An Interview with Poet Nicole Sealey

In the poem, “Legendary,” from her 2017 publication Ordinary Beasts, Nicole Sealey uses the sonnet form to hold the persona voice of Venus Xtravaganza, a narrator of the 1990 documentary Paris is Burning. Each ten syllable line ends with the word, “white,” creating a tight space in which all of the energy of Xtravaganza’s voice wheels acrobatics; the poem is a marriage of Sealey’s interest in traditional forms envasing contemporary concerns. Throughout Ordinary Beasts each poetic form vibrates on the page, the tension almost metaphysical as Sealey makes the subject matter and form abide by one another. And while Sealey’s poetry collection tends to the staple social crops of humanity such as love, rejection, grief, and myth, her aesthetic plays and emotes jouissance. I return to the poem “Imagine Sisyphus Happy” almost every day. Ordinary Beasts was a 2018 finalist for the PEN Open Book Award.

As well as a poet, Sealey dedicates her time to being the executive director of Cave Canem, a literary organization dedicated to supporting and fostering poetry of the African Diaspora in the world. Sealey’s poetics also transfer to her role as a leader—she is specific, she is measured, while also being able to take magnificently executed risks. Cave Canem has produced three Pulitzer Prize winning poets, Tracy K. Smith, Gregory Pardlo, and Tyehimba Jess; Natasha Trethewey, also a recipient for the Pulitzer Prize in poetry was the second winner of the Cave Canem Poetry Prize First Book Award; both Trethewey and Smith have served as the United States Poet Laureate.

I first encountered Nicole Sealey’s writing in a copy of the American Poetry Review in the advertising office at Poets & Writers Inc. The poem of Sealey’s in that issue is, “Virginia Is for Lovers.” I read the poem several times that day, thinking of the loss of my own close family friends, and the response to the AIDS epidemic I saw growing up in Key West, Florida. Sealey’s poetry sticks between the ribs and settles in. While having spoken to Sealey before, through my job at the time, I finally met her during a workshop at Cave Canem taught by Jason Koo. There was never a moment that I did not find Sealey engaged, encouraging, and insightful. And although familiar with Sealey and her writing for some time now—when she agreed to this interview, I felt like I had won a prize.

—Jessica Lanay

THE BELIEVER: In your latest collection, Ordinary Beast, you take on the amorphous subjects of love, desire, and, religion; they are common enough themes, but you approach them with a brevity and newness that is...