Reginald Dwayne Betts on Transformation and Surprise

First Draft: A Dialogue of Writing is a weekly show featuring in-depth interviews with fiction, nonfiction, essay writers, and poets, highlighting the voices of writers as they discuss their work, their craft, and the literary arts. Hosted by Mitzi Rapkin, First Draft celebrates creative writing and the individuals who are dedicated to bringing their carefully chosen words to print as well as the impact writers have on the world we live in.

In this episode, Mitzi talks to Reginald Dwayne Betts about his new poetry collection, Doggerel.

Subscribe and download the episode, wherever you get your podcasts!

From the episode:

Mitzi Rapkin: Something I noticed throughout this whole collection was that there was a lot of transformation taking place. I felt like I was a witness, even if it was small, lines for example you being not a dog person to being a dog person; to being who you were at 16, to being who you are now; to finding love or coming to terms with certain things in your life, and I’m curious how that may or may not relate to a poem’s ending. I feel like one of your greatest gifts is that your endings are amazing. And what are you going for, if you could even articulate that, and does transformation have anything to do with it?

Reginald Dwayne Betts: I try to make it sophisticated and complex when it was just like, no, it wasn’t at all. So, I will argue with you, but I’m really listening to you, and then I will take on your point so much that I will often change something that I had no desire to change at first. My editor said, Dwayne, these poems are little hmm.  And I was like, are you really trying to edit my poems? Did you just accuse my poems of being not safe for work? Have you looked at network television? This is joy. This is love. I don’t even curse in this book. What are you telling me? That I could weep, and I could feel sorrow and I could talk about the utter, deepest despair, and I cannot talk about sex at all? At this point, my generous, lovely editor was like, Yeah, you’re taking it way too far. She was like, I was talking about three words in that one poem. But I also knew that she was asking me to think seriously about the bandwidth of a collection. And what I did by listening to her and going back and revising a poem was thinking about what the end of a poem says. Sometimes the end almost reframes and summons everything that was going on at the beginning. So, what I’m doing with the end is trying to find a place where it’s not ending somewhere where I knew it would land. You know, I do believe this, when people say, if it’s no surprise for the writer, it’s no surprise for the reader. The ending point is the most obvious place for surprise, and I try to get other moments in the poems as well, but that ending, and it’s frequently clearly the place of surprise, because I knew the poem ended there, but I didn’t know how. And I’m constantly giving myself a decision. I’m telling you “Roadkill”, the title of the poem tells you how it’s going to end, and if the poem is written well enough, you think that the title just gave you what to deal with. But if the poem was written where I wanted it to go, I wanted the ending to make you completely reimagine what was going on when I named it “Roadkill”. But I had to work to get to that. And I had to work not just intellectually, but I had to work emotionally.

***

Reginald Dwayne Betts is a poet, lawyer, and CEO and Founder of Freedom Reads, a not-for-profit organization that is radically transforming the access to literature in prisons through the installation of Freedom Libraries in prisons across this country. For more than twenty-years, he has used his poetry and essays to explore the world of prison and the effects of violence and incarceration on American society. He is the author of a memoir called A Question of Freedom, which chronicles his years in prison where he was charged and sentenced as an adult at the age of 16.  His collections of poetry include the best-selling Felon and the newly released Doggerel.