monét cooper is a black, queer poet from the South, currently residing in the Midwest where she’s a doctoral student in the Joint Program in English and Education at the University of Michigan. Prior to joining the academy, she spent 11 years serving students and families in middle and high school English classrooms in DC, Maryland, and Virginia. A Georgia Peach from Decatur, she enjoys naps and eating German chocolate cake and misses live theater, museums, porch sits, and hugging her people back home. monét has work forthcoming in This House Will Not Dismantle Itself: Critical Future in Education.
Q&A
Give us a brief synopsis about this piece. What inspired you to write it?
bond includes three poems, all elegies about wonder, love, and attempts at liberation in the hold. In these poems, violence lurks everywhere, but so is an ever wide and capacious love for Black life, for the Black self, for ancestry and kinship, for memory that won’t let go. What is the interior of a life? In this work, I’m interested in how Black ancestry finds a home in the quiet rooms of memory, how the mundane is spectacular, and troubling the act of witnessing, especially in nature, inclusive of human nature. I feel so much myself when I’m walking in the woods or in a park, when I’m with my family, when I know my neighbors and they know me. I let my mind wander and pause to notice what’s along the path or while people watching on a stoop. Yet, what remains unforgettable in these spaces is the remarkable beauty experienced alongside the adjoining ways that antiblackness operates, forcing a confrontation with the settler colonial state. Who believes they have a right to police my body and, perhaps, yours? How do the violences of antiblackness make their way into the self? What do we do to survive these moments of rupture? Our interior offers a response. We survive in the Audre Lorde and Alexis Pauline Gumbs sense of the word, which requires a knowledge of self, ancestry and the evocation of memory. I hope I honored that inheritance in these poems.
Tell us about your journey as a writer.
After begging my parents to read me the comics every day, my parents decided it was time to teach me to read. I had to have been three or four, and one of the biggest joys of reading was going to the library and choosing books. My writing journey began with the delight of reading and searching for books, sitting on the floor of the library or behind the bed in my room, whatever corner I could find, curling up and reading. My mom gave me a diary, and I began writing my own stories about chewing gum, grass, and my wishes for a kitten, you know, things at the eye-level of a child. But it was important to me, and my parents always made me feel like the things I was writing and thinking about were worthwhile, which is such an important gift to a child. And, my parents and extended family, especially my cousins, introduced me to so many Black writers, which encouraged me to participate in the larger tradition of Black writing, illustration, and reading. Shout out to Eloise Greenfield, Jeannette Caines, Nikki Giovanni, Walter Dean Myers, Beverly Cleary, and all the comic books that carried my childhood. So much of what I fell in love with about writing happened as a child and as a writer, I want to honor that sense of wonder in my own writing journey. I was a journalist during and after college and continued to write and squirrel away my poems, but it was really when I came to DC that I began to take myself seriously. And it came through teaching. I first worked for an advocacy organization but was teaching poetry workshops for Black girls in middle school in Anacostia every week. Nothing makes us learn a thing more than when we must teach it, which meant I began taking the time to examine poems I loved closely before offering them to these young writers. What the students brought to reading the poems, crafting their own, and later performing them was all beauty and glory. Braiding in teaching and reading has been important to how I enter writing. Being a teacher, for me, means that I my students and I are constantly exploring our curiosities together, then I ask them to take time to write about those explorations. It’s disingenuous for me to ask my students to practice a ritual, I do not inhabit. As I’ve taught, I’ve also learned, and given myself permission to be honest and vulnerable in my writing like I’ve asked my students to do. Writing is refractive in that way. Entering a doctoral program has made me attend to myself in ways I didn’t when I was teaching full time. I’m becoming more accountable to making space to wonder and write. I’ve really tried to honor this time with attention to reading and rereading, revision, research, and learning how to listen. I think that was one of my first lessons at Hurston-Wright, which was my first creative writing workshop, ever. Our workshop leader was A. Van Jordan, and what I learned there from him and my peers there has stayed with me. My second time at Hurston-Wright was last summer in Danez Smith’s workshop alongside other brilliant poets. Both Jordan and Smith are writers whose word work and instruction have helped to shape my writing and aperture. I’m honored and grateful to receive an award from an organization that’s been integral in me joyfully coming into my own.
Is there someone whose writing style influences you?
So many. A. Van Jordan, Ai, Martín Espada, Lucille Clifton, Gwendolyn Brooks, Audre Lorde, Zora Neale Hurston, James Baldwin, Pablo Neruda, Ross Gay, Kevin Young, Danez Smith, bell hooks, John Murillo, Sharon Olds, Cornelius Eady, June Jordan, Ocean Vuong, Elizabeth Alexander, L. Lamar Wilson, Natasha Trethewey, Rae Armantrout, Natalie Díaz, and every student I’ve ever taught and learned alongside.
Are there books you return to when thinking about craft?
Graywolf Press’s The Art Of series, on periodt. I’m beginning to sit with Agha Shahid Ali’s ghazals. Kevin Quashie’s Sovereignty of Quiet is a text that gently reminds me about my own interior and how to look for it in the archive.
What does it mean to be a writer during a global crisis? Has your writing life or your work been affected or influenced by the events of the last 15 months?
Has there been a time in human history when there has not been a global crisis? The looting of Indigenous land is a global crisis. The continued murders of Indigenous people are a global crisis. The legal enslavement of Black people was a global crisis. The murders of Black and Brown people is a global crisis. The killing and bombing of Palestinian people and land by the Israeli government, who is using weapons funded by the U.S. is a global crisis. What’s happening in Colombia is a global crisis. Apartheid anywhere is a global crisis. What’s still happening in Flint, Michigan, is a global crisis. The legislation that bars trans girls from playing sports, having a right to health care, and living their lives is a global crisis. The continued trafficking of humans is a global crisis. The fact that globally, the wealth of one group requires the subjugation and oppression of so many others is a global crisis. Mass incarceration is a global crisis. The lack of critical, liberatory and abolitionist education in our country is a global crisis. Colonization is a global crisis.
And we are still in it.
During this time of multiple pandemics, white supremacy, heteropatriarchy, settler colonialism, antiblackness, has been made more visible. It is a choice to not see it. As writers, we must answer the call to see, listen, and write about it. Toni Morrison quotes her artist friend, when she writes, “This is precisely the time when artists go to work—not when everything is fine, but in times of dread. That’s our job!” When I read these words, I always ask, what does “work” mean? For me, it is to feel, to allow myself to feel everything and to feel alongside others. This means to love and give it, grieve, grapple with my own messiness, feel low, admit it, and seek help. And, when I’m ready, to convey those feelings and reactions in ways that feel most alive to me, which is usually through writing. June Jordan and Audre Lorde taught us so much. The words I offer to others, I also offer to myself.
I fell in love last year and am blessed to give and feel love so deeply. My grandmother contracted the coronavirus and transitioned last summer. She was one of my best friends and, more than anyone, encouraged me as a writer, nurtured my self-regard as she did her own, and allowed me to witness her fantastic self so fully. I’ve grown closer with my friends who live abroad, and we’ve begun working on projects together. One of my sister friends and I reconnected with each other. Group chats have been life giving, so have phone conversations and walks. A friend recommended The Book of Delights by Ross Gay at the beginning of the coronavirus pandemic and while reading it, my daily walks became gratitude walks, which have really helped my mental health. I’ve been listening to people read children’s books on YouTube. I’m a new plant mama and my plants are growing. I play phone tag with my parents. My sister and I exchange memes. We laugh, sometimes until we cry. I need to call my brother back. I spent most of 2021 dealing with my health. I read books that I’m loathe to put down. I survive. I’m supposed to be talking about writing, but I’m telling you how I’m living because I write about life. I have to spend time living it, too.
Writing in this past year has been more of returning to work I’ve written, then listening. I’m thinking a lot about place and space, how my body interacts with the histories circulating in those spaces. I’m writing poems about my family’s relationship to land, which means I’m in archives looking around. I write from a place of love, vulnerability, and wonder. And, while I’m a realist (who, yes, has a go bag), I’m also an incredibly hopeful person. I get it from my ancestors and elders. It’s how we’ve survived.
What advice would you give aspiring writers?
Well, I’d love to ask them what they’re learning about writing. What advice has been most useful to them? I’m trying to learn, too! If they ask, I’d offer some sage words given to me: Practice the art of listening. Listen to yourself, your interior. Listen to the world around you. Listen to your words on the page and in your head. Listen to the questions. Trust yourself. Refuse to believe that the writing life is required to be done alone. Do things you love by yourself and with people you love. Feedback from yourself and others is crucial to growth. Figure out what critique you’ll keep and discard. Critique, particularly from folks we trust, can be a form of care and love.
water I
for Rock Creek Park, DC
By monét cooper
in the morning light
my chest touches day
& already i have won
my first quarrel with
the sun over the
matter of how slack
i won’t become. on
this run i can feel
my back complain but
no one can hear but my
ancestors who say go
play in the forest & deer
almost extinct like me
branches weep on every
strand of human & horse
my eyes catch on
two ladybugs glinting
their soft bottled selves
so close at first
look it seems only one
enjoys its own beauty
or i move air’s boundaries
& i swear every
person on my trail
says hello or smiles
with teeth & eyes meet
mine even when open
spittle coaxes itself
out to my cheeks
i am no elegant
creature in this wood
just blessed to see
leaves change rooms in
soft loam spirals & my
shoes knead themselves
into a river’s bed
all my wants are
wet but not my tongue
& how is it that
three boys sat in hand
cuffs only last week
i saw the picture
their bodies as slack
as mine wants to be
as the police say
why they cannot sell
water nothing when
they don’t have permission
in my city (i
claim it) my body
would have been sold with
permission & the
bodies of girls who
look like me are sold
with permission &
can i think that on
my run a slave wore
this wood on her back
& this river now boasting
my shoeprint’s spit
was once full of all
the water she
did not want.