Chaun Ballard is a doctoral student of poetry at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln, an affiliate editor for Alaska Quarterly Review, an assistant poetry editor for Prairie Schooner, and an assistant poetry editor for Terrain.org. He is the author of the chapbook Flight, which received the 2018 Sunken Garden Poetry Prize and is published by Tupelo Press. Ballard’s poems have appeared in The Atlantic, Narrative Magazine, Oxford Poetry, Poetry Northwest, The Missouri Review, The New York Times, and other literary magazines.
In the following self-interview about his first collection of poetry, Second Nature, winner of the 23rd annual A. Poulin, Jr. Poetry Prize, Chaun discusses personas, sonnets, and being in conversation with a continuum of poets.
You include a range of poems written in the voice of the musician Johnnie Taylor. What led you to write in persona? Why did you lean into this practice?
My interest in Johnnie Taylor began when my mother mailed me a family reunion pamphlet that she received during the summer of 1980. The second page of the family reunion pamphlet featured a photo of Johnnie Taylor followed by the titles of a few of his hit songs. The paragraph concludes with “He is Our Star of the Family. Look for Johnnie at a Family Reunion in Detroit or Cleveland next time it’s held at Cleveland or Detroit.” Since then, I became curious about the life of the singer, but I had very little success finding a written autobiography or biography of any kind, so I found what I could from here and there.
I found inspiration from many poets (Rita Dove, Tyehimba Jess, Hanif Abdurraqib, to name a few) whose work engages with popular culture, well-known and, perhaps, less-known musical influences in order to write the poems I had difficulties writing. I wanted to write about family and lineage and survival and all the things that survive us in a country that has defined Blackness through manufactured narratives and stereotypes.
The sonnet plays an important role in Second Nature. Could you tell us more about your relationship with the form and your decision to bend its parameters?
I am very much interested in Black US-American engagement with the sonnet and—how the sonnet’s continual innovation and usage is a conversation about expectations, traditions, and structural malleability.
When I consider the sonnet’s longevity and innovation, I think about Langston Hughes’ “An Un-Sonnet Sequence in Blues,” A. Van Jordan’s and Natasha Trethewey’s blues sonnets, Tyehimba Jess’ “Millie and Christine McKoy” contrapuntal, and Jericho Brown’s “Duplex.”
I am obsessed with the sonnet’s possibilities. I am captivated by its musicality. I am haunted by its history.
According to Phillis Levin, editor of The Penguin Book of the Sonnet: 500 Years of a Classic Tradition in English, the sonnet’s origin emerged from the Sicilian strambotto—an eight-line stanza with an ABAB ABAB rhyming pattern commonly found in songs that were sung by Sicilian peasants—“something familiar to anyone” living in Sicily during the 13th century.
The blues, too, have a memorable structure that gestures their origins and re-members all the laborers of the land. Perhaps, this is why Hughes, Jordan, Trethewey, Jess, and Brown all embed the blues within their sonnet structures—because “[a] poem is a gesture toward home” (Duplex).
When it comes to the sonnet’s possibilities, I ask myself “What more can the sonnet do?” “What more can it be?” What would the sonnet look like as an acrostic golden shovel?” and “What happens if the rhyming pattern is turned horizontally?” “What would such an exercise reveal?” “How would it be received?” These are the kinds of questions, I believe, that preoccupy the mind of any poet working within the confines of the sonnet’s structure.
I notice there are many allusions to other poets and writers throughout the collection, either as epigraphs, titles, or, again, through persona. What is the significance of these references?
I hope to show that, across time and space, and in conversation with many poets and writers who have come before me, there is a continuum in which pivotal constructions of race and identity persist. I learn from, and look to, other writers to better understand what is ongoing. What Matthew Shenoda writes about the “lie of the individual” is precisely the point. We carry our histories with us and we, as writers, do not write separately from these histories and the many layers of national discussion. That is why I can visit Concord, Massachusetts, and sit with a small gathering of locals and listen to the recitation of Frederick Douglass’ “What to the Slave is the Fourth of July?” and still find resonance. This is why I can read W. E. B. Du Bois’ The Souls of Black Folk and Clint Smith’s How the Word is Passed and recognize the landscapes present within each of the narratives. There are threads that continue to persist between antebellum and postbellum US-America, between Jim Crow and the Civil Rights Movement, between my parents’ early years and yet another awakening in US-American consciousness. I hope that, through the allusions and nods and references to other writers, like Lucille Clifton, for example, I may demonstrate my indebtedness to their words, their labor, and their willingness to address what must be addressed in order for us to move toward a real and lasting progress.
