Rita Dove: I landed on Safiya’s work in 2011 when she applied for the creative writing program at the University of Virginia — and to paraphrase Emily Dickinson, she took the top of my head off! I was electrified by the soul and the muscular elegance of the poems. When she arrived in my classes, we discussed her troubled upbringing in a strict Rastafarian family and all the extra layers that come from diasporic living, which were so extreme and vast in her case that I didn’t understand them at first. However, in my classes I imparted my philosophy of talking through the poems and not directly about life, unless you absolutely have to. The pact is to communicate in terms of metaphor and through the craft. So that’s what we did, and she had a spine of steel. I would wrestle with Safiya line by line — every word and every syllable — while at the same time knowing that below each word was a squaring with the world.
To be a writer you have to live life and be curious about it. Then you can work from there. When you’re called to something, as I feel called to poetry, everything in your life will eventually inform that thing. I always ask my students, “What are you passionate about?” They say, “Oh, poetry.” And I reply, “No, no, what [else] are you passionate about?” One of my passions is ballroom dancing. I’ve had colleagues tell me I should be reading a book and I say, “Well, I’m doing that, too, but I’m also dancing a book.” The greatest thing about poetry is that it can ambush you. You can be moving through the most ordinary day, and then you read or hear a poem and suddenly everything around you sharpens.
Safiya Sinclair: Every week, Rita’s feedback would consist of a single-spaced page-and-a-half typed letter. She taught me that it’s OK to say a thing plainly, whereas my impulse is to be ornate and lush. I think about that all the time, the importance of trusting the simplicity of an image and letting it do the work on its own. It’s strange how sometimes writing gives you this high, like you’ve scratched the vein of God, and then the next day, there’s maybe one line there. There is much humility to be had in writing, in sitting with a thing constantly. I feel very fortunate that she’s helped me navigate academia as a poet and a Black woman, but also, more important, she’s shown me how to maintain the spirit and inner peace that are needed to actually write poems. To have a career is good, but that’s not the driving impulse behind sitting down from midnight to 5 a.m. and just listening to what the day has to say.
Interviews have been edited and condensed.
Makeup: Emma Persaud
