Speaking with Monica Prince

INTERVIEW | Santa Fe Literary Review Speaks with Monica Prince

Monica Prince writes, teaches, and performs choreopoems across the nation. Prince is the author of Roadmap: A Choreopoem; How to Exterminate the Black Woman: A Choreopoem; and Letters from the Other Woman, as well as the co-author of the suffrage play Pageant of Agitating Women with Anna Andes. Prince’s work has appeared in Wildness, The Missouri Review, The Texas Review, The Rumpus, MadCap Review, American Poetry Journal, and elsewhere. A Pushcart Prize and Best of the Net nominee obsessed with yoga and maxi skirts with pockets, Prince teaches activist and performance writing and serves as Director of Africana Studies at Susquehanna University in Pennsylvania. Members of the Santa Fe Literary Review editorial team were honored to interview Prince over Zoom on Wednesday, September 6, 2023.

Santa Fe Literary Review: To begin, let's talk about taking risks. What does it mean to you to take a creative risk? And why does risk-taking matter when we make art?

Monica Prince: I love this question. I love the idea of discussing risk. I think I learned about risk as a writer actually, in the fall or in the summer of 2018 with [poet] Tina Chang. I was at a fellowship in Aspen, Colorado, for a week, and I worked with Tina Chang that week, and on the second day she asked us all what the difference was between risk and courage. She asked us to think about a moment in which we took a risk, and what it taught us about courage. And so, when I think about risk, I mostly think about having the ability to do something in spite of fear. It shows up in my writing a lot. The first thing, of course, is that writing choreopoems feels like a risk because it's a very niche genre. It's very specific, and a lot of people don't know what it is unless they've read Ntozake Shange, or if they've seen “For Colored Girls.”

And there's just this sort of risk-taking in terms of writing the show, producing the show, getting the show published, trying to help theater companies understand what it is, trying to help publishers understand what it is. So, as someone working in the genre, it’s difficult—it’s a risky genre indeed. I think that as writers and as creative people, it's our responsibility to take those risks, because if no one has ever done it before, or if it's been done but no one is still doing it, then it's our responsibility to keep it alive, and to pave spaces for other people to create.

I remember [poet, painter, filmmaker, and editor] Richard Siken telling me during a reading he hosted that if you're writing something, and it feels like it's going really well, and it's easy, and it's just coming out of you, then you’re probably going in the wrong direction. But if what you're writing is difficult, and scary, and is just surprising you at every turn, then you're on the right track. I think about that when I consider the risk of creating choreopoems, especially because the genre itself is meant to encapsulate as many performative elements as possible, and that can be difficult to demonstrate on the page.

What I appreciate about the genre in and of itself is that you don't necessarily have to imagine who specifically will play these parts, who's going to perform them, what it's going to look like. You can imagine your creative space, but you don't have to hope that someone, somewhere, will be able to do it. You just have to trust your directors. You trust your choreographers to find the people who can do this work.

SFLR: Please tell us about your writing routine. Are you an early-morning type of writer? Late-at-night? At a coffee shop? What does a day in the writing life of Monica Prince look like?

MP: When I have time to sit down and write, I'm one of those midday writers. In the morning, writing is not a thing for me. I do not enjoy mornings. I think they're reserved for lying in bed, drinking water and tea, and playing video games on my phone, but around eleven, I feel motivated to get up and get dressed, make more tea, and then wander to some part of my house, or just stay in bed, actually, and just write. And then when I get into the groove of writing, I will do it for hours until I finish whatever individual project I'm working on. That can be confusing, whatever that project might be. Sometimes that project is a choreopoem that I'm working on. Sometimes it's an essay, but the last time I sat and really powered through a bunch of work was when I was writing another choreopoem called Hysteria. It's all about trying to navigate what it means to decide to have a child. It just flowed out of me, based on all these other poems I've been writing for years, and so I think my process, or my writing life, is frenetic and varied, and it's really dependent upon what my schedule looks like and what my day looks like.

When I'm teaching full time, my writing happens randomly, essentially whenever I have a moment. But when I'm not teaching, like in the summer or winter, I'm able to choose that space a little bit more intentionally. I can write pretty much everywhere. When I'm writing poems, I need silence. But when I'm revising, I could do that anywhere. I don't like coffee shops for writing because it feels too stereotypical. [Laughs.] And in my little town we only have, like, one really good coffee shop. The rest are just like bars, and then that's also a stereotype, being the drunk writer in the bar. They’re all complicated! There's no win in the spaces like that in my town right now. But overall, I can pretty much write anywhere. And that, I think, is a good thing.

SFLR: It is a good thing! And it also speaks to your talent, probably, that you can do that. Monica, we admire your harnessing of a range of artistic forms, including the lipogram and the concept of erasure. What are the benefits and limitations to using forms like these?

MP: I love form poetry. I love formal poetry. It's almost a shortcut to inspiration, because you just have to follow the rules. So in Roadmap, my choreopoem, there's a lipogram in there that is called “Black Boys are Missing,” and it's a lipogram for the word “suicide.” I recently fell into the form of lipogram because it's one of the Oulipian constraints. I got really into writing lipograms because somehow, it's the hardest thing. It takes you like six hours to write one poem, but it's really rewarding because you did this complicated thing.

When I utilize erasure in the form of the lipogram specifically, it allows me to think through how to say something without saying something, and it asks: How do you allow your readers to truly understand what's going on? And the lipogram has a trick in it, right, where you utilize every other letter in the alphabet, but you can't spell out the word that you're talking about, and then you have no choice. You can't think about anything else, because you can't say it. I remember trying to write a lipogram that was not about whatever thing was missing and just failing miserably because it's, like, the only thing you can think about. What I really appreciate is the ability to combine forms in the quarry poems and on the page, because it allows me to not just do a lipogram. I can also do an etymology poem, or I can write the lipogram in the form of a hustle or a sonnet, and I haven't done that yet. That feels like a lot. It feels very exciting. But adding the etymology to it has actually shifted a lot of how I understand the words I'm erasing.

Plus, because the premise of Roadmap is that there's a young Black man trying to subvert his most likely cause of death, which will be homicide, it's interesting to have a word in the show that is not what we think the whole show is about. The whole show is about him avoiding getting murdered, but then he performs this poem about avoiding taking himself out of the world. I wanted to demonstrate that sort of balance in the show, and to talk about the underlying erasure within the show, which is that we're losing Black bodies: they are just not available anymore. They're not present anymore. And because it's this epidemic in young people that we don't pay attention to as an epidemic, I think it's really important to include those sort of erasures within performances and within full-length collections, because they allow us to think, “What's the thing that's actually missing in our show? Or what's the thing that this show is trying to call attention to that's missing?”

SFLR: We're interested in learning more about the collaborative aspect of choreopoems. How does performing your pieces allow you to explore new elements of activism and expression that may exist beyond the written word. While you’re at it, please define the choreopoem for our readers!

MP: Of course! I always forget to do that. A choreopoem is a choreographed series of poems that includes performance, poetry, dance, music, art, yoga, Parkour, Zumba, burlesque, voiceovers, short video clips—any kind of performance media you can think of, all rolled in together and thrown onstage like a play. It’s a super accessible form in the sense that you don't have to know how to do any of those things to ask your actors to do those things. I know how to do Zumba, but I would never know how to put that in a show. What I like about the choreopoem genre is that it is inherently collaborative because it does require other bodies in order to come alive. I think when we write plays, there is an inherent idea of the performance. In a play, we don't emphasize, “How do we move from left to right?” There is not really blocking involved in writing the play. The blocking might be specific in terms of, like, someone needs to be stabbed, or someone needs to leave the room, but it's not as specific as entrances, exits, and what type of dances are happening.

And this is actually really fun when you're writing a musical or a play: You get to see your stuff come to life. But in a choreopoem, there has to be a little bit more intentionality behind the choices of media you're including because if, for example, you have a voiceover in the show, it needs to be intentional in terms of why it's there. In Roadmap I have a sort of omniscient character named The Novelist, and in earlier drafts, she was just a voice that would descend from the sky. This made sense in terms of the fact that no one can really see her, and we don't know where she's where she's coming from or who she's speaking to.

But then I realized, there needed to be a physical form of The Novelist because if you have that sort of “voiceover voice,” most audiences immediately think it's God, or some sort of deity in the sky, which is not my intention. So I made her a physical character on stage to avoid that confusion. And I think when you're making choreopoems, you have to be really intentional about the kinds of works you're including. In Roadmap there aren't explicit dances performed except for L’Apache. The French L’Apache is a dance that involves a man and a woman more generally, but more specifically involves a pimp and a prostitute. It’s a dance meant to show a man trying to destroy a woman onstage, and it's a very violent dance, a street dance, invented in Paris at the start of the twentieth century. And though I don't know how to do that dance, I do know that it's an effective form, and it's probably the most effective form to demonstrate a shift in body language onstage because it is such a violent dance. [The choreopoem] allows a director to take that direction and either learn it for the choreographer or have the choreographer know what it is, and then put it on the actors, or else, if you don't have actors who can do that, the director can still try to keep the momentum of what is asked for in the text.

So the choreopoem is really wonderful because you can write it by yourself, but the whole time you have to be thinking about the physicality of the words, physicality of the choices you're making onstage. If there's going to be a burlesque performance, why? What kind? Do you want it to actually be satirical, or do you want it to be sensual? I think that the intentionality behind the choices of collaboration is very important.

When it comes to the collaborative nature of writing the show: When I edit my shows, I lure all my friends into my house and ply them with liquor and pizza, and I ask them to read their parts cold. A lot of them have never performed before. A lot of them don't know what I'm looking for them to do, and it just helps me hear it. It helps me hear it from other people's bodies, which allows me to revise the show. Even that small collaboration dramatically shifts the show. For example, the poem “Unfinished List of All the Ways Black Parents Say I Love You” is what came out of two of my friends who played Raven and Neil when we were just revising the show. They both said, “We don't have enough lines,” and I was like, “It’s ‘cause you all are selfish, you want more lines.” And they said, “No, no, no, no, we really don't have enough lines, we only have these three poems and we don't think that that's long enough.” And I was like, “Okay, okay,” but then I didn't know where to put it. I was like, “How am I supposed to give you more lines? Where are you going to even show up again? We’ve moved past your limb in the family tree.” And that's when I ended up writing the poem, which came in response to the way that Dorian is trying to change onstage. The change is thinking about the the ways that his parents love each other, and the way his parents have loved him, is a way that he needs to actually consider how he's going to love Aisha. Even though it was a sort of flippant feedback because they just wanted to talk more, it actually made more sense in the show to add more lines for them because they really did need to speak more. They needed to be more present. Because you are always considering your director, you're considering your choreographer, there is no way to get away from who those people will be as you're crafting the show. I think that's the best part of the collaborative aspect: you trust whoever it's going to be, but you also have the opportunity to be present in terms of what you want it to look like. And that's really lovely.

SFLR: So your poems are often rooted in a physical experience. How does physicality empower your writing? And does the physical experience take precedence during the writing process? In other words, what comes first—movement or language?

MP: Yeah, language comes first. Well. [Laughs.] I want to say language first, but that might not be true. In most cases the language comes first, because I have the idea first, but frequently when I'm struggling to write at all, I will just kind of be thinking about what I want to see, if that makes sense. I want to know, what kind of image am I trying to put on a stage? And that helps me write the poem. The poem that Ty reads in Roadmap, “Do Not Pray,” came from an image I had in my head of a tall Black man wearing a hoodie, sitting down onstage, and speaking very low and very slowly, and I didn't really know where that was going. I wanted, whatever happened within that moment, for him to eventually stand up and kick the chair away from him and then yell at the audience, and I did not know who was going to do that or what that was going to sound like. Originally, I thought it would be Dorian because he's talking about the hypocrisy of “thoughts and prayers.” But then I realized, Dorian couldn't say that, because he's onstage for about ninety minutes, and he says all the things for so long. But also, the whole show is just about trying on different versions of his future. So he doesn't have to physically do that. We can have someone else come forward and be an imagined possibility. And so that changed the poem, “Do Not Pray” a lot because at first I just wrote it in response to watching way too much CSI Miami, because the first five lines are all about all the horrible ways that people die, and you find their bodies. And then it shifted almost immediately to referencing all the ways in which unarmed Black children had been killed in the last several years: one child walking out, taking out the garbage, another child just walking home, or just being in their own home, and being shot at. I felt the need to reference all of those horrible instances. The thing that was really in the back of my head was this fear of doing mundane activities and being killed for it. And so I emphasize that in the poem. And then, as soon as I was revising it, I realized that the moment where he stands and shouts at the audience had to be a climactic moment in the show.

So the physicality and the language sometimes come at the same time. I try to be intentional about that because I want it to be obvious to the audience that I can also do some of these poems. It's literally like this joke in my department because I perform “Do Not Pray” at admissions events, and at the end, you're supposed to scream, and it always terrifies these very well-meaning sixteen- and seventeen-year-olds. And then, of course, three or four years later, they're, like, “I remember you did this poem, and now I am here, and I think it's really cool” and it's very sweet, but I do it all the time because it’s a really physical and emotional poem that allows me to kind of, like, drop a mic and walk offstage, but it also allows the characters within the show to realize that the stereotype of having only two options as a Black man in the world—to go to jail or die— needed to be stark and obvious. That’s why it starts with this negro spiritual song, and then it ends with this—this rage.

And I like that the physicality of those emotions can come through in different forms throughout the show. There's a song that they sing, the “Ring Around the Rosie” song. There's “On the Outside” that they also sing, which I heard someone else do for the first time ever this past summer, and it was amazing and wild and so cool, because it was a whole different tempo than I'd written in in my head. And I was like, “Excellent. This is actually what I wanted.” I wanted the directors and the actors to take this song as it's written and take it elsewhere. So that was really incredible to see. I think the physicality is really important because it is a performance piece, and understanding what that looks like is interesting for poets who are afraid to perform their work in public. I think it's important for us to think about how work sounds outside of our brains. It kind of comes at the same time, the language and the physicality. And I'm really interested in it because, in a different lifetime, I would be a dance major with a French minor, but I'm not that person, so, to make up for it, I am just putting dance in my shows forever.

SFLR: Your work is often very intimate. What sacrifices must you make when you share personal revelations with your readership? And how do you navigate privacy—your own, your loved ones—while at the same time giving of yourself on the page?

MP: That's a really good question. I had a student ask me that this morning—how do you write about personal things and allow other people to perform them? A lot of Roadmap and How to Exterminate the Black Woman, which is the show where Dorian actually first appears, is built around the sort of lack of privacy we have as individuals now. Like, we're constantly being surveilled. We're being tracked all the time, whether it's our own doing by leaving our locations on our phone, or the doing of the criminal justice system. There's just sort of this acceptance that we will be watched all the time, and it's upsetting to think about in depth, but it's a reality that we have all kind of passively accepted. And so in that sense, a lot of things that were once private, are just not. I like the idea of bringing those things to the stage because I want people to talk about the things that we don't normally talk about, or that we're not supposed to talk about.

In Roadmap there are three poems in a row when we meet Belle, who's the grandmother. And she's talking about sex work. I remember I wrote that because I work with a non-profit called Beautiful Feet Wellness, and they focus on supporting survivors of human trafficking through fitness and wellness. I wrote that poem as a kind of response to the work that I'd started doing with this non-profit, and to create a character who had made the choice to enter sex work—while recognizing that it's actually not really a choice because it comes from poverty, it comes from lack of access, it comes from lack of education, it comes from the ways that we build our cities and our communities, and it comes a lot from lack of resources in terms of what is available to certain types of people when they're trying to make their lives better. By working with sex work survivors, I learned a lot about how to better understand that even if you're not forced into the trade, something did force you into the trade. I was understanding the difference between coercion and a willingness to put yourself in the space, recognizing that you wouldn't even have thought about it if you didn't have any of these other issues that were structured to keep you from success. And so you have “Sex Work is Real Work” first, and then that tumbles into “Cut,” which is all about self-harm. And it was important to put that onstage as well because I think it's a huge thing that we really don't talk about, and we don't talk about what self-harm looks like in these different venues.

So, with “Sex Work is Real Work,” we're looking at an active choice to harm oneself because there's so much, like, emotional and physical damage that occurs when women enter the sex trade. We have this inadvertent self-harming. And then we have this intentional self-harm of a character cutting themselves, and then that rolls into the sort of self-harm of omission between lovers. Right? We have Raven talking about how she has definitely been assaulted, but she doesn't tell her partner, not explicitly. Neither of them actually tells one another the explicit nature of their own destruction. That's harmful in relationships, and is also harmful, period.

By quickly bringing up these intimate issues onstage—they're some of the earliest poems in the show—I wanted to demonstrate that we have a lot of things that we keep from other people or from ourselves. But we actually have to talk about them so that maybe we don't repeat them. It's a cycle right? There’s a moment within the show where they say, “You have to break the cycle, because you can't just keep experiencing this harmful experience over and over and over again until someone finally learns their lesson.” Why should we sacrifice multiple generations to make something stop? I think a lot about how intimacy needs to be portrayed onstage for that reason. But additionally, I want to make sure that my audience is aware that there are real examples of emotional, sexual, and romantic intimacy with people of color and with Black people. I want to make sure that I'm demonstrating what Black love looks like, or can look like. That's why the line from Nikki Giovanni comes in, “Black love is black wealth.”

There are just not a lot of moments where we get to see Black characters loving one another outside of this sort of “Well, of course they're together. They're both Black” kind of energy. I see the way that it happens on television. I'm re-watching House now, which did not stand up to the test of time, but it's quite interesting. Anytime there is an intimacy between characters, it's always racialized. The only character who can have an issue with a Black patient is the Black doctor, right? The only character who can have an issue with the white patient has to be one of the white doctors. I don’t know that they notice it or if it's on purpose, but it's so clear to me, it's so obvious. I wanted to emphasize that they're not just together because they're both Black. They're together because they want to be together, and they have the choice to be together, and they're choosing it every single day.

In terms of privacy, I've kind of accepted that there's nothing private about anything. I write essays about my sex life; this is just where I've decided to live in the world. But when it comes to choreopoems, I want to focus on providing titillating language that gets us close to the thing without demonstrating the thing onstage because that should be private, if that makes sense. In terms of protecting my loved ones’ privacy—when I did a bunch of interviews for previous choreopoems, I had to be really careful to make sure I wasn't utilizing identifying features or qualities. But when it comes to my shows now, because a lot of my shows focus on Black people in their emotions, in their struggles, there is less concern on my part, at least, that my family or my loved ones will feel some type of way about it simply because I'm talking about the things that we have always talked about in secret.

I want those secrets to stop being secrets because they hurt everyone. I think about how we find things out after the fact, when our grandparents die, our greatgrandparents die. My grandfather died in 2009 and that's when I found out he had a whole separate family. And everyone knew, and everyone was fine with it the whole time. And I'm just like, “That feels like something we should talk about!” I don't believe that keeping secrets like that saves anyone. It prevents gossip, I guess, but shouldn't we have those conversations to prevent harm in the future?

SFLR: To conclude our interview, let's touch on writer's block. How do you navigate your own experiences with writer's block? And how do you encourage your students to break past their own blocks, from procrastination to a fear of examining trauma, to find deeper expression in their creative work?

MP: I don't do writer’s block very well because I don't really think it's a block. I think it's mostly that I am hesitant to write something. I think we all fall into these cycles where we're afraid to write something because it's going be hard [laughs], or it's going to be emotional. Or maybe we don't think we have the talent to do it? One of the main ways I get through writer’s block is through writing prompts and forms because you have to follow the rules. You don't feel that bad if it's not good at the end because your whole point is not to focus on the content. You're just focusing on hitting the rules, right? So lipograms are really helpful for writer’s block because you don't have a choice but to keep working on it until it's done, and then you go back and see if you screwed it up, and if it makes any sense.

I'm teaching a class right now called Poetry and Magic and my students are using different forms to accomplish different spells, if you will. We talk about how an elegy could potentially raise the dead. We talk about how sestinas can offer possible futures. We discussed how the sonnet could be a way to bring a lover home, or to bring a lover to oneself. It's been a really fruitful conversation with these students, because they talk a lot about how they don't really know what they want to write. Following a form kind of helps them get out of that moment.

I think we see writer’s block as sitting in front of your computer and nothing comes out for like three hours. And that sometimes happens to me. But I think my writer’s block is more that I justify not writing because I know that everything I'm doing goes into the writing. I learned this in grad school, but I really learned it when I read Letters to a Young Poet by Rainer Maria Rilke, and he has this moment in an early letter where he says, “Ask yourself in the most silent hour of your night: must I write? Dig into yourself for a deep answer. And if this answer rings out in assent, if you meet this solemn question with a strong, simple ‘I must,’ then build your life in accordance with this necessity.”

Because I know that I have to write, I can't not write. I need to, then I accept that everything around me is feeding into the writing, whether I’m giving readings or interviews, or I’m teaching, giving feedback on work, drinking coffee, going for walks—I just accept that everything I'm doing feeds into the writing. We as writers, I think, give ourselves permission to not get everything done all the time. Ada Limón talks about how she has a gathering time, where she spends time doing anything but writing for months or years, and then she spends six months just pouring out the book, and then she's famous. I don't think we as writers give ourselves permission to do stuff like that, right? You don't have to write every day. Just make sure you write. There’s still @CountsAsWriting, a Twitter account—I don’t care what he calls it, I’m going to call it Twitter [laughs]—that posts things like, “Today, writing counts as staring at your unfolded laundry.” Or, “Today, writing counts as taking a walk around the block.” Things like that. It's about giving ourselves permission not to do the work.

Procrastination is a big thing with my students and with me. But I also know that ultimately, my writing practice is more about content than it is about frequency, and if I'm doing multiple projects, I tend to get sidetracked. For the last three years, everything's been about Roadmap, and I haven't written anything else. But well, actually, I guess that's a lie, because I still have publications coming out, but most of my work has been around Roadmap. When it finally came out, I kind of just like sat around and thought, “I don't even know what I'm supposed to do with myself now.” So I try to allow that to be. I try to make that acceptable for myself and also for other writers. Sometimes we don't know what we want to write about. And that's okay? And it's okay to just not be writing.

One of the best ways to write is a deadline. Deadlines are very helpful. You have a workshop deadline, or you have a deadline for a place you want to submit to, or a contest looming. That is the best way to get writing done, but other than that outside pressure, I think I'm more interested in making sure that my writing is impacting me the way I would want it to impact my audience. Sometimes that means not writing at all. Sometimes that means writing the same poem over and over and over again. I have this lipogram that I've been working on for probably a year. It is just the same stupid poem five different times, and I think that's helpful because it allows us to really sync into what our intentions are with our work instead have just cranking stuff out for the sake of it.

I had my students do a semester of poems in the fall of 2020 because everything was falling apart. “We're all gonna die.” And so I was like, how about we put a little art into the world? And so we wrote a poem for every day of the semester. That was about 103 poems by the end—it was a depressing thing to realize that we are in school 206-ish days a year. By doing that, I suddenly had a lot of terrible poems, but a lot of good poems, and some poems that I could revise, and some of actually made it into Roadmap before it went to print because those were pieces that I knew it needed in order for the performance to be sound.