LaTasha N. Nevada Diggs on "Village," retrieval, and erasure

By Dasia Moore

When I first read poems from LaTasha N. Nevada Diggs’s TwERK (Belladonna, 2013), I was struck by the way her language danced on the page. It was a joy to return to her poetry in her newly-published collection, Village, which was released in February 2023 by Coffee House Press. 

Diggs is a writer and sound artist born and raised in Harlem. She has presented and performed work at several institutions, including the California Institute of the Arts, El Museo del Barrio, The Museum of Modern Art, and Walker Art Center, in addition to festivals around the world. She is also an independent curator, artistic director, and producer. 

Diggs has received a 2020 C.D. Wright Award for Poetry from the Foundation of Contemporary Art, a 2016 Whiting Award, and a 2015 National Endowment for the Arts Literature Fellowship, as well as grants and fellowships from the Howard Foundation, Cave Canem, Creative Capital, New York Foundation for the Arts, and the U.S.-Japan Friendship Commission, among others. She teaches at Brooklyn and Barnard Colleges. 

Diggs is known for creating work that crosses mediums and languages: She has expanded the possibilities of what a poem can be. Village creates a sort of personal archive—the poems work through the complexity of kinship and community stand alongside family photos, government forms, and handwritten notes.

It was an honor to correspond with Diggs about her latest work, and her village.

Dasia Moore: The words “my peoples” recur in the first section of Village and echo throughout the collection. How were you thinking through kinship and lineage in these poems?

LaTasha N. Nevada Diggs: “My peoples”—it’s one of those sayings I grew up hearing. “My peoples” as the folks I may consider family. “My people,” refers to those individuals I consider good people of good character. “Who are your people? Where are your people from?” The collection is working with these questions and the affirmation of lineage. And it goes further. My people are not just human. My people exist in places boundless. My people have wings. My people can breathe underwater and are fluent in Dolphin. My bones ain’t all in this soil or from it. 

DM: You are a multidisciplinary artist, but does poetry offer particular possibilities for you that other mediums do not?

LD: Sometimes. Since completing this collection, I have given myself a moment to think about the presentation. How will I read this book? How will I enter poems that were uncomfortable to write? Will I read these aloud? What do I want the listener to experience? I feel the entry point is layered: I am thinking about sounds. I am also thinking about visuals, moving images, in particular, as well as choreographic prompts and animation. 

I am delighted by the cover, which has been designed by my good friend Douglas Kearney. The cover is very much in conversation with the interior, and that’s all I’ll say about that. 

DM: The cover is lovely. On the subject of visual conversations, can you tell me more about the photos and documents you included in Village? How does visual work enter your writing process more generally?

LD: Can you tell me your impression of them? What do you think they are activating? 

DM: To me, there’s something provisional and incomplete about each image. Individually, they seem to speak to different things—community, survival, poverty, and love. Together, they seem to ask, what is a village, or what is safety? Is it this government form? This person’s handwriting? I think the photos are building a sort of answer, but one that resists completion. Now, here’s the part where you tell me if I’m way off!

LD:  No. I think you are right on, and everything you’re vibing with is a yes. What is a village based on what’s happening here? Yes! I do love that you brought up safety, and yes, what is that exactly? How does one define it, and what part of the world might this photo originate from? In some manner, this village is corrupted. This village is not attuned to balance. Or it is balanced by much of the wrong stuff. 

DM: Now I’m thinking about one photo in particular. Before we reach the first words of Village, we see your younger face on an ID card for public assistance, followed by your mother’s ID card. I was struck by that decision and intimacy. Why did you choose to begin the book this way? Where is LaTasha in your poetry, and why was it important to center her/you in Village?

LD: I myself was struck by the decision to include them! I had a long conversation with myself. I also had a conversation with Douglas Kearney. We talked about where in the book the images would have appeared if I allowed them in. Are they the closure of the book or the beginning? Would they exist between the pages? And in what order? I had my mother’s physical ID close by. Mine was stuck in a box somewhere. If I could not find mine, I would not use my mother’s. The collection is not about my mother. It is about both of us; what we share, what we do not. How easily these cycles can exist. How terrifyingly the blood carries from one to another in habits and dilemmas. So it had to set the book off from the jump and say,  “here is the cinema.” 

DM: “If I could not find mine, I would not use my mother’s.” Wow. I think that says a lot about how you thought about responsibility towards your mother and other loved ones in this collection, even though, as you said, the collection isn’t about her.

LD:  Yes, that’s tremendously important. There are two main characters in the book exist in a soup of other bodies that are navigating, struggling, being messy, and doing their best with very little. There is an attempt to get at something that is shared, something that is generational and gendered— it can’t be one and not the other. 

DM: In “twilight lore,” you write, “what evidence :: if any left available :: concerning / misspellings :: aliases :: contralto or mezzo :: coherent or intoxicated.” Evidence seems important to the poems in Village, and all your work. Do you think of your art as a record?

LD: I think Village considers the shaping of identity, and so, it has these questions, and some of them cannot be answered. How does that shape me? How does it shape you? Village is, in part, about the erasures that happen with knowing and not knowing, coping with the unknown and known, and existing after every attempt to get to the roots of oneself. There are still questions. There will always be questions. Village considers how to live with these questions, and that’s the I hope you see in the collection—the partial acceptance of all the holes and gaps. The retrieval from what could have been a far worse disaster.  

DM: Thank you for that word “erasures.” One thing that draws me to this collection and its archives is how they work against erasure, specifically the social erasure of poverty. Poverty is something our society dislikes talking about. It’s something that I, as a poet who grew up in poverty, don’t really know how to talk or write about. Did you set out to resist that silence?

LD: Poverty or, rather, dysfunction. Poverty is either not acceptable to write about, or it is eagerly grabbed, presumably because the market loves a good ole poverty story. I am being sarcastic here, but I do feel I struggled with for many many years. The topic is present in poems that I wrote during the 1990s—was it my best work?  No. And it wasn’t supposed to be. How old was I? 20? 24?

Granted, I write about it a lot. I also have a fondness for the experimentation and language folks know me for. Either mode for me is a kind of liberation and an argument, particularly in terms of the type of writing that may come from someone growing up where I did. The silence part you mention, I’m beginning  to understand it as that 1980s/1990s city girl/New York rites of passage “story.” I felt it was missing and that no one really touched it. The silence was annoying me. So I wrote about it. And still do. I just don’t share it often—smiles. 

DM: This is also a book filled with names—of neighbors, kin, restaurants, Harlem streets, North Carolina, towns and rivers, and landmarks. What is the effect of recording these names in your work?

LD: What do you think? I mean, honestly, there is always an element of failure in creation. Poetry can, to a degree, document a collective or singular history. Or not. It is also a realm where one creates an entirely different universe. It also depends on the person who is writing. 

Is the person writing from this experience, or is it someone who has researched this experience and now creates based upon what they’ve researched? Neither vibrations are wrong. Even so, something that is too close to the bone may halt the process, and something too far from the flesh can produce a body of work lacking a soul. There is a balance to be had.

Again, it is about how one determines whether something is a failure or a success. For me, the tensions were personal and impersonal;  tenant vs. landlord;  home vs. business; having a mother vs. not being a mother; youth vs being “middle-aged.” How becoming an artist feels like I’m gambling much in the way my mother played “numbers.” Multiple vibrations. Multiple sensations. What are the collective histories here? How does it feel in the body? Hopefully, it’s revealed to the reader once they delve into the book. 

Now, the recording of names functions as landmarks, and landmarks for me represent those forgotten people and intentional/unintentional narratives. We go back to my people. People from Pee Dee, bordering South and North Carolina. People in Anson County, Moore County, Greensboro, Southern Pines, Pine Bluff. People appearing in records from Virginia.  People appearing on a passenger ship list going or coming from Puerto Rico (not in the book). A nephew from Panama. And yes, Harlem. Lots of lore. Lots of factoids with no proper endings. In the words of poet and scholar Luis Reyes Rivera, a “scattered scripture.” 

DM: Where does poetry fail or succeed in recording personal and collective histories?

LD: I haven’t the faintest idea! 

DM: Your writing is often multilingual. What does working with multiple languages and mediums make it possible for you to express? 

LD: It is in my DNA. It is how I am shaped. Friends like to say I tell stories in a roundabout way. Well, you must know the story that gives birth to THE story that will then get us to THE STORY. But the question you ask has been asked countless times before. Think of a piece of yarn that might blend with another piece of yarn, and so on. It has little to do with fluency and more to do with pleasure, belonging and not belonging, as well making visible. My hope is that you, as a reader, pick a color or a direction and go from there. 

DM: When you’re writing, do you usually feel like you choose the color or direction, or does the poem itself choose? Or is it maybe something outside of you that does the choosing?

LD: The poem chooses;  the spirit chooses it. The vibration chooses it. 

DM: I feel like “accessibility” (in the sense of being readily understood) is something that concerns many poets, but it is also something that literary gatekeepers and audiences sometimes demand of Black poets. What is your understanding of that demand, and how does your work respond to it?

LD: I try my best not to concern myself with that. It is a dangerous treadmill to be on. To obsess over the arbiters of one thing or another? Nah. Sometimes, to be fair, to be flesh, having an ego, as we all do, has made me spiral at a particular event or occasion. I can get real salty! I laugh because that salty mood ain’t cute. So it’s best to put the blinders on when you are creating. 

You write what you write, and you write so that it makes you feel good. Or you write for revenge! [Laughs] Whether it is happy work or miserable work, it’s important that you are satisfied with your writing at the end of the day: No one else.

DM: Do you imagine your audiences? 

LD: I don’t. I really don’t. If I were to do so, that would mean crafting the work to fit whoever the audience may be. Nope. Nah. Now, afterwards, when the work is complete, I think about who I want to be in conversation with, but it’s only ever briefly. Who might they be? The oddballs of the galaxy. The raccoons. The goth babies. 

DM: And now that Village is out in the world, what types of conversations are you planning on or hoping to have?

LD: I’m happy you’ve asked this. I want “practical” conversations, meaning, I would love to have open dialogues with experts on early childhood development, sex therapists, lawyers, a particular podcast host, city council members on topics from the book—real solid forums about what something is and how it ties into Village. Conversations about poetics and structure are also great. I do want those also, granted they can be pretty abstract. 

DM: Just a few more questions before we end this conversation, which is teaching me so much. First, what are you reading now? 

LD: Work written by my students. [Laughs]

DM: What are you listening to?

LD: Depeche Mode. De La Soul. 

DM: And is there a question you wish (more) people would ask about your work?

LD: How are you? Truly. How. Are. You?