“The Space Between Us”: Six Questions for Ama Codjoe
As the music played through the loudspeaker I let it guide my body as I moved to the familiar rhythm. Counting the melody in my mind, I begin to dance the instinctual movements, the result of hours of practice. All other thoughts pushed aside, the world melts away; it is just me practicing my art, nothing else. In parallel, Ama Codjoe, the winner of the Lenore Marshall Poetry Prize, feels similarly regarding dance having studied multiple styles growing up while also being a celebrated poet and educator.
Born in Youngstown, Ohio Ama Codjoe attended Ohio State University receiving an M.F.A. in dance, additionally earning another M.F.A. at New York University in creative writing. She would go on to have her works appear in the New York Review of Books, the New Republic, and Best American Poetry. Her work, Bluest Nude in 2023 won her the Lenore Marshall Poetry Prize, and the Whiting Award, and made finals for the NAACP Image Award for Astounding Poetry, Kate Tufts Discovery Award, and the Patterson Poetry Prize. She has directed the DreamYard Art Center, taught at the ACTION Project, and was a faculty member for the National Guild for Community Arts Education Leadership Institute. Currently she is an assistant professor in literary arts at the Ivy League Brown University.
While skimming through Best American Poetry: 2024, the poem, “The Deer,” by Ama Codjoe caught my attention. After reading the poem, I was fascinated by the deer’s fragile yet captivating relationship with the poet, their looking back at each other for a moment before the deer vanished back into the undergrowth. As with dancing, the poem is focused, it is simply the deer and the poet in this poem no more no less. Intrigued, I immediately searched for more poems and fell in love with more of Professor Codjoe’s poems such as, “My Nothings,” and “Lotioning My Mother’s Back,” which explore similar themes of connection, love, and loss. I was very fortunate to get the opportunity to interview Professor Codjoe and found her insights not only on her poetry but about the world to be thoughtful as well as fascinating. Her responses are recorded below:
I discovered that outside of poetry, you also dance. As a ballet dancer myself, what style of dance do you practice, and how is this incorporated into your poetry?
As a child and adolescent, I studied ballet, tap, jazz, and modern dance; when I got older, I studied West African dance and Afro-Caribbean dance (e.g. bomba, cumbia, salsa). In my twenties I continued to dance and choreograph in the contemporary dance tradition. I don’t dance professionally these days, but there have been times when I’ve gotten into the routine of giving myself a ballet barre and it feels great to move and stretch my limbs. I think the most direct relationship between my background in dance and my writing practice is an attention to the body. The body, and the emotions and lineages it holds, features prominently in my first full-length collection Bluest Nude.
In your poem “The Deer” featured in Best American Poetry 2024, you mentioned in lines 10-12 that there was “love” between you and the deer. Is this love related to something personal or something more abstruse?
The spirit of the poem is an encounter with love with a capital “L,” which I think of as both personal and abstract. The poem attempts to describe an encounter I had with a deer, but the wonderful and tricky thing about poetry is that it is often grasping for language to describe the ineffable. In this case isn’t the whole of language a metaphor? Aren’t the personal and the abstruse always changing places as in a dance?
After further analysis, in lines 7-8, you describe the way the deer regarded you. There is a common saying, “a deer in headlights,” as deer tend to freeze when caught in light, but the language used makes it sound as if you were the one stuck while captivated by the deer. Could you take me through your thought process on developing this line?
When encountering the deer, the speaker of the poem stands still because she does not want to scare the deer or for it to run away. First, she is still, then she speaks softly to the deer. Then, she moves closer. And the tiny miracle of the encounter is that the deer does not run as the speaker walks toward it. In fact, the deer takes a few steps toward the speaker. In that staying-with lies the revelation of the poem: that it is love the speaker is walking toward.
In my English class, we have currently been studying the state of Contemporary American poetry, and according to the views of Joseph Epstein and Dana Gioia, poetry is “dying.” If you think this is the case, what have you done to keep it alive?
I can’t claim to know whether poetry is “dying” or not. I do know that I believe it is a necessary element of human culture (as Audre Lorde famously wrote “poetry is not a luxury”). Certainly our current U.S. culture would benefit from poetry’s ability to hold nuance and paradox; from its capacity to evoke feeling, and, importantly, the right action that is inspired by feeling; and from the ways the best poems encourages their readers to cherish the gray: poetry does not abide in black and white, it relishes complexity and contradiction. As far as keeping poetry alive, I think the space of the poetry reading does this brilliantly. I’m always happy to be in a room with people and to share poems with a live audience. It is a special, cherished exchange.
What is your opinion of the current internet culture of the times? If you are active on social media platforms, have you used anything found online in poems? If not, do you believe social media is a distraction for the next generation of intellectuals?
I don’t participate in social media, and I try to limit my time on the internet. Of course, there are tools to be found, relationships to be forged, and causes to be championed online; but the internet can also be a space of distraction, at the least, and, at its worst, a space of distress, misinformation, and abuse. It is not all bad, but, for me, the cons outweigh the pros. I feel most sane and most human when I am off the internet. I have the benefit of knowing what life felt like before the internet and what it feels like now. Though I am grateful for how the internet has created spaces for connection, I think the way we use the internet, and the way corporations use internet users, has led to a lot of personal, interpersonal, and societal harm. I’d encourage the next generation of artists and intellectuals to get comfortable with discomfort, silence, and face-to-face interaction; to have a conversation with a tree; and to call a friend or family member on the telephone for a long chat. These slower-paced interactions mimic the practices necessary for the kind of art-making and intellectual engagement that I find most rewarding.
What advice would you give to a student struggling to write poetry for the first time?
My best advice is also the most repeated advice for young and/or emerging poets and that is to read poetry. Most poetry collections are concise: they take less time to read than Anna Karenina or Moby Dick. My advice is to head to the public library and grab five or six collections (physical copies); read casually until you find a poem you like; reread the poem, study it, ask yourself why you like it; then try to imitate the poem—use the first line of the poem as a prompt, write a poem that explores the same subject matter, or find your favorite phrase in the poem and do a free write with the phrase as your title. Then challenge yourself to read the whole book. For every poem that resonates with you, write a poem yourself. First time writers need inspiration and there’s so much inspiration to be found in the stacks. The wonderful thing about writing poetry is that you don’t need a lot of materials: if you have something to write with and on you’ve got everything you need.