Ariana Benson is a southern Black ecopoet and the author of the Cave Canem Poetry Prize and Lenore Marshall Poetry Prize collection BLACK PASTORAL (University of Georgia Press, 2023). Back of the Envelope Assistant Editor Kennedy Marie Crowder conducted the Q&A. This interview has been edited for clarity.
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Kennedy Marie Crowder: To start, I wanted to ask about this concept of “the Black field” that is introduced through the prologue, the first “Love Poem in the Black Field” of which there are going to be several recurring throughout the collection. How are you thinking of the field and the Black field as these spaces that kind of move across other spaces and places?
Ariana Benson: The field is so important to me. My first engagement with the field is very literal. I’m from southern Virginia, and there’s a back road you take to drive from where I’m from to Virginia Beach, to the coast part. And for about 30 minutes you are driving through nothing but this two-lane, and there’s just fields on both sides as far as you can see. I was so enchanted as a kid by that because when you’re urban or even in a space like a suburban neighborhood you can understand or feel where your world ends, right? You can feel the lines of a place. You can feel the boundaries, maybe even the borders if you wanna call it that. The field to me has presented a place of expanse. Freedom. Ideologically, right? Not necessarily historically.
When you’re a kid, a Black kid, you don’t necessarily have those immediate connotations of the field with all the things you associate with them as an adult until your parents sit down with you and have a talk to explain those histories. So for me, it’s always this balancing act of understanding the field as this really ideal, endless place of beauty. It’s a pretty common Black experience; you know where your boundaries are, and you figure out pretty quickly where the road ends for you. So I think maybe there’s some kind of allure there, even inherently as a kid, to find a place where things didn’t have to end, where there wasn’t a sight line where there was an end. The Black field is holding both of those experiences at once. That’s the double consciousness of being a Black person, to hold the experience humanly of seeing a field and seeing freedom and the conscious experience of what human body you occupy and what that really means for you and for those who came before you in terms of a field, its history, particularly in Virginia. Once you learn what a field was for, you can’t unsee it. We were a huge Tobacco state, and Virginia is actually the first state that even had slaves. You can’t unsee those things.
KMC: A later move in the piece, you’re imagining Mars as this place where we can bring the Black field with us but simultaneously have a different kind of imaginative space. I’m very interested in this moment in Black Pastoral where you’ve been thinking very literally here on Earth about Virginia, the Atlantic, and our histories with those spaces, and then train your eye towards somewhere different.
AB: I think that’s so inspired by the kinds of visionaries among Black writers. Octavia Butler was seeing a different kind of field in the reverse. I’m trying to imagine a different kind of field in the future. And so I credit heavily the kind of Afro-futurist writing traditions; I’m a big fan of N. K. Jemisin. I’m thinking about looking forward to this idea that we can have the field–all the beautiful parts of it–without the ugliness of its history. Mars is a blank slate in that way: it doesn’t have a human history. I think there’s such beauty and potential in places that are unstained by history, and there’s so few, if any, remaining on this Earth. I’ve always too been a space cadet in terms of my imagination. I rarely spend a whole lot of time in the real presence of the world. If I think about “Oh, where would I wanna go? What would I wanna see? Mars.” Then my imagination carries me to stuff like Black boys playing basketball without any gravity, all of the cool things that would happen in that setting.
KMC: I’d also like to talk about the influence of art on the collection. We can just take the cover for example, this beautiful glass orchid sculpture that introduces us to the text. But also how you use artwork to inspire a lot of your poems. My favorite is “Rorschach After the Storm”. I went down a rabbit hole when I read this because I didn’t know the artist you had referenced, Julie Mehretu.
AB: Isn’t she amazing?
KMC: Yes! I was very curious about Julie Mehretu’s explanation of her work “Story Maps of No Location.” She says it is a “manifestation of an imagined rather than actual reality” and she also says “there is no such thing as just landscape, landscape is politicized.” So holding both of those things at once in reference to this particular poem but also Black Pastoral as a space altogether, how are you considering that dual nature of a Black Pastoral, both a landscape and a non-real location?
AB: Something I really wanted to introduce or work on with this book was poetry as translation. Poetry can translate these real moments that are very difficult to put your finger on in the moment, but then you stretch it out so thin with a string of words and it becomes something new and something different. And I think for me, I would approach the work of Julie Mehretu or an abstract landscape artist similarly, like I am applying my own linguistic translation to the landscape that Mehretu has created, to the lines and the strokes. Abstract art naturally scares some people in a way that sometimes poetry does. A lot of people are taught about art and about poetry that you should know what it means, you should see these things and that means this, or you should know that this is a symbol of this. And it doesn’t really work like that. I don’t always know what something means when I’m writing a poem. I’m sure that an artist at the moment doesn’t always know what every brushstroke means. So I think it’s lending itself to a privileging of the audience experience, which is pushing back inherently against some colonial ideas that the creator determines xyz, or the person who has the power is the one who dictates what you can take away from it.
The first time I’ve seen a Julie Mehretu in person… actually, there is one that is in the American embassy in London, and so on the Marshall Scholarship orientation in London, there is a staircase where we’re taking a picture and there’s this huge Mehretu piece. I was just so enthralled by the piece. Something that I love about art is that when it is created to a certain massive scale, it has that field feel. Even though there are walls and it ends, your mind can see where it extends beyond. Think about the traditional landscape, there’s a technique where they place the line of the horizon just so at a specific angle so that your mind imagines that the water goes on and on forever. It’s that kind of effect that I find really gorgeous in Mehretu’s work and in a lot of abstract paintings that correlate to my experience of the field and expanse and vastness.
KMC: Stylistically, you have “Rorschach After the Storm” and then on the following page “Black Pastoral”, the namesake of the entire collection. “Rorschach After the Storm” ends with “& under it all, the city / it all’s all city / don’t you understand / it’s all Damascus / its’ all Ninth Ward / all dammed, until it is—” Next page: “Black Pastoral.” This leads me to the question of when you’re putting this collection together, how are you thinking about where you’re placing the poems? Additionally, since we have a reverb of “Love Poem in the Black Field,” how are you thinking about where to place these specific love poems throughout the collection?
AB: In terms of ordering I had a lot of help, a lot of great feedback, because the first time I sent out the book it was very much in chronological order. It’s a book that can be done that way because there’s poems that take place in the 17th century, Middle Passage, and then there’s poems that take place today. So I had them originally very strictly in that order. I got some brilliant feedback from Sumita Chakraborty, a poet that I just adore, thinking about how to actually see the threads between the way a poem ends and the next begins. I didn’t even think about the thread from “it’s all, its’ all” to the title of “Black Pastoral.” I love that. Maybe the thread that I was thinking of was “it’s all” and then leading into what is it? What is there in all of those fields, in Damascus, in New Orleans, what is there? But I love your reading of it!
I think it’s inspired by music. I thought I wasn’t a full Beyhive member… and then I went to Renaissance. And I was like, “Why do I know all of the songs?” Something I respect about Beyonce is how she’s grown as an artist particularly with “Renaissance” and “Cowboy Carter.” The transitions from song to song feel so seamless, like she’s trying to paint a grander picture, create a landscape. She and a lot of my favorite artists, like Stevie Wonder and the interludes he puts in his work, they are able to tie those threads and find interesting connections between the end of a song and the beginning of the next.
And the Love Poems in the Black Field. A lot of those were placed with emotional impact in mind. Similarly to “On Mars” which comes after a pretty heavy emotional poem, I think after some of the darker poems I was thinking “okay, maybe I can put a ‘Love Poem in the Black Field’ here.” And not wanting them to be too close to each other. When you’re planning or designing, you don’t want too much red in one spot unless that’s your goal. My goal is to spread out and have different sparks. To me all of the Love Poems are the same shade of whatever color emotionally, so I was trying to find ways to use that in contrast to the darkness of the poems that were next to or around, to remind us again that yes, there was this darkness, but here was the love too. Yes there was this suffering, but here was the love too. You and I wouldn’t be sitting here having this conversation if the love didn’t somehow thrive through the choke-weeds of the darkness.
KMC: There is such a strong yin and yang happening in this collection. I had read that someone else said in conversation with you how the collection shows the beauty and ugliness in Southern geographies. That to me is clearest in this conversation on how beautiful Southern geography is, yet you can’t take the history out of this landscape. History appears so heavily in this collection, and I really enjoyed learning things I hadn’t known before while reading. There is a particular poem about a captain…
AB: Moses Grandy.
KMC: Thank you, yes! The poem is written from the perspective of the swamp, to him. That’s something that you can’t get from reading about Marcus [sic] Grandy. Not from documents. Not from reading his autobiography or the narrative of his life. This poem makes me wonder about the value of ecopoetics in trying to learn about Black history.
AB: I love that you brought up history first and foremost because the two are so inseparable for me–history and nature. But if you nailed me down and asked me, I would probably say that my impulse for writing is primarily towards history, and really just story. History is just real story, story that we have record of. Thinking of poetry for me as translation, I’ve spent so much time thinking about the way history is taught in school as straightforward fact. 1619, we’re brought to Virginia. That’s what we’re taught you have to put on the SOL to pass the state test. No further context. But what did they experience? What did the land look like? What had they gone through up until that point? I feel very much like we’re teaching history with a kind of STEM mindset as though just the facts matter, and not very much beyond the who, what, when, where, why. That does a disservice to the grander story of history, and the story to me is primarily about journey, about emotion, about how people grow or change or learn through it. With poetry, I have the ability to weave in these details that you just don’t get in a standard textbook. It’s translating that straightforward “objective” knowledge into a subjective experience. It’s an effort to repair the stories to storydom.
Nature comes in when I think about how to speak to people or how to reach people. I’m very proud of all the things that have come from this book in the official channels and whatnot, but this is a book I wrote at home. It was COVID and I decided to take a year off from the Marshall Scholarship, so I was back living in Virginia for the first time since I had gone to college, and I wrote it for the people at home, for people from Hampton Roads. I was thinking then in what kind of language and what kind of words we will all understand, and nature is one of the most universal languages we have, because we all live on this planet. Everybody knows what a tree is, everybody has seen open water at some point in their life. I love when friends who have lived in different parts of the world all their life and I get to experience them saying “this is the first time I’m seeing snow!” It’s like seeing someone learn a new part of language, learn a new world.
So for me, nature is the lens that I filter the emotions through. If I use a metaphor about a flower, I can understand what that image is. I think it just makes it kind of a language that is more broadly spoken than any that I can put on the page or any that has been historically taught or denied us.
KMC: I didn’t think of this as a language, but now that you’re saying it, one of the languages of Black Pastoral is God. We think of pastoral not just as a shepherding but also pastoral advice, a spiritual connection. I think we see this clearest in “Blackness as Theodicy.” I wanna pick your brain a bit on how you’re thinking of theodicy in relation to blackness and how it’s related to Black Pastoral.
AB: My impulse towards theodicy comes from me being a certified overthinker. A theodicy is an attempt to explain or understand or explore why a God–and a God that I’ve been taught and believe is good–might allow bad things to happen. It’s something I thought about a lot before I even had the word theodicy. It’s always been in contention or at least a kind of contrast in the landscape of my faith. My mom always said bottom line God is love. That’s how I see it. When we see love in the world, I’m seeing the God that I believe in. I think there’s so many ways and so many experiences of God and so many languages for that experience. So I don’t necessarily limit it to the tradition that I was raised in, but this kind of belief in that experience. So God becomes for me another attempt at a universal language because a lot of the world is defined by what we believe, our faith. Our cultures are often tied to that. I couldn’t write about nature without writing about who I believe made all of this and where all of this comes from.
Theodicy is cathartic for me. It’s a way to think about or sit with the contrast. You can have faith, but also we have minds, we’re gonna have questions. And maybe those questions aren’t meant to be answered, and that’s something I love in poetry too: you get to just ask the questions. You don’t have to have the answers, you get to just pose the questions, and then we can have a conversation about it.
KMC: There’s God, and then there’s also the ghostliness of the text. Hauntology shows up when you study Black people near constantly. Everything is haunted by us. Towards the end of Black Pastoral we get the poem “No. 2 (No. 7 and No. 2): oil on canvas: Mark Rothko: 1951” that is an intensely haunted poem for its allusion to real people, contemporary, very recent real tragedies. What does it mean to have Eric Garner and George Floyd in this text about ecopoetics and the Black field? What did that do for you as a poet to have that piece included?
AB: Yes, that one was really special to me. Most of my poems start with knowledge of history or a real story; this poem started because we know that Eric Garner was somebody who tended to the land, that was his job. He worked for the parks system, he’d have his boots on, you know, he tended the land. So I started from that knowledge.
I also love that you brought up hauntology because for me, yes, everywhere is haunted by Black people. That’s how it is and that’s how I experience it, our histories. But also I think one unique experience of Blackness and being descended from the histories of slavery and oppression is it’s a haunting of the mind. So even if the ghosts aren’t inherently in a space, they’re with you. You can’t look at something and not see. I cannot look at a bottle of Arizona Ice Tea and not see the ghost of Trayvon Martin just wanting to enjoy it or drink it. You carry the ghosts with you.
In approaching that Rothko–I love Rothko. Again, it’s that whole landscape, abstract, I can let my mind go crazy in this visual field. Whenever I think of a field, I am going to carry with me the ghosts in my mind and the ghosts that are in the real field. I think this poem was attempting to play out that haunting of the mind while also attempting to remove that negative connotation from it. The spirits of those that came before us are protective, it’s what keeps me strong, it’s what keeps me solid, it’s what keeps me from feeling alone in a world full of places that would very much have you feel alone. So I wanted a beautiful scene to play out with the ghosts in my mind as they enter that painting.
KMC: I only have two more questions I’d like to close with. The first is on your very impressive bio. You are a highly decorated poet, and I’m excited to see that your work is receiving institutional recognition. I’m wondering about how receiving these awards, fellowships, and support in prizes helps in your writing process and what it does for you as a writer to receive that validation… or if it doesn’t do much for you at all?
AB: So if this Q&A comes out after this date in September you can include this, and I’m glad you asked this question, because it has literally been my whole life for the last three days.
So a few days ago I got a call from the Academy of American Poets saying that my book had won the Lenore Marshall Poetry Prize. That prize is basically saying you wrote the most outstanding book of poetry in the year 2023. My book will be sent to hundreds of members of the Academy of American Poets, I get a residency, and then I get $25,000… I’m in shock still.
So I’m glad you asked this question, because that’s all I’ve been thinking about for the past few days, is how to experience that kind of praise and validation. And it does feel good. I wrote that book without an MFA. I was 23 years old, the world had stopped. I grinded my way through college, and I got this Marshall Scholarship. And they tell you this is your time to be unserious and explore the world. I got five months of exploring the world and then March 2022 happened and that was it. I was unceremoniously shunted back home into Virginia where I hadn’t been for going on five years at that point. What I think happened for me there was so specific for how the book developed. You never sit and write a poetry collection thinking “I’m gonna win all the big prizes, people gonna read this book!” It’s poetry. Maybe some people do, but for me I love poetry, and I understand it is a beautiful bubble in its own corner of the world.
There’s such a long period of time between when you write the book and when people read it and then another year from that because when the Lenore Marshall will be announced it will be almost a year to the date that the book first came out. It’s been 3-4 years since I’ve written this book, so while it’s super exciting, it’s also strange to grapple with the version of me now, the poet I am now, the poet who really appreciates and loves this work–it’s almost like existing in two different timelines. I read these poems and they’re so different from the poems that I have written recently in beautiful and amazing ways.
So I feel very affirmed in that work and the work that I put into that book. The research that I did, the time that I spent teaching myself, listening to craft talks, the workshops that I went to with Black women. I will always say Vievee Frances, Amber Flora Thomas, Saretta Morgan, Patricia Smith: those were my first workshop leaders, period. All Black women. And the accessibility, I got to do that because of COVID, because all of the workshops were on Zoom. I certainly didn’t have all the money to fly to all these different workshops.
There’s an uncanniness that I struggle with, but it helps me if I tie it to “the work is being rewarded; this book specifically is being validated.” I love that so much. But there has to be a way for me to keep going and to want more. I’m obsessed with sports, so I’ve been watching the Olympics. And something that Simone Biles tweeted about when the athletes win a gold medal and people ask them what they’re going to do next. She talks about in her documentary how she came home from Rio and she was depressed for months and months because of this feeling of “I’ve accomplished everything I was supposed to do. What’s next?” And so I think separating it in those two timelines and always wanting to do more, always wanting to explore new things, keeps me from feeling that “This was my one main goal… what’s next?”
All that said, obviously I’m super hype! Prizes get discussed a lot in poetry, and I think it’s quite an unfair system. It’s basically a lottery system and I felt like I won the lottery, and I think there can be a lot of work done to overcome that and make things equitable. That said, I’m always so happy when I see Black and brown and queer poets who are probably in the same economic shoes that I’m in getting huge blessings because of poems they wrote. I think that’s so cool because it’s literally rewarding passion. You don’t write poetry for anything other than the love of the game, because there’s really nothing guaranteed on the other side of that piece of paper. And so as a person who is such a nerd about all of these random little niche things I love to see that kind of passion be rewarded and supported so that it can continue. I’m grateful that in that interim period the passion remained and I think that’s because I was taught to write for the passion. Sharan Strange, my professor at Spelman, when I was learning, we never really talked about sending your poems out or submitting. She said if you learn the craft, all the rest of it will come. If you love it and you continue to tend that love, all the rest of it will come. And that’s what happened for me.
That’s a long answer that you may or may not be able to include, but I would love for you to be able to. And I’m glad that you asked that, ‘cause clearly I’ve been dying to talk about it.
KMC: I’m glad I asked too because oh my gosh–this is so exciting!
AB: Listen, I was taking a nap, and I woke up to a text that said “Hey Ariana, Ricky from the Academy of American Poets. Got a minute to chat?” I had fully missed the call like three hours ago. And I was like, Lord, when am I ever going to not miss these calls? I missed the Ruth Lily call and then had to wait until the next day.
KMC: You find such luck in sleep. Maybe you should dream more, that’s what that sounds like!
AB: I’m a lifetime napper, it will never stop me!
It’s cool because Ricardo, the head of the Academy of American Poets, he was at my launch in New York. That was really special. It was at the Schomburg Center, and in the lobby there’s this beautiful kind of thing on the floor, and that’s where some of Langston Hughes’s ashes are interred. So to have my book launch literally in this place of history, in this place where a piece of one of the people that my work would not exist without–I don’t think there’s any Black poets out here who can say “I would exist without Langston Hughes.” To have someone that I was able to share that beautiful moment with maintain those connections, that’s been really special.
KMC: Wow! Well, we’ll conclude with this last question. You’ve touched a bit on how you’re feeling about the text now that you’ve developed even more as a poet. I’m wondering how you feel overall about the work, if there’s any poems you return to or see in a different light. How have your feelings grown or developed about Black Pastoral?
AB: What I’m proudest of is that this really was an experience of passion and faith. I’ve gotten to meet such incredible people through poetry, and if you had told me that, I wouldn’t have believed it. I really just kind of lean into that because I think it’s such an example of the potential for passion without the channels that we think it has to go through. I didn’t have the MFA, I didn’t necessarily have that structured way that people think you have to have to achieve this. This is something I continue to express because I think accessibility in all manners is so important, especially when it comes to poetry that is becoming more and more entrenched in this academic sphere. But I think poetry is an art of the people.
That’s another thing I’m proudest of. My dad–proud dad, of course–brought Black Pastoral to work with him and all his coworkers got copies. One of his coworkers, she’s now retired, but she was a navy veteran and she got the book. One day, my dad went to work and she showed him on every single page all the words she didn’t know she had looked up the definition and written them in the margins of the book. Everything that has happened with Black Pastoral aside, that is the most rewarding. I didn’t wanna write a book that was only legible in certain towers to certain people, or only moved certain people. Even though she had to look up the words, I think it’s such a testament to the power of Black reading. The determination of Black readers and the value of that especially because we were disallowed for so long from reading. It feels like my book reached the intended audience.
Coming up on a year, it’s been a whirlwind. I’m super proud of that work, I’m grateful that all of this happened when it did in my life, it couldn’t have happened at any other time. I was unemployed at home chilling, and so I had time to develop and put into the work as much time as I wanted to. I think a lot of people see poets who are on the younger side publishing and they think “Ugh, I’ve already missed the boat.” No! My boat just came when it did, and I’m grateful for that, but I never wanna discount the work of people who have grinded at it for a good long while.
I feel like a completely different person now from when I wrote that book. I’ve had different life experiences, the world around me has shifted a lot. Anything that was done in the pandemic also feels like a separate timeline. It’s an experience of having to reconcile all of that going forward. I’m still poeting, still writing, so I’m thinking about what my practice going forward will look like and what things I can take from the experience of writing Black Pastoral, because it’s irreplicable… Hopefully it’s irreplicable, we do not need another pandemic! But because it is irreplicable, I have all these questions of what is the second book going to be? Is it going to be what this one was? So I’m trying to find what I can take from that experience and what I can take from what I am now and what I’ve learned since.
KMC: Thank you so so much for speaking with me, and thank you for writing Black Pastoral. Please keep writing. If only for me to be able to read some stuff–I’ll be selfish–please keep writing! And thank you as well from The Offing for giving us an opportunity to share your work with some of the members of our audience.
AB: Thank you to The Offing. It’s definitely one of those journals I read consistently when I was trying to find what people are doing, what can I learn from. I feel it is one of the journals that I hope continues to be modeled in terms of poetry community and elevating who they elevate.
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