On the Recycling Bin & Rooms Full of Other People

Asiya Wadud’s fifth poetry collection, Mandible Wishbone Solvent, was published in February by University of Chicago Press. The collection is interspersed with mixed media collages, photocopied images of hands and paper. Dense, stacked, and complex, her poetry engages with architecture by mediating the constructed world. Lyrical and playful, the collection is both serious and whimsical.

Asiya Wadud’s other recent work can be found in Interlude Docs, POETRY, e-flux journal, BOMB magazine, and elsewhere. Wadud is interested in the borders and edges of language and landscape and, in thinking about ways to approach what she sees, knows and intuits with questions instead of answers. She wants to know about the spaces where language folds and where gaps don’t get filled in. Wadud’s work has been supported by the Foundation Jan Michalski, Lower Manhattan Cultural Council, Danspace Project, Finnish Cultural Institute of New York, Madhouse Helsinki, Beirut Arts Center, and Kunstenfestivaldesarts, among others. She teaches poetry at Saint Ann’s School in Brooklyn, New York, and also teaches at Columbia University and Pacific Northwest College of Art.  

In May, I sat down with Wadud, who works at the same Brooklyn Independent school as me, to discuss pedagogy and poetry.

Laura Winnick (LW): I want to start by expressing how artistic and complex your work is, and then ask how to teach those literary moves to kids, especially young children.

Asiya Wadud (AW): That’s a question that I’m thinking about every single day: how to bring the work that I find compelling and interesting to any age? How does that part of teaching happen? How can I find ways to allow them to enter the poem from wherever they’re standing? I’m often thinking about that in my own poems and in my teaching as well—what are the many different ways to enter the room? What are all the different layers, like peeling back the same little onion?

LW: It’s so interesting because one of the themes of this book is bridging, and what you just described is the pedagogical bridging of content and age. So what has worked in your classroom?

AW: This morning in kindergarten, I brought the poem “Love Is a Place” by e.e. cummings. It’s the end of the year, and, when I got to the classroom, there was a question on their board: What has been your yet of kindergarten? I was thinking about this idea of “yet,” but the poem I planned to bring to them was this idea of a world of yes:

love is a place
& through this place of
love move
(with brightness of peace)
all places

yes is a world
& in this world of
yes live
(skilfully curled)
all worlds

—e.e. cummings

We talked about: do you believe in a world of yes? And what does a yes world look like? And then someone said, “Well, if you say yes, it creates echo—a yes echo.”

That way of thinking almost feels like some pedagogical truism. This echo of yes to wanting to bring something that’s challenging. Wanting to bring something that’s maybe not necessarily a kindergarten poem. We just talked about what it means to be in the world of yes, and also in a world of no, which also happens sometimes.

LW: I love that, first of all, you came with a world of yes, and they had your yet on the board. I feel like there’s so much privilege in thinking about the world of yes because the world is such a world of no right now. There’s something really profound about the potential of a classroom. Outside the world is a world of no, but in our classroom, how can we have a world of yes?

AW: The world outside of the classroom is one thing. When I’m thinking about the poems that I want to bring and share with the kids each week, I have to always think about, why this poem? Why now? Just a series of why, why, why, why this? Why this writer? Why this moment? What need is this speaking to? What questions can these poems help us engage with? Embedded within that is the acceptance and acknowledgement that outside the classroom, there’s another world that exists. But I think also, as far as I see it, part of our jobs and work is to bridge the world outside to the world inside the classroom. This idea of reaching toward something, this idea of isthmus, how do we bridge it? How do we do so in a way that feels kind and do it with gentleness, graciousness? In a way that feels like you’re opening up possible ways to think that’s not too heavy for a five-year-old?

I think for me, in the work that I’m doing with children, I’m mostly interested in the questions we can think through together. A lot of the time spent is engaging with these big questions and bringing poems that help us engage with these bigger themes of distance and bridging and thinking about bridging across worlds and countries and time.

I’m mostly interested in the questions we can think through together.

LW: Can I ask you to explain the term “isthmus” as it exists in your book?  Is there a way you see that framework applying to the classroom?

AW: The isthmus is a little piece of land that connects to much larger pieces of land. The isthmus is a transitory space or space where you need, where it’s going to be necessary, to pass from one place to another. But I’d like to think of the isthmus as doing a lot of important work in helping us find our way between these two places that otherwise we wouldn’t be able to travel to.

During my first year teaching poetry here, in my fourth-grade class, we made a continuum of all the words between desire and necessity. We were doing this just to give us some framework to think about: what do we need in our lives? What is it that we want? What is it that we will to do? What is it that we hope to have?

I love thinking about stretching out a bridge—how far can you stretch it?  How can you really extend it? I think that also relates to how I want to think slowly with the kids and really spend our time unraveling something and thinking about how two things that feel really far apart may seem closer than they actually are. Not in a way of creating a false resonance but just in a way of thinking about difference, how maybe two opposite things are closer than we originally thought.

LW: One of the things I wanted to discuss with you is about coherence—how two things you wouldn’t imagine pairing together can be paired together. In this book you include mixed media, most notably images of hands and of fabric. I wanted to ask you about your relationship between materiality and poetry.  

AW: Maybe this has something to do with spending a lot of time with kindergarteners, first graders, even second graders, where words do have this kind of materiality. Maybe something about the newness or the new relationship that kids have to this huge acquisition that’s happening in those years of words and language and how to put things together. So often, especially in kindergarten poetry, kids are always experimenting and trying things out. Sometimes they come up with these ideas and images that are so uncanny—they’re slightly off because they’re just smashing things together. I really do have the sense of language as being very tactile. You can take one word and move it a little bit; nothing is really fixed.

My professional training is in city and regional planning. I think a lot about poems and place and poems and landscape and the architecture of poems. You start with a single word. I always tell the kids who say they don’t know what to write about today: Do you have one word that you’ve been thinking about? If you have one word you can start a poem. You just need one. You don’t need the whole poem—that doesn’t have to be fully formed. You build upon it.

In this most recent collection, Mandible Wishbone Solvent, the hand images, everything was made right there on that copy machine. It goes to the copy machine one time, then I feed it back again and rearrange the hand and then feed it back again and give it a little shake. Or I find tissue paper in the recycling bin and then crumble it and see what happens. Those are all just experiments—I’m here after school wondering, what’s in the recycling bin today?

I was talking to someone recently about some of those images, and he asked me if they were landscapes. They can be whatever they want to be. It’s the same way with the poem for me, you can enter it in many different places. I’m thinking about the process of finding something, cleaning it, reclaiming it, recycling it, and giving it this new life.

If you have one word you can start a poem. You just need one.

LW: I felt like the malleability of writing and wordsmithing was very evident in your book. How do we teach it to students? Within those first two sections that kind of alliteration and word play and fragmentation just felt so playful and malleable, so much repetition, being reworked and then put through the copy machine.

AW: That’s something I definitely try to bring to the classroom as well. What does it mean to be done but not finished? What does it mean to accept the fragment as the final poem and to sit with that feeling and to feel it in your mouth, just say it out loud, to embody the words of it? I think so much of the work that I’m trying to do with kids is to experiment and to play and to recognize language as something that is not fixed. You can always change your mind.

What I’m most interested in is, let’s just try it out, introducing them to poets who I think are doing that kind of experimental work of trusting something and not relying on something that’s been done before, trying something that feels fresh and new for them. Experimentation. Play. Bringing words to light.

LW: Some of that really goes against how traditional classrooms function, about how power usually functions in a classroom.

AW: One thing that I really appreciate about the structure of this particular school is that we do have some freedom to really think about our own pedagogy and what it is that we want to do in the classroom. I think about the kinds of conversations and the kinds of things that are possible at any grade level with the kids if we imagine that the classroom doesn’t have to be hierarchical in ways that we traditionally think maybe that it has to be. 

I’m willing to make a lot of compromises in terms of: how can we create something together? What is it that we’re trying to create together? I have my lesson plan and what I want to teach them in each lesson, but the poetry workshop is an ongoing and open conversation. I really try to think about what it means to follow the lead of the kids. What are they interested in? I have questions that are interesting to engage with for any poem, and I’ll start with some of those questions as we read something as a class. But then sometimes things come up where I never would have thought to ask that question, but maybe a third grader or second grader will raise that question. I like that sense of possibility in the room, that sense of aliveness—all of us have knowledge and are able to share something. It’s not a passive experience.

This morning when I got to the kindergarten, the teacher asked, “Do you have any advice for me? Sometimes I can’t find the words I need, and what do you do when you can’t find the words you need?” All the kids were waiting with baited breath. I said, “Sometimes there’s something that already exists for someone else. Maybe it’s a song or a poem. Maybe there’s a beautiful tree to go visit or a walk or flower or river or something that feels like it can answer something to help me find words when I can’t find them.”

One of the kids raised their hands and said, “If you can’t find the words, maybe you can break the big words into smaller ones.” And someone else said, “You could even try breaking the problem into the smaller problems.” I really just love that. It’s something we could have missed out on if we think the kids don’t have anything to offer. 

LW: Your narrative around the teacher posing a question to you that invites everything you want to do in the classroom but also lets kids hear it differently—what a great structure.

AW: I’m going to keep coming back to it. I really want this moment of the kids recognizing that sometimes grown-ups don’t have the words, too. Adults don’t always have the answers. I think it’s really important for them to see that and to know that they know how to help. The kids are always thinking in ways that really surprise me. Sometimes they just have these observations that never would have come to me. That’s magic. 

LW: I have a question related to a part of that. In this book, I was reaching toward the conversation you were having with artists and authors. There’s the dedication to the black printmaker in Finland, there’s a few different paintings by Etal Adnan, there’s an epigraph from The White Book, and in the acknowledgements, you actually list more artists that inspired you.

I also will say that I came across your work in Christina Sharpe’s Ordinary Notes, so there was this profound moment of the conversation really extending beyond the pages of what I read. I’d love to hear your process of thinking beside and in conversation with these writers and artists.

The work I’m interested in is the work of we, of us, of being in a chorus.

AW:  For me, so much of poetry is thinking laterally and thinking with and being in the room with and thinking about all these tenuous connections with other writers and other artists. I used to often feel like this little leaf blowing in the wind, just nothing to say without others. I don’t know what kind of work I would make if I were not engaged with the work of others. I often feel like I need this kind of reverberation in order to make anything. The work I’m interested in is the work of we, of us, of being in a chorus. All of my books have an epigraph, I always have this funny feeling that I don’t want to be the first voice in this book, and I don’t want to be the last voice either.

For this book, it was a lot of Howard Smith and Etal Adnan. I often think about how to show that sense of the poetics of we above the I. How can I show that in my own work and also my own pedagogy? A lot of the work that I do with the kids is in conversation with other artists; there’s never a class where I don’t bring work for them. Once you start to make a room that includes others, others also invite you to their own work and room as well. That’s the kind of place I’m interested in—where the work isn’t born out of this solitary experience of writing. 

LW: It really flips a narrative or an understanding of writing as a solitary act or idea that “a room of one’s own” is how we see writers work, and that’s really different from your orientation and also what you create.

AW: There are times I need a room of my own, but I think generally, there’s a room that I want, which is full of other people.

Featured photo by Monstera Production from Pexels.