Between Stillness and Stirrings: Aída Esmeralda Interviews Ariana Benson

Ariana Benson is a southern Black ecopoet, a Gemini Moon, and a huge fan of shonen anime, sports, and all things cozy video games. Their debut collection, Black Pastoral  (University of Georgia Press, 2023) won the Cave Canem Poetry Prize. A Ruth Lilly and Dorothy Sargent Rosenberg Fellow, Benson has also received the Furious Flower Poetry Prize and the Graybeal Gowen Prize for Virginia Poets. Her poems and essays appear or are forthcoming in Ploughshares, Poem-a-Day, The Yale Review, The Kenyon Review, and elsewhere. Benson is a proud alumna of Spelman College, where she facilitates creative writing and storytelling workshops for HBCU students. Through her writing, she strives to fashion vignettes of Blackness that speak to its infinite depth and richness. 

Black Pastoral is available for purchase here.

From Aída Esmeralda: Black Pastoral is a collection that treks us through various Black temporalities, desires, and harbors as Benson invites us to sit with a euphony of southern Black voices and the lives they intimately and radically pave(d) for themselves. Structured in three parts (Black Past, Black as, and Black __), Black Pastoral is a project that nurtures and tends to the Black imagination, subverting the conventions of romantic pastorals and ecopoetry to allow the southern Virginia landscape to transform into a palimpsest of Black life, where often the speaker asks, “what new life can there be/without forgetting/those given over/to flame?” Benson’s poems pulse with the lush vibrations of manifold forms, inventive historical offerings, and an emotionally poignant lyric complexity. 

This interview was conducted over Zoom and later transcribed and edited in March 2023.

AE: Ariana, I’m so excited that we’re finally getting the chance to talk about your debut poetry collection, Black Pastoral. What a debut! I have to tell you–I’ve read this collection now three times, and each time my reverence for your abundant (re)imagining and tender languaging grows only more profound. There’s a devotion to research and dialogue as a method for reclamation and deep listening that feels obvious to me as a reader. I’m especially thinking about your epistolary love poems like “Dear Moses Grandy…Love the Great Dismal Swamp” and the repeating “Love Poem in the Black Field” and the conceptual nods made to theorists like Christina Sharpe and Dionne Brand.  Could you speak to your process of developing the powerful layers of historical and creative knowing and conversing that this collection tethers? 

Ariana Benson: What I don’t get to answer a whole lot about is what happens before the page, by far the most important part of my process, is that 80% of my writing happens way before I pick up the pen. I have to draft by hand. I need to feel language coming from something corporeal. Most of my process is listening, listening to family members, listening to community spaces, reading, and listening to my own curiosity. Honestly, I’m just a nosy, curious person. This lends itself to a lot of inspiration when I’m already in the space of being ready to create. A lot of times writers are told there’s this “spark,” an innate feeling. It’s not that I don't feel that “spark,” but if I'm being honest, the spark starts when I read something. It’s not a thought that exists before me–my poetry exists in the natural world–the southern world, the Black world. It’s those questions that I’ve had since I was a child that I didn’t know were there. I remember living in Virginia and going on field trips to colonial sites and you look around and see the reenactments of these battles and settler life, and as a Black child, I remember thinking this isn’t my history. But as I got older and really learned more, these memories took shapes that weren’t there as I experienced it. 

A lot of this book was me retreading childhood memories of loving the land, and also from the perspective of studying at an HBCU and having a better grasp on understanding what happened on that land. Merging too, the beauty and joy and brutality that I know is true. How that loss is reenacted– I still hold on to the area’s historical culture. I grew up in Great Bridge Virginia, where the Battle of Great Bridge happened and every year I would drive by reenactors. I ask myself, does any other state reenact the Civil Wars like Virginia does?  

I wanted my language to be really specifically plotted out. I wanted this collection to be interdisciplinary and have textual references and I wanted to do this specifically because of the movement to cite Black women outside of the disciplinary map that heeds specific inquiries about histories of Blackness. I wanted to plant those seeds in as many fields. Poetry is my field. 

AE: There’s a tension that I felt throughout Black Pastoral between stillness and stirrings, a complexity that you nod to in the Lucille Clifton epigraph you include at the beginning of the book: “Why/ is there under that poem always/ an other poem?” Even in the gentle intimacy of some of these poems, there’s also a risk, a potential for grief. In a way, this tension moves, expands, and quiets like variations of musical tempos and vibrations that carry the words through the pages. I’m thinking about poems like “Epithalamion In the Wake” and the anti-elegies too, how they celebrate and complicate singing as spiritual relief/release.  Were you conscious of the sonority of these poems as you were writing them? 

AB: It’s great that I really feel you’ve honed in on the several tensions and counterbalances of the book. I would say that my intention with a lot of the opposing themes, ideas, and emotional valances was to achieve a kind of balance. I’m so glad you mention the epigraphs—one of the conventions we hear in workshops is to avoid too many epigraphs, you don’t want to “give the poem away to the reader.” For me the epigraph served as a grounding gesture. 

Yes, the poems you mention were high lyrical investigations of a “small” moment of joy, of levity. I wanted to make sure we knew where the lovers were standing, what time it was, and how short the time they had was because of where they were in the South, because of that moment in history. Even in sequencing the collection, I had so much help. Initially the poems were in chronological order and I used the epigraphs to lay out a year’s journey, but I think the poet Sumita Chakraborty was who pulled my attention to maybe something more important than time, the emotional journey. So I started thinking about what the poems had to say to each other, creating something like equations–like my own calculus or my own affective journey of what I wanted Black Pastoral to do. 

In regards to musical terminology, something that I resonate with is staccato, where every note is short, but more than that, every note is heavily punctuated. I think my lyric sensibility is interested in prioritizing that staccato and particularly in the way I try to use enjambment. Every line is its own unit, has its own sense of meaning, there’s intentional breaks where I want them to be. I  want you to hear this even though the same note is being played. I want you to hear it every single time it comes out and really listen to the silence between them. I’m thinking about what it means to consider musical instructions when I write poems, how I might want the poem to be walking, sliding–a musicality that could let me think about the rhythm of the lyric. 

AE: Adding to my previous question, another avenue that tension resonated through was the multitude of forms you achieve in this collection too: the concrete poems, the Rorschach test as a poem, still lives, aubades, and ekphrastic poems, among others. How did you choose, trace, and behold these shapes and transformations as you wrote this book? 

AB: For this collection, I intentionally chose shapes I could easily manipulate to a certain degree. For me, I lean towards concrete poems if I feel like the poem has an overarching image metaphor. In the elder poem, a lynching scene is the emotional and visual engine. I wanted that to be seen in the poem. I’m interested in what we all really see depending on where we are, who we are, how long we are looking. Images are filtered through our own knowing. 

As far as other forms, most of my poems start off as prose and then I revise the lines to privilege that staccato and the titles. You’re making me think about the way that using similar language in titles is a gesture towards the poem–a gesture towards saying the shape, length. I would say that titles indicate form for me as well. Especially with still life poems, these are poems meditating on difficult dark themes of death, potential death, but also meditating on continued life after the window of death has opened/closed for the writer and speaker—whichever I'm occupying. Still life as a moment frozen in time but also still life, there remains, continues to be, still, life outside of this frame. I’m thinking about photography and poems, and how photos are almost a manipulation of how we experience time. We can't stop and freeze, we can't hold the moment in a mechanical stasis, but the camera can and we go back and investigate that. Several poems were inspired by photographs in Black Pastoral because it is a book interested in playing with time, in overlapping. I’m in the field now and who was there before? Poetry is a medium through which we can bend and stretch out time and a moment becomes so much longer than what we would have experienced it as. 

AE: The field alludes to the very real landscapes of the Virginian south, with swampland and plantations that reflect a complex web of Indigenous and Black resistance and land stewarding set in opposition to colonial plunder. The field is also, at times, an imaginative space where lovers, elders, and descendants reconcile and tend to each other and the flora and fauna amongst them. Can you speak to the field acting as a harbor for remembering, reckoning, and reconfiguring, a stark contrast to the romantic pastoral?

AB: I think the intense attention to the field was my own attempt to expand beyond the literal existing space of the Black field. Yes, we have the literal pasture, the place the crops were grown and tended, the brutality and suffering, but when I think Black field I think discipline and rhetorical space and cultural home–the Black field of my mind and history and my ancestors–this has been a safe place for me, a place of retreat. There were moments where there was nobody in the field but the slaves. I was wondering, if that was one of the few spaces they had to themselves, what was wrought there other than the literal land? It was important for me to posit the grief and devastation of the field and the love that occurred there and sewed there to talk to the Black field of our mind, the dream, the future. Playing with time, space— I wanted to expand the field beyond its literal meaning to capture deeper experience of those who really lived and worked and toiled and breathed there and their children too. For me, I write poems with the hope that someone walks away having learned something. I want to make the world bigger. Thinking about my poetics, I’m interested in the micro, small human moments like a hand brushing a leaf. I’m interested in writing what we might understand as a miniature moment of existence within a certain context. When we talk about history, suffering, trauma, and the loss of thousands of people, we lean toward quantification outside of any kind of context. A number can be lost in the mind, but when I tell you about one little boy who leaned down to pick a flower and almost lost his life for this I’m trying to tell you about magnitude.

AE: Your book has almost been published for six months now! It was brought into the world right before winter and here we are talking about it at the beginning of an early spring. How would you say the collection has evolved since then? How do you see its li(ves) growing in the future? How have these poems allowed you to invent new ways of being since writing them? 

AB: I want to try and stick the landing with this metaphor. What’s been interesting with this whole process, having poems become a book, is having been able to see the poems I made and tended to years ago get there. I didn't have an MFA. This book really came out of a self-taught practice of listening to podcasts and watching craft talks. It was beautiful to experience a spring of sewing and writing and a summer and fall of harvesting and publishing. And if the book was planted when we were just about to turn towards the sun, now I’m really reaping the pleasures of that work. An interesting process has happened for me as a poet and writer. If when writing Black Pastoral I was creatively “in season” then now I’d say I’ve been in a fall/winter. I have had to go through a professionalization of being a writer. I think we should talk about that more. Sure, writer’s block is common, but I think we can conceive of it more as a needed hibernation that we need to go through in order to let that field go fallow. I struggled with that and I wasn’t prepared. 

While half of the year the book has been in the light, the poet me has been in the shadows. I do think that I feel especially distant from Black Pastoral as a thing I wrote, that is finished, and in the world. As I get new inspirations I feel those days getting longer, I see the light starting to get there again. All that to say that there’s a duality and seasonality to my writing life. It has been a gratifying journey in all seasons. As for future projects, I grew up a little black girl so immersed in so many kinds of visual media, anime, and so I’ve been reading and imagining a lot of essays right now. I’m thinking about how images of Black womanhood in the media shaped the world I saw and the way I grew up seeing myself. Poetry for me is a medium of exploring the world and will always remain that way, but I'm less interested in myself as a poetic subject than I am in finding a way to find interest in myself as a lyric subject. 

Aída Esmeralda is a queer Salvi poet and interdisciplinary tinkerer from Woodbridge, VA. She received her MFA in Poetry at ASU.