Monica Prince teaches activist and performance writing at Susquehanna University in Pennsylvania. She is the author of How to Exterminate the Black Woman: A Choreopoem ([PANK], 2020), Instructions for Temporary Survival (Red Mountain Press, 2019), and Letters from the Other Woman (Grey Book Press, 2018). Her work appears in The Texas Review, American Poetry Journal, Madcap Review, and elsewhere. She is the managing editor of the Santa Fe Writers Project Quarterly, and the co-author of the suffrage play, A Pageant of Agitating Women, with Anna Andes.
She will serve as the judge for this year’s Minerva Rising Dare to Be Poetry Chapbook Contest.
Emily Lake Hansen[ELH]: First of all, how are you? How are you dealing with the world at large right now as an artist and a teacher? How has your work been changed or impacted by the current year?
Monica Prince[MP]: Mostly, I’m fine. At first, I was drowning in a lot of disappointment and stress, scared for my life and my family. My book came out in April, launched at AWP, and a week after the conference, the entire country shut down. My book tour was canceled, all of my appearances and workshops postponed indefinitely. In the beginning, I felt like my work, which relies heavily on performance and live interaction, no longer mattered
As a teacher, I spent a lot of time trying to comfort my students. I’m in charge of our program’s senior capstone course, so most of my students every semester are seniors, who were devastated at having their lives abruptly stopped. In the spring, our first two weeks of virtual classes, I hosted nearly 60 individual Zoom conferences with students who were back in their hometowns working, caring for family members, doing their homework in closets and the backseats of cars, recording their poems in their backyards and basements, writing me feverous emails about their anxiety and fear and safety. So many of my students went home to families that don’t support their gender identities, sexual orientations, or partners. They returned to unsafe spaces rife with abuse, dismissal, and poor communication. Most of my students were fine. But many of my most vulnerable ones were not.
As an artist and a teacher, I’ve always taught with a compassion-focused pedagogy. Trauma-informed pedagogy has shaped much of this, as well as Critical Race Theory and other forms of pedagogy rooted in the empathy of differing perspectives and backgrounds. Though my classes are still difficult and my students still work very hard, every decision in the classroom is based around the support of my students as people, as young artists looking to restructure their lives. I found it difficult to write during this year, and only by forcing myself to through challenges and self-imposed deadlines did I manage to create work that didn’t need to be experienced live on a stage. I imagine after this is all over, I will have created work that can be translated into virtual spaces, not just a floating head on a screen but an actual performance that impacts audiences the way my in-person choreopoems have in the past.
ELH: You work in particular with a genre you call choreopoems. Can you tell us a little more about choreopoems and what attracts you to writing them?
MP: Of course. The choreopoem is a genre created by Ntozake Shange, may she rest in peace, in 1975 with her groundbreaking show, For colored girls who have considered suicide / when the rainbow is enuf. That choreopoem used poetry, dance, music, and song to combine the elements of theatre with poetry. Before slam poetry, there were choreopoems.
I’ve been writing them since college, inspired heavily by Shange and other women working in theatrical spaces. Thankfully, I’m not the only person creating these shows, but I’ve noticed that many of them are created by women. Not sure why.
In short, a choreopoem is a choreographed series of poems that blends performance poetry, dance, music, art, and other forms of performance media together on stage. Think a dance recital, choir concert, art exhibit, poetry slam, and parkour video presented as a play. I’m drawn to choreopoems because they combine art forms. I’m not limited to just poetry or just drama or just dance. I’m able to include all these physical experiences that I love in one place, and that allows people to enter the work from different doors. A musician might experience a choreopoem differently from a dancer or singer or poet or hip-hop artist, and they all might experience it differently from someone who doesn’t even engage in art. Choreopoems are about access, and the more ways diverse audiences can access the art, the better the impact.
ELH: We are obviously in the middle of a big culture reckoning right now in terms of the history and continuing reality of systemic racism in our country. Your poetic work, in particular your most recent chapbook How to Exterminate the Black Woman, deals with some of those themes. What role do you think poets and artists can have or take on within these larger moments? What about presses and literary journals?
MP: I think it’s Nina Simone who says that it’s the role of the artist to represent the times. It’s our duty as artists to use our work to reflect what’s happening around the world. If I, as a Black American woman, didn’t use at least some of my art to call attention to lynchings, the systematic genocide of folx of color, or the social inequities our government perpetuates, I’m not living up to my expectation as an artist. Historians hold the stories of the past so that we may not repeat them; artists must give the human perspective, the perspective ignored by the winners, the perspective that promises those living in oppressed systems that they are not crazy.
My chapbook/choreopoem How to Exterminate the Black Woman was written out of anxiety about the 2016 election. After November, I watched as trans students committed suicide, Black and Brown folx get harassed and violently assaulted, and womxn lose the will to fight to protect their own bodies from unwanted attention. Those things were happening before 2016. They were happening for centuries before America existed. But in 2016, my best friend from college got pregnant, and I found myself asking the same question I asked when I first read Harriet Jacobs’ Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl — “Why do Black women keep having children?”
Slavery followed the condition of the mother — so if the mother was enslaved, her children would be, too. We’ve reappropriated this policy in new ways — if one generation is poor, all following will be poor; if one person is a criminal, the entire family is condemned — but the worst part of this idea is that it puts Black women in a dangerous position. We don’t get a choice if we will have children; it’s expected of us. It’s our responsibility to make sure the race stays on Earth. We must keep having children to fight for the generations of slaves, sharecroppers, servants, and students who have died for our right to vote, own property, attend school. It’s on the Black woman to birth the next generation of freedom fighters, children who must then take up the torch to fight for a few more inches toward the Promised Land.
It’s not fair.
I wrote How to Exterminate the Black Woman because I didn’t want to be responsible for bringing more children to the slaughter. I could not bear trading vicarious grief for my own, just because if I don’t pass on what I know to my own progeny, my life suddenly loses its meaning. I wrote this choreopoem because I wanted to reimagine legacy, to think about different ways to train and support those who come after me. But mostly, I wanted to prove to my own mother, who I don’t believe ever planned on being a mother, that she did a good job, that her choice to bring my siblings and me into the world wasn’t in vain. The decision to give birth as a Black woman is more than just wanting to have children to nurture and mentor; it’s about accepting that one day a cop or a neighborhood watch member or a white supremacist or a good guy with a gun may see your child and decide the world would be brighter without them in it. It’s praying every time your child leaves home that they won’t move their hands too quickly to their pocket to produce an ID, or cut off someone in traffic who carries a shotgun in the front seat, or look threatening.
I wrote this show because I wanted people to know that Black women historically put the needs of the culture above their own, choose the possibility that their child could save the whole race over the more likely scenario that they won’t live past 25.
ELH: I found How to Exterminate the Black Woman to be wonderfully harrowing and powerful. I was in particular really drawn to the way the characters’ names would play directly into the lines they were speaking, so that there was a layer to the reading of the choreopoem that may not even be present on the stage. How carefully do you think about the difference between performance and reading as you are writing the choreopoems?
MP Performance is part of my writing process. Every poem I write, I imagine its performance. I imagine who is speaking, how quickly, what their bodies are doing during each line. The sestina is an interesting poetic form because on the page, the reader can tell the poem is repeating itself, can hear the differing word forms and how the lines have to reinvent themselves to accommodate the form. But in performance, it mostly sounds like everyone is saying the same thing over and over again, so the best way to avoid that experience is to train the performers how to say their lines. A good director or performance coach can do that very well.
The second poem in the show, “When Asked About Power, I’ll Tell Them–,” has the characters reading the lines that feature their names. I did this because in my earlier choreopoems, audience members found it difficult to follow the different characters because they never heard their names. Because poetry doesn’t necessarily require characters to name themselves or dialogue between characters, there was no real way to tell the audience, “Hey, this person is named Michelle.” To avoid that confusion, I had the characters say their names in the poem, while linking their names to the colors they wore, so the audience could link them by color if not by name.
To write a successful choreopoem, it’s important to consider the performance aspect of each poem alongside the aesthetic on the page. Of course, I never really know what it’s going to look like outside of my brain, so workshop is helpful for ironing out what the audience will understand or perceive.
ELH: What do you think separates a chapbook like How to Exterminate the Black Woman from a full length project, aside from page count itself? Do you think differently in writing a chapbook vs. a collection?
MP: How to Exterminate the Black Woman as a chapbook was written that way on purpose. The entire show revolves around the number 6, so there could only be so many poems (there are 18) to align with that number. I have other choreopoems that are much longer — before the page formatting, How to Exterminate the Black Woman was 35 pages, and now it’s like 48 or something — and those would still not be considered full-length projects because essentially, there aren’t enough poems.
When I create a collection, I’m looking somewhat at how many poems there are, but also about breadth of content. In my first full-length collection, the poems aren’t just about race and womanhood; they discuss mental illness, sexual intimacy, rape, family, inhertance, and loss. The poems wouldn’t work as a chapbook because they’re less connected the way my other shorter collections are.
In grad school, I remember one of our poetry professors telling us that a chapbook was a collection of poems (or one poem, as the case sometimes may be) that was concerned with a central image or idea. One that the poet couldn’t sustain beyond maybe 20 poems. That was the most helpful definition at the time — take your poetry preoccupations and put them together. I did that for my first chapbook, Letters from the Other Woman, because I knew those poems wouldn’t work beyond the fourteen or so that make up that chapbook.
Alternately, that definition only works if you have a small number of poems relating to the same thing, right? Terrance Hayes wrote an entire book of American sonnets because 20 wasn’t enough. Ross Gay wrote a whole collection on gratitude because 12 wasn’t enough. Tina Chang wrote a whole book on the concept of being a hybrid because the zuihitsu required her to keep writing and writing and writing. My next choreopoem, theoretically, will also end up being a chapbook because it’s focused on the idea of pleasure. But who knows? I might surprise myself and create a choreopoem that’s also a full-length collection.
ELH: What sorts of things are you drawn to in the chapbooks you pick to read? What’s your favorite chapbook you’ve read recently?
MP: I’m most interested in chapbooks that are concerned with a controlling image or idea — something sustainable over several poems but maybe not over dozens of pages. It’s the kind of work that allows poets to explore their preoccupations without fear of boring their audience. During August, I completed the #SealeyChallenge, orchestrated by Nicole Sealey: you’re supposed to read one poetry book/chapbook a day for the entire month, posting your mini-review and the covers on social media. Last year, I only made it to Day 13, but this year I finished it! The massive benefit to the challenge, beyond shouting out publishers and authors, is the ability to plow through my bookshelf of unread poetry books.
I read a lot of chapbooks, and I was blessed to have had so many. I loved Luther Hughes’ Touched. That book illuminated issues of assault as related to the Black masc-centered body in ways I hadn’t seen before. I also loved Jessica Fischoff’s The Desperate Measure of Undoing, as it focused on the femme-centered body through persona poetry (something I find difficult to do so I was super impressed by her control). I can’t wait to read more. The chapbook is an underappreciated form. My students produce them every year in droves, and they don’t seem to understand that these are collections that the public wants to read.
ELH: Are you working on any new projects now? Or do you have any big goals for yourself this year in terms of writing?
MP: I’m writing a new choreopoem this year called Insert [Fantasy] Here, a show that focuses on pleasure and being polyamorous. It’s a show I’ve wanted to write for a long time, but I haven’t had the resources to do it because most of my performed scholarship involves the use of college students. I’m excited to be working on something that isn’t about them or for them (which sounds cruel, but literally everything else I do is for them, so…).
There’s other stuff, too. I wrote a suffrage play with my colleague Anna Andes this past spring, A Pageant of Agitating Women, so we’re working on revising and completing that for publication after its final workshop performance in October. I’m also the managing editor for Santa Fe Writers Project, and I’m currently in charge of diversifying our catalog. So I’m signing new authors of color and developing their books with them. Plus, I run the SFWP Quarterly, so I’m curating that journal every few months.
My biggest goal for this year, in terms of writing, is to land a fellowship that will give me time away to write and revise. Between grad school and my grownup job at Susquehanna, I participated in so many writing retreats and fellowships, and I’m longing for that time to work. I love teaching and advising and curating university experiences for my students, but I love my poetry more. I have put it before lovers and jobs and stability my whole life, and a pandemic, a civil rights movement, and a tumultuous election aren’t going to change that priority for me.
Additionally, because we’re back on campus (with some of the strictest restrictions in the state), I’ve challenged my poetry students to write one poem for every day of the semester (weekends included). It comes out to about 104 poems, assuming we don’t get shut down. Doing that has opened my writing up to new heights. I’m hoping that the constant generation of work will help me create new pieces for the choreopoem I’m writing, as well as potentially help me shape my next poetry collection. But I’m honestly less interested in the traditional publishing of poetry books for myself. I have always been more excited about publishing choreopoems. So far, Shange is the only one to do it more than once. I hope to join her and surpass her record one day.
That’s how I want legacy to work. Not just with children and yearly memorial celebrations. But with competition and reverence. When I’m gone, I hope scholars will compare me to Ntozake Shange, will say our names in the same breath, will see what we did and think, “I will do that, too, and more.