Transforming Trauma into Verse: Tennison S. Black on “Survival Strategies” [INTERVIEW]

Tennison S. Black is the author of Survival Strategies (winner of the National Poetry Series, UGA Press 2023). Their work has appeared or is forthcoming in SWWIM, Hotel Amerika, Booth, Wordgathering, and New Mobility, among others. Black received their MFA at Arizona State University. They are the Managing Editor at Sundress Publications and Best of the Net and are the editor of the anthology on contemporary disability, A Body You Talk To. Though Sonoran born, Black resides in Washington state. Below are excerpts from the interview with James Morehead on the Viewless Wings Poetry Podcast.

James Morehead: “Survival Strategies” is a tour de force. The characters and Sonoran setting are so clearly drawn and consistently woven through the poems and prose that the reader is left deeply affected. Details connect the poems and passages, the kestrel cry of ‘killi killi killi killi killi’ repeated in multiple places is one example. How did you approach crafting this collection to work so well as a unified whole?

Tennison S. Black: “In the first draft of the book, it was one poem. I had become very enamored of the long poems of Alice Notley and Diane di Prima. And so, I thought that I would try my hand at this idea of an epic poem. Originally, it was one poem. I think it was ninety to ninety-seven pages or something like that. But that’s why it kind of is unified. But then later, I started breaking them out. I found you can’t publish in journals if it’s all one poem. So I started pulling out pieces, and then I was like, ‘Well, that doesn’t make sense without this other thing from, you know, ten pages previous.’ And so I started putting things together that needed to be together, and in that process, it started to become individual poems. So it was a process over a very long time, but it feels unified. I think that that process gave it the arc that it has and gave it that sort of through line that you don’t see a lot in poetry collections. I don’t think I’ll ever be able to recreate it or capture that same thing again.”

James: I had a similar experience with my second book. I had a long poem, or series of poems, but really one poem, just like you described, of an 18-day trip I took as a teenager to the Soviet Union. It took three months to write, and people really liked it. But I was not sure what to do with it because it was twenty-five poems, separated by numbers, but really it’s just one long epic poem. Like you described, I can’t imagine ever doing that again. This particular experience had so many rich moments that there was no way to capture it in anything but a very long series of poems. So I ended up putting it out in my second book as more than two-thirds of the book and then rounded it out with a few other things. But yes, it’s tricky. You can’t publish, you can’t send that to a journal. It’s just not publishable in its true, full form.

Tennison: “No, and excerpts become not nonsensical, but they don’t contain the richness and the information needed to stand entirely on their own. They become almost experimental, or just so far out that they’re losing important information and they’re not maintaining the storyline if you.”

James: Well, that definitely explains why there’s such a unified whole to it. Building on that question, the character representing you has a narrative arc, a journey of understanding about their relationship with the Sonoran Desert. How did you approach crafting that arc while remaining true to the autobiographical elements?

Tennison: “I don’t think it was always there. I think I had to live it before I could write it. I had spent so long hating where I was from. I really hated it. I reviled it. I would not even say that I was from there. My social media pages would tell you that I was from Washington because that’s where I live now, and where I found my home and my people, but I didn’t say where I was from. And then I went late to college. You should know that I was already a parent and had raised my children because I was a teenage mother.

“So, in that process, I decided that I was going to go to grad school. I applied widely and was lucky enough to get into several schools. But ASU offered me the best package and the best opportunities, and also studying with people that I so greatly admired. And I was devastated. I was just beside myself. Of all the places on Earth, now I’m going back to Arizona. And that’s actually where the first poem in the book comes from. After I had been accepted at ASU and I took their offer, I wrote the first poem in the book. It explores that ‘What am I doing? Why am I doing this?’ kind of feeling. But you know, over the course of that time, I had received a fellowship to go back to Yuma at one point, and I began to revisit these places as an adult. You know that feeling if you were ever a sensitive child who felt threatened and who had some trauma and challenges, and then you become an adult and you try to become the adult that that child needed. In that process, you also make yourself feel safer. So, I had some of those experiences. I made friends, and I found things that I loved about Yuma and about Arizona. And now, I look forward to it every time I get to go back. I get excited to see those people, to revisit those places, to eat my favorite foods, you know. But I think it was in that process that I lived that arc of ‘I hate this, I can’t do this,’ to ‘Actually, maybe this is okay.’ Now, I wouldn’t say it’s always okay for those sensitive children, but I lived that arc. And I tried to write it not to redeem myself in any way, but maybe to redeem the story, maybe to say that everything wasn’t lost, everything isn’t terrible.”

James: I think your book captures that arc so clearly, and the extra color you just provided is such an interesting backdrop to that. No, it really is why I found the book so compelling. It’s because you were living through this character, kind of like you do with a novel where you really get invested in the characters. When the novel’s over, you miss them. I don’t typically feel that with a collection of poetry. I go back and revisit certain poems that I really enjoyed, but this book, in particular, left me missing the characters that were drawn. So, it’s really effective.

In “My Father Warned Me of Javelina” you wrote:

"He warned of rattlesnakes. And scorpions. Taught me
that the desert into which I was born was both beautiful
and deadly. He taught me respect for nature. Sorry, no.

That's not true. He never warned me
of anything. Except boys of a certain shade. But those
boys never harmed me once. Unlike him."

There are many moments like this that caught me as a reader, that made me jolt. How do you approach editing moments like these that are so important for the power of the narrative?

Tennison: “I almost cut that poem.”

James: Interesting.

Tennison: “I did. And I still sometimes look at it a little sideways and wonder if it’s too heavy-handed. I mean, I think all of us do that, right? We revisit our work years later and stare at it and think, ‘Is that what I would write today? Are those still words that are within my best capabilities?’ But I think when I was putting this together, I would look at poem A, poem B, and I would realize that the gap between them was too big and therefore this other A and a half needed to be there.

“I was actually born on the street ‘F and a half’ because in Yuma, there are a lot of these streets that have letters and so my birth certificate says my address is on ‘F and a half’. It doesn’t exist anymore. It’s now got a name, but what lies between A and B and a half? I think that for some of those narrative pieces, that’s where those were. I cut a whole lot out of that 97-page poem, a lot of that is not in the book. But when I was rearranging the book and trying to figure out why it wasn’t working, it was those pieces that fit in between. I think of that as one of those in-between pieces because it bridges what precedes and what follows.”

James: “I think I pulled it out because I thought it was so effective. I think that if the entire book had been in that tone, then maybe you’re right. It’s too heavy-handed. But because it was surrounded by so much that wasn’t in that tone, it just stood out in a good way. Like it caught you, so I found that very, I was very moved by that. So I’m glad you didn’t cut it. I thought it was very powerful. Thank you.

The poems build to a long prose poem, labeled a fable, titled ‘the mother and the mountain,’ and anchored on the image of a thalweg, ‘being the alluvial feet of mountains.’ What was the journey of this piece? Did it start as a prose poem or grow into one when constructing the book? How do you approach the forms that different pieces should take? And I’m modifying my question again with the knowledge now that this truly was one contiguous piece to start with. But even within that, you vary the forms. Can you talk about how form played a role?

Tennison: “Well, in that particular piece, it came in and went out. It’s been broken up into different poems and then it’s been put back together. I don’t know how you work, but I’m very messy. I just tear things apart and put them back together and mix it up. I’m always moving them around. I found that these were all the pieces that I had cut from other things, and they were all my mother, my mother’s story. And if there’s anything that I didn’t want, it was for my mother to end up absent because that was exactly what this period of time had done to her, this period of time had erased her magic, her capabilities, everything that she was in the world, and subjugated it. I hate that, I hate that for her. I hate that for every woman who has ever lived. I hate it, and I need to push back against that.

“I had woven her in much more intricately into each of the poems, but then I found that those pieces were striking notes. Those lines rather were striking notes that threatened to derail each individual key and tip it toward that instead of toward what I was trying to say. And so I slowly was like, ‘No, I can’t use this,’ but I would say it and move this and I can get up, and then I ended up with this whole long thing about just my mother’s story. And I thought, ‘Okay, that’s what I really want, for her story to have importance, to have value. But in order to really understand all of that, you had to see all of this other stuff first. You need to understand both the location and the people that were involved before you could look at who she had been both previous to and then through it. And so over time, it began to gel into this other form, and I wasn’t really sure that anyone was going to let me get away with it for my first book, right? And I had a lot of concern about it. But also, you’ve got to do you and you have to do your art your way and hope that it finds a home.”

James: The form definitely helped do that.  I have a couple of examples of where I knew I had a great foundation for a poem. I had one in my second book around a very impactful trip I took to Normandy and to the D-Day beaches and all the experiences I had there. And I knew I had this really cool story to tell, and at first did it in sort of tight three-line stanzas with a meter and rhyming structure. And when I finished the whole thing, it didn’t work. Somehow, the form was undermining the content. So I completely scrapped it and redid it as another poem using the form of another poem I’d written in the form of a screenplay. My youngest said, ‘That’s just not working,’ so I took that form and rewrote the Normandy poem as though it were a screenplay and a prose poem, and then boom, it worked.

Tennison: “I did, and I think unlocking that piece, finally finding that form, also allowed me to unlock the way that the book was going to lay and move it to the appropriate place, and everything at that point fell into place.”

James: In ‘I Divorced the Desert’ you write:

"The roadrunner, the javelina, the lizards all tell stories of the
ocean that was once theirs and I want to be a listening person.
But I hated this desert. The volley of my life between the
ocean and the sage. I began to hate the drifts of sand at the
edges of everything, the scrub that scratched and burned

tender skin."

How did writing these poems, so personal and in places, painful, help you understand your history with your parents and the places where you grew up?”

Tennison: “My parents divorced when I was young. Up to that point, I had my mother’s protection in this place. But my mother took me and ran when I was two years old to Southern California. That meant, though, that I had to go back to Yuma in the summers and holidays, in a way that was unprotected. I no longer had her as a buffer, and that was really difficult. For a long time, I just blamed him. I remember all the times that I didn’t want to go and I would scream and grab onto door knobs and door jams, begging my mother not to make me go. I remember her crying and saying, ‘I have to send you or I will lose you. I don’t have a choice, you have to go.’ I did not want to go, so I blamed him for not being sensitive to that, for not caring. Maybe I still do, but in thinking it through more, I didn’t come to a place of peace about that. But I found other good things to love about the desert in general and to not hate it so much.”

James: “I wrote a poem about a mugging in Boston when I was 10 in the subway all by myself, hand over my mouth. It took me years to figure out how to write that down. It was very helpful to externalize it and almost get somewhat clinical about it because then, as you’re crafting a poem, there’s an element of you having to be clinical and critical, which is different than it being in your head. I found that was very helpful in dealing with that traumatic experience, growing up and being bullied as a middle schooler, and having to capture some of that. It just externalizes it, and I don’t know if that’s something that you felt.”

Tennison: “Yeah, that’s spot-on. When I was writing these early on in my grad school experience and connecting with the desert, I was a disaster, crying every day. That process of bringing it up is super painful, especially if you’ve buried these things for a long time. It’s almost like they accumulate additional grief over that period of time, and opening those boxes is awful. I was really struggling, but my mentor and I talked about the ways that bell hooks pushes things out into the third person to distance them. So, there was a period of time when the whole thing was in the third person for that reason, to push it away from me a little bit and let me look at it a little better. I think your point about externalizing is really valuable. It definitely made a difference for me, and then eventually, I could bring it back in when I was a little more healed.”

James: The unnamed “cowboy” is a recurring character in multiple poems. In “The Scrape of the Barrel of My Father’s Revolver on My Teeth”, which is a fantastic title, includes the line:

"When the cowboy and the stepmother arrived home
to a cruiser in the drive he hissed, that nosy woman

should be drug out behind the barn
and shot."

And in “the mother and the mountain” you wrote:

"The cowboy's charming nature rusted when exposed to the weather of marriage."

How did you approach weaving characters into this book, blending autobiographical and imagined elements, and achieve the consistency that makes this book sing? I’ve talked about this before and about blending autobiographical and imagined elements, thinking about each character through what I now understand was one long poem. But even that makes it a richer question because that’s how novelists have to approach a book, with characters that are fully understood. I remember Margaret Atwood said that when constructing a book she knows what’s in the night side table drawer, even if she never opens it. Knowing now that you wrote this originally as one piece, did you have a strategy or structure, an approach to the characters that you were going to include, and how you were going to represent them? Was that an organic thing, or was there some kind of intentional approach to ensuring that consistency?

Tennison: “I like to think I’m intentional in those things, but it’s probably both. My parents were larger than life, and I wanted to capture some of that. I don’t know that I was always completely effective, but I wanted to make sure that I incorporated or at least tried to depict them in a realistic way as I saw it, but that was consistent throughout. I didn’t want them changing who they were partway through or anything like that because they did not, as humans. They were pretty consistent throughout their lives, but they were also these huge, incredible people who were both great and terrible at the same time. And yeah, I thought a lot about symbology. I thought a lot about what are the things, the objects that tie me to these people, because I’m an object person. I still am. I keep things that belonged to them just to hold in my hand sometimes and think about that. I gathered those in my mind and in my notebook, and I thought about not just what those mean to me, but what do those mean in the outside world? You know, what does the cowboy’s belt really mean? When is it about the tooled leather and the silver belt buckle, and why do we associate the belt almost more than the hat? For me, it was because it struck me, both literally and figuratively. It was also that it was eye level to me, and it was something that I had to contend with a lot and wrestle with. The hat, which we think about a lot, is almost a throwaway. It’s also so on the nose, so wholly silly, almost a caricature. But the belt is something else.”

James: I mentioned that your book is full of poems with wonderful titles, titles that could stand alone as mini-poems. How do you approach titling your poems, and what role do you feel a title should play?

Tennison: “Oh my God, titles are ridiculous; they’re so hard. I was taught by a mentor of mine, Alberto Rios, that the title is the address. It’s geo-positioning, if you will. So, I think about that a lot. How do I locate this particular glom of words amid all of them? How do I locate it? And sometimes I’m not so great at it, and other times I say, ‘Well, this is the thing. This is the one thing that makes this completely unique amid not just my poems but the sea of poems that exist in the world.’ Sometimes it comes really quickly, and sometimes it has had 27 different titles over the course of… I actually have a spreadsheet when I was submitting them where I have to list what titles it was under in each of these different submissions. Like, it’s the same poem then I’m like, I go to submit it over here, and I like, I hate that title, and I’ll just redo it.”

James: I have the exact same thing. I have a spreadsheet with multiple names of the same poem.

Tennison: “Totally, and then eventually it kind of reaches a place where you stop changing it, and then maybe it’s settled into that, and that really suits it.”

James: Titles are so important. I had a poem called ‘Stage Fright,’ which is functional, in eighth grade – a stage fright experience. A poet friend of mine pushed me, said, ‘This poem is so cool, but you’ve got to change the title. The title is so bland.’ So I changed ‘Stage Fright’ into ‘That time I was left for dead downstage,’ and it immediately got placed. Now, I don’t know if the two are connected, but I think the title certainly helped, and it really stuck in my mind. So now I think that if people aren’t interested in the title, it’s going to be really hard to get them interested in the poem. Especially when things are published in a journal and people are flipping through the table of contents or it’s online, and they see just the snippet and nothing else. It’s really, really important.

Tennison: “Right, and the title to my book in general, when it was one poem, and a long time after, it was actually titled ‘The Lilac Sea’ because I was focused on that concept of my mother and what she gave to me, and the lilac was her favorite flower. But when I realized it was not her story, it was also not the cowboy’s story. It’s my story, and then when I came to that, that’s actually when I changed the titles of the eponymous poem, that survival strategy within the collection. I changed that first. It was still ‘The Lilac Sea,’ and then eventually, I was like, ‘No, actually, that’s also the name of the collection because this is my story. This is my struggle or also the struggle of, you know, queer and creative and sensitive kids in places where it’s very difficult to thrive, and that there are ways that the desert survives and also ways that features within the desert.”

James: So I love that connection of the resiliency of the desert. It’s a very harsh environment, yet life survives, and there are these wonderful capsules of… I hadn’t thought of that, it’s a really beautiful connection. You paint a powerful, painful, and sometimes beautiful portrait of life in the Sonoran Desert. You write,

"Sonoran kids where the kind of dirt that hasn't seen rain or dew since winter last" 

and

"The peccary and I breathe together.
Yogic deep. Heavy. Dilated breaths."

In revising and editing this collection, what was your approach to testing and perfecting these images of the desert?”

Tennison: “It was a lot of memory work. It was just sort of sitting and being present, both figuratively or in my mind, but also later within the actual desert itself. It involved long walks in the Yuma desert, writing and lists of memories, whole long lists of things that struck me, both just visually but mostly emotionally. Like, what are the things that, at my age, I still remember?

“For me, it was just connecting all of those pieces within myself because I had locked them away for so long and just shut the door and labeled it, ‘Fuck off,’ you know? Opening that door was terrible. So I think a lot of that imagery just comes from that. It was like opening the door, and then they just start to hit you in the face, and you’re just like, ‘Wait, wait, wait, wait, let me write it down.’ It was that process of pulling it back out of myself.”

James: I was in the Soviet Union pre-perestroika, so that whole environment doesn’t exist in the same way anymore. It took me months to write, but I was astounded about how much I remembered, the more I wrote. As I wrote, it just unlocked memories and details that were all there. The process of writing poetry, I encourage anyone who has had a powerful experience, whether positive or negative, that the process of writing a rich poem will just unearth memories that maybe you need to remember and deal with, or you want to remember because they were so powerfully positive. Writing poetry is a very effective tool for sucking memories out of your brain.

Tennison: “I live in that world of sensory processing disorder, and I’m sensory overload all the time. I’m fully aware of every sensory detail that’s happening around me, and my memories contain all of that sort of sensory information as well. The process of poetry just gives me a place to put it out of my body, and just say, ‘Okay, that’s there,’ because it’s almost like my body has to hold on to it. We don’t want to forget this; we need this information. Why we need this information, I do not know, but my body is like, ‘We have to hold on to this information because we need it.’ Like the things you store in your attic that you might need one day. My body says that, and so for me, writing poetry lets me say, ‘Okay, it’s alright to say that we might need this one day, but let’s put it over here where it’s maybe a little further away.’ There’s some distance, and that brings me peace.”

James: The writing of queer authors is under attack in many parts of the United States and around the world. One of the ways to combat censorship is to promote and put a spotlight on censored authors and help people find their work. What authors do you recommend our listeners seek out?

Tennison: “Oh, gosh. I don’t know that they’re really censored, but I think we don’t do enough in this country to promote the work of indigenous writers. So I would recommend… I really hate this question because I’m one of those people that, as soon as you ask me, I can name names all day long, but as soon as you ask me, my brain goes blank.”

James: Well, maybe rather than trying to do a listicle, maybe just pull out one of the more recent things that you’ve read that deserves a spotlight.

Tennison: “One of the books that I keep nearby and go back to again and again is Leslie Marmon Silko and ‘The Storyteller,’ specifically because her work is so vibrant and so important. I just can’t recommend it enough, any of her work, but I keep ‘The Storyteller.’ close all the time because when I just want to read something that takes me away, she does that wonderfully.”

James: I asked this question sort of selfishly too because I inevitably end up going and seeking out an author or book that I was not aware of, and then love exploring a different thread. Well, finally, before I turn the mic over to you, what advice do you have for writers dreaming to be published, both from your own experience getting published and as a managing editor of Sundress Publications?

Tennison: “There are so many incredible writers who try and try and try and have not managed to publish their first collection. I think that’s a horrible feeling in the world of creatives and art. I really think that every writer deserves to be published and deserves to be read. So my advice has to be persistence, but that feels mean because if you need to quit, then you need to do what you need to do to protect your creative self. But it would be persistence, and I mean, I submitted ‘Survival Strategies’ three times to the National Poetry Series and many other places, and was rejected many, many, many times. In fact, after I won the National Poetry Series, after I knew, but I couldn’t make the announcement and therefore couldn’t withdraw it from the places where it was pending, I got rejections while knowing that it had already won. Presses are so subjective in terms of what that they need at that moment. So my best advice is to know that it has so little to do with you, and try to get into that idea, and protect your heart, and to know that it’s not you, it’s not your work, it’s not that you’re not good enough, and so that your work isn’t good enough. It’s that presses have a lot of things that they have to think about that have nothing to do with you.”

James: Absolutely. You shouldn’t read much of anything into a rejection. It’s possible that underneath the hood, there’s some valuable feedback, but most of the time, it really has nothing to do with you. Another option, that I had to choose for my first two books because I wrote poetry for 40 years, published it to a website, shared it with friends and family, until during the pandemic a friend said, ‘You should really get serious about your poetry. There’s some really good stuff here.’ Those things had already been effectively published, so I had no choice but to self-publish them.

But then I learned Margaret Atwood’s first book of poetry was self-published, and I started looking into a whole ton of incredible authors. Loreena McKennitt, who’s a multi-platinum artist I interviewed very recently for the podcast, an amazing person to talk to, built her own label, managed her own career, she’s totally self-published her music. So there’s nothing wrong with that. But the one piece of advice I’ll give, if you self-publish, that does not absolve you from all the things that a publisher would do. You’re going to need to hire an editor and a copy editor, you’re going to need to hire a designer unless you’re very savvy about doing it yourself. If you want to create a quality book, you have to do the things that create quality and find a way to have that editorial oversight.

Tennison: “Yeah, like I am a professional editor. I edit professionally for people who get paid to do so. I’m also the managing editor of a press and I oversee other editors. But my own work, of course, went to an editor in the process. Sometimes it came back with errors that just made my jaw drop. Like, how did I not see that? It’s proof that even editors need editors; we need people to look at our work and help us make it pop, not always in content, but in form.”

James: Absolutely. I actually hired a separate copy editor whose goal was letter perfect. That was their job, and they looked at it from that lens. They also had an MFA in poetry, so they understood that poetry, unlike prose, can be imperfect in intentional ways. But she would ask, ‘Did you intentionally intend to do this?’ Because if you were following the Chicago Manual of Style, you wouldn’t do this. But it’s poetry, and as long as it’s intentional… I’d go, ‘Oh, no, that was not intentional,’ or ‘It wasn’t intentional, but it’s actually pretty brilliant, so I’ll keep it that way.’

Tennison: “Yeah, it’s embarrassing. There was an ‘A’ in there that was important. But I think the biggest thing about being published, whether you do it yourself or otherwise, is to persist and not give up. Understand that there are no poetry emergencies and poetry is not meant to cause you harm. So, if the process is causing you harm, step back and look at the ways that you can change what you’re doing, absolutely.”

Listen to the full interview on the Viewless Wings Poetry Podcast to hear Tennison recite selections of their poetry.