Bernard Ferguson is a Bahamian poet, essayist, and MFA candidate at NYU. He is a winner of the 2019 92Y Discovery Contest, the 2019< Breakwater Peseroff Poetry Prize and the 2019 Nâzım Hikmet Poetry Prize, as well as an Adroit Journal Gregory Djanikian Scholar. He has work published or forthcoming in The New Yorker, The Paris Review, The Southampton Review, The Common, SLICE Magazine, Pinwheel, Winter Tangerine, and the Best New Poets 2017 anthology, among others. He won for a package of poems titled “Notes on Migration,” which included “Mr. Jailer,” “St. Catharines, 2018,” and “proper burial for the yellow bellied sapsucker.”
Q&A
Why do you write?
I feel like I’ve had to answer [this question] in multiple stages of my writing and it changes. For the past year, I’ve written to help me understand the world and how I feel about some of the things happening in it. Most of the time, I write toward a sense of wonder, a sense of delight in things. I think that’s the base mode of my thinking, but it’s so hard to sometimes hold onto. But I can turn to a poem and can capture how I feel delight about something or, what is it about the history of a moment that I’m really enjoying. It’s just a way for me to capture what I’m feeling about the world, typically [in] a delightful or wonderful way.
What was the motivation before?
I think before being motivated by wonder, I was motivated by survival. I was, at the time, in Minnesota as an immigrant. Still I’m an immigrant now, but I was working in Minnesota on a work visa and I really hated the work that I was doing. It was kind of like soul sucking. I felt trapped, like I didn’t have an identity, I really was losing my mind. Poetry became this way to get those feelings out, to examine them and understand them. I think maybe there’s some wonder in there, but it wasn’t like the core of it. It was just, I have to get this out or I’m going to die… I had to do it. I had to do it.
You spoke about how your experiences have shaped your writing. What experiences have shaped you most as a writer?
I’ve come to writing quite a bit late. I’ve only been writing in a pen-to-paper way for like four years. Over the past four years, there’s so many things that have just kept me pushing through to some next level, some new understanding of writing, new joy, something to attach myself to. It started with slam. Slam just gave me this format for me to express myself through poetry; I would not be a writer without slam poetry. Then there was the experience of encountering Hanif Abdurraqib’s work. He takes pop culture so seriously, small moments in the everyday so seriously that it made me feel like the things that I love, that I can take them seriously too. That was another step that just completely changed my writing. Ross Gay taking delight very seriously, that’s something that really changed my writing and helped me to understand how I can do the same. And Aracelis Girmay taking the natural world and grace and gentleness so seriously, that kind of helped me. All of these moments are like transformative, these moments of transformation that I … that my writing was not the same afterwards.
How would you say those influences impacted “Notes on Migration”?
Slam, Hanif, Ross, Aracelis… yeah all of them are in there. So, from slam, I think my poetry is always thinking about how it sounds. … Slam poetry, you’re saying it out loud, you’re expressing it, it lives in the body. And, that’s how it is with my body, through reading things out loud I kind of just figure out the music to my poetry. Hanif is in “Notes on Migration,” … especially in that first poem, “Mr. Jailer.” It’s about a song that’s sung by a Nigerian singer, Asa, and then that’s later sung by Jah Cure. It was when the song was playing, it was this moment that wracked the song out of my body. I would not have taken that moment so seriously and unpacked that moment if I had not encountered Hanif’s work in which he kind of does a lot of the same. Ross Gay is in there in the way that I talk about my niece in the St. Catharine’s poem. …I learned how to look at delight, to feel delight from just looking at a field and looking at my niece. I learned that from Ross Gay. And the final poem, that’s absolutely Aracelis. Her focus on the natural world and death and life. … It was an actual bird that I saw that was dead on the sidewalk and I would not have stopped and considered the history of like migration and of flight and this bird and myself if not, you know, learning how to pay attention like that from Aracelis. Learning how to channel that with grace and gentleness from her work. So yeah, all of them are in there. I’m really happy you asked this question because I’ve never verbalized it like this, but they’re all in there.
What kinds of writing tend to impact you?
I’m learning – I’m in an MFA program right now in NYU – and I’m learning a few things about my writing. The first is that [I’m] a first instinct poet. I have to capture the poem as it’s happening. I have to capture the emotion, the moment of the poem, as it’s unfurling in real time. So, someone said, you’re a first instinct poet and I think that’s absolutely true. So, I tend to be drawn to poetry that’s about a specific event and just sprawls out from there. Someone else [said], I’m also learning that I’m an associative poet, which is a poet that’s really interested in making associations, jumping and leaping in new ways. So the poetry of Terrance Hayes is extremely important to me because he is absolutely an associative poet. … I love poems that are musical and sprawl and when you read them out loud, it almost feels like you’re singing them. I’m also into work that’s really soft or gentle, especially work by men and folks that identify as men that’s just really soft. I’m interested in widening, work that widens the idea of masculinity to include softness and flowers and squirrels and pillows and laying in the park.
Are you thinking of masculinity and soft and gentle in terms of subject matter or in terms of sound or in terms of structure?
I think all of it, I think in every way. I am not a harsh person. I’m not brutal; I lean away from violence. So even where then are like violent sounds like a barrage of bees in my language, in my poem, I tend to think about that. Is that useful? Where can I wield that the most? When it comes to the sound, to the topics, when it comes to the structure – just anything that kind of subverts masculinity is kind of fascinating, kind of intriguing to me. Men, kissing other men platonically. Men holding one another. Men just really sitting in nature and considering hydrangeas or something. There’s not a lot of that. There’s not a lot of images like that; there’s not a lot of poems like that. There’s not a lot of references throughout history that we can touch really easily that are like that, so I’m really interested in kind of flooding the world with more of that.
How would you describe your writing process?
The poems happen in the exact moment that the poems are about. … I feel the moment happening and I’m like wait, this is poem, and I start capturing details, the language that’s coming to me. It takes me out of the moment a little bit, but it’s in service to capturing the moment. … But the problem is a lot of times the poem comes out mostly formed, and it’s very hard for me to get back into it and make substantial edits after it’s done. If I write about a moment that happens a week later, I feel like I don’t have access to that moment anymore, the poem is gone. So that’s something that I’m working through in my MFA program. But most of my poems… just sprawl, associatively or through juxtapositions or through ampersands; they just try to bring in context and context and context.
Do you have any advice for other student writers?
I wouldn’t worry too much about publication or accolades very much. I would worry about how do you have the most fun in your writing. Fun that you can name as fun, not somebody else. That’s one of the things that’s at the core of my practice: How can I have fun? So, if you’re having fun then you don’t have to worry about having a reason to write or what prizes you’re winning or what publications you have or if anybody else thinks it good. You’re having fun. And that’s always something that you can return to, that’s always something that will keep you going.
Interview conducted by Jovonne J. Bickerstaff
Mr. Jailer
By Bernard Ferguson
for Gbenga & Karisma
in Ethiopia, t’ej, their honey wine, is made
when honey is added to six parts water, stirred & left
for days. beneath the low hanging bulbs
in Bunna Cafe, i look at the Wikipedia entry for the wine
while my tongue gathers, like a secret, what is left of it
on my lips. close by, a man plucks his guitar, his fingers
a pendulum across three perfect chords, his voice
like Marley’s or like any of his sons or any of theirs.
it is modern day Bushwick so he could be playing the common bop
or some unfortunate thing from this country’s country
but the silk dusk is thick & glinting & so the man sings island reggae, an Ethiopian
flag hanging above his head & above the head of the violin player & above
the head of the man on the conga drum, steady hands, his entire palm
slapping the skin. the man sings stop calling me a prisoner & like this
he hands me back my fortune. i am on some bullshit again, jiving & dipping
through bougainvilleas, banana trees in my yard, cousins at my back,
the song falling like honey from the neighbor’s window, the clouds rain-
plump. the woman next to me shakes my shoulder & it seems she has seen
a ghost. who sings this? i say Jah Cure, a man who, on the proper shore,
might look a little like me or else look a little like another man
who might have looked like me. the Nigerian man who i had once confided in
who, too, has to cross an ocean to return to where he is from, says
i am wrong, says the song is by Asa, a woman who might look like him.
& the woman, who i once thought as comrade, the one with
the afro & the gold chain with her name hanging
from her neck, concurs that the song is Nigerian. & with words
glimmering like flint, the diaspora has come alive again, ruckus with debate
& privy memory. the wine in my glass hums like bees & my phone tells me, like anything,
the t’ej will eventually sour & one might use additional honey to undo
the rules of time. the woman with the afro, who is no longer a comrade, looks up
from her phone, tells us the song was written & sung by the woman that might look
like the Nigerian, & then later sung by the man who, beneath
a fresh sunset, might look like me. just like she & him & i have found ourselves
in the place we were not born, so too has the song that falls like nectar about
our ears, a smile soothing what the year has done to our faces.
rip the injera, stack it with feast, all at once, unlike the wind we know that blew against the curled roof of the woman’s afro, before it tickled the nose of the man
when he was once in Nigeria, before it dipped
inside the only dimple of my cheek. it has taken
this long for the song to arrive. for us to finally meet.