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Khadijah Queen, Author, Poet
November 23, 2018 /in Interviews, Interviews, Winter-Spring 2019 /Interviewed by Jordan Nakamura
Photo Credit: Michael Teak
Khadijah Queen (to remix two very famous quotes by Walt Whitman and Lionel Blue) contains multitudes like everybody else, only more so.
In one sense, the scope of her work is so radically diverse in form and genre that it's difficult imagining all of it coming from one author. Queen describes a literary life that involves reading through a bookstore alphabetically at an early age. It makes sense that an artist with that level of drive and curiosity would explore as many different forms as possible.
But in another sense, it also applies to her personhood and the many valences and roles that Queen lives out through her real life.
Her latest book, I'm So Fine: A List of Famous Men and What I Had On, contains a multitude of clothing outfit descriptions and the anecdotes the speaker experiences while in them. Each poem explores the internal engines hinted at by very external details and interactions. The book blooms into an outside-in interrogation of the male gaze and power dynamics at large, a focus and critique that has remained evergreen in our still-patriarchal society. Her poems are also full of humorous stories, recorded banter, and the animated energy of a flood of memory.
She is wise, as eager to laugh as to go deep into theory or historical issues, committed to justice and, with a dedicated but almost casual air, she redefines and challenges what is possible for herself and by extension all of us.
Jordan Nakamura: Hi! First of all, I know I speak for so many of us when I say we are so excited and honored to have you as a faculty at Antioch. Welcome back! And congratulations on your beautiful book.
Khadijah Queen: Thank you.
JN: I thought I'd ask you about I'm So Fine first. In addition to detailing these amazingly vivid and often nostalgic outfits, we get to hear what the speaker has read (Sula, The Salt Eaters, The Autobiography of Malcolm X), almost like "what I had on" includes "what I had on my mind."
KQ: I love that! I hadn't even thought of that, but I'll take it!
JN: Done! It was your idea all along! So, it's clear that books were on your mind, and I'm curious as to when your writing life started. When did you decide you wanted to be a poet?
KQ: That's a good way to put it, "decide." I started writing at a young age and reading at a young age. My dad taught me to read when I was like three, and would read me the newspaper. I don't remember not reading. We always had books around, and somebody was always reading something regardless of whether or not they went to college.
My grandmother's living room had one side with a tv and the rest of the walls were all books, and she didn't finish high school. It was just a part of my life growing up.
So I was writing poetry in high school and I was writing in the [military] service. I still have some of those really bad poems…
JN: [laughs] I'm sure we all do.
KQ: Really bad! But I didn't say "I want to be a writer" until I took a class called Modern Poetry in undergrad and read more contemporary work. Up until then everybody being taught was dead—I didn't know anybody alive who was writing poetry. But then I read Lucille Clifton and Czesław Miłosz and I was just like, "Wow, this is amazing, I love this!" and I just started reading more.
There was a Barnes & Noble a block from my house, and I would go there and just start with "A." I read everything in the bookstore and when I finished that, I went to the library and did the same thing.
Maybe six months to a year after I started writing, I'd start turning in work to be published and they'd just be like "I'm returning what you have sent me" and not even calling it a poem! But it didn't make me feel discouraged, it made me want to do better. That was in my mid-20s.
JN: I'm So Fine feels like a very especially '90s era LA book, not only in that it's mostly set in LA, but also how it presents a chronicle of life punctuated in celebrity sightings. Like you mention, you and everyone else maybe don't see so many celebrities everywhere now, but—
KQ: Yes because there was no internet.
JN: Right.
KQ: Like, we couldn't follow them on Instagram, we had to follow 'em in the mall. Or at a restaurant or whatever. No online shopping, so the only place they went to get their high-end clothes was the Beverly Center.
JN: I was thinking about how the book is kind of this record of that time, and so I view it partially as an archive. Do you ever think about archival work, and if so, what are things you are driven to attempt to preserve in your work?
KQ: You know, I hadn't thought about it consciously, so I'm glad you asked that question, but I definitely do that and am interested in that. I'm reading this book right now called The Work-Shy by Blunt Research Group, which goes through the archives of testimonies of and about people who were in this detention facility for youth where the goal was eugenics, and they were basically imprisoned and forcibly sterilized—and the book is these erasure-poems of those testimonies.
So I'm very much interested in finding things in history that have not been told, or [have been] ignored, or that have been suppressed and bringing those things out in the open. Think about a "great American novel," for example, we don't really think about a black girl in South Central LA. That's not the first thing we think about… but it's the first thing I think about, because that was me.
But we all can relate to these stories too. I mean, we all have issues with what we are wearing and strive to try to show off what we wear, maybe it's actively trying to be nondescript or not care, but we all have an opinion about what clothes we have on. And, also, it's just really fun!
JN: It is! Now, it seems like our country is (finally) starting to have a serious national conversation about accountability, abusers, silenced victims, and institutions. Your book addresses aspects of that conversation on an everyday level, to where it's not just talking about only prestigious women, and it also speaks across generations. I was wondering at what point in the project did you notice that taking shape, as in, did you set out with it, or did you more realize the work was speaking to that conversation…?
KQ: Not until the revision, when I had a good number of them. I wrote them in a poem-of-the- day project called The Grind and people would respond that they'd want to hear more of them because they were funny. But as I kept recalling these circumstances, these feelings started to accumulate like, hey, wow, this is pretty… horrible. [laughs] But we were trained to laugh about it, we were trained to just move on, we were trained to say this is how it's supposed to be. And it's not until you were out of that environment, honestly, that you think how messed up it actually is. And plus, with what was brought up with the election, like we basically have a serial abuser as the leader of our country. But circling back to my family and the archive, in new work, I'm thinking about the legacy of sexual assault and the absence of choice. I'm going back to ancestors of mine who were kidnapped and brought here and forced to bear children for their enslavers and addressing how that has passed down across generations.
JN: You mentioned how these were written as a result of grind poems, which is such a hard thing—or at least it was for me when I've done it before. Do you believe in setting aside a kind of regular time, do you just kind of write when you feel "inspired," etc.?
KQ: I mean, I believe in it generally.
JN: Haha!
KQ: [laughs] And I did it for six years. I wrote every day for six years. That's how I got four books written! So I recommend it if you respond to it and it's something you feel excited about and it's not a weight or a burden. For me it was very powerful because I had gone through a period of not writing for six months, so even if it wasn't a poem, if it was just a line or a sentence, I just wanted to write something. Then I had surgery in 2015, and I was on medication and my brain wouldn't let me do anything. Except heal, and order takeout, and watch Basketball Wives, haha.
JN: All under the umbrella of healing!
KQ: Yep, I totally binged on Basketball Wives and Game of Thrones and I did not write, because every time I'd try to write, my brain was just not working. That was tough. That was like a mourning period for me because I had to change the way I thought about my writing practice.
But I did eventually get back to the feeling of working in a burst, and I had all this material that I'd collected from previous writing, and I just sat down and finished two books that following summer, so, like, a year or so later.
So now I think it's a combination of both: I'll get in a mode where I need to write every day or I'll get into a mode where I'll just do it as it comes. But I find that I write books better after a period of writing every day for a while and then having the time to myself to make the book happen.
I wrote them in a poem of the day project called The Grind and people would respond that they'd want to hear more of them because they were funny. But as I kept recalling these circumstances, these feelings started to accumulate like hey, wow, this is pretty… horrible
JN: Like in revision.
KQ: Yes.
JN: You've shared really valuable advice on literary citizenship. Could you talk a bit about what that means for you, how you practice it?
KQ: I would like to be the kind of writer who participates in making the field more inclusive, and more humane and more expansive creatively. Whatever that looks like in terms of teaching or my professional actions. I try to keep in mind the idea of further humanization and professionalization of the field, just as a general baseline.
JN: Sometimes the idea of citizenship can feel very public, but how do you protect your interior life?
KQ: Yes, I think I'm not necessarily into the whole loud or public part of being a citizen. I like to just watch what's going on and work behind the scenes, like, "I see you, I see what you're doing." But I don't mind if it comes to me being more vocal and public. I'm not afraid of it, but I want it to be on my own terms and, again, in terms of further professionalization and not anything to do with sensationalism, invasion of privacy, or disrespecting the confidence of people who have confided in me. Their trust is very important to me and that's the number one thing, I think. I don't want to be in a position to be asked to impugn my integrity.
JN: I find your work really models a sense of fearlessness and play. I feel like poetry is sometimes boxed in to certain emotions like sadness or frustration, but I wonder how much fun and playfulness get understated. Do you think about this in your work consciously, and how important are the aspects of play and fun in your writing?
KQ: You know, I was talking about this the other day at this place called The Lighthouse Writers Workshop where I teach in Denver, and we were talking about genre concerns. I was saying how it took me forever to write this memoir in the Navy because it was such tough shit, but I finally found the thing that made it fun. So now it's coming, and I don't have to stress out about it, I can just write it.
So fun for me is a way to access completeness. It can't just be, like, a cesspool of sadness. It can't! I'm not gon' make it! I have to be able to enjoy my life, what I'm doing. I need joy and fun, especially when I'm dealing with rougher aspects of the content.
JN: What advice do you have for fostering fearlessness, not being worried, retaining the excitement and fun and play of writing?
KQ: I don't know how fearless I am, I just have to do it anyway. Even when I'm scared. But I have a lot of practice. It just takes practice. When I was in the service, I was afraid of heights. And I'm also not the best swimmer, but we had to dive off a ten-foot diving board and swim across the whole pool in order to get the hell out of boot camp! I was terrified, but we had to do it anyway. It's fine to be terrified, but have a lot of support, try to have a great community around you.
And sometimes your fear will tell you what you shouldn't be doing. So if you really are afraid of something, and it will feel traumatic to share, then that might just be for you. I was at a workshop with Sharon Olds, and she said she has multiple books that she has not shared. Because it's not for anyone else, it's just for her. So it's recognizing what your own boundaries are too.
JN: In Fearful Beloved, you write in one of the poems addressed to Fear: "I don't want to keep looking at what I have already survived."
And also in I'm So Fine, you write: "so much happened between us I could write a book about it but I've lost interest in pain."
It reminds me of what some poets, in particular poets of color, are coming around to: that a lot of people want us to write about pain in order to be read or seen at all. But it can kind of turn into this re-traumatization cycle that, whether rewarded or not, is at best exhausting. It's really refreshing to witness what feels like a radical resistance to this in the poem itself. How do you think about life-sustaining habits that support your well-being, your interests, your enthusiasms, to move beyond mere survival?
KQ: Well first of all, I know people might have issues with this but, like, go to therapy. Handle your personal shit so that you can emerge into the writing stronger with a greater sense of who you are and what you're capable of doing. I've certainly did it. I still do it. It's super helpful! It's a health issue. It's like getting a check-up. So that's number one, as a life habit, if you have access. And if you don't have access to it, maybe researching some free resources, even through your school, like from Antioch even and saying, "Look, I need some help with this issue, do you know of any free resources?"
Also, I'll say again, having a supportive writing community, that is non-toxic and uplifting and helps you be at your most productive.
What else… Read me the question again?
JN: I mean what you said is good! Like, "art is not the same as therapy." Amen.
KQ: It's not! And it doesn't mean you can't say what's going on with you, but in order to have a little bit of distance to sort of elevate it beyond "this horrible thing happened to me" and to make it relevant beyond your experience, I think it takes dealing with your personal shit.
JN: I'm struck and inspired by your attentiveness to everyday things often overlooked: you wrote letters to your Fear in Fearful Beloved. You wrote a play where small and strange objects take center stage. You weave an LA tapestry through a personal but also what feels like a more collective feminine consciousness through often subtle gestures in interactions and details of outfits. Do you feel any connection to the ecstatic tradition in your love, in your attentiveness? Or what voices or directions do you feel drawn to and who do think are kindred spirits also moving to where your enthusiasms travel and dwell?
KQ: I certainly love exuberance. Muriel Rukeyser writes about it quite a bit in her book The Life of Poetry which is the first craft book I ever read. I was still in the military and just came across it in the bookstore. And she was a single parent also, so I was really inspired by her work. And she talked about the fear of poetry and that being rooted in the fear of emotion.
And I think that's something that as a society we are still struggling with, really deeply. Like we are afraid to talk about what we feel because we are afraid people [will] use our feelings against us. But poetry demands that we talk about those feelings, deal with them, and reflect back, you know, our life choices and our thinking around very large ideas captured in these tiny snippets.
So that's what I love about poetry, I don't know what else to say about that. I read a lot of Rumi when I first started. I just took a Melville class: he's super exuberant! Even though he's super problematic! But he was doing the best he could, I guess, in the 19th century. But he had this deep exuberance and love for writing that I appreciated very much and that I appreciate in some of the newer writers that are coming up. Like, be free. Freedom! Freedom is wonderful.
JN: Shout-out to Freedom! You mention Fred Moten in an epigraph to a poem in Fearful Beloved. Both of you have a strong interest in experimental writing. What does experimental writing mean to you? Perhaps in the sense of how you both explore liberation through the improvisational space of experiment.
KQ: Yes! I love improvisation. I grew up listening to a lot of jazz too, so it just feels natural. And also, I just like to make up stuff. I don't like having limits on what I can do, I don't like being told how I'm supposed to do something. Sometimes constraints are delightful; I like forms too. But my interest in experiment came from wanting to do as much as possible.
JN: A lot of people reading this interview will likely be involved in literary institutional spaces at some capacity. Clearly, the literary community has been long in desperate need for swift and serious accountability so that people can feel safe, supported, believed, and overall like they can focus on being an artist. What are some of the ways you are seeing progress in institutional accountability? What are ways you wish more people would practice to help each other along the path toward a safer, more professional, and nurturing environment in institutional (and really any) spaces?
KQ: I want to see our field be more professional. That means treating people with respect, it means listening, it means if someone says, "Hey, this behavior harms me," correcting yourself—being willing to be corrected. Not using your power to hurt other people. Letting people go to work without interfering, like can we go to work? Let's do that.
I think that's probably the work of my life: thinking about how I can just go to work without some creep harassing me or treating me badly because of my gender, race, disability, whatever it is. Can we just make room for everybody who comes to work, to work? It's very simple.
JN: You've graduated from and have taught now at multiple low-res programs. What was your draw to low-res programs as a student and now as a faculty?
KQ: Well, as a student, I was working full-time and I had a kid so I couldn't do a full residency, it just was not going to happen. For the teaching, I only teach at two, Regis and now at Antioch. Regis just asked me, and they seemed cool, so I was like sure!
And they are, they're amazing! And the same thing with Antioch. I just like talking about poems. If they're going to say, "Hey, you wanna come talk about poems," pretty much I'm going to do it if I have the time to do it.
JN: Yes, I don't know if it was you who was saying this, but I think you mentioned there is like an advantage sometimes to the way the packets work in low-res programs because of the rigor in terms of feedback on the page—or maybe that was Carol Potter…
KQ: I think that was Carol Potter. I don't have as much experience as Carol does. It's definitely a challenge to manage time and give students the feedback that they deserve, so I just try to organize my schedule so I do it in a period when I have that time. And hopefully they'll be sending their stuff in on time so it don't mess up my flow!
JN: Haha.
KQ: I love working with students, with both manuscripts and individual poems. For a long time, I worked a regular job, so I'm kinda like a newbie at this whole jam, so I just want to help people figure out what to read that will help them do what they would like to do, and share what I know in this almost twenty years of being a writer.
JN: …So you're not really a "newbie."
KQ: [laughs] Yes newbie to the academic side, but certainly not a newbie to poetry.
JN: It seems that you've had a voracious reading life. What does that look like presently, what kinds of things do you read: genres, titles, time periods, etc.?
KQ: I'm in a PhD program now, so I'm—like my brain's going to explode, because I'm reading a lot. We had to read all of Melville's prose…
JN: Wow.
KQ: I might have skimmed some. Such as Pierre, which was horrendous. So, yes, all of Melville. I really like the 19th Century I found out actually, because they have this interaction between race and gender and class that is very stark, but also seems to parallel like the underneath of what's going on now. Frances Ellen Watkins Harper is a poet that I've been looking at. She wrote a poem called the "Bible Defense of Slavery"—
JN: Wow…
KQ: —which reminds me of how Sessions is trying to use the Bible to defend his actions.
JN: Yeah, what the hell?!
KQ: Ain't nothing new under the sun, man! I love world literature. I love contemporary writers. I just bought Not Here by Hieu Minh Nguyen, and one of my colleagues at DU is Diana Khoi Nguyen, whose book, Ghost Of, is fucking incredible. It's about her brother who committed suicide a few years ago and it has text with cut-outs of her brother because he cut out his picture from the family pictures before he did what he did, and so she made poems in the shape of his absence.
JN: Oh my god…
KQ: I'm saying. And I just finished reading Alexander Chee's How to Write an Autobiographical Novel, and I mentioned The Work-Shy earlier… Oh, one of my favorite books I just read in the last year is Dionne Brand's Map to the Door of No Return, which is sort of trying to reconcile ancestry that has been interrupted by the displacement of slavery, and tracing those roots across the world.
JN: Yes, Dionne Brand is awesome. In addition to your poetry, we got to hear some of the novels… Or is it a memoir, or a novel, I don't know what to call it…
KQ: Prose? It's prose.
JN: The prose piece! So I'm not sure how much you want to talk about that since it's in- process, but I found it refreshing to hear about what many identify as another very male-dominated space, from your perspective. You've explored so many different genres. What made you want to tell that story in prose? And what strengths do you find in the other forms you've worked in?
KQ: I felt it was too big for poetry. I needed to tell the whole story, but, like, the multiple stories. I have written a little bit about it in Fearful Beloved but, I don't know. That voice wasn't going away and I started writing it a really long time ago.
I haven't seen any military literary work by black women, so I think we need that because there are a lot of us. I think that often, just with military people in general, there's a feeling that people don't want to know what really happened. Like, behind that whole "thank you for your service" thing, they don't really want to know what that service really is. So I'm just being that person saying, "This is what that service is like, in all of its nuances."
JN: What has been bringing you joy? What do you love that you love right now?
KQ: Oh, man, I love getting my nails done! Haha, they have this new thing called powder dip! Or whatever they call it, dip powder. And it, like, it lasts forever. And it's all sparkly and it doesn't break. It's so awesome. What else? Sleep. Because I'm… deprived.
JN: Somebody once—I feel like somebody tweeted this, something like, "Actually, no-sleep is the cousin of death." And I never forgot that.
KQ: [laughs] Yes! I love naps, naps are everything. I found that when I started the PhD, that, because I was taking in so much information, I really had to sleep in order to integrate it. I don't really have, like, traditional ideas of fun. Like, I don't go hiking, or I don't go skiing or do any of that. I like to go to the movies. I see the movies that I like more than once.
JN: Oh, yes, repeat viewings are important.
KQ: Like, I just re-watched Black Panther.
JN: If you've only seen it once, have you really seen it…
KQ: You haven't! You really need to wait until you memorize it. And then you see it again and repeat it back to the television. I like traveling. I like hanging out with my kid. And I like talking about poems.
JN: I'm going to borrow this last question from Rachel Zucker, who hosts Commonplace.
KQ: Yes, I love her!
JN: Is there any question that no one has asked you, that you're like, "How come no one's asked me this yet?"
KQ: Hmm.
JN: I know it's kinda strange because I'm like, "Look for what you've never seen…" But you seem to be good at that, so…
KQ: Yes… Hmm. One second… "How has motherhood made you a better writer?" That's what I wish. Instead of the other question which is, "How do you do it?" I'm so over that question. But my son and my writing were basically born at the same time. So I wouldn't be a writer, I don't think… or I wouldn't be the same kind of writer if I wasn't responsible for this other human life. Thinking about creativity in terms of the kind of world I want him to live in. What kind of intellectual space I would love to present to him to be available for him to occupy.
JN: That's really good. Yes, I feel like motherhood is kind of an under-explored, or at least really misunderstood topic in literary spaces. That whole idea that somehow you can't do both or—
KQ: Yes, people presume it's interfering or whatever and it—I mean, I try to think about it differently. Like it was harder for me to write prose having a kid all by myself, but some writers can do it.
I just want to put it out there that children are not an interruption. Sometimes it can be an inspiration. And however motherhood shows up in your writing life, or not at all, because that is a choice that ought to be respected as well, we do ourselves a disservice when we presume that children are burdensome to our creative output. They can exist alongside one another in beautiful ways.
JN: That's great. Thank you so much, this was fun.
KQ: It was a pleasure.
Jordan Nakamura is a poet and serves as the graphic design lead as well as co-lead editor for poetry and visual art for Lunch Ticket. He was born and raised in Hawaii and lives in Los Angeles.
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