Ahead of her upcoming reading with Sandra Cisneros, we talked to acclaimed poet and sound artist LaTasha N. Nevada Diggs about her strikingly personal new book, Village, the poetry of grief, her singular performance style, expecting the unexpected, and more.
Village is more personal and vulnerable than TwERK, your first book — you are sorting through grief in an explicit way. Were you conscious of trying to write from a more vulnerable place, or did it emerge naturally out of your writing process?
I am unpacking my relationship with my mother in this book, attempting to come to terms with her death in 2006. There were moments when I struggled, honestly. Memories are memories — they are neither recorded analog nor digital. They are not perfect. I had to figure out how to write about something that is disturbing while remaining true to my bizarre sense of humor, and my attraction to process, restriction, and poetic devices. It might not make sense at first glance, but these are the things that drew the narrative out.
When TwERK came out in 2013, it made a huge impact among poets. It was singular. On the one hand it was this combustive lyric machine, all its wildness perfectly packed onto the page, but then also a score for your dynamic vocal performances that add a whole other dimension to the poems when you read them live. After that, Village took ten years to arrive. What changed for you in the interim?
In the years moving up to the present, I’ve been finding that a lot of me is my mother. This body that I did not want to become — a body that has gone through a lot of fight and struggle — is in many ways my mother’s body. And because it is my body, I have to love this body. I have to love both of us. It took more than ten years actually. The manuscript was written between 2006 and 2008 as the thesis for my MFA, following my mother’s passing. This could not be forced. I needed to look at it, to run away from it, and to look at it again. What am I wanting to convey and why? Time was a necessary tool to craft this into something that was more than a thesis. How do I write about grief? How do I write about the tensions between a mother and a daughter? These are not unfamiliar questions — many writers have written books from these questions. I had to figure out how to do it differently, in my own way.
Diggs performs the poem “daggering kanji” from TwERK at 92NY in 2018.
Multilingual collision and sharp swerves in and out of various vernaculars has long been central to your work, and in Village there seems to be a particular emphasis on Tsalagi, a Cherokee language. You’ve spoken elsewhere about a high school teacher who introduced you to it, but I wonder how this particular language — and more generally, the practice of learning other languages — has informed the poems in Village?
In the original manuscript, Tsalagi was throughout the book. I had a moment of asking myself — why? How is it functioning? In all of the languages I’ve studied, there’s always a question of fluency. I’m not fluent in Spanish, and I don’t even consider myself fully fluent in English. With Tsalagi, I had a desire to be fluent in it, but I have (I’m still in denial, lol) to accept that this was not possible — due to location, age, and my daily engagement with other folks who speak Tsalagi, which is null. I think its place in this book, along with Portuguese, represents a kind of longing. In certain communities, to be a descendent is not enough. I am of that ancestry and I need to know my place.
You’ll be reading with Sandra Cisneros, a fascinating pairing — formally and musically, your work is quite different. But I’m wondering where you see points of overlap or unforeseen convergence. What is your relationship to Cisneros’ writing?
I was introduced to her work in this little anthology I picked up years ago, as a young poet. I’m tickled by being in unlikely pairings, because I often feel like an outsider. This goes back to what I was saying about grief — I am always asking myself how to not be obvious. So this pairing of Sandra and I is not obvious. Well, the first reading I ever went to was at the Nuyorican Poets Cafe. The poets that I gravitated toward early on were not Langston Hughes, Nikki Giovanni, or Gwendolyn Brooks, though Gwendolyn now sparks me. It was largely Latine poets — Sandra María Estevez, Edwin Torres, Octavio Paz, César Vallejo. The folks who were encouraging me to read anything at all, period, were poets Tony Medina and Louis Reyes Rivera. This is what germinated writing for me. If you know this about me, the not-so-obvious is quite obvious. Especially when allowed a deeper reading of both of our work as women examining identity. So, I’m excited to read with her.
What do you hope audiences take away with them after seeing this reading?
I want to make them cry, and also laugh. There is so much to this book that we didn’t get to cover in this interview — housing, Harlem, the trifling artist application that I attempt to use as a poetic form to find something new. I hope they get to see the next chapter of my evolution through all of this — as a woman, as a daughter, as a child who is still learning. And I hope they are introduced or reacquainted with all of the different types of erasures that can take place in the life of one person.
LaTasha N. Nevada Diggs reads with Sandra Cisneros on Thursday, October 5.