Interviews & Podcasts
Poetry Foundation I – Salvation in the Dark
Vievee Francis on dark corners, an encounter with a bear, and the promise of the north.
Preview ~ “Vievee Francis: I think I’m an awkward blend of a city person with rural roots. And Detroit was so different than Atlanta. I had been living in Atlanta. We lived in Sandy Springs and in Decatur. And Sandy Springs was predominantly white then. And so, all we heard was, “You’re going up north to that dangerous city,” and all of this type of thing. So, I was a child and I was nervous, but we moved into a suburb that was predominantly Jewish. I didn’t even know what that word was or meant. And suddenly, all of the Smiths and the (LAUGHS)—”
Poetry Foundation II – Not My Face in the Mirror
Vievee Francis (part 2) on beauty in a racist world.
Preview ~ “Vievee Francis: So, the memoir is called Ugly. And that’s the immediate consideration is, having been called ugly all of my life. So I have body dysmorphic disorder, which concentrates on my face. So, it’s not considered curable. I’ve had difficulty accepting my face, tolerating my face for most of my life now. I’ve had therapists work with me before, I think, they realized what the disorder was. And for a long time, I was able to say, “I’m not ugly. Those people out there, the external world, find me ugly,” but I could maintain my sense of who I was.”
The Slowdown – 1433: Given to Rust by Vievee Francis
Ten Questions for Vievee Francis
Preview ~ 1. How long did it take you to write The Shared World?
It took around six years. There are some poems that are much older, which I finally found a home for in this book, but I began writing in a focused way around six years ago, near the time
Forest Primeval was released.
On Being, “How Delicious To Say It”
“How delicious to say it,
to allow it like hibiscus to wend over the tongue
where it opens at the gate, lending its red, unknowable
taste. What wonder the palate may embrace – in a flick
behind the teeth: loquacious, ‘liebchen, schätzchen.’
Let us praise the labium that shapes such syllables, and
parlay of their attendant assumptions like a shuttlecock
struck back and forth over its simple backyard net.
Let us not neglect, but laud the mature mouth ready
for more than a dollop, the spoonful of lip, loon,
April, billow, or some simple pronoun. No. It wants jouissance,
Dostoevsky, provocations heating the exchange, say
chipotles in the chocolate. Consider the uvular awakenings
of the day, the throat stretched to signify its pleasure and release.
Your name spun through the reel, wound up from the bassof me. How I want to say it, and hear my own, again.
for Matthew”
The Slow Down – Old Farmer
You are in the open room, on the old couch,
and will not or cannot remember me. You smile
and joke with the stranger eating meat at your table.
Strangeness in a woman means she can’t be trusted,
so you keep your distance on the other side of the room.
Laughter is, in the end, Devil’s Medicine, but you can’t help it,
you laugh. Because my father is miles away I laugh too.
Once, I thought you and he were the same man.
You beat him into manhood. He beat me into the common
turns: fat aunt, mad martyr. Why make it pretty? I’m not.
I planned this visit to make peace with my place,
with my cotton-picker’s knuckles, my teeth
sharp as a coon’s up a tree.
Brutal Paw,
I have come to give you what for,
but you have grown short and hunched in my absence.
The plow that furrowed your brow will soon break your plot.
Though you have not forgotten how fit for sin all women are,
you grin, and I laugh at this trick of fate.
Grandma says, “He doesn’t know you anymore.”
And I must remember to tell your son, my father,
that he too may one day forget himself, and be forgiven.
LA Review of Books – This Is My Name: A Conversation with Vievee Francis
Preview ~ “Vievee Francis: I want to address danger and how we see danger. Sometimes we walk right into things we don’t see as dangerous, but they are. My decision to strip myself of my rurality and live only as an urban person was dangerous; it was profoundly unwise. And yet that’s exactly what I did without realizing it. And I think part of the reason why the wilderness undid me was because the city I built within me was fragile, and it could easily fall. Which is why I say nature in the end has its way. I think particularly so here in North America. No matter how many cities we place on it, there’s something so wild and ferocious about American nature.”
Vievee E. Francis 