As a poet, Kiki Petrosino has published four collections, including most recently, White Blood: A Lyric of Virginia, and received the Pushcart Prize and the Rilke Prize, among other awards and fellowships. As a prose writer, her first full-length book, Bright: A Memoir, published in August, and she will give a reading from it on Friday, September 9, at New Dominion Bookshop.
C-VILLE Weekly: Though your poetry has embraced aspects of memoir, Bright marks your first book of prose exploring personal history. How did you decide to make this shift?
Kiki Petrosino: I consider this to be a really exciting expansion of my writing practice. Over the past several years, I became really intrigued by how difficult it is to write an essay. I can anticipate how it will feel to write a poem; I couldn’t anticipate how it would feel to write an essay but I wanted very much to write sentences and paragraphs and hear how my voice would sound in that form.
Once I finished my latest book of poetry, which was also a work of research, I realized that I had more to say on the topics of racial identity and background and upbringing. And I wondered if I could take some of the additional things I wanted to say, and the additional stories I wanted to tell, into a lyric prose form. I wanted to see if I could do it, I hoped that I would, and I wondered what I would sound like.
As an artist, I’m interested in different ways of making meaning, and poetry has been a set of forms that is capacious and expansive and allows me to investigate a number of different kinds of questions and to think about language in a particular way, and so I always value poetry for that. But, I also admire the way that essayists, whether they are lyric essayists, investigative writers, or personal memoirists, have been able to tell stories that also evoke emotion. I’m mostly a lyric poet, in the sense that I want my poems to evoke an emotion. Sometimes I tell stories but the stories are meant to make the reader feel what I am hoping that they will feel. More and more, I’ve become interested in the actual stories themselves, and prose might be a place where I can actually say what happened and also find language for talking about how it felt to be in that story or to guide the reader toward some kind of emotional impact. And that’s why some of the tools of lyric essay writing, such as juxtaposition or contrast or braiding—placing two stories next to each other so that the reader can understand the relationship between those two stories without the essayist having to explain it—are the kinds of prose forms that I’m interested in, because they actually link back to things that happen in poetry.
What led you to structure Bright around fairy tale interludes, and how do you hope that shapes the reader’s experience?
I am interested in the way that fairy tales are allegorical. Bright is a memoir that tells the story, in part, of my own life living as a Black American of interracial background. And because my external appearance announces that fact, what I often encounter, especially when I first meet people, is that I can tell that there is a story about me that they’re telling themselves. And those stories may or may not match up with my lived reality. In a society where, historically, the optical marker of race has been so determinative of someone’s experience, I wanted there to be a place where I talk about how I came to be but also how it feels to be this self. And so the language of fairy tales seemed to overlay quite well onto the kind of investigation I was making.
I also just really enjoyed writing one- or two-sentence fairy tales, and it was fun, over time, to be able to piece together a fairy tale where some parts of the story are told and a lot of the rest of the story is submerged into silence. For me, writing is not necessarily about explaining everything so that the reader can draw a map to where I want them to get. Often, with writing, I want to point a reader in a direction, not deliver them to the exact destination.
You write that, “To write a poem is to assert one’s attachment to the materiality of language, but it also requires the poet to assume the openhanded posture of a questioner.” What questions did you grapple with through this work?
I wanted the reader to understand the term “brightness,” and that it is both a physical description of someone’s appearance but that it also has these other meanings. It’s a superficial term that doesn’t speak to the interior life of the person being described. I wanted to ask what does it mean to me to have this descriptor applied to me and what relationship do I have to the term … to see if the memoir could allow me to claim that term in a way that is resonant for me and doesn’t necessarily connect to what other people say brightness is. As a person moving through the world, I want time to think about what I mean to myself. Being able to think explicitly about what my journey through the world has been was really rewarding because I went down some paths of inquiry that I wouldn’t have predicted.
As you explore the lives of your Black ancestors in Bright, you continue your work to examine the legacy of Thomas Jefferson, which is also a recurrent theme in your poetry. How has that evolved over the course of your work?
I continue to approach Jefferson with fascination and curiosity. That doesn’t mean I take an uncritical view of him, that I don’t see what his vision excluded as much as what it included. It means that I walk a line between those two modalities. For me, the generative place—the place where writing can happen—is in the space between absolutes. Jefferson is an incredibly complex figure. To read him solely as a hero or solely as a villain excludes other things we could be learning. And I always want to be in a position of learning.
His archive is so extensive, and so much of his archive is right here in Virginia and at UVA that his legacy also becomes an opportunity to explore what an archive can contain and exclude, and to listen carefully to how, for better or worse, an archive may “stand in” for or represent the legacy of a person who is no longer here in a physical sense. Archives also change, so I don’t feel that Jefferson is static in terms of his legacy. My relationship to that legacy continues to gain complexity, and I think that is exciting. It’s not a simple story.
Bright also explores your Italian grandfather’s life and death by suicide. How did you decide to include his story?
In White Blood, I have a sonnet sequence that talks about my student days at UVA, and my grandfather completed suicide during my second year at UVA. So that material is in those poems but I approach it in the way of poetry—it’s built and braided into this sonnet form.
In the memoir, I wanted to talk about how I would observe my Italian grandfather’s relationship with nature. In thinking about his influence on my life, I couldn’t not also talk about his death and how that affected me. Also, as it happened, I was majoring in English but minoring in Italian, which I had started studying because I wanted to learn his language. So, while I’m trying to learn this language and read the literature—encountering Dante’s Wood of the Suicides—in my memory, that corresponded to that particular moment of my grandfather’s death, and so it also points to how my literacy was shaped. It isn’t only the high points that have gone into making you who you are, but it’s also the grief. All of those things are marbled into experience and so I could not leave that out of the memoir.
What drew you to include the specific and wide-ranging literary references that you did?
What’s interesting is that when I wrote my last poetry book, I found myself pretending to be a kind of scholar—in the sense that I’m not a trained historian—and going into the archive, learning what the techniques of documentary poetry are. When I wrote my last poetry book, I found myself reading works of history, looking at primary sources. When I was writing the memoir, I was putting this together during the height of the pandemic and all the archives were closed. So what I had was my memory of what works of literature were in my personal lexicon, my own firmament of referentiality. I encountered Dante at a pivotal point in my literary education, so that work became entwined with my literacy. The same with Beowulf, with Shakespeare. So I wove together the memoir not having to do, and not being able to do, outside research, but thinking about the tangle of literacy that I could tell. Those are the works that came out.
Being able to attend the reading that Seamus Heaney gave in 2012, in London, was one of the most wonderful moments that I experienced as a poet. Being in a London audience listening to Seamus Heaney, especially reading that one poem, “Digging,” that’s probably his signal poem. Those are moments that, as a writer, I continue to think about and remember. They’re just these moments of luminous attention that have stayed with me.
Is there anything in particular that you’re excited to share with local readers at your upcoming event?
For me, writing becomes complete when it’s shared with other people. To be able to share this work that I was putting together during a time of really close quarantine and lockdown, and all the isolation that many artists felt, it’s going to be meaningful to actually bring that out into the world and speak it in words. And the audiences at New Dominion are always so wonderful. It’s going to be an honor to read there for the community.
