In the Grand Machinery of the World: Hanif Abdurraqib on Form, the State of Music Venues, and Vulnerability

Hanif Abdurraqib is a poet, essayist, and cultural critic from Columbus, Ohio. His poetry has been published in Muzzle, Vinyl, PEN American, and various other journals. His essays and music criticism have been published in The FADER, Pitchfork, The New Yorker, and The New York Times. His first full length poetry collection, The Crown Ain't Worth Much, was released in June 2016 from Button Poetry. It was named a finalist for the Eric Hoffer Book Prize, and was nominated for a Hurston-Wright Legacy Award. With Big Lucks, he released a limited edition chapbook, Vintage Sadness, in summer 2017 (you cannot get it anymore and he is very sorry.) His first collection of essays, They Can't Kill Us Until They Kill Us, was released in winter 2017 by Two Dollar Radio and was named a book of the year by Buzzfeed, Esquire, NPR, Oprah Magazine, Paste, CBC, The Los Angeles Review, Pitchfork, and The Chicago Tribune, among others. He released Go Ahead In The Rain: Notes To A Tribe Called Quest with University of Texas press in February 2019. The book became a New York Times Bestseller, was a finalist for the Kirkus Prize, and was longlisted for the National Book Award. His second collection of poems, A Fortune For Your Disaster, was released in 2019 by Tin House, and won the 2020 Lenore Marshall Prize. His most recent essay collection, A Little Devil In America was released in March, 2021 from Random House. He is a graduate of Beechcroft High School.

Hanif Abdurraqib joined The Interlochen Review editors Maia Siegel, Bianca Layog, and Lane Devers for a virtual conversation about his poetry and nonfiction.

Lane Devers: I had a question about the essay “Carly Rae Jepsen Loves You Back.” You describe the experience of attending one of her shows as “an hour long clinic in vulnerability,” and I was wondering if you could speak a little to the role vulnerability plays within that essay specifically, but also within the book as a whole? What is it like to consider vulnerability from the vantage point of a writer versus a musician?

Hanif Abdurraqib: I think that writing about vulnerability is not hard, if you are living vulnerably, or living with the type of openness that allows for comfort with vulnerability. I think living like that is hard, because it's a commitment you make so that the work of writing, the work of thinking through the daily exercise of being vulnerable, it's just kind of braided into your everyday life. When I think about that, that’s the challenge I think of. 

The thing about music is that whether or not musicians want it this way, there are often so many elements to a song or an album that allow for someone to hide behind those things. There’s instrumentation, or the lyrics are sometimes limiting in a way that allows for a type of vagueness, these kinds of things. And I think that in my own work, at least, I am not very separated from the speaker in the piece. Often the speaker is someone who—if not literally me—is someone who is very close to the surface of my life. Or it’s someone articulating something very close to the surface of my life, and that requires, I think, again, a real comfort with vulnerability broadly, but also trust, trusting myself to deliver the news of my living, and trusting myself to do it without being self-conscious about what the news of my living might reveal to strangers largely. That vulnerability is fostered through living a personal life; through my friends, my loved ones, the people that I care about. It’s fostered through a life that really honors the potential for openness and ideas and vulnerable, actual tactile affection. 

Maia Siegel: I have a question about A Fortune for Your Disaster. In the book you repeat the title, “How Can Black People Write About Flowers at a Time Like This” for several different poems, and I’m interested in how using the same title for multiple poems affects the shape of a collection. I’m also interested in whether or not giving poems that same title implies a conversation between them.

Hanif Abdurraqib: Those poems in part came to life because I was trying to divest from the idea of completion. That title initially came from something I overheard at a reading that the poet Ross Gay gave, and I was upset. The easy poem would be to write an angry poem about this thing I heard, directed at this stanger. But I thought, what is the challenging poem? I don’t know anything about flowers, and I don’t know anything about the way flowers can be used in work to illuminate a larger idea. Why don’t I write a poem about that? I wrote the peonies one, that was the one I wrote first, and originally I thought, well alright, I’m done. I did the thing, and I’m done. But then this obsession grew to where I was looking up the history of flowers and the lifespan of flowers, and it reminded me that you don’t really finish a poem. This might be hard to explain, but I don’t really think you finish a poem, I think a poem is finished with you. Sometimes it takes on a series of things and it changes, so I don’t really believe in—I wrote this one poem and now it's done and I’m done with this idea. I more so believe in, I’m chasing this obsession until I am exhausted with it, in however many forms that takes. In however many forms it's going to take, for as long as it’s going to take. 

It definitely implies a conversation, but more importantly I think it is shaped by the collection, but I also think that was unintentional. Yes, they are the poems that show up the most and they are the poems that pull people back into what is happening, but what was really going on was that I was trying to shape this obsession that I had, and in some ways trying to shape the writer I imagined myself being when I took on this book, allowing myself the freedom to be unsure and uncertain. 

Bianca Layog: As a poet, you seem interested in form, and your latest collection has quite a few prose poems. We also see this interest in your essays, which feel like a hybrid of the personal lyric essay and music criticism. What about stretching traditional form and genre interests you? 

Hanif Abdurraqib: I came into poetry through slam and I came into poetry late. I started writing poems around 2012, and also, to be super clear, I didn’t even think I was going to be someone who wrote poems with any kind of consistency. I was just thinking about how writing the slam stuff helped me write better, visually. I was always writing for my work to be read out loud, and never for the page. Now I understand that that distinction is flimsy, but in 2012 I was going through what some might call “writer’s block” here in Columbus. And in order to participate in this slam, you had to bring in two new poems every week. I was doing this slam to have a deadline, so I could make myself write poems. That was it. That was the whole thing, and so truly I was only writing to be read out loud. Because of that, I became really invested in the prose block, and the way that a prose block, if done right, can be a bunch of different forms at once. The prose block can transform itself into multiple forms, or it can be manipulated in enough ways that isn't boring. It’s why you see some stuff with slashes. I’m intentional about where the line ends. Now, granted, because I don’t understand form, I’m not very beholden to it. I don’t really revere form. I think that I’m a very audible person. I often think reading out loud and hearing poems back to me is important. I record myself reading my first drafts, and I play those recordings back to myself. I think there’s something about audio that tells you what a poem's shape should be, or what a poem's shape could be. I rely on that, but even with that I’m reaching back to my roots. What I first loved about poems is that a prose block can be really transformative and fun to play with. 

LD: I had another question related to the general structure of A Fortune For Your Disaster. I really enjoyed the section titles and the epigraphs, especially the first section title being “The Pledge” and the Florence Welch quote, “I want you so badly/but you could be anyone,” and I was wondering how you went about finding quotes that worked in conversation with your own work? 

Hanif Abdurraqib: The epigraphs and quotes and stuff before books are such a big deal to me, and they probably shouldn’t be, but I spent so much time on those. Dating back to my first book, I remember the day it went to the printer, I was still picking out the epigraphs. This one was actually a little easier. That one in particular was the easiest. I heard that song, “Sky Full of Song,” the song that that line comes from, when the album came out, which was while I was in the process of finishing the book, and the minute I heard that line I thought, oh that’s it. That’s the thing I’m getting at. 

I don’t know if you all have seen the movie The Prestige, the movie is fifteen years old, but there’s a part of the movie that revolves around this idea where there are these two magicians, and one of the magicians has a twin. This magician has a wife, and sometimes the twin would be with the wife, and the magician would be elsewhere, and then this recurring thing happens throughout the movie where the wife would sometimes be like, “I feel like you don’t love me today,” or otherwise, “I feel like you love me today.” And you don’t know that they are two different people, until the very end. It clicks at the very end, and you go, oh, she could tell when it was actually him or not.

Much of this book is playing on the idea of a relationship falling apart, but also, and I wholly believe this, all of us are many things. We have many selves, and some of those selves are better at loving certain people, and that some are more so our actual selves than others. When I heard that line, I thought, this is exactly what the book is getting at. This is the whole thing. 

So that one was easy. There is also one from the very beginning, the Terrance Hayes one, it’s from one of my favorite of his poems called “What It Looked Like.” And I just loved that line, I love “never mistake what it is for what it looks like.”  All of them, in a way, or at least most of them, have to do with the idea of looking, or magic, or optical illusion. The Suzan Lori-Parks thing about not watching her mother get old. One, I just love Suzan Lori-Parks so, so much, and also that line, “if you don't have your folks to look at, you don’t really know where you’re going.” I love that so much. So I was looking for quotes that played with this idea of both survival and tricks—that the heart and the eyes play on each other, and the intersection of those tricks. 

BL: In both your poetry and essays, the musician as a sort of technician and personality, like Marvin Gaye, Prince, or Bruce Springsteen, appears quite often. I was wondering if you could speak to how this combination of the technician, artist,  and personality appeals to you as a writer. 

Hanif Abdurraqib: That’s such a good question. What I’m most interested in is personality, if I’m being real with myself. I think personality is the thing that informs all the other things. You think of someone like Bruce Springsteen, right? To be fair, you think of anyone I write about, and most of the time, I don't know them. So when I say personality I say the personality that they’re choosing to offer the public, which, as we all know, is a fraction of the person, sometimes a miniscule fraction of a person. 

I think what I can do with that as a writer, as someone who likes to imagine the world and the space that someone occupies, I think it’s really exciting. What that offers by ways of telling me what type of technician a person is, or what kind of worker a person is, or what type of things a person chooses to offer the world. That’s exciting to me. I think that a personality is the thing through which all other things flow. I have to do it with the understanding that even the idea of a personality is a really flawed thing, right? The personality that we see is a fun house idea of the person, and I say this as someone who also is at least somewhat visible, and has to make decisions about what I share with the world, and what I do not share with the world. And so that’s important too. 

MS: I have a question about music criticism. So you push against the convention of the reviewer as a sort of blank slate. You also often connect the art you’re reviewing to your personal life and the political situation around us. Why do you think it's important for criticism to be imbued with the personal? 

Hanif Abdurraqib: I think the reason that I’m not that interested in the traditional review as we’ve come to know it over the years is because I think we’ve moved out of the phase where the critic sits on high and tells people what they should listen to and why. I think we’ve moved out of that phase because, thankfully, we’re finally getting around to this idea that anyone can write a review. Anyone can be a fan, for better or worse. I think it’s often for better, but I think a thing that is coming to the forefront in our understanding, and what’s been true in music for a long time is that specifically pop music is driven by young folks, specifically young women and young queer folks, in demographics that have been largely dismissed and disserved by the spectrum of music criticism, because it has largely been straight, white, and male. Thankfully, now I think we’re maybe at a point where a lot of the music cues that I get are from younger people. I’m often in dialogue with younger folks, because they’re the people who read my work. 

There is Selena Gomez, for example. I’m using a Selena Gomez example I’ve used before. For a long time, I  just wasn’t getting into Selena Gomez’s work, and I’m  still lukewarm, but at the time I wasn’t into it at all. I wrote this review of a song I didn’t like, and I got this wave of emails from her fans. I responded to folks, as long as they were not horrendously mean, and I hit them back and was like “Yo, I want to like this, I’m not shitting on this because I don’t like it. My desire is to like this, and if you can help me and give me a path to help me understand what I should be listening for and what I’m missing, I want to hear it.” Folks hit me back and were like, “Alright, here's a song. I didn't like this song either, but here’s a song you might like.” That, to me, is actual music criticism. That’s what I want. I want an engagement that removes this hierarchical nature of the elder critic on high dictating to the masses. 

I want an exchange of fandom. That’s what I’m excited about. I don’t care how old you are or what musical background you came from. If you have access to hearing something better than I have, then I want that. I want to like music. I want to love music. Sometimes it doesn’t hit, and sometimes I’ve got to tell people, “I listened to that shit, and it wasn’t hitting for me. But I thank you for offering me the path.” I think that’s where my heart for music criticism comes from, is this idea that we’re all fans of something, and within that fandom there’s an excitement that only certain people can articulate. I want to be close to those people. I want to find those people. And if there’s music that’s not hitting for me, I want to talk to people that it’s hitting for and I want to see what they’re hearing that I’m not hearing. Criticism is an exchange, or to me it feels like it should be an exchange, and not a dictation. 

LD: I have a question going back to that more critical voice interwoven with the personal in They Can’t Kill Us Until They Kill Us. I was curious about the general organization of the book. Did you see the personal aspect start to become more prevalent later on? When thinking about shape, was there one you necessarily valued over another, in terms of structure?

Hanif Abdurraqib: I think I really value the personal, in terms of drive value. I think I value the personal more, because  in the personal, I find myself more prone towards an emotional connection that helps me articulate a solid connection. I could do the very basic straightforward, “here’s how I feel about the music, here’s me telling you what the music sounds like,” but there are only so many ways to describe sound. There are significantly more ways to describe the emotional connection brought on by sound, or brought on by the communal experience of listening and hearing, in taking in a spectacle, an on-stage spectacle. That, to me, does not get fully animated to its potential without stepping out onto the ledge and at least offering something personal, or at least offering a world where people believe that the personal could arise for them. 

MS: So again, about Carly Rae Jepsen, you talk about how at the concert, there’s a gap between her perceived audience and her actual audience, which is actually much more varied and diverse. So similarly, did you find there to be a gap between genuine and perceived audiences for your own work, is there anything about your own readership that has surprised you?  

Hanif Abdurraqib: That’s such a good question. I suppose, if I'm being honest, I cannot just think about my readership in that way, or in general, because I get too anxious. But I will say I have felt, because I am a person that gives readings or is in front of people—I will say that I’m surprised by the range of readership I seem to have. I know that my work tends to span a lot of topics. I’m surprised by the ages, or backgrounds, and maybe I shouldn’t be surprised by that, but I did come up in slam, and slam is a very specific thing.  So to have a world outside of that thing feels really intense. But I’m also thankful for it. 

MS: In “A Night in Bruce Sprinsteen’s America,” you compare the theater of musical performance with political theater. And, as you know, in 2020, musicians were very visible and active in political theater. I’m thinking especially of Kanye West, where we saw a musician run for office. How might the intersection of theater and musical performance affect music criticism? Is all music criticism political criticism? 

Hanif Abdurraqib: All musical criticism is certainly not political, but what I do think is going to happen is some critics who have made lives off of not taking political stances are going to be dragged into that arena by the changing scope of the people making music. Big pop stars, too, as music gets younger, as musicians get younger and more daring and more political and more in control of themselves, I think there’s gonna be some conversations that get forced. And I think the critics themselves are gonna have to steel themselves for those conversations, and I’m not sure if everyone is ready for it. But we’re also at a point where, honestly, musicians don’t necessarily need critics anymore. They don’t need them. Billie Eilish doesn't need a critic for anything. Ariana Grande can drop an album and not need a critic for anything. I’m not saying that critics are going to have to conform. But I think they have to ask themselves, what am I bringing to the table? How can I project interestingly upon this artist who does not need my service? I think, in some ways, that will illuminate itself through a deeper political understanding.  

LD: To jump off what’s already been said, thinking of musicians as a constructed personality within They Can’t Kill Us Until They Kill Us, I loved how specific essays later on shift away from centralizing themselves around one single musician like they do earlier, with Carly Rae Jepsen or Springsteen, and we move outwards in terms of scope later on. I’m thinking specifically of essays like “February 26 2012,” where we spend more time on the general setting of the midwest, or “On Kindness,” where we are more embedded in the personal, and I was wondering if you could speak a little to the role of those kinds of essays in the collection. 

Hanif Abdurraqib: Yeah, I think I was charting through where I was physically and mentally, in the moments where someone Black was killed by police. Sitting through and thinking about time in that way felt really important to me, thinking through the physical space I was in, and what I felt like in the not-knowing of what was happening in that moment. And then being confronted with the knowing, later, that seems so interesting to me to dive into. I think it also was super interesting for me to understand that my place in the world is very small. In the grand machinery of the world, my role is almost unnecessary. 

BL: I was really intrigued by your essay on My Chemical Romance, not only because of the face that they reunited but because The Black Parade ratifies the certainty that we are all going to die, and that none of us know what is coming next. In the essay, I was really intrigued by the idea of universal grief, something that is all too present in this time, with the pandemic. Looking back on this essay years later, how do you think the pandemic has heightened these ideas? 

Hanif Abdurraqib: I have been thinking a lot about mortality, obviously, but also about the relationship with mortality that will exist years down the road. Something interesting that has been happening with me, and I know for a lot of other people, that we were just watching the numbers, right. I’ve been thinking a lot about mortality, obviously, but also about the relationship with mortality that will exist years down the road from now. I know a lot of people that were watching the numbers. Here in Ohio, the cases have been going pretty wild. It gives itself into a watching of numbers. So every night, I pull up the little charts or whatever, and I see the numbers. I think there's something in that I understand that this is just the way these things have to be tracked right now. But there is something about engaging with death in that way, where it is all through a toll for months, right, and we’re engaging with the death toll instead of the actual lives of people lost, how their lives have echoed through other people's lives, not even seeing photos, just seeing numbers. There's something about that, that I have to pull myself back from that break very often, and remind myself that I believe in death as something sacred and cherished and a real opportunity for gratitude. 

You know, having loved someone and lost them, it’s obviously not good, but it is an opportunity for gratitude for me. And I don't want to lose that. But I do feel like we are at an interesting point where it feels like that is slipping away for so many of us. Because death has been used, in many ways, to amplify agendas, and to amplify interests that have nothing to do with life and loss. I guess I've been thinking about this a lot. But what I've mostly been thinking about is how we as a people will engage with loss years after this one, much like everything, like: how will we engage with touch years after this? How will we engage with just generally being in public with other people? I'm not talking about immediately post-vaccine, but about five years down the road, you know, these things linger. My best friend had a child at the end of last year, the middle end of last year. She and I were talking the other day, and she was like, anytime I hand him to someone, even someone I love, even my parents, he can't take it. And it's because he's only ever seen his parents. He's only ever been in the house of his parents. It's so awful, he is in this entire generation of children from toddlers to seven year olds who are going to have this embedded in their DNA, this moment. And that is undoubtedly going to have some impact on the way they reflect, they see the world, they love the world, the case of the world. 

MS: I have one more COVID question, just because you write a lot about the physical intimacy of concerts. COVID-19 has obviously changed the way we experience music, but has it altered the way you write about it? How do you think it will alter music criticism, and music in general, in the years to come?

Hanif Abdurraqib: When I write about music now, it’s always so whimsical, it's always so reflective and romantic. I think I am trying to rebuild the worlds I miss, even though I know I'm not doing them justice, I'm trying to. To be super honest, before COVID, I did miss a lot of music. I spent so much of my early adult life going to so many concerts. In my 20s, I would sometimes go to five shows a week. In my 30s, I still go to shows, but I'm very okay with leaving early. One of the last shows I went to, last summer, I went to see Maggie Rogers and I love Maggie's work a lot. But once you play all the songs I wanted to hear play, I was like, cool, I'm gonna go home. I don't really care about an encore anymore. I just, I just don't care. Because I've just seen so much, you know? And it's funny, because now I miss all that. It's like, oh, man, why didn't I stay for the end of that show. I think that there'll be a lot more after this is “over.” 

I have been trying to tell people that some of the musicians we love, and some of the bands we love, we're just not going to make it to the other side. If they do, they're not going to do it in the same way. The reason is, we've lost so many music venues already. Whenever it is safe for people to perform, and to see performances again, the same amount of ticket sales is not going to be happening, there's going to be fewer venues, there's going to be just as many musicians trying to get into those venues, those venues are going to prioritize the biggest names they can to get ticket sales, there's going to be some people who are left behind in this process. They might be bands and musicians you love, they're going to be bands, musicians that I love. Musicians I know and love and talk to now are going back to law school, because they don't know if they can make it. I think the future of music is a little worrying. For me, I'm less worried about music criticism, because as long as there is music pushed into the world, there will be people like me, who want to make it seem appealing. I am worried about not just the future of live music, but actually the future of bands and musicians I love. I have this weird hope that maybe underground will come back. I came up on the punk scene in the Midwest, and much of that was like, if you've got the space, we will clear out this room. I worry, every day, seriously, about the lack of venues, and the fact that despite fewer venues, there’s the same amount of musicians, and the math does not work in my head. That's what I'm worried about. 

LD: In what ways do you find the ordering of an album to be similar or dissimilar to the way we think of ordering poetry collections?

Hanif Abdurraqib: I chart my poetry collection sequencing the same way. I think that all artists chart an album sequencing, because, essentially, you’re asking people to be able to find themselves through a sustained journey with you, you’re trying to build trust with the person who’s saying, I’m asking you to go on a journey with me. It is my responsibility to make sure that you don’t get lost along the way. That’s what sequencing actually is, an extending of the hand to a willing reader, and leading them to a place that is potentially satisfying to them. To be fair, there are a lot of albums I love that I don’t think are sequenced particularly well. The beauty of music streaming is that you can re-sequence an album if you want to, pull it apart, then restructure. One of my favorite albums of the decade is Melodrama, the Lorde album, but I don’t like the sequence. But the songs are good. I think, for me, there is a point where sequencing can go out of the window, so long as the songs are just good, if I like every song, if what you’ve made is so good that we don’t care what order it’s in. I don’t have that same kind of confidence in my poems. I believe that my poems are enhanced by a sequencing that makes it seem like I’m organizing a symphony. In the sense that if every poem was an instrument, it has a responsibility to the instrument next to it. You want to think about it like that, then I think some real good can happen.