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Zoe Imani Sharpe

KEY WORDS

feel, people, work, poem, relationship, writing, thinking, film, conversation, archaeologist, book, experience, reader, language, interesting, reading, practice, camcorder, building, realize

Zoe Imani Sharpe is a poet, editor, teacher and workshop-maker. Her work is often interdisciplinary and collaborative; combining poetry, essay, critical writing, research, workshops, and reading groups. Her recent collaborations include an exploration of “life writing” and practices of vitality, called Bout That Life (with Fan Wu), a workshop gathering disparate citational materials; WhAt She SAid: Promiscuous References & Disobedient Care (with Cason Sharpe and Yaniya Lee), and an intimate poetic correspondence about relationality, subjectivity, violence, power and language, titled Power, Baby! (with Claire Freeman-Fawcett). You can find her recent work in YYZ Artists' Outlet, Writers’ Trust of Canada, Best Canadian Poetry 2021, and Gallery TPW.

This conversation took place in September 2023.
All poems presented alongside this conversation are exerpts.

I thought we could start with how we met. Our mutual friend Gabe came to visit, and we did a little gallery crawl, or that was the hope. You shared that you were a writer and were teaching. And then we slowly went back and forth, like, oh, I'm really interested in what you're doing.

I remember when you started talking about your work, I was really eager to see it. I was surprised that you're not really on Instagram. It was kind of mysterious. Where is Zoe online? Yeah, you have a book on the way and are so active in this community. It’s so interesting when you meet people in the arts who are doing a lot but are not online. I'd love to hear your thoughts about that.

I’ve been in a long gestation period with my work, which has been somewhat intentional. I’ve needed a secluded space to work through some difficult material and take things much slower than is my impulse, I mean I usually like to move really fast with whatever I’m doing. So yeah. I’m not like, internet-averse, but a few years ago I was really coming out of some grief and working and moving and finishing a Master’s program, and I was like, I need to focus on being present and shutting out the noise. I’ve written for a long time, but I haven’t published a book yet, and my practice has taken this funny path where I’m teaching and doing a lot of close, in-person relational work. So you’re right…you’ve caught me in this moment where the bulk of my process is taking place behind the scenes.

My collaborative work has come out of these  close, face-to-face relationships. I'm working on this poetic correspondence with my friend, [with poet] Claire Freeman-Fawcett. We've been working on it for about three years, talking through our relationship to writing before and after seminal experiences, asking how our relationship to language has changed over time, and the relevance of poetry, like, how does this form help us say what we know? It’s kind of a study of how language mediates our relationships and the power struggles and intimacy that arises from all that. But that project lives on a private, you know, Google Doc.

Anyway, I guess this question about social media is like, how and with who do you share your interiority? I explore those questions in my poems. I seem to I work best when I’m connected to my own interiority, my own intuition, and to cultivate that in the way I want I’ve gotta get really quiet and solitary. But maybe that part of my process will change.

Have you ever struggled with that being your preference and how the world has shifted? If you're not showing that you're making something, are you really making it? Or the pressure to be performing your craft all the time?

I don’t know that I’d say it’s my preference but it’s definitely a part of my temperament. I do struggle with it. It’s becoming increasingly important to me to figure out ways of letting people experience or be alongside me as my ideas develop. So much thinking happens before I write anything, and definitely before my concerns become clear. There's a lot of idle time and living in-between. I don't necessarily feel pressure to perform, but I feel a desire to find ways to share the process.

That reminded me of the other night when we were talking about teaching. You mentioned that the writing process can be really lonely, and teaching is a way to open up that process. I'm also thinking about the workshop you just ran at TPW and your explorations in sharing and creating with others. I'm curious about when you discovered that desire to open the process and involve more people in that living phase. I know you come from a family of writers.

“So much thinking happens before I write anything, and definitely before my concerns become clear. There's a lot of idle time and living in-between.”

– Zoe Imani Sharpe

Yeah. When TPW asked me to do a Poet-in-Residence stint I thought it would be cool to do a workshop and invite different artists; musicians and performers and people who worked with images. [Fan Wu] was really generous in helping me build out the reading list for Bout That Life which was this amorphous idea I had from reading Akilah Oliver’s The Putterer’s Notebook and Deleuze’s Immanence: A Life, and watching this tv show from the 70s that I thought was funny, called, This Is Your Life. I wanted to figure out how to write biographically while making my “I” kind of plural, and I was skirting around writing down some real shit, looking at the poems and feeling like… this is not how it went down *laughs*

Then Fan brought in Zhuangzi and some Daoist thought, and we started reading all this stuff in the group and I was like, oh, this project is about how to live. Like I didn’t know I had this desire to put some meat on these frameworks, spiritual and practical and philosophical ones, for how to live life that actually supports life. Like how to nourish yourself - that’s the word that kept coming up in the texts - and how to live life that isn’t just death-driving to the end. I think in retrospect maybe I was coming out of a little bit of a destructive period of partying and not always taking the best care of myself. And coming out of that into a place of more balance, realizing life is actually precious.

I love being in a group because it gives me a chance to hear different vantage points to a topic. I love hearing about what other people are working on. That’s a crucial part of my process as an editor and teacher - developing ideas together. With workshops and reading groups, they can operate outside of an academic institution and be a place to gather and talk without an overdetermined structure. So I wanted to provide a space to explore together and infuse our individual work with a collective experience.

My dad was a jazz musician, and my mom was interested in experimental movement practices. Growing up there wasn't a huge distinction between making art and living. And my siblings are both writers. As an adult, I realize how rare or particular that is.

We had books in the house, and music; I think my dad was particularly invested in being part of artistic communities. He was slated to go to the army and work in a steel mill like his father. And he sort of just dissented and left. Actually, he became a roadie for the soul singer Baby Huey, and then he came to Canada. So, an artistic life was not spectacular; it was just one aspect of a social life; and not special or elite. And it could be found in small and big ways in anyone’s life. I’m thinking of people gardening, cooking, reading, dancing, being resourceful.

It's really beautiful to be a kid and not realize how rare it is to have an art practice be a ritual or part of the ins and outs of everyday life as opposed to this separate, "spectacular" thing. I'm thinking about just how precious that is. Was there a moment or a time when you realized other people had different experiences, saw creativity or art differently, or thought it was spectacular how you grew up?

Yeah, I mean, although my parents were artists they were also, you know, poor and working-class people who were like, you need to get a job. They both came out of a certain kind of bohemia that was still possible in the 70s and early 80s, but by the time that was all over, the economy had changed so drastically, and they stayed broke. There was no stability. So they were  invested in art, and felt artistic life was important, but at the same time, I think I got the message that it was also dangerous and precarious and thankless. Which is not untrue. I mean poetry by itself doesn’t make you any money.

I remember giving a friend a little piece of sculpture for her birthday one year, maybe in my early 20s. She was like, oh, when did you start doing this technique? You know? I was like, this technique? I didn't understand that you could think about art in that way.

So yeah, it wasn’t until later, with some external validation and encouragement and schooling, really from women teachers, that I realized art wasn’t just an intuitive daily processing but could serve as this connective force or mediated conversation.

I'm curious about your relationship with publishing work because there's an element that involves external feedback. People who experience your work experience it privately. How do you feel about releasing work into the world and not being able to be behind the words that you write and clarify, or have a conversation with everybody who interacts with it?

“You did make the thing, but it gets activated by the reader in a particular way. You can have an intention, but there’s a release of a certain kind of control. The type of poetry I gravitate toward tends to be stuff where the reader gets to be a part of meaning-making.”

– Zoe Imani Sharpe

Hmm, that's a good question. I think I'm in the process of learning about how that all works. Particularly with writing, there's a way that you're estranged from the poems once they’re published. You did make the thing, but it gets activated by the reader in a particular way. You can have an intention, but there’s a release of a certain kind of control. The type of poetry I gravitate toward tends to be stuff where the reader gets to be a part of meaning-making. There are older writers who’ve been exemplary to me in trying to do that, people who are really locating themselves in their particular experience but with an eye to the wider way language is experienced. It's very personal work in some ways but doesn't foreclose the poem so that the reader is actually able to insert themselves into it.

Sometimes there's a push to publish and a valorization of publishing. But writing and publishing are different things. I'm curious about what it will be like to publish a substantial collection. I will probably learn something new about the poems.

Yeah. You're reminding me that so much of our relationship to our practice is ever-evolving, but it's always sort of unknown. It's not like you do the thing, and it's a step-by-step process. It's not, I write a poem, I publish it, I write another poem, I publish it. When you're committed to a relational approach to your work, even though the poem stays the same, the relationship that you and other people have to it is always changing. Allowing for context and nuance in work makes it feel like it always has something to give us. This is a good place to bring up one of the first questions around who you bring forward with you in your life and work, and who lives on through your work?

That brings up a lot of questions I have around ethics and writing and being attuned to what you're making at all times. I don't know if I have an answer for who I'm bringing forward, but there's something about poetic subjectivity or voice that can seem singular, right? This is this person, a single person, talking. But that voice is often a composite of family, friends, influences, lovers, people you’re responsible to, those who have actually made my voice. Part of my practice is trying to attune to the multiple prosities and valences of this voice.

That makes me think about how complex sharing work is, and I also think about this with music. When we hear a song, you might think it's verbatim, one person's experience. We feel we know the person as opposed to a composite or understanding of a person's world or something more all-encompassing. I'm curious about, I don't want to use the word frustration, but the tension between poetry being misunderstood as one voice and wanting to be understood, whether through a stranger reading your work or people close to you, and the challenges that come with that awareness.

It’s possible that something is always lost in writing; there is a chasm between experience and its translation into language. Maybe something is gained as well?

Language is inadequate in so many ways, and connective, and clarifying, and obscuring. I guess I’m okay with being a bit unintelligible? But I do want to connect on an emotional level. Maybe I just don’t care about connecting on a totally rational level.

I took a class recently with Gabrielle Octavia Rucker. We read an essay by Malidoma Patrice Somé, who talks about the hierarchy of consciousness in the philosophy of the Dagara. He says that in this philosophy, elements of nature are the most intelligent beings because they “do not need words to communicate” and therefore “live closer to the meaning behind language.” Humans, in his telling, are “cursed by the language they possess or that possesses them…an instrument of distance from meaning that we can’t live without and that is so hard to live with.” I found this extremely moving. It made me think about all the different kinds of frustrations and separations that we live with, in communicating with one another. It's almost about building a capacity for that in the reader and in myself because there is always a desire to be known and to be felt, but I think that's a really complex process that always has to do with a little bit of loss, and reaching out, and also love. I mean, no one is inside my body but me.

I don't feel as though I know the writers I read, but there's something about the way they use language that pings buried sensations or even feels dissonant and alienating enough to cause a reaction in me. That's a wild space of intimacy and not-knowing that we can try to tolerate.

Yeah. There was so much that you said there that I love. I forget where I read this; it was on Instagram or something. It said life is just us building our capacity to let go. In every single area of our lives, that's the human challenge: building tolerance or a relationship with letting go. And I see that struggle in a lot of friends and family, our wanting to hold on so badly. You and I talked about this the other night, too, our struggle to allow things to have a lifecycle that isn't forever and to appreciate them for however long they last.

When you said building capacity in the reader, it made me think about something specific in creating work, maybe a book of work, and how these poems come from you and where the reader comes in. I'm curious about the thought process of how you're taking care of the reader and building a relationship with them, even though you don't know them. Like in any relationship, you can't get someone to jump into the deep end when you first meet. I think about the books or albums that build a relationship with you. You feel sad when a book ends because the author has done exactly that.

That's funny because I was talking with my siblings about this last night over dinner. My sister is sort of a long, what's that word? An endurance runner. She was saying last night, I love a 1000-page book. If the story is compelling enough, I just want to be in that world. And my brother was saying the exact opposite. He was like, I hate that. I'm a sprinter. I want to get in and get out. There's a speed that he's attracted to in writing. Just two different kinds of readers and how much their personalities influence their attraction to particular types of books.

We think about books as static because the words don't move. Once they're there, they're fixed in place. I'm reading this Derrida book called Aporias, and I've been reading it for a long time, maybe two years. Not consistently everyday, but I just keep returning to it. Each time I go back, something new changes or a sentence that I thought I understand is suddenly totally confusing and out of my grasp. What I would want, or what I'm hoping for in my own work, is to have a relationship with a reader over time. I realize that people won’t understand everything at the same time or all at once. It's exciting to me to have readers pick up on different pieces.

I've been trying to write long poems and it’s difficult because I have to give myself over to being in one emotional and perceptual space for a while. I think of this in terms of pacing. Probably because I'm becoming more interested in film.

In my experience, poetry doesn't reveal itself quickly; it proceeds in a way that you can't see, and not in the same way a story does. You're not really sure what the next feeling is or which sensation will bubble up. That's continuously potent to me. So, I don’t know, I guess it’s important to say, even as the writer, I’m on this journey, too, and I don’t know what’s gonna happen next?

The second you started describing your siblings' approaches, I thought back to me saying when you first meet someone, you don't want to jump into the deep end, but some people really do. That's their style. They meet someone, and yeah, there's this intensity.

Facts.

*laughs*

I think if I saw a 1000-page book I'd be so intimidated by it. I don't have whatever it is that's needed of me for that. And as you were describing writing long-form poetry, it made me think that the process you're going through, the reader goes through as well. You don't know where the poem is gonna end up and in the same way, the reader doesn't know where they're going to end up. You're on this similar journey at different times.

When writing long-form anything, essays or even these interviews and conversations, I know not everybody will read them from start to finish. My hope is that people come to these conversations and wherever they land gives them what they need. There's a beauty in landing somewhere and taking what you need from that specific place, understanding that it's not everything, understanding that you can come back and there might be something different there for you. As opposed to thinking, I've been there, done that, I learned what I needed to learn, and I won't return. I'm curious about that openness, or I don't even know what it is. Understanding that because we're always changing, nothing is ever static; relationships aren't static. Being open to always learning, maybe that's it.

Yeah, there's something about being receptive. You know, I'm not receptive all the time. Some days, I'm actually really, really not receptive. But on the days that I am, it becomes much more apparent that you can't grasp all the information that an artist is giving you and perhaps the mystery of that separation is erotic. I’ve been reading Renee Green’s essay on On Kawara and Chantal Ackerman where she talks about an artwork as just a trace or residue of this longer process that’s invisible to the viewer. When I read that I was like, whoa, that’s it. 

Maybe one of my hopes is that I approach an artwork knowing that my perception of it will continue to change. You don't stay the same, there’s humility involved, and I think that's really beautiful.

Yeah, I agree. Our best selves know that if we are receptive and open to returning to anything we know, there's always more to learn there. It's so funny how there's a voice inside of us that, on some days, is absolutely not receptive to that. Last night, I couldn't decide on what to watch. There are movies I love that I was just like, I've already seen this. Even though they are from years and years and years ago, it's as if I remember every single waking moment of the film, and there's nothing else there for me. I know I'll have a good time if I watch one again, and I know I'll see something I didn't notice the first time, but there's this desire for newness in us. A newness that has to come from something new instead of exploring the possibility we could find something new in something "old." Yeah, we are funny.

I'm curious about your approach to this next question. What will you leave behind for the archaeologists of the future?

I love that question partially because the manuscript I'm working on has a lot to do with my felt perception of time, particularly after my father died, there was this way that I felt like time doubled. I’m interested in architecture too, buildings as living fossils. Do you know the architect Gordon Matta Clark? Or that Instagram account @hoodmidcenturymodern? Anyway, two things came up when I was thinking about this question. One is very simple: a record of a life. Yeah, that feels pretty straightforward. The other thing is a record of a language, and languages are also something that change, right? They do not stay static. They're always being built. They are composites of time, people, and place. Some kind of record of how we're using language or how I, as a writer, am using language now. It's really interesting that we can't see our time when we're in it, or at least I can't. I think it's hard to know what’s going on right now. There's something about looking back at how language was used, and words giving some kind of information to people in the future.

“What I would want, or what I'm hoping for in my own work, is to have a relationship with a reader over time. I realized that not everybody is going to understand the same things at the same time. It's exciting to me to have readers pick up on different pieces.”

– Zoe Imani Sharpe

When you mentioned architecture, fossils, and a record of a life, it made me think about the other day when we were on our way downtown. You were showing me where your house was and how everything's being redeveloped. Even if the physical thing isn't there anymore, your life still happened. I feel like language and storytelling, I don't want to say reclaim, but preserve that thing that is no longer physically there.

When I say my life, I don't just mean me, Zoe, you know? I mean a record of life, the actual traces of what life is as a material and cosmic thing. I think about it less in a strictly historical sense but in an actual felt sense around the shapes life can take.

I love challenging our notion of time as well. A friend in this residency I'm in was talking about how we see past, present and future in Western culture. We typically say that the past is behind us, the present is now and the future is in front of us. There are cultures where the past is in front of us because it's what we can see, and the future is behind us because it's the thing we can't see. I was thinking a lot about how feelings from our past can inform so much of our future. As you were describing the folding in of time and it being more of a felt sense, I was thinking about when time feels slow or sped up, and all of these feelings that we can't mark accurately in Westernized language and our understanding of time.

I've been reading a little bit about entropy, and also trying to understand time through the way it collapses. I’m not a scientist. But I’m like yeah, how does time move? How is it in the soil? I hope the archaeologists have some other sense of time. Maybe that's what I'll leave for them.

I love that, a more embodied relationship with time, events and feelings. Imagine we learned history through feeling?

Yeah. Totally.

How much more connected to it would we be?

Yeah.

I love that challenge. What also comes up with this question is who is an archaeologist? And are we connected to thinking about that far ahead?

Yeah. Last year I was teaching Dionne Brand's poem Ossuaries to a group of undergrads. In an interview, Brand describes the book as exploring what it means to be both an “artifact of catastrophe” and to “carry, port or bear the artifact of catastrophe.” The students and I talked a lot about this, its relationship to Black life, and to writing. Basically, what does it mean to be both an artifact and archeologist, simultaneously?

Yeah, like a collapse of "the other." Seeing everything as one and the same and interconnected. Being able to understand everything as a relationship as opposed to, here's this thing separate from me, and just how big that feels when you see it that way.

What is one area you're dying to work in or collaborate in? Or a new method you want to learn?

Maybe we've talked about this because I know you make films and moving image. I really, really want to make a film. I bought a shitty camcorder this spring. I was away in Paris, Lisbon, and then Detroit over the summer, so I've been shooting a lot of stuff and having fun with it. Because I don't know anything about film, I'm surprised by the images I'm attracted to. I'm curious as to what's going to come out of it. My friend, Oubah Osman, is an exceptional photographer and poet. We've been talking about the possibility of collaborating on some kind of film-image project; I see our images speaking to one another in their colour and stillness and quiet. There are a lot more people in my images than in my poems. Filmmaking feels both, you know, unlanguaged and informed by my poetic thinking.

“There is always a desire to be known and to be felt, but I think that's a really complex process that always has to do with a little bit of loss, and reaching out, and also love. I mean, no one is inside my body but me.”

– Zoe Imani Sharpe

Yeah. It is a new language to communicate feelings. I feel like it requires less of like your audience in terms of direct attention too. Reading really requires something specific of people, and being immersed in film feels more accessible, maybe. I am surprised and delighted in the things I capture on film. Making the ordinary really extraordinary is a different process in moving image as opposed to trying to describe a moment in a poem.

Yeah, I'm noticing a few things when I'm shooting. One is that I have much more patience for language in a way, the way that language moves. I can really sink into reading in a patient way. When I'm shooting film, I get speedy and lose that patience. There’s a focused agility to shooting film, like being ready to capture an image at all times. I feel like I'm really practicing my alertness, waiting and finding images. I’m also discovering how my mind makes connections between really disparate images. It's bringing up all this stuff for me around narrative and how it’s built and unbuilt. Film is teaching me about how poems move and vice versa.

I can't wait for a Zoe film.

*laughs* One of these days.

And there's something when you're led by your intuition in getting to know a craft; like you said, it's just fun. When I first started getting into moving image and taking random videos, it felt more free than writing did. I was like, a new way to express myself that doesn't require the thing I know already.

Yeah, exactly. I don't have any baggage or any in-depth knowledge. It’s a blank slate, so I’m just following my gut. Also people seem willing to engage in filmmaking, maybe because I've been working with this camcorder, which feels like an ancient technology. In Paris I saw this man with incredibly intriguing tattoos and I asked to film them. He was like, if it were a cell phone I wouldn't let you because it'd be used somewhere, but because it was this camcorder, he was kind of like, okay, sure, I'll talk to you for a bit. I’ve never been that directly engaged with the physical and social world while making art. It’s been freeing.

I'm so happy you shared that. Yeah, a camcorder is disconnected. It's used in real-time. You have to take it home, upload it to your computer, and do something with it. There's a different relationship with it. It feels less like surveillance or like I'm recording you, and this could immediately be put on the internet for some other means. There's more intentionality to it.

Yeah, it's a nice way to collaborate that feels in real-time with people. I guess it’s a slower way of making, and I’m into slowness right now. 

“The other thing is a record of a language, and languages are also something that change, right? They do not stay static. They're always being built. They are composites of time, people, and place.”

– Zoe Imani Sharpe

Okay, and lastly, do you have a song or, a movie or a phrase on repeat in your mind right now?

I’m not sure how to answer this one. I like lots of things at the moment. I've been listening to the last Sudan Archives record, Natural Brown Prom Queen. I love it. The song structures are so gorgeous and constantly changing. I just think she's great. I've been listening to a lot of Grace Jones. That one song, Private Life. Maybe that says where I'm at. *laughs*

I find it so funny that this question, in particular, people have the hardest time with. But I think your answer really connects with how we started; your practice being very private, but also the ever-changing qualities throughout it all. So, it's perfectly fitting.

Love when that happens.

ZOE IMANI SHARPE

Zoe Imani Sharpe is a poet, editor, teacher and workshop-maker. Her work is often interdisciplinary and collaborative; combining poetry, essay, critical writing, research, workshops, and reading groups. Her recent collaborations include an exploration of “life writing” and practices of vitality, called Bout That Life (with Fan Wu), a workshop gathering disparate citational materials; WhAt She SAid: Promiscuous References & Disobedient Care (with Cason Sharpe and Yaniya Lee), and an intimate poetic correspondence about relationality, subjectivity, violence, power and language, titled Power, Baby! (with Claire Freeman-Fawcett). You can find her recent work in YYZ Artists' Outlet, Writers’ Trust of Canada, Best Canadian Poetry 2021, and Gallery TPW.