Past Resident
Ama Codjoe
Ama Codjoe is a poet raised in Youngstown, Ohio with roots in both Memphis, TN and Accra, Ghana. She studied poetry in NYU’s Creative Writing Program, is a two-time Pushcart Nominee and the recipient of many fellowships and honors including a Rona Jaffe Award.
“As a poet, I am obsessed with heartbeats: image, repetition, transformation, and sound. Finding a pulse, losing it, and finding it again is the beautiful work of this vocation. Ultimately, I write poems to make meaning of the world.”
Q&A with Ama Codjoe (from Crosstown Arts newsletter, February 18, 2021)
Crosstown Arts residency alumnus Ama Codjoe is the author of Blood of the Air (Northwestern University Press, 2020) and Bluest Nude (forthcoming from Milkweed Editions in Fall 2022) and is a winner of the Drinking Gourd Chapbook Poetry Prize.
Ama has been awarded support from the Cave Canem, Jerome, Robert Rauschenberg, and Saltonstall foundations, as well as from Callaloo Creative Writing Workshop, Hedgebrook, and MacDowell. Her recent poems have appeared in The Yale Review, The Best American Poetry, and elsewhere. She is the recipient of a 2017 Rona Jaffe Writer’s Award, The Georgia Review’s 2018 Loraine Williams Poetry Prize, a 2019 DISQUIET Literary Prize, a 2019 Oscar Williams and Gene Derwood Award, a 2019 NEA Creative Writing Fellowship, a 2020 BRIO Award from the Bronx Council on the Arts, and a 2020 NYSCA/NYFA Artist Fellowship.
Crosstown Arts registrar Jesse Butcher caught up with Ama to discuss her chapbook, Blood of the Air, and how the pandemic has affected her writing.
Jesse: I just finished your fantastic chapbook, Blood of the Air. What initially struck me beyond the prose was the amount of research dedicated to the poems. These seems to be an uncommon approach for the poet in the chapbooks I am familiar with. Can you speak on the research process in your practice? Is research the starting point for the work, or do you realize while writing that this poem has been informed by something you would like to further research?
Ama: Research, in the archives of the imagination and in physical pages of a well-worn book, is a consistent part of my writing practice. I often write in order to investigate a series of questions. In the case of Blood of the Air, I was interested in considering through writing questions such as: How are stereotypes of Black women constructed as mythology? What are received narratives we inherit surrounding sexual violence? Who are the storytellers? What does freedom look, sound, taste, feel like?
In short, one thing leads to another. For example, the long poem “She Said” reappropriates text from a 1612 rape trial. The poem began with research into a few paintings by Artemisia Gentileschi. I was particularly struck by her version of Judith Slaying Holofernes. Researching the back story of the painting, the idea that Artemisia Gentileschi painted Holofernes in the likeness of the man who raped her, led me to read several books about her life, including Artemisia Gentileschi by Mary D. Garrard, which includes the full transcript of the seventeenth century rape trial. Though Gentileschi’s father brought the suit on her behalf, she was tried, tortured, and questioned. Reading the transcript reminded me of Dr. Christine Blasey Ford’s 2018 testimony before the Senate Judiciary Committee and more generally of how victims and survivors of sexual violence and rape are often the ones put on trial.
The human figure permeates and haunts the book. Bodies become homes and vessels — bodies that betray others and sometimes bodies that ultimately betray themselves. It is interesting how the body becomes ubiquitous in the work and how you address that each body has an individual and shifting moral code. When you were composing these works, what was it like for you to inhabit and navigate this variety of bodies and voices?
It was fun. I enjoy utilizing the thin mask of persona. Throughout Blood of the Air, there is so much “talking back” and creative invention in terms of the speakers of the collection. It is empowering to be the storyteller, even if the stories are difficult or challenging.
The variety of linguistic play throughout the book is remarkable. Have you always been able to write in such varied modes of syntax, or have you developed that skill over time?
Thank you, Jesse. With this project, I consciously set out to write in a variety of modes and to exercise different muscles. Specifically, I was keen on exploring documentary poetics in the spirit of C. D. Wright’s One with Others and M. NourbSe Philips’ Zong! When I wrote the chapbook, it was after months of focusing on writing and revising a draft of my first full-length manuscript, and I wanted to immerse myself in something completely different and push beyond my habits. I hope to continually experiment, grow, and learn.
You have an interest in visual art as well, as noted in “Head on Ice #5 for Lorna Simpson.” The design of the book itself is very unique with some poems prompting the reader to turn the book, while other pages are left blank like deep breaths. How did you design the particular layout of the book?
One of my favorite things to do besides reading and walking is to engage with visual art. Lorna Simpson is a goddess, and I’m such a fan of her work which, by the way, has graced a number of recent poetry collections: Vievee Francis’s Forest Primeval, Aricka Foreman’s Salt Body Shimmer and Donika Kelly’s forthcoming The Renunications — all marvelous books.
To the question of design, I simply let the poems dictate; the blank page and the moment when you have to turn the book come from the “instructions” those specific poems generated. I offer gratitude to Northwestern University Press for the care with which they produced Blood of the Air and the agency they gave me as a writer to trust where the poems led.
It has been a while since we have seen you in the residency program. Have you been able to find a place of understanding or grounding to continue throughout the pandemic? What have been some of your favorite books, movies, and records during this time?
I am writing, gratefully, and perhaps more importantly, reading. My reading life through this turbulent, devastating time has been crucial to my well-being. I sincerely believe reading is writing. Thinking is writing. Paying attention is writing.
Early in the pandemic, I wrote a poem that appeared in The Yale Review and is collected in the anthology Together in a Sudden Strangeness: America’s Poets Respond to the Pandemic (Knopf, 2020), edited by Alice Quinn. I have also been revising my debut full-length collection Bluest Nude, which will be published in Fall 2022 by Milkweed Editions.
There are many 2020 poetry titles I still haven’t had a chance to read, but here are the first twelve “end of year” pieces that come to mind. All books (except the last): Lucille Clifton’s How to Carry Water, edited by Aracelis Girmay; Be Holding by Ross Gay; Wanda Coleman’s Wicked Enchantment, edited by Terrance Hayes; Cathy Park Hong’s Minor Feelings; Nikky Finney’s Love Child’s Hotbed of Occasional Poetry; Shane McCrae’s Sometimes I Never Suffered; Tommye Blount’s Fantastia for the Man in Blue; Eduardo C. Corral’s Guillotine; Mary-Kim Arnold’s The Fish & the Dove; Shayla Lawson’s This Is Major; John Murillo’s Kontemporary Amerikan Poetry; and Michaela Coel’s I May Destroy You.
Ama, thank you so much for taking the time to speak with us! We look forward to following your work and will definitely look into your recommendations.
