As you’ll see, we range across such diverse subjects as how poetry written from one particular perspective reaches across racial, social, and chronological divides to speak to all readers because of emotions expressed in the poem that we all share, what our mothers could and couldn’t give us, and how a person might be broken and resilient at the same time. I am so pleased to offer Persimmon Tree readers Vievee Francis’s interview, which includes her beautiful readings of some select poems from The Shared World.

The Shared World by Vievee Francis, cover photo¹

CYNTHIA HOGUE: When you read at the Poetry Center last winter, I was deeply moved by your work. I love the way you braid the strong visual images, the subtle cultural critiques, and the very frank, occasional personal memories in your poems. The title of your book is eloquent, especially with this amazing photograph on the cover.

VIEVEE FRANCIS: Yes, the title and that cover were quite important to me.

CH: Could you talk a bit about the photograph on the cover and your title, The Shared World?¹

VF: I took that title from a Naomi Shihab Nye poem. I think the complete line is, "This is the world I want to live in, the shared world." Her work is so extraordinary, and I feel like it reaches this kind of universal accord between people.² So when I read that line, I just felt like yes, I want to share my life, but I also wanted to make a point about how all of our lives intersect. Each of our individual lives is still connected to each other, and we're connected to history. So The Shared World seemed like a perfect title.

CH: I think it's so relevant today, in particular, something that we're struggling to do as a people.

VF: I agree, and that's definitely a part or an aspect of that title, that we share this world, whether we want to or not. We don't get to say, "Oh, I'm just not going to relate to you." We have to share this world. And the sharing humanizes us. When we decide, "I don't share this world with you. You don't exist," when we decide to dehumanize others, I like to remind people that we have to share. We can't ignore each other. We can't deny each other. Here we are.

CH: Would you talk about how you first knew yourself to be a poet, when you started writing?

VF: Poetry has always been a part of my life. My father loved poetry, and he had a kind of library. He also kept all of his textbooks from college, and he bought a book of children's verse. I can't say if he bought it for me or not, but it was in the library. And there was an Ogden Nash poem, a silly little poem that I loved because hidden within this Ogden Nash poem was a question of bravery. It was about Custard, the cowardly dragon. And Custard would never defend himself. Custard was very shy, very placid. But the second Custard's family was in trouble — there was a little boy, a little girl, a little dog — he became ferocious and pushed back and would eat the villains. And that spoke to me as a very young child. I was friendless, and my parents were integrationists, so they were constantly putting me in places where I did not see myself. But I've always been the person who got between the person and the bully. And that little poem – I had the ability to read it beyond itself as just a simple narrative, so that little poem informed how I felt about the world.

There was an empathy there that I felt in myself. And then later, maybe my third year of high school, I read Robert Browning's "Soliloquy of the Spanish Cloister," and I started crying in the classroom. I couldn't understand why I was drawn to this poet who was not of my gender, not of my race, not of my region, and not of my era, but I felt it. And that's the moment I realized how the reach of poetry is across time and space and gender and ethnicity. But my instructor did not believe someone who looked like me could have those sensibilities. And he told me so.

But I didn't believe him. By that time, I was quite well read. I've always been a reader, and I knew something was happening, but not what. So this was, of course, persona work, and then maybe three years later, I read the poet Ai. The poem was "Child Beater" from her book Cruelty. I was in a Borders bookstore and started weeping. I didn't know you could present the villain that way. It's a horrible poem emotionally. You're just jarred by it. And at the very end, the gaze turns right upon the reader. It broke my heart. And that is the moment I said, "I'm going to write this."

I had a heart that had been broken before. I had an unusual history, and I wanted to make someone feel the way these poems over the years had made me feel. I have a Detroit sensibility. I think a lot of Detroit poets of my era have this sensibility, and that is not that there is a group of people who are so talented, and you can never reach that. My sensibility was to work, and I felt that, "Okay, I'm not a strong poet now. I'm just starting. But if I keep working at it, I'll meet that bar." We have the attitude of, we'll do this work. So I just started the work of the poet. Through all of the incredible racial horrors I'd been through, I felt I'd found my tribe and entered it. I started writing at about 19. By 24, I called myself a poet.

CH: Besides Ai, who were some of the other poets who were impactful to you?

VF: Well, definitely Robert Hayden in so many ways. Jay Wright. And I've also, like my husband [the poet Matthew Olzmann], been strongly influenced by Polish modern and postmodernists. So, Szymborska and Milosz play a definite role in my work, as well as Zagajewski, who I had the good fortune to meet. Also my contemporaries. A. Van Jordan broke linearity for me, and that opened up my work.

CH: I wanted to turn to your poem and wondered if you would read the first poem that you read to us at the Poetry Center, "Break Me and I'll Sing." It's such a forcefully personal poem, but it’s also an oblique and nonlinear poem, a poem that seems full of secrets. You have to approach them through the poem itself, not through anything that it particularly reveals. As you say in another poem, “the secret to knowing the secret is to speak.”

Would you read it?

CH: Just magnificent, Vievee. I wonder if the notion of the permission to speak that this poem is referencing is a kind of poetics for you. The approach is in the poem, not so much in the details, which are haunting, but what compels us is the force of the speaker giving herself permission to sing finally, which is, of course, the lyric. That’s what I'm calling a kind of poetics, but is that an approach that compels you?

VF: I would say yes. Poem after poem, I am suggesting that not only do we have to speak – I don't want to be so cliché as to say "our truths" – but we have to speak ourselves out. We have to speak up for ourselves. There will always be those who want to silence us, but this poem is pushing back. This poem is saying, "Not only am I going to speak, no matter what tries to silence me, I'm going to sing." I'm going to lend joy to it. I'm going to give it a kind of radical force. I won't be silenced. I'll find a way. And then once I speak it, I'm going to sing it. And I say "sing" because music gets closer to the emotions than the text.

The text has another layer that we have to move through to get to that emotion, but music is very immediate. That's why we can hear a song in a language we don't understand and still feel it profoundly. So this is my way of saying not only am I not going to be silenced, but suggesting nobody allow themselves to be silenced and to speak with the force of song.

CH: Well put. I can't add anything to that, but I would say that my experience of your poems, a poem like this one, is to feel it more deeply than I can articulate. Those images, they add up to a threat that the speaker faces in order to sing. What the images add up to is beyond what can be articulated in prose. I'm stumbling around here, but the emotions come through as the emotions of music come through.

VF: It's interesting because music is quite important in many cultures. In African-American culture, music becomes essential. It's central to the culture. And there was a moment when there was an argument: Why do Black poets mention music? Why is that so important? Can't we write without it? And I thought to myself — for a moment I thought yes, because I like to move in different directions that I don't necessarily follow. And so you would think I would say, "Well you're right. Let me stop using so much song." And then I thought about it a little more. And to sing, despite what is happening around you, is a radical act. It's a way of being and of saying, "I'm here, and I know you hear this song. I know you feel this song." And there's so much emotion. I decided no, not only am I going to not stop singing, I'm going to lean into it, which is interesting because I was a singer. I sang professionally, but in my early twenties I got cancer that took my singing voice.

So for me the poem has personal resonance because while I can sing — I had a voice that was quite strong, if I say so myself. I thought there was beauty in my voice. Losing my voice almost killed me, in that I gained so much affirmation in the world for my capacity to sing. So when I was unable to sing anymore or to sing with that kind of capacity, I was actually singing and writing poetry, and I moved deeper into the lyric poem after I lost my singing voice.

CH: You really reinvented yourself! The next poem you read to us that I found so impactful was "A Call to Arms," which speaks to another kind of resistance, right? "A Call to Arms" is really about standing in resistance and protest. Could you read that poem, and then we could talk a bit about it?

CH: Wow. That has the force of a vision, Vievee. Could you talk a bit about the experience of writing that? How did that unfold?

VF: This was a difficult poem to write. I wrote it over time. I kept questioning it. It's not a finished poem, which happens with my poems. They'll show up in a journal and then differently in an anthology, and then I'll read it differently aloud at a reading because many of my poems are always in process. In this particular poem I wanted to capture over time my feelings about knowing that you must say something, that you must do something, and not knowing what to say or do, and then deciding that anything will do because things are there that must be discussed, addressed, and acknowledged. I noted the cyclical nature of history, and I was trying to find a way to say that call to arms is always there. There's not a moment of our lives where there's not something or someone we need to look out for. The call to arms is still there.

And the question becomes for me, where am I? I ask myself, "Why do I keep hearing this? Why can't I just live my comfortable life and be comfortable and calm?" Why do I feel this roiling inside? Why can't I close my ears? It's not something enjoyable to hear that call. The call to arms is not a beautiful thing. And so the poem questions again, "Don't you hear it? Am I alone? Don't you hear it?" Are you not listening because it didn't ring out in a peal of bells, the way we might expect? That call may not be something expected or beautiful like, "Let's all go." No, the call can be a moan, can be a scream, can be a whisper. We have to pay attention.

CH: An empathic person like yourself, who is also an artist, hears. Alice Fulton talks about writing a poetry of “inconvenient knowledge,”³ and the responsibility of somebody who feels for others. And it's very interesting that right now empathy is dismissed.

VF: I would say we are in an anti-empathetic era, an anti-intellectual era. We're in an era where indifference reigns. There are eras of extraordinary cruelty. I believe we're on the edge of something worse, much worse. I have been saying this for a while, in different ways.

I think my childhood was such a painful era in American history, and then experiences I had in late middle school and high school. I watch for the signs of society moving in different directions. And I definitely feel that American society right now is not leaning into empathy, is not leaning into humaneness. And I can't sit comfortably, even when I'm physically comfortable, I can't — my mind is always thinking about the world around me.

CH: I believe that's why I so wanted to feature your poems, Vievee. I didn't do a lot of research about your biography. Were you born in Texas, and then the family moved to Detroit?

VF: I was born in San Angelo, Texas. I've lived all over Texas. Two places in Texas inform my identity. One is the Piney Woods, as they call them in Texas, of East Texas. You can find correlations between the East Texas Piney Woods and the lower Appalachians, that juncture of Tennessee and North Carolina. These cultures are actually quite similar, unusually similar ways of life. My grandmother was born in East Texas, and I lived a short while with her. I really feel that's when I started feeling or understanding that I had a self. I loved, loved, loved my mother's mother, my grandmother.

And the other was Amarillo, Texas. My father took a job in Amarillo up in the Panhandle. I was alone in my blackness in a school K through 12. The desegregation of the schools in the south was staggered. So the high schools were desegregated first. The elementary schools, it was ten years later, right as I was born in '63. So I'm going into elementary school with people who are still angry about desegregation, who are still pushing back against the federal government for forcing the desegregation. I didn't understand what was happening around me, but it was painful and I was friendless. I saw myself as a human among humans, but that is not how others saw me.

At the same time, I was moving back and forth into the Piney Woods with my mother's parents. They treated me as something precious. There was affirmation. Isn't she cute? Look at her legs. You know, because I had these little chubby thighs. And the culture of the Black south found them very cute. But in the culture of the white Panhandle, it was quite different.

For a short time I lived at Fort Ord, which was in Monterey, California, where my father was stationed. My parents took me from the gorgeous hippie flower children in California back to Texas in the Panhandle. Seeing those hippies, hearing that music, I saw people who would identify as white, but they were not cruel. They were curious. They were speaking of love and peace. And it struck me. It may have informed my life more than anything else, those values.

I believed what I heard. You have hippies talking about brotherhood, and then you have Black culture talking about brotherhood. These two different streams were both inside me at five years old. So when we got to Amarillo where I experienced a great deal of cruelty, it broke me, but I believe that my first becoming a poet may have been there where I needed to address what was happening to me. By the time we left Amarillo, I didn't believe what society told me, which was constantly that I was not human. I fought it. I kept a secret self, where I may not have had the strength to speak back, because I could have been brutally punished, but inside I knew I had a self. Inside I argued with the adults who made laws that hurt my people. Inside I knew that cruelty from a teacher was wrong because I was as human as the others. That being paddled, which I was, was wrong.

We also lived in Georgia. I started reading books in the library around indigenous cultures and what was happening, because in the '70s what was happening in the west was outrageous. I read the novels that were coming out of that period, and I was deciding for myself what made someone human. I was finding in my own way others who felt that societal restrictions around race were wrong. In my quiet self, in my silent self, I held onto myself and my beliefs until I was able to sing it out. It showed in my voice. There was a pathos in my voice, and then that shifted into the lyric when I couldn't sing physically anymore.

CH: And that abides. Your family moved so much because your father was in the military. Is that right?

VF: Yes, and then he began to work for one of the major car companies. Eventually we moved to Detroit.

CH: So you were someone who was not broken by what happened to you but found creative ways and resilience within.

VF: I can see now that I had resilience, but I would say that I was broken, truly broken. I could use so many expressions where I split apart, I was rendered asunder, and yet survived, perhaps due to the affirmation of my grandmother in those Piney Woods who just adored me. She was not a reader, but she would, whenever I was there in summer, get big laundry baskets, and all year long fill them with books for me. For her, I was a baby who loved to read, and she admired it. In Black culture, you don't necessarily speak of your brokenness. You gave in, especially if you were a woman as brown as me, to the mythos of being a strong woman.

There are many strong women, but that doesn't mean they haven't been broken. They're surviving despite the breakage. I don't let anyone or any group, not even my own, tell me what I am. So all the people telling me I was so strong, I'm like, "No, I'm not. I'm surviving, but I'm broken." It's not one or the other. It's both. Am I resilient? Evidently. Am I broken? Absolutely.

CH: You know, I'm looking at the poem "Landscape." Because it really is about you as a grown woman in 2018 returning to the Panhandle. Would you read that poem?

VF: It's not that I hide the individual events. It's that the specific events are connected to things that are so much larger. So I was doing a reading in Denton, Texas, North Texas, back on the Panhandle as a grown woman. I hadn't been on that Panhandle since I was a child. And [CHOKING UP], excuse me. I was walking down the sidewalk, grown woman, and two young women about 18, 19, were walking down the sidewalk in front of me, and I jumped off of it into the grass without even thinking.

When I was growing up, there were laws. They were unwritten, but you knew them. And if you were Black walking down a sidewalk, and a white female was walking in front of you, you moved over, and you knew you had to move over.

I remember walking with my grandmother and realizing that if I was arrogant enough to keep walking on that sidewalk, she could get slapped. She could be hurt, because you had to get off that sidewalk. And you knew it. And it became habit. You didn't look, if you're at the grocery store, you didn't look up into the eyes of a white female. You waited until you were addressed, or you addressed with your eyes down. I didn't know how, living in the Jim Crow South at such a young age, how that can embed in you. And it was embedded. Did my friends who were walking behind me, who are white poets, know why I jumped into the grass? No idea. Did they know why I fell to my knees and started crying? No idea. Did they understand my shame? Not at all. But I understood it. In that moment, I realized how very damaged I had been by living in a world that saw me as an animal, as less than human, even though I knew I was human.

And so that moment is embedded in this poem. I'm saying I can go back to those places now, and no one will bother me in that moment in 2018. The writers are writing, minding their business, and yet I carry that history with me. It's still a part of who I am. The world has changed, but I'm wondering how much, and I'm stating how much it changed me and how much more change I need to make to understand the world I'm in now. I can cross the tracks back and forth. My father crossed the tracks once when he was younger to get to a job he was working, and two white men beat the hell out of him. I had forgotten how deceptively subdued the desert palette is, that there's so much life thriving beneath and so many dangers. We don't see the rattlesnake beneath the prickly pear. I love to eat prickly pear, but we don't see the rattlesnake beneath it.

I wrote at the very top, "Hasn't changed," meaning that if I remember all the people around me my age and above, they can't have forgotten. They know what it was like. So perhaps now everyone smiled in 2018, and no one was openly unkind, but what lies beneath? And now we know exactly what was beneath because the wheel has rolled around again.

CH: I've framed this next question, about the poem "I've Worn It Three Days in a Row," about your mother. You've talked a lot about those early memories. Is it too painful to read that poem?

VF: No, and if it is, I can face my pain. I allow my pain.

CH: Understood. Understood. You've talked about the cultural challenges, the political challenges that you had to face as a child. And some of the things, like your grandmother's influence that ameliorated the pain and gave you windows through which to see other possibilities. But that omnipresence of the mother judging and criticizing the child was something that spoke to me in a very different way.

VF: It is marvelous to me the way poems can speak to people, and draw up their own experience. It's one of the things I love about poetry. So could you tell me how it reached you?

CH: The fact of the mothers, my mother as well as your mother, albeit differentiated by race, criticizing the child for how she failed to measure up to certain standards spoke to me. Although I understood the differences, what we shared was that we had mothers who found us falling short of perfection, I guess you'd say. My mother who could never accept herself passed that on to her daughters, so that despite all the things she gave us, she could not give us the confidence that she didn't herself have. And your mother judged you for not measuring up to a standard of beauty that was imposed on the Black community by the white majority.

VF: So I'm thinking about three different things. The first thing that comes to mind is the poet Jack Ridl out of western Michigan. He is a poet, but he writes textbooks as well. He discusses why poems reach people of vastly different backgrounds or across time, space, ethnicity. He says it’s because we're writing not the same poem, but we're pulling from the same human emotions, this necessary emotional chord. So we're all writing poems of love or grief or deception or poems of ecstasy. All of us experience those emotions. And so the “I,” anyone's “I,” is the universal “I.” Even if you haven't had that particular experience, if I write a poem, say on ugliness, there are going to be many who have been called that or who have felt they've had to move beyond the way others may see them. So the specifics may not matter as much as the emotion that's drawn up. In almost every poem, the reader looks for the self. The reader finds relatability, and that's part of the humanness. Poetry allows for that, and it can't be denied. We can read each other's stories and then feel our own story because we know what those emotions are, even if the experience isn't exact, right? So your being able to relate to the story, I absolutely understand it. It makes me feel actually very honored because then my poem did what I wanted, because I don't want to just tell my story. I want readers who can find themselves inside of it. And this poem has done that.

I wrote this poem after my mother died. It was extremely painful to write. We had a complicated relationship, and inside of the culture that I'm of, I am not considered aesthetically pleasing, we'll say. I don't like to use the black/white binary, but that is what the country uses. Inside of my young life, there was that binary, and the culture I was under the heel of was definitely white culture, and I certainly aesthetically didn't suit it.

There were some things about me that saved me inside of Black culture, which was very different. The aesthetics were very different, and southern aesthetics were their own. So I was comely of shape inside of Black culture, but not of face. I would get constant comments about the length of my hair because my hair could grow quite long. And the comments would basically be, "Well, thank God for your hair." It kind of saves you from not being beautiful.

My mother was considered a very pretty woman, and she had been pretty and also slender for much of her life. And I look like my father. By the time she passed, she was suffering quite a bit, and my looks still disturbed her, but the last thing my mother said to me was, "I love you." It was over the phone. I'd gone down to Texas to see her because I knew her time was near. But while I was down there, she reminded me how ugly I was in my hat. It was my favorite hat. When I left, I said to my husband, "I may not see my mother again because it was so painful." But I called her. She said, "I love you," and died within four minutes after that call. And I wrote this poem. I found myself wearing the dress I was wearing when my husband told me she'd died, over and over again without thinking about it, without realizing it.

CH: Oh, Vievee, thank you. That was a gift. Oh, painful poem, I realize, and I really debated about whether to ask you about any of this. But thank you for being so forthcoming. You've been honest and moving. The last poem I’d like to ask you to read is "Relevance," which is full of the largesse of your poems and of your spirit. Could we close with that?

VF: Well, before we close, I'd like to say that my mother’s and my relationship was complicated. She drew upon her beauty. It was important to her. She loved me to her capacity, and sometimes the capacity was great and sometimes not so much. And sometimes we don't understand the history of our relationship with a person until they pass. I loved my mother like someone starving for bread. And my mother was cool of personality, and I was always so heated

CH: It's remarkable that she came to that place, to tell you her true feelings.

VF: Yes, it saved me. If the last thing I remembered of my mother was her feelings about my aesthetics, I don't know what would have happened to me. So it probably saved my life that she said that she loved me at the end.

CH: Beautiful. And I actually find you beautiful. In that combination of spirit and body that shines through you and from you.

VF: Thank you. I appreciate your reading my work and wanting to talk with me and allowing me to talk so freely. I just appreciate it so much.

CH: Your time with me has been a gift. So in all honor, thank you.

came as the lanterns floated upward
on a night of celebration and as flares spun upward out of the fear
of those who set them, as shawled women smiled in the night,
prayed into the night, and just as many ran through the swallowing
night, as a bed was shared between those shepherding each other
and as others shared nothing, nothing at all, as doctors took their oaths
and committed no harm, privileging some, denying others, as another
dies by the hands of a group of strangers, and another by the hand
of her father, and another because a stranger was lost in the anger
of his mother.
I am telling you the call to arms came
as we slept and as we marched, as we questioned, and as we hid
our heads in the dust of nostalgia or our spent dreams. as bills came due,
as the debt grew and values diminished, as women decided other women
mattered less,
as we raged and as we ignored and the doors began to close and close and close
and close and close and those who had opened them were marked for death
or forgetting, and those who kick them down are marked for death or slander,
and this is not the first time a call to arms has caught us imagining it had stopped,
the call is ever, is constant, don't you hear it? Don't you? What? It didn't ring
out in a peal of bells? It rings out in the silent appeals of children, a child
who cannot remember the name of their father. You aren't listening. And
if you are listening, you must keep your ear to the street, to the field, to
the alleys and bridges, to the riverbed and floor planks of abandoned houses,
and I heard the call to arms like a moan from a drain, desperately clogged, and
in the lowing of cows in drought, in the impotent drone of senators, that officious
blather, and in this moment I hear the call and realize I am not the lion but
the antelope and I must resort to my feet and my wits amid a storm of teeth and
claws
on a day that began as any other, and I can't tell you why I hear
what too many refuse to admit, like the pounding of your own heart
upon hearing this.

(West Texas Panhandle, Winter 2018)

1. hasn't changed. The mountains
 
remain treeless and full of their invisible life,
like the javelina in the backyard dark as its own
shadow under the thick prickly pears, unseen
but heard grunting, barking, rooting.
 
Where did everyone go? The ones
whose eyes I could not look into?
The ones I got off the sidewalks for?
Who are these people?
 
Inside what would have been an old shed
a few years back, is a café. All the ink-stained
writers, writing. No long guns. No shotguns.
A mistletoe wreath on the door. No one
cares that I'm here, or if they do, they have
the sense to pretend indifference. Another kind
of disappearing. I catch the old accent
in an aging body desperately trying not to age,
but the face betrays the slim jeans. Yoga body.
Time bends us. I know yoga won't undo
its lessons. Now, the corrugated tin doesn't rust
the way it used to. Money being damned
and shifted ruthlessly like waterways in the West.
What was a sign of poverty is now a sign
of privilege. The corrugated tin of the house
by this café is a deep pink, like the lining
of a brown woman's inner lip. On my table
is a spiderless cactus. I can walk any sidewalk,
look up, wave or smile without being slapped.
 
2. In a white car I cross the tracks
 
back and forth and back and forth and . . .
because I can . . .
 
3. What I remember
 
you would not believe.
 
4. I had forgotten how deceptively subdued
 
the desert palette. How the sun blanches
me into you.

The dress my mother died in    no
the dress I was wearing when
my mother died
and
I took pictures of myself      self?      no
of the dress      of my legs curled tight under
the dress        only my ankles and feet showing
I held my arm up and back
and
did not want  to show my head    my
swollen eyes
and chapped lips             and all that dried salt
on my face
my          face
she could not bear to look at      unless
it was with disgust                      my hair
never good      no good    and my unironed
dress    this one     I am wearing now
with its white cotton underslip and its red
embroidered paisley upon a white background
It is           beautiful even
with me in it    Yes     I am not
wearing a hat            She said, You look so ugly in that hat
It was my favorite one of three
hats
She had more than one hundred hats stored in her
basement            in labeled hatboxes  they
were her    particular thing        every Sunday a new
one      perched proudly as a bird-of-paradise
though only the males are so presentable
but she was a tomboy once   and
so was her mother       She hated my teacups
and my dollies that I couldn't sleep without
like I slept that day when I found out
she had died    I lay fetal upon the bed
atop the duvet and wanted to live     and felt
guilt like a razor over the wrist     You always
were odd and always carrying on     You
talk too much           You are a mess    And I was
a mess     my chest wet and my heart
shrinking in and I was
shrinkingand this
wasgood     She was
alwaysasmallwoman    except
for ten years
when she grew past what hersmallframe could hold
who can say why
her hunger grew    and why
she hated my hungertobeheld and so    recoiled
and I went days and days without any touch at all
and I have gone days and days since      Ugly
in my hat    even my father thought so    though
now he isn't sure     Since she died so much
has changed      even this dress now
stained by wear and coffee and crying and     now the pills
won't let me
and now and again
sleeping in it    and just last night keeping it on for dinner
alone at the same counter where I was when
I found out she had died
a few minutes after our last phone call
when she couldn't see me and
so could afford to love me.

Endnotes

1. Cover photo for Viviee Francis, The Shared World. Evanston: Triquarterly Books/Northwestern University Press, 2023. The cover image was taken of Juniata College senior Harriet Richardson assisting Juniata poet-in-residence Galway Kinnell, who had been wounded by a state trooper’s billy club during the famed protest in Montgomery, Alabama, March 16, 1965. Juniata was one of the many colleges whose students had traveled to participate in the historic Selma to Montgomery march led by Dr. Martin Luther King. Photograph by Charles Moore/Getty Images.

2. The poetry of Naomi Shihab Nye was twice featured in Persimmon Tree, in Winter 2013 by then-poetry editor, the late Wendy Barker, and in Spring 2025 by poetry editor Cynthia Hogue.

3. Alice Fulton has described her poetry as specializing in what she dubs “inconvenient knowledge,” by which she means the kind of knowledge about some unethical or immoral practice that urges us to change our lives. Alice Fulton was featured in Persimmon Tree in Spring 2024.

Acknowledgments

I wish to thank Vievee Francis for making this interview possible.

Vievee Francis. “A Call to Arms,” “I’ve Worn It Three Days in a Row,” and “Landscape.” In The Shared World: Poems. Evanston: Triquarterly Books/Northwestern University Press, 2023. Pp.4, 22-3, and 88-9.

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