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Double Recollection: Chimedum Ohaegbu interviews Georgio Russell

Congratulations on winning the Open Season Poetry Award for “Anxiety Attack”! I loved this poem from its start to its conclusion, how it begins in the aftermath of the titular attack and moves forward by going into the past. How does time factor into your work?

First, I want to say that I am elated that the poem met you so well, and that I am grateful to The Malahat Review staff and to the judge, Matthew Hollett, for this honour, one of the highlights of my early career. To answer your question, I will have to reveal that I am working on the manuscript for my debut collection, and one of the running themes—which I discovered rather than initially intended—is the relationship we as individuals (and as peoples) have with memory and, therefore, with time. “Anxiety Attack” is one of a few pieces I've written where the central persona is physically displaced within his own memories, such that the remembered event or place infiltrates the present scene—or vice versa—the way the “crows” of this poem become his brothers. The anxiety in the poem is never actually revealed to have sent the persona to the hospital. The reader does not know when the guinep memory actually happened—it could have been that morning or several years prior. Time is blurred because the emotions of “then” and “now” cannot be separated at the core of the persona. Because of all its triggers, trauma itself is anachronistic; it refuses any temporal confinement. I have consciously engaged with this idea in my work.

I noticed and appreciated the frequent use of alliteration (“overthrow the omen,” “boys below / a banyan”), and wondered if earlier drafts of the piece leaned more or less into the use of this technique. Put another way, what, if any, literary techniques (including alliteration!) did you prune from the poem or choose to nurture, and why?

The image of the birds\boys below the different trees urged “Anxiety Attack” along toward its current form. The original draft unravelled as a more prosaic narrative, but I tend to edit the language around the themes and images, in vague agreement with Robert Frost’s concept of “the sound of sense” (I say “vague” because it need not apply to every poem). In this poem, and several others, I’ve attempted to employ alliteration as a mnemonic tool. As mentioned, I am currently fixated on how past traumas stutter into images of the present, and how this intrusion confuses the “whens” of the matter. When used properly, alliteration behaves like a controlled echo, a constant snag; admittedly, I also want to believe that my small-island upbringing makes me partial to the “wave-like” quality inherent to the technique. Aside from that, I wanted to represent the persona’s dis-placement in the nearness of certain words as well: “omen” as the long-vowel inversion of “amen,” for example, or “prejudice” being right next to “promise.” I had also played with anaphora in an earlier draft, but ultimately removed it because it seemed unnatural for a sick persona in meditation.

“Anxiety Attack” is rooted in two places—the hospital room with its sentinel banyan and crows, and the past with guineps dropped down to the speaker’s brothers—though granted, the latter receives more attention and immediacy than the former. Where were you when you were writing this poem? Do you think that the poem is steeped in aspects of the place(s) you wrote in, or is the poem and its characters more a turning away from where you were writing?

I wrote this poem here and there throughout Ontario—school, a borrowed office, my backyard deck—but the initial hospital image is an actual memory that had summoned me back to the Caribbean. The poem is itself a double recollection, the layers of that reaching back exemplified in the places of the poem as well, including the region of its origin. What I mean to say is: I was in Canada remembering a time in Jamaica when I remembered something that happened in The Bahamas. Being so far removed, both in time and place, I had to rely on imagination to sanitize certain images; this is a thing that many migrant poets grapple with. However, there is a benefit to being removed, I find, in that the muscle of myth-making comes into play and one isn’t beholden to the symbols of his surroundings. Had I been nearer, for instance, and able to find out the exact species of bird I saw that day, all of the elements associated with the crows of the poem may never have come. I recalled sable feathers, and that vagueness was enough to take the route I did. The poem is equally “steeped” in place as it is in distance.

The speaker alludes to the possibility that the anxiety attack was triggered by an act of racism perpetrated against them—or just the pervasively racist atmosphere of their daily life: “this melanin / means more reasons to feel / the inquisitions in my stomach [….]” Earlier, the speaker notes the negative perception people have of crows based on their black hue, and indeed throughout the annals of English (and European language-literature), “darkness”/ “blackness” is often made analogous to evil, whereas “light”/“whiteness” is often aligned with the good. With this context, I was interested in the speaker denoting their skin as a “nightmare,” albeit one chosen “for sake of the same sloppy fruit, / the same brothers”: What went into this word choice?

Funny enough, this is the word I wrestled with the most in this poem. I always try to give most of the words I use some function beyond their immediate meanings, and here I had tried multiple nouns, from “sin” to “trouble” to “sickness,” but none of them worked as well, I hope, as “nightmare.” The first reason is the most obvious. In the context of this poem, the word “night” re-presents the picture of blackness, but the second function of the word was determined by the dream-logic of the narrative, its conflation of time and place and symbols. Blackness, in the poem, is associated with stealing, arson, and decapitation, all of which hint aggressively at villainy, as you mentioned, hence the naming of a white protagonist, Hamlet. The persona understands that he is a “nightmare” to those who believe the omen/stereotype of his skin; these people, “the pale tobacco lady,” are also “nightmares” to him, as is his skin for incurring this undeserved negative attention. This is a conflation of blame. Following this, the third and most important reason is because one has no real control within a nightmare—or else the sleeper would exalt it to a dream—and so the persona has a subtly misleading epiphany toward the end of the poem. When he makes the claim of “choosing” his nightmare, he is simultaneously admitting that he has no choice in the matter anyway, only that he will choose to turn his mind to the more dream-like elements of said nightmare, these being his brothers and the fruits that make for a more positive nostalgia, despite the questions/anxieties he still feels in his stomach. None of the other words I tried were able to hold these intentions.

What are you reading now? What do you consider your foundational texts?

At the time of writing this response, I am pecking away at the following books:
The Denial of Death, Ernest Becker
The Anxiety of Influence, Harold Bloom
Before the Coffee Gets Cold, Toshikazu Kawaguchi
The Collected Poems of both Edouard Glissant and Aime Césaire

At the time of writing “Anxiety Attack,” I recall that I had been poring through the debut collections of some of my favourite black contemporaries:
King Me, Roger Reeves
Muscular Music, Terrance Hayes
Progeny of Air, Kwame Dawes
Cannibal, Safiya Sinclair
Sounding Ground, Vladimir Lucien
Quiet, by Victoria Bulley
I strongly recommend them all.

I hope that I am interpreting this question correctly, but here is a baker’s dozen of texts that helped me the most in forming my voice and artistic vision:
The Poetry of Derek Walcott 1948-2013
The Arrivants, Edward Braithwaite
The Heinemann Book of Caribbean Poetry (1992)
Gardening in The Tropics, Olive Senior
Chinese Lanterns from The Blue Child, Anthony McNeill
Native Son, Richard Wright
The Waste Land and Other Poems, T.S Eliot
What Goes On, Stephen Dunn
Night Sky With Exit Wounds, Ocean Vuong
Surrender to Night, Georg Trakl
Bird by Bird, Anne Lamott
The Letters of Vincent van Gogh
Letters To a Young Poet, Rainer Maria Rilke

In reading some of your other work—let me note that I love, love, love the eerie urgency of “Circadian” in The Missouri Review—I came to notice a semi-frequent use of a first-person narrator (though you’ve employed others, as the second- person speaker in “Walking Home” in The London Magazine proves). What draws you to the first-person POV? Did “Anxiety Attack” begin in first-person, and what about it do you think you’d make different if you had written it in third- or a choral first-person POV (“we”)?

I think my love of film as a medium has influenced my decision making when it comes to POV. I am always conscious of the “camera” of a poem that involves actual action, as opposed to more abstract meditations, such as you see in “Circadian.” My choice in point-of-view usually depends, more than anything else, on how close I want the speaker (and reader) to be to this “action,” physically or otherwise; sometimes I want to foster distance. In “Anxiety Attack,” for example, the memory-within-a-memory framing demanded that the speaker be able to plunge into himself in a way that a detached narrator could not; the first person better implies intimacy with the brothers and the hurt/heart of the poem. In the other piece you mention, “Walking Home,” the child is perceiving the otherness (second-ness) of his mother's body and the changes of his town in a kind of rolling montage that precluded any layered introspection, and so the 2nd person felt more natural to that growth and separation—like a neighbour on a porch watching the boy and his mother pass daily, yearly. As a final example, I have a poem published in Nimrod International, “Piano Man,” that uses the third person because it is an old, fable-esque anecdote that I intended to read like the oral summary of a myth. Neither of these would have worked as well with “Anxiety Attack,” in my opinion, because they better serve poems whose “actions” are more external, poems that do not rely on the speaker's deep interior, or at least poems that are not structured on memories that need the interpretative presence of the “self.”

What is your writing practice like, and do you change it from poem to poem according to the pieces’ needs, or do you keep it as a constant variable?

I have lived a pretty nomadic life and my practice has echoed that commotion. While I do have an established writing area, it isn’t necessary that I sit at that specific desk to get any work done—thank god. By now I have found my own creative rhythm and try to get at least one first draft completed to my standards every week, Sunday to Sunday, although, when I revisit these drafts, I will “sit” with each piece as long as I’m required to. I am heavily against rushing; the one-week thing is more an average than a deadline. The poems typically begin with a short scribble in a journal to get the mind running, after which I’ll transfer whatever I’ve gotten down into a google docs file, which makes it portable. Once I’ve started a poem, I am essentially consumed by it until I’ve gotten that draft done. Wherever I am, even when I am not consciously thinking of the poem in progress, I feel the undercurrent tug of it, and I will sneak away from anywhere to add a few lines or change a word or phrase that has bubbled to the surface. My drafts are rarely born in any single sitting, due in part to my anxiety; they are panted into being over time, and then edited later for sense and fluidity, the seamless quality that seems “a moment’s thought,” as Yeats worded it. I find that this stammer-style works for me, though it belies how strict I am with my regimen overall; after about a week or two of no work, the absence begins to feel like dissociation, like withdrawal. That sounds dramatic, I know, but I attribute it to my anxiety, for one, and to my general commitment to meeting my potential. Every poet—every artist—has to find their rhythm before they can achieve any creative momentum. What works for one poet might stifle another.

What three poems, songs, practices, recipes, etc. do you recommend—I ask as a way to know the terroir of the poet who wrote “Anxiety Attack”?

There are a handful of poems that have resonated with me so deeply on a heart-mind or technical level that I wish I had written them. I imagine they combine to form a kind of Polaris I unconsciously follow, some for their precision of imagery, others maybe for their control of lyric, the credibility of sentiments, or the arrangement on the page. Three such poems are: “A Season of Phantasmal Peace,” Derek Walcott; “Diving Into The Wreck,” Adrienne Rich; and “The Mare of Money,” Roger Reeves.

As for songs, I tend to prepare for a sit-down session by first listening to hip-hop, a caffeinated genre. “I’m Me” by Lil’ Wayne is excellent at providing the bravado necessary. Then I might temper this energy with the melancholic “Shrike” by Hozier—my favourite all-time song—just before the session; songs like this put me in the mood to praise, in the Rilkean sense of the word. While writing, though, I can only listen to songs without lyrics, and so I might play any composition from “Wishing” by Alexis Ffrench to “Van Gogh” by Virginio Aiello, depending on the intended tenor of the poem. Half the time, the poem wants silence.

A key mind-clearing strategy that I have is taking showers. On a dedicated writing day, I can take between two to four of them while slogging through a poem; walks work just as well, but my knee injury prevents me from doing so for a sufficient time. Nick Mahoka, author of The New Carthaginians, once told me to find anything that puts me in the “poetic mind,” whether it be movies or the making of tea or the sketching of my subject. These are the things that work for me. One thing I love about writing poetry, though, is that the poems stubbornly demand that they be born on their own terms, to their own songs, so to speak, and never in the exact path of the poems written before them. In a way, every poem I write feels like the first poem I've ever written. That makes all the wonder endless.

 

 

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