Poet, essayist, and critic Hanif Abdurraqib is the judge for The Georgia Review’s 2023 Loraine Williams Poetry Prize. Here, associate poetry editor Soham Patel interviews Abdurraqib about art in different genres that is inspiring him as well as his desire to break down traditional hierarchies in cultural criticism. As a reminder, the deadline to submit to the poetry prize is May 15, through Submittable or by regular mail postmarked by the due date The Loraine Williams Poetry Prize is an award for a single poem, to be published in The Georgia Review. The winner will receive an honorarium of $1,500 and an expenses-paid trip to Athens, Georgia, to give a public reading with Abdurraqib. Submissions include a one-year subscription to The Georgia Review. Current subscribers to the Review may enter the competition free of charge. All entries will be considered for publication. We invite writers from all backgrounds to submit.
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Soham Patel (SP): What are interesting cultural intersections in film, TV, art, literature, or music sparking your curiosities right now?
Hanif Abdurraqib (HA): I am finding myself really enjoying television shows that grapple with grief and loss from unexpected angles. I deeply appreciated the show Shrinking as a portrait of how to live with and carry grief (specifically the loss of a maternal figure) for a long stretch of time, and how living with that grief can impact the entire ecosystem encasing you. Friends, co-workers, parents, children. There are a lot of shows, I think, that are thoughtfully engaging with the prolonged impacts of grief or trauma (Yellowjackets is another that comes to mind) and doing it in ways that force me to think beyond myself.
SP: To me your work fosters a new vision of what’s possible for cultural criticism, what the role of a “public intellectual” brings to the forefront. How do you see the role of the public intellectual playing out in this particular and crucial moment in U.S. history?
HA: Oh, I’m not sure. I don’t really think of myself as any kind of public intellectual. I suppose, by definition, I think out loud and share thoughts with the public. But broadly, I’m disinterested in all of the ways I’ve seen that role personified, and I don’t really have an interest in reformatting that role for my own purposes, when I think I’m better served ignoring it entirely and trying to write/create/think out loud in a manner that removes any hierarchy. I’m just as interested in what a person next to me in the grocery aisle has to say about an album they recently enjoyed as I am anything I could say about that album myself. My capacity for intellect and enthusiastic curiosity is fueled, inspired, enlivened by broad public interaction. Asking people what they think, how they read or heard something differently than I did. That feels not only more useful, but more in-line with how I grew up, with a long runway for curiosity and no one shouting it down.
SP: Besides music and emotion, your heroes and heartbreak, what brings you to poetry as a form? What poetry has surprised you recently?
HA: I am more commonly surprised by poems than I am any other writing, this—in part—due to the fact that I came to poems so much later than a lot of other poets I know. And so I feel like I’m still seeking the feeling of pleasure I got when I read the first poems that excited me, and I’m still lucky enough to find that pleasure in many places. I love Janine Joseph’s Decade of the Brain, Eugenia Leigh’s Bianca. The new Vievee Francis book (The Shared World) is sitting on my desk as I type, and I am eager to open it.
