By Sheree Greer

I caught up with novelist and poet Colin Channer at the Miami Book Fair back in November to talk about his new poetry collection, Providential (Akashic). Yeah. November. I know. I know. But let me explain. I hadn’t seen Colin since the heavens smiled on me and created an opportunity for me to study writing with him in an advanced fiction class at Columbia College Chicago. That was seven years ago, but I remember it like it was yesterday. The way Mr. Channer challenged me and my writing. The way he twisted his lips into a smile while listening to what we thought, as novice writers, were certainties of our process and craft. I remember, for example, him laughing—and he has this melodious, intoxicating laugh—and telling us that as beginner writers we had no process. “Toni Morrison has a process. You? You have habits,” he said as he caught his breath from his hearty laughter. I recall that class often, with the same awe and appreciation with which I recall the experience of sitting across from him learning about rhythm, risk, and realness on the page.

This history, this kinship, is what took me so long to transcribe this interview. When Colin and I greeted each other, those seven years got swept up in the ocean breeze and carried away. Dressed casual and sipping from a paper cup of coffee, he was just as cool and confident as I remembered. I went all beginner again. I was nervous and excited; I was a little timid and, again, totally in love. I sat in on his morning poetry reading (as an added bonus I was introduced to the work of Vladimir Lucien). I listened as Colin read his poetry, and I melted in my seat, just as I used to melt sitting in that semi-circle at Columbia College, swooning from the beauty of it all.

The interview followed the panel discussion and book signing. It was a bit of a challenge finding a quiet space to talk, but once we did, we got settled and got busy. And even though it was an interview, something about the way he leaned over the small table between us made me feel like class was in session.

It took me a long time to transcribe this interview, and not just because I’m not a journalist and sorta kinda suck at transcribing interviews, but because part of the beauty is in hearing Colin Channer’s voice. I listened to the interview multiple times. Each time prepared to transcribe, and each time my fingers stalled then fell from the keyboard for listening, for just listening. I’d get to the end of the tape and be like, “Damn. Y’all shoulda just been there.” But that ain’t fair. And where my Jama would say, “Life ain’t fair,” I’m going to be kind.

A word of advice though? Scroll to the bottom and start with the playlist. And maybe, just maybe, you can feel Colin Channer and feel this new work just as vividly as you get to know him from this interview.

Interview recorded at Miami Book Fair, November 2015:

Sheree L. Greer: What would you say are three things you’ve learned about yourself as a writer in [the last] seven years?

Colin Channer: Well, I think in the last seven years I’ve learned that my interest in poetry is not just as a reader but also as a maker of poems. I’ve learned that each teaching environment gives me the opportunity to learn more about students and their needs, and also their challenges. I was at Columbia College Chicago when we met, then I was at Wellesley College, and then I went to Brandeis. Columbia is a college that is known for media and for hands-on education, Wellesley is a college for women, Brandeis is a nonsectarian Jewish university. So in a sense all of these places are niche, which is good, because each place has given me an intense experience of the variety of students as individuals, and so I think I’m a better teacher—I’ve become a better teacher—in the last seven years. And also too, in the last seven years I’ve learned a lot about how writing and parenting relate because in that time I became the custodial parent of my two children. And there’s a way in which as writers we take it as a responsibility to seeing the complexity of individuals that people our work. What I’m trying to say is that writing can ignite us to make similar accommodations for our children; they’re complex.

SLG: Your writing has always been lyrical, and I’m thinking of how I first became aware of your work. When you were coming to Columbia College, I read Waiting in Vain and the collection you edited, Iron Ballons¸ which features fiction from Elizabeth Nunez and Marlon James, Kwame Dawes and Kaylie Jones. And the lyricism I found in your fiction also comes through in your poetry. But I have to ask, why poetry?

CC: [That melodious, warm, and inviting laughter I mentioned before] Just kinda like every rapper wants to play in the NBA and everyone in the NBA wants to be a rapper. [Laughter], every fiction writer deep down wants to be a poet, or wants to be able say,“I could write that if I really tried. I just haven’t tried ‘cause I’m busy.” [Laughter] So there’s that. I’ve never heard the word “prosaic” used as a compliment. But “poetic” is a compliment, right? So I think as a prose writer, I was harboring a deep insecurity [Laughter]. But the serious truth is that I came to poetry after I found a subject…Jamaican police.

And the subject of the Jamaican police came in a couple of ways. One of them is from reading a nonfiction book by an anthropologist by the name of Deborah Thomas. She’s at the University of Pennsylvania. It’s a book called Exceptional Violence, and it’s a history of violence in Jamaica. So I started thinking a lot about the structural violence in Jamaica. You know because I’ve always been interested in Reggae, and Reggae has always articulated Jamaica’s structural violence. And then I think when my son, who was living with me, was going through a hard time, it made me think a lot about my own dad, who died when I was young. I began to write about structural violence and then in writing those poems, I found out that what I really wanted to deal with was how my dad is a part of, was a part of, the police force, which has been a part of the structural violence in Jamaica since the 1860s. So by writing poems one by one about and around and between and over and below the same subject, I got material for a book.

SLG: How was the process of writing a book of poetry? Was it difficult?

CC: No. Actually, the writing of the poems was fairly easy. And here’s what I mean—because I didn’t make any public declarations of what I was writing, it was easy. A private thing, right? And I would write the poems in email. I would send them to my good friend Kwame Dawes for safekeeping. So what became hard was looking over the poems and seeing that most of them were rubbish. [Laughter] And [what became difficult was] writing with a greater awareness of what poetry involves and what it takes and what its values are. And another difficulty was ordering the book. I know this with fiction, how to do it. Fiction helped me because I’d written a story cycle before [Passing Through, a collection of short stories]. I sort of knew how to create a work that is coherent but is not predictable, where the different parts of it work at odd angles. So that kind of helped.

SLG: The title poem of the collection, “Providential,” is New England and Jamaica, it is you and your music, this man as poet-writer and this same man as father. It is you and your children. It has this feeling of being both old and new, this past but present, both this moment but also later. It’s a complex poem. Tell me about writing that poem.

CC: “Providential” was written late in the game. In fact, originally, the collection had what I now see as a false ending. It originally ended with the poem “Knowing We’ll Be Mostly Wrong.” Which is now second to last. It’s a solid poem and all that, but after looking over the collection at one point I felt and knew the book had one more step to go. So when I looked back through the collection. I said, you know something, there is this poem about the ancient relationship between Jamaica and New England, because at one point, anywhere that was owned or claimed by England was in essence a “New” England. But also too the cod [used] to feed slaves came from New England and Canada. Where I live now, New England, and where I come from, Jamaica are related. There’s even a Kingston in Rhode Island. And it’s pronounced like the Kingston where I was born. So with all this sense of connection and place and displacement running through me I wrote that big, long, epic poem, and it was like, yeah. This poem introduces new conversations but also continues and reframes other conversations that have been going on in the book. Because after I wrote [“Providential”], and this is going to surprise you, I went back to the collection and I read it. And I said, there is another kind of poem the book needs. Then I wrote “Fugue in Ten Movements,” which is in the middle of the book.

I couldn’t have all the long poems stacked in the end. [*Note to reader: I really, really wish you could hear how excitedly he spoke here, about this work, about the process. This thoughtful, passionate energy comes across in the collection]. So there are these ten poems that relate very closely to each other, and I put them in the middle and stretched the book. Bulked up the middle a little bit. So there are these three long poems in the book. Mid-size ones. Small ones too. Part of the inclination and ability to write the long poem comes from having written fiction. The fiction writer has a sense of stamina. And can keep something going for a while. The poet’s strength is compression. So if you can keep something compressed but make it long, you can write something which can work. The book Providential is in sections. It’s got these movements. Then “Fugue” now has its ten smaller movements within the overall book’s movements. So it’s like making a sort of contraption… you know… moving parts.

SLG: “In Tentative Definitions” you write, “On honesty: A lie for a lie/and a truth for a truth.”

CC: “Old Babylonian Law.”

SLG: Exactly. So, give me one truth and one lie, and don’t tell me which is which.”

CC: [Laughter like music, all steel drum and bass guitar] All right. My first car ever was a Fiat. And… I once had a love affair with Crystal, who sings “Twice My Age” with Shabba Ranks. [Laughter then sings…] “I’m in love with a man nearly twice my age…” [Laughter followed by the ABSOLUTE BEST Shabba Ranks impression I’ve ever heard.]. I don’t know. [He shrugs and smiles] My first car was a Fiat. I once had a love affair with Crystal… when I was… seventeen. And she was about twenty-five. I don’t know. [Shrugs and laughs].

SLG: [Of course I’m cracking up too. And trying NOT to be consumed by which I think is true. I manage to find my composure] I just turned thirty-five, and my father is seventy. And he said, this is him, three years sober, and he says these really reflective things now. So he says, “I feel strange that you’re thirty-five, because I was thirty-five when you were born.” And I thought about him saying that because today, before reading one of your poems, you said that when you’re young, you cling to your mother and you take her side. Then later—and you likened it to becoming a man, but I likened it to getting to know my father as a real, actual person—that you begin to understand your father’s point of view. In that way, your father’s voice and how you capture him, in these poems in particular, make for an intensely emotional experience, an introduction to a new point-of-view almost. What do you think he, your father, would say about this work?”

CC: One of the things is that I don’t know my father very well. I was six when I last saw him. I don’t know him as a person. But I remember he was a very quiet man, and I once made him cry when I was about five. He gave us some pocket change, and he gave me the least because I was the youngest child and what would I do with money, right? And I threw it over the fence, I was so angry. And he started to cry. And it struck me because my mother’s reaction would have been different. I was just confused by an adult crying, much less a man crying. So, he would probably cry and say, “I should have done better by you guys. I should have done better.”

I think my dad was very guilty. One of the things that happened, is that when he and my mom separated and he moved back to his district, I later found out from aunts that he used to come to Kingston to try to find his kids. But we’d all changed schools. You get older; you go to another school. And he didn’t know what his kids looked like anymore. And he would just go around to schools and hang out at the gate and look at kids to see if they were his. I told my brother this story, and my brother told me, he said one day he saw our dad at his school but he was embarrassed to go see him. I thought at first—you know, I thought my aunt was just trying to make me feel good about my dad, but he actually did [that]. He died one of those trips. He came to Kingston, and he was side-swiped by a bus. He hit his head and went into a coma and never came out of it. I always thought it was an alcohol-related coma, but he had a concussion, and he died.

[*Note to reader: I know, right. This part. You can’t do nothing but sit with it for a minute.]

SLG: What would you, or do you, tell your children about this work?

CC: I’ve been very honest. My son is very touched that he’s written about in quite a few of the poems. My daughter has been at university the past few years, so he’s the one that’s been at home with me, you know. He felt kinda proud that he was worthy to be written about.

SLG: For readers who aren’t familiar with your work, what five songs would help readers get to know you?

CC: [That familiar smile, a mischievous flash in his eyes]

Junior Murvin’s “Police and Thieves in the Streets”

John Coltrane “A Moment’s Notice”

Madeleine Peyroux “Don’t Wait Too Long”

A jazz standard called “Old Folks” if they could hear the version by Jon Hendricks: [Unfortunately too exclusive for us… I’mma keep trying to find it though]

Bob Marley “So Jah Seh”

[Sings] “So Jah seh not one of my seed should sit in the sidewalk and beg bread…”

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Sheree L. Greer is the author of A Return to Arms (Bold Stroke Books), Stop Writing Whack Essays, and the short story collection Once and Future Lovers. A Milwaukee, Wisconsin native, Sheree’s short stories and essays have appeared in Hair Trigger, The Windy City Times, Reservoir, Fictionary, and the Windy City Queer Anthology: Dispatches from the Third Coast. She has performed her work across selected venues in Milwaukee, New York, Miami, Chicago, and Tampa, where she hosts Oral Fixation, the only LGBTQ Open Mic series in Tampa Bay. Ms. Greer received a Union League of Chicago Civic Arts Foundation Award, earned her MFA at Columbia College Chicago, and currently teaches writing and literature at St. Petersburg College. Ms Greer is also an Astraea Lesbian Writers Fund grantee and VONA alum. A novel excerpt “Prom Story in Three Parts,” received a special mention in Publishers Weekly and appears in Best Lesbian Romance 2012.