Raina León, poet and judge for this year’s Amsterdam Open Book Prize, recently shared some thoughts on the containers, expansive and embodied spaces, and explorations occurring within and around her work and in connection with community, in conversation with Versal Editor Jennifer Arcuni. This is part 1.

JA: We're excited to have you selecting the winner and runner up for Versal’s Amsterdam Open Book Prize and it’s great to have a chance to chat today! I'm curious to hear a little bit from you about what shapes your interests as a reader?

RL: I love work that is experimenting with form, reinventing form. When I have an opportunity to read in that space, then that makes me super happy. I am drawn in not only to the meaning of the poem and how it affects my body, my understanding of the world, how it invites me into thinking about its impact beyond even my experience of it, but I am invited to think about the construction of the poem and the book itself. [I think about] how poems are in relationship to one another and how form blossoms so that you see to the flourishing of it, see it from how it begins and opens up. Authors are so mindful of that construction, whether in the single poem or in the book together, of how to reveal, how to teach us how to read. I love reading books that bring me into that, teach me how to understand the authentic world that they're creating.

I also love finding books, following authors who are able, within the slim container of the form, to hold multiple tonalities and voices. I think of the work of Lucille Clifton; she had some incredibly tight poems, right? And yet in the same poem, you can have wonder and grief and agitation and anger and advocacy and all these things within eight lines. I think on Sonia Sanchez, who has a similar practice or Gwendolyn Brooks. And then I also think about Adrienne Rich and Ross Gay, who are incredible masters of the epic poem, the extended consideration; or Patricia Smith, who has within Incendiary Art, singular poems that function independently and as part of a linked series. Together they are also their own work. I think of the poet Arisa White, who has a long poem within You're The Most Beautiful Thing That Ever Happened, which is this beautiful sustained elegy. A poem whether in the slim container, a few lines, three lines, two lines, or across the expansive book, can hold all of the fullness of who we are as human beings wrangled around and entangled to reveal something new. That fills me with wonder.

I'm interested in how the embodied understanding of the world can also be brought forth through the poem.

JA: I really love that, because something I especially love in your work is the way that your work is arranged and composed and what's conveyed in those arrangements. What are some of the mechanics or forms or elements that you're currently gravitating toward and exploring in your own work? And how do you see these as containing or disrupting or taking forward?

RL: I'm really interested in forms like the prose poem, understanding the rules of prose and turning it on its head. I love that. Exploring the boxiness of the prose poem on the page. And yet the text itself is pretty expansive, even in the use of italics or additional languages other than English to have this polyvocality that's happening within the false container of the prose poem. I myself really love bringing in multiple voices, whether it's in using marginalia and an external collective voice in sombra: (dis)locate. If you follow that book, you can see that I'm using marginalia in surprising places, and those voices directly relate to the poems. But if you take them as their own specific voice, it creates its own poem in the text. And most people, nobody has asked me about that, but that's what I was doing.

I love creating spaces for experimentation and language, whether in our spoken language or written languages or our visual languages. How do we incorporate gesture in the poem? I'm interested in how the embodied understanding of the world can also be brought forth through the poem. Those things excite me in my work, things that I'm working with now and I like to be in conversation with others who are in those same spaces.

One other thing I should say about my work is that when I speak about ancestors or when I speak about voices rather, I am speaking about the community around me, and also the community within me, if you will, of ancestors who are always in my mind or at least more pressingly in my mind these days and how I can be in relationship to understanding how I can best be in ancestral alignment within my practice, within my work in the world. What does it mean to be in connection with their liberatory practice through the struggle to find joy, and what does that mean for my legacy? I think perhaps because I've just turned 40, I'm very mindful of legacy and ancestry and ancestral alignments and future visionings.

JA: Each decade puts us into a different connection on a different level of that experience, for sure. That makes me want to ask you, how you experience literary community in the here and now. And what do you think of evolves thriving literary communities and artistic spaces?

Like, with how many people can you really be like, yo, like, what do you think about that Octavio Paz? You can't break that out at every dinner party, right?

RL: Yeah, I have been so incredibly delighted with all of the places that I have been and communities I have found along the way, whether through the LouderArts Collective in New York and the Acentos Bronx Poetry Showcase and the Acentos community, to moving down to North Carolina, being a part of the Carolina African American Writers Collective, and founding a reading series down there called Touchstones, which was in relationship with the academic space at UNC at the time, as well as the performance slam poetry community there, to moving to many different places, founding writing workshops, wherever I went, especially with youth; and then going to the Bay and being connected with initially Kevin Simmonds—who is longtime Cave Canem family for me—and his invitation to be a part of a reading that he had at Truong Tran’s home, which is just an art gallery in itself, and that immediate immersion into these intersections of literary community, and how giving and thoughtful the Bay's literary community has been for me. But place is not the only boundary of my understanding of literary community, right? I've been a part of Cave Canem and CantoMundo and the Macondo and The Ruby and the [SF] Writers Grotto and I seek community; I seek it, I establish it because I believe in immersion with one another.

We challenge one another; we excite one another with another text. We talk books and get nerded out, right? Like, with how many people can you really be like, yo, like, what do you think about that Octavio Paz? You can't break that out at every dinner party, right? So those kind of conversations and walking the streets of Berlin and singing Erykah Badu Green Eyes song with another poet, like that just doesn't always happen but it does in these circles in which I have run. And all of these communities also have been not just literary communities, but arts communities, right? With musicians and artists and visual artists, photographers, cinematographers. The communities that I've been a part of have been pretty expansive and how they have encountered the page and beyond the page and also thought about their engagement with the world, that art can make a difference in the world, that art can be a part of political and social action, that art can change, and save, your life and the lives of others like that—that belief set.

More to come, stay tuned!

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