Note: This transcription is edited to facilitate the reading experience. To see every word uttered in this recording, please click the “Transcript” button for captioning you can follow :)
Tariq Thompson: It was an oral tradition first, and you can tell when a poem was written only on the page and then it’s arriving to air for the first time and it’s like, “I don’t know how to walk, I don’t know…”
DeeSoul Carson: Oh my goodness. I just had a whole — ugh, if you could have heard me in the car. It’s becoming so clear to me, especially recently, how much poets — especially folks who only go through the MFA or things like that — how deeply we need a class on poetry in the oral tradition. I’m like, I need a class where you’re forced to recite a poem…
DC: Hellooooo, poets of the internet! I’m DeeSoul Carson, and this is O, Word?, the podcast interested in craft, poets, their obsessions, and the things that keep them writing. Today’s episode is O, Prosody! I’m here today with my friend, Tariq Thompson.
Tariq Thompson is a poet and educator from Memphis, Tennessee. He’s the author of the chapbook LONE LILY (from Sunset Press, 2021). His poetry has appeared in the American Poetry Review, The Adroit Journal, Split Lip Magazine and elsewhere. Thompson was a finalist for a 2023 Ruth Lilly and Dorothy Sargent Rosenberg Fellowship. He holds an MFA in poetry from New York University. You can find more of his work at tariqthompson.com.
Tariq, hello!
TT: Hello!
DC: How’s your day going?
TT: It is going all right. I ate good this morning. The Daylight Savings Time definitely whooped my ass though, so, a little sleepy.
DC: Yes. As we talk on this Daylight savings day, I have just returned from AWP, which, if anyone here is a usual listener, I might sound a little slower than usual ‘cause I am rebooting from a long and beautiful AWP conference. We got to throw ass in Lucille Clifton’s home.
TT: I saw, yeah.
DC: Definitely kind of a spiritual experience. Like we were in her home. Her daughter, Sydney, who is just like this gorgeous being, was doing a little welcome for us, and at the end of the welcome, she started reciting “won’t you celebrate with me?” and all of the poets in the room, the majority Black room, started reciting the poem with her, and we all did those final lines together. And it was just like, “wow, this is what it’s all about.” Like the community that’s being created in this room. It’s what it’s all about.
And then a couple people walked into the room who did not look just like us and asked whose house it was, and that kind of broke the immersion, but …nonetheless, it was a beautiful time, a tiring time. But now I’m back and super excited to be talking to you. You are one of my favorite poets. I think you know this, but I love telling you anyway. I just love everything that you do with language, I love your attention to sound, and rhythm, and movement.
I’m really excited to talk to you about all those things today, but you know, this being O, Word?, we love this being kind of a craft-teaching podcast, and this episode being about prosody, I would love it if you could tell us in your own words what prosody is.
TT: Yeah. And thank you, also, for having me on the podcast. I really appreciate it. We get to speak all the time more casually, so it’s really nice to be able to talk about poems and, I guess, share with other folks. I consider prosody as a poem’s dance throughout the body.
DC: A poem’s dance… say more about that dance, or how do you interpret that dance when you go about writing?
TT: Yeah. I was thinking about this earlier today. I think about poems as a kind of physics. I teach this to my students as well, that instead of thinking of a poem as “bad” or “good,” I invite them to consider a poem as “strong” or “weak” and that they are like physical forces in the world.
So, when I say that, I’ve read one of your poems, right, DeeSoul, and I’ve been moved, I really mean that I started in one place, I arrived to the poem in one emotional state, and by the end of the poem, I’m somewhere on the other side of the room emotionally. And I assume for myself that I danced there, if it was a really strong poem.
I think about muscularity. I know we’ve talked a bit about a Carl Phillips essay related to that, but, how a poem kind of feels in the mouth, in the body, the surprises within that. And I think after reading a poem, also, the quiet that comes afterwards. Like, if a poem is really moving in a way that stays with me, I miss it after I finish the poem.
Does that make sense?
DC: It does. It does. And I’m definitely gonna come back to that Carl Phillips essay, ‘cause I know that’s one that’s important to you. I love what you’re saying there about the physics of it, and even “strong” and “weak” being distinct from “good” and “bad.” And how can maybe even a good poem be maybe a less strong poem, and what are the different ways that we quantify that, or measure that?
I also love what you’re saying here about the soundscape. Like the idea of quiet, and how quiet fills a room. And, I think especially with poets who play with sound and the relation between language and the mouth and things like that, the silence becomes its own actor in that — especially, I know you’re someone who thinks about and appreciates hip hop as an art form — so thinking about the way that space happens within like one’s “flow,” you know, how does that become a part of the line? As someone who appreciates hip hop, I would love to hear more about how you see that influencing your work as a writer.
TT: Word. Thank you. Yeah, hip hop, I mean, I love it. Oftentimes I wish that I was a rapper, or maybe a successful rapper. But alas, I’m a poet, which is just as good. I’m a very musical person. Folks that know me or have lived with me, as you have, can attest to all the times that I’m kind of humming or freestyling or just kind of singing, whatever, as I’m doing things.
What’s coming to mind right now actually is when I was younger, I would go over [to] my cousin’s house while my mom worked, and we would have to do the dishes, and it was always a slog and we’re like, “oh, we don’t wanna do the dishes.” And so, we started memorizing Maya Angelou’s “I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings”1 and singing it to one another as we washed the dishes. So, I would do one verse and he would do the other. And even still, like to this day, I can, think I can, still do it:
The caged bird sings
with a fearful trill
of things unknown
but longed for still
We’d just be scrubbing away, singing the poems to one another. So, in terms of music generally, that’s how important it is to me, and with hip hop, it just feels like magic. I’m continually impressed by the way that rappers are able to wield language, both in a way that is sonically pleasing or even if it’s not sonically pleasing, just sonically moving, I’ll say.
The reason I said even if it’s not sonically pleasing is, I was thinking about Lamar’s “u.” That’s a very difficult listen. It’s one of my favorite songs by him, but there’s a cacophony in there that makes it difficult to listen to, on top of the subject matter. There are ways that a poem or a song can go against the grain of what we think is conventionally, sonically pleasing, and still have a profound effect of still [communicating] what the rapper or the poet intends.
TT: The reading of a poem is really, really important to me. And is, I guess in some senses, the most important part, I think? At least, that’s where I derive the most pleasure from poetry, the reading of it and the listening of it. I’m thinking of Kaveh [Akbar], who rocks on the balls of his feet as he reads. And another example of the poem dancing through the body, like he cannot help it, it is coming up through his feet. I really do appreciate when poets have considered what a poem is like when it’s living in air.
DC: I need a class where you’re forced to go to a slam. I need a class where you’re forced to get judged by strangers on how you deliver, because it’s obvious to me you didn’t write this with someone intending it to read it out loud. It looks great on the page. Terrific, beautiful on the page. But when it gets out into the air, it dies.
If we’re thinking about the poems as a conservatory for words, at some point we have to let those words go and live in the world. If those words are let out into the wild and they get into the world and they die, then we have not done our jobs as good conservationists of language. And so thinking about, like, how do we nurture those words? How do we nurture the sound?
Every syllable matters, especially in rapping, right? Hip hop, that’s what makes it so, like, if we want to talk about true inheritors of poetic tradition, in no place does iambic pentameter or anything otherwise matter than 16 bars. If you fuck up the flow, people are gonna let you know. There’s something really, deeply connected to tradition in the hip hop verse.
Growing up and listening to hip hop I think also imbues a certain kind of confidence in one’s ability to — and I say the same thing about growing up and doing slam — it imbues a certain kind of confidence in the work because if you don’t, that’s what your peers have. And so if you wanna measure up to your peers even, the people that you love, you have to kind of take on, even if you don’t feel it, sometimes you gotta put on a persona of confidence.
DC: I also love hearing what you’re saying about you and your cousin and “How the Caged Bird Sings,” and that act of recitation. I’m wondering if that act of reciting a poem, you feel, has [been] something that has gone on even as you go on to do your own work, the poem living in your head and then becoming some sort of music, [is] that something that resonates with you with your other writing?
TT: It does. A lot of times, a line will — and I think this is true of a lot of poets — a line will come into my head and at times it feels like… magic’s not the right word, but like a bird suddenly appearing in your mind, and it just, it’s there and the bird has music and you’re like, I gotta get this bird on the page somehow. And then it moves on from there. I think that having experienced poems living within me definitely has made it … I won’t say easier to be a poet, but more fruitful. I feel like I am being truer to myself into the language.
DC: Thinking more about this music and this idea of sound: in your writing process, what order of power would you say that sound lives in? Like, how does it govern your approach to poetry? How important is it to you in all the things that you’re considering when you’re crafting a poem?
TT: I would say that sound reigns supreme, and sometimes that’s to my detriment.
DC: Interesting.
TT: There have been many times where I have dug a hole for myself because I was really following the sound; it wasn’t until revision later that I was able to excavate more of the meaning that needed to be there. But I always, I think, lead with sound, because it just feels most natural and most exciting for me. A lot of times, I’ll begin with a free write, for example, and it’ll be based on this kind of associative sound play.
For example, I’ll try and write just without really thinking too much and just listening. So a lot of my free writes, if you look at it, the first part of it doesn’t make any sense, ‘cause it’s just words that are kind of similar sounding or have some sort of sonic connection. Then, as I’m warming up more, there will be more distance between those words that have stronger sonic connections. It’s like, if I’m swinging from word to word at the start, there are lots of small, quick swings, and as I get more comfortable and more meaning arrives to the work, the swings take a longer time between one another, but the swing is still felt.
As an example, if I were to start with the word conundrum, I might associate that word in three different ways. I could go with drum and the next word would be like drumstick. I could go with nun, and the next word is nunchuck, literally just n-o-n-e, none. Or I could go with con, right? And the next word is convict. And just going and going. Conundrum. Convict. Victoria. Orpheus. Just swinging from word to word.
It helps me, because it opens up my language, for one. Whenever I do this, I am encountering words that I know… they are in my body, they’re in my head, but I have not pulled them out as often in everyday conversation or maybe even in my writing recently. And that association reminds me that I have a much wider and more varied vocabulary to pull from for my poems, which is huge. ‘Cause there’s sometimes when I’m looking at a page and I’m like, “Man, I only know like 30 words.”
DC: Which is crazy, ‘cause you are one of the most well-versed niggas that I know.
TT: Thank you. I like being a versed nigga, so I appreciate that.
DC: That’s great. I was gonna ask you —because we were talking about hip hop and thinking about the joys of clever word play— I was gonna ask you how you find the word play and the sonic association guiding the work? So that’s really great, and any exercises that you had doing it, but I love that and that’s probably something I could do more.
I definitely lean on, I try to lean on sound, like I love a good alliteration to guide the rhythm of the work. When I see it in your poems, I think I’m always really struck by the clever sonic freedom of the work. It can maybe be a little bit contradicting, like that tight association does create some sort of sonic freedom. Like, I feel free saying it because the words are coming so naturally in my mouth, but I am thinking of your birthday sonnets.
And for anyone who’s listening and is not already familiar with Tariq’s work, Tariq shares a birthday with 20 incredible people. And then his parents also share birthdays with incredible people. I was recently teaching your poem, “On Their Birthday, Suge Knight & My Daddy Discuss Forgiveness,” and the interesting ways that 1) as “after” poems, which I define as really most poems of direct inspiration, it does not tell us who specifically the speaker is, or rather, there is a melding of voices between your daddy and Suge Knight, or in, your other poems, like you and Lorraine Hansberry. And just thinking about the way, not only that you’re in there, there’s two voices kind of now layering on top of each other, but also even the way that the rhythm and that sonic association is maintained even when you’re using the words from maybe a specific kind of…
TT: Maybe vernacular or…
DC: That’s exactly the word I’m looking for, a specific kind of vernacular, and I’m sure there’s something you’re considering there, ‘cause you’re very thoughtful about the play between those. But I think maybe if I was to phrase this as a question: When you’re going about those poems specifically, where you’re thinking about the vernaculars of other folks and how they live, how does that factor into those sonic considerations?
TT: Yeah. And thank you for the attentiveness to the work, I really appreciate it. I mean, everyone has their own natural rhythm, and if you are attentive to other folks and you listen to how they speak or how they’re writing it, it becomes more apparent. I actually, I wanna shout out Tangie Mitchell.
We were at a bookstore recently, and she was telling this story about her mom and her grandma, and she switched into this impersonation of them, ‘cause she was talking about a conversation that they were having. And I was just so struck by the specificity and clarity in imitating them. I was like, you love them so deep, and you know them so well that their words, their sound, their rhythms can come out of your mouth and it feels true. I was floored. And it’s apparent in her work too.
DC: And so many black women poets, specifically, the way that lives in, like… I talk about Remica Bingham-Risher all the time, and I will continue to, honestly, I’m not even sorry about it. But just thinking about the way that the words in Room Swept Home live. I’m thinking about Nicole Sealey, who only does certain, you know, she doesn’t do as much direct quotation, but thinking about when she talks about her mother or things like that, the way the words live in her body. What being known by someone does to the work, the reception of the work, like, I can see when someone has paid deep attention to a thing, or has deep care for a thing and that charges the attention to the work.
Not a black woman, but Keith S. Wilson has one of my favorite poems, in defense of Pigeons2 [sic]. And, it’s just once again, like, the kind of attention that is given to a thing and the way it changes the energy of the poem. It changes the sound of a poem. I’d also think, like, the rhythm and wordplay — maybe not directly or consciously — but there’s a subconscious euphony that happens. It’s really pleasing to us, and something about the way that it’s pleasing goes back to that sense of attention. You cared about this thing enough to give proper form and proper weight in the air.
DC: I want to go back to the essay you mentioned earlier from Carl Phillips. For those who haven’t read the essay, it’s called “Muscularity and Eros: On Syntax” by Carl Phillips. And in the essay, Phillips talks about the patterning of language that makes a poem, saying that the poem is “a bodily thing.” And that, like our bodies, it moves as a result of unseen mechanisms. So, just as the body moves from joints and tendons, the poem moves with volta and enjambs and rhymes. I’m wondering for you, Tariq, how does poetry become an embodied thing for you, and how do you find yourself patterning language?
TT: Thank you. I love this essay so much. I think it’s one of my favorite essays on poetry. It really has informed the way that I think about my work and the works of others. Once you start considering poems as bodies and start looking for those tendons and joints,and those patterns especially, it opens up so much. I just wanna say, I really invite folks to use color if they can.
We’ve been in class together, so you’ve seen this a bit, but I love to take a bunch of highlighters and kind of make up my own key for myself. If I see a particular image popping up a bunch, or a particular sound, or even a kind of sound, like harsh sounds versus softer sounds or sounds that require this certain movement of the mouth versus this other one.
Thinking about poems as bodies and how that relates to my own work and my own process… actually, what I kind of just referenced is the way that a poem or a line feels in the mouth, I think is what I’m thinking about often, whether I’m in revision or I’m in workshop with someone, or even if I’m just at a reading and something really moves me and I’m, like, rolling it over in my mind and in my mouth.
As an example, or kind of two examples, there’s a Suge Knight poem that you mentioned earlier. I was reflecting on this, because every time I read this poem, there’s a particular moment that always almost makes me buckle. When I was younger, I didn’t think about why as much, like I thought about it in terms of meaning, but I didn’t think about it in terms of, the mechanics of it as much, but the moment in the poem, the line is:
I caved & loved him. I left.
And the reason that I think that moves me, is because we have the, the V sound, loved, and then we get left; it’s like a similar movement, but it’s so much softer. And so that breaking of that pattern, I think, is what creates the energy or the heat in that moment. And then, talking again about Karisma, who is incredible, there’s a poem in her debut titled, “What’s It Like Escaping Something Trying to Kill You?” And the final line is:
Such sororal horror.
And that’s a line that lives in my head rent free. I think it’s also about the way that the mouth moves, ‘cause when you say it, your lips and teeth only meet at the very beginning:
Such sororal horror.
So that shhhh, chh. But the rest of that line, oral horror, such sororal horror, like you’re just, your mouth is just open, that sound around. And it’s haunting. You feel a bit disturbed, but also intrigued and it’s just, it’s masterful.
I think about things like that in terms of the tendons and the joints. And then there are two other things I was thinking about. Carl Phillips himself — Mr. Syntax — there was an exercise that you and I both had to do in Monica Youn’s class, think it was our, like a year or two ago. We had to write a poem that was just one long sentence that had a lot of twists and I think the poem we were reading was like, “Wherefore Less Lonely.” And when we were first given that assignment, I was like, “I don’t know how I’m supposed to get anywhere near what this man does with syntax,” and like the twists and turns, the surprises. So what I ended up doing, I sat in the library and I think I had like a piece of a sentence that I wanted to kind of play around with, and I just wrote it over and over.
I would write it on one line and I would write it again, and another part of the sentence would kind of come to me. I would write it again, and I’d realize that that comma I put there actually needed to be an em dash, or maybe a colon. And I would write it again. And I think I wrote through a third of my Moleskine, just that one sentence that kept growing and the turns kept changing.
It felt true to what Carl Phillips was talking about in the essay, like, literally my hands were writing this poem over and over and over and I could feel when something needed a tweak or where something was catching in just the wrong way.
I think that’s an example of where the poem is also living in other parts of the body, right? Not just the mouth. I think sometimes, too, I can get stuck, right? Even though I like to be led by sound, sometimes I can get stuck in the same place. And so, speaking of the Grace Jones sonnet, that poem, I had done, I had done all the emotional research3, right? I’d watched all the interviews, taken all my notes, listened to all the songs. I felt… the feeling was there. I knew what I wanted to say. Not exactly, but in terms of direction, right? But the music was not there, which felt really ironic.
So what I did — Terrance Hayes is one of the biggest influences on my work, specifically, American Sonnets For My Past And Future Assassin — to kind of get out of that rut, I sat down at my desk, which is actually literally where you are sitting right now, and I read American Sonnets [for My Past And Future Assassin] cover to cover, out loud, in one sitting. I went through each poem and once I got to the end, I put it down and then I wrote. And ‘cause those poems were dancing in my body for… I think it took me like an hour and a half to read the entire thing, I could hear everything. And I wrote that poem in one sitting —
DC: Damn.
TT: — Which does not happen very often, but I was really shocked by how helpful it was to just read aloud for an extended period of time and what that could unlock. So, the last thing I guess I’ll say about this is, I’m also a syllable counter. Not to the point that I’m a master of Iambic pentameter, I still very much struggle with that actually , but I think a part of the rhythm, or thinking about how a poem comes out of the mouth, is like, if it feels like too much is trying to get out at once.
So as I’m writing the sonnets or any of the other poems, I’ll just count. And with the sonnets in particular, nowadays, I have a stricter approach to it where I’ll —if you look at the later ones like Grace Jones, or there’s a forthcoming with Kevin Garnet, you’ll see that for the most part, the lines are about like nine to 12, syllables, but in the earlier poems, especially Malcolm X.
Malcolm X has a fat ass. Both — that’s not a sentence I thought I would say. [laughs] That poem… you know what? He probably did too. He was fine.
DC: And was, yep.
TT: But that poem is so big towards the end. You can tell that I was a younger poet that had a lot to say, and I don’t think that having a lot to say or it growing towards the end is a bad thing, necessarily. It is more so acknowledging the difference of what being more attentive to the syllables affords me. I think by the beginning of that poem, it kind of sticks to that nine to 12 ish. But by the end of the poem it’s 16, 17 syllables and you can hear it.
And so if I were to read that poem and then immediately follow up with Grace Jones or Kevin Garnet, the tightness and the specificity and the surety in those later poems, I think, is much more apparent because the sound is being attended to more closely. It’s a tighter dance.
DC: Yeah. I recently wrote my own birthday sonnet, thinking about yours, and I had a similar issue where I was writing it and I realized my sonnet was becoming unwieldy. I looked back at your sonnets and I realized how tight those, or how — tight’s not the right word, or maybe it is — but you know, the syllable count was consistent.
There was a consistent length of that breath, and me realizing like, oh, the reason why this sonnet feels like it’s doing too much is because it is doing too much. Like, it’s too much language at once, and I have to allow the lines of the sonnet to breathe a little bit more. And so then I went back and I edited it and I was like, okay, this is a better Thompsian sonnet.
We could talk about your work all day, and the very clear attention you give to work. And dear listeners, if you ever have a chance to see it in action, Tariq does the most incredible close reads. It always was a joy to have you present in class in the middle of some other fuck ass presentations, because it was always so clear…
I was talking with — and this is no shade to anyone in our MFA program — but I was talking with someone earlier about the rigor that is or isn’t required of us sometimes in the classrooms, and maybe that’s at other MFAs too, just like, what [is] the MFA actually asking of us? And what I really appreciated about you as a peer is that you always brought your own rigor. Like, the bar was low. Some people limboed beneath that bar. And you always set the bar so much higher, and I think it inspired a better poetic landscape in the classroom.
Like, it made me just want niggas to like really read the stuff that they were reading, and to give it the proper attention and it deserved. ‘Cause you showed us that [in] any poem, there’s something to excavate. There’s always something to be gained listening — especially from you, talk about a poem — and your close reads.
But with that, I think I will thank you for your time, Tariq. It’s been so wonderful having this conversation with you, and I would love [it] if you could close this out by reading your own work that showcases prosody.
TT: Absolutely.
YOU LOOK JUST LIKE THE BASTARD
My daddy, all honey & heartthrob, smooth rain slid slick down panes of glass. My daddy bladed shade, all wicked glint & stride. My daddy pleads & weathers. My daddy a rage of absence, air viscous, all cuss words & steel. My daddy myth & muster. My daddy Mister Silence. My daddy missed suppers. My daddy’s silos & silos of loss. My daddy real. All moonscape & scar. My daddy’s freckled badness. His saccharine bass. So, my strawberry nose.
Copyright © 2025 by Tariq Thompson. Originally published in Split Lip Magazine.
Used with permission of the author.
DC: Thank you all for listening to this episode of the O, Word? Podcast, produced by me, DeeSoul Carson. If you are interested in this topic, I’ve added some folks recommended by our guests in the Substack post. The music for O,Word? is provided by Esoteric Creations. Check them out on Spotify.
Our guest, Tariq, offers the following prompts:
Write a poem that uses disruptive punctuation (like in Kaveh Akbar’s “Pilgrim Bell”)
OR
Write a poem that meditates on a letter by overusing alliteration (like in sam sax’s “LISP”)
Both example poems can be found in the episode transcript. Until next time, thanks for listening.
If you’re interested in prosody, Tariq recommends:
“Carolina Tryptich” by Tangie Mitchell
“Triptych” by Diana Khoi Nguyen
“Feeling Fucked Up” by Etheridge Knight
“Wigphrastic”’ by Terrance Hayes
“Motown Crown” by Patricia Smith
“Kink” by Imani Davis
“Those Winter Sundays” by Robert Hayden
“LISP” by Sam Sax
“Pilgrim Bell [How long can you speak]” by Kaveh Akbar
Dear reader, it was not until I was editing this episode that I realized the poem itself is just called “Caged Bird.”
My mistake. The poem is actually called “I Find Myself Defending Pigeons.” Sorry, Keith!
“Emotional research” was brought up in a portion of this conversation that was edited out. This came from Karisma Price talking about the work of attention to the subject/person you’re writing about.
