Nicole Sealey on The Ferguson Report: An Erasure : An interview with Sally Bliumis-Dunn
SBD
I am so excited to delve into The Ferguson Report : An Erasure. Thank you for giving your time to PLUME for this interview, Nicole. The first question I have is, what spurred you to turn to erasure?
NS
Thanks so much for having me, Sally.
I didn’t come to The Ferguson Report with erasure in mind. After thinking about how I might further engage with its findings, I instinctively began erasing it—not knowing what, if anything, would come of it. Striking through whole sections of the document felt physical, like ripping out drywall and taking the document down to its studs.
SBD
I love that image of tearing down the house of racism to a skeletal structure that can become something else.
Is this your first erasure? If not, how was it different this time around?
NS
I’ve written two erasures, a poem titled “Cue” in my secocnd book Ordinary Beast and, now, The Ferguson Report: An Erasure. After writing “Clue” sestinas based on the board game of the same name, I began thinking about the erasure form. Though I didn’t yet feel comfortable erasing someone else’s work, I had no problem erasing my own. “Clue” then provided the text and context for my first erasure, “Cue.”
SBD
How did your process differ in these two mediums?
NS
“Clue” is a poem and The Ferguson Report is a government document. In the former exists creative language from which to lift. In the latter, exists only information, information that doesn’t delight in any way.
In my experience, poems are often prompted by beauty, not always in the traditional sense, as there can be beauty in the seemingly unpleasant image, absurd idea and strangely put phrase. That said, after spending hundreds of hours with The Report, I can confirm that there’s very little beauty therein, traditionally or otherwise. This dearth was the main difference, which has less to do with the erasure form than the document itself.
SBD
Could you describe in more detail looking at a page of text from The Ferguson Report and choosing words versus sitting down to write poems that aren’t erasure?
NS
When writing free verse, for example, the words I’ve learned to date are at my disposal. With The Ferguson Report: An Erasure, on the other hand, I was limited to the text already on the page and the order in which it appears. I’d continuously scan the pages of The Report, highlighting words and phrases that could, down the line, build to or become moments. In ways I’m not able to fully describe or comprehend, I had to both see intently and look past the document’s logic and language. Words that I thought would’ve been ideal, were oftentimes absent. Having to find alternatives kept me open to anything and everything.
SBD
A Poets.org excerpt reads: we called out as in we neighed. The final version, however, reads: Horses, hundreds, neighing— / part reflex, part reason, / part particular urge. / At gunpoint, among them, / you are… Why the shift from we to you? And, how did you decide what to make explicit and what to suggest?
NS
After it had been published, I realized that I wasn’t satisfied with the excerpt. Something about it read off—lyrically, musically. To make the excerpt sit right with me, I left it alone for a long while, then returned to it from different angles. After thinking about the tensions a point of view shift might incite or stifle, I landed on the second person. This collection, to a good degree, is concerned with discomfort. The shift to the you is, I hope, discomforting.
SBD
Yes, the shift to you is discomforting and implicates the reader in some way yet to be defined.
It sets the reader off balance and on a kind of high alert.
NS
There’s nothing coy about erasing The Ferguson Report, which details racist policing and court practices in Ferguson, Missouri. In terms of what is and is not expressly revealed, the severity of the text decided for me.
SBD
Did you visually break up “neigh ing” in this excerpt from the erasure in order to have the phrase embody a present tense moment, “neigh” and then a moment of longer duration with “ing.”
NS
Honestly, no. But, I’m thrilled that the layout brings these thoughts to mind. The letters, words and phrases fell where they fell. When I happened upon them, I tried my best to pick each up.
SBD
Are you conscious of the group clusters of alliterative words that get this erasure rolling: “horses” and “hundreds,” or “part,” “part,” “part” and “particular” or “less,” “likely” and “live?”
NS
Alliteration and repetition are devices I use often. The repeated words like the many parts feel to me like a car engine revving. During the drafting process, the music that alliteration and repetition elicit were oftentimes the only things holding these excerpts together—I didn’t know where I was going and to what end. These devices provided momentum. State violence against Black people doesn’t let up. The language of this collection should be as incessant and insistent as the state; hence, these repetitive sound devices.
SBD
With the word “wild” broken as it is (“wi ld”), is it your intention that readers read, “why” before they get to the end of the word, so as to call into question the violence?
NS
I’m thrilled these questions come to mind. Because “wild” was wanting in the text and the poem required it, “wild” is the word I made.
SBD
Fascinating to me that you did not change the placement of any letters or words in the text and that this offered such a rich and evocative reading!
The beginning of “pages thirteen to twenty-one” reads: Then the birds began to fly. Is “Then” a flag word meant to signal that this is a chronological narrative, as The Ferguson Report: An Erasure has a centuries-long history of racial violence behind it?
NS
Readers could begin with the last excerpt and end with the first or begin with the middle excerpts and read outwards—there’s no right way to read The Ferguson Report: An Erasure. The movements of this work aren’t meant to be linear. I imagine each happening simultaneously, in disparate locations.
The original document created the context for the erasure but, visually, the erasure is the form from which the shadow of The Report emerges. And, with that shadow comes a history of police brutality, anti-Black racism and a combination thereof.
SBD
I was wowed by the simile in that same excerpt—the “birds” are “hands” and “a gun.” Did you mean to evoke this sense of being unsafe?
NS
Definitely. There was never a time in my reading of The Ferguson Report that I didn’t fear for the lives of the Black citizens referenced. The investigation proved that, on a whim, at any given moment, the Ferguson police department, with the assistance of the city’s courts, had (has?) absolute power to ruin lives or, worse, extinguish them. So, in this collection, even the seemingly harmless image of a bird reads precarious.
SBD
Could you talk about the thought behind spelling out the more violent “prey” in the excerpt’s a boy pretends to prey, though the syntax suggests “pray”?
NS
Stop! Hands where I can see! precedes the “prey” line. Because of this, I think that prey actually works best, while also hinting to the homonym “pray.” Based on our syntactic expectations, we get two words for the price of one, which makes the line more interesting.
SBD
In the first three sections you have “horses,” a “dog,” “birds” and a “deer.” Why animals?
NS
Animals have populated my work since before I can remember (my first two books are titled “The Animal After Whom Other Animals Are Named” and “Ordinary Beast,” respectively). In high school and college, I studied for years to become a veterinarian. Obviously, I’m no vet, but I’m still fascinated by animals and with anthropocentrism, the idea that humans are the most important of all living things, which is a kind of supremacist thinking. I resist this idea and, I think, this resistance manifests itself in my work through the appearance of animals.
SBD
That is what I intuited but it reaches deeper now knowing that you had wanted to be a veterinarian, a healer.
I’m struck by the rhyme in the third excerpt: a design /oversight assigned / to that particular beast./On the police radio… Is the rhyme “beast” and “police” intended to make ear associate one with the other? If so, are there other such instances?
NS
I’ve only recently noticed a couple of these rhymes, including the one you mentioned as well as the first excerpt’s “live” and “captive.” With these rhymes, I was most likely listening to my own internal music, while trying to stay within the confines of the erasure form. Which is to say, I don’t know if I was completely conscious of the “beast” and “police” rhyme (or, for that matter, “live” and “captive”). The word “beast,” for me, doesn’t automatically call up savagery, the way the word “police” does when reading The Report.
SBD
Yes, a “beast” can simply be an animal, of course.
In “pages thirty-five to thirty-nine” the word “force” repeats—brute force, force a smile, force open your door, etcetera.
Thank you for the audio of this lifted poem pages 35-39.
NS
There’s a stretch of The Ferguson Report that repeats the word “force” so often that the pages that follow that stretch feel somewhat incomplete. What was surprising is “pages thirty-five to thirty-nine” is pulled from the part of The Report with less “force,” not more. It wasn’t until after I’d read beyond the sections that repeat “force” did the possibility of “pages thirty-five to thirty-nine” surface. Though at no point in the process was I on the look out for the word, it had made its way into my imagination.
SBD
In “pages forty-four to forty-nine”: You put down one color / Bearden thought and it calls / for an answer. What is the answer / to black, I wonder? Any reason for this being the first time we hear from the “I”?
NS
All of these excerpts seem unrecognizable from earlier versions. The Bearden quote emerged around the twentieth draft or so. Initially, the “I” was asking the woman the question but, as I continued to revise, what the woman thought became less important. The “I” also enters the final excerpt, “pages seventy-eight to eighty-four”: a figure (separate, / his offenses), motions for me / to get closer. With an ear / to the glass, I remain silent. In both cases, the “I” is responding to outside forces: an idea, a figure. For me, respectively, first-person makes the question the I asks less hypothetical and the silence the I waits in more severe.
SBD
Did you plan to have the last section of lifted poems or were they an afterthought? I don’t imagine that you created those first?
NS
The erasures came first. The lifted poems followed. Though I hadn’t imagined the lifted poems while erasing, they weren’t an afterthought either. Whether in its erasure or lineated form, The Ferguson Report: An Erasure operates as a poem, in the “traditional” sense, with all of its flourishes: images, allusions, alliteration, etcetera. If these flourishes are missed in the erasure, it is my hope that readers find them in the lifted poems. And, vice versa
SBD
Reading the erasure versus reading the lifted poems creates a very different reading experience.
NS
Compared to the lifted poems, the erasure moves in slow motion, as readers must piece together the words as well as the worlds of the poem. While the erasure determines the pace at which information is released, because it lacks punctuation, the reader determines when and where to place emphases. In contrast, there’s a sense of direction with the lifted poems because punctuation and enjambment are present. There’s a clearer sense of the line, visually speaking. The erasure alongside the lifted poems provide an interesting kind of double interiority.
SBD
Reading The Ferguson Report: An Erasure felt like using a Ouija board. The words appear, letter by letter—a kind of decoding. Is the Ouija board analogy true for your process or part of an intended effect? Are there specific reactions you hope to elicit?
NS
The Ouija board analogy feels apt. While it wasn’t my intention, it was my experience. With this work, with poems in general, I often feel guided by something beyond myself.
Yusef Komunyakaa described the collection’s movements as “fleshy blips on the heart meter.” A dear friend painted the process of reading The Ferguson Report: An Erasure as “equal parts language processing and visual processing.” I just hope that this work sings to and for readers, even if that song is a dirge.
SBD
Thank you so much, Nicole, for all the time and care you gave to elucidating your amazing work, “The Ferguson Report: An Erasure.”
NS
Thank you, Sally.
Nicole Sealey was born in St. Thomas, U.S.V.I. and raised in Apopka, Florida. She is the author of Ordinary Beast, finalist for the Hurston/Wright Legacy Award and the PEN Open Book Award, and The Animal After Whom Other Animals Are Named, winner of the Drinking Gourd Chapbook Poetry Prize. An excerpt from her forthcoming collection, The Ferguson Report: An Erasure, was awarded the Forward Prize for Best Single Poem. Her honors include a 2023-2024 Cullman Center Fellowship from the New York Public Library, a Rome Prize in Literature from the American Academy in Rome, a Hodder Fellowship from Princeton University, the Stanley Kunitz Memorial Prize from The American Poetry Review, and fellowships from CantoMundo, Cave Canem, the National Endowment for the Arts, and the New York Foundation for the Arts. Her work has appeared in various journals and anthologies including The New Yorker, Poetry London, and The Best American Poetry (2018 and 2021). She is a visiting professor at Boston University and teaches in the MFA Writers Workshop in Paris program at New York University. For bookings please contact Anya Backlund at anya@blueflowerarts.com.
