We should start with something serious. “On the radio,” writes the revered poet Hanif Abdurraqib early in his new poetry collection A Fortune for Your Disaster, “a singer born in a place where children watch the sky / for bombs is trying to sell me on love / as something akin to war. / I have no lie to offer as treacherous as this one.”
That tired pop-song notion of love as a battlefield has bothered him for awhile. “From a metaphorical standpoint,” writes the revered critic Hanif Abdurraqib early in his blockbuster 2017 essay collection They Can’t Kill Us Until They Kill Us, “one of the worst things we do is compare love to war. We do this in times of actual war without a thought about what it actually means. Mothers bury their children while a pop musician calls a bedroom a war zone and romance a field of battle—as if there is a graveyard for heartbreak alone.”
This observation appears in a piece titled “Carly Rae Jepsen Loves You Back,” by the way. Consider Zayn Malik, the Muslim pop star of British Pakistani descent, whose lascivious 2016 hit “Pillowtalk,” which describes Zayn’s bed thusly: “It’s our paradise and it’s our war zone.” Yeesh. “He’s obviously not the only one,” Abdurraqib tells me. “But it’s like, ‘Fam, but you’re, like, from a literal war zone.’ And I’ve always pushed poets, in my editing and my writing, like, war is not a metaphor. War is war.”
He makes this observation while we’re both sipping strawberry-lemonade slushies with added custard, by the way. We should add something frivolous. So here’s the deal: Abdurraqib, a proud native of Columbus, Ohio, is one of the most exciting and empathetic writers we’ve got. That applies to both his poetry (his first collection was 2016’s mournful The Crown Ain’t Worth Much) and his criticism (in February he celebrated the release of Go Ahead in the Rain: Notes to A Tribe Called Quest, a full book of trenchant and highly personal essays about the group). He loves his city: “I came back all the time,” he recalls, of a recent attempt to live elsewhere that didn’t take. “The drive from Connecticut to Columbus is nine hours, and I can get it done in eight.” And his city loves him back: On Sunday, at a packed hometown reading, none other than former Ohio State champ Maurice Clarett showed up, and marveled at the sizable crowd a local poet could attract.
And so, to celebrate Tuesday’s release of A Fortune for Your Disaster, Abdurraqib and I embarked on a brief ice cream tour of Columbus. This was meant to reflect his status as a distinctly Ohioan sort of Renaissance man, and to realize my lifelong dream of expensing Dairy Queen. Like his city, he contains multitudes. In They Can’t Kill Us, he writes beautifully about both Nina Simone and My Chemical Romance, Marvin Gaye and Carly Rae; he owns 93 pairs of sneakers, including the Air Force 1 Low Off-White MCA University Blues he wears for our meeting, and occasionally we talk about DQ on Twitter. Hence the ice cream tour, a frivolous gesture to discuss an often serious and invariably startling body of work.
“Part of the project of this book was like, how can I very plainly find a way to articulate this immense heartbreak cleanly and plainly?” he says. “And saying, like, ‘I’m not gonna lean on the grandiose nature of the easy thing.’ I’m not gonna say, [serious poet voice] ‘My heartbreak felt like a bomb.’ But how can I very plainly say, ‘I was very sad’?” He’s got a lot of ideas. And we’ve got a lot of ideas as to what to eat while he talks about those ideas.
Stop No. 1: Jeni’s Splendid Ice Creams
Him: Scoop of Orange Blossom Chiffon
Me: Scoop of Roasted Peanut Butter and Strawberry Jam (Dairy-Free)
Jeni’s is a Columbus-born artisanal joint founded in 2002 and now serving up the likes of Brandied Banana Brûlée and Sweet Cream Biscuits & Peach Jam in locations stretching from Charlotte to Nashville to L.A. Shortly after They Can’t Kill Us came out, Abdurraqib did a hometown reading here at the scoop shop in Columbus’s hip-adjacent Clintonville neighborhood, and from there embarked on a national Jeni’s mini-tour that constituted his first time reading in ice-cream parlours.
“I think people are happier,” he observes of that environment. “People are genuinely happier.” He is generally averse to the perks of local fame, but he does leverage his personal relationship with Jeni to secure coveted pints of Sun-Popped Corn, when it is in season.
The idea of the flower as this thing we go to these great lengths to preserve the beauty before it fades, it just seemed like the perfect thing to write about. The idea of preservation.Hanif Abdurraqib
One does not reach these heights of luxury and influence overnight. Abdurraqib grew up on Columbus’s far less hip-adjacent East Side, raised on rap and soul and Rumours and punk rock. (The most moving essay in They Can’t Kill Us is about Fall Out Boy.) He did not study, or plan, to be a poet, but the city was insistent that poetry find him anyway, and The Crown Ain’t Worth Much is an audacious mix of tones and inspirations, teenage reveries and grown-up-too-soon heartbreaks.
To wit, the poem “The Author Explains good kid, m.A.A.d. city To His White Friend While Driving Through Southeast Ohio” includes both a frivolous and quite serious aside as to why that white friend’s mother might describe the Dairy Queen off Route 36 as “ghetto.” And the poem “When We Were 13, Jeff’s Father Left The Needle Down On A Journey Record Before Leaving The House One Morning And Never Coming Back” treats every element of that title with the utmost respect, and ends with a shattering revelation about what else happened in the author’s life when he was 13:
and so maybe this is why my father would stare at the empty spaces my mother once occupied, sit me down at a baby grand and whisper play me something, child.
Abdurraqib’s mother died in her sleep of an abnormal heartbeat caused by her bipolar medication, and she’s a heavy presence in The Crown Ain’t Worth Much from the dedication—”For my mother who raised me. For the city that raised me when she no longer could.”—onward. That book was also, he says now, a product of his “wrestling against a very specific American moment” brought on by the tragic and infuriating events in Ferguson and Baltimore and beyond, animated by the specter of police brutality that haunts poems like “All of The Black Boys Finally Stopped Packing Switchblades” and “I Don’t Remember The Whole Summer When Do The Right Thing Dropped.”
“Now that I got that book out, I very much look back and say, ‘I don’t want to make a book where black people are only suffering,’” he says. “Or, ‘I don’t want to make a book where black people are only present as tools for state violence.’ Or, ‘I don’t want to make a book where it’s being overlooked that black people, or marginalized people in general, are in charge of full lives outside the machinery of a country’s violence.’”
He sidestepped that machinery somewhat on the 2017 chapbook Vintage Sadness, which was inspired in part by songs from Abdurraqib’s youth that he only belatedly realized were about sex, from Next’s “Too Close” to Ginuwine’s “Pony.” (Like any reasonable kid, he thought “Pony” was about an actual pony.) What emerges, on A Fortune for Your Disaster, is a poet who can veer effortlessly from elation to devastation, from pop-music melodrama to actual human tragedy, from the vast exterior to the even more vast and painful interior. Consider the poem “It Is Maybe Time To Admit That Michael Jordan Definitely Pushed Off,” inspired by a direct quote from a flight attendant Abdurraqib overheard litigating an argument about the 1998 NBA Finals. Halfway through the poem, this bomb drops:
& who is to say really how much weight was behind Jordan’s palm on that night in Utah & on that same night one year earlier the paramedics pulled my drowning mother from the sheets where she slept & they said it must have felt like a whole hand was pushing down on her lungs & I spent the whole summer holding my breath in bed until the small black spots danced on the ceiling & I am sorry that there is no way to describe this that is not about agony or that is not about someone being torn from the perch of their comfort...
It goes on; the death of Michael Jordan’s own father is evoked. “The whole magic trick of a poem to me,” Abdurraqib says, “is about telling someone that they’re witnessing something, when you’re really showing them something else.” (He’d become obsessed with the 2006 Christopher Nolan dueling-magician drama The Prestige; the poems in A Fortune for Your Disaster are subdivided into The Pledge, The Turn, and The Prestige.)
If you idly flip through this new collection, what you’ll immediately notice, along with repeated references to Marvin Gaye (a longtime Abdurraqib hero) and Nikola Tesla (he’s a Prestige thing, too), is that there are 13 separate poems with the title “How Can Black People Write About Flowers At A Time Like This.” That, too, was an overheard line, this time from early 2017, stage-whispered by a white woman in the audience while the poet Ross Gay read a poem about tending his garden. But that incident didn’t necessarily spur Abdurraqib to write about racism, or even A Time Like This. It made him want to actually write about flowers.
“We’re talking about something that comes out of the earth with a predetermined expiration date,” he says. “We’re talking about something that is born dying, as we all are, but it’s just a shorter timeline, right?” He didn’t know much about flowers, flowers not being much of a presence in his neighborhood growing up. “The idea of the flower as this thing we go to these great lengths to preserve the beauty before it fades, it just seemed like the perfect thing to write about,” he continues. “The idea of preservation.”
His Orange Blossom Chiffon has melted into soup by now. But he’d already managed to fully explain the art of poetry, as he understood it: “The trick of the poem for me is how long I can hold someone’s attention. To make a sports analogy, which I do oftener than some, it’s like a quarterback with a clock in their head, where they know how long they have to release the ball. Every poem to me is like dropping back and trying to figure out how long I can hold someone’s attention before I let the ball go and reveal the bigger thing.”
And that, dear reader, is where you come in, whether you’re under his spell in the comforts of your own home or amid the grandeur of a high-end ice cream shoppe. “Cause once the ball’s out of your hand,” he says, “It’s just up to everyone to catch it. If they can.”
Stop No. 2: Whit’s Frozen Custard
Both of Us: Strawberry-Lemonade Slushies With Custard
He ordered first; it sounded good. Whit’s opened in Granville, Ohio, in 2003 and has since franchised itself steadily eastward and southward; the Clintonville spot sits right near the old skate shop where Abdurraqib worked/loitered as a teenager, and is currently next door to a new crystals boutique where we pop in so he can grab some black tourmaline. In Abdurraqib’s lifetime Columbus has somehow both radically transformed itself and not changed at all.
Abdurraqib spends much of his time on tour, and whether he’s teaching or reading, he brings a vivid picture of Ohio to places where no such vivid picture exists. He can describe a crucial Columbus venue like the Basement in universal terms: “‘That messy, small, hot punk venue in your town with no sightlines.’ When I say that, people say, ‘I know a venue like that. I know where I can’t see shit from anywhere.’”
That approach applies, of course, to other, far less frivolous things. “If I say I’m from a place where the buildings around my childhood playground aren’t the same buildings they were when I was a child, people are like, ‘I get what that means,’” he says. “Then I can say, ‘Well that means that I can’t take people back and show them where I grew up all the time,’ and what does that do to the humanity of a person, when you can’t show them who you were once?”
He’s been thinking a lot about “what it means to be quote-unquote visible in a city that you live in.” Abdurraqib still goes to plenty of Columbus shows and readings, albeit not with his old teenage ferocity; he is visible enough in person and on Twitter that sitting at a sidewalk table, we’re interrupted halfway through our slushies by a fan of his. (They get to talking about ice cream joints in Maine; every year Abdurraqib orders a dozen or so pints of Strawberry Balsamic through the mail from a place called Gelato Fiasco.) He tweets often about local politics and protests, including the recent maddening case of Masonique Saunders, a 16-year-old girl charged with delinquency murder following the police shooting of her boyfriend; in honor of A Fortune for Your Disaster’s publication, he’s urging his readers to donate to Central Ohio’s Black Queer & Intersectional Collective. He lives here; he breathes here.
If you browse old poems on his website, you can chart the years-long evolution of Abdurraqib’s author bio, which at one time included the line, “He thinks poems can save the world.” “Now I don’t,” he tells me. “I had this idea that they were so magical. This idea of metaphor itself, metaphor and image, and how I could convince you in writing that that tree”—he gestures behind me, in a neighborhood in which someone has apparently knitted many of the trees cute little sweaters—“is not a tree, but that the tree’s branches resemble the arms of a person you long for. Right? That felt magical to me. If I can use metaphor, if I can use image in a way to reshape the physical breathing world, then there’s no way that poems can’t change the world.”
Here in 2019, the poem probably can’t, but the older and wiser and more pragmatic poet maybe can. That evolution applies to far more personal subjects for Abdurraqib: References to his mother are less prevalent in A Fortune for Your Disaster than in his earlier work, but she’s arguably a stronger presence than ever. “When it comes to large losses, that is something I’ll never get right,” he says. “The grief over my mother’s passing is something I will carry with me for as long as I’m alive. That means I am going to age with it, and in my aging with it, that means I’ll find new ways to get it—not right or wrong—but to get after it.”
Here’s a relatively simple way to put it: “To make any choice to love someone,” he says, “is to also make a choice—I mean, really, to make a choice to commit to someone—is to make a choice to also commit to a life that potentially might not have them in it.” It’s a beautiful late-summer Ohio day. We’re drinking strawberry-lemonade slushies. It’s only a contradiction if you think it is.
Stop No. 3: United Dairy Farmers
Him: Sherbet Freeze
Me: Scoop of Butterscotch Cookie
The mighty UDF is an unwieldy but beloved Ohio gas station/convenience store/ice cream institution that figured heavily into Abdurraqib’s childhood, when his favorite flavor, when he had a little leftover change, was Blue Moo Cookie Dough. “They dropped that when I was, like, 10, and that was all the rage growing up,” he says. “It’s mostly just vanilla, just like chocolate-chip cookie dough with blue food coloring. But it was one of those things where it tricked the eye, and so it tricked the taste buds, right. Cause when you’re a kid, you could tell me it tastes like anything, and you could believe it. You know what I mean?”
Some magic tricks are easier to explain than others: Abdurraqib still can’t quite explain why They Can’t Kill Us Until They Kill Us became a bestselling and lavishly reviewed sensation amid the constant internet glut of music criticism and hot takes and personal essays. He’s written for The New York Times, The Paris Review, and MTV News during their brief but massively influential circa-2016 apex. (There’s Carly Rae again.) He made Fall Out Boy sound like the most life-or-death important band in world history, and maybe that piece connected with so many FOB skeptics because he once believed it.
“I’m writing from a perspective of a fan who’s willing to be wrong, and eager to be wrong almost,” he says. “I think people like a critic who’s not certain, you know? I came up reading music critics who were singularly gifted at telling me how to feel and why. My hope is that we’ve moved past that.”
Take a good-natured argument he got into during the book tour for Go Ahead in the Rain. “When I was in Dallas, I flippantly—not flippantly, I believe this—but offhandedly I was like, ‘Well, I think Cam’ron’s a good rapper,’” he recalls. “And someone in the audience was like, ‘I don’t think Cam’ron’s a good rapper.’” And Abdurraqib heard the hater out. “This person made great points: ‘On Purple Haze, the rhyme scheme was not really advanced.’ And I went back and listened to Purple Haze, and I think that person was right. I still like Cam’ron, but that person was correct. To me, that’s so much more exciting as a music fan.”
We talk about the poet and indie-rock totem David Berman, who died in August, and who Abdurraqib loved, though he didn’t get a chance to fully, publicly mourn in part because he was still spent from mourning Toni Morrison. (The notion of committing to living without someone you love applies to major artists, too.) “I think there are many ways to write the simplicity of feeling not good,” is how he explains Berman’s appeal. “But, I think there are so few ways to do it that aren’t asking for sympathy.” Aburraqib’s work, in any medium, inspires sympathy without asking for it. The funniest line in A Fortune for Your Disaster goes as follows:
I tell my therapist
you can’t spell
heartbreak without art
and she doesn’t laugh
but it’s true
The trick might be to find a therapist powerful enough to not find you amusing, and find a poet powerful enough to make even the terrible parts of living, from private grief to societal despair, sound exquisite and necessary and communal. We never make it to Dairy Queen. There are far greater tragedies, but also far lesser ones.
