RICKEY LAURENTIIS

In an interview with Blackbird back in 2016, you confessed, “I’m a very selfish and voracious reader. I just am greedy. I just read everything.” If your new book, Death of the First Idea, is any indication, you’ve kept up that literary appetite, as it’s chock-full of references from Greek myth and the gospel to James Baldwin, Wallace Stevens, Emily Dickinson. Have you read anything that’s resonated with you recently, perhaps something that might find its way into a poem?

You know, I still remain a voracious and selfish reader. I’m an enthusiastic reader. I will have to confess this, though, I’m not the best at keeping up with contemporary trends. But I wanna be. That’s gonna be the part that’s coming up next, where I’m going around reading new stuff. I’m still reading the classics, and when I say the classics, I mean classical antiquity, the archaic period, the proto-poems, if you will.

Yeah.

So, nothing immediately strikes my heart as something that I read that I know will be in the next couple of books, other than the fact that I keep returning to the wisdom texts of the world. The Song of Solomon, for instance, in the Bible, not the whole Bible, but the Song of Solomon. I’ve been going further east into India, into Hindu texts, Vedic texts.

Oh, nice!

And I’ve been coming even further west to Native mythology. I just know that my work is assuming its weight and its height in the world.

It makes sense to me that you’re into older texts, because a lot of your book feels very timeless. There aren’t iPhones in it or much digital media. There is one poem with Warby Parker glasses, though, the eclipse poem that you have. Do you feel like you purposely leave those contemporary references out of your poems?

Here are the Warby Parker glasses (displaying them on her Zoom frame)!  Yeah, I noticed that really early in my poetic journey, my poetic education, that I was just not as interested in asserting or showing that I live in the present, because obviously I live in the present. That’s where the book is. I don’t remove the contemporary on purpose, because again, I make the presumption that the reader will find me in their moment. 

Someone you write about in this new collection, and whom I was surprised to hear was a favorite poet of yours, is Wallace Stevens. You know, he’s this somewhat stodgy, company executive who spent his whole life working in (yuck) the insurance industry. But, then again, thinking about his exalting of the imagination, his embrace of modernity, and giddiness at bucking tradition, seeing “the gods dispelled in mid-air and dissolv[ed] like clouds,” I can see why you’re attracted to his poetry. Could you talk a bit about what his work has meant to you and how you converse with it?

(Shows off her Collected Wallace Stevens)

Oh, I have the same one!

This is the first time someone’s mentioned my relationship to Wallace Stevens. After writing my first book, when I was on tour, I made my way to New Haven, which is where I believe he spent his life, in addition to Key West.

Oh, really?

Yeah, he’s from Connecticut, but he spent a lot of time in the South, in Key West, writing about it. And there was a band of people there who called themselves The Friends and Enemies of Wallace Stevens.

Did he have a lot of enemies?!

I mean, he was a vice president of an insurance company.

True! Enemies come with the territory.

Yeah, they gather their enemies. So, that makes sense. In terms of his poetics, though, I’ve always marveled not just at his use of language, but the facility and the execution of his mind. I’ve said elsewhere that people like Michel Foucault really gave me permission to think in a different way. Not necessarily to think exactly what they thought, but they illustrate pathways of how to think, and I feel similarly with Wallace Stevens.

When writing a poem that responds to him, or to Foucault, do you find that sometimes you’re kind of arguing, or testing some of their propositions?

Yeah, yeah. That’s exactly right. I feel like I’m in an argument with some of the positions that Wallace Stevens takes. If you read his books, what you come to find out is that he was racist, and, of course, the time he was in was racist.

Yeah. Not too surprising, right?

Yeah, not surprisingly. Casually, he’ll have a “Negress”...“walking through snow,” which, actually, is a striking image, but also, who told him he had that kind of permission? I mean, famously, he wrote, “Like Decorations in a Nigger Cemetery.” And when I arrived at that poem, I knew immediately what my work had to be. And so, I don’t feel like I’m always in dialogue with him, so much as I’m wrestling in a dialectics with him back and forth.

Yeah, I like that. That feels needed.

He’s not the only one that I do that with.

The poem that you’re referencing, “Black Hole (Or, Eclipse),” I actually wrote in one fell swoop. It was during the moment of the eclipse, and it just felt holy. There was a black bird, a raven, probably, that touched down. I just had to write something, and so that poem came out pretty much fully conceived. There’s this announcement that happens in each of my books. In Boy With Thorn, my first collection, there’s an early poem called “I Saw I Dreamt Two Men.” That was a poem that came to me in a dream. She came twice. I saw the same dream twice, and I woke up immediately and just wrote the poem. There are some edits that you come back to here and there, but I feel like those sort of moments announce. You know, it’s like I’m channeling something at that moment.

And I love the ending of that poem. I think you say something like his head turned, “and I stood with southern silence.” It’s such a beautiful contemplative moment to end the poem with.

Yes, that’s exactly it. Thank you.

Maybe we could talk more about “Black Hole (Or, Eclipse),” because it does feel very Stevensy (or Stevensian?) in the way that it’s engaging with voids and darkness.

Yeah.

But it’s meditating on the speaker’s own experience, like you said, of gazing up into this majestic eclipse. Like Stevens’s “Domination of Black,” which is a poem I really love, in which the speaker’s imagination imbues darkness with color and memory, your poem looks into the eclipse and finds self-recognition and lyrical ecstasy, “the deepest, O! the blackest of Wet / Gorgeous origin, Black / Hole.” In another poem of yours, entitled “Staring Out The Psych Ward’s Window” there is a Stevens-like transformation where “Black trash bags blown haggard” get snagged on trees and “show up as ravens” in the speaker’s mind. What I like about this poem, too, is that it uses the abstraction “ravenous” in its first line, then moves to these imagined ravens, but never depicts any actual ravens. Reality stays obscured, but the imagination is described vividly.  It reminds me of a quote from an essay of yours called “Kinds of Dark” in Poetry, where you wrote that poems “are just machines for rearranging that darkness. And the darkness, I’ve realized, is as brutal as sugar.” Can you say more about how darkness operates in your poetry and what it means to “rearrange” it?

Yeah. I just have to say, Anthony, you’re really smart. You’re a really smart reader. You’re, like, an ideal reader, so I thank you for that.

Thank you! I mean, it was such a joy to read your book, so it’s very easy to come up with questions when the text has so much going on.

Thank you. I am familiar with the references you bring up. “Domination of Black” is a short little poem that has this immediate terror. I think they have the peacocks in there, screaming?

Yes! The scream of the peacock is right at the center of this associative swirl of images.

The dark, to me, is a contested field, right? Like what is it? Is it substantial? What is it made of? I like to say that the dark came first, even before the light. It was the page that the light had to be written upon. It seemed necessary for me to rescue the dark, at least partially.

Yeah.

The dark is not all that bad, you know. The dark is also the dark of a womb…. And it’s the dark of a tomb. Not to make a rhyme out of it, but it’s a dual place where both violence and creation, and, you know, plainly said, miracles can exist.

Yeah, no, that makes me think of David Lynch. Like, how he was always thinking about the way that darkness and light intertwine. How you can’t have one without the other.

 Yeah, so that’s always the point. You will hope for balance, but you have to actually have at least duplicity in the world, if not plurality. It’s so funny that you reference “Kinds of Dark,” which I wrote, oh my god, like 15 years ago now, and it’s about Kara Walker’s first public project at the sugar refinery.

Oh, really?

Yeah, the Domino Sugar Refinery that used to stand in Brooklyn, and she made a piece called “A Subtlety,” which was a giant sphinx made out of sugar. Instead of a classical lion with a woman’s face, this sphinx had, for lack of a better way to say it, Aunt Jemima’s face, because she had, like, a bandana, and it was clearly a Black woman. But also, what people had less to say about were these Black boys made out of molasses that were carrying baskets and doing this, that, and the third. You had to kind of walk up on the trail, past them, and they were melting. They were coming all apart as you were getting closer and closer.

That was part of the experience; they were melting into the ground?

Yeah, because in that essay, I mentioned the fact that my feet were sticky. I was walking all over these little black boys in order to get to this Black Sphinx. And so… I still think about that exhibit, or that show, if you will. I don’t know, the dark, for me, is an incubator. It’s a place that we can find some level of safety in. Every time we close our eyes, there we are, in the dark.

There’s a pretty big gap between your previous book and this one. And you write beautifully about the expectation that was placed on you, and the accompanying pressure of following up on such a well-received first collection. You end your first book with the titular poem, “Boy with Thorn,” which includes a final image that is at once self-destructive and resilient: “He shut the thorn up in his foot, and told his foot Walk.”

This new collection starts with a transformative cleaving, as you quote Jesus of Nazareth in the Gospel of Matthew saying, “If your foot causes you to stumble, cut it off.” With ten years between these collections and having transitioned since writing the first one, I wondered if you could give some insight into the process of writing this new book and how you hoped to usher the reader into it. What kind of world did you want to bring that reader into?

I’m grateful for the ten years in between. I can’t pretend to the thought that all of that was elected or chosen. There was a period of about five years in which I wasn’t writing at all. It was a sad time, and it was a time in which I had to go into that incubator space and really take responsibility for my life. Take responsibility for my sadnesses and my lonely feelings. And really transmute that, transform that into what you see today. I’m really… I’m really proud of myself.

Reading the book, the time feels necessary. Like, to me, as a reader, it feels like, maybe you needed to steep a little while to have this collection.

Yeah, like a good, good pot of tea. I had to steep.

You know, I really thought about the epigraphs for this book, and they’re ultimately four, but the last one that you mentioned is the one from the gospel of Matthew and Mark. And I took it seriously. If your foot causes you to stumble, whether there’s a thorn in it or not, cut that bitch off. Some people are gonna come to that and read that as a literal explanation for my transition. But it’s more metaphorical than that, you know?

Considering how you’re being led into the book, when reading your title, I immediately thought about how it conflicts with Allen Ginsberg’s famous maxim: “First thought, best thought.” By killing off (or, perhaps, letting die) the first idea, there is this suggestion of revising, changing, and questioning that clashes with the beatnik desire for unfiltered and immediate writing. In your beautifully vulnerable poem “Disappointment,” in which you seem to be meditating on the pressures and expectations that came with writing such an acclaimed first book, this self-questioning leads to apprehension as the speaker says: “Doubt / equipped me with a severe patience; doubt / Took over my mouth.” I think so many folks, including me, can relate to this kind of “impostor syndrome” that you describe here. Were there any writing practices, especially in the last three years when you’ve been writing heavily, that allowed you to work through that doubt so you could arrive at this superb second book?

If only there were writing practices! I’ve been reading and writing for the majority of my life. I didn’t necessarily develop a discipline for it until much later. One of the ways I developed a discipline for it, I would come to realize, is through the workshop model. And that’s neither here nor there; that’s not bad, but the only thing that’s not the greatest about the workshop is that it doesn’t create in the student, necessarily, an individual practice.

Sure. It’s hard to do.

With the first book, you’re writing poems because they’re fun. Because you want to write poems, and you’re not yet aware that you have an audience. Whereas with the second book, and with every book thereafter, you have some realization that there is an audience, and that audience is what, for me, engendered doubt. I had faith that this interview would happen, though. I was like, “Look, it cannot not happen.” 

I like how it’s not just doubt, it’s doubt that led to a “severe patience,” right? So there’s agency in that. You’re choosing patience, at least to some degree.

Yes. Patience gets a bad rap today. I think we’re living in a manic culture. A culture that just wants to produce, produce, produce, and consume, consume, and wants to do that all the time at the same time, while being outraged and saying, you know, “Oh my god, everyone hates me!” And that’s where we are. And I don’t have time for it. I had to break from that. So in that way, there was agency, because I’m just like, “You know what, I’m gonna leave this entire millennium and go back, and go way back—”

All the way back to Plutarch.

Yes, I wanted to just give myself permission to have that patience. Now that I’ve done it, I feel like I have the actual skill set and the techniques and the means and the wherewithal to get to the third book much more quickly. Because I’m more aware of what’s at stake and where I'm going in the dark.

Are you someone who will do a lot of writing as you’re reading? Like, if you read something really stimulating, will you run over to your notebook and scribble something down?

Sometimes, yeah, or I’ll just go to a different tab on my phone and get out the notes. I like that moment. I await that moment because that means I’m reading something really useful and juicy. I take a lot of notes. I have tons of notebooks. And I like the physical act of writing. I had to come back to that. If it awakens in me or inspires me towards that action, I know what I’m reading is worth it. That’s what I would like to impart to some of Divedapper’s readers. Remember that you’re a writer, and get into the notebook again, even to the notes tab, and copy those things that give you inspiration. Don’t plagiarize! But listen to Eliot, who said, “Good poets borrow, but better poets steal.”

I’ve heard, too, that your brain actually works and processes differently when you’re handwriting. Because you’re engaging more senses, I think it reaches vaster neural networks and activates the mind more.

Yeah, I think that’s true. I think there’s something still magical to manuscript… and, we always kind of glide over this, but it’s called “spelling.” I mean, you’re casting a spell, so I think there’s still something really beautiful about the physical aspects of our lives. So much of our lives is caught up in a cell phone, and look, I’m a millennial, so I’m not against it. The whole world, the whole history of the world is essentially in this phone. I have access to that information. That’s not yet the same thing as wisdom, though.

Yeah.

You really have to work out and wrestle with that information towards wisdom.

True. But yeah, to get back to the book, one poem that really stood out to me was called “Sometimes Tropic of New Orleans, II.” This is a poem that’s especially enamored with transformations, as it depicts a group of herons that quickly morph in the speaker’s mind, and that eventually manage, through clever lineation, to alter the speaker herself: “Now see I change (you can / Really Change, y’all) their rosy color cyan, now pink, easy as I happen pink.” Like Emily Dickinson’s poetry, which you reference a few times, yours is a poetry of possibility, of malleability, not only in how the speaker sees the world, but her own body. Were there ways in which you tried to embody that changeable nature in the form of your poems or the structure of the entire collection?

I want to start with that little parenthetical that I had “(you can / Really Change, y’all),” that “y’all” can fall on many different kinds of ears, but I know, as I was speaking in that moment, I was speaking directly to the family that I come from. And the community that they come from, and the race that that comes from, and the culture that that comes from.

Yeah.

In America,  all we do is change. It’s actually rendered and written into our Constitution through the amendment process that we are a body of government that can change. At the same time, it seems as if change is seen as anathema. It’s seen as the most despicable, diabolical thing. It’s evidence of the fact that you weren’t pleased with the first draft. So that’s why I raised my head a little bit with the Allen Ginsberg thing. Of course, he said that “first thought, best thought,” because, I mean, look at his poems. But I can quote so many other people, um, Wordsworth comes to mind, where he says something like, poetry is maybe the hot, spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings recollected in tranquility.

Yeah, recollected, right? Like, after the fact.

Right. And so this book sort of came out of that kind of hot heat, but I had to learn how to recollect it in a cool tranquility.

And yes, the structure and the forms and the books. Boy With Thorn is 33 poems. It’s structured around that long middle poem, and there are a lot of forms, which I used to call “lynched forms,” because they were wrestling with violence, especially in Black history. But the forms there do not tell their names. They don’t show off. If it’s a sestina, it’s hidden. If it’s a pantoun, it’s hidden. If it’s a sonnet, it’s barely there. The same thing is true in Death of the First Idea. Except that I’m not quite sure the forms arrived. I often feel like I don’t have enough lines. I don’t have enough space to get to what I want to express. It sometimes feels like a little cop-out for the poet just to say, “I want to create forms.” It’s a little bit boring to me. It seems conservative. Like, okay… sure.

Yeah, and sometimes the poem wants to figure out what it is as you’re writing it.

Exactly that. I was of two minds, where I had some impulses and some ideas of where I wanted to go with the book, or with a certain poem, but at the same time, I knew I needed to yield to the poem. Even though I wanted it to be as tight, or as pathetically beautiful as a sonnet, at the same time, I wanted to have some of that wildness. That poem that you mentioned, “Sometimes Tropic of New Orleans, II” actually came out of the first one, and it was a long poem. It was kind of gargantuan, and I chopped it in half, and worked around the 14 lines or so, so that you have a hint of the sonnet, you have a hint of the form in the air. It’s sort of like a humidity in the book. At the same time, it’s not like you’re literally walking through water. I’m trying to chart something new while using the old.

And that’s one of a few poems where you cycle through a lot of different colors in the course of the poem. I think throughout all of your work, color feels really important. Like we said before, it’s your antithesis to darkness. Do you think a lot about splashes of color you’d like to include when you’re crafting a poem?

Yeah. I do. I think about color a lot, because I’m not colorblind, and I think about tone a lot, because I’m not tone-deaf.

Haha, I love that!

Those who are gonna be colorblind and tone-deaf will not enjoy this book. They will not enjoy it, because the book will seem like a Sybil screaming. I think about color a lot, without trying to be color-struck, which I think is what our culture is. I can’t help but think about race and complexion as I think through this question. And I just have to say that, at some point, you gotta get over it. It’s something that has material consequences and effects, but at the same time, it’s just a random phenotype. We’re not in that last century no more. We’re not in that second millennium. The Christian God is dead. You gotta get over here and move through it, because if you’re not, you’re not growing. If you’re not willing to change, you dead.

Yeah, and relating to what you just said, tone is really important in your poetry, and one of the more humorous poems in your collection, in my opinion, or at least one that has some humorous parts, is “Boy Coming Out Gay Going Far to Lady Way to Queer” which opens: “I confess the Trans is dangerous.” That phrase “the Trans” felt spot on in how it parrots a Fox News grandpa whose only social media is “The Facebook.” As the poem continues, however, we see that transness is only dangerous to the status quo and those hierarchies that have entrenched themselves in our society. While this is clearly an important topic to the speaker, the tone here makes the poem fun, dynamic, and transgressive. Could you talk about how you navigate tone on the page and manage to move so deftly between a suite of voices?

Yes, I’m not making a display of it right now, but my voice is something that I really cherish, and I like to change my voice quite a lot. And I like to change and manipulate my tone as to communicate a specific idea to a specific audience, sometimes in medias res. That kind of code switching, or that kind of navigation, I think, is important, beautiful, historical, and American. 

Yes, totally.

I hear voices in my head all the time that are just completely tone-deaf, and I just don’t understand why they choose this head, and why not another. But for me, that poem that you mentioned, that says, “the trans,” I can’t help but think that some people are going to come to the book and say, “Well, aren’t you a Black poet?” That goes without saying, she points to the cover of her book (and, indeed, she does). That goes without saying, because I’ve always been Black, I’m always gonna be Black, and so I don’t need to necessarily hammer that on the head, but it hasn’t been true that I’ve always been trans. And it’s not always true that I’ve been a woman, and that… that journey, exactly how it went, is not necessarily interesting to me on the page.

I see.

But to actually create a mythology, a mythos around it. Towards that kind of idea, so that the reader can come away with the same idea, not necessarily needing to institute it in their own lives. But are they willing to accept it in the modern day? And so, I don’t know if that answers your question, but that's… that's one way to get into it. Does that make sense?

It does, and I think it brings me to another question. In Death of the First Idea’s notes section, you say a lot about how modern conceptions of gender and sex feel not up to snuff, or lacking in some way, which seems like part of the reason that you go all the way back to antiquity and embody mythological figures like Tiresias, the Greek seer, who experienced life as both a man and a woman. Besides showing that transness pre-exists modern conceptions of gender, I like how these poems equate Tiresias’s oracular abilities with the paradoxes of poetry.

Yes.

Could you say more about why Tiresias is a figure that you came to, and what you find fascinating about them?

Because Tiresias never sits down. That’s the reason why I like Teresias. If you know your antiquity, he is constantly being asked questions from everyone, from the king of the gods to the queen of the gods to Oedipus Rex and to Sophocles, and so forth, and he’s constantly showing up in all these different texts because he’s wise. And why is he wise? It’s not just because he’s an old man; it’s because he went through a transformation. He knows the parts of the world from different perspectives. And never mind the fact that he also returns back to an old man. At the end of his life, he maintained and retained all of that knowledge because he was also a seer. He was also endowed with a powerful ability. And so in my poems, I want to show that transformation. Or at least summarize that transition, but I also wanted to give space for the moment where he is she. 

Perhaps my favorite poem in the collection, “Toward A Tall Lyric For Palestine (Or, The Harder Thinking),”  is admirably intersectional and self-scrutinizing. In it, the speaker, attending the Palestine Festival of Literature in 2016, realizes their failure of empathy, saying, “I assumed Black Authority on suffering, that we were top Winners of pain, I was an insufferable fool.” This honesty and willingness to see the “details of a blatant, physical Occupation” is so powerful and reminded me of Ta-Nehisi Coates’ most recent book, The Message, in which he writes about the brutal realities of occupation with similar lucidity. Like Coates, you aim for a global solidarity and think about the plight of Gaza from a Black American perspective. Thinking back on this trip and this poem, what do you think you took away in terms of the significance of witnessing and effectively presenting the struggle of others?    

I was so honored to be invited to the Palestine Festival of Literature in 2016. I got that invitation, I like to think, because I read from an Anthology that was organized by Ru Freeman, who’s a Sri Lankan novelist. She organized and curated this book, whose name is Extraordinary Rendition: (American) Writers on Palestine. I read an excerpt from Boy With Thorn. It was a kind of thorny excerpt from the middle poem, and I also wrote a really small essay, like a paragraph chunk, that presupposed or prefigured the long poem in Death of the First Idea by the fact that it makes the comparison, but it already felt the kind of dis-ease, or uneasiness with doing that. And so I like to think that that was something that was enjoyed or respected, and that’s how I got invited.

I should say that the poem, and all my poems, aren’t directly autobiographical, so I am playing with time, I am playing with tone, and I sacrificed myself. You know, I say, I’m gonna use it in the “I” and become just the “most insufferable fool.” So that whoever’s reading this can see that this kind of position exists.

No, I love that you don’t pull punches on yourself even. It’s beautiful that you’re able to self-scrutinize like that.

It was hard, it was hard. It took me… it took me those ten years to do it. I don’t really have a smart explanation as to why, except for the fact that, I think that what got in the way is my own self-pity. 

There are moments in that poem that almost remind me of Carolyn Forché. She has these poems of witness, the most recognizable of which is the “The Colonel.”

Yeah, with the ear.

Yeah, this evil colonel spills a grocery bag of ears and says, “Something for your poetry!” You have this moment where, I think, a Palestinian vendor commands the persona to “tell this story.” Is there an anxiety or fear of mistelling when you are presenting the stories of other folks in that piece?

Of course, of course, I think that was a part of it. Certainly, I have come out of anxiety.… I grew up, not just with anxiety, but having obsessive-compulsiveness around that anxiety, which feels really American these days; it doesn’t really feel millennial as much as Generation Z.

One of the reasons we were invited to Palestine was because we were writers, and so there was an expectation that we would go to Palestine, see what we saw, and then come back and write something that would change the narrative, change the plight of Palestinians. But it’s hard to do that when you know you’re coming back as a Black American poet, or as whatever, to an audience that’s not ready or willing to receive that message. It’s only very recently. I mean, this only could have been just yesterday.

That’s true. It feels like a different century, but it’s only ten years ago, right?

That’s what I’ve been trying to tell folks. These last ten years have been a tight conduit, a tight, narrow door, a keyhole, if you will, that we’ve had to pass through, so that now it goes without saying that there is at least a pro-Palestinian strain in American politics. At least among that very generation that I just mentioned, Generation Z at Columbia. What happened at Columbia is insane and historical. But it was hard. It was hard trying to come to that. And I wanted to also write a poem, because I’m a poet. And what I had to realize, what I had to learn, is that the poem is just not going to be a beautiful poem. And I thank you for referencing it, but it’s not my most beautiful work. It’s a political poem that had to be written. And rewritten and rewritten towards what it became. And I’m proud of the fact that it was published. It was published 3 times. It was published all over, and I’m happy about that. It seems like an important contribution to what is still an ongoing struggle in the West Bank and in Gaza. I have them in my heart.

Interview Posted: February 3, 2026