Burnside Soleil grew up in a houseboat on the bayou but these days is a pilgrim in New Orleans. His work has appeared or is forthcoming in [PANK], Southampton Review, Harvard Advocate, and elsewhere. His poem “Imani” can be found here. It appears along with two other poems in the Mar/Apr 2021 issue of the Kenyon Review.
What was your original impetus for writing “Imani”?
In 2018, my brilliant former student Imani wrote in her characteristic unabashed enthusiasm about a college poetry course she unexpectedly loved, including two of her essays in the email, which I’m grateful to have still. Her writing was eloquent and creative, even in the restrained academic form, and I imagined many more letters in the future, ones that would detail the particulars of her life—a long and rich life. When her first year of university concluded, she visited our campus, but we missed each other, though I received a few of her cupcake character trinkets she’d often craft for my daughter. It’s still unreal to write that Imani died a few days later from a sudden illness. I felt immense grief. Rage, too. I wanted to write to her. I wanted her to write back, to have all the experiences she anticipated and, I’d argue, deserved. The poem happened, pretty rapidly, in that state of bewilderment and mourning.
This poem is addressed to a “you” character. Can you speak to the process of bringing another person to life through direct-address poetry? While you were writing, did you feel a closeness to the “you” as the human being? Or did you feel closer to the character you were constructing of them?
Imani had planned to study biology, earning a spot at Vanderbilt, and she had real tenderness and curiosity about pretty much everything, which maybe sounds like a platitude. But it’s not. I’m a limited person, someone who can do maybe one or two things well. Imani was limitless, really: an accomplished musician, voracious reader, young scientist, media artist, writer, thinker, and more. In the poem, I wanted the roles to shift a bit, for the student to instruct the teacher in lore, in this case biology, which is where the scientific names came from. And I was close to Imani, to many of my students, as teaching is relational, but I can’t say that my writing collapsed any distance between us, of course. In the poem, none of it happened. And that Imani—older, faraway—has never been and can’t be. Nevertheless, I wanted the lines to feel vivid, real, for the imagery—the things she’d notice and study—to seem honest, even if an alternate reality.
This poem borrows language from the “you” character, the natural world, and the speaker’s own commentary. As you were writing, did you ever feel that those voices blended together into one, becoming the rich, layered “sudden forest” at the end?
The poem, as I’m reading it again, pretends to be polyvocal, and there are multiple registers, parts written as if by a natural scientist, a confidant, etc. Hypotheticals fill most of the stanzas, but by the end, we actually get something Imani wrote, the whole adjective bit, and so as the speaker imagines an alternate future and as he tries to make her voice linger a bit longer, that all doesn’t seem possible once her own words arrive, a line that’s simultaneously about connection and alienation. The speaker then turns his gaze to himself, seemingly transformed, and if it’s a “sudden forest,” that makes me think he can’t locate himself, can’t place—in a particular way—where he is. Physically, sure, he’s in the kitchen. The rest of him, however, seems lost. But maybe that’s the catch of the poem, now that I’m thinking about. If some embodied part of himself is present yet the rest absent, then the reverse could be true, too
How has your writing changed since you started out?
In college, we barely studied poetry, and for whatever reason, I never had the luck to attend a workshop, to talk to a mentor or learn craft with peers, etc. other than with my best friend, who’s a far superior writer. So the learning has been slow, mostly happening by immersing myself in books each day. I write attending to sound first, slowly, intuiting when one word works, then the next, so my strategy has been perhaps banal, linear, as I labored on each phrase, each sentence, until I could achieve longer and, hopefully, richer poems.
What project(s) are you working on now or next?
I’m working on a manuscript that’s a series of epistolary poems, a speaker addressing this coterie of friends, relatives, weirdos, et al., much of it set near the bayou where I grew up. It’s a hoot.