“To Whom It May Concern”: Toward Theorizing Poems of the Interior

Gregory Pardlo

Princeton © 2012

I had spent the morning participating in readings and panel discussions at another conference of sorts, a poetry festival in Newark. This other poetry festival was held the same weekend as the annual Callaloo Conference which was hosted by Princeton University. I had been invited to participate in both. Rather than choose between them when I discovered the scheduling conflict, I got greedy. In my mind I shrunk the distance—the four exits on the Turnpike and the sprint down Rt. 1—from Newark to Princeton, and I imagined the trip being more manageable than it was. As it turned out, the physical distance wasn’t so much an issue as was the affective distance I had placed between the two.

As I left the parking lot in downtown Newark, I texted my friend, the poet Vievee Francis, who was already in Princeton, to tell her I would be there soon. If I had called her instead of sending a text, because I distrusted my voice, she might have detected an undercurrent of guilt there, and she would have asked if everything was alright. Subconsciously, I suppose I felt as if I might be asking her to cover for me. I felt like I had engaged in a betrayal, though I didn’t know of what or whom. The theme of this Callaloo Conference was LOVE.

I smacked the EZ Pass against my windshield and, as I passed through, peered up into the roof of the toll shed as if for some larger approval. Vievee’s updates from Princeton chimed on my phone in the well beneath the emergency brake. Recklessly, I stole a peek at the text, which read, “Drive safe!”

For years, I mocked the populist appeal of the big poetry festival in Newark. I mocked it the way I mocked jazz and gospel concerts sponsored by tobacco companies and fast food chains. But when the invitation to participate in that festival came I can’t say I spent much time deliberating. Popularity is a form of patronage, prosaic as passbook dividends, but patronage nonetheless. It is rare for a poet to reject such patronage when it comes within reach. I was not prepared to let pass an opportunity to share my work with hundreds of new readers—even if many of them might be heavy-lidded middle-schoolers. So why did I feel guilty? Perhaps because, to be honest, my motives were misplaced. Selfish. Much of my original disdain for the “mainstream” was a kind of sour grapes; I never expected to be invited to that poetry festival in the first place. Also, like most poets, I was starved for affirmation. I was a species of Diva at the poetry festival in Newark.

I wanted nothing from the Callaloo Conference in Princeton, however. That is, I wanted nothing in return. I am eager to see the people who convene under the flag of the journal. I don’t have a fear of being rejected by them no matter how star struck I am by the talent around me.

I sorted the details of my predicament into a familiar inner conflict. I laid it out like this: the Turnpike was the rack on which I was being stretched between one of the most (popularly) esteemed gatherings of poets in the nation here, and the Callaloo Conference, the premier gathering of literary scholars, poets, writers, and critics of black culture, there. Although the opposing forces in my melodrama of literary torture are equally respected institutions of American letters with sympathetic—if not congruent—missions of expanding literary culture, I imagined them addressing competing audiences, competing identity groups. I was caught between my competing ambitions.

The first event of the Callaloo Conference was a dance performance by The Nanette Bearden Contemporary Dance Theater. From the question and answer period following the performance I learned that one way to express emotion in dance is by modulating between gestures of containment...