KARAN

Thank you for your poems, Sydney. Even though we had 1133 submissions for our contest, once we came upon yours, the decision was not very hard. Your voice took each of us captive and am so deeply grateful that we get to be the home for so many of your extraordinary poems. The first poem here, “Nashville, Tennessee,” beautifully juxtaposes expectations of the South with a harsher reality. You write, “this is not the south you were promised: / marigolds, big and batwinged / off of yam-sun, blushing your neighbors’ / lawns, taro ichor leaking from your nostrils.” This expected richness is contrasted with the harsh “radnor lake grey / and heronless” winter scene. I sense this tension between expectation and reality elsewhere in your poems too. Do you find that disillusionment often serves as a catalyst for your writing? Where do your poems come from? And do you have a writing routine?

SYDNEY

Oh Karan thank you so much, thank you to you and Shannan and everyone on the ONLY POEMS team. Being Poet of the Year is such an honor and I am so grateful to become a part of the ONLY POEMS community. 

I would say that my poems come from observation first and then sound. Looking, attentiveness, granularity, specificity are my bread and butter and I’d like to think that my work reflects that. The moments that you pulled out from my poems are all the result of walking around, stopping, lingering, and learning the places and people that surround me. Once my brain latches onto a particular image it then develops, with varying amounts in between the initial observation and the writing of the poem, a set of sounds. It means that my work frequently emerges from a place of sudden sound, pattern and rhythm. It makes the writing practice really sporadic, so I wouldn’t say I have a writing routine. More so a writing rope that pulls me into poems whether I want to write them or not. 

It was interesting for me to consider disillusionment as a catalyst for my work. Living in a world where we are constantly being advertised to breeds an inherent disillusionment, one that creeps into everything we do. For me, I think I find those moments of tension to be sharpest when considering the environment. I was born and raised in Colorado and feel immense pride in being from Denver and being a poet of the Rocky Mountains. But I do think watching Denver be gentrified was my first taste of great and pervasive disappointment. I remember Colorado being so green growing up. I also remember when they first started the construction on the condos, remember the marketing campaigns for a stronger Denver, the wildlife preserve being bisected for the light rail, the amount of songbirds in my neighborhood thinning while the landscape browned and the old brick houses in Park Hill were being suffocated with white paint.  

As my colorful Colorado became less colorful to accommodate higher income transplants, what was being marketed to transplants was disappearing because of them. And what was being marketed to us as improvements was dulling the environment and dispersing our already small Black community.

KARAN

The thing I love most about these poems is that there’s a working-class consciousness about them. I find that people find it difficult to write about economic struggles and class-related experiences and your poems never let go of that. In “Nashville, Tennessee,” you write, “you / are too broke / to buy a space heater,” and in “root deeply,” the speaker starts a “tomato garden / in a halved oat milk carton,” (I love, too, how the large and the small are conflated here) and then in “Golden Glosa:” “pickpocketing raven feathers” and making a living with a squeegee. This class-consciousness has seeped into your lyric. How does your background inform the way you portray work, money, and class in your poems? Do you see your poems as a form of resistance against societal expectations or economic pressures? 

SYDNEY

For me, it would be impossible to separate lived experiences of labor from my poetry. Since I was old enough to form coherent sentences, I’ve been working. As a child I would help my mom out at the front desk of her salon, at fourteen I worked at the Denver Zoo, in undergrad there was a point where I held three jobs, and so on and so forth. The same is true for everyone in my family, they’ve been at work their entire lives. It is just me writing what I know. What I know is work, what I know is money as finite, as a barrier to entry.

I am a poet from a working-class background and so I write poems that are about myself and the people I grew up with who are working class. Can’t really do anything else. Which is why I don’t see my poems as a form of resistance against societal expectations or economic pressures. I see them as approximate depictions of my reality. 

KARAN

I’m also excited to speak about form with you. I can see that you love trying out all the different forms available to us in poetry. We read multiple golden glosas by you, a double abecedarian, and two sonnets, and were so impressed by your precision and the fact that none of your lines seemed forced. We at ONLY POEMS highly value that because when done well (as in your case!), formal poems have a spell-casting quality to them. I welcome you to share your thoughts on formal poetry — what do you think of them in general, and why do you like to practice them? What is it about the constraint of the form that is so appealing, or even liberating?

SYDNEY

I do love form, it is the part of poetry that gets me most excited to write these days. There is always a new form to discover, to try and to mash together which is my favorite way to engage with it. I’ve been obsessed with form since I was a sixth grader playing around with a sestina generator, and as I’ve gotten older I’ve become enraptured by forms that were created by Black poets — like the Golden Shovel and the Bop — or adapted by Black poets—like the American Sonnet and the Haiku. There is such a rich Black poetic tradition surrounding form that I am still researching and growing toward. But at this stage in my life it has fueled so much of my desire to explore and expand as a poet.

To answer the question about what I find so appealing about constraint, I’ll start by saying that I was recently in a workshop with the incredible Paul Tran who taught me so much about poetry on the linguistic level. Being in that workshop made me reframe the language I use around form, so instead of saying that I find constraint appealing, I want to say that I find the use of poetic devices both appealing and empowering. I like the idea of being in charge of the form rather than being constrained by it. I have a toolbox and I am able to select what works and doesn’t. I so often use the golden shovel as a tool because it allows me to work in a space of reverence—reverence for Black poetic innovation, reverence for writers like Wanda Coleman, Sonia Sanchez, and Toni Morrison whose work I often use as the basis for my golden shovels, and then reverence for the subjects of those poems. Thinking about it that way feels so much more liberating and taps into what I love so much about form, its limitless possibilities and endless histories.

KARAN

I was mystified by your titles. Despite, or perhaps due to their simplicity and directness, there’s a welcoming quality about them. I wanted to know your process behind titling your poems? Does a title usually come before or after the poem for you? Do you think of them as a door, a window, a key, or something else entirely?

SYDNEY

I started thinking critically about titles when I first read Hanif Abdurraqib’s “How Can Black People Write About Flowers at a Time Like This” when I was in high school. I loved the idea that a title could reach outside of the poem into something broader while also adding the needed background to really comprehend the poem. Reading Abdurraqib’s poem was the first time that I’d ever felt a bit of magic happening between the title of the poem and the first flourish of lyric.

To borrow your imagery, I would say that a good title is the welcome mat, the space between the body of the poem and the title is the door, and the poem is the room. I don’t know if my titles do that all of the time—I think they tend to live mostly in the contextual space—but it is my goal to always make a bit of magic between the title and the poem’s first line. 

KARAN

I see a lot of nature imagery in your poems. Here, we encounter snow, pollen, silverfish, marigolds, herons (or their absence), magnolia, wasps, ravens, rosemary, robins, silkworms, etc. and the whole tomato garden bit. I’m a fairly new plant keeper and love looking after them. There’s a tenderness about this process. I’d like to hear about your relationship with nature. How does this connection manifest in your approach to crafting poems?

SYDNEY

I feel so lucky to have had many entry points into a love of nature, the first being my mother’s kitchen sink greenhouse. Distended with orchids, aloe and ivies her collection was always spilling out onto the cutting board and her love for those plants spilled into me. But, her thumb is much greener than mine which is why I think I attached to birds. As a child I was obsessed with owls, and at one point had to be saved from a group of geese that I chased down in City Park. Birds are such enigmatic creatures, up close they feel so incongruent with human civilization. They don’t have thumbs or light bills. They’re just free. I identified with their strangeness, their non-humanness early because I felt as incongruent with humanity as I deemed the birds to be. And that feeling led me to chase down geese and black billed magpies. It led me into research about the birds of the American West and all the stunning colors and forms they take. Which, to finally answer your question, opened up a greater category of images to pull from when writing. What better description of red than something like the sapsucker, a being that evolved to be that striking shade of red. That line of thinking creates so much of the imagery in my work — if I’m going to describe something, something red, something fragile, the natural world is bursting with life that corresponds, that heightens what I’m writing about. 

KARAN

This next question has become a staple for us and I’m always delighted by the variation in the answers. So, there’s a school of poetry that believes a poet can categorize their work in one of these four ways: poetry of the body, poetry of the mind, poetry of the heart, poetry of the soul. I can, of course, see all these elements in your poems, as one would expect in any good poet. But I’d love to know where you feel you're writing from. And do you see yourself moving elsewhere?

SYDNEY

I have always struggled with the allocation of sensory experiences. I am prone to overwhelm and have found that poetry is the best way for me to organize the tactile experience of being alive. Poetry allows me to take sensorial overwhelm, accept its largess and then adapt it into something resonant.

And this process of adaptation, and really acceptance of my incompatibility with the physical into lyric is what makes me identify most as a poet of the body. Even the places where my poems come from, the ear and the eye, are fixed in the body, are rooted in the tangible world.  

I hope to one day move closer to poetry of the heart and soul, poetry that is able to be bold in its emotionality, but I know that the only way for me to reach that space is through the sensorial landscape — through sight, sound, touch. 

KARAN

Both your golden glosas are written after Toni Morrison, and in each poem you ended up creating a rich intertextual dialogue with the original text. In “Golden Glosa with Squeegee & Saxophone,” you write, “You make your living pickpocketing raven feathers from skyscraper window seals and / husking pistachios with saxophonist’s tongue.” Wow! You blend the urban and the musical in a magnificent way. How does your engagement with other writers’ work, particularly Black writers, influence your own poetic voice? (I’d love for you to speak about Toni Morrison specifically if you like, she’s one of my most favorite writers, and also Shannan’s who’s writing a book inspired by Beloved.) 

SYDNEY

Colorado is an extremely white place. And growing up there, attending majority white schools made me yearn (yearn!) for depictions of Blackness. While in high school there was a period of time where I only read Black writers because I felt desperate to link what I loved to my lived experience as a Black person.  It was during that period that I discovered writers like Etheridge Knight, Amiri Baraka, Morgan Parker. And Toni Morrison.

There’s not a week that goes by that I don’t think about Song of Solomon. It was the first Morrison novel that I’d ever read and the concept of flight, the origin of Milkman’s name, his relationships with Guitar and Hagar, none of it has ever left me. And so when I was given the assignment to write a glosa in Didi Jackson’s workshop, I knew I wanted to complicate it with the golden shovel, and I knew that I wanted to use a text that stayed with me when hunting for the forty words that would compose the poem’s spine.

I landed on the quote: “And talking about dark! You think dark is just one color, but it ain't. There're five or six kinds of black. Some silky, some woolly. Some just empty. Some like fingers. And it don't stay still, it moves and changes — " because of the way Morrison, through the voice of Pilate uses the word Black, uses repetition and texture to convey the largess of blackness as color and being, felt open enough to enter through and emerge out of. 

KARAN

It’s clear to me that you’re a poet who cares about her voice. Do you feel you’ve found your voice?  Of course this is not to say, your voice will now remain the same forever, but for now, it seems as if you’ve figured it out for yourself? Do you feel the same?

SYDNEY

It is interesting for me to think of my work as having a voice — specifically a voice that belongs to me. I see the poems as an amalgamation of voices — the church choir my mother, grandmother and uncle sing in, the ache of the Rocky Mountains, the language of poets like Langston Hughes, Evie Shockley, and Rita Dove, the thrum of the refrigerator and bell lights, the laughter of my friends and mentors, the lyric in the calls of the black-billed magpie. None of that is truly mine. Just because I’m the fly that landed on the wall doesn’t mean I own the wall. It just makes me the peculiar observer of the whole.

The question of voice is also complicated for me as a poet who writes in English. Like most writers I am someone who loves language, who spends hours hunting for the exact right words for my poems. But I can’t help but acknowledge that all that love and all that seeking is being done in a language that is incompatible with my personhood.

Maybe what is most accurate is that I am dedicated to getting the most out of a language that has been imposed upon me and so many colonized peoples. And it isn’t to say that I don’t value the English language or enjoy writing in English, but I do wonder all the time what sounds have been lost to colonization and enslavement, what is preserved in AAVE and my place in all of it.

To better answer your question Karan, I think that I have figured out very little about ‘my voice’ only that I owe so many for it, and that I have it in spite of my dis-ease with ownership. 

KARAN

What is some of the best writerly advice you’ve received so far, whether it be during your time at Iowa or now in Nashville, or even outside of institutionalized education that you’d like to share with other young writers? 

SYDNEY

The best advice I’ve ever received as a writer has very little to do with the actual practice of writing. It was advice given to me by the legendary Donika Kelly when I had the opportunity to work with her at Iowa. Through her work and her mentorship, she has given me so much and I owe so much of my success and ‘my’ voice to her.

Here’s the advice: The best thing you can do as a writer is to build community with other writers. Not only does it open up a world of joy and language, but it can reframe the meaning of success. A win for a friend is a win for me, which is why I stay winning.

This was something I needed to hear at that point in my life, when I was too busy being lonely and arrogant. And now I have an incredible community, one that suspends me in a state of celebration. 

KARAN

Recently, we decided to ask our poets for a poetry prompt at the end. Would you provide a prompt for our readers, to help kickstart a poem?

SYDNEY

Take a haiku and use it to create a golden shovel. If you’ve never written a golden shovel, one of my favorite forms created by Terrance Hayes and inspired by the incomparable Gwendolyn Brooks, you’ll be taking the words in your selected haiku and using them as the right spine for the poem. The last word of each line forms the selected haiku.

Obviously, you can turn any poem into a golden shovel, but I think the brevity of the haiku and its frequent engagement with the natural world and humor can often force you to make something particularly exciting. 

Some of my favorite haiku to try this with: 

Don’t worry, spiders, 

I keep house

casually. 

Kobayashi Issa, translated by Robert Hass

do we ease 

into death with 

workingclass abandon 

“dance haiku” Sonia Sanchez 

Gaze at the charred hills, the woebegone kiosks, we are all

God's hussies

“Twenty Five Haiku” Marilyn Chin