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DeeSoul Carson: Every time I see it, my brain wants to think “Conversion”, so I’m just gonna do the whole thing over again.
Remica Bingham-Risher: I appreciate you, that’s a completely different title, by the way, so…
DC: Right! It would be something different
RBR: You know what I mean? It could work, but it’s not what I’m doing over there.
DC: Right, it’s not… and that’s not what you meant when you titled it.
RBR: That’s right!
DC: So I’m gonna try that again.
[Intro Music Plays]
DC: Hello, poets of the internet! I’m DeeSoul Carson, and this is e·pon·y·mous, a segment of the O, Word? Podcast that is interested in poets, their collections, and title poems, and how they find their ways into our hands. Today’s episode is on Room Swept Home by Remica Bingham-Risher.
Remica Bingham-Risher is a Cave Canem Fellow and faculty member, an Affrilacian poet, and a member of the Wintergreen Woman Writers Collective.
She is the author of Conversion (Lotus, 2006), winner of the Naomi Long Madgett Poetry Award, What We Ask of Flesh (Etruscan, 2013), and Starlight & Error (2017), winner of the Diode Editions Book Award.
Her memoir, Soul Culture: Black Poets, Books, and Questions That Grew Me Up (2022), was published by Beacon Press. Her newest book, Room Swept Home (Wesleyan University Press, 2024) , won the LA Times Book Prize.
Remica, hello!
RBR: Hey! I’m excited to be here!
DC: I’m so excited to have you! Thank you so much for, you know, accepting my invitation.
RBR: Oh, please. I mean, really, I was super excited, and I just… I have to say on record, you read all those lovely accolades, but we haven’t spoken since you won a pretty large prize. Is that… the case?
DC (laughing): Hahaha, yes. That is the case, yeah.
RBR: Am I remembering that correctly? And that prize was?
DC: The Ruth Lily. That’s my biggest thing, yeah.
RBR: That’s what I was talking about! Is there something else? Well, listen, break the news.
DC: No, no, Ruth Lily is definitely the biggest one since then.
RBR That’s right! Amazing! Congratulations, poet!
DC: Thank you so much, I appreciate it. Yeah, I’ve been trying to keep the work going. I try to keep it fueled, but, I keep myself fueled by reading poets like you, so it keeps me going. I mean, I’ve been super, enthralled by Room Swept Home ever since you talked about it at, AWP1, and so I… it’s kind of like one of those books where I’m like, oh, I kind of need everyone to read this.
Because you’re doing so much cool stuff in this book, and it’s such a deeply… Well, I’m… from what I’m reading, it’s a deeply personal book. I mean, I know you have so much of your… I try not to make assumptions, but I think the whole conceit of the book is…
RBR: No, but you would be correct in that assumption, yes. Yes, absolutely. It’s a book about my grandmother, so it’s deeply personal in kind of every way, and that puts a different spin on things.
DC: Yeah, I’m sure, and there’s so much work in the archive that I want to talk about later, about what you’re doing, but first, the first thing I want to talk about is your title poem, “Room Swept Home.”
It’s this nice, almost quiet ghazal that comes at the end of the collection, which I thought was really interesting. And I was wondering if you can maybe just talk a little bit more about the book’s placement and the form for it.
RBR: Absolutely. I mean, it’s so interesting. Even though it’s a really simple poem, a lot of people miss that it’s a ghazal, so I’m so glad that you got that right off the bat. There’s so many different forms in this work. You know, I don’t know if I think of myself as a formalist, but I am a poet who loves form. And so, interestingly enough, “Room Swept Home” is the first, it’s the oldest poem in this collection.
DC: Oh, wow.
RBR: When I wrote the poem, though, I had no idea that this would be the collection. I was really, just kind of thinking about all the things that my aunts had taught me, and particularly an aunt that this book is dedicated to, my aunt Evelyn, who is the child of Mary, when we start talking about the book, but this is the child, her first child that she had, and she was sent to the asylum shortly after.
But my aunt Evelyn, you know, we… listen, we’ve been a lot of things, but rich ain’t one of them, so we’ve been broke for a long time. And I remember going to her house as a teenager and seeing her sweep the dirt on her front porch, sweep lines in the dirt. She didn’t have nothing else, but she was gonna keep it clean, right?
DC: Yeah.
RBR: And so that kind of shows up as part of Room Swept Home, and it just reminded me, like, whatever we have, you know, these women, particularly these matriarchs in the family, tell me, you know, you care for what you have, no matter what it is, right? And you keep it up as best you can.
And particularly, you know, your faith, all the things surrounding, keep it up as best you can. And so that’s where the idea for that poem came from, and all of the imagery is physical imagery from Norfolk, Virginia, where I was just moving at the time of where my aunts lived, and where a lot of the things in the book take place. So I was getting used to the space. And, trying to remind myself of all the things they wouldn’t let me forget, and that’s how the poem emerged. And strangely, I started calling the book Room Swept Home long before I ever knew, really, what it was.
DC: Nice. Yeah, one of my next questions was going to be if the name for the collection, like, immediately jumped out of you, or is it something you kind of rediscovered when you were going back through your poems?
RBR: No, in my mind, because I had written that poem, and I knew in my mind it was kind of about what these women gave me, when I started writing these poems about my two grandmothers. That whole endeavor was about what these women gave me. So, there was already a connection there, but it’s strange for me. Titles are not easy. Especially titles of manuscripts, my goodness.
But there was… it really… and there was something about the sound and the wordplay that happened with these kind of three one-syllable words pushing up against each other, but also the double entendre that happens when we’re talking about, keeping something clean and then sweeping something under the rug, you know,
DC: Yeah.
RBR: what folks don’t know, right? So it was all of those things at the same time, and I think that’s why it stuck.
DC: I mean that captures the spirit of the collection so well, so I appreciate you elaborating on that. It also makes me think of my grandmother, who lives in East Oakland. And this is a woman that goes out, I’m not gonna say every day, but very quite often to go sweep the street. She’ll sweep the sidewalk, she’ll sweep the street…
RBR: …And go all the way down past her path on the other...
DC: Yeah, and I would… for the longest time, I was just like, “Granny, why are you sweeping the street?” And what my grandmother would say was, you know, “Just because we live in the ghetto don’t mean we gotta look like it.”
RBR: Come on! Listen!
DC: Yeah, and she kept that place clean, and it was so, I love, I mean, as… I think another reason I was gravitated toward this book is I love grandmothers. I love the kind of wisdom that they have, and I love my grandmother specifically. She’s a really great woman. The other interesting thing about my grandmother that I always think about, she grows a cotton plant on her fence. And I remember… that’s another thing about my grandmother I just remember being so struck by, you know? I was… and I was like, why…
RBR: Yeah, why?
DC: Why would you grow a cotton plant?
RBR: Why are you growing bulbs of cotton, right? But she’s like “Listen, it’s mine.”
DC: And, and you know what, her answer really was, “because I have the seeds and I know how to do it.”2
RBR: That’s right!
DC: And I was like, wow, how simple that is. She could take care of a thing, and she did.
[Transitional Music Plays]
DC: Something else that really interests me about this collection is there’s an emphasis on both archival work and the work of trans-generational empathy, if we can call it that.
RBR: Yeah.
DC: And so you’re writing these poems from the viewpoints or, you know, the time around these two different women in your family tree, and the way their stories parallel and show up in the book is so really well done. And so before I get too far into it, I was wondering if you could just, like, explain a little bit more about the book’s background and the women who bookmarked these sections, especially for people who haven’t had the chance to read it yet.
RBR: Sure, thank you for all those kind words about the book and its construction, too, because that’s, you know, a different thing. The poems are one thing, the makeup is another. And so, you know, my two grandmothers of mine, my third great-grandmother, paternal, Minnie Fowlkes, and my maternal grandmother, Mary Knight, were both in Petersburg, Virginia, within one mile of each other in 1941. They didn’t know each other, these families weren’t connected, and when I found out that they were within one mile of each other, it was just a little bit too much for my poet heart to tell.
DC: Yes.
RBR: Those kind of “coincidences,” and you see I’m putting quotes around them, because whether they are or not, those things you don’t walk away from as a poet. You find out the why, the how, and then where that leads us, right? And so, I wanted to write Minnie’s story. Minnie was in Petersburg because she had lived there most of her life, in Chesterfield County. She was born enslaved in 1859, and was interviewed for the WPA Slave Narratives in 1937, and stayed in Petersburg until she passed away in 1945.
My maternal grandmother, Mary Knight, was on the opposite end of her life, very young when she was in Petersburg. She was only 18 years old. She had just birthed her first child. And postpartum was an ongoing mystery then, so she was taken to the Central Lunatic Asylum for the Negro Insane, which was in Petersburg in 1941, 9 days after she had birthed her first child.
So that’s how they ended up being only within a mile of each other. Minnie lived only about a mile away from the path to the asylum, which is now Central State Hospital, still in existence. And so I wrote their two stories, because they lived fairly ordinary lives with extraordinary circumstances. So I wrote Minnie’s section, Mary’s section, and then kind of wrote through the historical and personal that leads us to today.
DC: Right, and I mean, that’s the strength of the archive, right, is we get to weave those things in, like, the personal… our personal, daily lives are not exempt from history.
RBR: Oh, no.
DC: It’s really wonderful, I mean, getting to see this work, and there’s this collapsing of that distance, of that mile, but there’s also this great expansion, right? And it’s this expansion through history, since we have this feeling that time and space are not, they’re not finite, right? Especially in the work of poetry. Like, the beautiful work of this… of this book is that those circumstances and those things that we’re talking about in 1941, they come back to… to speak to us now, in 2025, however we may need to receive them. So I thought that was… that was really wonderful.
What was the experience for you writing from the place of these two women? I don’t know your own personal relationship to these grandmothers beforehand, but just what was the experience of writing from this place?
RBR: Yeah, so, you know, I decided early on that these were going to be persona poems for the most part, so I would write them in the voices of both my grandmothers, and Minnie, of course, passed away in 1945, so I, you know, came about 40 years after Minnie had already left this earth. But my paternal grandmother, the other person that the book is dedicated to, is still alive, Shirley Bingham, up in New Jersey. She will be listening to this…
DC: Hey Shirley!
RBR: She makes sure she’s on it. Yes, hey, Nana! And Minnie was her great-grandmother. She was born in Minnie’s bed. She remembered Minnie from the time that she was, like, 5 or 6. So she became my intercessor in many ways, for Minnie. My other grandmother, Mary Knight, I was holding her hand when she passed away in 2006, so, these were, you know, this was a grandmother that I was deeply close to.
I’m the 15th of 15 grandchildren. My mother’s the youngest child of hers, so we were… we were extremely close. So her voice was a whole lot easier for me to capture, because I knew it, and I still hear it all the doggone time.
But that did not make it an easy path to write the voices. Because, like you said, I love, I love… no one has talked about, you know, kind of the expansion of the mile beyond that space. That was a beautiful way to put that, DeeSoul. And so what you don’t think about, is you’re doing, certainly historical work. I’m doing archival research, and that research, for lack of a better term, is very cold, right?
DC: Yeah.
RBR: It’s, you know, you’re looking at ledgers, you’re looking at text, you’re looking at microfiche, if anybody remembers microfiche3. You’re looking at all of these different things that are absolutely… the person is left out of those things. And when you try to bring those things to voice, especially things like children passing and the difficulties that they had to recall in their lives, and then you’re doing it in their voice. I have never cried so much writing a book in all my life, right? Because you, you… absolutely start to embody some of the trauma that they had to endure. And it teaches you a lot about yourself.
But also, you know, I think one of the things that it reminded me of very early on, as I wrote these very difficult poems, was that a book like this also has to be filled with beauty inside and out, because I knew it had to start in trauma, there was no way around it, but we were gonna end, with them living out their 84 years — both lived to 84 — and teaching us how to be happy despite. So that was, you know, kind of the goal of the collection overall.
DC: It makes me think of the work of witness, right? The work of these persona poems. There was a long time where I had this moral dilemma of thinking about how to approach poems about other people, people that I love, or people within the Black community, because I had felt that I got to a point where it was wrong of me only to write about the bad things that had happened to us, right? Or that were happening to us, right? And I wasn’t doing the proper work of honoring the people who came before us by honoring the lives they lived, and how they had them, and how we live happily in this world despite the things that happened to us, so I really appreciate you talking about that. The need for both, right? It’s not just about these things that we went through, but also how we survived them, right? And how we get through them.
[Transitional Music Plays]
DC: I wanna go back for a moment to this note on the archive that I know you’re working with so much in this book, and this book is so intentional about the sources that it’s including, and that it uses, and that’s used as inspiration for several of the poems. Why did you feel that those were foundational to the grounding or understanding of this work, right? I mean, as far as it being a very personal work, you know, the ones that you included that weren’t necessarily about your grandmothers. Why were they so grounding for this work?
RBR: I mean, there’s a number of reasons. Thank you for reading that closely. You know, I’m a poet that turns to the notes pages and the acknowledgements first.
DC: Same. Yeah.
RBR: I think, you know, now, I ain’t lumping you into my category, but I think it’s just because I’m nosy, and that’s fine. It gets me to know many things. But that for me is really important. Also, I love a bibliography. I knew… when I started embarking on this book, and I really… I have to give a shout out to Wesleyan University Press that published the book. Because, I knew I could trust them with this, with this text, because they had done some really brilliant work beforehand.
One of the books that comes before it, and that in many ways is a precursor to what Room Swept Home was able to do, is Honorée Fanonne Jeffers’ The Age of Phillis, which is a book of historical, archival research poems about Phillis Wheatley Peters, but also has a thick bibliography in the back of the book, and you don’t see that in most poetry.
And it was important for me to at least have a selected bibliography and to make meticulous notes about which part of the archive, whether they be personal, whether they be historical, whether the images in the book — there are family photographs, and historical photographs, so we needed to offset those. And I thought they all helped tell the story of these two women and of the country, right? Where it was in 1859 all the way to where it sits right now, you know, the muck of us in the moment.
And so it was really important for me to have all of those, notes and, archival pieces, there so people could trace their own past, right? Not just their own past, family-wise. I would love if people were doing ethnographic research and archival research and doing genealogical research, you know, that’s there too. But really, if you don’t believe me, go look.
DC: Yeah. I was so impressed by the bibliography, because like you were saying, I don’t think I had read a book before that had one, and I was like, oh, poets can be scholars! We can do this! Absolutely. I mean, it’s not that we’re not scholars, but it’s such a great reminder that there’s real work going in. Like, we’re not just, you know, it’s not just woo-woo-woo, we’re writing poetry.
RBR: And that’s what people think, they’re like, oh, you put some butterflies, and you talked about how they felt. Baby, no. What I’ve done is 10 years of work.
DC: Right, exactly, right. And it’s deep, intentional, focused work, right? Like, the ability to… the ability for you to distill these things that you’re reading. Because here’s the thing, people don’t want to read! People don’t want to go and read, you know?
RBR: My work at the university where I am now, it’s teaching faculty how to integrate critical reading, so if I was doing a book like this and not doing the critical reading work and not leaving a path, I’d just be a hypocrite. So I don’t want somebody to call me on my stuff.
DC: No, I mean, it’s such a… it’s such a good inspiration, cause we gotta… we have to be able to… the beauty of it is that it takes those things that other people aren’t reading, and it’s able to distill the feeling of it, right? And that’s the core of the poetry, is it distills the feeling, the anger, or the fear, or the life that’s there. It does that so well. In this book, you…
RBR: It contextualizes things.
DC: Yeah, exactly, yeah.
RBR: The archive does not do that, right?
DC: Right. And it’s up to us as the people putting it together to frame it.
RBR: Absolutely.
DC: Yeah. In this book, you go through a lot of different, forms, and I say forms broadly, I don’t just mean received or given forms, I also mean you do a lot of, kind of, novel things in this book. And so I was wondering, is there any form in here that you enjoyed doing the most, or if there was any that gave you a hard challenge?
RBR: Oh, what a good question. It might be the same. Listen. So, there is a crown of sonnets in the book
DC: Yes, the “Lose Your Mother…”
RBR: Yes, thank you. “Lose Your Mother,” talking about, like, brilliant folks, Saidiya Hartman, a brilliant writer, scholar, thinker, she… her book, Lose Your Mother, is about her tracing the path back to the continent, and thinking about, you know, what Blackness means in the diaspora, kind of large.
And, you know, I started reading it, and I was just so blown away that I just started highlighting, like, almost every line, I realized, this could be an epigraph, and so all of those titles, ended up being, epigraphs from Lose Your Mother, and kind of traced my path through my grandmother’s back to the present.
And I… absolutely did not want to write a crown of sonnets. I was real mad when that crown started appearing. I love the sonnet. It’s one of my favorite forms, it comes up in so many different ways here, but I was not enamored with writing so many of them. And then there’s another, it ends with Saidiya’s cento, which is made up of the line that I used… so it’s like a crown of sonnets plus one.
DC: Yeah.
RBR: And that… it took me so long to kind of write those poems, and to make those poems different from each other, and to build on, different parts of my understanding of who I was, and… how I was tracing my path through these women’s lives, but I think it just couldn’t have been any other way. There had to be real connective tissue there, and I think the form was the perfect space. For that work.
Now, was it hard? yep.
DC: I think when I read it initially, I think it was a… I thought it was a heroic sonnet, or a Heroic Crown, and I think it is still pretty close to that. Close, yeah. I’m not gonna discount it, because it’s still much harder than anything I’ve done. To write a collection of sonnets is daunting, and I think what’s interesting to me about these sonnets and what you did, is that they’re not all written the same.
RBR: Oh, no, yeah
DC: Like, you know, you have one in the beginning here that’s, like, a contrapuntal, the first part of that suite is a contrapuntal, you have ones that are in… in tercets, you have couplets, so even within this, this constraint of the 14 lines, there’s a lot of innovation within the sonnet, which is another really… and there’s one that’s, like, you know, it has these, it’s like, these mono stitches and couplets and things like that. There’s just a lot of interesting stuff happening with the form in this collection, or in this…
RBR: You gotta keep yourself interested once you start writing fourteen , you know, second straight sonnet, you’re like, okay, 14 lines, left justified. What else can we do? So yeah, so it becomes forms on forms on forms, yeah.
DC: It was great, it was great.
RBR: Thank you.
DC: What do you feel like the forms, or the expansiveness in the forms of this collection, allowed you to accomplish that you wouldn’t have been able to do otherwise?
RBR: Oh, yeah, I think about this all the time. I was just meeting with a graduate student this morning, who’s really into form right now, and translation in particular. I’m not on that boat, but we were talking about form, and I was talking about one of my teachers, Natasha Tretheway, who is a brilliant formalist, as we all know, not to mention the sonic crowns and Native Guard and beyond, but…you know, she… when I interviewed her years ago, we talked extensively about form, but she reminded me that form is a way that you can keep the emotional spillage from just taking over.
And of course she’s writing about losing her mother and all of these different things, right? So, I mean, things that could, if you let the tears start, they would never stop. That’s what she said once. And I… was just trying to figure out in this book, how I could keep from just banging people over the head with, “Man, you should have loved these women. You, you should have cared for these women.” And, and, and… I had to keep finding ways to rein myself in, right?
But to do it well, right? Like, a sonnet still gives you… poets know this, you know, we can do a whole lot with 14 structured lines, right? That still leaves me room for expansion beyond it, but doesn’t give me time, to kind of wail in the way that you might have wanted to emotionally. So I feel like form is a lovely box in many ways, and it really helps me rein in emotion, but be as precise as I possibly can in any given moment, and that’s the job of the poet to me. Beauty, one, but clarity first.
DC: I appreciate a poet’s commitment to clarity, because I… sometimes I need that.
RBR: Yeah. And those are the poems and poets that I like to read. I’m not saying that we can’t have ambiguity and lyrics and all of those things, because those are, that’s what makes poetry an expansive art. But clarity, for me, is first and foremost, what I value as a reader of poems.
And also, just as an aside, something I was thinking about deeply as I was writing these early poems in this book: Neither one of those, Minnie, did not learn to read until maybe her 70s. Mary, my grandmother, had to leave school in the sixth grade to work the fields with her family, so I thought often about those early poems, you know, if they were standing beside me, would they understand them?
DC: Yeah.
RBR: Yeah, and I owed it to them to make sure they did.
DC: Perfect. Well, thank you so much, Remica. This has been such a wonderful conversation, and I would love if you can close this out by reading your eponymous poem.
Room Swept Home
Remica Bingham-Risher
Mama say, Jah holy. House holy. Both clean. Keep things in their places. Is disorder ever clean? Preserve the skin alive by soaking, bathe and lather high end low, clean. This water in the Chesapeake, the Bay bodyfull and green. All tide swept by heavy row: clean. The needle’s eye and day’s work both seamless: hem and stitching, knife-edge sharp, sewn clean. Gristle bone sucked and crushed—teeth mincing meat to red marrow—clean. Sweep porch steps, no steps, dirt path—pristine; any small patch of earth we’re given: Godstruck, bare, but so clean.
DC: Thank you all for listening to this episode of e·pon·y·mous, a companion segment to the O, Word? Podcast, produced by me, DeeSoul Carson. If you are interested in Remica’s work, there are some links in the substack post to some poems of hers online.
If this book interests you, Remica recommends that you also check out:
Native Guard by Natasha Trethewey
The Age of Phillis by Honorée Fanonne Jeffers
Load In Nine Times by Frank X. Walker
The music for O,Word? and e·pon·y·mous is provided by Esoteric Creations. Check them out on Spotify.
The AWP panel Remica spoke in was “Black Women As (Keepers of) the Archive: Photographs, Hybrid and Historical Text,” available to watch online here.
I borrowed this line from my grandmother for my poem “Looking at the Backyard Magnolia Tree”
Dear reader, this was my first time hearing that word
