This interview happened over four months via email between 20.35 Africa Interviews Editor, JK Anowe, and Mary-Alice Daniel, whose debut collection of poems, Mass for Shut-Ins, is exhilaratingly imagistic and refreshingly bold, specifically within the context of contemporary Nigerian – and by extension, African – poetry. For some time, contemporary Nigerian poetry, at home or abroad, has not seen a truly conceptual book of poems. So, imagine the pleasant surprise when we came across Mass for Shut-Ins, a collection completely unshy in announcing its distinctiveness. The singular audaciousness of individual poems across its 5 sections permeates the book structurally in a remarkable way.
JK Anowe: I will begin by asking about structural narrative. A good number of the poems in your chapbook, Blood for the Blood God, appear in Mass for Shut-Ins; similarly, your book’s architectonics reminds me of structural narratives deployed in such poetry collections as Ilya Kaminsky’s Dancing in Odessa and Chris Abani’s Sanctificum, wherein each section of poems feels like a standalone chapbook. I am curious about how you were able to give each section in Mass for Shut-Ins, whether linearly or fragmentally, tonal and rhythmic resonances of their own. I am interested in your creative process and what your experience was putting poems together at the micro and macro levels of section vs. collection. How, if at all, were you thinking of narrative across the book?
Mary-Alice Daniel: My late mentor, Louise Glück, said something beautiful to me 20 years ago. That if there are 45 poems in a given book, the book itself constitutes the 46th. Holding this near my heart, I vigilantly maintained a holistic view of the manuscript, even as I partitioned it into discrete sections – these architectural divisions organically materialized from my preference for writing poems in a series or sequence. I gravitate to sequential poems because of the added potentiality, possibility, and utility in their capacity to expand, their tendency to kindle and combust. By which I mean – I exploit the compounding alchemy and intensity achieved by layering lexis. As you compose a series of poems, the first line of the first poem performs a double duty. It stands as both the first line of the first poem as well as the first line of the sequence as a whole.
In a similar vein, the last line of the last poem is at once the last line of the last poem in addition to the last line of the full sequence. Stationed within the book’s superstructure, these mechanisms are charged with exponential energy. Points of Opportunity. There is so much in my work that is shrouded, shadowy, remote, distant – seen in the recurring distancing of myself and the speaker, the speaker and the reader. At the same time, I want no distance evident in the language itself, which is immediate and exact, never obscure. I use these points deliberately as a method of doubling down. Signposts – meaningful indicators of how things stand. Or where we scuffle and step. Of what I mean. Of why and in what manner things are moving.
Within a given section of my book, I arranged poems by visualizing their concrete nouns occupying a room or field. Every room is littered with a miscellany of physical objects – i.e., totems. Some object appearing at the conclusion of one poem is placed in close association with the object that opens the next poem. I ordered my poems with the belief that by placing specific articles in proximity, in a state of semi-togetherness – almost touching but not quite – I might conceive and heighten a tension between them. For example, at the end of the first poem, “Must Be Some Kind of Spell,” the final image manifests a knife inside your house. Initially missing, the blade reappears, by some intrigue or evil, beneath the precise center of your bed – pointing perfectly straight towards your pillow. Fixed at the very beginning of the book’s second poem is an unusually stubborn screw. You cannot pry it out of your motel room wall. Sequentially, the menace of the knife (in the first poem) contaminates the commonplace, domestic screw (in the second poem). My intention was to amplify the lingering threat of the knife. Its terror turns a workaday screw into a weapon, an intently hazardous omen.
The moodscape I mean to craft pans around a supramundane staging ground, destabilized and teetering in the ever presence of harm. Engineering the collection as a whole, I intended to resist and repel every instinct and effort of my reader to locate a thread or string that coheres, resolves, that eases, that moves toward conclusion or remedy or harmony. There’s no healing to be found here. For this reason, immediately following the final poem in the book, the pictogram I inserted is the caution sign that alerts factory workers around machines that stop and start automatically, without warning, often machines with dangerous moving parts. This symbol is seen right after a closing poem in which the speaker expresses revulsion at the notion of being reincarnated and begs for a “most final” death. The supplicant in that poem gets nothing.
JK Anowe: Incredible! The anecdote about the book being the ultimate poem made me a bit giddy because it called to mind this instinct that I have often to count the poems in the table of contents (if the collection has one) before settling down to read the book. Where the poems are divided into sections, I take note of the number of poems in each. I wonder if other readers do this and, if so, why. I do it to remind myself that each poet has a specific reason for picking a specific number of poems to be in their very specific book. Likewise, my resonance with your treatise on, as you have termed it here, “Points of Opportunity.” I am completing a full-length collection of poems that intersects modern modes of self/being with traditional modes, specifically contemporary psychiatry and Igbo cosmology (the concept of Chi), to hypothesize and theorize about mental illness (depression), lineage, country, etc., and a few things I have had to constantly account for, to keep my reader locked in, are these points of opportunity that you’ve elaborated on above. Glad that I can finally put a term to this instinct/strategy.
A strange, nightmarish obsessiveness saturates the logic of your poems; logic itself is invented and reinvented throughout the cosmos of the book. The world is never as we truly know it in these poems, yet the world is ever recognizable and undeniably THE WORLD. The series of poems on the nature of Hellfire and even the Mefloquine poems, speaking as someone who has experienced firsthand the hallucinatory side effects of malaria drugs, help ground an ultrarealistic sensibility spread across the book to the point that everything, even the things one might consider “real life,” take on a dreamlike, metaphysical aura. Could you talk to me about your understandings around, as Matthew Shenoda puts in his foreword to Blood for the Blood God, “reinterpreting the world to create from it a new logic”?
Mary-Alice Daniel: Your question embarrasses me a little because it is essentially a more elegant articulation of the moodscape I attempted to delineate in the previous question! I’ve recently been reflecting on the irrational “Flat Earth.” Sociologists cite the sharp rise in the popularity of this conspiracy theory as indicative of a broader public rejection of intellectual inquiry and critical thinking. The mentality behind conspiracy theories disturbs me and seems to me grotesque – repellent and intriguing at once. I put no credence in conspiracies, but paranoia is one of the main feelings I elaborate on the page. Especially the paranoia emergent as a person finds herself at odds or at war with her own mind. My poetry frequently follows a particular line of reasoning until it breaks down, and then it plays with the ruptured pieces of logic embedded in pseudoscience, circular arguments, fallacies, and cult-like delusions.
My morbid fascination with the Flat Earth ideology is with the closing of the mind. The extreme of willfully minimizing one’s purview and perspective – flattening one’s own materiality and compressing the breadth of one’s being. Fundamentally, what construes a nightmare is the loss of control faced within the oneiric environment. In the nightmares I enter, which I described in the series about the side effects of anti-malarial medication, the most terrifying aspect is forfeiting all command of my faculties, sometimes even into the limbus of my waking life; I experience sleep paralysis. Flat Earthers abide atop a leveled plane of terra firma, deceived by powers whose tyranny is totalitarian, absolute enough to machinate the illusion of a spherical world. The actual ground we trample melts under manipulation by nefarious parties. That is the nightmare distilled.
The textures of reverie contour a central theme in my writing. I believe the reason I feel compelled to probe the dreamworld via the imaginative exercises and interrogations of poetry is that I have told myself that by doing so, I am the architect of my existence. I might access or achieve agency over my environment, my thoughts, my fate. I am aware that this is comically erroneous.
JK Anowe: With reflections on hyperrealism and the metaverse, the speaker of these poems seems to seek theoretical ways of seeing and perceiving their worlds. The book is epigraphed by Parul Sehgal’s definition of “Nightwork,” which just happens to be one of the two frameworks through which the book foils its arguments, the second being “Dreamwork.” I am curious about these frameworks and the tools you’ve found useful in integrating research and critical theory into your creative work and worlds – for there are those who believe that the difficult, rigorous language of academic theory only hinders imagination. What you have done with the poems in Mass for Shut-Ins is meld those inner vestiges of imagination characteristic to the cerebral and the hyper-imaginative with the theoretical, “the grounded,” the researched. What does it mean for poems to find imaginative possibility within academic discourse and theory?
Mary-Alice Daniel: The poems are literal “night work,” as I am a night owl. I cannot reconcile writing poetry with daylight. I’m not certain why, as I do revise without concern for what the sun is doing. I am inordinately productive deep into the night, when I take advantage of the unwholesome hours to apply acute measures of concentration and attention to my work. I truly enjoy being with my drafts in the dark. We sit together with the stridulations and raspings of insects; alongside all sorts of sound from the menagerie of the nocturnal; and the moon and megascopic stars; and the absence of birdsong, which is nearly as noisy as birdsong in terms of the amount of notice you pay; and everything else; the intruders and intrusions that are numerous – except for the presence of most other people.
The bookend, “dreamwork,” is positioned to reinforce a sense of captivity – at the curtain call, we greet the terminal space trapped still inside the dream state, which is an empery of no escape.
My debut collection was obsessed with darkness; my second, with light – not as night’s opposite, but as its own oblivion – eclipse in its own right. An esoteric imagescape. A seething space of open potential where I might say Something. The poems in RANDOM ACTS OF LIGHTNESS are different than what I’ve written before – this is intentional. In my next volume, I am purposefully altering my syntax and style. I credit this to Louise Glück.
Poetry is both incantation and excantation; is antithesis; is disenchantment found in the countercharm; is fragments in flux; is introspection and extrospection alike.
– Mary-Alice Daniel
JK: Could you say more specifically how your time with Louise Gluck as mentor shaped your aesthetics and poetics and perhaps also, as a teacher? I ask this question because I am always curious about artistic lineage and how this well of influences shape each individual poet. Could you, beyond or before Gluck, talk to me about some of your, I daresay, “poetry patron saints”?
Mary-Alice: I’ll share a few things here, but I am still processing her death. My next book is dedicated to “Lucie & Louise.” Lucie Brock-Broido and Louise Glück. I met the former a few years ago when she visited my PhD program, but we didn’t talk much. She passed in 2018. Earlier this year, I was woken up from my sleep sobbing, thinking of a poem of hers I must have read all those years ago and had no idea I even remembered. It came to me whole in my dream. As I mentioned, my second book is about light, so it is fitting that it is dedicated to a Lucie. It is driven by lucid dreaming. I’m writing poems in my sleep now.
When Louise died, I was editing the first few poems of the book to send to her, but I waited too long. She died on what I would consider the unluckiest day of the year – Friday 13th October. Ironically, Glück means good luck; just as my first book was preoccupied with ill luck and ancestral curses, and in service of another inverse motif, this second book is about light and also luck. Everything, I think, is intensified under the light I’m focusing on.
I recently published an essay for Poetry Daily about how poetry is like a hologram (a light map recorded with lasers). Poetry parallels the optics of our universe and its qualities of light. The figure of Lucifer, Light Bringer, must return. The light of Hellfire foregrounds. In my first book, a character is atomized by a black hole. In this one, I might be ejected out of a white hole. Luck and light thread the lineage.
JK: In another interview, you spoke about syncretism, which you defined as “the phenomenon of disparate religious traditions colliding,” and about your own disparate religious and cultural backgrounds. The poems cut across several worlds from Nigeria and Los Angeles to the internet, which interestingly is no less a geographic location than, say, the American South. You were born in Northern Nigeria and grew up in England and Tennessee. You have said that you think of, and I quote, “…Poetry as remaking an original cosmology from. […] contrastive influences.” Have there been points of tension and/or harmony in trying to commingle these influences? And if so, how have you approached them at the stylistic or aesthetic levels?
Mary Alice: Intertextuality is one technique I use to synthesize the diffinity of my chaotic experiences and cultural influences. Some texts and types of expression I reference include: clinical studies; pub trivia tournament factoids; AI glitches; the language of flowers; conspiracy clickbait; recipes curing generational curses; the Holy Qur’an; mistranslations of the King James Bible; spam emails re: The End Times!!; self-help slogans; Nigerian Prince scams; alchemical formulae; automatic writings & dream journals; antiquated dictionaries; prayer books & hymnals; pharmacopoeia; product warranties & software manuals; compilations of idioms & aphorisms (bad ones); demonology; binomial nomenclature; my wildly inaccurate middle school social studies textbooks; true crime case files; lists of baby names; colonial-era race science taxonomies; grimoires; glossolalia, the frenzied babblement called “praying in tongues”; ephemera from everywhere; and all the novel, newfangled vernacular in the fields of astronomy & physics.
The matter of harmony is twinned – tied to the element of disharmony: of discord and “holy mess.” My pages follow the order of the inverse. Poetry is both incantation and excantation; is antithesis; is disenchantment found in the countercharm; is fragments in flux. It is introspection and extrospection alike. I most often alight upon a site nearest to the nature of a thing by way of negation. By admitting and allowing a counter-object or a counter-idea, I inject uncertainty, ambivalence, and contradiction while corrupting the quietened mind, eroding equanimity—opposing any inclinations or overtures of solidity and solution.
JK: Now it is my turn to be embarrassed because your answer makes me want to almost take back my previous question on artistic lineage and influences. What is remarkable is how your above glossary of reference enacts this disharmony and negation you speak of. Each following item seemingly a small escalation from the former: “my wildly inaccurate middle school social studies textbooks; true crime case files; lists of baby names…” etc., etc.
Secondly, I asked the previous question about the commingling of influences because of recent but not-so-recent debates about what constitutes “true” Nigerian poetry as well as American literary influence, specifically the confessional school, on the home genre. There is an empathetic take on the issue in Open Country Magazine. I only bring up the question to talk about what poets of Nigerian-descent might be thinking as regards to their positionalities within the larger field of contemporary African poetry. Your own book, in my opinion, embodies quite well the Nigerian consciousness, especially toward superstition, conspiracy theories, healthcare, and religion. I am interested in how you were able to stay true to this consciousness of sharp, observant, and unwavering suspicion, true hallmarks of being “Nigerian,” some would say, i.e., to take things a bit further than what we call “initial gra-gra” and then even taking it farther than that. I am interested in how we could think through bringing more of these sensibilities to page poetry, because the fictioneers (by way of characterization) & spoken word artists (by way of performance) are already doing it. Why not page poetry too?
Mary-Alice: I have unfinished business with my native country. There spills a steady measure of bad blood between us. The poet in me inherits from my Fulani kin, composers of Sufi poetry: soldiers and sages who ushered a great revival of verse during the era of our Islamic empire. A nomadic people, the Fulani may have been the first to settle in West Africa as converts to Islam.
In poems, I was pushing against traditions, superstitions. Poems pull me back into the pre-vaccinated pastoral of a rural recent caliphate and a ravaged colony. In a few senses, they pull me apart. Inside a black hole. In seeds flowering with festering doubt. If we’ve ever prayed, after, we wait for some wanted thing to happen. When we write, we have asked; we expect. What comes next, we take for curse, cure, consequence.
My Evangelical mother refuses to divulge the exact hour of my birth because she assumes I ask in order to create an astrological chart. Given the way I was raised, the most corrupt course I could take: go too close to and get tempted by our traditional religions, considered demonic by Christians and Muslims alike. I go in search of spirit systems. I hope to meet a decent attitude of dealing with death – before I die. I develop a genre speaking to ancestors. I want them to speak back to me. Maybe.
JK: Who/what are you reading? Specifically, what books by African authors are you currently reading, have read, and/or are excited about reading?
Mary-Alice: I am excited about Logan February’s provocative multimedia manuscripts, Saddiq Dzukogi’s forthcoming epic book-length poem, Bakandamiya (University of Nebraska Press, Fall 2025), and If I Gather Here and Shout, Funto Omojola’s poetry collection (Nightboat Books, November 2024). Engaging Funto’s collection, I am currently writing a lyric essay about ‘evil’ rhythm and soul-snatching ways to enter a poem for The Harvard Review. It will be published soon after the collection itself, and it’s not a review in the typical sense – instead, I am trying to show the reader the work through my most speculative lens.
Mary-Alice Daniel was born near the Niger/Nigeria border, then raised in England and Tennessee. Her poetry debut, Mass for Shut-Ins (Yale University Press, 2023), won the 117th Yale Younger Poets Prize and a California Book Award. In 2022, Ecco/HarperCollins published her tricontinental memoir, A Coastline Is an Immeasurable Thing, which was People’s Book of the Week and one of Kirkus Reviews’ Best Nonfiction Books of the Year. A Cave Canem Fellow and an alumna of Yale University (BA) and the University of Michigan (MFA), she received a PhD in English Literature & Creative Writing from the University of Southern California. She held the 2024 Mary Routt Endowed Chair of Writing at Scripps College and turns to her third and fourth books of poetry/prose as a scholar at Princeton University.