wrap myself in this poem. But before I do that, what what about this poem draws you to it.
You know, this was one of the first poems I read in a college class of contemporary poets. And at the time, I was really struggling to find my own voice. I knew I had things I wanted to say, things that were simmering things that I couldn't articulate, but I didn't know how to say them. I didn't know anything about registers in poetry, tone shifts, any of that. And when I came across this poem, for the first time, I just completely lost it. I
just, it was a release. It felt like a godsend. It felt like this poem was a complete whole and holy rebuke, of being too much. And what I loved about this poem was its tenderness. Its tenderness, and the fact that the speaker had so much love For the subject. Yes, yes, I also felt like I knew Peter, a little bit, even though that's ridiculous. But, you know, in some ways, we all have a Peter or are the Peter, you know, in our own lives. Flamboyant, fun,
carefree, deeply connected to pleasure, to appetite, to beauty. And so those through lines of connecting appetite, pleasure experience to beauty to the sublime that I felt was a restoration, it gave me back something that I felt I was losing on a daily basis.
I love that all he did was go down and have a salt tight of wanting as much as he wanted." And now that that we just tumbled from that. I feel like we're falling and we fall into heaven in that moment. And yes,
you do tumble into heaven. And what is taking us there is Peter's love of life. Yeah, you know. So in many ways, the subject is being reanimated through our connection to that beautiful, ravishing music to these luscious images to these gorgeous fragments. Yes. And Doty is so good at also making us complicit in Peter's pleasure. Absolutely. Because we're feeling the pleasure, oh, we don't
want it to stop. We don't want these tercets to end and by the time I got to the end, I was upset that it was ending, I wanted to reread it again. And again. And again. And so it's creating that desire for for excess, and pleasure. And the craft is so well and intentional.
He takes us so deep into it, that you completely are in a position of embodying that like experience that Peter was having where you're like, I want more, I don't want this to end I want to be in this space. And you feel like you are, like you said complicit in that in that desire,
and also complicit in the love that the speaker has for the subject, the love that the speaker has for Peter, that you couldn't but adore him. And whereas this poem kind of opens up, you know, into heaven, I wanted like my apocalypse poem, to kind of begin in a heaven, and then zoom out and come back down to earth.
And I think each poem is saying, you know, hold on, and also, it's showing us like, you're saying, like, we make a
heaven of hell, we make a hell of heaven. It's showing us in a way that this doesn't have to be the way that we see it, there is something else, there's another way of understanding and entering into the reality of this person to think differently, and see differently and understand our role, our control our you know, what power we have, and how we understand each other, right do to each other.
I mean, because ultimately, you know, as far as I'm concerned, that's the role of the poem. It's not just to, you know, virtue signal or whatever, but it's to really try to interrogate what it is that the reader believes, and what their position and positionality is, to the content, right? And what I try to do in all of my poems, and what I love about this Doty poem is that even though the speakers of both poems are speaking back to the spectacle of
an the specter of hatred, they're also both not performing. No, my poem is not performing fatness Tiara is not performing gayness, okay. What it is doing is it's defying, okay, these are defiant poems. So they're defying what your relationship to gayness is, you know, not saying, oh, you know, this is our gayness, please accept it. You know, please accept our queerness No, it's saying, Listen, this is how we live. This is how we love. And wouldn't you be so lucky?
Yeah, absolutely. So, thank you for talking to me about this poem. But I also want to ask you, yeah, what are you up to? What are you working on right now? I mean, I know you just gave us this book. So no rush.
Well, yeah, I gave the book and the book is still giving. It's still giving. It's still giving because I am working on the audio book. I'm very excited to be recording. That's great.
That's good. I'm happy for people. get to listen to you read this book, because it's great to listen to hear it read your poems.
I mean, not to toot my own horn, but when you hear a poem in the voice of the speaker, that's another kind of experience and, and translation. And so the intimacy is just heightened. So that's what I love about the audiobook. And of course, I'm always writing poems, and I'm working on a children's book.
Ah, oh my gosh, for the children. Everybody's lucky. I'm excited about that.
Yeah, very cool. Yeah, I'm really excited. What age group like 10 Eight and under, you know? Yeah, it's
exciting. It is
exciting.
It's so great to talk to you about these poems. Thank you so much. It's been a joy.
Thank you, Camille.
Thanks for joining us today. I'm your host Camille Rankine. Omatara's poem After the Last Calorie of the Apocalypse Prayer for the Clinically Obese appears in her debut poetry collection Song of my Softening, published in 2024, and aired with permission from Alice James books. Mark Doty's poem Tiara is from the book Paragon Park, Turtle Swan, Bethlehem in Broad Daylight and
Early Poems, copyright 2012. It was used with permission from Yhe Permissions Company LLC on behalf of David R. Godine Publisher Inc. And that's it for this season of The Glimpse. It's been a pleasure to be in conversation with these writers and their words, and to share the conversation with you. I hope you'll keep going keep reading poems and join us for the next season of The Glimpse which will focus on Irish poets. Make sure to like and subscribe to The Glimpse
wherever you get your podcasts. You can also find episodes on our website Brinkerhoff poetry.org. If you have any questions or comments, please drop us an email at The Glimpse poetry podcast@gmail.com. The Glimpse is a production of the Adrian Brinkerhoff Poetry Foundation. I'm your host Camille Rankine. Our senior producer is Jennifer Wolfe Kat Yore is our technical director and mixing engineer. Editorial Director Amanda Glassman is our curator and
production coordinator. Amy Holmes is the foundation's Executive Director and our co founders are Cathy and Peter Halstead. Thanks for listening