Reginald Dwayne Betts writes poems. A Cave Canem fellow, his poetry has appeared in several national magazines. He is a Breadloaf Writer’s Conference scholarship recipient, a finalist for the 2007 Ruth Lily fellowship, and received Honorable Mention for the 2007 Atlantic Monthly Student Writing Contest. He’s taught poetry and made appearances at several DC Metropolitan Schools, and currently teaches poetry with the DC Creative Writing Workshop at Hart Middle School. A student on full scholarship at the University of Maryland, Betts has also won the prestigious Holden Fellowship to attend the MFA program at Warren Wilson College. He currently works on his debut book of poetry, Shahid Reads His Own Palm, and has a book contract with Avery/ Penguin for his memoir, A Question of Freedom.
Your poem, Ghazal, will appear in the Winter 2008-09 issue of Ploughshares, guest-edited by Jean Valentine. Where did the idea for this poem come from?
Most of my good poems don’t come from ideas as much as places, moments in my life. I’m walking in the grocery store and suddenly a piece of a line comes into my head. But even before that happens there has to be something in my experience that will make me open to noticing those lines, those scraps of details that all of us get or ignore every day. For this poem the start came with my finding the form. It might have been 2002, 2001. I read Agha Shahid Ali’s ghazal Arabic and an essay of his on the form. I’ve always been somewhat of a formalist on the low. Intrigued by how you can find freedom in confinement, and so I was drawn to the possibilities of the form. How you could tell a number of narratives at once, without really telling any narratives at all. I consider the ghazal a way to link seemingly disparate images, ideas, circumstances in a way that isn’t jarring.
Yet, really all I’ve said so far is how I came to the form. The thing about the ghazal is that even though it’s a strict form, the poem is all about the subject. The form, when executed well, emphasizes subject just as much, if not more, than it does rhyme and repetition. I got my subject matter from the time I spent in prison. Anyone familiar with the ghazal will notice that I signed mine, Shahid. For me, the signature in my ghazals is a nod to a phase in my life when I was known as Shahid to the people closest to me. One of the pleasant coincidences in my life is to have been introduced to the form through the poetry of Agha Shahid Ali –because my decision to be called Shahid was about my need to hold on to an identity as a witness and so much of his poetry is an act of witnessing.
In Ghazal, the repetition of the word “prison” builds a wonderfully fierce cumulative power. Can you talk about the use of that repetition at all?
There really are two repetitions going on in ghazals that hold strictly to the form. There is the refrain, called a radif, and there is the rhyme that precedes it, called a qaafiyaa. In my poem, the refrain is “in prison.” I wanted the poem to get at how once you’re in prison, it’s inescapable. That the idea of prison begins to dominate who you are and what you think about the world. But also how it’s a multifaceted experience, how it’s a number of different stories that are only linked by prison, but so strongly linked by prison that you can’t get outside of the idea.
A lot of ghazals in English that I’ve read don’t use the qaafiyaa. I’d say even less try to do something to approximate the Urdu meter. The meter doesn’t translate to English, but Agha Shahid Ali talked about using syllable counts, or English meter to create a stand in. And I think the idea is that, by having a form that is built on so much repetition the writer is free to pull those disparate ideas, places, things together with the confidence that there is something built into the poem that will hold the connection there.
When I first wrote this ghazal, I didn’t have the qaafiyaa. I was talking to a friend of mine, John Murillo, about the poem and he suggested that I should push the form if I were to use it. What he was arguing with me was that the skill in manipulated the qaafiyaa, was like a rapper who can push the same rhyme for sixteen or twenty bars without it sounded redundant. And the thing is, after talking with John about it, I began reading more on the ghazal. I wanted to learn not only the form but also the sources of it and what were the typical themes. By getting more at those, I was able to think about what I was saying and how I was saying it in context of the form. What I found in deciding to work the trilogy of repetitions is that it led to thoughts, words and images I wouldn’t have found otherwise, and I hope it leads to a, sort of, restlessness agitation in the poem itself.
In addition to writing poems, you also just finished a memoir. How has it been to move between genres?
There really are two repetitions going on in ghazals that hold strictly to the form. There is the refrain, called a radif, and there is the rhyme that precedes it, called a qaafiyaa. In my poem, the refrain is “in prison.” I wanted the poem to get at how once you’re in prison, it’s inescapable. That the idea of prison begins to dominate who you are and what you think about the world. But also how it’s a multifaceted experience, how it’s a number of different stories that are only linked by prison, but so strongly linked by prison that you can’t get outside of the idea.
A lot of ghazals in English that I’ve read don’t use the qaafiyaa. I’d say even less try to do something to approximate the Urdu meter. The meter doesn’t translate to English, but Agha Shahid Ali talked about using syllable counts, or English meter to create a stand in. And I think the idea is that, by having a form that is built on so much repetition the writer is free to pull those disparate ideas, places, things together with the confidence that there is something built into the poem that will hold the connection there.
When I first wrote this ghazal, I didn’t have the qaafiyaa. I was talking to a friend of mine, John Murillo, about the poem and he suggested that I should push the form if I were to use it. What he was arguing with me was that the skill in manipulated the qaafiyaa, was like a rapper who can push the same rhyme for sixteen or twenty bars without it sounded redundant. And the thing is, after talking with John about it, I began reading more on the ghazal. I wanted to learn not only the form but also the sources of it and what were the typical themes. By getting more at those, I was able to think about what I was saying and how I was saying it in context of the form. What I found in deciding to work the trilogy of repetitions is that it led to thoughts, words and images I wouldn’t have found otherwise, and I hope it leads to a, sort of, restlessness agitation in the poem itself.
In addition to writing poems, you also just finished a memoir. How has it been to move between genres?
It’s interesting. There are things that I couldn’t do in the memoir that I can attempt in poetry and vice verse. My poems are about me and they aren’t about me. When I think of poetry I think of talking to the world about what I see in the world. My memoir was really me talking to the world about what I saw in my life. There is a filter in it that doesn’t exist as much in my poems. I don’t try to write every poem from my perspective. Poetry wouldn’t be as fun for me if I did. Even the poem published by Ploughshares has several strands of experience that aren’t in any way mine. My memoir is different. It’s about me. No matter how much I tried to write a world into the book, it’s unabashedly a world through Dwayne’s eyes. It’s about the eight and a half years I spent in prison and what it meant to be a juvenile in an adult prison. Sitting down and writing about the phase gave me the opportunity to do much more explaining than a poem gives room for, and it also just gave me time to say something about the hard accumulation of moments in prison. My poems go for an expression of a moment, a few moments at most. But the memoir is an attempt to let the reader stand at the bottom of the hill and feel what the snow ball feels like as it’s rolled down the slope and gathered more snow; to see that snow as it gathers and decide what to make of it.
At sixteen, I carjacked someone. And honestly, there is no real way to deal with that part of my life with this one question, but I can say prison is where I began writing poetry and where I began to shape myself into who I am today. The book is an attempt at writing about what I to be guilty and have to live with that. To write about what it means to be in prison knowing that I wasn’t in any physical way prepared for it. The night of the crime was the first and only time I’d held a gun. After it happened and I was arrested, I closed my eyes hoping it would go away. The memoir is about what happened when I opened my eyes.
I’ve been thinking a lot about the role community plays for a writer lately, and you’ve been a part of several notable artistic communities—such as Cave Canem, the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference, and, more recently, Warren Wilson’s MFA program. How has your participation in these communities shaped you as a writer, if you feel it has at all?
I started writing alone. No workshops, no critiques, and few people reading what I’d written. Yet, I had the most diverse community a person could wish for. I used to kick it with Walter Mosley and then Franz Kafka. One week it would be Robert Jordan, and then it would be Octavia Butler. Baldwin, Wright, Hughes. Etheridge Knight, Galway Kinnel. Point is that literature opened up a world to me. Problem was that I still pretty much only interacted with that world through certain episodes, through some eternalized moments. I don’t think my early writing was as sensitive to the world I lived in because I was isolated, literally beginning my life as a poet during a sixteen month period where I spent twelve months in solitary confinement. Once I begin to get closer to the diversity that is in a few acres of prison cells, I began to understand that I had to at least think about the nuances of people.
Writing communities give you that same chance. To see nuances in folks and in the world and to write from a place, that at least on the periphery, cares about that nuance. I’ve been in rooms with white men from Mississippi who I honestly may have never spoken to outside of writing. Talked with amazing writings from different continents, different countries. And the thing is, the important thing is, that the talk isn’t always about writing. I remember one conversation I had about this pizza that you make with thinly sliced mandolin potatoes. The story is absolutely irrelevant, except one day I’ll eat that pizza and introduce it to someone else and my life will be a bit richer for having done it. You can’t really have rich work without have a rich life –or, I should say that I can’t imagine writing about a world if all I know are the things five blocks or fifty miles from my front door. The communities you mentioned have been a part of introducing me to the world. For me, someone with no money and no real history of travel or college in my family, Cave Canem, Bread Loaf, the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown, and Warren Wilson opened my eyes up to people from different states, different backgrounds, different goals, and different voices. I think that’s invaluable experience for a writer who is aiming to be sensitive in a world that is increasingly becoming simultaneously global for some folks and hyper-provincial for others.
I started writing alone. No workshops, no critiques, and few people reading what I’d written. Yet, I had the most diverse community a person could wish for. I used to kick it with Walter Mosley and then Franz Kafka. One week it would be Robert Jordan, and then it would be Octavia Butler. Baldwin, Wright, Hughes. Etheridge Knight, Galway Kinnel. Point is that literature opened up a world to me. Problem was that I still pretty much only interacted with that world through certain episodes, through some eternalized moments. I don’t think my early writing was as sensitive to the world I lived in because I was isolated, literally beginning my life as a poet during a sixteen month period where I spent twelve months in solitary confinement. Once I begin to get closer to the diversity that is in a few acres of prison cells, I began to understand that I had to at least think about the nuances of people.
Writing communities give you that same chance. To see nuances in folks and in the world and to write from a place, that at least on the periphery, cares about that nuance. I’ve been in rooms with white men from Mississippi who I honestly may have never spoken to outside of writing. Talked with amazing writings from different continents, different countries. And the thing is, the important thing is, that the talk isn’t always about writing. I remember one conversation I had about this pizza that you make with thinly sliced mandolin potatoes. The story is absolutely irrelevant, except one day I’ll eat that pizza and introduce it to someone else and my life will be a bit richer for having done it. You can’t really have rich work without have a rich life –or, I should say that I can’t imagine writing about a world if all I know are the things five blocks or fifty miles from my front door. The communities you mentioned have been a part of introducing me to the world. For me, someone with no money and no real history of travel or college in my family, Cave Canem, Bread Loaf, the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown, and Warren Wilson opened my eyes up to people from different states, different backgrounds, different goals, and different voices. I think that’s invaluable experience for a writer who is aiming to be sensitive in a world that is increasingly becoming simultaneously global for some folks and hyper-provincial for others.
Who are your some of your favorite writers? Do you consider them influences as well?
Favorite writers. That’s a hard question. I’ve spent weeks with R. A. Salvatore. You know what I’m saying? I mean, I’ve gotten genuine pleasure from reading those four in one Reader’s Digest abridged edition. Then too, I’ve learned something about the music in a sentence from John Edgar Wideman. I spent a few years wanting to write something that in any way came close to the Walcott lines, “I have Dutch, nigger, and English in me,/ and either I’m nobody, or I’m a nation.” So I have to say that my influences are really all that I’ve read that comes back in my mind in the moments when I’m searching for a reason to give a care about the world.
Favorite writers. That’s a hard question. I’ve spent weeks with R. A. Salvatore. You know what I’m saying? I mean, I’ve gotten genuine pleasure from reading those four in one Reader’s Digest abridged edition. Then too, I’ve learned something about the music in a sentence from John Edgar Wideman. I spent a few years wanting to write something that in any way came close to the Walcott lines, “I have Dutch, nigger, and English in me,/ and either I’m nobody, or I’m a nation.” So I have to say that my influences are really all that I’ve read that comes back in my mind in the moments when I’m searching for a reason to give a care about the world.
But that’s an incredibly evasive answer. And if you pinned me down to a few favorites, I’d say Wideman, Baldwin, and Komunyakaa. If you give me one more name I’ll say Philip Levine, and if you give me any more room I’ll just start pulling books off my shelf.
What’s the best reading you’ve ever attended? What made it so great?
Best reading? Two come to mind. The 10th anniversary Cave Canem reading with Elizabeth Alexander, Cyrus Cassells, Lucille Clifton, Kwame Dawes, Toi Derricotte, Cornelius Eady, Nikky Finney, Erica Hunt, Harryette Mullen, Yusef Komunyakaa, Sonia Sanchez, Tim Seibles, Afaa Weaver. The range of voices there was crazy. And the crowd got involved, reciting the lines they knew, calling for certain poems. You couldn’t beat it for the sustained energy.
Then there was this Thomas Sayers Ellis reading at the University of Maryland. He has skills, and you can tell that he cares about the audience when he reads. Or at least he cares enough about the poems to make them new each time. Plus, there were a few moments during the reading where I just had to pause thinking about what he’d said. And if a poet can make you pause in a one to two minute poem, I feel like he’s accomplished something.
What’s the best writing advice you’ve ever gotten?
Advice. Stephen Barnes said everyone has to get out their first million words before they have something decent to write. He also said read ten times the amount that you want to write.
Best reading? Two come to mind. The 10th anniversary Cave Canem reading with Elizabeth Alexander, Cyrus Cassells, Lucille Clifton, Kwame Dawes, Toi Derricotte, Cornelius Eady, Nikky Finney, Erica Hunt, Harryette Mullen, Yusef Komunyakaa, Sonia Sanchez, Tim Seibles, Afaa Weaver. The range of voices there was crazy. And the crowd got involved, reciting the lines they knew, calling for certain poems. You couldn’t beat it for the sustained energy.
Then there was this Thomas Sayers Ellis reading at the University of Maryland. He has skills, and you can tell that he cares about the audience when he reads. Or at least he cares enough about the poems to make them new each time. Plus, there were a few moments during the reading where I just had to pause thinking about what he’d said. And if a poet can make you pause in a one to two minute poem, I feel like he’s accomplished something.
What’s the best writing advice you’ve ever gotten?
Advice. Stephen Barnes said everyone has to get out their first million words before they have something decent to write. He also said read ten times the amount that you want to write.
What are you working on now?
Just poems. I have a few ideas that I want to work out. One is about time and prison. I’ve been reading Shakespeare’s Twelfth Night, the edition edited by Bruce R. Smith with texts and commentaries. One of the commentaries addresses the issue of time and how it figures in the play. The commentary talks about how Shakespeare marks time in a way similar to the Book of Commons, through recognition of certain practices: holiday time, youths preparing to marry, mystery and epiphany. Shakespeare has those things function as measures that a reader or audience can use to trace the passage of time in the play. Prison has its similar set of ideas and I want to find a way to explore those in verse. Because ultimately, I think time is different in prison and if I find ways to bring out those differences I can say something that people recognize about their own lives in the lyrics and narratives I pull from prison.
Just poems. I have a few ideas that I want to work out. One is about time and prison. I’ve been reading Shakespeare’s Twelfth Night, the edition edited by Bruce R. Smith with texts and commentaries. One of the commentaries addresses the issue of time and how it figures in the play. The commentary talks about how Shakespeare marks time in a way similar to the Book of Commons, through recognition of certain practices: holiday time, youths preparing to marry, mystery and epiphany. Shakespeare has those things function as measures that a reader or audience can use to trace the passage of time in the play. Prison has its similar set of ideas and I want to find a way to explore those in verse. Because ultimately, I think time is different in prison and if I find ways to bring out those differences I can say something that people recognize about their own lives in the lyrics and narratives I pull from prison.
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