(MUSIC PLAYING)

Helena de Groot: This is Poetry Off the Shelf. I’m Helena de Groot. Today, As I Am.

When I talked to Ama Codjoe, who was in Italy on a fellowship, she told me she doesn’t write for a reader, she writes for herself. And I think you can see that in her poems. They’re so unpredictable and free, the literary equivalent of “dance like nobody’s watching.” In her latest collection, Bluest Nude, she centers the body, specifically the Black female body. Not as an object—“look at everything that is done to Black women”—but as a subject. This is what it feels like to go on a long walk, lie on the grass, take a bath, make love. As she puts it in one poem, “My body is a lens / I can look through with my mind.”

With her body as the lens, she notices all these other bodies: her mother’s, her siblings’, her cousins’, as well as the bodies of women in paintings, sculptures, dance. She even builds her own personal canon of Black women artists: the painter Lynette Yiadom-Boakye, the photographer Deana Lawson, the assemblage artist Betye Saar, and Simone Leigh, the now world-famous ceramicist who represented the US at this year’s Venice Biennale. And it’s with Simone Leigh that Ama Codjoe’s book begins, actually, because right there on the cover of Bluest Nude is one of Leigh’s sculptures of a female figure in glazed earthenware. Here’s our conversation.

Helena de Groot: I first wanted to start with the worlds of the book, because you created such an immersive world, you know, a whole mood, as the kids say, with, you know, the kind of scenes that you find in paintings, you know, women bathing, lying on the grass, you know, in an embrace with their lover. And you also reference a lot of art in your poems. So can you tell me about that process? How did you build the worlds of inspiration for your book, and then what were you looking for?

Ama Codjoe: Mm-hmm. There’s something about, I guess, the point of time in the making of the book where I became conscious of an objective. Which was to make paintings, strangely, out of poems. To try to think about the Black female nude in my own life and in situations that I imagine. And to make those portraits. So, what you’re speaking to, I think, is really in line with my intentions. And I just let my imagination go. So like, for instance, just the question of, “Where am I naked?” for example, and thinking about this really great (LAUGHS) spa in Koreatown in Los Angeles, where, you know, one of the kind of rules for being there is that you have to be naked when you’re in the pools. And I just remember just seeing all kinds of different bodies. And having a really kind of meaningful experience. And then transferring that into a poem, just thinking about like, this is a version of heaven and who would be in that heaven, you know? But Gwendolyn Brooks (LAUGHS) and Wanda Coleman.

Helena de Groot: Yes.

Ama Codjoe: And you know, what does heaven mean? Well, maybe it’s a relinquishing of the things that feel sorrowful, even in the things that have not happened yet. Like the death of my mother. So, yeah, it’s kind of, I guess a series of questions that I was asking myself and then led myself into these, these paintings that are poems.

Helena de Groot: Mm-hmm. Yeah. I used to live around the corner from that particular spa. And what I love about it is that it’s, you know, when you think of spa, you think of this really pretentious, expensive place, you know, with sort of lights and music. And this one is, like, not pretentious at all, and it’s a lot cheaper. And as a result, you see a bigger variety of people.

Ama Codjoe: Mm-hmm.

Helena de Groot: And I’m just wondering, can you set the scene? What, you know, what was your experience going to that spa and why is that spa the one that you choose for heaven, your image of heaven?

Ama Codjoe: Yeah. Well, I went with a dear friend who was living in Los Angeles at the time and raved about it. And I actually was a little maybe shy, (LAUGHS) I was like, “Do I want to go to a place where I have to be naked?” And we went and it was so, I guess, surprisingly wonderful in the sense of like, there’s something really affirming about just seeing people’s fleshy bodies. That it’s not like Photoshop, that is not like some really toxic, streamlined idea of what a body should be. And I love those moments, like in a gym or after a dance class or whatever. It’s just like, this is the flesh. This is what the flesh looks like. And then it’s a healing space. And like you said, it’s really affordable. Like, if I lived in LA, I would be there all the time. And you can just, like, kind of be like a tea bag, you know.

Helena de Groot: (LAUGHS)

Ama Codjoe: And a bath full of mugwort. And it’s just incredible. Like, you know, here we are tending to ourselves. Like, how beautiful is that? In a world that is really hard on us.

Helena de Groot: Yeah.

Ama Codjoe: You know, and I just thought it was remarkable. So I’m sure I was just not only experiencing my own joy and pleasure and soothing, but just looking around like, marveling at that, that a space like that existed.

Helena de Groot: Yeah.

Ama Codjoe: Because I’d never been in a space like that before.

Helena de Groot: And if I remember correctly, it’s open 24/7 or something, right? So you can go at 3AM if you like.

Ama Codjoe: (LAUGHS) Yeah. People like, people can, you know, there’s food, there’s like a warm jade floor where you can, like, put a robe on and lay down. People bring their laptops, they work. People spend the night. Like it’s, you know, it’s a lot, there’s a whole, you know, culture of spas like that in Koreatown. And it just seems so right.

Helena de Groot: Yeah.

Ama Codjoe: It seems like something that the world needs. (LAUGHS)

Helena de Groot: So when you went there, how long did it take for you to go from, “Oh, I don’t know if I want to be naked” to feeling like, “This is good. This is, this is healing.”

Ama Codjoe: It was a pretty instant situation. (LAUGHS)

Helena de Groot: (LAUGHS)

Ama Codjoe: It’s a pretty instant situation, because I, I have a dance background, so taking off my clothes is not that big of a deal. Yeah, I have a lot of comfort with my body. And once it was just like, this is what it is, it was fine. It was maybe more the thinking about it that was like, causing me issue rather than the actual experience of it.

Helena de Groot: Yeah, yeah.

Ama Codjoe: Which felt totally natural and fine.

Helena de Groot: Yeah. Yeah.

Ama Codjoe: Yeah.

Helena de Groot: I mean, that’s also the thing about dancing, right? Like, when you take your clothes off as a dancer, well, it’s in the context of a dressing room with the other dancers.

Ama Codjoe: Mm-hmm.

Helena de Groot: Or, you know, even on the context of being on a stage and having very little on. There’s like a frame for it, you know? And I can imagine that before you are used to this new frame, you’re like, “Oh, is that frame going to be enough to put me in the right,” you know?

Ama Codjoe: Yeah.

Helena de Groot: To be like, “This is okay, I’m not just disrobing in the supermarket,” you know?

Ama Codjoe: (LAUGHS) Exactly.

Helena de Groot: I was wondering if we can read the poem.

Ama Codjoe: Yeah.

Helena de Groot: So it’s on page 52, “Heaven as Olympic Spa.”

Ama Codjoe: Okay.

(READS POEM)

Heaven as Olympic Spa

Koreatown, Los Angeles

Gwendolyn Brooks stood stark naked.

I stared into her bespectacled eyes.

Ms. Brooks showed me how

to tend to myself by scrubbing dead skin

with a coarse wash cloth, rinsing

the body’s detritus down a common drain.

My flesh was taut, loose,

and dying. Even in paradise I was dying.

At first, this surprised me. Oh, the capsized

boat of the body, Wanda Coleman sighed.

We keep sailing, even when we believe

we’re ashore. Coleman drifted to sleep

on a heated jade floor. Clasping

my spa-provided robe, I lay on my side

beside her. Do the dead

dream? I wondered to myself.

Wrong question, Coleman muttered.

I remember sleeping beside my mother,

touching her nightgown lightly,

as if a gesture could restore the cord

that, in the beginning, tethered us. As if

I smelled her death in the satin scarf

keeping the plastic curlers in place

or in the Vaseline glossing her arms.

In childhood, I pined for my mother

though she was there.

Here, in the afterlife, I had no mind

to search for her. I was freed

from a loss that haunted me

even before it occurred.

Gwendolyn Brooks hummed a wordless

song that stripped me of all longing.

I untied the robe’s stiff belt

and walked amongst the nude women,

my skin brushed smooth and silent.

I was ordinary and motherless.

Because I was not alone,

my nakedness felt unremarkable.

I didn’t miss my mother—

I didn’t miss missing her.

Helena de Groot: It’s such an incredible poem. There’s so many strands coming together. You know, sisterhood, mortality, the meaning of nudity. The way our mothers are always inside our bodies, and we inside theirs.

Ama Codjoe: Mm-hmm.

Helena de Groot: Yeah. And that longing, too. Let me see. “In childhood, I pined for my mother / though she was there. // Here, in the afterlife, I had no mind / to search for her. I was freed // from a loss that haunted me / even before it occurred.” Later, in the poem you write, “I was ordinary and motherless.” I think a—for women, especially, the foundational part of our self-image, the way we relate to our body, comes so often from our mother. And I was wondering if that’s true for you and if so, how was that?

Ama Codjoe: Definitely. I think there is that kind of mind-boggling fact that we are, like, in our mothers who were in their mothers who were in their mothers, like, on and on and on and on. I mean, I don’t know. I can remember, like, being the size of wrapping my arm around my mother’s leg. You know?

Helena de Groot: (LAUGHS LIGHTLY) Yes.

Ama Codjoe: And looking and looking at her body. And today it’s like, looking at her and seeing myself in the future. Like, it’s, I feel like it’s hard not to think about all of those things in a regular interaction with her. And it feels like some kind of consolation to know that no matter if my mom is living or dead like, I’m marked by her. In my physicality, in my, obviously in the way that, you know, I was raised and gestures, and. So, yeah, it’s a, it’s a really central relationship. And I think it comes up in the book in a lot of different ways. Also, just like, in the poem, “Lotioning My Mother’s Back,” where I’m really seeing her. Because I can remember being a child and seeing, like, the moles on her body and being like, “Wow, there’s so many moles.” And like, now (LAUGHS) I have so many moles.

Helena de Groot: (LAUGHS) Yeah.

Ama Codjoe: (LAUGHS) Yeah, it’s, it’s this aging body.

Helena de Groot: Yeah. I also feel like often we model the way our mothers relate to their own body. If they are filled with shame, we are more likely to be filled with shame. If they feel free in their bodies, there is at least a good starting point for us to feel more free in ours.

Ama Codjoe: (LAUGHS) Right.

Helena de Groot: (LAUGHS) Yeah, I wouldn’t say that the—you know, the relationship is so automatic, I don’t think so. How is it for you?

Ama Codjoe: I think she critiqued her body a lot. I think that’s still the case, but I think it’s less so now. But I. I thought about this a lot. Like, because I was a dancer, I grew up like, from four or five through being in my early 20s. So I had to think a lot about body image. And I, I honestly think the way that I feel embodied and the way that I feel about my body, which is largely positive, has not to do with the dance world. (LAUGHS)

Helena de Groot: (LAUGHS) No surprise there. Yes, yes.

Ama Codjoe: (LAUGHS) But more to do with the fact that I just don’t consume a lot of images.

Helena de Groot: Huh.

Ama Codjoe: Like I’m a very low-tech person. I don’t read the glossy magazines and I don’t watch the things on the Internet or TV. Like, I just don’t. And so I really only have images of women’s bodies from real life. Like, from the moments in ballet studio. Like from the gym, the YMCA (LAUGHS) you know? In Bedstuy, Brooklyn. From like, this spa in Los Angeles. Like it’s—they’re not, whatever that other version is, they’re just not that. They are like, dimpled and they have cellulite and they’re like regular bodies.

Helena de Groot: Yeah.

Ama Codjoe: And so I expect my—especially my naked body to be anything but what it is. I think if I’m like—this is very strangely particular, but in a swimsuit, I have all these images of women in swimsuits and I can compare my body to that. But when I’m naked, it’s just like, the naked women I’ve seen look like me. You know, they look varied and like me.

Helena de Groot: Yes. That is such a good point.

Ama Codjoe: Yeah.

Helena de Groot: I’m also wondering, you know, how old are you?

Ama Codjoe: I’m 43.

Helena de Groot: Because, you know, in the poem you write, “My flesh was taut, loose, / and dying. Even in paradise I was dying.” This is such an interesting line to me. Can you tell me how you relate to your own constant dying?

Ama Codjoe: Aging?

Helena de Groot: Mm-hmm.

Ama Codjoe: And kind of contending with mortality?

Helena de Groot: Yeah.

Ama Codjoe: It’s not so bad. My grandmother, my mother’s mother, she told me never to get a perm. So, you know, for her Black women, that’s like straightening their hair. Never to chemically process my hair. And she said, “And never dye your hair.” By which she meant not, like, blue, but more like to get rid of the grays.

Helena de Groot: Mm-hmm.

Ama Codjoe: And I live by those two things. (LAUGHS) And I think they’ve saved me from a lot of trouble because,

Helena de Groot: Yeah.

Ama Codjoe: I think she was really just saying, the upkeep for this is a lot. You know? Like, you might think this is a good idea, but you will have to continually, like, be in the beautician’s chair.

Helena de Groot: Yeah.

Ama Codjoe: Forever.

Helena de Groot: Yes. Spend all this money.

Ama Codjoe: Yeah!

Helena de Groot: Yeah.

Ama Codjoe: And I, I mean, just to kind of take those two, like, I straightened my hair for a long time. Like, that was what I grew up—that’s what my mother chose for my hair. That’s what I did to tend to my hair until I was in my late teens, early 20s, when I decided I just wanted to let it grow naturally. And my grays are certainly there. I don’t, you know, I don’t love them. But today happens to be my mother’s 70th birthday. And the truth is like, you know, what’s the alternative? To not grow old.

Helena de Groot: Yeah.

Ama Codjoe: You know? And, you know, I’ve had experiences where people who are young have died.

Helena de Groot: Yeah.

Ama Codjoe: So I don’t know if this sounds impossible or not, but I have a pretty good relationship to my aging body. I just feel like I want to be in the world as I am. And make whatever choices feel good to me. That could be anything. It’s very unlikely not going to be dying my hair every day.

Helena de Groot: (LAUGHS)

Ama Codjoe: I’m very low maintenance person. (LAUGHS) But if I wanted to, I would. So it’s not about the choice. It’s more just the acceptance of like, I’m here.

(MUSIC PLAYING)

Helena de Groot: Yes. There’s another thing that, you know, I always feel sort of awkward and out of place for asking about, but your book is very much not just about the body and how, you know, how it is to live embodied in a world that yeah, wants to criticize it all the time for doing just that. But it’s also specifically a book about and for Black women.

Ama Codjoe: Mm-hmm.

Helena de Groot: And I don’t know how off the mark I am, but just from casual observation, I often have the sense that the closer you are to the white supremacist ideal, the less liberated you are about your body, which is sort of like an upside down thing, right? Like, you would think that the more you conform to the ideal that society has put forth, the happier you’d be with your body.

Ama Codjoe: Mm-hmm.

Helena de Groot: And yet, I feel like that is not the case, you know? That if you are actually almost there, that the criticism is just unrelenting and the kind of stuff that sends you to the plastic surgeon and on and on, you know?

Ama Codjoe: Mm-hmm.

Helena de Groot: And I’m wondering if that is anything that resonates for you. And if so, how? Like are you just born happier or is that the laborious work that you have to do every day? Like, is that something you do for each other? Can you tell me a little bit about that?

Ama Codjoe: Yeah. Yeah, I love, I love it. I love all that. It’s great. Just because it’s so complex. I think you’re right in the noticing about being closer to an ideal that has been shaped with an imagination that is white supremacist. And I think there’s something about Black culture, specifically. I mean, I just had this flash of like, oh, when my family—I grew up in in Ohio, in the Midwest, and we drove to Toronto one year, and went to Caribana. So a really huge Caribbean festival. I mean, this obviously has an equivalent in many, many, many places. But just thinking about that body celebrated like, you know, hips and breasts and, you know, it’s like a different culture, right? (LAUGHS)

Helena de Groot: Yes. (LAUGHS)

Ama Codjoe: It’s a different culture. It’s a different culture. It’s not like the narrow, like, trying to fit into a very, very small box.

Helena de Groot: Yeah.

Ama Codjoe: Even though, at the same time, if we’re thinking about the United States in the context of the United States, like, we all have the same TV. So it’s not to say that those ideals are not, like, also being in for breakfast, lunch, and dinner.

Helena de Groot: Mm-hmm.

Ama Codjoe: But I do think there’s something about Black culture that is embracing of a full-bodied person. And yeah, I think that that is equivalent to this idea of like, what I am consuming, like, what is beautiful to me. I mean, if I look at my family, I’m not looking at, like, to be specific, a super thin, very tall, blond person. I’m looking at mostly women. My mom has three sisters. I have a lot of women in my family who are just like, beautiful. And they don’t look like that. (LAUGHS)

Helena de Groot: Yeah.

Ama Codjoe: So that’s another piece is like, what is being reflected around a person, which is sometimes choice and sometimes, sometimes not.

Helena de Groot: One essay that is sort of underneath a lot of this book is an essay by Lorraine O’Grady, the African American artist and critic. God, what was it called now? Olympia’s Maid? Something like that.

Ama Codjoe: Mm-hmm.

Helena de Groot: And she writes—I’m going to paraphrase. She writes that, you know, you can criticize the white gaze and, you know, what it does to us all you want, but it won’t get you any closer to being who you are. She writes, “It cannot turn you from an object into a subject of history.”

Ama Codjoe: Mm-hmm.

Helena de Groot: So how do you become a subject instead of the object?

Ama Codjoe: Yeah. So that’s like a, that’s a pivotal text that, I think you put it well, that’s like, that my book is resting on. That’s underneath the book. And that sentiment in particular, so, criticizing kind of ‘them’ or criticizing racism, institutional racism, white supremacy does not get me closer to my own self-making was like an arrow or a directional force in thinking about even composing the poems. Because I really wanted to focus on, I guess, this figure and not the forces of oppression that are also impacting this figure. Meaning the Black feminine nude. So I think it’s through expression. Just actually stopping to express who I am is how I make myself. And when I’m only focused on the kinds of oppression that shape my life, I’m missing the part where I’m expressing myself. So (LAUGHS) a goal of the book was to be like, okay, I’m not going to ignore the things that shape my reality, but I don’t want to foreground them in this moment. I want to foreground all these other moments and people and experiences that are me. And like, wow, what is all of that? And how beautiful and rich and sorrowful and joyful and complex that is, as opposed to, okay, let’s again talk about how whiteness is an issue. (LAUGHS)

Helena de Groot: Yeah, yeah.

Ama Codjoe: You know?

Helena de Groot: Well, that’s what I thought was so, back to, you know, the world that you create in Bluest Nude, you know, it just felt like you’re stepping into (PAUSE) a kind of utopia.

Ama Codjoe: Hm.

Helena de Groot: And it’s not it’s not like Afrofuturist or something. There’s nothing really futurist about it. It’s so clearly in the now, you know? It’s so clearly focusing on the living you already do, and on the pleasure you already have dancing or making love or just being naked with Gwendolyn Brooks and Wanda Coleman. (LAUGHS)

Ama Codjoe: (LAUGHS)

Helena de Groot: And I find it so interesting because, you know, the essay by Lorraine O’Grady, even though yeah, that’s informing the book in many ways, you take it so many steps further. I feel like she diagnoses the problem and then you run with it. You know, she writes about how Black women have been “so long unmirrored in our true selves, we may have forgotten how we look.” She also, you know, she writes about this invisibility in many ways. She writes about how up until the 1960s, even in the work of African American artists, there were no Black nudes.

Ama Codjoe: Mm-hmm.

Helena de Groot: So anyway, I feel like she’s doing a lot of diagnosing. And you take that diagnosis and then go like, “Great, look, let me then actually show what could be or what already is.” And I’m wondering how you pried open your own imagination, because I think the limits of our worlds also have a tendency to limit our imagination of what’s possible. And so in what ways did you push against those limits?

Ama Codjoe: Yeah. Well, thank you for that. It’s really very cool (LAUGHS) to be in the position of, like, making something and then to hear someone who really spent time with it and understands it, like, reflect back. It really is a privilege. So thank you for that.

Helena de Groot: Yeah.

Ama Codjoe: I don’t know. I think I just, I mean, we’re as poets and artists, we’re misfits and weirdos. Like, I just, like, gave myself (LAUGHS) the space and then I made. And I guess that, you know, the space part is a foundational piece. Like I, I couldn’t, I don’t really write in my everyday life. It’s certainly not the thing that you hear a lot of writers, especially who are mothers say, which is like, I just took a snatch of time in the morning and then I was writing on a napkin and like—I really need the time and slowness. I need to not be in the job of caretaking for anyone besides myself when I’m writing. So I love residencies. (LAUGHS)

Helena de Groot: (LAUGHS)

Ama Codjoe: I love residencies. That is where the majority of the poems that I write get written.

Helena de Groot: Mm-hmm.

Ama Codjoe: And when I’m away, I literally say to my friends and family, “If you would like to contact me, you can write me a letter. Here’s my address.”

Helena de Groot: Yes.

Ama Codjoe: So, I think that imagination and the kind of prying open and the freeness and like, the ability to do what you’re describing came from the space. If I didn’t have that space, I certainly would be writing different poems.

Helena de Groot: Mm-hmm.

Ama Codjoe: I’m really grateful for having the spaces to slow down and just be. I mean, you’re—I’m sitting at a desk for hours and I can go for a long walk and be amongst the trees. And then someone prepares a really amazing meal and like, that’s my existence for 30 days. You know?

Helena de Groot: (LAUGHS) Sounds pretty good.

Ama Codjoe: Yes. (LAUGHS)

Helena de Groot: I’m also, I mean, thinking about the choice to have time and to have space, and it does sit at odds with the job of caretaking. And I’m wondering what kind of caretaking you do in your ordinary life?

Ama Codjoe: Yeah. It’s with my family and friends. It’s not, I don’t have someone that’s ill or sick them I’m caretaking for, but it’s just emotional being available. Someone saying, “I have this question, I need this advice, I need a thought partner for this.” I have—for many years I was an educator. And so I have this kind of tribe of mostly girls, (LAUGHS) who are now women, who I tend to in the ways that I can, and who, you know, expect me to be available. So it’s just relationships, which I prize. I like being dependable. And I’ve always had, like, really deep friendships with people. Even more so than romantic, like, that has been the consistent force of good in my life, has been really sisterhood, honestly. And that just means I gotta show up. I take that pretty seriously. So that’s the kind of caretaking. And then, I’m a facilitator. So I leave a lot of workshops or, you know, have conversations with nonprofits about justice, about equity, about group dynamics. So because of that, I’m also just like always seeing what’s going on in a space and who’s talking and who’s not talking. And it’s really hard to turn that off.

Helena de Groot: Absolutely.

Ama Codjoe: So, yeah. So those are the kinds of caretaking that I mean.

Helena de Groot: One thing that I also, that really resonated for me in your book is the fact that you don’t have children.

Ama Codjoe: Mm-hmm.

Helena de Groot: There’s this one poem where, yeah, you write that you’re often mistaken for a mother, sometimes because you have a kid with you, like a nephew or something. But sometimes also just because, you know, whatever, people make all kinds of assumptions about women. And I am not here to ask you “Why don’t you have children?” I mean, I’ve spent my 30s defending myself and justifying myself for not having children, and I would never do that to anyone else. But I am interested in how you see the life that you can lead specifically as a woman when motherhood is taken out of the equation.

Ama Codjoe: Yeah. Well, I mean, what I’ve seen and for a long time at this point in a lot of different friends who have kids of varying ages is it’s a little bit impossible not to be consumed. I mean, you’re literally like, if you’ve given biological birth to your child, you’re literally feeding them from your body and oftentimes sleep deprived for like, a number of years. There’s so many things that go into that path. And I think for me, being an artist, like, what feels really liberating is just like, being able to go away, like I mentioned. Which is, I think a difficulty, even with the residencies that are kind of trying to think about supporting parents that are—usually those residencies are like five days or like seven days.

Helena de Groot: Yeah, yeah.

Ama Codjoe: And I’m, five days, I’m just getting there.

Helena de Groot: Yeah, yeah.

Ama Codjoe: Like I’m just. So, I have what I need to make the art I want to make and my life support that. And I think there are specific ways that children change an artist’s life and change the way that they make work. And that’s not, you know, negative. That just is what it is. And there are certain ways that I have access to a kind of life that for me is really meaningful, beautiful and fulfilling, and allows me to make the kind of art that I want to make.

Helena de Groot: Mm hmm. I’m wondering if we can get to another poem.

Ama Codjoe: Mm-hmm.

Helena de Groot: How about, let me see, one poem that I love, love, love, although I don’t understand it at all, but it seems like an experience, like going to a concert where everyone is sweating and the music feels physical more than something just for your ears. That’s how this poem felt to me: “After a Year of Forgetting.” It’s on page 80 something. 80. Just 80.

Ama Codjoe: Mm-hmm.

(READS POEM)

After a Year of Forgetting

Now I will learn how to tie an apron and unclasp

my bra from behind. I will become hard

like a moss-covered rock. I’ll be stiff as a nightgown

dried on the line. When the pond freezes over, I’ll walk

to its center and lie face up until it is May

and I am floating. I’ll become an anchor

pitched skyward. I will steer chiseled ships,

spinning fortune’s splintered wheel. I will worry

over damp stones. I will clean ash

from the Madonna’s cheek using the wet

rag of my tongue. I’ll make myself shrine-like

and porcelain; I will stand still as a broken clock.

I will be sore from lovemaking. I will become so large

my hair, loosened, will be mistaken for the swallow’s cave.

After June, there is a year of forgetting, after the forgetting,

antlers adorn the parlor walls. Then it snows, and I’ll be

coarse. I’ll be soft as my mother’s teeth. I’ll be sugar crystals

and feathery snow. I’ll be fine. I will melt.

I will make children from office paper. They’ll be cut

from my stomach, wearing blank faces. Bald

and silent, they will come out of me: triplicates

holding hands. I will smooth their foreheads

with a cool iron. I will fold the tepid laundry, turn down

the sheets, then sleepwalk along the Mississippi

until it is ocean and I’m its mighty saint. I will baptize

myself in silt and December. I will become

a pungent, earthly bulb. I’ll pillar to salt. I’ll remember

the pain of childbirth, remember being born.

Helena de Groot: How is it to read this?

Ama Codjoe: I mean, it’s lovely. I—there’s something I, something I noticed about my poems when I’m writing. It’s like this, this future.

Helena de Groot: Uh-huh.

Ama Codjoe: This will thing. And I guess I was in this moment of wanting to reclaim what I wanted, which is also a theme in the book. There’s so much about desire. What I’m claiming will happen. And obviously it’s not like in the, in the language of like a five-year plan or something. (LAUGHS)

Helena de Groot: (LAUGHING) My goals.

Ama Codjoe: (LAUGHING) Exactly. I just, I guess remember the impulse that kind of, I think it was following a season of sorrow and letting go.

Helena de Groot: Can I ask what the sorrow was about?

Ama Codjoe: Because a loss of a relationship. I think at the beginning of that, let’s say heartbreak, there was the intense grief, which might be called fire that, I think is, it’s actually an honor to go through. But then by the time I was writing this time, it was a year after that. And so there was something a lot softer and far away. Less fire. And the year after any kind of loss like, is, it’s finally free of, you know, “Last year at this time, I was doing this with this person” or “Last year at this time, you know, I celebrated this holiday with this person who isn’t here.” It’s like breaking out of that finally.

Helena de Groot: Yeah.

Ama Codjoe: And I can say that I remember dancing and just like putting on, well, I mean, it’s very, (LAUGHS) it’s very laughable, but putting on Destiny’s Child’s “Survivor.”

Helena de Groot: Yes!

Ama Codjoe: And just like dancing it out. Like, yeah! (LAUGHS)

Helena de Groot: Yes. The best anthem for post-breakup rediscovery of self. Absolutely.

Ama Codjoe: (LAUGHS) Yeah.

Helena de Groot: Yeah. I mean, this book is so full of desire and longing. And, you know, the desire sometimes is a group effort. Like, you’re with your sisters at the spa, you’re longing for your mother, even though she’s still here, you’re longing to feel the way these dancers on stage who are dancing “Le Sacre du Printemps” are feeling.

Ama Codjoe: Mm-hmm.

Helena de Groot: You know, there’s a lot of sex in your book. There’s a lot of that kind of desire, you know. But I think the most interesting desire in your book is the desire for yourself, which is radical. I mean, it feels almost ridiculous to say, you know, in the year of our Lord 2022, that the desire that a woman feels for herself is, is radical. But it is. And there’s a risk attached to that, you know, there’s a risk that people will criticize you or mock you or not take you seriously. Did that ever trouble you? How—do you ever get any kind of blowback for inhabiting your own desire for yourself?

Ama Codjoe: Not that I’m aware of. (LAUGHS)

Helena de Groot: (LAUGHS) Wow. Okay, I’m going to need a manual here. (LAUGHS)

Ama Codjoe: (LAUGHS)Yeah. I, it’s funny because I, yeah, I am who I am in most spaces. I don’t perform for other people. And I also don’t write poems for other people. (LAUGHS) So, you know, if I wrote this book and no one ever wanted it, then that would have to be okay. So much of being a writer is about like, rejections and getting used to that. And I have said to myself for years, whenever I get a rejection or I don’t get something that I applied to, it is an actual reminder to myself of why I write. So, I maybe feel bad. That’s okay. But then I say to myself, “Ama, why do you write?” Okay, well, I write because it’s a way to be in this world. I write because it helps me, like, feel like I have a sense of control over some things that I didn’t have control over. I write because I like the way that I feel when I’m making art. So I have these answers, and then none of them have to do with publication or prizes or what anyone else’s opinion is of this poem.

Helena de Groot: Yeah. You’re still writing. They can’t reject that.

Ama Codjoe: No!

Helena de Groot: And you said you like the way you feel when you write. How do you feel when you write?

Ama Codjoe: I have that, you know, sciency, the flow state.

Helena de Groot: Yeah.

Ama Codjoe: Which is just so good. Yeah, the time passes and. And also the figuring out, the kind of problem solving of making a poem. And then I also am like, I’m communing with others. I’m communing with other writers. I’m communing with my teachers whose voices are in my head. It feels like, open and warm and fun. (LAUGHS) Yeah.

Helena de Groot: And so to make it a little more concrete, can you, you know, the poem that you just read, “After a Year of Forgetting,” I think it’s such an interesting poem because there’s no, there’s no obvious narrative there.

Ama Codjoe: Mm-hmm.

Helena de Groot: It’s really a poem kind of poem, you know?

Ama Codjoe: Mm-hmm.

Helena de Groot: You said that one of the pleasures of writing is problem solving. So can you tell me a little bit about, like, what is a problem in this poem that you then solved with the poem? Like, can you just tell me a little bit about the making of this poem?

Ama Codjoe: Yeah. I had to push it. Because there’s, you know, there’s an anaphora happening. There’s like, this repetition of “I will” or “I’ll.” And though there can be an engine in poems like, with that kind of repetition, there’s also the down side, which is it can fall flat.

Helena de Groot: Mm-hmm.

Ama Codjoe: It can start to just be like, I don’t actually care if you’re a reader. I don’t care what happens after this, because I know it’s going to repeat. So I just remember thinking about pushing the language and trying to, like, surprise myself. At especially the last, I guess, three stanzas of the poem: “I will make children from office paper. They’ll be cut / from my stomach, wearing blank faces.” That whole image is so strange. (LAUGHS) And these kind of domestic chores that are happening, the ironing and the laundry and turning down the sheets, how to use that and still, I don’t know, startle myself. Even the word “pillar,” so “I’ll pillar to salt” definitely came in revision.

Helena de Groot: Mm-hmm.

Ama Codjoe: That using that verb in that way. So yeah, I can just remember having a draft and then really looking at what was feeling a little bit boring, and trying to make it more enticing for me.

Helena de Groot: Yeah.

Ama Codjoe: Yeah.

Helena de Groot: Yeah, I love that verb, “pillar to salt.” I mean, how, how different it would be if you would have written, “I’ll turn into a pillar of salt.” No, “I’ll pillar to salt.” It’s just so good. And it’s a good point. I hadn’t really thought about how boring it could be to just have this list of like, I will do this, I will do that. You know, that at some point the reader just thinks like, “Okay, you’ll do a bunch of things, I get it,” you know?

Ama Codjoe: Mm-hmm. (LAUGHS)

Helena de Groot: (LAUGHS) And you’re right, you kind of, you make it so surprising that you want to see what you’ll do next, because nothing follows. You know, it seems to follow sometimes: “I will fold the tepid laundry, turn down / the sheets, then sleepwalk along the Mississippi / until it is ocean and I’m its mighty saint.” Phew. “I will baptize / myself in silt and December. I will become / a pungent, earthly bulb. I’ll pillar to salt. I’ll remember / the pain of childbirth. Remember being born.” There’s such a circular movement also, of time in there.

Ama Codjoe: Mm-hmm.

Helena de Groot: You know, you will, you will, you will, always in the future, and then you’ll remember being born. Like you’re right where you started. And I think, to go back to having or not having children, I think one reason that friends who have children tell me they wanted them was to be a part of that circular movement of time. They will die, but the children are born and they will go on living. And you have this—every ending has like a new beginning. How do you hook into the circular truth of time?

Ama Codjoe: Well there’s so many ways to answer that. I mean, my body will, will be a part of the earth at some point.

Helena de Groot: “I will become a pungent, earthly bulb.”

Ama Codjoe: Yeah, exactly.

Helena de Groot: Mm-hmm.

Ama Codjoe: And there’s also, there’s also just this—being an artist is a part of that circularity. I mean, I think that’s actually a big part of the book is like, being a descendent of Black women artists and also being in conversation with contemporary artists who are making art now. Like, that’s a kind of cycle, circle that I’m a part of. And I, I don’t think the human face or the human being is like, the most important way to go on. I mean, there’s so much trouble in that face. Like, it is making choices that are killing the planet. So, I’m happy to be going back to dirt. (LAUGHS) And to be with the planet.

Helena de Groot: Right. Like you can create other things than humans.

Ama Codjoe: Definitely. Yes. Yes. Relationships are I mean, lately I’ve been thinking about just like the very casual relationship that you might have with somebody who, like, sells fruit at the farmer’s market. Like how beautiful and profound that is, truly. Because that’s what makes up our lives.

Helena de Groot: Yeah. I find this so beautiful. Seriously, Ama, I love your collection. Love it in a way that feels like hunger, you know?

Ama Codjoe: Mm.

Helena de Groot: And, yeah, I feel like you spread your love widely

Ama Codjoe: Mm.

Helena de Groot: Instead of narrowly into a family, like, you know, into kids, you know, the way that, I guess, it has to be when you have kids, you know, I mean, you better.

Ama Codjoe: Mm-hmm.

Helena de Groot: And yeah, the way that you talk about the relationship that you can have with the person selling you vegetables at the market, I think it is profound. I think it isn’t talked about enough. How close we can feel to human beings who we may never see again.

Ama Codjoe: Yeah.

Helena de Groot: And how close it brings us to ourselves. And, yeah, again, to that feeling of unity. I don’t know. I don’t know, Ama, I’ve just been thinking so much about all this because on Sunday, my husband of 12 years and I decided to separate because I don’t want children. And he does. I mean, he knew that from the beginning. I never made a made a mystery of that. But, yeah, he thought he could get over it, and it turns out he didn’t. So I’ve really had to, like, affirm my choice over and over and over again. You know, that this life without children is a good life, that this is an okay choice, that I can spread my love widely. That that is a good way to live also.

Ama Codjoe: It is a good way to live!

Helena de Groot: (LAUGHS)

Ama Codjoe: It is a good way to live.

Helena de Groot: Yeah.

Ama Codjoe: Yes! I mean, I mean, I could give you many versions of a pep talk in terms of the childfree thing. (LAUGHS)

Helena de Groot: (LAUGHS)

Ama Codjoe: I just think there’s so many different ways to live a life. (MUSIC PLAYING) And we grow up and we’re told, like, “You can be a doctor, you can be a lawyer, you can be a teacher.” And then mercifully, we figure out like there’s a bajillion things we could do. And there’s so many ways that we can love and that our life is a love story and that it’s not about just one person. And that family means a lot of different things. I’m, I’m kind of bowing to you in this particular moment. And to your grief and to the work of that. And also just affirming that I think it’s a beautiful life that you’re living and will live.

Helena de Groot: Well, your book definitely felt like a hand being extended in my direction. So even though you didn’t write it for me or any other reader, it spoke to me very deeply. So, thank you for that. Thank you for writing, for writing this book, for choosing to do that with your life.

(MUSIC PICKS UP)

Helena de Groot: Ama Codjoe is the author of two poetry collections, Blood of the Air, winner of the eighth annual Drinking Gourd Chapbook Poetry Prize, and Bluest Nude, which came out this September. She received the Rona Jaffe Writer’s Award, The Georgia Review’s Loraine Williams Poetry Prize, and an NEA Creative Writing Fellowship. She also received support from the Cave Canem Foundation, the Jerome Foundation, and the Robert Rauschenberg Foundation, as well as from Callaloo Creative Writing Workshop and the MacDowell Colony. She lives in New York City, where she works as a facilitator of social justice training in arts and education, and as a Visiting Assistant Professor of Social Justice and Inclusion at The New School.

To find out more about Ama Codjoe, check out the Poetry Foundation website.

The music in this episode is by Todd Sickafoose and Eric van der Westen. I’m Helena de Groot and this was Poetry Off the Shelf. Thank you for listening.