AUDIO TRANSCRIPT

The Poetry Magazine Podcast: Esther Belin and Diamond Forde on Poetry as Self-Definition, Self-Reclamation, and Biomythography

(If you notice a mistake in the transcript, please let us know by emailing [email protected])

(MUSIC PLAYING)

Diamond Forde:

(READS EXCERPT FROM “Clabber Milk Cornbread”)

When she’s five, show her the pigpen, the Yorkshire pig glazed bored in the mud. She’ll hope to play,

Esther Belin: Welcome to the Poetry Magazine Podcast. I’m Esther Belin. Today I’m thrilled to speak with poet Diamond Forde, who joins us from Asheville, North Carolina. The poems in her debut collection Mother Body, are described as “an intersectional exploration of the trauma and agency held within a body defined by its potential to mother.” Today we’ll hear from a new series of poems published in the December issue of Poetry. The poems continue an exploration of maternal lineage, this time, centering on Diamond’s, grandmother, and addressing the complex processes of self-creation, and biomythography. Diamond, welcome to the podcast.

Diamond Forde: Thank you for having me, Esther, it’s really cool to be here.

Esther Belin: The Book of Alice, how did you come up with that title for your new project?

Diamond Forde: Alice is my grandmother’s name, actually. And it’s called The Book of Alice because I used the King James Bible as a framework, both in structure, but also in content. The book is shaped into three different sections: “Genesis,” which thinks a great deal about creation, thinks a great deal about self-making, thinks a great deal about origin. And so some of the poems that appear in this issue of Poetry are from that first section. “Exodus” is a parallel between my grandmother’s migration northward, along with her migration from this world. I’m thinking about her death and thinking about the impact that that had on me, and the shaping of my relationship with her. And then finally, “Revelations,” where I think a great deal and work through ideas of legacy and ending cycles and creating community and creating my own self, right, and trying to establish joy. It’s very much not just a revelation, but like a revel, a revelry. Joy is intense in that final section.

Esther Belin: Mm. Diamond, it seems like with this new project about your grandmother, you’ve had to do quite a bit of research into your lineage. And tell us a little bit more about your grandmother’s beginnings.

Diamond Forde: My grandmother was born in North Carolina in the late 1930s. She has a bit of an interesting beginning in that her father was a white man. And in the 1930s, of course, interracial marriage is not heard of. Her father would pretend to be a shoe salesman, as a way of trying to see my great grandmother. Because they didn’t live in the same neighborhood. He would come to her neighborhood and knock on a couple doors and then go see her.

Esther Belin: (LAUGHS LIGHTLY)

Diamond Forde: And that was how they would spend time together. They had at least three daughters, including my grandma, Alice. And my grandmother grew up about the ways that you would expect in the rural South, and in particular, she ended up working in the cotton fields. And she hated it, loathed it, promised herself that the first man to ask her to marry him, she would do it, just so that she wouldn’t have to work in cotton fields anymore. And so she met my grandfather when she was 14 years old. And part of the ways that my grandmother kind of made her escape from the South is that she had to bake biscuits for his parents to prove that she could be a competent wife. And so she made the best biscuits, clearly. And now I’m here. She’s buried here in North Carolina as well. When I referenced The Blue, for instance, in “Clabber Milk Cornbread,” I’m referring to the Blue Ridge Mountains, which were her favorite mountains. She loved spending time here.

Esther Belin: The King James Bible has been a central source for your new work. Can you tell us a little bit more about it as a text?

Diamond Forde: The King James Bible, I want to say, is honestly my grandmother’s first introduction into poetry. It’s not the first translation of the Bible into English, but it is one of the most wide-selling versions of the Bible. It’s one of the most longstanding. There have been later translations to bring the Bible into kind of more modern syntax and structures. But the King James Bible was very much a project of kind of political coming together. We had James essentially try to commission all of these anonymous translators into creating the text and translating the text from the Latin and Greek versions and Hebrew versions into a kind of English project. And that idea of anonymity is very interesting to me. We don’t know whose voice contributes to what section of the Bible. It’s like a collaborative poem of sorts. And my grandmother, even though there were other editions, it was the King James Bible that she loved the most. And I think that’s what I mean when I say it was her first real introduction into poetry, because it was the rhythms that she incorporated into her own body. It was the images. It literally sang inside of her, and I’m trying to tap into that very music when I am thinking about this Bible project. So I had to return back to the King James. That was poetry for her. This is a poetic project for both of us.

Esther Belin: Mm. I want to hear you read “Clabber Milk Cornbread,” which you—it’s a recipe essentially, which you turn into this archeological dig of sorts, right? Things are uprooted and mixed and fondled, meditated on. And then, you know, the ending is really interesting. I can’t really tell if there’s like a consumption or some sacrificial practice happening. Let’s hear you read it.

Diamond Forde:

(READS “Clabber Milk Cornbread” -- please note this poem has special formatting and is best viewed on it's poem page)

Clabber Milk Cornbread

OR HOW TO KEEP THE DAUGHTER HUMBLE

INGREDIENTS

2 cups cornmeal                                        1 egg wrestled from the hens, still warm
full pan of bacon fat                                  ¾ cup of butter, soft
2 cups clabber milk, cold                         1 sugared pinch
1 tsp baking soda                                       cast-iron, screaming hot
dash of salt
 

DIRECTIONS

1. Soak the cornmeal in the clabber jar overnight to loosen its toothsome bite, but only do this if it’s stone-ground (& it will be. Hurled upon the WORD each day, she’ll learn to dodge the pebbled sky).

2. When she’s five, show her the pigpen, the Yorkshire pig glazed bored in the mud. She’ll hope to play, to ride him in The Blue to the pond you love—the old hole your Daddy dug back when you was proud, ashy, unabashedly loud, dodging the rough hands you called brothers when they howled, playfully, upon you.

Back before the catfish learned to bend like reeds tryna hide from your greasy gathering, half ya Daddy’s family bunched under a fish fry’s rank.

Her fingers rake against the hem on her hip, a twitch, a wish to itch the Yorkshire behind his flitting ears. Swat her. Not hard, just enough to startle her from wanting. Then show her Mercy—cut the neck so clean, the blood forgets to leap into its red skirt. She’ll tremble, awestruck, in her feathers. Tell her, this is the first of many blessings.

3. Fry the bacon till it kicks, sputtering, like the pig’s last will & testament. Its leeched grease the foundation on which you’ll build.

4. Crack eggs. Mix with steady hand. & you’ll be steady. So steady, she’ll mistake you for a god. Your Father, just as unflappable. Couldn’t move from drink till drink moved him from you. Pastor say he watchin’, but you hope GOD good enough to shut the curtain that day you conceived

5. a dream—your Daughter, taffeta curled & thrown into cast-iron summer. She runs & you fix to catch her but she sizzle between your fingers like bacon grease, dress flapping, footsteps fervid & far-flung, she’s an auric pleat of laughter, a seamed bright sun, & you simmer in a kind of devotion, remember the flickering embers of Daddy’s eyes turned coal—if you could smote the light blinking on her back, if you could bear the burn, an old flame winking in her eyes—maybe, just maybe, you could keep her.

(MUSIC PLAYING)

Diamond Forde: I’ve always been interested in thinking about the body as a landscape. And this could be part of a wrestling with kind of chronic illness, what it’s like to basically have a body that’s in pain. So I’ve always thought about getting to know the body as kind of traversing a kind of land. And of course, the first ways that I experience Asheville, which is very much a homecoming for me, this is an area that my grandmother grew up in, and so now I’ve basically returned back to this space. Asheville is a beautiful and temperate space most of the time. But I did have my first real snow last year, last winter, and I had a blast. There’s something about snow that has a way of returning me back to that child self. Most of the ways that I get to explore Asheville is still through the body. So even when I’m writing about the land here—and I am focusing on writing about the land here—I’m very much thinking about how, how does the land move both inside and outside of me?

Esther Belin: Wow, it sounds like you’ve enjoyed this homecoming back to your, you know, ancestral, that ancestral connection, which I feel you are really in tune to.

Diamond Forde: Yeah, I, it’s really a reckoning, I think, to be here in a lot of ways. In that this is the space that raised my grandmother into being, raised my family into being, but it is also the space that my grandmother fleed from. She traveled during the Great Migration from Asheville into New York. She would eventually return to the South. But it was a decision that she made because she could no longer stand the idea of being forced to work in cotton fields, she could no longer stand the pressures of the Jim Crow South. And she really imagined the North, as I suppose many Black people during the Great Migration imagined, that the North could be a space of liberation. And there’s something about my return here, because I secured a fellowship at the University of North Carolina, Asheville, that is resituating that narrative. I am in probably the best space of my life. And I am living all of those possibilities that my grandmother could never imagine for herself. And the fact that I’m able to do that, in this landscape that she used to call home, the fact that we were able to return home, she is still buried around here, right? That at the end of it, this is still where she chose to return to at the end of her life, and that I get to kind of grow in this space and occupy this space now, it’s a really long dream. A beautiful, long dream.

Esther Belin: Yeah. And I think it’s really interesting listening to you talk about the healing, the idea that this space, and the land that raised your grandmother, to me really acknowledges that the land is also affected by slavery, by trauma, and that your presence there now is healing for the land, right? And that you are taking that time to get to know it. And maybe not even on your terms, but on the terms of the land, because it’s changed so much.

Diamond Forde: Mm-hmm.

Esther Belin: And now seeing what it has to offer. And there’s a very childlike quality—you were talking about snow and I think that’s exactly how the land wants us to appreciate it, with that very curiosity-led joy.

(MUSIC PLAYING)

Diamond Forde: Poetry writing, for me, is self-definition. But it’s also self-reclamation. I, for instance, I talked about kind of reckoning with the landscape and that how my return to this landscape really sort of shapes the narrative that my family has with this space. I think that that purposeful return to something is part of the ways that we can kind of form our own narratives and also recognize that those narratives live beyond us. I’m very flexible in terms of how I define my lineage. The fact that I am basically pulling from biomythography means to me that Audre Lorde is very much in my lineage. Are we blood related? No, I wish, right.

Esther Belin: (LAUGHS LIGHTLY)

Diamond Forde: But we are still like in family together, in kindred together.

Esther Belin: Yeah.

Diamond Forde: And I think that this is incredibly important to me, because we still live in a moment in which slavery has still impacted Black ideas of kinship and family ties. And so, the fact that I can create my own sense of family, the fact that I can create my own sense of self, and that these things are malleable, and that somebody in the future might be able to adopt me into their family, it feels like a way of healing, right, that doesn’t have to be controlled, right, that can be malleable. And I really love that malleability.

Esther Belin: I think what you’re talking about, too, when you mention Audre Lorde is this idea of poetry ancestry, poetry ancestors, and Joy Harjo talks about that quite a bit. And, you know, I think Audre Lorde is part of my poetry ancestry as well. I mean, there’s so much of a foundation, many of those early writers. And I even think of Octavia Butler, as well, where she had these futuristic ideas of who we are. And, you know, why, why we actually need to leave. And then why we need to return, which I think is really beautiful.

Diamond Forde: I think I love joy for that reason, because it very much, I mean, the timelessness of joy feels like a simultaneity. I mean that it reaches back and forward at the same time. So when I’m thinking about approaching this land, or when I’m thinking about approaching a poem, joy becomes a really big keystone for me, right? It’s a kind of grounding marker. It’s the place where I want to situate myself. I think there are so many reminders in my day-to-day that I need to practice joy. And that’s something that I talk with my friends, with my students about, is that we forget that joy is a essentially a thing we have to practice. But when I do practice joy, when I choose joy, when I live within joy, I’m also making a decision for my future, and my past. And I really love the ways that joy can kind of occupy that space, that this harm has happened. There’s no real way of erasing that harm, right? It is in the past, but I can change the ways that that harm impacts my future through joy. And I always feel like joy is the one space I want to occupy most because of that effect. And so I’m always thinking about, where’s the joy? Where’s the love? My students think I’m cheesy because of that, I think.

Esther Belin: (LAUGHS)

Diamond Forde: But it really is, it makes a big difference to me, I think.

Esther Belin: Oh, it makes a huge difference on your outlook, especially knowing, you know, the histories of people of color in the United States. And I’m curious how you use that joy lens when, you know, thinking about the migration of your grandmother, her choice to leave, and then her choice to, later in life, return? And how that kind of affects you. Like, were you able to see joy through her?

Diamond Forde: I think that what I saw from my grandmother was many of the ways we impede ourselves from or silence ourselves from joy. My grandmother found joy late in her life. And I think that for my grandmother, her journey to joy came through a kind of selfishness that she couldn’t afford for herself when she was younger. She saw herself as a woman, and in her definition, right, her definition highly aligns with kind of like biblical, Judeo-Christian ideas of woman, right, and that her job was to perform for a family, it was to perform for husband, and that her joy could only be dependent upon those things. But in reality, I don’t think my grandmother wanted to be a mother most of the time. I don’t think she wanted to be a wife most of the time. When she was asked later on if she ever wanted to get married again, she’s like, “No, I realized I’m happier not being married.”

Esther Belin: (LAUGHS LIGHTLY)

Diamond Forde: And so I think that the more that my grandmother learned to situate joy in herself, the more that she was able to express and feel that happiness. And I don’t think it was until her final moments that that really happened for her. But that was a valuable lesson for me to start thinking about how to situate joy in myself earlier. In the grand scheme of things, thinking about how we break the cycles of trauma. And when I’m thinking about trauma, I’m thinking about silence, in particular. I’m thinking about the ways Black women have silence weaponized against them, and how sometimes we learn and internalize strategies for silencing ourselves. That’s what I love about joy. It’s boisterous. It’s loud, right? I laugh, and they can probably hear me from across the hall, you know? I do think that the more that I shove off the shackles of silence, and that’s still an active process, but the more that I shove off those shackles of silence and find joy there, the more that I’m learning to live for myself and live for my future.

(MUSIC PLAYING)

Esther Belin: I think that’s a great monument to take those seeds of, you know, even if they were late in life, of joy, and to really nurture them. I think that’s very tender. And I know that your, some of your newer work, I feel is taking your grandmother as a central character. And how has it been for you to kind of write through that perspective, and through her life history?

Diamond Forde: It was a challenge every step of the way. When I first started the project, I think it was a project of resurrection, first and foremost. That I needed desperately to speak to her in terms that I have never been able to speak to her when she was alive. The only inheritance I have from my grandmother is the King James Bible. And she loved that book. She loved it intensely. And I often wondered, what was it in that book, she gravitated to? Where were the characters that she felt herself reflected in? And so, while my grandmother is also a character here, right, I’m also thinking about other marginalized voices that are speaking, and must have spoken to my grandmother, and giving them all space to occupy and speak to one another.

Esther Belin: Wow. I’m curious, you know, did she write notes in the margin? Did she highlight things? Were there circles around words? Did she write things that are helping you kind of retrace part of this journey?

Diamond Forde: She did write things, but not a lot, in her Bible. And maybe she approached it in a way that was sacred. There’s more highlights than anything. And those highlights are incredibly interesting. They’re very fascinating. But when I think about that book as an inheritance, I mean it in two ways. I mean the physical copy, but I also mean the ways that she raised my mother, who then raised me. She very much used that book as a kind of guideline for how to construct her own life, how to construct her children’s lives. And so that carried on through me and defined that through me. She very much saw this book as our one means towards survival. And so that when she gifted this to my mother, and some of those gifts were very hard to receive, I will acknowledge that, but she did that with the intent to see her children survive and with the intent to see her children’s children thrive. And so I appreciate that. Although, I will admit for my sake and my mother’s sake, that some of those lessons were hard earned.

Esther Belin: You know, thinking about the constructs that come from the biblical foundation, I am curious, you know, especially in the world she lived in, the world that was presented to her as a young woman, young wife, how much or did she adapt in regards to race and racism, a lot of those, that outlook.

Diamond Forde: The reason I mentioned the marginalized characters in the Bible earlier is because I am really engaging with the scholar Renita Weems. And she wrote about African American women reading the Bible and the strategies that they employ in order to do that. And we tend to approach the stories with an urgency towards recognizing the characters that most aligned with our own particular worldview. And my grandmother’s worldview was very much shaped by the fact that she was a Black woman during the 1930s, ’40s, ’50s. And so the ways that we approach these characters and understand these characters is also like how closely they resemble the ways that I have to navigate through the world. So when I talk about the marginalized characters, I’m thinking about the characters that my grandmother might have seen herself in, and also the characters that I see myself in. And sometimes that requires a stretch of the imagination. So “The Sow Speaks to Noah,” for instance, I’m thinking about that biblical story of Noah, but I’m wondering what character in that story might not get a voice that I want to hear from, what character and that story might not get a voice but might speak to me the loudest. And the pig tends to be that character.

Esther Belin: (LAUGHS LIGHTLY) And I love how you give voice to the sow. Can we hear you read it?

Diamond Forde: Yes.

Esther Belin: Let’s hear you read “The Sow Speaks to Noah.”

Diamond Forde:

(READS “The Sow Speaks to Noah”)

& what should I think of this, Mercy in a near month
languishing on a boat gone nowhere?

²The tusk & musk of livestock, gassy camels, chickens
that flick wet flecks of shit, giraffes & they long necks forever
knockin’ somebody flat on they asses—

³Never mind the sheep bleatin’ all night. & that
somebody stay watchin’ me piss, eat, or sleep, remindin’ me
that I’m the voice of a generation—

⁴As if that should make me humble. As if that might
make me forget that the only sky you’ve given me is a puddle
snagged on the sharp edge of candlelight.

2 It can’t be a journey that takes you from home & never gives
you back—

²Is it a gift that I’ve survived to send my kids to
slaughter? Better home is the mouth of their mother.

³Yes, I will eat my children before I let their buttocks
butter into fatback—better to boar, gore through the neck’s soft
meat. Unseed my children, chestnuts rendered free, their spirits
you can’t digest.

3 & this ain’t the last flood, Noah.
Your generations drown my kin in white noise daily.

²But did you know a pig can swim for miles if it gotta?

³& I breed often, turn my whole ass out to open ocean,
kick a tremolo of waves behind—
my whole brood finna wash this planet.

4 Maidens of mud, when the water done makin’ slop of the earth,
we’ll root in raw dung. Kick wherever our pink hooves please.
Outnumber the men who penned us here.

²Feed till our bellies bulge into boulders—be too large
for any hook to hold us.

(MUSIC PLAYING)

Esther Belin: Thanks for reading that. I sense not only just the intensity coming from this, you know, voice of the pig, but also that humor as well. I really like how you animated the animal. You know, when you were talking about characters, for some reason, I didn’t, I didn’t include animals in that. And I really like how that turned out.

Diamond Forde: Thank you.

Esther Belin: You know, looking at it too, it’s written, I guess as a chapter or a format that could be the biblical text. It looks like it had the blocks of, like, two and then I guess verses, and you didn’t read those. Like, so how should we be reading this type of work?

Diamond Forde: So the poem is formatted to imitate my copy of the King James Bible that my grandmother gave me. It is structured in both chapter and verse. So there are chapters, like, large headings, but there’s also kind of smaller numbered verses on the page. And the ways that the poem are situated on the page very much aligns to that idea of verse. The reason I did this is because a big question for me in the project, or at least a big goal for me, rather, in the project was resituating Black women into this canonical text. I think that so many of the ways that we’re taught to read the Bible whitewashes and erases. And so part of my goal was to write in a way that would resituate these narratives as if they were in the original canonical text. I’m also interested in apocrypha, which are the kinds of verses that are seemingly removed or deemed not worthy of being in the canonical text. And of course, I’m always interested in the ways that we define what narratives are worthy, what narratives belong. When I am thinking about formatting, it’s very purposeful in trying to poke holes in the idea of canon.

Esther Belin: Knowing that it’s written in that format, so should we read it as such? Like, you know, chapter 2, verse 1, or just does it read as a poem should read?

Diamond Forde: When I read it, I read it the same way I would hear it in church. I’m trying to capture that, that musicality and movement and rhythm of, you know, the pastor at the pulpit. But what I want to underscore most of all is reading it the ways that Weems underscores how Black women approach the Bible, right, is that when we approach it, we approach it in a method to read for ourselves. And so, if articulating that fact that this is chapter two, verse two, when you’re looking at it, right, is the ways that you want to approach the poem, I say, go for it. That brings me joy. I want that kind of malleability on the page. For example, chapter 2, verse 1 through 2 would be,

(READS EXCERPT)

2 It can’t be a journey that takes you from home & never gives
you back—

²Is it a gift that I’ve survived to send my kids to
slaughter? Better home is the mouth of their mother.

And so that would be just chapter 2, verses 1 through 2. And you could really play up on the ways that you wanted to read that.

Esther Belin: And I really like what you said about the voice that you were hearing or that was resonating, is the voice of the preacher at the pulpit. It really humanizes the text, it elevates it off of the page where it becomes almost a living document rather than something that’s just ancient words on a flat surface. And I really appreciate that thought that went into creating these.

Diamond Forde: I’m so glad you think that way. I really appreciate that. I mean, musicality, my favorite parts of church—and maybe this is the heathen in me speaking—but my favorite parts of church were always the kind of choral exercises and bits, right, the kind of chorus stepping up. And this could also be revealing in that my mother was a big part of the chorus in church, my whole family, really. My mom, my aunt, my uncle would play guitar. That musical element, right, was always my first really big understanding into the church. And so when I’m thinking about writing into this religious text, the musicality, that thing that was like integral to my family and my family’s intimacy and growth, right, it’s gotta be musical! It’s gotta be a delight to say.

Esther Belin: And it is. Again, I think that is something that, you know, speaks to people in the sense that when we’re talking about something faith based or spiritual based, it can be ceremonial. But I think it’s, in order for us to really walk in it, we have to walk in it, right? It has to be something so relatable to the space we’re in, to the relationships we have. You know, the selection that we have from you in this issue really is—and I’ll use the word again—that monument of, that pillar of just marking time and generational time. And love, really, for your grandmother. I want to say it was an interview I heard you talking about your fondness for love poems. And so, is this, you know, kind of a love offering as well to your grandmother, this new project?

Diamond Forde: Absolutely. I am actually teaching a poetics of eros course right now, and my students are very sick of me quoting Anne Carson. But it’s got to be said again: Carson in Eros the Bittersweet talks about a triangle in desire. And by that triangle, she means that there is a lover, a beloved, and the obstacle between them. From the outset of this project, the obstacle I was trying to reach through to find my grandmother was that, her death, was that distance between us, was time, was the impossibility of kind of returning to the past. All of these things were obstacle. And the more that I continued to write through this project, the more that I was inevitably asserting the love that I have for my grandmother, you know, the act of trying to traverse that obstacle again and again and again, is a testament to love. And so yes, this entire project is essentially my way of saying, “Grandma, I love you,” but also saying, “Diamond, I love you.” Because these are things that I have to reckon with in order to better understand myself, that they’re, in a lot of ways, obstacles towards my own growth, and my own joy and my own future. So at the same time as like, I’m acknowledging the love that I have for my family, I’m also like, admiring the love that I have for myself and how that carries outward. I mean, I said, my lineage is malleable. So I have love for my poetry community. It’s just a big ol’ sloppy love letter. It really is.

Esther Belin: And I love that poetry can let you do that, right? (LAUGHS)

Diamond Forde: It’s the cool part, yes.

Esther Belin: Thanks, Diamond, for sharing this time with me today. It really has been fun to get to know your work better, to hear you read. And just to really be in awe of this new project that you’re working on.

Diamond Forde: Thank you so much for having me here, Esther. It’s been a real joy. I’m really glad we could cultivate some joy together.

(MUSIC PLAYING)

(READING OF EXCERPT FROM “The Sow Speaks to Noah” FADES IN)

& what should I think of this, Mercy in a near month
languishing on a boat gone nowhere?

²The tusk & musk of livestock, gassy camels, chickens
that flick wet flecks of shit, giraffes & they long necks forever
knockin’ somebody flat on they asses—

³Never mind the sheep bleatin’ all night. & that
somebody stay watchin’ me piss, eat, or sleep, remindin’ me
that I’m the voice of a generation—

⁴As if that should make me humble. As if that might
make me forget that the only sky you’ve given me is a puddle

(READING FADES OUT)

(MUSIC PLAYING)

Esther Belin: Big thanks to Diamond Forde. Forde is the author of Mother Body, out from Saturnalia Books in 2021. You can read three of her poems in the December 2022 issue of Poetry, in print and online. If you’re not a subscriber to Poetry magazine, for a limited time, you can get two subscriptions for the price of one. For $35, you get 11 book-length issues for you and for a friend. Visit poetrymagazine.org/podcastholiday to subscribe. This show is produced by Rachel James. The music in this episode came from Resavoir, Alabaster DePlume, John McCowen, Rob Mazurek, and Irreversible Entanglements. Until next time, be well, stay safe, and thanks for listening.

(MUSIC FADES OUT)