Emerging Writers: Stephen Foster Smith

Associate Editor Andy Sia: We noticed a number of writers in our recent issue who are in relatively early stages of their publishing career, and reached out to chat with them as a part of our emerging writers series. In a sense, writers are always “emerging,” given the constant self-discovery and self-transformation that happen throughout any craft process. For the purposes of this interview series, we focused on the scope of professional affiliations—institutional support to date, range of publications—though we recognize that ultimately, emergence is an ineffable state that exceeds easy definitions. More broadly, our curiosity about emergence extends to the work itself: How does a poem or story take shape from amorphous origins and, indeed, emerge? Here’s my interview with Stephen Foster Smith, whose poem “The Yam Reflects” appears in the issue.

Take us back to the start, before you’d begun drafting. What set the stage for “The Yam Reflects”?

“Yam,” as I like to call the poem, came to me as a complaint, really. I was perturbed by the frequent misunderstanding of food origins in America, particularly in the American South. Regarding yams, it has been recorded that hundreds of thousands of yams were brought along the middle passage to sustain captive Africans, meaning yams were also stolen along with Africans who too had been taken captive. Yams are not sweet potatoes but are often mislabeled as such, which was an interesting form of erasure for me to contend with—that confusion being a direct result of colonization. We should know, too, that stories about food are always a deeper dive into the histories of a people and their culture. So I took what frustration I had, and what knowledge I had, and I decided to deal with it all in the form of a poem.

Tell us about the process of writing “The Yam Reflects.” Did the poem change significantly since its inception? How did you land on the structure and overall trajectory of the poem?

Well, the poem did not begin in couplets. In fact, I cannot remember how it first appeared on the page, but I remember being dissatisfied with it until it was in couplets. I remember wanting two specific things in the poem: the tradition of that intentional beginning of slave narratives (“I was born”) and clear, deliberate, declarative speech. This challenged me to explore the idea that maybe the yam possesses a certain animism. I also figured the yam would like to communicate, since others were doing it for them, and poorly. After quite a few revisions, I decided I wanted the eye to scan the line slowly, to go over the poem slowly, so I knew that couplets would work in that regard. I also wanted to explore ambivalence in each couplet, and pace the development of emotion throughout the poem. The slow burn of the yam’s frustration, that is. Lastly, I remember being at a reading Terrance Hayes gave, and he read a very new poem to the audience in which the color black was cut open to reveal a deeper black, and I remember being completely taken by that scene, and so I wanted that type of descent to occur toward the finale of my poem.

Describe the first poem you wrote. What’s the most recent poem you wrote?

My first poem was about a monarch taking its last flight, but I wrote it in reverse. So the departure from the branch was the finale, and the final folding of the wings occurred at the beginning. I thought it was cool. I thought it was different, and I was trying to play with this idea that if you came across someone at the end of their life and asked them to recall their years, they’d probably tell you about it all in reverse. And I thought that made sense at the time. I don’t know what I think about any of that now, though. My most recent poem concerns the idea that all of us have the potential to be saviors, but only if we sacrifice every bit of our being, and that perhaps we do so more than we think. I attended parochial school as a child and grew up black in the American South, so Christ’s life and crucifixion was glamorized as heroic rather than analyzed as a metaphor for one’s commitment to loving another so deeply that it could require the entirety of your life. Recently, in light of turbulent geopolitics, I have been exploring the difficulty of unconditional love, and the life of Christ as a hero’s journey, one that could potentially happen to all of us, but on a much smaller scale. How our highest calling is practicing a type of love that saves another, that could erase us in the end, and how frightening that is. But it’s not impossible.

What is something you’ve been learning or practicing of late, whether that’s related to writing or not?

Two things. One—to make listening and observing everyday practices. As poets, I think listening and observing are necessary to write. We have to be very nosy, catching snatches of conversations, songs, lines, and so on. We also have to be experts in observation, seeing into the world and not just seeing the world. Both of those are necessary, and I have been forcing myself to do so every single day. Two—considering the reality of rejection, to be honest. As poets, as artists, we face rejection often, and it can be dismaying and psychologically irritating. However, what keeps me going is the fascination I have with my own work, with my own poetry and growth, and how much I believe in my own work. That’s what matters to me, and that’s what I keep at the forefront of my mind.