Contemporary Authors

• \blak\ \al-fe bet\: Poems Persea Books (New York, NY), 2013
• Dying in the Scarecrow's Arms: Poems Karen & Michael Braziller Books/Persea Books (New York, NY), 2018

. Dying in the scarecrow's arms : poems https://lccn.loc.gov/2017959223 Douglas, Mitchell L. H. Dying in the scarecrow's arms : poems / Mitchell L.H. Douglas. New York, NY : A Karen & Michael Braziller Book / Persea Books, 2018. pages cm ISBN: 9780892554874 (original trade pbk. : alk. paper) 2. \blak\ \al-fe bet\ : poems https://lccn.loc.gov/2012042828 Douglas, Mitchell L. H., 1970- \blak\ \al-fe bet\ : poems / Mitchell L.H. Douglas. First edition. New York : Persea Books, [2013]©2013 63 pages : 21 cm PS3604.O9323 B53 2013 ISBN: 9780892554218 (original trade pb : alk. paper)0892554215 (original trade pb : alk. paper)

• Cooling Board: A Long Playing Poem - 2009 Red Hen Press, https://www.amazon.com/Cooling-Board-Long-Playing-Poem/dp/1597091405/ref=sr_1_3?ie=UTF8&qid=1519511327&sr=8-3&keywords=Mitchell+L.+H.+Douglas

• Mitchell L. H. Douglas Poetry - https://www.mitchelldouglaspoetry.com/about/

  Mitchell L. H. Douglas is the author of dying in the scarecrow’s arms, \blak\ \al-fə bet\, winner of the Persea Books Lexi Rudnitsky/Editor's Choice Award, and Cooling Board: A Long-Playing Poem, an NAACP Image Award and Hurston/Wright Legacy Award nominee. His poetry has appeared in Callaloo, The Ringing Ear: Black Poets Lean South (University of Georgia Press), The BreakBeat Poets: New American Poetry in the Age of Hip-Hop (Haymarket Books), Crab Orchard Review, and Ninth Letter, and among others. He is a cofounder of the Affrilachian Poets, a Cave Canem graduate, and Associate Professor of English at IUPUI.
  photo by MICHELLE PEMBERTON

  photo by MICHELLE PEMBERTON

  Copyright 2018 Mitchell L. H. Douglas.

• Indiana Writers - https://www.indianawriters.net/douglas-mitchell-lh.html

  Mitchell L.H. Douglas
  Picture

  Mitchell L.H. Douglas is the author of \blak\ \al-fə bet\ and Cooling Board: A Long–Playing Poem, which was nominated for an NAACP Image Award and a Hurston/Wright Legacy Award. His poetry has appeared in Callaloo, The Ringing Ear: Black Poets Lean South, Crab Orchard Review, and Zoland Poetry Volume II and other magazines. He is the recipient of Lexi Rudnitsky/Editor’s Choice Award. A founding member of the Affrilachian Poets, a Cave Canem fellow, and Poetry Editor for PLUCK! The Journal of Affrilachian Arts & Culture. Douglas is an Associate Professor of English at Indiana-Purdue University Indianapolis. He lives in Indianapolis, Indiana.

• Indiana Humanities - https://indianahumanities.org/5-questions-with-mitchell-douglas

  QUOTED: "I write with the understanding that poetry is a condensed language that appeals to the senses. The expectation from the reader and the writer that a poem be condensed means it carries the emotional weight of a short story in much less time and space."
  "The beauty in condensing language in this way is that it encourages the construction of metaphors to provide that emotional heft and the compressed language creates a kind of music that makes poetry sound much different than prose. That music means the poem is practically begging to be read aloud to fully enjoy the sound the poet creates."

  Mitchell L. H. Douglas is the author of dying in the scarecrow’s arms, \blak\ \al-fə bet\, winner of the Lexi Rudnitsky/Editor’s Choice Award, and Cooling Board: A Long-Playing Poem, an NAACP Image Award nominee. He is a cofounder of the Affrilachian Poets, a Cave Canem graduate, and Associate Professor of English at IUPUI.

  Adrian Matejka: Thanks for taking the time to talk about music in poetry, Mitchell. It seems like a natural conversation to have given how musically resonant your new collection dying in the scarecrow’s arms is and that your first book, Cooling Board, was about the great Donny Hathaway. You’re already living in music! Let’s start out by narrowing things down some. Can you talk a little bit about where music in a poem comes from?

  Mitchell L. H. Douglas: I write with the understanding that poetry is a condensed language that appeals to the senses. The expectation from the reader and the writer that a poem be condensed means it carries the emotional weight of a short story in much less time and space. The beauty in condensing language in this way is that it encourages the construction of metaphors to provide that emotional heft and the compressed language creates a kind of music that makes poetry sound much different than prose. That music means the poem is practically begging to be read aloud to fully enjoy the sound the poet creates. In fact, as a poet, it’s best to read your work aloud as you write and as you revise in order to ensure that you are creating an endearing and fluid music.

  My way of explaining the importance of rhythm to my students is that it dictates the tone of a poem. When you are deep in the work of rendering a lived or imagined experience on the page, you have to consider ways in which the rhythm of the poem honors the emotional state you are attempting to create.

  AM: I love your point that a poem needs to be read aloud for a reader/listener to fully enjoy in the sounds. Do you think there are different expectations musically for an audience when they are hearing a poem versus when they read the poem to themselves? I’m asking about the music of performance, maybe, but I’m not asking of the specific sonic brilliance of a poetry slam necessarily. I’m thinking about of how a poem’s music may or may not change based on the poem being performed by the poet themself.

  MD: Absolutely. Sometimes, I think we’re listening for the poem to give us a different kind of truth sonically when someone else, especially the poet, reads a poem aloud. We listen to see if we’ve missed a pause, stop, or emphasis on image and action we might have overlooked in our own reading. I don’t think of it as being critical of ourselves as readers, it’s just a matter of being hungry and actively searching for all the poem has to offer. We want a fully realized experience.

  AM: What are some of the devices or strategies we can use to impose musicality on language? Which are your favorite devices and why?

  MD: End rhyme in contemporary poetry has fallen out of favor because of its predictability, so I find myself relying on a host of other means to create rhythm. I often think of the LeRoi Jones (later Amiri Baraka) essay “How You Sound??” where he asserts “MY POETRY is whatever I think I am. (Can I be light and weightless as a sail?? Heavy & clunking like 8 black boots.)” Naturally, the question becomes “How do you make a poem sound like the thud of heavy shoes or a sail caught in wind off water??” And, yes, why not adopt Baraka’s double question mark or add a third to make it your own “sound”??? Alliteration, assonance, slant rhyme, and, in very small doses, blank verse (moments of creating that unrhymed iambic heartbeat) are helpful to me as is an awareness of the power of different sound groups in the alphabet. It’s important to know that words that begin with liquids like “l” and “m” can slow the pace of a poem and create a calming effect, and the sibilants “s” and “sh” rise loudly off the page like cymbals. It is often said that Baraka was writing a form of jazz with his poems, and I believe that music speaks to his passion and connection to words. I love jazz, but I am also a child of the golden age of Hip-Hop. Not only that, I am a very urban-centered poet (you can take the man out of the city, but the city in me ain’t goin’ NOWHERE!!!). I want to sound like the rise of glass and steel, the gruff of gutter and pavement (notice the emotional impact of words that begin with gutturals like hard “g” and “gr”). When I attempt to create that city-centered mood in a poem, I think about Hip-Hop and the percussive pop of plosives like “p” and “b” and alliteration for making beats on the page.

  AM: Now you have me thinking about the ways in which we use punctuation to create music—Etheridge Knight and his forward slashes or Emily Dickinson and her em dashes. E.E. Cummings and everything he did in his poems. It also makes me think of the way so many young poets are still learning the nuances of punctuation in poetry. If there was one piece of advice you would give young poets about using punctuation to create or accentuate music, what would it be?

  MD: When I think of the rhythm of songs that I like, no matter the genre, I understand that rhythm is a question of hesitation. When does the beat rest, when does it advance? Using punctuation allows you to exhibit a high level of both auditory and visual control of the line. Punctuation makes the difference between a pause and a hard stop clear whether the poet is there or not. With a period firmly in place at the close of a line, there’s no question about how you, the poet, wanted the breath of the speaker to be heard. As a writer who shares his work with the world through publishing and readings, I value that kind of control (especially when I remember that my readers may have never heard me speak or have any familiarity with my natural speech patterns in a regular conversation). I want my specific strain of the conversational English my poems are built on to speak well for me even when I’m not in the room.

  It’s funny because in my early education as a poet, I avoided punctuation. I think that happened because Nikky Finney was my first formal teacher, and I noticed there were times when she wasn’t using it (look at the poems in Rice for example). Or we come to poetry with a sense that punctuation is a foreign object, as if commas and semicolons stand in the way of freedom of voice. I never require my students to use punctuation, but I make it clear that if they don’t, they need to be able to utilize a system like Finney once used: a frequent line break where punctuation would have been and capitalization to show where one thought ends and the next begins.

  AM: What poem do you think is the best example of musicality (tough question, no doubt) and what makes the poem swing for you specifically? What are some other poems who you see as being emblematic of musical verse? ​

  MD: I love Toi Derricotte’s “The Tour” from her book Tender and I often use it to illustrate the power and importance of being intentional about the music you create in a poem.

  The Tour

  The castle, always on an

  outcrop of indifference;

  human shells,

  the discards on the way.

  Where our mothers were held we walk now

  as tourists, looking for cokes, film the bathroom.

  A few steps beyond the brutalization, we

  stand in the sun:

  This area for tourists only.

  Our very presence an ironic

  point of interest to our guide.

  “The Tour” is part of an eight-poem sequence called “Exits from Elmina Castle: Cape Coast, Ghana.” The “ironic point of interest”—a black woman touring a slave castle in Western Africa—is conflict enough to make this poem worth a read, but it’s Derricotte’s unique approach to creating music that makes me share the poem with students. The alternating “a” and “o” sounds in the first couplet create what I can only call a kind of alliteration with vowels that is both unusual and captivating. Not only that, the alternating “a” and “o” words rise and fall in pitch like the rise and fall of waves in an ocean. I can’t help but believe Derricotte did that on purpose given the importance of the castle’s proximity to the ocean. Derricotte intensifies the feeling of the movement of water in the third couplet with alliteration that relies on the repetition of words that begin with “w.” It’s an exciting musical feat and the kind of awareness we should all strive for as poets.

  Additionally, I can’t help but think of “We Real Cool” by Gwendolyn Brooks as a great example of musicality (it’s another favorite that I use when teaching). Ms. Brooks famously said that she wished other poems she had written got as much attention, but its appeal is hard to deny. It’s short, to the point, and doesn’t complicate its message with the allusive or semantic difficulty. But the real treat is the music Ms. Brooks creates.

  We Real Cool

  THE POOL PLAYERS.

  SEVEN AT THE GOLDEN SHOVEL.

  We real cool. We

  Left school. We

  Lurk late. We

  Strike straight. We

  Sing sin. We

  Thin gin. We

  Jazz June. We

  Die soon.

  Ms. Brooks creates music with alliteration and repetition (the “w” of “We,” the “l” of “Left,” “Lurk,” and “late,” the “s” of “Sing sin” and “j” of “Jazz June”) consonance (“real cool”), assonance (“Sing sin”) and hints at a possible end rhyme scheme (“cool/school,” “late/straight,” “sin/gin,” and “June/soon” that instead becomes internal rhyme because of the repeating “We” that ends lines one through seven. And it’s a breathless “We” when she reads the poem which makes the music that much more striking.

  After an epigraph with alliteration (POOL PLAYERS) and internal rhyme (SEVEN AT THE GOLDEN SHOVEL) that tells us how many people have gathered, the first line begins with four syllables that sound like an iamb and a trochee standing back to back, the stressed syllables at the center of the line. When the whispered “We” ends all but the eighth and final line, it calls for seven lines of the poem to begin with a lurching, forward-leaning rhythm. Lines two through seven are the three-syllable antibacchius foot (two stressed syllables followed by an unstressed syllable), and the eighth line closes the poem in the haunting “Die soon,” a spondee of two stressed syllables. For Ms. Brooks, I imagine that rhythm felt like the voices and movements of the people in her beloved South Side Chicago: constantly in motion and moving forward.

  Persist by Mitchell L. H. Douglas

  I.

  She plants the first kiss

  in the back of a taxi, cabbie

  craning his neck, eyes in rearview

  to catch the warm press of lips.

  We run

  from cab to night, Capital

  breath pinning us to the hip

  of One Way & DON’T

  WALK, signs blinking white

  surrender as we stand

  in more eyes, the whip

  of wind,

  kiss again. Ready

  for knees, the kneel

  & spin of our steal-

  away song, I stop her

  in winter’s thaw, chirp

  I love you

  before feet rush

  our bodies indoors

  to corner tables

  & candlelight.

  Yes,

  you do

  she laughs, & I

  lose my coat,

  get acquainted

  w/cold.

  For an example of musicality in my own work, I have chosen “Persist I.,” the introduction of a five-part sequence that runs throughout my latest book, dying in the scarecrow’s arms. This series of poems is meant to speak to all the ways we love—both good and bad—in the midst of crisis. “Persist I.” illustrates a conflict between two people who are attempting to define their relationship but have different levels of feeling for each other. The rhythmic scheme employed here is an attempt to show the intensity of emotion the couple feels by introducing moments of concentrated rhythm (the interplay of assonance with “a” and alliteration with “c” in the first four lines is one example). I hope that the rhythm gives the reader a sense of the level of anxiety the speaker experiences and an understanding of what’s at stake.

  Indiana Humanities is celebrating National Poetry Month in collaboration with Indiana Poet Laureate Adrian Matejka. We’ll be sharing interviews with Indiana poets, discussion on poetic form and other poetry. See the full span on National Poetry Month posts here.

  Adrian Matejka is the Indiana Poet Laureate and is the author of The Big Smoke, Map to the Stars and many other works.
  Posted In: Poetry, National Poetry Month

• Poets and Writers - https://www.pw.org/content/mitchell_l_h_douglas

  Mitchell L. H. Douglas

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  425 University Boulevard Cavanaugh Hall, Rm 503V
  Indianapolis, IN 46202
  Phone:
  (317) 278-0421
  E-mail:
  mildougl@iupui.edu
  Website:
  www.mitchelldouglaspoetry.com
  Author's Bio
  Mitchell L. H. Douglas is Associate Professor of English at Indiana University-Purdue University, Indianapolis. His debut collection, Cooling Board: A Long-Playing Poem (Red Hen Press, 2009) was nominated for a 2010 NAACP Image Award in the Outstanding Literary Work-Poetry category and a 2010 Hurston/Wright Legacy Award. His second poetry collection \blak\ \al-fə bet\, winner of the 2011 Lexi Rudnitsky/Editor’s Choice Award, was published in February 2013 by Persea Books. His poems have appeared in Callaloo, Crab Orchard Review, Ninth Letter and the anthologies The Ringing Ear: Black Poets Lean South and Resisting Arrest: Poems to Stretch the Sky among others. He is a Cave Canem graduate and cofounder of the Affrilachian Poets. His third collection of poems, dying in the scarecrow's arms, is forthcoming from Persea Books in spring 2018.
  Publications and Prizes
  Books:
  Cooling Board: A Long-Playing Poem (Red Hen Press, 2009)
  , \blak\ \al-fə bet\ (Persea Books/Karen & Michael Braziller, 2013)
  Anthologies:
  America! What's My Name? (Wind Publishing, 2007)
  , Poetic Voices Without Borders (Gival Press, 2005)
  , Resisting Arrest: Poems to Stretch the Sky (Jacar Press, 2016)
  , The Ringing Ear: Black Poets Lean South (University of Georgia Press, 2007)
  , Zoland Poetry No. 2 (Zoland Books, 2008)
  Journals:
  African Voices, Callaloo, Crab Orchard Review, Louisville Review, Ninth Letter, Reverie: Midwest African American Literature, Sou'wester, Tidal Basin Review
  Prizes Won:
  2011 Persea Books Lexi Rudnitsky/Editor's Choice Award
  Personal Favorites
  What I'm Reading Now:
  The Kitchen-Dwellers Testimony by Ladan Osman
  , American Purgatory by Rebecca Gayle Howell
  , The Virginia State Colony for Epileptics and Feebleminded by Molly McCully Brown
  , Into Each Room We Enter without Knowing by Charif Shanahan
  More Information
  Listed as:
  Poet
  Gives readings:
  Yes
  Travels for readings:
  Yes
  Identifies as:
  African American
  Prefers to work with:
  Any
  Fluent in:
  English
  Born in:
  Louisville
  Raised in:
  Iowa City, IA
  Please note: All information in the Directory is provided by the listed writers or their representatives.
  Last updated: Sep 26, 2017

QUOTED: "This collection is well-worth dipping into to hear Douglas sing of America in all its vice and virtue."

Dying in the Scarecrow's Arms
Publishers Weekly.
265.8 (Feb. 19, 2018): p51+. From Book Review Index Plus. COPYRIGHT 2018 PWxyz, LLC http://www.publishersweekly.com/
Full Text:
Dying in the Scarecrow's Arms
Mitchell L.H. Douglas. Persea, $15.95 trade paper (96p) ISBN 978-0-89255-487-4
"Right now, I shouldn't be," writes Douglas (Cooling Board), a founding member of the Affrilachian Poets group, to open a third collection that packs a powerful punch. A poet of both place and race, Douglas explores the segregated cities of America and their inhabitants, particularly the attraction to and fear of black people: "the bartender ogling the emerald glow of your dress the ink that snakes my arms every eye on guard." The book contains several searing meditations on the deaths of black people; there are the well-known cases at the hands of police, including those of Fred Hampton and Mark Clark, Tamir Rice, and Eric Garner, and the more personal and particular ones, such as the poem where a mother asks for the newspaper "to browse/ the obits for names/ she knew in high school." Peeking out between instances of violence are moments of tenderness, intimacy, and light: "As I make a late breakfast/ my 8-year-old cheers// @ the promise of grits. Surely/ there is a little Southern woman/ in her soul." This collection is well-worth dipping into to hear Douglas sing of America in all its vice and virtue. (Mar.)
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
"Dying in the Scarecrow's Arms." Publishers Weekly, 19 Feb. 2018, p. 51+. Book Review Index
Plus, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A529357502/GPS?u=schlager&sid=GPS& xid=447169b4. Accessed 3 June 2018.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A529357502

QUOTED: "Douglas imaginatively explores many facets of racial conflict."
1 of 3 6/3/18, 6:29 PM
http://go.galegroup.com/ps/marklist.do?actionCmd=GET_MA...
\blak\ \al-f[??] bet\
Publishers Weekly.
260.3 (Jan. 21, 2013): p43+. From Book Review Index Plus. COPYRIGHT 2013 PWxyz, LLC http://www.publishersweekly.com/
Full Text:
\blak\ \al-f[??] bet\ Mitchell L.H. Douglas. Persea (Norton, dist.), $15.95 trade paper (80p) ISBN 978-0-89255-421-8
Haunted by questions of contemporary blackness, this second book by Douglas is packed with risk and conflict, but also beauty. "Admit it," he begins "Passing Negro Mountain," "you read the title & thought/Here we go again--/ another race poem, (aren't we Post-Black?)" But he packs a lyric punch: "Does this explain the heart? How/one finds another, families/ intertwined like crops//on farms standing root to root." In an explanatory epilogue to this formally various collection, Douglas writes, "My plan was for the book to have a series of poems dedicated to the Alabama sharecropping days of my grandfather and his brothers .... Would I be accused of mining a subject that had been seen too often from a black poet? Did it matter? After all, this was a true history of my family." Douglas invents and analyzes his invented form, the Fret, which features a six-lined stanza inspired by the guitar, but with only a handful in the finished book, a reader can be left wondering what all the fuss is about. Douglas imaginatively explores many facets of racial conflict--from birth certificates reprints to Bops, to free-verse lyrics; when the resulting collage gets caught up in chronicling of narrative particulars, the poems can become more muddled than satisfyingly fragmentary. (Feb.)
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
"\blak\ \al-f[??] bet\." Publishers Weekly, 21 Jan. 2013, p. 43+. Book Review Index Plus,
http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A316201746/GPS?u=schlager&sid=GPS& xid=57edfc44. Accessed 3 June 2018.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A316201746

QUOTED: "He succeeds in marshaling fresh and active language in vibrant, chiming, and rolling lines."

2 of 3 6/3/18, 6:29 PM

http://go.galegroup.com/ps/marklist.do?actionCmd=GET_MA...
blak al-fe bet
Donna Seaman
Booklist.
109.11 (Feb. 1, 2013): p14. From Book Review Index Plus. COPYRIGHT 2013 American Library Association http://www.ala.org/aboutala/offices/publishing/booklist/
Full Text:
blak al-fe bet. By Mitchell L. H. Douglas. Feb. 2013. 80p. Persea, paper, $15.95 (9780892554218). 811.
Douglas' supple poetry collection begins with the death of family matriarch Mamie Lee and circles back to net memories of Selma, Mabama, and the surrounding countryside. As his title suggests, he is seeking a new approach to the stories of African American sharecroppers and their descendants, and he succeeds in marshaling fresh and active language in vibrant, chiming, and rolling lines. Surprising word combinations, arresting metaphors, sensuous richness, intensity, and levity pull us forward and bring Mamie and her clan to life. Steeped in the blues, Douglas has invented a new poetic form based on the structure of the guitar, which he calls the Fret. He evokes a "plow's path" and a passing train, a soap opera running in a house full of cousins, humble landmarks and harsh lessons on city streets, sorghum molasses and family nicknames, parents with a sixth-grade education working hard to send their kids to college, ferocious heat, cotton, and "how low a back must bend / to fill a sack / of sorrow." Douglas has built "an altar of remembrance" that is at once personal and collective.--Donna Seaman
Seaman, Donna
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
Seaman, Donna. "blak al-fe bet." Booklist, 1 Feb. 2013, p. 14. Book Review Index Plus,
http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A317308457/GPS?u=schlager&sid=GPS& xid=56444501. Accessed 3 June 2018.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A317308457
3 of 3 6/3/18, 6:29 PM

"Dying in the Scarecrow's Arms." Publishers Weekly, 19 Feb. 2018, p. 51+. Book Review Index Plus, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A529357502/GPS?u=schlager&sid=GPS&xid=447169b4. Accessed 3 June 2018. "\blak\ \al-f[??] bet\." Publishers Weekly, 21 Jan. 2013, p. 43+. Book Review Index Plus, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A316201746/GPS?u=schlager&sid=GPS&xid=57edfc44. Accessed 3 June 2018. Seaman, Donna. "blak al-fe bet." Booklist, 1 Feb. 2013, p. 14. Book Review Index Plus, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A317308457/GPS?u=schlager&sid=GPS&xid=56444501. Accessed 3 June 2018.

• Connotation Press
  https://www.connotationpress.com/hoppenthaler-s-congeries/2012/une-2012/1412-mitchell-l-h-douglas-poetry
  Word count: 3395

  QUOTED: "I’m concerned about how \blak\ \al-fə bet\ will be received, but not for the reasons some would expect. While Cooling Board was written in persona about an artist I admire, Donny Hathaway, \blak\ \al-fə bet\ is autobiographical. I am grateful for the way Cooling Board was received, and I’m hoping \blak\ \al-fə bet\ receives similar attention. The success of a book should be about the proficiency of the poems, but I’m also hoping readers will accept my family and our story into their lives."
  "The narrative at the center of \blak\ \al-fə bet\ is the death of a Southern matriarch and how the loss affects her family. Readers will see Kentucky and Alabama roots reflected in the poems as well the way place impacts voice. There is also a poetic form I invented that will debut in this book. My hope is that it will get readers talking and encourage other poets to take to the form the way they have embraced Afaa Michael Weaver’s Bop for example."
  "There is no Donny Hathaway biography (the only full-length texts devoted to him are mine and Ed Pavlic’s, which is also a book of poems). This is why Cooling Board begins with 'Essex House Hotel,' a poem about Donny’s suicide. Essentially I was saying: 'OK, he committed suicide, but that’s not all there is to this man.'"
  "The rest of the book examines his development as an artist, the way he found his voice as a musician, and the people who loved and supported him. When we get past his suicide, you realize there is so much more to Donny’s story that is worth our time."

  Mitchell L. H. Douglas - Poetry
  DouglasMitchell--credit_RachelElizaGriffiths Mitchell L. H. Douglas is the author of Cooling Board: A Long-Playing Poem, nominated for a 2010 NAACP Image Award, and the forthcoming \blak\ \al-fə bet\, winner of the 2011 Persea Books Lexi Rudnitsky/Editor’s Choice Award. A Louisville, Kentucky, native, he is a Cave Canem fellow, cofounder of the Affrilachian Poets, and Assistant Professor of Creative Writing at Indiana University- Purdue University, Indianapolis.
  ---------

  Mitchell L. H. Douglas interview, with John Hoppenthaler

  Mitchell, your first book of poetry, Cooling Board, was nominated for an NAACP Image Award in the Outstanding Literary Work-Poetry category as well as a Hurston/Wright Legacy Award, and the forthcoming \blak\ \al-fə bet\, has won the 2011 Persea Books Lexi Rudnitsky/Editor’s Choice Award. I assume that volume will be published soon and that the three poems represented in this month’s Congeries are from a third volume. Given the attention that your first book has garnered, I imagine that you might be a bit apprehensive about the second’s reception. True? Anything you’d like to say about the manuscript for the 3rd book?

  “La Ofrenda” will appear in \blak\ \al-fə bet\ (which will be published on Feb. 6, 2013). “Ekphrasis: At the Table” is an outtake from \blak\ \al-fə bet\ (it’s a poem I’ve liked for some time, but ultimately couldn’t make work with the narrative presented in the manuscript). “The Fears” is a newer poem that has not been committed to a manuscript.

  It’s true, I’m concerned about how \blak\ \al-fə bet\ will be received, but not for the reasons some would expect. While Cooling Board was written in persona about an artist I admire, Donny Hathaway, \blak\ \al-fə bet\ is autobiographical. I am grateful for the way Cooling Board was received, and I’m hoping \blak\ \al-fə bet\ receives similar attention. The success of a book should be about the proficiency of the poems, but I’m also hoping readers will accept my family and our story into their lives.

  As for the third book, it’s too early to discuss the concept. I can say that the project is underway and that I am dedicating the summer of 2012 to work on it at the Anderson Center in Red Wing, Minnesota. I have a residency there in July thanks to the Lexi Rudnitsky prize.

  The Cooling Board addresses soul singer Donny Hathaway, who committed suicide in 1979, and it’s a book length poem. What can you tell us about \blak\ \al-fə bet\ in terms of style and/or content?

  The narrative at the center of \blak\ \al-fə bet\ is the death of a Southern matriarch and how the loss affects her family. Readers will see Kentucky and Alabama roots reflected in the poems as well the way place impacts voice. There is also a poetic form I invented that will debut in this book. My hope is that it will get readers talking and encourage other poets to take to the form the way they have embraced Afaa Michael Weaver’s Bop for example. New forms, I believe, create excitement and interest in the genre. If someone asks “What’s new in poetry?” you can point to new forms like Ruth Ellen Kocher’s Gigan or the Golden Shovel by Terrance Hayes and see poetry as an innovative and evolving art.

  A cooling board is a board used to present a dead body. During winter in some rural areas, since the earth was frozen and it was nearly impossible to bury a dead person, the body would have been wrapped and placed in an out building the ground thawed out. This fact is referred to in a number of songs, including Hathaway’s "Thank You, Master (For My Soul)." Dark stuff and the three poems here are also full of darkness. What is it about such subject matter that compels you to write about it?

  You can’t talk about Donny’s life without discussing his death. I don’t think he gets the credit he deserves, and this slight is due, I believe, to his suicide. There is a stigma that goes with suicide that has clouded his legacy. There is no Donny Hathaway biography (the only full-length texts devoted to him are mine and Ed Pavlic’s, which is also a book of poems). This is why Cooling Board begins with “Essex House Hotel,” a poem about Donny’s suicide. Essentially I was saying, “OK, he committed suicide, but that’s not all there is to this man.” The rest of the book examines his development as an artist, the way he found his voice as a musician, and the people who loved and supported him. When we get past his suicide, you realize there is so much more to Donny’s story that is worth our time.

  On the Afro-Punk blog site, you describe yourself as an “Affrilachian Poet, Hip-Hop Head, and Afro-Punk.” How has punk and Hip-Hop music influenced your poetry? What does it mean to be an Afro-Punk?

  The Afro-Punk movement started with the James Spooner documentary of the same name that released in 2003. It was a way for blacks who liked Punk to proudly claim their allegiance (even when the scenes they were involved in didn’t always understand their presence). Of course, the contributions by blacks in Punk music go back several decades before the movie’s release: Death, Poly Styrene of the X-Ray Spex, Bad Brains, D.H. Peligro of the Dead Kennedys, Fishbone . . . he list goes on.

  I discovered Punk and Hip-Hop at critical times in my life. When I was seven, I moved to Iowa City, Iowa, from Louisville, Kentucky, and it was culture shock (my Dad was completing a Ph.D. at the University of Iowa). I never felt like I fit in because I was often the only black kid in class. I was nine years old when my best friend played the Clash and the Undertones for me, and my life was forever changed. When I turned 13 we went to local Punk shows, and soon after I had a mohawk and started writing poems. It was the political lyrics I heard in 30-second Punk anthems that moved me to write poems of my own (it also had a lot to do, I believe, with the brevity of my poems). There was also the lesson if you were committed to a specific genre of music, you, as the fan, witnessed it live. I still believe that, which is why concerts and literary readings are so important to me.

  Just when I was getting comfortable with Iowa City, we moved to Columbus, Ohio. I still loved Punk, but this was my freshman year in high school and an incredibly exciting time in Hip-Hop (UTFO’s “Roxanne, Roxanne,” Roxanne Shante answering back with “Roxanne’s Revenge,” Kurtis Blow’s last hurrah with songs like “A.J. Scratch” and “Basketball.” I was witnessing the passing of the torch from Old School to New School in Hip-Hop and embracing a music that lifted my spirits in my new surroundings. One of the highlights of my difficult year in Columbus was seeing a Kurtis Blow concert (I also argued with my parents about why I couldn’t go to a bar to see a Battalion of Saints show, another story entirely). Once again, I didn’t fit in (this time not because of my race but because I was so painfully square compared to my classmates) and once again, music saved me.

  Punk helped get me to the page. Hip-Hop gave me a sense of music to aspire to in my work and the clear message that rhythm creates tone and even place in poems.

  On that site you also write, “You can be my friend if...you believe art is not only beautiful but an agent of change: socially & spiritually.” This, of course, flies in the face of those who insist that poetry makes nothing happen, affects no change. How do you respond to such people?

  If you create art, it should be with the intent of making people think differently once they have witnessed your work. Why bring new art into the world if you have no intent of changing the way people think and feel? Don’t clutter the landscape with billboards, pick the right flowers and plant your garden well. This is non-negotiable with me.

  And you also list some of your favorite books (which are also some of my own favorite books!). I’m interested in why two of them particularly, Li-Young Lee’s Rose and Frank O’Hara’s Lunch Poems are on the list. What about these two volumes speaks to you, and how has any of that carried over into your poetry (if it has)?

  Lee and O’Hara are poets I admire and teach often. Lee has a sense of quiet magic that appears so effortless it almost feels accidental (of course, if it seems easy you know that can’t be the case, which is a testament to his talent). A poem like “In the Morning” is a good example. Lee gives us an account of the routine matters of a day and by the end of the poem we realize that part of the routine that has gone on “half a hundred years” is the mother flirting with the father, the son as speaker of the poem telling the reader all. It’s a private moment rendered with such skill, the reader feels as though they are intruding. I still smile when I read it and hear my students’ reaction.

  As for O’Hara, his poems are so New York, the “I do this, I do that” style representative of the constant movement of the city. That’s his magic. “A Step Away From Them” and “The Day Lady Died” are just a few examples of how he captures that spirit, the way that even in a city’s chaos that there are times when “Everything suddenly honks,” a sense of urban synchronicity. I think my poetry is constantly trying to live up to Lee’s frankness in image and O’Hara’s action in witness.

  You’re a cofounder of the Affrilachian Poets. I became aware of your group while living in West Virginia a while ago, and its presence is a great gift to those interested in the culture of Appalachia. Among the notable poets associated with the group are Nikky Finney and Frank X Walker (whose work appeared in an early issue of Connotation Press in the guest-edited feature by Jim Harms ). The web site for the group describes its mission this way: “The Affrilachian Poets are a multicultural group of poets devoted to the aesthetic of making the invisible visible. Underneath their feet you can hear the roar of the Appalachian culture and landscape.” Can you talk a little bit about your role in the organization and its accomplishments up to now? Along with Cave Canem, the group seems, to me, to have been vital in bringing crucial American voices to our attention.

  I am very proud to be both a cofounder of the Affrilachian Poets and a Cave Canem fellow. Affrilachian Poets Frank X Walker, Kelly Norman Ellis, Randall Horton, Bianca Spriggs, Amanda Johnston, Kamilah Aisha Moon, Stephanie Pruitt, Natasha Marin, Makalani Bandele, and Keith Wilson are also Cave Canem fellows. Our cofounder Nikky Finney is Cave Canem faculty, and Affrilachian Poet Parneshia Jones is on the board of directors for Cave Canem. The Affrilachian Poets helped nurture my life in poetry early on and we are a real family. People ask about membership, but we rarely add new members. Maintaining the family dynamic is important to us. Cave Canem continues to challenge me as a writer by putting me in contact with poets from around the world who, like me, are considering their contribution to contemporary letters as African-American poets.

  The Affrilachian Poets formed organically at the University of Kentucky in 1991. We were students and faculty members who knew each other and just happened to write poetry. Frank X Walker’s vision as the creator of the term Affrilachian was for our poetry to live beyond the page. Not only did we write, we workshopped, and shared our poetry at local readings in Lexington. Over the years, that dedication led to publications and travel to major literary festivals, universities, and cities across the United States. You’ll find us on panels at AWP or reading in New York, Chicago, and D.C. We even had a bus in 2009. We are notorious road warriors!

  I learned early on as a member of the Affrilachian Poets that the way we raise our national profile and honor the art is through publication. In 1997, the fact that a major anthology like Spirit & Flame featured Frank, Kelly, and Nikky was huge for us. I saw the work they put in, the books that followed, and I said “I want to contribute to that.” When I publish individual poems and books it’s a win for the Affrilachian Poets and Cave Canem. My work proves the value of both organizations. I am trying to honor all they’ve done for me.
  ---------

  Ekphrasis: At the Table
  (after a photo of Wendell Berry by James Baker Hall)

  Oh, the head pushed back in a weary blues, forearm in foreground, vice of skin & bone tight w/ a life’s work. What verse has turned your head, poet, spliced your insides to seeds, mixed every particle into something fragile? This is your “days long gone” pose, your “sun has set” profile—a crop of deep brow, heavy breath. Is this some lonesome diner that calls after the hour’s hard hand, the table for resting elbows when your heart sows holler? Such comfort in this space, no shame, no dark to hide the jaw, its plow of light. Eyes: closed. Lips: parted. An auger’s sigh…as if dark could cloak this flowered murmur. Cry.

  La Ofrenda

  As poeta, I am sensitive
  to certain truths: how
  my verse sometimes falls
  into a hammered riff of “b,”
  how a short line
  is a sharp line,
  the mention of crimson
  cliché. How names are poetry,
  the rap of a family’s honor
  blessing the ear. Sometimes
  the rhythm
  is bitter.

  What do you have to offer?

  I bring these heightened senses
  to an altar of remembrance.
  Abuela—center of our earth—
  we honor you
  w/one tall burning candle,
  black light, harvest moon;
  a needle with unblocked eye,
  thimble, fabric scraps
  for patchwork magic; two bowls:
  one of flour for the sustenance
  you baked, the other
  filled w/coffee beans
  for the morning cup
  you drank deep.
  I could grind these dark cells,
  mix the flour with buttermilk,
  but they would not be your offerings,
  another truth
  I must bear.

  Forty-eight hours
  before pencil-filled circles, our hand
  feeding the machine
  our dreams, El Dia
  de los Muertos
  will raise its skinless head
  to laugh at the idea
  of dying.
  Abuela,
  can we honor the death
  of a loveless effort:
  the destruction of confidence,
  violent mass, what weapons
  a lie reveals? We wish
  you were here to see us
  add a bowl of oil
  & a bullet
  to la ofrenda, laugh
  the blood of eight away.

  & a bullet to la ofrenda, laugh
  the blood of eight away.

  The Fears

  I.
  Bound in the wounded tale
  of dream, more
  than winding sheet,
  entombed, perhaps—
  hours of earth pitched atop,
  the drop of pebble on wood,
  grim rhythm, Reaper’s
  open hand, leveled scythe.

  I do not know the minutes ahead,
  the number afforded,
  what seconds can be bought
  when buried. Time
  is fickle host. No sun
  to raise me from the pine;
  the box as trap
  before my time.

  II.
  …your open box tops,
  upright pitchforks
  & six-point stars. Yes.
  I know.

  Time for new fears.

  Flashback:

  80s trips to Chicago—
  Michael Jackson’s Off the Wall
  summer soundtrack.
  The drive from Iowa City
  to the South Side,
  involuntary dance moves
  conjured @ the close of car doors.
  Michael’s scarred tenor: serenade
  in brick city air. Bare-

  knuckled, sister’s stories
  bruised their way to memory.
  The welt that won’t heal:
  how a group of boys cornered, questioned

  Who do you represent?

  No one, she said,

  & she spent the day in their company,
  the cult of Barksdale
  her eyes through the winded city.

  Memories simmer,
  years wind above our heads
  like the El, & my heart
  throbs in my throat
  when Dad says
  When’s the last time
  we saw Chicago?
  Let’s drive.

  III.

  Sometimes, the city—
  like memory—
  is coffin. How deep
  we are
  below.

  ---------

  Photo Credit: Rachel Eliza Griffiths
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• School Library Journal
  http://blogs.slj.com/adult4teen/2013/04/22/national-poetry-month/
  Word count: 294

  QUOTED: "If you can’t find the music in Douglas’s sermons, something’s ... wrong."

  Adult/High School–Given the title and Douglas’s claim to have invented a new verse form called a “fret”, readers may be forgiven for expecting a more formally adventurous collection. Instead, the fret turns out to be a fairly simple acrostic–using the notes of the six guitar strings as each line’s first letter, with a simple vertical caesura to denote the guitar’s frets–and in the end Douglas only supplies three examples. Nevertheless, the poet has no need to resort to formal tricks when he has such a rich topic and strong command of his free verse. He sets out to tell the stories of his sharecropping grandparents, in four sections. The first and last sections act as brackets, telling the story more-or-less straight. The third section, meanwhile, directly confronts the collection’s place within Black literature, citing contemporaries such as Debra Kang Dean and Marilyn Nelson. But it is in the crucial second section that Douglas truly shines, as he builds on the story’s musical references (in the author’s note he mentions sharecropping blues guitarists like Son House), creating “alternate takes” and variations, larding his vocabulary with musical terms and introducing the fret. He prepares for these musical musings in the title and opening lines (and, indeed, the collections best lines) to the first section’s penultimate poem: “Al Green Was a Preacher/before he was a pastor–/let me explain. If you can’t find/a sermon in ‘Love & Happiness,’/something’s wrong.” And if you can’t find the music in Douglas’s sermons, something’s equally wrong.–Mark Flowers, John F. Kennedy Library, Vallejo, CA

• Nimrod International Journal: Blog
  https://nimrodjournal.blog/2018/02/02/the-feast-before-her-the-threat-her-back-a-review-of-mitchell-l-h-douglass-dying-in-the-scarecrows-arms/
  Word count: 1211

  QUOTED: "Douglas’s voice in his third poetry collection, dying in the scarecrow’s arms, is conversational and intimate, and he isn’t afraid of addressing the reader directly."
  "This authenticity is not just an element of dying in the scarecrow’s arms, but an integral part of its power. Douglas’s celebration of himself, his voice (even when he works in persona), and his blackness is a political act. The beauty in this collection isn’t only found in the self and the voice, though—quite the contrary. Douglas celebrates the human body, and the work and personalities of countless poets, musicians, icons, and ordinary people."

  The Feast Before Her / The Threat @ Her Back: A Review of Mitchell L.H. Douglas’s dying in the scarecrow’s arms
  February 2, 2018 / nimrodjournal

  Authentic (noun) — a word too frequently used in literary reviews.

  All art is authentic in one sense: it is the genuine product of a mind and the culture surrounding it. But all art is also inauthentic, because it is something someone has labored over with the goal of perfecting it—something we don’t often get the chance to do with our everyday speech. At worst, authentic is the wrong way to describe art, and at best it is inadequate.

  But it’s the word that leaps to mind when I think of Mitchell L.H. Douglas’s writing style, and it’ll have to do until I find a better one.

  Douglas’s voice in his third poetry collection, dying in the scarecrow’s arms, is conversational and intimate, and he isn’t afraid of addressing the reader directly. Talking in an interview about his tendency to do this, the poet said, “This is my attempt at the poem being between people instead of between pages in a Frank O’Hara kind of way,” and described his work as “thinking aloud.”

  Dying in the Scarecrows Arms - Cover

  In his poem “Heretics,” Douglas puts it even more directly: “the rebellion you speak of / is a poet rejecting the language of poetry.”

  This authenticity is not just an element of dying in the scarecrow’s arms, but an integral part of its power. Douglas’s celebration of himself, his voice (even when he works in persona), and his blackness is a political act.

  The beauty in this collection isn’t only found in the self and the voice, though—quite the contrary. Douglas celebrates the human body, and the work and personalities of countless poets, musicians, icons, and ordinary people. Muhammad Ali, Rita Dove, and Robert Hayden (from whom the title of the work is drawn) all make appearances.

  These aren’t name-drops, but ways of getting at what it means to be human—even, or especially, when denied humanity by one’s society. The beauty of Ali’s physical form when fighting, as well as the beauty of his poetic language and quick wit, are quietly emphasized in Douglas’s “{Ení (of the Unreliable Knuckles)}” and “Epilogue”—and the artistry and day-to-day life of an unnamed fellow author are celebrated similarly in his poem “Two Black writers walk into a bar in Colorado is not the beginning of a racist joke,” where he speaks of “lives devoted to lines of witness” and “dare[s] a motherfucker to say something about Alizé or Courvoisier.”

  The poet Martín Espada comes into the book early on, his voice entering the poem “Used. Sold.” in the form of a note in a book Mitchell Douglas “rescued” after it was removed from circulation in a Michigan library. The idea of finding beauty—both in the artistic sense and in the sense of a personal connection—in an unexpected place is crucial to this book.

  It’s no accident that “Used. Sold.” follows “Loosies,” a poem addressed to the NYPD officer who murdered Eric Garner over cigarettes. Both poems, in very different ways, explore the violence our society directs at people of color. “What’s that like, / standing in place / night after night, / your spine exposed?” the speaker asks in “Used. Sold.” Douglas spends the rest of the collection answering this question—and confronting the answer.

  A series of poems titled “Persist,” gradually unfolding a tale of two lovers’ encounter in quiet, intimate language and image, is threaded throughout dying in the scarecrow’s arms. “We glow,” one says, “in candlelight, now halos / in the mirror’s bend.”

  In somebody else’s book of poetry, “Persist” might be a respite from the violence that makes up so much of the rest of the book. In this collection, though, “Persist” offers not relief, but a reason for the speaker to continue getting out of bed in the morning; or, put another way, to continue living. Again and again, Douglas finds beauty, joy, and humor even in the world where so many are murdered every day—some names we’ll recognize, from Tamir Rice and Sandra Bland to Bobby Kennedy and Malcolm X, and some whose names never get reported or recorded.

  A poet I know once casually dismissed Martín Espada’s work as “too political”—a descriptor I’ve rarely heard attached to a white writer’s work— and perhaps it was too political for the library depicted in “Used. Sold.” I can easily imagine Douglas’s work facing the same criticism from some quarters, though the book is much less concerned with something as narrow and sharply defined as “politics” than it is with the things that human hands can make and do: songs and guns, punches and caresses—as in “Selma Love Song,” when Douglas writes: “This body / tuned & flawed, / the fret board / a plank of mercy. / In the burn / of the baddest juke, / no soul fears dance.”

  The complication of small moments of joy and power, acts of compassion and mercy in the face of all this pain and oppression, is central to the book, as when the speaker in “Family Business: Indy” asks “How / is this living? How do you keep / your daughter’s mind on the feast / before her, not the threat / @ her back?”

  There’s no easy answer in dying in the scarecrow’s arms, but perhaps asking the question provides its own answer—if there is a daughter or fellow writer or friend or lover, or even someone you don’t know, barely audible somewhere out in that “guncentric city” or violent country, then there is a reason to live, and a reason to fight back.

  dying in the scarecrow’s arms is available from Persea Books on March 6, 2018

  Mitchell LH Douglas

  Photo: Rachel Eliza Griffiths, Author site

  —

  Eric Morris-Pusey has written a few poems, some of which appear in The Missouri Review, Driftwood Press, and 3Elements Review, among other places. He holds an M.F.A. from Vermont College of Fine Arts and works on the Nimrod Editorial Board. You can find him on the interwebs or on his stoop in Columbia, Missouri, staring wistfully at the moon.

• The Indianapolis Review
  https://theindianapolisreview.com/featured-poet-mitchell-l-h-douglas/
  Word count: 1755

  QUOTED: "Living in Indianapolis, it’s hard to ignore the tides of violence the city has suffered, the way we resolve disputes with the finality of bullets. Add to that our increased awareness of disregard for people of color in police shootings of the unarmed; a white supremacist apologist/reality show president; and a segment of the population that thinks denouncing racism makes you racist. These are trying times."
  "I was working on an entirely different book, and the voices of Tamir Rice, Sandra Bland, and Eric Garner spoke to me. I had no choice but to put the other poems down and devote my time to this new project. When more and more stories of police shootings broke, I dug into the details, thought about my own interactions with police, and started writing poems."

  FEATURED POET: MITCHELL L. H. DOUGLAS

  An Interview with Mitchell L. H. Douglas
  By-Natalie Solmer

  If you live in Indianapolis, or in Indiana for that matter, you should be made aware of how fortunate we are to have the accomplished poet and professor, Mitchell L. H. Douglas, among us. Read on to find out more about his forthcoming third book of poetry, the importance of music and art in his work, his thoughts on racism in the Heartland, and much more. After reading the interview , click on “Next Page” in order to read forthcoming poems from his new book!

  NS : Your third book, which is set to drop via Persea Books on February 13, 2018, is titled dying in the scarecrow’s arms: poems. There are so many exciting and intriguing things about this book that I hope you can elaborate on, such as the description I found of it, which depicts the book as addressing “the assault on people of color in American’s increasingly divided Heartland.” You were born and raised in the Midwest, and currently live in Indianapolis; how much is this book based on your own life and the volatility you observe around you? Was this subject matter something you feel you chose to write about, or did it choose you? What was the process of writing and shaping this book like for you?

  MLHD: It took me a long to time to realize it, but I owe the Midwest a great debt in honing my poet’s voice. I started writing poems at 13 in Iowa City, I earned an MFA from IU Bloomington, and I’ve lived in Indianapolis since 2006. The Heartland is my physical and spiritual home.

  Living in Indianapolis, it’s hard to ignore the tides of violence the city has suffered, the way we resolve disputes with the finality of bullets. Add to that our increased awareness of disregard for people of color in police shootings of the unarmed; a white supremacist apologist/reality show president; and a segment of the population that thinks denouncing racism makes you racist. These are trying times. I was working on an entirely different book, and the voices of Tamir Rice, Sandra Bland, and Eric Garner spoke to me. I had no choice but to put the other poems down and devote my time to this new project.

  When more and more stories of police shootings broke, I dug into the details, thought about my own interactions with police, and started writing poems. They were so different than the poems in the manuscript that was supposed to be my main project, but I knew I had to write them. Eventually, I noticed that I had enough of these new poems to create a manuscript I never planned to write. This was an exciting proposition: a manuscript that grew and assembled itself very organically. It was determined to exist even if I never intended it to be.

  NS: Your first book addresses the life of soul singer Donny Hathaway through persona poems, while you’ve said your second book is more autobiographical and explores your Southern roots and deep pain at the loss of your grandmother: your family’s matriarch. However, both books use music and innovative forms (such as your invention of the “fret” form). Will we see use of music and/or any particular or peculiar forms in this third book? How much of this third book would you say is autobiographical?

  MLHD: To some degree, this book employs the use of alternate takes found in my previous books. The form I invented for \blak\ \al-fə bet\, the fret, will return in a future project (the one I was working on when scarecrow grabbed my attention.)

  There is a lot of me in this book in terms of my pain in reaction to very high profile deaths on the national and local level, but I wanted to make this book more than my personal experience. You’ll have to decide if what you hear is one voice or many, but as a poet, I always reserve the right to explore persona. That’s my reach for a higher truth.

  NS: The title of your third book is a line from a fascinating Robert Hayden poem entitled “A Road in Kentucky,” which features a mysterious woman. Can you elaborate on how you came to this title and what this poem means to you? Also, your cover art is super cool, and comes from the artist Derrick Adams. Can you elaborate on how visual art such as Adam’s impacts you, and if this particular art has affected your writing?

  MLHD: My friend, the Kentucky poet Maurice Manning, unknowingly gave me the title for the book in the summer of 2016. In the summers, I teach poetry with the Kentucky Governor’s School for the Arts: an intensive three-week program for gifted high school students based at Centre College in Danville. Maurice was born in Danville and has a farm just outside the city. Visiting his farm has become an annual pilgrimage for our creative writing students. When he read “A Road in Kentucky” to our students—a poem that places the mysterious woman you reference in an uncertain existence outside Kentucky—I related to the poem immediately. I had recently come to peace with the fact that although I had previously identified my Southern roots as central to my art—Kentucky, Alabama, and Affrilachia to be exact—Indiana was feeling more and more like home. The line “dying in the scarecrow’s arms” rang in my ears as a metaphor for dying in the Midwest, a subject that had been moving my poetry for months. That day, the book lost its original title (it’s awkward and I’ll save myself embarrassment by not mentioning it). It was as if dying in the scarecrow’s arms was the only title it ever had.

  I am a failed visual artist. Well, let me rephrase that—I stopped pursuing visual art to concentrate on poetry. The inspiration is still there. My father is a painter, my uncle is a painter (he did the cover for \blak\ \al-fə bet\), so I was raised with a natural appreciation for art. Before I ever published my first book, my plan was to always have striking cover art. The cover for the new book speaks to the feeling of fear and conflict that the poems address.

  NS: I know that you teach full time as an Associate Professor of English at Indiana University-Purdue University Indianapolis (IUPUI), you are a founding member of the Affrilachian Poets, a Cave Canem fellow and Poetry Editor for PLUCK!: The Journal of Affriliachian Arts & Culture. In addition to all of this, you are a parent, all while attending to your own writing. I was very interested to see that you were on a panel at AWP about parenting and writing. How do you juggle it all? How do children affect writing? Any tidbits you want to share from the AWP panel?

  MLHD: If you’re an artist and parent, the best thing you can do is find other artist parents. Some of my closest friends are raising smart kids and making good art. That inspires me and shows me it’s possible. We share our stories and lift each other up. I am a product of several supportive artistic communities and each encourages me in different ways. I don’t take the blessing for granted.

  One quirk that’s served me well is that I am a night owl, so writing at night when the house is quiet and my wife and daughter are sleeping makes perfect sense.

  NS: How long have you lived in Indianapolis? What are some things you like about Indy? Favorite literary / music / arts / entertainment spots in Indy (or surrounding areas)?

  MLHD: I’ve lived in Indy since 2006. Like my hometown Louisville, Indy cares about the arts. I felt that right away and knew I was in the right place. My introduction to Indy was being invited to participate in a tribute to Etheridge Knight at the Chatter Box. How could I say no? I love the IMA and the Children’s Museum, Fountain Square and Mass Ave., crate digging at Indy CD & Vinyl and LUNA in Broad Ripple. Pacers games, literary readings at IUPUI, Butler, and Indy Reads, hanging out at the main library downtown with my daughter, the Indiana Writers Center’s Gathering of Writers, comic book stores, Half Price Books. I have my regular haunts that I’ve grown incredibly attached to. It’s hard to let go.

  Mitchell L. H. Douglas is Associate Professor of English at Indiana University-Purdue University, Indianapolis. His debut collection, Cooling Board: A Long-Playing Poem (Red Hen Press, 2009) was nominated for a 2010 NAACP Image Award in the Outstanding Literary Work-Poetry category and a 2010 Hurston/Wright Legacy Award. His second poetry collection \blak\ \al-fə bet\, winner of the 2011 Lexi Rudnitsky/Editor’s Choice Award, was published in February 2013 by Persea Books. His poems have appeared in Callaloo, Crab Orchard Review, Ninth Letter and the anthologies The Ringing Ear: Black Poets Lean South and Resisting Arrest: Poems to Stretch the Sky among others. He is a Cave Canem graduate and cofounder of the Affrilachian Poets. His third collection of poems, dying in the scarecrow’s arms, is forthcoming from Persea Books in spring 2018.

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