Past Resident
S. Erin Batiste
S. Erin Batiste is the author of Glory to All Fleeting Things. Her other recent honors include the 2019 Bread Loaf-Rona Jaffe Scholar in Poetry and fellowships from Cave Canem, Callaloo, Vermont Studio Center, SPACE on Ryder Farm, and Brooklyn Poets. She is a reader for The Rumpus, and her Best New Poets and Best of the Net-nominated poems are anthologized and appear in wildness, Paper Darts, and Puerto del Sol, among other decorated journals. She is presently at work on her first full-length collection, Hoard, which examines the devastating failure of the 1980s and 1990s Huxtable-era of the suburbs and the Black middle class. She is a desert poet who lives in Brooklyn for now.
“I do Black women’s work. My poetry unapologetically centers us and traces my own matrilineage to explore various forms of Black femininity and feminism, addiction, loss, loneliness, and nostalgia — what has happened to generations of Black women — our shared and repeated narratives: discoveries, deaths, traditions, celebrations, and legacies, alongside what I have personally inherited, chosen to hold onto, and to give away.”
Q&A with S. Erin Batiste (from Crosstown Arts newsletter, May 13, 2020)
Crosstown Arts resident artist S. Erin Batiste is a writer based in both New York and Los Angeles. When the pandemic hit, resident artists were given the option to quarantine in Memphis and continue work in their studios. She opted to stay and relish the quiet, alone time to write, edit poetry, work on submissions, and engage in some serious self-care. She says she’s felt welcome in the Memphis arts community and appreciates the collaborative energy in the local arts scene. Crosstown Arts registrar Jesse Butcher caught up with S. Erin Batiste to discuss her poetry and her multidisciplinary art practice.
S. Erin Batiste is the author of the chapbook Glory to All Fleeting Things. She is a 2020 Crosstown Arts resident artist, 2019 Bread Loaf-Rona Jaffe Scholar in Poetry, and Cave Canem and Callaloo Fellow. Other recent honors include fellowships from Vermont Studio Center, SPACE on Ryder Farm, The Mastheads, and Brooklyn Poets. Her poetry can be found at: www.sbatistewrites.com
Jesse Butcher: Thank you so much for letting me read your work. It is very beautiful, sometimes achingly and crushingly so. I’m interested in how you start a poem. Do you have a specific phrase that triggers the need to begin a work? Or does the moment or presence you would like to convey live with you until the right language presents itself?
S. Erin Batiste: Thank you for that compliment. I appreciate you spending time with the work. That is a great question. I’m inclined to say both. Some of my poems were born out of assignments from classes or workshops, and, as a result, I feel like they came with a kind of blueprint or framework, and so a title or a few opening lines made themselves instantly available to me.
Sometimes a poem starts with one word. I love language and am always trying out how words sound in my mouth. Recently, I’ve been trying to fit “perforated” into a poem. No luck yet. Also, I am a very moody person, and I feel like most of my poems arrive out of me trying to express, recreate, and understand a feeling or scene. There is a sense of cinematography to my work, maybe as a by-product from living in Los Angeles longer than anywhere but also as a confessional poet, I am always trying to capture narrative and emotion in “poetry time” and want my reader to feel whatever the speaker, or inevitably myself, the arbiter and the poet, felt at that moment.
Jesse Butcher: I admire that you place your work in the cinematic and it certainly is. In many ways you are able to capture with language a realness and honesty that would be incredibly difficult to depict within film. Do you consider your poems to act as abstract scripts? Do you have any films or other visual art that evoke the feelings you would like to portray?
S. Erin Batiste: I consider some of my poems to live in the realm of the dramatic monologue. I have worked with choreographers and dancers, and separately a harpist, in the past to put movement and music to a few pieces, so I suppose they could just as well function as abstract scripts. That is something to consider. My highest wish is that they have many places in the art world. One thing is for sure; now the poems are outside of me. They have their own lives, their own ways of moving. Some have even traveled to places I’ve never been.
I have not made any films to speak of, but in terms of visual mediums, I’d like to fancy myself a hobbyist weaver and an amateur photographer because I do enjoy taking pictures (mostly because I have the latest iPhone, and portrait mode is so dreamy). I live a very visually intense and immersive life. The way that I dress and express myself comes from a deeply emotional and personal place and has become a part of my practice in terms of representation and resistance, but I think that someone was right in their assertion of me as a “poet’s poet.” I’ve tried to make many different things, but poetry is the only medium that has stuck so far.
I do, however, have a series that first appeared in Paper Darts, and later my chapbook, that I am currently expanding for my full-length collection. It is skin-bleaching and hair-straightening advertisements from the 1950s and 1960s that were targeted at Black American woman. They are stunning and take one’s breath away, in the worst of ways. One that comes to mind is a hair straightening ad from about seven years after WWII had ended. It shows a house with pressing combs dropping down like bombs, and it reads: “War Declared on Nappy Hair.”
Alas, I am now archiving and erasing them in a form known as erasure poetry. I have a complicated and largely estranged relationship with my mother, so I first began this as an exercise of empathy and forgiveness, just trying to imagine living in her world. She was born in 1954, just days after the Brown vs. Board of Education ruling ordered American schools to desegregate, and she has never lived in a world that wasn’t actively demeaning, diminishing, attacking, and trying to destroy her on a daily basis.
The erasure poems have now become my artist practice of reclaiming and re-framing the language of beauty for Black Women — using the language which remains to restore some dignity and honor for my mother, myself, and other generations and ancestors. While these have an intentional visual component, they are still legitimately, primarily poetry. But I will say that the ways in which I’ve witnessed both visual artists specifically and non-native English readers engage with my erasures has been transformative and eye-opening to me. I am always seeking out alternative ways to amplify my work and have it reach more people, people who might never pick up a book of poems or go to a poetry reading. I feel like their capacity is limitless. I could see exhibiting my beauty erasures as visual artworks. One day.
Jesse Butcher: I appreciate that you have found several ways to sing in your own voice and hold a stance across a variety of mediums. Some artists find it hard to invest in a multidisciplinary practice, because they feel they have succeeded in a singular aspect of their work. Do you have any advice for other artists trying to explore other mediums?
S. Erin Batiste: My best advice to artists wanting to try out other disciplines would be: experiment and play, and just have fun with it. I tend to take myself and my poetry very seriously, but when I work in other mediums, I automatically lower the stakes or take the stakes out. It’s unlikely that I’ll ever be recognized as an award-winning weaver or world-renowned collage maker (I’ve actually had teachers who are such), but I do know that sitting at a loom, holding the thread in my hands, the meditative quality of going through an old magazine and cutting out beautiful images feels good, and I wouldn’t trade that feeling. It also helps take me completely outside of my own head. So much of writing happens internally, but I have a different experience or thought flow when I work in visual disciplines. It’s more tactile, more intuitive, somehow more immediately real and realized, out-of-body, or maybe I should say out-of-mind. All of the racing thoughts turn off. I think there is value in making art that is not necessarily for commercial, competition, or consumption purposes, art that is for your own pleasure or wonder. It can wind up pushing and growing out your own primary practice in an unexpected and interesting direction.
Thank you so much for taking the time to speak with us. We at Crosstown Arts look forward to following your work.
