A Poetry Collection That Imagines a World Beyond Empire

When I met Marissa Davis in 2017, she was a baby poet. She will admit this herself. She’d just graduated from Vanderbilt University and was spending her June as a summer fellow at the Bucknell Seminar for Undergraduate Poets. I got my chance to hear her read for the first time in one of those seminar workshops, crowded around a beige conference table in a beige room in a beige building. It was a low-stakes chance for all of us fellows to introduce ourselves through our poetry, and when Davis read her poem, I remember feeling the colorlessness of the room drip away. The feeling of some cosmic miscalculation descended: she didn’t sound like a baby poet. She had this line in her poem that, nearly a decade later, has never let go of me: “Even ash can raise a temple.” 

That sentiment—of the tender possibility for growth embedded in a moment of destruction—runs like a pulse through Davis’s debut collection, End of Empire. It’s a collection that only further reinforces Davis’s profile as a preternaturally wise voice, as a kind of interlocutor between the spiritual and the domestic, the doomed and the daring, the earth and the ether. 

When I first grabbed her book, I expected it to be beautiful. It is. But I was surprised by how much the book also feels like a form of travel. Davis’ language drives us through the Upland South of Paducah, Kentucky to the small apocalypse of a bee dying on a sidewalk in Beirut. She guides us through pelvic ultrasounds alongside maple seeds alongside environmental catastrophes alongside the reaches of state-sanctioned violence. And she threads these considerations together with a baffling understanding of song and dream, hope and heresy, witness and erasure. 

When I reached out to Davis to talk about the book, she explained, “I wanted to find a language that could at least tug away the helplessness that can be so easy to feel these days.” For her, poetry became a force to imagine possibility in the face of despair. I couldn’t help but remember her in that Bucknell workshop, imagining similar possibilities even then. If ash can raise a temple, a poem can defy a ruin. Davis’ collection is a wager on that possibility. We chatted more about this, as well as about the tangled faultline of endings and beginnings, the act of naming, and more.    

---

A.D. Lauren-Abunassar: There is so much urgency in a collection like this. In its demands for witness and for change on both an individual and collective level. It’s worth noting you end this book with the section “Genesis”—which we might normally think of as a beginning. If this book is both a consideration of an ending (End of Empire) and the beginning, what is it that’s beginning? 

Marissa Davis: In a nutshell, the “ending” within the book (which comes at the beginning) is hopelessness. The beginning within the book (which comes at the book’s end) is hope. Or, the beginning is the end—the end of one system, a broken one that breaks us, too—and the ending is a reconstruction; the start of a new cycle, a more communal and equitable order. Or the ending is our strident, quintessentially American individualism, and life begins precisely where the self learns that it can—and must—betray its borders. Or that all borders of any kind must be betrayed. The beginning is where the self has newly understood itself via the channel of relation; and not, as before, through the brutal and consumptive gaze of structural power. Or the ending (which opens) is meant to be the kind of wildfire whose rampage, cataclysmic, also releases the seeds of certain conifers. Knowledge that leaves the self bare to itself. That opens. At the ending (the beginning, genesis—), rises: a tree. 

ADLA: I love how much music is embedded in your work; even in your response just there. (The chorus of “ors” and the multiplicity they convey!) It’s making me think of how often you turn to polyvocality in your work. You speak with so many voices in this collection: Lot’s Wife, Doe of the Haruspex, Demeter, Antigone, Persephone, even a red bell pepper…What are the voices you sit with on a daily basis when you start to write?  

MD: I don’t know if there are any voices I sit with regularly, per se, but I do very much love to inhabit different ones at different moments. I think there’s something that draws me about looking at the self prismatically. In telling an ancient story anew, you have to find the commonality in particularity; the particularity in commonality. Myths are a kind of mirror: which is exactly why there have been so many poems written about, for example, Lot’s Wife or Persephone. How many different ways are there to descend into an underworld, any kind of underworld, and arise from it? How many different ways are there to miss a home, any kind of home, that one can’t or should not return to? 

The form is the reader’s first encounter with the work, whether they realize it or not.

I love how persona allows us to tap into the commonality of the very experience of being human while adding our own irreproducible thread to those stories. Sometimes the persona is something I choose with intention—like for “Doe of the Haruspex,” I’d just learned the word “haruspex,” found it fascinating, and wanted to try to write a poem about the idea. A lot of the time, though, I think that the persona I choose to inhabit can be a negotiation of both a desire for and fear of vulnerability, too. For example, “Demeter and Child” allowed me to write about something I was struggling with and wanted to work through without having to make it about myself. This masking, perhaps ironically, makes vulnerability easier. I’m in many ways a very private person—even to myself! I find I can say more when I’m not attaching my own “I” to the writing. 

ADLA: There is something deeply sculptural about your work; poems sprawl across the page/margins, line breaks surprise us, we are held in dense prose blocks. There is also so much about land in these poems, and it feels as though they are even building their own topographies/geographies/cartographies. Can you speak a little bit about your relationship to the page and how you negotiate where you want to locate us as readers?  

MD: I like using space to tell stories. It’s something that I find unique about poetry as an art form—it relies on language, yes; but also music; but also a sort of visual art. End of Empire, for example, uses a lot of fragmentation across its pages. There’s a sort of double-sidedness to it, with reclamation the force of negotiation between them. In the beginning, it’s often a representation of a fragmented self; and at the end, of a self that aims to fragment the very fragmenting structures. 

Every poem’s shape has its own specific aim, though. Several of these poems sprawl across the page (or across many pages), making more the kind of topographies you’re talking about. These poems are often trying to communicate immensity in some way—whether the immensity of a fault line, the immensity of grief, or the temporal and spatial immensity of imperial violence.

The form is the reader’s first encounter with the work, whether they realize it or not. There’s something, to me, reminiscent of a child hearing the mother’s voice in the womb and only later emerging to see her. We turn the page, and our eyes take in the whole poem’s shape even before they absorb any individual word. Form is thus the first framework and the first enigma, and I want to make that count, poem to poem.

ADLA: I know we have a shared love of Audre Lorde and her essay “Poetry Is Not a Luxury.” There is a moment in that essay where she writes, “Poetry is the way we help give name to the nameless so it can be thought. The farthest external horizons of our hopes and fears are cobbled by our poems…” When you were writing this collection, what were you trying to name? 

What I think this sort of poetry can do is strike the flint in many individual hearts.

MD: This question is one for which the answer evolved over the course of writing End of Empire. At a point, it was certainly myself. My chapbook, which was published by Jai-Alai Books in 2020, was actually titled My Name & Other Languages I Am Learning How to Speak. Even though very few of the poems from that chapbook feature in this collection, I do feel that there were lingering questions about identity, self-hate and self-harm and self-love, reclamation…that I was still writing my way into. The lens already begins as different, though—End of Empire is seeking the roots of that feeling of namelessness, or perhaps of a stolen name or a name called out of. It finds there something that is, first, more communally experienced; and moreover, more structural, more intentionally and systemically violent. 

And I think that this is something the collection aims to name, too—the many, many effects of violence. The many ways in which it is inflicted. The many victims of it. The violence not done to us is so often invisible to us, is accepted because it is invisible to us. It is simple enough for me as a Black American to grasp police brutality and what it means. It is not always an instinct, though, to grasp, say, what violences of greed might lie surreptitiously behind the clothing I buy or the food that I eat or how much I’m used to running A/C in the summertime. How do I name my part in the web of things? How do I name this odd space of being both oppressed for my Blackness (internationally as much as domestically) and privileged—at times even oppressor—for my Americanness? Or these ingrained systems that we’ve all been brought into without even asking to be?

And I suppose the last thing I wanted to name is some sort of path out. A hope, I guess I could say. One that leans on community, on the power and dignity and beauty of resisting domination and seeking togetherness. 

ADLA: Speaking of systems, it’s impossible to escape discussion of empire right now, with multiple ongoing genocides, environmental, social, political catastrophes, etc. Can you speak a little bit about what empire has to do with poetry? Or maybe what poetry has to do with empire?

MD: Language is the way we construct the world. It’s through language that we understand existence, communicate that understanding to others, define ourselves, define others. It’s a tool—and one that can be used in the service of forging and preserving hegemonic power just as much as breaking it down. You can witness the former just about any given day in the news: in the right-wing discourse around immigration, for example, or in the way that headlines have framed and continue to frame the genocide of Palestinians. Pretty much any racial, religious, sexual, gender, or other minority will grasp, without having to be told, how dominant cultural narratives shape how others view you—and very often how you view yourself.

I find poetry interesting as an axis of subversion because of how it uses—creates—language that can push against what language has created: splaying open received narratives, analyzing them, composting them in a sense, and calling something fresh to emerge. It brings the interior and the exterior into contact and communication. It summons the metaphor—which calls us to find similitude in the seemingly unsimilar; to de-other any supposed other while still leaving the difference intact. As writers, it asks us to pay attention, to look increasingly deeper. We have to create in thinking both critically and unexpectedly. As readers, we have to entrench ourselves in another’s interiority, their desire and agony and vision; we have to learn to be comfortable with the discomfort of not always understanding, of letting go of certainty and control and letting feeling take its place. 

I don’t necessarily think the kind of poetry I write, though, is the kind that would guide a revolution or topple a kingdom. What I think this sort of poetry can do—or at least, what I hope it can do—is strike the flint in many individual hearts. It can bear witness, tearing the mask off of violence and making its expressions and effects better known and understood; and it can put us into connection, weaving, in that process, the feeling—or better, conviction—of solidarity with one another, which is the only shovel that can dig an empire’s grave.

ADLA: Survival is another urgent consideration in this book. We can see this particularly in “Parable for the Apocalypse We Built, I: / The Forum:” where you write:  “Will it survive/ … Will we survive / … Will our children survive / … How can it survive, if dying? / … Did we not deserve a prophet to warn us?” I’m momentarily electing you prophet. What’s the warning here? And what tools do we need to survive? 

MD: The warning is that the path we are on is a completely and absolutely unsustainable one. When it comes to the climate crisis, for example, the outlook for global warming and sea-level rise has never been a happy one, but corporate interests, warmongering, and the increasing ubiquity of AI (all interrelated), among other conditions, have massively accelerated the issue over the past few years—a situation that was never necessary, but that the interests of the powerful have placed every single one of us on this planet in. When it comes to state and institutional violence, a refusal to see the interconnectedness between another’s oppression and your own (take as an example some of the recent online discourse about whether or not Black people should “mind their business” with regards to the ICE raids and anti-ICE collective actions in LA) is a death sentence for them, you, and everybody. 

Our best tool is believing that we do, in fact, all owe something to one another and to the earth.

The challenges are many, but the tools we have are many, too. It’s putting land back into indigenous hands instead of corporate and/or colonial ones. It’s refusing to believe that voting is our only tool of liberation. It’s getting used to being a lot less comfortable—realizing that just because we can have anything doesn’t mean it’s needed. It’s learning to care authentically for ourselves and our communities instead of relying on the “retail therapy” and consumption that are marketed to us and that both create massive amounts of waste and widen the gap between rich and poor. It’s taking on education and awareness so that we can construct our values intentionally and do our best to live by them. It’s a lot of other things, too; more than I have the space to name. And I should perhaps add that I also recognize there are limitations to personal power and responsibility in the face of that of state and corporate (often, too, state-backed) actors; much less the constraints of just trying to survive in the world order as it stands, in which money rules all. At the root, though, our best tool is believing that we do, in fact, all owe something to one another and to the earth that houses us, and then doing our best to live through that conviction—knowing that communal power is its own force, too. 

ADLA: The whole collection ends with some of my favorite lines: “We yearn / to become / we become it”. This whole book is filled with moments of hunger, yearning, becoming. At the risk of sounding syrupy, can you speak a bit about what you want this collective “we” to become? What you yearn for?

Omar El Akkad on How the Empire Weaponizes Language to Numb Itself to Genocide

“One Day Everyone Will Have Always Been Against This” explodes the myth of the West’s moral superiority

Mar 3 – Bareerah Ghani

Interviews

MD: I’ll be syrupy, too! We’ll be syrupy together. I yearn for the we to recognize itself. To struggle in its togetherness for its freedom and to win it. I want each “I” of which the “we” is composed to feel love for every other “I”. To see that they also want to dance and sing songs, to cook the meals of their parents and raise children that will grow joyfully to adulthood, to lounge in the sunlight on a warm day, to marvel at how the sunset is a little more lavender this evening than usual. I want the “we” to have the chance to experience the full awe of their life in freedom—without the dropping of bombs or the poisoning of their land or the incarceration of their children or having to labor until weary just to survive. 

Humanity is so incredibly simple in some ways that it can be almost baffling that we manage to cause each other so much pain. There are many reasons behind that, but I feel that a principal one is the inability to recognize the self in each other, an inability that tends to be taught to us. I want the “we” to unteach it. And in that unteaching, in the fight that it implies, to reclaim all the rest. 

The post A Poetry Collection That Imagines a World Beyond Empire appeared first on Electric Literature.