April Gibson is a poet, essayist, and educator whose work has appeared in Prairie Schooner, Water-Stone Review, PANK, pluck!, Literary Mama, and elsewhere. April is a Fellow of the Poetry Incubator, the Callaloo Creative Writing Workshop, and the Watering Hole Poetry Retreat, as well as a VONA Writing Workshop alum. Her current project is a full-length poetry collection exploring performance, politics, and Black womanhood. Her poem “Things to Do in the Belly of a Whale” can be found here. It appears in the Sept/Oct 2020 issue of the Kenyon Review.
What was your original impetus for writing “Things to Do in the Belly of a Whale”?
This poem was originally written in a workshop with Natalie Diaz I was fortunate to take a few years ago in Minneapolis. One of the exercises involved us reading Dan Albergotti’s poetry, which served as inspiration along with the prompt to write ourselves out of the whale. The entire workshop manifested such unique, complex drafts in response to the idea and it always fascinates me how there are so many ways of seeing the same thing. On a deeper level, however, at the time I wrote this poem I was experiencing profound emotional devastation, a great stuckness that I had been trying to claw my way out of. Writing this poem allowed me to regain some agency; it was like a tally mark toward what I knew would one day total to some kind of way out of the blue.
Can you talk a bit about the relationship of your work to Dan Albergotti’s 2001 poem of the same title?
The first time I read Dan Albergotti’s 2001 poem of the same title was the day I wrote this poem, which certainly puts the two pieces in conversation. I also chose not to change the title for a couple reasons. For one, the title is doing work for the poem; it serves as a type of setting which then allows me to just write the rest of the story without worrying for the reader’s sense of place. Also, as someone who teaches literature, I am deeply interested in the way texts are in conversation, especially poetry, and I think “after” poems are a good way to understand intertextuality.
The image at the end of this poem is so strong, with the speaker regaining a sense of agency, and starting a fire! Do you have advice for poets who are struggling to find the last lines of their work?
As poets we love words, like obsessively, but it is the image or emotion a word manifests that makes a poet a poet. Once I began writing the poem, I knew it had to end with a resolution, as mentioned previously I had to write my way out of the whale. So, I guess I had a goal. I also write a lot of narrative poems and often write poems as if they are stories with settings, mini-plots, characters, etc., so it has become easier over time to come to an end. I have been advised that poets often struggle with first lines and that most times the first few lines can be cut for fluff; I’m starting to think sometimes this may be the case with ending lines as well. I often find myself snipping a line after what is the true last line, and it seems that the issue is me trying to explain what is already established by the rest of the poem, especially if there is some overarching lesson/moral. I realized I can trust my reader to get there without me being didactic in a poem. Also, I don’t know if a poem is ever finished, but at some point, all poems have to be done.
Can you share any more about how this poem fits into the themes of your most recent poetry, or any larger projects?
Looking at the ending image in the poem as an example of themes in my work, the “hell of everything inside” alludes to a type of restoration that comes after destruction, a small apocalypse that makes way for a new world. I am a “burn it down” kind of woman because I know sometimes that’s the only way to get free. My recent work is mostly concerned with the social, political, and emotional healing and liberation of Black women. Also, the reason why I was so attracted to the image of the whale is rooted in my childhood experiences in a very religious Christian home where I read and learned about stories from the Bible. Much of my writing plays with these images like Jonah and the whale, the Garden of Eden, the rapture of Revelation, etc. It is liberating to reimage, to rewrite and write my way out of ideas that were used to indoctrinate me. In the end, for me, writing is always about becoming more and more free.
How has your writing changed since you started out?
As I continue to live, learn, read and listen, the way I craft a poem continues to evolve. I know now it can take years to get a poem right. I recently came back to very old poems and was able to make them into what they needed to be because they were waiting for me to grow. The way I edit my work has changed the most. I have no issue tossing and cutting but nothing is really trash, just a possibility for later. During this pandemic, I have been editing more than writing as I want to complete my manuscript, and I must say it actually felt fun and exciting, intense but in a different way from the grueling work of getting it down. I still try to hold on to that emotional core that motivated me to become a writer in the first place, but now I have a process where I do the burdensome work of writing drafts that often have immense emotion then let them breathe, let life show me something about myself, come back to the poems when I am ready to revise them as pieces of art and not just matters of the heart. Doing this I have been able to take a poem from being a reaction to trauma to being a well-crafted work. I still have the core, but there’s more and I don’t feel a pang when I touch it.