The Black Condition ft. Narcissus by Jayy Dodd

Acclaim doesn’t make you better, setting goals & focus does. Recognition (beyond the unquestionable social capital) is figuring out your pocket, your spot & being best your possible in it. But figure out where you want your work to be read. Be “not published enough” for a chapbook contest. Be “not distinguished” enough for an award. In tandem with productive arrogance, my best advice for anyone entering the literary realm is to lean into the naïve. If your poem born of you can’t do a work outside of your body, reconsider your power. Consider how much labor a poem takes out of you. We can only approach our poems like bringing lives into this world - living, breathing, & hopefully undying things. The infallibility of your work should be in it’s truth to you, yet we as the poets, the demigods creating but also know our work may die, may kill, may destroy, may take a whole life of its own. The best advice for poetry I ever received (by a white cis straight man no less) was “write every poem as if you are a demigod, you can manifest anything as real but still can face some mortal consequence”. While I don’t suggest innocuously taking such a privileged approach to poetry, there should be a level of infallibility that you should feel when you create. There is an elitism that fosters performative rigor but also stalls the motivation to innovate from new & unheard voices.

Writers whose voices & canons are brutal, concrete, lasting, though constantly decaying. There is an unfortunate amount of arrogance in poetry, usually distributed among the most mediocre of writers. What advice do you have for young and emerging writers, particularly of marginalized identities? What’s the best advice you’ve ever received?

The Black Condition ft. Narcissus by Jayy Dodd