the craft. on intuition with Ajanae Dawkins
Written by: Ajanaé Dawkins
Ariana Brown wrote a thread called, why spoken word matters, which was life-giving for me as someone who despite my English and MFA degree was originally introduced to poetry through spoken word via open mics and slam. Spoken word did two things for me:
1. I was taught to intimately associate being on a microphone with telling the truth…i.e. I saw the labor of the poem and truth telling as synonymous. While this didn’t mean that I yet had an ethical center that guided my decisions as a writer, it did mean that I firmly believed that my most intimate truths were the most important part of the poem and preceded the craft.
2. I understood that the page was an incomplete vehicle for the poem with the poem’s second and equally significant life being in the body. The page had grammar and the body had sound. The page had white space and the body had movement. The page had caesura and the body could turn almost anything into a song.
When I went to my MFA program, my language failed me in my first year. This is in part because I was in the middle of a quarter life crisis—newly married, in a new city away from friends and family, in COVID quarantine, and having a crisis of faith that disrupted my sense of self completely. It is difficult to write well when you have no intimate knowledge of who you are. No interior life. That kind of self displacement disrupted my engagement with my writing and consequently all my lyric was failing. Craft without a truth to cling to is just a box of tools with no function. All of my work from this era was unsure.
Additionally, this was the first time that all of my process—my writing, sharing, study, and revision was entirely on the page. I read poetry and craft books in my head. I wrote my poems and submitted them in electronic packets. I got back written feedback which we discussed over conversations. I marked up my pages with navy blue pens. When I rearranged my words, it was in google documents. This was a far cry from my familiar workshops where we were assigned a poem and read them out loud—usually multiple of us so that we could hear the way the words landed differently in everyone's body. We would write our own poems and immediately read them to each other. When preparing for performance or slam, we would often revise a poem on the stage once the body notified us that something was awkward, unclear, or sonically incomplete. My body has always known best when my lyric is failing me.
Spoken word also disrupted my understanding of the reader or audience who for me was never imaginary but always right in my face, responding in real time to the language I’d crafted. The intimacy of this always meant that I understood my writing to be communal, intimate and alive.
This is not to say that the reader, laying half clothed in bed reading your well crafted confessions is not intimate but that it is another kind of intimacy—to stumble upon someone’s review, their tweets or TikToks, or to imagine them in your data analytics. Whether I understood my responsibility to them at the time, I always believed this was a mutual exchange and that the audience and I were in many ways bound to each other—that my responsibility was to them as much to myself.
This season of my writing life is a commitment to returning to the practices that kept me most deeply in tune with my intuition. Revisiting my poems from ten years ago, I didn’t have the language for caesura or trochaic tetrameter but the clarity of my intuition was clear. My compulsion was toward truth and language that excited me. Young Ajanaé knew what stirred my spirit and she knew how to make others believers in whatever gospel she was peddling—the gospel of the dignity of Black women or a collective lament. This season of my writing life, I’m starting with truth, I’m revising in the body, I’m reading to friends, I’m letting the clarity of who and what I love saturate everything.
Photo: Cindy Elizabeth
Ajanaé is a poet, conceptual artist and theologian. She works through poetry, visual art, performance, and audio to explore the politics of faith, grief, and intimate relationships between Black women. As a theologian, she blends cultural criticism, memoir, and theology as autotheory to consider the relationship between Black church history, spirituality, and creation. Her work has appeared in the Academy of American Poets’ Poem-a-Day, The Rumpus, Prairie Schooner, the Indiana Review, Frontier Poetry, The BreakBeat Poets Black Girl Magic Anthology and more. Her solo-exhibition, No One Teaches Us How To Be Daughters, debuted at Urban Arts Space in 2024. Her chapbook, BLOOD-FLEX, won the New Delta Review’s Chapbook prize and is forthcoming in Spring 2025.
Electric Literature’s The Commuter is our home for poetry, flash, graphic, and experimental narratives. It publishes weekly on Wednesday morning, and has showcased the likes of Caroline Hadilaksono, Aleksandar Hemon, Jonathan Lethem, Lindsay Hunter, Tahirah Alexander Green, and Julia Wertz. (Apr. 21-27)
Ebony Tomatoes Collective is interested in stories that capture grief in its many forms and faces. Think: The mundane griefs that pepper our lives as a result of intergenerational trauma. The silence that follows going no-contact with family members who do not accept our queerness or religious differences. The loss of temperate seasons as a result of widespread environmental catastrophe. The altars we maintain for our ancestors and all the love and wisdom they were not able to share with us. (Closes Apr. 30)
The Ploughshares Emerging Writer’s Contest recognizes work by an emerging writer in each of three genres: fiction, nonfiction, and poetry. We consider authors “emerging” if they haven’t published or self-published a book in any genre. One winner in each genre per year will receive $2,000 and publication in the literary journal. The winners will also receive a conversation with our partnering literary agency, Aevitas Creative Management, regarding their work and writing careers. (Closes May 15)
