This article is part of a regular series of conversations with the Review’s contributors; read past ones here and sign up for our e-mail newsletter to get them delivered to your inbox each week.
In August Nicole Sealey essayed for the NYR Online a consideration of Cowboy Carter, Beyoncé’s Beyoncé–cum–country album, that doubled as a history of Black people’s contributions to the genre. “Country music by Black artists obviously exists,” Sealey wrote, “and has ever since the genre’s beginnings, but one is usually hard pressed to hear Black country songs on the radio or see Black country acts on television. Hence the elation when, in February, Beyoncé released two tracks from her then-forthcoming country album.”
Sealey is the author of three collections of poetry, The Animal After Whom Other Animals Are Named, Ordinary Beast, which was a finalist for the 2018 PEN Open Book Award, and The Ferguson Report: An Erasure, a segment of which won the Forward Prize for best poem. Her poems have appeared in The New Yorker, The Paris Review, and two collections of The Best American Poetry.
This month I wrote to Sealey to ask her about Florida, Beyoncé, and the tradition of erasure poetry.
Christie Sylvester: You grew up in Florida—how does where you’re from affect your approach to writing or your style?
Nicole Sealey: I grew up in Florida, true, but I was born in St. Thomas, United States Virgin Islands. When it comes to writing, this background informs my ear and affects how my poems sound. There’s a kind of music that I’m chasing and hearing that’s related to my relationship to these two very different places.
What first inspired you to write about Cowboy Carter?
When the singles “Texas Hold ’Em” and “16 Carriages” were released, I had been working on Country Music, a poetry manuscript exploring the genre’s Black roots, and what it means for me to consider myself a “countryman” given the rise of white nationalism in my own country.
Even after the hostile reception Beyoncé received at the 2016 Country Music Awards—where she performed a track off her album Lemonade with The Chicks—she didn’t shy away from claiming country music as her own. In this claim, in Cowboy Carter, I heard something familiar, an insistence on Black life and, therefore, Black art that moved me to write about the album in a historical context. Cowboy Carter plants a flag, so to speak, in country music resembling the American flag with Pan-African colors that the artist David Hammons made in 1990.
Would you call yourself a Beyoncé fan—a member of the Beyhive? What is it about her music that appeals to you?
Not a Beyhive member, but a fan for sure. Beyoncé is one of the greatest artists of all time. Rather than blossoming, her music lives in a state of continuous bloom. Her fans, myself included, never know what to expect, which explains our continuing anticipation of her next project, and the one after that.
In your essay you discuss the “disregard” of “Black contributions to country,” which is notable because, even though their work is often exploited, the significance of Black artists’ contributions to most other genres of American popular music is at least acknowledged. As a Black writer, how do you try to address this effacement of Black culture?
I haven’t tasked myself with tackling the effacement of Black culture. That would be an unfair, if not completely overwhelming, charge of myself as an artist. I think I write about Blackness (and anti-Blackness) because it is an inexhaustible subject that I am moved to bear in mind. When I do address this effacement, it is usually excursive and by surprise—the inciting image or idea has nothing (and then everything!) to do with Blackness.
I don’t know if it’s my place to advise Black writers and artists on how best to go about their work. It is my place, however, to encourage them to continue to take up space.
Your book The Ferguson Report: An Erasure addresses the killing of Michael Brown by a police officer by refiguring the subsequent Department of Justice report into poetry through a series of redactions and erasures. Can you say a bit about how this method—as opposed to, say, an essay or a more traditional poem—might more effectively convey your meaning or your feelings?
Erasure poetry is a reconsideration of an existing text, and there was something very satisfying about “reconsidering” The Ferguson Report—striking through whole sections of it, as if undoing the harm that had been done. The process of prying lyric from a lyricless document, however, was like pulling teeth, at best, and extracting water from stone, at worst. Still, I don’t think I would have been able to access the words for and worlds of this work on my own or in any other form.
