This Is a F*** You Poem

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SPEAKERS
Camille Rankine and Omotara James

COLD OPEN (Omotara James speaking)
“It's important to subvert tropes. It's really interesting during this time of social media, body positivity, fat liberation. I feel that times couldn't really be more polarizing. The more space that is created socially for people who are fat, super-fat, infini-fat, the more visceral and vitriol there is around our bodies.”

Music starts
Camille Rankine
Welcome to The Glimpse. I’m your host, Camille Rankine.

Poet Omotara James is skilled at subversion. She’s the author of the poetry collection Song of My Softening, and her work has been featured in NPR’s Morning Edition, the Paris Review, and The Believer. She has received support from the African Poetry Book Fund, the Poetry Foundation, Lambda Literary, and Cave Canem Foundation. Omotara is our guest today on The Glimpse.

In her debut poetry collection, Song of my Softening, Omotara James carves out a hard-earned way of knowing: a way of seeing through the language we've been given to a clear understanding of self, of body, of being. Her voice and these poems move with a surefooted and sensual grace through pain and shame toward abundance and a tender truth-telling. Hers is an eye that doesn't shy away. She lifts what the world has hidden in shadow up to the light and lets it shimmer. Welcome, Omotara. Thanks for being here.

Omotara James
Thank you. I'm so happy to be here with you.

Camille
I'm really happy to be talking to you. I want to start off just by asking about your poems in general. As I was reading your book, I was thinking about this balance that they strike between vulnerability and confidence, and they can be really intimate at the same time, unbowed and unbossed—channel Shirley Chisholm—and I just wondered how do you arrive at that space as a poet or as a person?

Omotara
You know, I feel like I'm always trying to navigate a kind of balance and generosity in my life. So whatever is happening within my interiority, I try to bring that to the work. And so I'm very focused on my process, which means I'm focused on what it feels like as I'm perceiving the world, entering into the actual writing phase. I try to have a ritual that book-ends the process when I write, so that when I walk into the poem, I know that there's going to be a beginning, a middle and an end. There's a finite amount of time. And that gives me some kind of surety and confidence in my process, knowing that, “Okay, I get to decide how it ends.” And even though I don't know how it's going to end, I still get to decide. So it makes me feel some sort of power and control.



Camille
Mmmm, that's so interesting. I feel like I see that in your work. That sense of power and control is so present in the poems and it's interesting, because that comes through even when what the poems are talking about might lack that control, like the actual scenario or subject, your narrative… They might be talking about a lack of control, but the poems themselves feel in control of their matter, if that makes sense. You know, I think that's really interesting how that power comes through.

Omotara
It does, that creates that delicious sort of tension, you know, between helplessness and control. And that's how I'm always trying to strike a balance, what I'm always navigating. And I remember when I was, I think it was at Breadloaf [a writer’s conference] with Vievee Francis, one of my favorite American poets, and she told us that we should have a beginning and end to the writing process when we are writing about something traumatic, problematic, you know, because that grace that we give ourselves, we'll find it again in the work.

Camille
Right. Do you feel like that process, that beginning, middle, and end, that process, is it consistent for you? Or does it change depending on the poem and the work you're working on?

Omotara
It changes. It also changes depending on the time of day that I'm working. Because when I work in the evenings, that's when I'm my least guarded self, my most open, my most vulnerable, and everything becomes a little blurry, right? The boundary between being awake and being asleep, the boundary between what I remember and what I can't forget. So I'm trying to, on the one hand, blur the boundary, and channel some kind of spiritual, psychic energy. But also, my intellect is also thinking along certain themes and certain concerns that I'm exploring.

Camille
Yeah. That's so interesting. That tension, that balance is so present in all these different ways. I think that's a lot of what makes poetry kind of electric, you know?

Omotara
Yeah!

Camille
Absolutely. All right. Well, let's hear a poem if we can. I'd love to hear you read the poem that you're going to share today.

Omotara
Okay, absolutely. So I'll be reading from my debut collection.

After the Last Calorie of the Apocalypse /
Prayer for the Clinically Obese
On the last day, let there be a fat inhalation
of delight between the lap of our sunrise.
As the tongue separates the doubt from the cream,
let pleasure sift through the metal strainer of time. Only
hours now. Waiting for the thin people in my life to die,
I read a magazine, have sex, smoke a cigarette and
ride the elevator down to the lobby. We’ve only minutes
now. Having nothing against them, personally, unlike art
they don’t improve much upon the original form. Why
was I ever only awake to the past, my past selves asleep
to what was plentiful? Exiting the lobby for the corner
store, I pass an absurdity of them. Only seconds now, staunchly
insisting their last instance be tailored to fit. Their paper lips
fanning the tulle hem of my dress, red, for the rest of us,
mere moments away from freedom, from this fine tyranny. If only
for a short while, as they begin to shrivel and wilt. Oh
mercy of the thin breeze. On this day, lovelies, we will be free
when the food runs out.
“After the Last Calorie of the Apocalypse / Prayer for the Clinically Obese" from the book Song of My Softening by Omotara James, used with permission from Alice James Books, 2024.


Camille
Thank you, I'm obsessed with that poem a little bit.

Omotara
Oh my gosh!

Camille
I love it. I love the way that you read it.

Omotara
Thank you

Camille
It’s so gorgeous and I'm just thinking about the language of pleasure, especially, that immediately draws us in: breath, sunrise, tongue, cream, sex, cigarette. Like it feels so warm and languid in its opening. Can you talk about the choices that you made in image and language to create that feeling?

Omotara
I wanted to begin the poem with a feeling of exultation, of almost climax. And I was very aware that I wanted to begin probably in a higher register than I wanted to end. So I was thinking, like, a gorgeous sunrise, a deep pastel, creamy, abstract, a Renoir sunrise. Something that you just couldn't help but be drawn to and compelled by, something delicious. And I wanted to begin with pleasure and I wanted there to be slippage between the deliciousness that you see and the deliciousness that you taste, right.
And then we get into the body. So that's the tongue separating the doubt from the cream, which is like, “Okay, what does that mean?” We don't know entirely, but it's very lyric. It's very evocative. And certainly, as the poem continues, there's this element, this thread of cruelty, right? And that's kind of underpinning the poem, and I didn't want to point too overtly to what was happening outside of the speaker, like the exposition. I didn't feel that we needed a lot of exposition in an apocalypse poem.

Camille
We get it.

Omotara
There's a dissonance there. There's a dissonance between this excessive pleasure to all of a sudden, we're smoking a cigarette, and we're having sex and we're reading a magazine, which is really pedestrian. And then as we continue, the eye of the poem kind of opens out to everything that the speaker is just kind of walking through, and the camera’s just kind of following her. And she's the only one who's in focus, walking through this apocalyptic state, where thin people are just falling to the ground. And she’s saying, “Yes, that's right. That's right.” And with every thin person that is obliterated, she is occupying more space. She's becoming more confident. She's feeling more liberated. And so there's this relationship between occupying space in a fat body and being liberated and just being left alone, you know, not having anyone critique you too closely. And so that was how I began the poem.

Camille
I love that you mentioned this idea, this element of cruelty. One of the things that I really find myself drawn to is the voice of the poem in moments like that, with like, “having nothing against them, personally, unlike art / they don't improve much upon the original form.” I just love that “I,” that, just like, “they're fine, I suppose.”

Omotara
I mean, it's funny, I thought that was funny.

Camille
Yes! I think that’s hilarious! I love that.

Omotara
Thank you! I’m a funny poet. People don't necessarily get that. There is humor there.

Camille
I’m mean, I’m over here cracking up!

Omotara
You know, life is so absurd, you have to laugh. And also, too, I did write this before the pandemic, so it felt just a little bit more fun to speak about an apocalypse before COVID-19.

Camille
Right.

Omotara
But it was this, you know—it was out of a time where there are all these like zombie movies, there's all of this, you know, all of these fantastic apocalypses that were showing, but I wanted to reclaim that because depending on the life that you lead, and how you're living and how you're in community, you might be facing the apocalypse every day. Right?

Camille
Yes, absolutely. Yeah. There are apocalypses happening for people all the time, yeah.

Omotara
All the time, all the time. And in ways that are more obvious and ways that are just smaller and more innocuous. So I just wanted to take it from high to low, from, you know, grand to mundane.

Camille
Yes, I think there is so much grandeur that even the mundane elements of the poem, like magazines, cigarettes, sex, they're cast in this light, like this romantic light, you know. I just feel like this poem is doing a lot with reframing of language, of image, of body. And I—one of the things I love about that kind of casual cruelty of the voice is how it works to reposition thinness into something sort of withering and sad, you know?

Omotara
It's important to subvert tropes. And it's really interesting during this time of social media, body positivity, fat liberation—I feel that times couldn't really be more polarizing. The more space that is created socially for people who are fat, super-fat, infini-fat, the more visceral and vitriol there is around our bodies. So there are these extremities and the idea of seeing a speaker just walk through them, just cut through them, with such, you know, poise and sense of self and being so casual about it. That was very attractive to me to see a speaker, a fat speaker, framing the narrative and not just solely being the subject of the narrative. It felt very important.

Camille
Yeah, I think that comes across. And another thing that I really enjoy thinking about, that turn of power and grace, is that last line. The entrance of the word “lovelies,” can you talk about that? Like how you arrived at that moment of address?

Omotara
So while I was writing this poem, I was also thinking a lot about how I could condense the last few minutes of someone's entire life, and how to create that heightened sense of time. And in doing so, I thought, you know, when no one knows how they're going to go out, right? No one knows when their last day is going to be. And so I just thought, the poem began in beauty and is ending in death. And also through that death, there is another beauty being born. So we're beginning in beauty, and we're ending in beauty, but not in the same place, right. So it just felt really important to make sure that there was some love for those who are left last at the end of the poem.

Camille
And there's also something really hopeful, I think. When we think about how many apocalypses we live through and a lot of people live through, of taking that moment and spinning it around a little bit and thinking about what can we build? What can we gain? How can we be freer? I think there's something hopeful about it, even though it's about the end of the world.

Omotara
Yeah. And that's why I wrote it in couplets too.

Camille
I was gonna ask about that. I love a couplet! Talk to me about that.

Omotara
I love a couplet. You know, it feels like when you're writing a couplet, you're beginning somewhere and you're ending somewhere. It's like two hands holding.

Camille
Yes! I always say that, it’s like hand-in-hand skipping down the street. You know?

Omotara
I was just about to say! Oh, my goodness, Camille!

Camille
You get me.

Omotara
You’re here. We're here together in this. Oh, my goodness. Never felt so seen. The sisterhood. So yes, so there's this feeling of when I see couplets together, it's like, oh, okay, we're merrily going along this poem. Right. So there's that lightness and that levity in terms of how it looks so kind of unassuming. But also, what this poem is saying is, “Death is coming, death is coming, death is coming, death is coming. And we're going to be okay, for, like, a few minutes after all the thin people perish.”

Camille
“It’s gonna be good for a few minutes.”

Omotara
“And that's gonna be good.” And also, you know, when you go back to the title of the poem, the first part is “After the Last Calorie of the Apocalypse,” right. But the second part is “Prayer for the Clinically Obese,” and that word “obese” and “obesity,” especially in the within the culture and context of fat liberation, that is, you know, very much a slur, because it is a word that is highly loaded, that's always used really pejoratively. There's no place where it's not used pejoratively. It's built into the word, especially when it's used clinically. And in those clinical spaces, those medical spaces, people who are fat, are most vulnerable and also the least seen. We're not taken seriously. And that's why we don't enter those spaces as much as thinner people. People living in thinner bodies would enter those spaces because there's more freedom there.

Camille
I was thinking about that inclusion of “Prayer for the Clinically Obese” in the title. Just the coldness of that word, the accusation of it, and how the whole poem seems to sort of just laugh in its face, almost, sort of—it pushes right back against that and seems to, to me, just take the control away from that, that designation, and control that story in that narrative. It just creates such an interesting tension to me that really informs the way that I understand and feel the impact of the poem itself.

Omotara
I mean, certainly this is a fuck you poem.

Camille
Oh, yeah.

Omotara
You know, I mean, there's no way around that. It's a poem that says “My personhood is going to be asserted, whether you like it or not. And I actually prefer that you don't like it. (Camille laughs.) That would bring me pleasure.”

Camille
You don't need it. It’s fine. Yeah, yeah.

Omotara
Right.

Camille
I think that's what is so delicious about the poem, that, you know, that sense of facing that title and pushing back and laughing at that title and saying, “I'm actually not, I'm not going…about to take that on myself. Good luck. Good luck to you all.” No. All right. Yeah, I think that's, that's glorious.

Omotara
Thank you.

Camille
Thank you. And I think this is a good time to take a little break.

Omotara
Okay.

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We hope you're enjoying The Glimpse. It's just one small part of the Adrian Brinkerhoff Poetry Foundation. We are the founders, Peter and Cathy Halstead. Our goal is to make poetry more accessible to everyone and we do that in a variety of ways: through partnerships, our film series, this podcast, and our website, brinkerhoffpoetry.org. We hope these works will lure you into a parallel universe, the way a Möbius strip brings you into another dimension without leaving the page you're on. Thanks for listening.

Camille
Okay, welcome back. So we are going to hear a poem that has inspired you.

Omotara
The name of the poem is “Tiara” by Mark Doty from his collection
Bethlehem in Broad Daylight.


Tiara
by Mark Doty

Peter died in a paper tiara
cut from a book of princess paper dolls;
he loved royalty, sashes
and jewels. I don’t know,
he said, when he woke in the hospice,
I was watching the Bette Davis film festival
on Channel 57 and then—
At the wake, the tension broke
when someone guessed
the casket closed because
he was in there in a big wig
and heels, and someone said,
You know he’s always late,
he probably isn’t here yet—
he’s still fixing his makeup.
And someone said he asked for it.
Asked for it—
when all he did was go down
into the salt tide
of wanting as much as he wanted,
giving himself over so drunk
or stoned it almost didn’t matter who,
though they were beautiful,
stampeding into him in the simple,
ravishing music of their hurry.
I think heaven is perfect stasis
poised over the realms of desire,
where dreaming and waking men lie
on the grass while wet horses
roam among them, huge fragments
of the music we die into
in the body’s paradise.
Sometimes we wake not knowing
how we came to lie here,
or who has crowned us with these temporary,
precious stones. And given
the world’s perfectly turned shoulders,
the deep hollows blued by longing,
given the irreplaceable silk
of horses rippling in orchards,
fruit thundering and chiming down,
given the ordinary marvels of form
and gravity, what could he do,
what could any of us ever do
but ask for it.
Mark Doty, “Tiara” from Paragon Park: Turtle, Swan, Bethlehem in Broad Daylight, and Early Poems. Copyright © 2012 by Mark Doty. Used with the permission of The Permissions Company, LLC on behalf of David R. Godine, Publisher, Inc."


Camille
Wow.

Omotara
I know.

Camille
Talk about a fuck-you poem. You know?

Omotara
(Laughs) Yeah, yes!

Camille
I don't know, I love this. I think I just want to wrap myself in this poem. But before I do that, what about this poem draws you to it?

Omotara
You know, this was one of the first poems I read in a college class of contemporary poets. And at the time, I was really struggling to find my own voice. I knew I had things I wanted to say, things that were simmering, things that I couldn't articulate, but I didn't know how to say them. I didn't know anything about registers in poetry, tone shifts, any of that. And when I came across this poem for the first time, I just completely lost it. I just…it was a release. It felt like a godsend. It felt like this poem was a complete, whole, and holy rebuke of being too much. And what I loved about this poem was its tenderness, its tenderness and the fact that the speaker had so much love for the subject.

Camille
Yes, yes.

Omotara
I also felt like I knew Peter, a little bit, even though that's ridiculous. But, you know, in some ways, we all have a Peter or are the Peter, you know, in our own lives. Flamboyant, fun, carefree, deeply connected to pleasure, to appetite, to beauty. And so those throughlines of connecting appetite, pleasure, experience, to beauty, to the sublime…that, I felt, was a restoration. It gave me back something that I felt I was losing on a daily basis.

Camille
I love that “all he did was go down / into the salt tide / of wanting as much as he wanted,” and how that we just tumble from that. I feel like we're falling and we fall into heaven in that moment.

Omotara
Yes! You do tumble into heaven and what is taking us there is Peter’s love of life. Yeah, you know, so in many ways, the subject is being reanimated through our connection to that beautiful, ravishing music, to these luscious images, to these gorgeous fragments.

Camille
Yes.

Omotara
And Doty is so good at also making us complicit in Peter's pleasure.

Camille
Absolutely.

Omotara
Because we're feeling the pleasure. We don't want it to stop. We don't want these tercets to end. And by the time I got to the end, I was upset that it was ending. I wanted to reread it again, and again, and again. And so it's creating that desire for excess and pleasure. And the craft is so well and intentional.

Camille
He takes us so deep into it that you completely are in a position of embodying that experience that Peter was having, where you're like, “I want more, I don't want this to end, I want to be in this space,” and you feel like you are, like you said, complicit in that desire.

Omotara
And also complicit in the love that the speaker has for the subject, the love that the speaker has for Peter, that you couldn't but adore him. And whereas this poem kind of opens up into heaven, I wanted my apocalypse poem to kind of begin in a heaven and then zoom out and come back down to earth.

Camille
And I think each poem is saying, you know, “hold on,” and also it's showing us, like you're saying, we make a heaven of hell, we make a hell of heaven. It's showing us in a way that this doesn't have to be the way that we see it. There is something else. There's another way of understanding and entering into the reality of this person. To think differently and see differently and understand our role, our control, what power we have, and how we understand each other, what we do to each other.

Omotara
Right. I mean, because ultimately, you know, as far as I'm concerned, that's the role of the poem. It's not just to virtue-signal or whatever, but it's to really try to interrogate what it is that the reader believes, and what their position and positionality is, to the content, right? And what I try to do in all of my poems, and what I love about this Doty poem, is that even though the speakers of both poems are speaking back to the spectacle of and the specter of hatred, they're also both not performing. My poem is not performing fatness. “Tiara” is not performing gayness, okay? What it is doing is, it's defying, okay? These are defiant poems. So they're defying what your relationship to gayness is, you know, not saying, “Oh, you know, this is our gayness, please accept it, you know, please accept our queerness.” No, it's saying, “Listen, this is how we live, this is how we love. And wouldn't you be so lucky?”

Camille
Mmhm, yeah, absolutely. So thank you for talking to me about this poem. But I also want to ask you, what are you up to? What are you working on right now? I mean, I know you just gave us this book. (Omotara laughs.) So no rush.

Omotara
Well yes, I gave the book and the book is still giving,

Camille
It’s still giving.

Omotara
It’s still giving, because I am working on the audiobook. I am very excited to be recording that.

Camille
That's great. I'm happy for people who get to listen to you read this book, because it's great to listen and hear you read your poems.

Omotara
I mean, not to toot my own horn. But when you hear a poem in the voice of the speaker, that's another kind of experience and translation. And so the intimacy is just heightened. So that's what I love about the audiobook. And of course I’m always writing poems, and I'm working on a children's book.

Camille
Ah, oh my gosh, for the children. Everybody's lucky. I'm excited about that.

Omotara
Thank you.

Camille
Very cool. Yeah, what age group?

Omotara
Like ten, eight, and under, you know.

Camille
It’s exciting.

Omotara
It is exciting!

Camille
It's so great to talk to you about these poems. Thank you so much. It's been a joy.

Omotara
Thank you, Camille.

Camille
Thanks for joining us today. I’m your host, Camille Rankine.

Omotara’s poem “After the Last Calorie of the Apocalypse / Prayer for the Clinically Obese" appears in her debut poetry collection, Song of My Softening, published in 2024 and aired with permission from Alice James Books.

Mark Doty’s poem “Tiara” is from the book Paragon Park: Turtle, Swan, Bethlehem in Broad Daylight, and Early Poems, copyright 2012. It was used with permission from The Permissions Company, LLC, on behalf of David R. Godine, Publisher, Inc.

And that’s it for this season of The Glimpse! It’s been a pleasure to be in conversation with these writers and their words, and to share the conversation with you. I hope you’ll keep it going, keep reading poems, and join us for the next season of The Glimpse, which will focus on Irish poets.

Make sure to like and subscribe to The Glimpse wherever you get your podcasts. You can also find episodes on our website, brinkerhoffpoetry.org. If you have any questions or comments, please drop us an email at theglimpsepoetrypodcast@gmail.com.

The Glimpse is a production of the Adrian Brinkerhoff Poetry Foundation. I am your host, Camille Rankine.

Our senior producer is Jennifer Wolfe. Kat Yore is our Technical Director and Mixing Engineer. Editorial Director Amanda Glassman is our curator and Production Coordinator. Amy Holmes is the foundation's Executive Director and our co-founders are Cathy and Peter Halstead. Thanks for listening.