JoAnne McFarland is a widely celebrated multihyphenate artist and author of 14 poetry collections, including her latest, AMERICAN GRAPHIC (Green Linden Press, 2024). McFarland is Founder and Artistic Director of Brooklyn’s Artpoetica Project Space. The Offing Guest Editor Gabrielle Civil conducted the interview.

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There’s nothing quite like the work of JoAnne McFarland. As a poet, visual artist, and curator, she counters racial and gender violence with elegance, sensuality, and beauty. Her inspirations include African American history, visual culture, personal memory, and abundant curiosity about lived experience. After years of reading her work, I remain blown away by its clarity and insight. Her tenth poetry collection American Graphic won the 2024 Wishing Jewel Prize for poetic innovation from Green Linden Press. In advance of its release this month, we talked about this work and her absolute faith in creativity.

Gabrielle Civil: Congratulations on American Graphic! The book is so rich, inventive, and surprising, and it continues your multimedia innovations with poetry, found text, beading, and collage. As a visual artist and poet, how do you navigate image and text in your work?

JoAnne McFarland: Well, people would always ask me, Are you an artist or a poet? And when you’re doing one, is it different from doing the other? For years, I almost felt like I had to decide there was a difference and then explain what it was. But there really isn’t a difference for me. Whether it’s through the words I’m using or the images that I create, my aim is to say, Isn’t this beautiful? Even though I’m aware of all of the violence and ugliness around us, these moments in our lives that we put together are so fleeting and gorgeous and emotionally so rich and powerful.

GC: American Graphic pushes us to consider: What is a poem? What is a painting? Can you say more about combining different forms?

JM: When I was a kid, making things was always so intimate and erotic an experience; it was so dreamy but so concrete. It made me feel so much in the world but also beyond the world. Integrating different forms is a way of trying to capture somebody’s attention after having captured my own attention. And that’s actually hard to do. Having animated text or collage paired with words, all of that is a way of creating a vibration.

GC: The cover of American Graphic offers an incredible vibration from jump. Is that really you in nursery school in front of that flag?

JM: That is really me in nursery school in front of that flag! And that’s probably the earliest picture of me, which is interesting because I’m already three years old. My nursery school class was having our pictures taken, and we were in the yard. They were taking our pictures one by one, and I was playing and running around, and I fell and hurt my mouth. I was so upset because I knew that they were going to be taking the pictures. Now, all these years later, that photo seems to capture our mood of being almost on a precipice of things disintegrating around us. And the flag is so saggy, but so big.

GC: There’s a little tear in the flag’s corner, which also feels important to what you’re saying about the mood of today.

JM: Yes, I think that photo, oddly enough, captures the vulnerability of blackness in this country, the unending vulnerability of blackness, which we carry with us and carry forward. American Graphic is using historical material to say these things are intimately connected to the present. How are we managing that? Where are we headed? I hope that the reader feels that even as we move through darkness, the collection is celebrating love and connection.

GC: That reminds me of the book’s epigraph by bell hooks from All About Love, which warns us of lovelessness. She says, “Turning away [from love], we risk moving into a wilderness of spirit so intense, we may never find our way home again.”

JM: Those words by bell hooks I find so profound because I really, really, really believe that love is the essential power for everything. All About Love is on my bedside table right now, right next to Audre Lorde’s little book The Master’s Tools Will Never Dismantle the Master’s House. Both books are stunning. And All About Love is so strong, so wise that it’s generative. Now, I will say that I think we always have the power to find our way home. That’s my personal faith in the power of creativity. Through many decades, spending very quiet time with myself, I have come to the realization that violence and creativity are opposites. And I can leverage creativity to manage the overwhelming violence in our culture. And my hope, the reason why I keep writing and making things and sharing them, is that I think my strategy can work for other people. I want American Graphic to demonstrate the power in making things and how that force within us is something that we can all use to find our way home.

GC: In the “Sampler” section of the book, you pair poems with quilt patterns from the Underground Railroad and in the “Accounts” section, you pair runaway slave advertisements, love notes, and your original collages of dresses. Can you talk more about your process of putting these things together? 

JM: I have absolute faith in the creative process. For example, the dress collages, in the final part, “Accounts,” weren’t even there. The collection was all done, we had the cover with that photo of me on the front, it was all ready to be printed. And I woke up one morning and felt something missing. The title is American Graphic. Was it graphic enough? I said, Wait a minute. I think my collages go in here. And I knew instantly which one went where. Now when I read the book, it’s like, how could they not go there? It was in the back of my mind as just a feeling, but if we give ourselves enough breathing room and free rein, which is a skill, the answers will come, the problems will solve themselves. The poems will almost write themselves.

GC: You mentioned knowing that those collages had to be in American Graphic and you’ve been making them for more than twenty years. What makes these collages so important in your practice?

JM: My earliest dress collages had lots of brown in them, which reminded me of African-American skin. So those original dresses had this feeling of being like African-American girls and women, and I loved that. Over the years they’ve kind of evolved, but that dress shape reflects my love for women and women’s lives and energy, that female energy. I wanted this object that, even if men wear it, is associated in our culture with women and femininity. That shape is so fertile, and I can find more and more sources. The Sears Catalog, rice papers, French journals which somebody gave me. I like to be anchored to something and then see what I can do with it.

GC: Another anchor for American Graphic seems to be A Domestic Cook Book by Malinda Russell written in 1866. You tell us that it is “the first known cookbook by a Black woman in the United States.” Can you say more about this inspiration?

JM: I love Malinda Russell’s cookbook. She’s using language we don’t use anymore. It’s so formal and much denser than the way we speak, and I find it so charming. It’s so life-affirming to have this belief in nourishment and food and supporting oneself. The cookbook is an artifact and we can reinvent that as something else. She wasn’t thinking about me 150 years later, but I got it. So I can use the past as a springboard and have faith in the magic of creativity.

GC: How do you come across the historical material in your work? Do you go to archives or libraries and look for things? 

JM: Again I have faith that things will find me. Take for instance this book here, An Illustrated Catalog of American Fruits & Nuts. I live in Gowanus and had just walked over to Red Hook because I spend so much time by myself walking around neighborhoods. I stopped into a store and saw this book. I said, Wow! These illustrations from the 1800s are gorgeous. This book is $50 and I’m going to take it home and cut it up for my dress collages. I had no idea I was going to come across this book. But the thing that’s been invaluable to me is when I get excited about something, I follow that.

 GC: In “Ingredients,” the center section of American Graphic, you offer what you term a “call and response” with Russell’s cookbook. Can you speak more about the shape of these poems?

JM: It’s the same process as the dresses where I’m starting with an anchor. I take something that leaps out at me in her exquisite body of text and then see where it takes me. Maybe it’s three words or a phrase, and I’m just going to go. So that first response is the draft. And often the draft has its own energy and then we almost kill it. We refine something down to death. It might be better, but it doesn’t have that energy.

So I said, I’m going to cheat. I’m going to keep the draft so that I don’t have to give up anything, and then I’m going to create my final spare version because that’s what many of us think a poem is, this spare, clean, formal thing. So that’s how each of those “Ingredients” poems developed from Malinda Russell’s text, my draft using what I took from her, and then this final poem.

GC: Digital versions of the “Ingredients” poems won the 2023 Connecticut Poetry Society’s Experimental Poetry Contest. In the digital version, lines float on the screen and land in different order. By the end, the poem looks the same as what’s printed in American Graphic, but the arrival is very different. How do you relate the digital and print versions?

JM: The digital piece for me is pure magic. The first two books in the trilogy, A Domestic Lookbook and Pullman, also exist as digital works in my archives, even though those versions have not been made public. Those digital collections feel extraordinarily intimate. With the arrow on the screen, the reader is controlling the way the poem unfolds. And it unfolds slowly enough that the reader has time to ingest the unfolding, and then you have it at the end. So I love that. It just adds another dimension and it gives you another poem. For me, the real heat is in the digital experience.

GC: The performance artist in me wants to know if you feel like that heat, the unfolding movement of the digital poem, is a performance?

JM: Absolutely. It’s so great that we’re talking, because I know that you’re a performance artist, and I keep thinking, “Okay, so what’s next?” I don’t know what the next frontier is, but something is happening there.

GC: I have to ask: have you tried to make any of Malinda Russell’s recipes? They’re wild!

JM: I know. Some of the ingredients she’s using, I’ve never seen them. I don’t know what they are. I have to look in my imagination. And in that way, the recipes are not just for food. That reminds me, one of my early books, Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Black Girl has a section called “How to Save Your Own Life.” I was thinking, if I were going to die, what would I want my daughter to know? And I am deadly serious. You look at those things, how to roast a chicken, how to make a flower out of tissues, how to . . .

GC: sew on a button. 

JM: Right. I am in deadly earnest that those are the things that you need to know how to do. You need to know how to feed yourself and make beautiful things and how to manage money. You don’t need to know a lot of the other stuff that you’re told you need. I have a blood daughter and a blood son, but I have lots of kids. And I want them to live in that space of creativity and making and understand that that’s how you survive. This trilogy of Pullman, A Domestic Lookbook and American Graphic is just building on that, recipes to survive.

GC: Early poems in American Graphic like “Plate” and “White Castle” describe early memories of artistic hunger. How has your own creative spirit managed to survive?

JM: At this point in my life, I can model living as vividly as possible. When I turned sixty, I looked at my life and said, From sixty to seventy is likely to be my best decade. The reality of aging, of losing mental acuity, of losing physical strength, of caretaking responsibilities, of having resolved a marriage and child-rearing responsibilities, all of that put me in a very specific point to look directly and ask, How am I going to handle this? So I made a vow to myself very consciously. I’m going to go with my life one hundred percent, just for those ten years, sixty to seventy. I’m going to say yes to everything. I’m going to honor my values. I’m going to live my life. American Graphic is the culmination of that decade, because it will be published right before I turn seventy.

I recognize it as the culmination of what I feel are my powers, what I came to Earth with: certain potential, certain drive, certain talents, and I wanted to give myself a chance to use them. Was I going to be brave enough to do that? Yes. But I had to train myself every day. The linchpin was that I would do one creative thing every day. There’s no excuse. It can be tiny. I sent that email. Or I wrote that line. But it’s a question of leverage. You are building a platform under you.

GC: That’s powerful. Do you think you’ll continue doing one creative thing a day after you turn seventy?

JM: I don’t know. I have total faith in the creative process. Total faith. Whatever I need to do then, I will do. But I don’t need to know. Everything is just more vivid, more beautiful if you can give yourself some space, that space.

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