by JAMINNIA STATES
Kailande Cassamajor is business-like when discussing her double major in psychology and biology at Howard University. She’s a graduating senior, so there’s sweetness, anticipation, and a healthy dose of uncertainty in her voice as we begin our interview. When I introduce the subject of poetry, her face lights up, through the phone no less. Cassamajor becomes animated when I ask her when she fell in love with poetry.
Like most artists, she was a young child when the inclination to make and record beauty occurred to her. It started with a love for reading and a friendship with her elementary school librarian. “She always had books to recommend. . . [Once] she recommended this book by Jacqueline Woodson, Peace Locomotion. Woodson included poetry in that book and. . . I really liked her use of language. It felt beautiful and warm and familiar.”
She committed to her love for language right away. “That same year, one of my uncles gave me a rainbow-colored notebook, and I started writing poetry in that notebook.”
On her blog, AfroetryWorks, readers can see the good habits of a poet in action. Her posts include reflections on reading, on life, and most enjoyably, she includes some of her poetic experiments. One of her personal challenges was to write a poem for every place she visited in a night during a city-wide arts event. In each poem, Cassamajor focuses on a personal or environmental detail, zooming in on it amidst the hectic background. She allows her imagination to fill out the details, contexts, and textures of the unobservable. These entries are the work of an artist–an open display of her process, the joy of experimentation. The poems she features on AfroetryWorks are sometimes playful, sometimes serious, and always evocative of familiar details. It’s a poet’s way, and Ms. Cassamajor has been walking the path ever since she received that rainbow-colored notebook.
“As a child, poetry really gave me a lot of peace, and it taught me that there’s a lot of beauty where we are, just in the moment. I didn’t have the words for that,” she explains. “But I understood if I was in a park, and if I was sitting fairly still and observing my surroundings, I could be embraced by the beauty that was already around me. I wanted so much to capture those things.”
It was this attention to detail and her capturing the beauty of the mundane that drew our editors to her work in the first place. In her poems, “Catharsis” and “Out of Dust and Thorns,” we see the harsh reality of events softened by the intensity of the sensory details. From “Out of Dust and Thorns:”
A hand reaches out
Limbs
branches
marked with a million
scratches
touches my face.
These lines about the harsh feelings of branches against skin get juxtaposed with: “Cotton in my hair/ Sugar all round my neck”
Likewise, “Catharsis” begins with a stunning image. Cassamajor zooms in on a set of hands and then zooms out for the surprise, as a filmmaker might.
Aged and callous hands
Unfold
Reveal fingers
Holding onto
Blood red petals.
Without meaning to, Cassamajor’s other interests mirror and support her study of poetry. The films she admires most are visual poems, which she didn’t notice until we talked about them in detail. When she raves about the aspects of the films she adores, and I observe that her favorite aspects were image, movement, function, and metaphor. Of what more would a poet speak?
“I watched Burial of Kojo by Blitz the Ambassador last year. In his film, there wasn’t this need to have such dramatic action or expansive dialogue. Just the beauty of it, of the imagery in his film, and the metaphors that those images sought to bring to life. That really resonated with me.” This film, like her poems, is sparse on dialogue and hurried action and the camera lens focuses more on what is better understood as observed. Both poet and filmmaker seek to capture the beauty in existence.
“I asked him, ‘What’s your best or favorite piece that you’ve created or shot?’ And her very matter-of-factly, very bluntly, said, ‘Honestly, if you’ve produced your favorite work, it means you’re ready to die. Because you can’t get any better.”
Cassamajor also draws inspiration from photographer Chester Higgins, Jr., whom she got to interview during a summer in New York. His advice to her spurred her on the writer’s path. “I asked him, ‘What’s your best or favorite piece that you’ve created or shot?’ And her very matter-of-factly, very bluntly, said, ‘Honestly, if you’ve produced your favorite work, it means you’re ready to die. Because you can’t get any better.”
The revelation rocked her.
“I felt like there was so much truth to that. I always kind of knew I’d be writing poetry for the rest of my life, but it hit [me] that there’s never going to be a point where you’ve made your favorite work. And thank God! That’s a good thing.”
I asked her to reflect more on how that revelation changed her art or the way she approached her craft. “It brought me rest, if that makes sense. I know poetry and who-Kailande-is are intertwined. There was no way to separate that, and there was never any desire to separate that. [The conversation] made me think about the way poetry helps other people, and when you create something, yes, you made it, but it’s no longer yours after that. . .our role is to share it. In the long term, I want to say I’ve shared more than I’ve withheld.”
As this issue marks Kailande Cassamajor’s third publication with A Gathering Together, we are grateful to be one of the many vehicles through which her words reach ready ears. We hope our readers enjoy these poems as much as we do, and we look forward to seeing more from this bright young poet in the future.