Reginald Dwayne Betts is the father of two sons, Micah and Miles. He is the author of the poetry collection Bastards of the Reagan Era and the memoir A Question of Freedom. Currently, he is an Emerson Fellow at New America. His poem “Parable of the Groundhog” can be found here. It appears in the May/June 2018 issue of the Kenyon Review.
What was your original impetus for writing “Parable of the Groundhog”?
“Parable of a Groundhog,” it’s mostly true, in the way all good lies are true. Visiting a prison, someone told me the story of this groundhog and it stayed in my head.
What do you feel is gained and emphasized by bringing this sense of a usually child-associated genre of the exemplary and moral tale to prisons and inmates? Was your intention to increase the dangerous and foreboding tone of the piece?
This question is way too smart for me. Or, put a different way, I think there is a notion that poets go into the work seeking to do things like “bringing this sense of a usually child-associated genre of the exemplary and moral tale to prisons and inmates”—but, at least for me, the poem is instinctual. And sometimes it’s just true. The groundhog wanted freedom, in the same way that men do, that women do. And was willing, though maybe the groundhog didn’t know it, to die for it. The danger and foreboding that I hoped to create, was more about seeing the groundhog’s flight as a promise—of what the want can lead you to do and what the want can end up doing to you.
What drew you to this poetic form, four-line stanzas with the third indented? Is there an intention to give off a sense of disorientation and displacement as the piece is traversed? In what ways do you hope your poem functions as a visual form and object on a page as well as a literary work?
It’s really a bootleg ballad. I kind of honed the line based on a sound that I was chasing. But I don’t think I was chasing disorientation or displacement as much as song and movement. These questions, though, are challenging, because they suggest that I was far more intentional at the earlier stages of drafting than, in fact, I was. But if the line is about imagery and sound, if it’s about restraint and exploding out against those tensions, then structuring a piece like this with the four-line staggered stanza helps. But it’s all, really, because I wrote this thinking ballad.
“Parable of a Groundhog,” as a title, seems to draw the reader’s mind to the story of spring’s arrival, a cheerful animal popping up from underground, but your piece brings this hopeful upward escape into barbed wire. How do you hope the expectations that this title perhaps creates works or is undercut by your poem’s contents and conclusion?
The most lovely things, some of them at least, are the ones that startle. I hope that this poem creates a moment that startles the reader though in truth, from the first stanza in the reader knows the groundhog climbs, the surprise comes with discovery of the fall.
How has your writing or writing process changed since you started out?
To be honest, I’m still writing this poem. I can’t stop, not in the way that others seem to just shut down their writing. And this poem, in particular, went from long lush lines to shorter lines to the happy medium that exists now. Though, I hate to admit it, but I’ve turned it into a more traditional ballad with a traditional rhyme scheme. I just, you know I’m getting at it and getting at it and even though the version in the Kenyon Review is good, by my eye, I couldn’t stop tinkering.
Which non-writing-related aspect of your life most influences your writing?
Hip-hop. Pretty easily, I think. This new Black Thought album is what’s driving me lately. And the Pusha-T album. Bruce Springsteen, too, and going back to old Sade albums and Dione Ferris. The thing is, these musicians, these singers and MCs, their sense of metaphor and simile and figures of speech and compression reminds me of what’s missing in my poems, or what’s sometimes missing.
What is either the best or the worst piece of writing advice you’ve received or given?
Still this from Marlon James, but he talks about how it’s stupid to tell someone to write what they know, because for many folks they take that as an excuse not to learn more things. So I’d say, the worst advice I got was always write what you know. The best advice, I don’t know, it was probably something like read twice or three or ten times as much as you write.
What project(s) are you working on now, or next?
Felon. That’s my new collection of poems. Just working on that and some prose. But Felon is the focus. It’ll come out in 2020 with Norton.