David Bradford : part five

What are you working on?

I’ve got a second book coming! Bottom Rail on Top (Brick Books, 2023) is something I’ll be editing likely in the spring and summer, a dense sequence of sequences about central conceptions and narratives of Blackness—from my own here and now, and looking all the way back and down to the South. I’m lining up a few things for that. But lately, I’ve mostly been working on a translation, also for Brick Books, of Désormais, ma demeure, Quebec poet Nicholas Dawson’s third book. It’s a collection of hybrid essays, prose poem and photos so eerily familiar to me in terms of depression, diasporic contexts, and, among other things, masculinity, all inquired into with a kind of languid, readerly, lush, run-on lyrical essayism and interdisciplinarity I'm revelling in all over again as I work my way back through it. 

Writing-wise, I’ve been increasingly trying to lean toward keeping it top secret / full in-the-dark mode. I’ll just say I’ve been thinking about the gravity of dominant groups as a subject for the dominated, and about dominant group readerships wanting to be addressees, wanting the symptoms of their gravity addressed, wanting to hear the dominated group describe the domination’s effects in heavy detail. I’ve been thinking about this particularly in terms of certain white people and whiteness and trying to cut across performances of all that and move on from them in a big way. I’ve got something cooking that’s working on that.

David Bradford : part four

Why is poetry important?

You know, I think it’s healthy to seriously adjust your expectations for the perceived importance of poetry, and I definitely balanced that with this first book, Dream of No One but Myself. Then suddenly people are calling you up crying about it, and people you haven’t much spoken to in a decade are dropping deep confessionals in your DM’s, and your communities and your people within those communities are reaching out, reaching you anew, are telling you this put words to something they wanted words for in a big way.

It’s a touchy-feely thing but this is all touchy-feely stuff: if it’s important enough to you and you get deep enough with it, it’s going to be important to someone else. A lot about being alive isn’t easily legible, even when the details are as sharply organized as they can be, and poetry can be a tiny, deliberate enactment of that—the intense drama in making sense of things, in making sense in and out here, in making sense at all. Poetry is the drama of still getting after IT, whatever IT is, and getting that “still getting” to someone else that really wants it.

David Bradford : part three

When you require renewal, is there a particular poem or book that you return to? A particular author?

Renee Gladman’s Calamities, Lauren Berlant and Kathleen Stewart’s The Hundreds, Rachel Blau Duplessis’s various Drafts, Fred Moten’s “On Freedom,” Andrea Actis’s “Volta: One poem,” Claudia Rankine’s Don’t Let Me Be Lonely, Anne Boyer’s “Questions for Poets”—I feel like exposing our reading loops is both irresistible and embarrassing, but here we are anyway.

To give a straight answer I’ve got to bend the question a bit because I’m most likely to return to hip hop. When I’m spent, sometimes I think 2Chainz’s “FREEBASE”—those “I came from nothing” hoots get me every time, but also: 

Work hard play hard work hard again (Freebase)
My bankroll had twins can you comprehend (Freebase)

To make sense of this thing we do, I like to be reminded of the whole maniacal theatre of confidence and hustle and survival that can go into it. Often Princess Nokia’s 1992 Deluxe gives me that too, but with a different kind of situatedness than the above—I’m thinking of “G.O.A.T.”, that “eatin’ off the land” serious joke seriously landed. I go to Jay Rock’s “WIN” for the cynical but critical mass version of the same—you know if you know it.

But lately, it’s been JID’s DiCaprio 2. JID’s a poet’s poet, an MC’s MC, an ATLien talking that shit. I’m reminded of Simone White wondering why she’s so stuck on hip hop and the moments when she may have stopped caring. This whole album’s one of those moments and a complete classic to me, but “Despacito Too” took me forever to get into. Now, though, it breaks me right into something insular but big—a chip on the shoulder, that paranoid player one, forever fresh and on refresh—and it reminds, me, on some level, poets are always playing, playing hard, even darkly:

I can be a dream, yeah, or I can be a nightmare
Born on Halloween night, it seems like a light year
Double my sprite, hey my guy do you got a light, yeah
Squash them pea, plenty lion and many bison, huh
Seen some, seen one, but it's not many like 'em
When I fry or when I die, bury me with many mics, yeah

If you can fully work out the rhythm he so fully works out here, you’re doing alright. Give it a listen. This whole poem thing is a dramatic, unreasonable confidence game we’re playing with ourselves. That good-good rap reminds me to big it up.

David Bradford : part two

Has your consideration of poetry changed since you began?

Hugely, yeah. I think, on the one hand, I was exposed to so little when I started writing poetry because I’m just old enough that the internet was much smaller for poetry then, and one had to rely on teachers and library stacks to figure out where one stood with this thing. As a weird little light-skin kid with very white teachers, that was mostly bad news for me. Then everything became reachable all the time and what I do now has been made possible by that, full stop. That’s one reason I’m always—with massive caveats, just like everyone else—grateful for the internet.

On the other hand, I think a natural shift has occurred over time, wherein I’ve moved from working to take myself seriously as a poet to working to take poetry serious as a practice. It’s a trope, no doubt, but: this stuff has kept me going, kept me alive. People taking you seriously has, on its own, next to no shelf life; I try (try) not to think about how the work will be received when I get to the reception part because the angst that can come with is has no life in it for me. So, now I work to make my days busy with the practice of this work keeping me alive. My understanding of taking that seriously, of being dead serious about how hard you have to keep pushing for that life to keep, has grown with that. It’s the way a sprint is enough to get you high at first, and by year 19 it’s running an ultra in the woods with a bad knee by headlamp in the middle of the night wondering when you’ll start vomiting. That growth is still changing poetry for me.

David Bradford : part one

David Bradford is a poet and translator based in Tiohtià:ke (Montréal), on the unceded territory of the Kanien:keha'ka Nation. He is the author of Dream of No One but Myself (Brick Books, 2021) and several chapbooks, including Nell Zink is Damn Free (Blank Cheque Press, 2017) and The Plot (House House Press, 2018). His work has appeared in The Capilano Review, The Tiny, filling Station, The Fiddlehead, Carte Blanche, and elsewhere. 

What do you feel poetry can accomplish that other forms can’t?

I don’t know that there really is that much poetry can accomplish that other forms can’t; I've kind of gone the hybrid camp that says (campily) it’s fiction, essays, poetry if you call it that. But I do think deciding something is poetry frees a number of things up. 

Unlike if you call it fiction or nonfiction, sending something out into the world you decides to call poetry is to send it out into a book industry convinced there’s no money to be made off it. Publishing, book distribution, book promotion, bookselling stuff and people and places often act like they’re pretty convinced in this matter, and I don’t really blame them, even if I think it’s a wrongheaded conviction. 

I think the old “poetry is economically unproductive” adage is untrue, but that it’s generally perceived that way is certainly true. Now, there’s a bit of a self-fulfilling prophecy at work in a publishing world that makes that call (don’t try too hard to sell poetry books and poetry books definitely won’t sell too hard), sure, but it’s one which, for poets, sustains an opportunity we maybe take for granted. 

Poets and poetry get to work in the dark, maybe more particularly in the economic dark. Calling something “poetry” and bringing it to publishers as “poetry” is to lean into the fact it’s been worked out somewhere away from “will it $ell,” somewhere opportunities outside of selling are easier to get to. Whether that work is good or bad doesn’t really matter to what I’m saying: the potential afforded by the form’s unprofitability branding is, maybe, “poetry” getting to do whatever the poet wants it to. By contrast, the “big publisher dream” for prose writers amounts to thousands of tiny and not-so-tiny demands for changes in direction, style, tone, point—requests made in droves by agents, acquisition editors, publishers, etc.—before a manuscript even gets a yes. A poetry collection usually has to show up already cooked or it doesn’t get served; no publisher really has the time to invest in overhauling your poetic conceit or having you add five action beats to your book of poems. They’ll take the book because they like your choices or they won’t because they don’t.

This might sound bleak but it’s a better place to be as a writer than it seems, which is the magic of it, maybe. Call it poetry as long as you can. That’s our lot.