m. mick powell on crafting the Black feminist poetic “Dead Girl Cameo”

m. mick powell is a queer Black Cape Verdean femme, a poet, an artist, an Aries, and author of the chapbooks threesome in the last Toyota Celica and chronicle the body. Their poems have been nominated for the Best of the Net Anthology and a Pushcart Prize, and appear in RHINO, Muzzle, Up the Staircase Quarterly, and elsewhere. mick is a professor of gender and sexuality studies at the University of Connecticut and an adjunct in Bay Path University’s MFA in creative nonfiction writing program. A former Tin House Resident, mick enjoys chasing waterfalls and being in love. Below are excerpts from the interview with James Morehead on the Viewless Wings Poetry Podcast.

James: In Dead Girl Cameo, you have crafted such an intricate collage of historical record, poetry, and visual artifacts to memorialize larger-than-life women in music and pop culture. I probably spent as much time rabbit-holing into research as I did reading your wonderful book. How did the concept of this book begin?

Hosho: “Way back in 2007, I wrote a little chapbook for a press called Kinder-Steiner Editions, and it was 37 of these poems. I called them Psalms from the Badlands because they were poems about New Mexico. I had so much fun doing it that I thought, ‘Well, there’s 150 psalms in the Bible, so why don’t I just do 150 of these things?’

“And then, lo and behold, 17 years later, I actually finally finished. It took a heck of a long time, mainly because I didn’t push it. I just kind of let moments and things come to me and take them in different seasons. That was a big part of it. Seasons are a huge part of haiku, so I wanted there to be some years. I certainly didn’t anticipate 17 years, but I’m happy that it took as long as it did.”

mick: “Thank you so much for spending time with the work, I really appreciate it. And thank you for this question. You’re right, it certainly was a project, and I think the way that this project came together is that it was a series of various projects that I then started to see as one thing. At one point, I thought I was writing specifically about the music industry and artists who had experienced sexual violence, domestic violence, and intimate partner violence in the music industry. I was looking at those stories and that was the throughline I was focused on. As it started to open up a little bit more as a project, I started to think about the other connections and similarities to some of the artists that I was interested in studying.

“I should go further back because I’m thinking about it as a fully formed project, but I think the place where it started for me was, of course, with my love for the artists and my childhood into my young adulthood into my full adulthood love, obsession, care, and reverence for these artists. That’s really the place where it started. Then as I was sorting through my interests thematically, I started to put together these pieces. I started to think about, or what I noticed in my research, were these eerie similarities between people’s lives outside of their careers, within their careers as well, but certainly outside their careers and even just the timelines of their careers. Many of them were child stars who started their careers young. Many of them perhaps struggled with some type of addiction. So there were all of these throughlines that connected them for me.”

James: One of the first poems in the book, “Billie Holiday, from the smoking room,” captures the melancholy that permeates many of the poems and prose fragments in this book. You wrote:

Despite this,
I wore my name like a long pink mink. I burned
and shunned all their ruby crowns from my head;

but there's not a girl who can say she's survived this,
no—
not until the very moment she's dead.

How did you choose, and approach capturing, the unique voices of the women you profile in this book?

mick: “I think getting to spend time with the artists’ archives, spending really intentional time with Billie Holiday—of course, so much of her archive is not necessarily live performance or video footage, but so much of it is newspapers. So I spent a lot of time reading these newspaper articles that were published throughout her life, as well as her own memoir, her autobiography. I think doing that work, that research, allowed me to capture their voices more authentically, I hope.

“I will say also, so many of these poems originate from other poems. I’m thinking about this Billie Holiday poem in particular; some pieces of it are collaged from other poems that at one point, I might not have known what to do with. Later on, I realized, ‘Oh wow, I think some of this language here is speaking to perhaps an experience that Billie Holiday had that I didn’t even realize I could connect in this spare language that I had.’ So when I look at this Billie Holiday poem, I remember that sort of collaging that came together for this, and how there were fragments and pieces and echoes of her voice, perhaps in those pieces that I put aside and wasn’t so sure what to do with at one point. That was a really cool part of this process, the organic coalescing of the research, the archival inspiration, with some of the work that I was already moving through and questioning and wondering what work it could do.”

James: Your book is anchored on Saidiya Hartman’s essay “Venus in Two Acts.” Reading this essay was one of many fascinating backstory rabbit holes I dove into while reading your book.

In the essay, Hartman argues that the struggles of the enslaved contribute to an “incomplete project of freedom” and the “precarious life of the ex-slave,” describing it as the “afterlife of property” where “black life remains in peril.” How do the tragic fates of the singers in your collection connect to Hartman’s concept of the “afterlife of slavery,” suggesting that systemic violence continues to manifest in the lives of Black women, even those who achieve global renown?

mick: “Thank you for reading the essay because I do think that when you read the full piece, it gives such a fuller context to how it’s engaging with the poems in the collection. So I think that’s a really brilliant and wonderful question.

“To turn back to that Billie Holiday poem which opens with that epigraph where she says, ‘you could be miles away from any sugarcane and you could still be working on a plantation.’ One of the throughlines in the book is, of course, thinking about the afterlives of slavery and what it means to be on some of the world’s biggest stages, to be so hypervisible in all of these magnificent and magnificently tragic ways, and to still be tethered to this industry that owns you, that makes you work in a particular way. What is glamorized, and is perhaps hidden behind the glamour, is this overwork, this laborious, taxing labor—emotional labor, physical labor, creative labor—on these Black women artists in particular.

“So Hartman’s essay really illuminates that, but what Hartman’s essay also does, in addition to thinking about the afterlives of slavery, is highlight that perhaps even within the most perilous and heinous conditions, there is an opportunity for friendship, for love, for connection. Not even just perhaps, but there had to have been for survival. So I think the other throughline through the book is the deep friendships that the artists had and the deep ways that they demonstrated their love throughout their lives for their loved ones and then also other artists. So many of these artists here worked in collaboration with one another and other artists to uplift. They were very much artists who were showing love to other folks and not trying to gatekeep, trying to teach people the industry to protect them, to keep them safe. Famously, Phyllis Hyman and Whitney Houston had such a relationship, and there’s a poem in the book about that. They had such a relationship where Phyllis would instruct Whitney that she had to know. She had to know what was going on. She had to be able to read her contract. She had to be able to speak up for herself because the industry would continue to exploit her. So, I think Hartman’s work is really speaking to all of those themes and I’m trying to apply it to the music industry broadly.”

James: The long poem “At the Midnight of my Life” ends with a powerful visual metaphor, with the phrase “in perpetuity throughout the universe” repeated and overlaid and crashing in a jumble at the bottom of the page. How do you approach visualizing your poetry?

mick: “The visuals are often trying to mimic or mirror what’s happening in my mind. I think about poetry as the most vulnerable visualization of my psyche. Even with the poem that you’re pointing out with those overlapping and overlaid lines, I had this phrase stuck in my head. It connects to the question we were just talking about, around the contracts and the ownership. In one of the most recent films about Whitney Houston’s life, they name that in the contract between her and Arista, that Arista owns the rights to her music and her likeness ‘in perpetuity throughout the universe.’ They repeat that throughout the film as this almost endearing thing, but it’s actually quite haunting. It was something that was stuck repeating and repeating in my mind, so that’s how it comes out here on the page. And of course, the language of the universe connects with the cosmos and constellation of the book. But here, it’s that sort of overwhelming and consistent repetition, almost to the point of being so obscure, so tangled up and enmeshed. I think about sound and how sound is even represented in this, the hearing of it over and over again, that layering.

“So that speaks to that poem in particular, but generally speaking, it’s about how do I show where I paused in my thought process? How do I show the gaps that even exist, because so much of the project is about filling in gaps? How do I visualize that through the use of space?”

James: “Dominique” is a perfect example of a prose poem. The prose is tight, distilled to an essence. The poem begins:

Dominique liked to kiss with Pop Rocks in their mouth, sour green apple turning our tongues lime and alive with sugar. Dominique was desperate and ready for booty-shorts weather.

The momentum is immediate and pulls you in. How do you approach the form your writing should take to have the most impact?

mick: “That reminds me of the question about the spatial and visual component on the page. The poems I feel most confident about when I’m writing often come out as prose poems because there’s almost no thinking space. I’m just writing it as it is and as it comes to me. There are a couple of poems in the book like that that felt, as I was writing them, like they came out in one sitting. They were there, that was it, I said what I needed to say. I could go back and revise it a little bit, but ultimately the form was there.

“The poems that are free verse are usually poems that I have struggled with in some way to get into that shape and to understand the poem a little bit more. So my approach to form is really about my relationship to the context and content of the poem. When I think about more formal devices or uses of form, I often turn to form when I am really struggling, when I’m really deep in it and I’m like, this needs a container. Maybe I have too much and I’m trying to parse it down. I think that’s when I turn to form as a way to help me do some of that work.”

James: “Dead Girl Cameo” has epic liner notes that I highly recommend readers devour. I’ve interviewed a couple of poets who provided a glimpse into the extensive research behind their work. How do you approach research, what are you looking for to infuse into your writing? How do you decide what to include explicitly and what to leave out for the reader to discover on their own?

mick: “A lot of the initial research for this project was passive because I think of it as a project I’ve been working on my whole life through watching music videos, interviews, and documentaries, and listening to family members and loved ones talk about these artists. So much of that research was passive and not even thought about as research, just my regular everyday consumption. That’s an exciting part of the project for me.

“Even daily throughout this project, my social media is saturated with these fan pages, these archive pages for these artists. I follow hundreds of them. That’s one part of my research that’s really interesting and cool because I learn so much through the snippets that these curators are putting together, and they have led me into so many tunnels that I was able to follow that come out in the book. So I shout out the social media folks in a quick line in the acknowledgments, but I certainly want to thank those folks who are also researchers, who are doing this research and archiving these things.

“What I was looking for, in a serious way—I’m a poet first and foremost, and then I’m an academic in other ways. I teach at the university level, but I have an academic mind and I think theoretically. So part of how I approached the research project was looking for some experiences in childhood that I think were really important. So many of these folks survived such egregious forms of violence in their childhoods, so I was interested in where that came up. I was interested in where and when their careers started and how. A lot of the folks have family relationships in the industry, and some folks don’t, and I think that also distinguished their experiences. Importantly, I was thinking about where and how and if queerness showed up in their lives, whether in the media or in rumors spoken about them after their deaths.

“Even without that explicit content, I had to look up certain words when doing my newspaper research to see if things would come up about them, and sometimes there wouldn’t be. There wouldn’t be articles about Aaliyah and queerness. So then it was up to me to also think about ways to make those connections, one through my own experiences and my relationships to her as an artist and me as a fan, and then also through the relationships of other fans. So I was also looking for fan testimonies, specifically queer and trans fan testimonies, that spoke to how they related to the artists. Those were some of the similarities that I started to notice organically and then became the things that I focused on.”

James: The poem “[people thought they were lesbians]” employs the duplex form invented by poet Jericho Brown. For those unfamiliar, this is a modern form that combines elements of a sonnet, the repetition of the Ghazal, and the call and response of the Blues. You wrote:

Strangers speculated a sapphic song
lilted from the girls' cherry lavender lips.

        From their cherry lavender lips, they lilted,
        clung tight to each other like their given names.

I’ve been inspired by this poem to write a duplex poem, a form I’ve never attempted before. What authors have inspired you to explore crafting poetry in new ways?

mick: “Oh, wow, so many, and as you pointed to the liner notes, so many of them come out in there. I’ll shout out three poets whose work really impacted me. First, I would have to say the poet Ntozake Shange; she just changed my life. She comes up in the book. Secondly, Pat Parker, who definitely influenced my work, and third, I would say the poet Cheryl Clarke. So those are my three guiding lights that I’ll mention today.”

James: Another thread running through “Dead Girl Cameo” is a series of “dead girl” poems interspersed throughout the book: “dead girl interview,” “dead girl cento,” “dead girl pastoral,” “dead girl chorus,” “dead girl antelogium,” and the title poem.

In “dead girl pastoral” you wrote,

it is an impossibility to pronounce her dead
to her herd of deer who watch and wait,
who wallow in the womb of a forested grief.

And in “dead girl antelogium” you wrote,

i will applaud an ovation
in opal. i will buy the million-
dollar ticket to your final show
and ask for you again alive and

encore and encore and anchor
a stunning syllable to your mic.

After finishing your book, I went back and read the “dead girl” poems in sequence. The construction of this book is so intricate and thoughtful. How did you approach the structure of “Dead Girl Cameo”? Was your approach organic, discovering the structure as you wrote, or did you map out the book and then write to the structure?

mick: “James, thank you so much. It was an awful struggle. Organization was one of the hardest parts of writing this book. I think in the earliest versions of the manuscript, I had everything chronologically and I was like, ‘Here it is.’ There were some section breaks, but not really. It was quite a mess, and it was something that every time I talked to anybody about it, I would say that is the thing I don’t know how to do with this collection.

“Structuring it did become this really fun puzzle. I got to print out all my pages and put them together like that. I did so many series of thematic arrangements. I had one version of the manuscript that was linked together by theme: here’s a childhood theme, here’s the theme of my queerness hypothesis. I had them structured into themes. One version was structured by person, so we followed their story as one unit. That didn’t feel quite right either.

“What I ended up with was this blended structure where I think we get to see the connections a little bit more seamlessly between the folks because they are so close to one another. Without separating them, we have to see them together. That was a big part of how I began to think about the structure.

“Lastly, I will say, guided by ‘Venus in Two Acts’—the language around ‘two acts’ helped me start thinking about the sections as scenes. When I started to think about them as thematic scenes and how I could bring these different characters, so to speak, into play and into conversation in these moments, it really broadened things for me and helped me think about the book. Then, when I decided on using ‘Venus in Two Acts’ as the anchoring piece, pulling my epigraphs really helped me to thematicize the scenes that I then agreed with myself to make. So that was my process, but it was grueling. It was as grueling as a poetry process could be.”

Listen to the full interview on the Viewless Wings Poetry Podcast