Jessica L Wilkinson interviews Lauren Russell
I first met Lauren Russell in 2023 at a documentary poetry conference at The American University of Paris. She had given a powerful poetry reading, which I mention below, and an intriguing paper about the process of writing her second book Descent, a work of documentary poetry that attempts to trace the omissions in her family history. I sat next to Lauren at the conference dinner, and we talked nonstop about poetry and cats and everything in between. After the conference we met up at the Musée d’Orsay to see the Manet/Degas exhibition, amongst other works, but were struck silent by a pop-up children’s mass choir that echoed throughout the main hall for some thirty minutes. Needless to say, it seemed as if the foundation of our friendship was forged amongst a shared four days of intense aesthetic and intellectual pleasures.
Lauren is the author of three books of poetry—What’s Hanging on the Hush (Ahsahta Press, 2017), Descent (Tarpaulin Sky Press, 2020), and most recently A Window That Can Neither Open nor Close: Poems, Plots, Chance (Milkweed Editions, 2024). She won the 2021 Anna Rabinowitz Prize from the Poetry Society of America for Descent; she has also received fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, Cave Canem and the Wisconsin Institute for Creative Writing at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, amongst many other honours. Lauren is currently on the faculty of The Writing Seminars at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore. We conducted this interview over email in August 2025.
‘Poetry invites readers to experience the event of language uncurling from these attempts to distil and convey. The ‘real’ world is dizzy with maladies, but there is pleasure, beauty, catharsis—power—in poetry’s bold and manifold efforts.’
Poetry for this issue was guest co-edited by Mark Nowak and Angela Costi.
This interview originally appeared in the 2025 Rabbit Annual.
Jessica L Wilkinson: Lauren, I met you at the Documentary Poetry, Popular Protest and Activism conference in 2023, and you did a reading from Descent at that event—one of the poems you read was about the whippoorwill. That poem has really stuck with me, and reading the book the whippoorwill reappears (as bird, as signifier, as metaphor). I would love to hear from you about the significance of the bird and the word to the book.
Lauren Russell: The starting point for Descent was a copy of the diaries kept by my great-great-grandfather, Robert Wallace ‘Bob’ Hubert, between 1889–1894 and in 1917. He was a Captain in the Confederate Army, and after the end of the American Civil War went back to East Texas and had 20 children by three women he had formerly enslaved, who happened to be half-sisters of one another. One of those women was my great-great-grandmother, Peggy Guerry Hubert. It took me a full year to transcribe Bob Hubert’s diaries, and what most interested me were their omissions. He first mentions Peggy as ‘Margaret Hubert’ who ‘lives near me and used to be my cook,’ in the context of his accompanying their son to pick up their daughter from school, but in the diary there is no mention of who these people are to him, although he always takes care to identify his white relatives by family relationship (‘bro,’ ‘nephew,’ ‘niece,’ ‘grand niece’). Those kinds of omissions occur throughout the diary, so you have the feeling of a shadow text lurking beneath the text. On Tuesday March 26, 1889, Bob Hubert notes, ‘Heard a whippoorwill holler this morning for the first this spring.’ And in other places he mentions choking cotton, stripping cane—work happening on his farm at various times. In the whippoorwill prose poem, I worked the language sonically and associatively, so that violent undertones emerge from beneath these prosaic reports. Whip, will, holler, choking, caught, stripping, cane. Thereafter, the whippoorwill appears throughout the book as a stand-in for sexual violence. I made this choice intentionally. In the 2015 New York Times article ‘A Language for Grieving’, Sonya Posmentier writes, ‘By making violence strange and unfamiliar, very different poets like [Gwendolyn] Brooks and [NourbeSe] Philip have gone beyond merely repeating its effects, like a viral video of a police shooting, and beyond the realm of the evidentiary to that of the imagination, where we might not only observe violence but mourn and counter it.’ I don’t compare myself to Brooks and Philip, but with the whippoorwill imagery, I am trying to do exactly what Posmentier suggests.
Heard a whippoorwill holler this morning for
the first time this spring. Heard a whippoorwill
holler. All hands choking cotton. Heard a
holler, a whimper. Heard a will whip her. Will
heard a whip. Whip or will. Will heard.
Herding hers. Whipping herds. Sowing oats.
Whipping whores. Stripping cane or—
whelped her willed her a well and a hold. Dank
of the dark of the hell of the hold. Choking
cotton. Caught in. A yoke and a pull. Stripped
and caned for— Heard her holler, caught her,
held her hand to the— whipped out your—
held her head to the— whipped out the
billfold. Heard a whimper this spring. Choked
or— heard a holler, a hollowed-out hold,
whipped to a wheelbarrow, hell-bent toward a
hole, ripped from a wrapped in a gutwrench
sugarhold.
—from Descent (Tarpaulin Sky Press, 2020)
JLW: The poem certainly conveys a sense of intensity and brutality all on its own, though this information you provide takes it to further depths for me as a reader, knowing how one line in a document (a somewhat beautiful observation) strikes against others (violence), and catalyses your work as a poet to develop this potent poem.
Descent is documentary poetry but also family history, or a probing of the blank spaces—omissions and gaps, and traumas—in that family history. The notes at the back of the book give detail about the immense amount of research you undertook to inform the work. Can you tell our readers what motivated that research, and give us an overview of the research journey? Then I would love to know about how that information was ‘transmuted’ into poetry—or, rather, how you found artful forms to shape that material into the book that Descent became. Another version of this question might be: what were you looking for, and how do you think Descent—both the research and the writing of poetry—helped you to find it?
LR: Well, I was looking for Peggy, and I didn’t find her. As I mentioned earlier, it took me a full year to transcribe Bob Hubert’s diaries, and over the course of that year, I became most fascinated by what he was leaving out. Peggy is mentioned a few times in Bob Hubert’s diary, in a couple of US censuses, and in her children’s death certificates. That’s it. I’ve never found a photograph of her, though there are a number of photographs of Bob Hubert and of their children, mostly as adults. Peggy did not leave behind any diary or correspondence that I can find. Works like M. NourbeSe Philip’s Zong! (and later, Saidiya Hartman’s nonfiction book Lose Your Mother) have contributed to how I think about handling gaps in the archival record, especially because the creation of archives is controlled by people with power. I did a lot of peripheral research to try to imagine Peggy’s life in slavery and freedom—through a combination of secondary sources and primary sources, including the Federal Writers’ Project’s interviews with formerly enslaved people in Texas in the 1930s. I arrived at Peggy’s voice through a forms class I was auditing my last semester of grad school, when I had just started writing some of the poems in Descent. We had an assignment to write a poem in blank verse, and I had been reading some of these ex-slave narratives, so I also had those voices in my head. The iambic pentameter created an interesting idiosyncratic voice for Peggy, which seemed suitable for her situation because it is constrained. It worked so well that I decided to maintain the iambic pentameter for Peggy’s voice throughout the book.
Later I drafted a number of the poems in the book at the Cave Canem retreat for Black poets. My first time there, which was in 2015, Lyrae Van Clief-Stefanon was on the faculty, and she talked about the importance of acknowledging Black joy throughout history and not buying into narratives of abjection. This was a big influence on how I imagined Peggy, her multidimensionality. Another year, Tyehimba Jess came to the retreat to give a craft talk about Olio. He discussed the importance of research, that since Black people’s stories have been misrepresented for centuries, we have a responsibility to be as accurate as possible with whatever sources are accessible to us at the time we’re writing. I take that responsibility seriously and also see the imaginative work of poetry as reparative. Perhaps not coincidentally, the cover art [for Descent] by Sarah Stefana Smith is called Mend from the series A/mends.
JLW: You refer to a couple of books of documentary poetry via a quote from Eleni Sikelianos from The Book of Jon as an epigraph to the book, and in a note at the back of the book that M. NourbeSe Philip’s Zong! was an influence, which you reiterate above. What is it that you draw from literary influences, do you think?
LR: As I mentioned above, M. NourbeSe Philip’s project in Zong! and her discussion of it made me think more creatively about archival gaps as opportunities rather than limitations. Eleni Sikelianos’s marvelous opening to The Book of Jon was a big influence on my introduction to Descent, stylistically. Descent took seven years to complete—from my receipt of the copies of Hubert’s diaries in 2013 to the publication of the book in 2020—and in those first few years, I kept a running list of forms I was encountering that I wanted to try. I know I encountered cross-outs in Tyehimba Jess’s first book, leadbelly. I had already been doing substitutions (there are several in my first book, What’s Hanging on the Hush), and I think I learned that from Harryette Mullen, who innovates on Oulipo’s more restrictive N+7/ S+7. I love how she uses substitution to transform Shakespeare’s Sonnet 130 in Sleeping with the Dictionary. Instead of just plugging in the word seven up or down in the dictionary, she uses hilarious contemporary synonyms or same-letter substitutions. Mullen also influences how I work language sonically and associatively, as in that whippoorwill poem. I have a prose poem that begins ‘I am not a cook or a Captain,’ where I describe myself in relation to Bob and Peggy through what we do not have in common, and I got that from one section of a poem called ‘The Abolition Journal’ in Brenda Coultas’s The Marvelous Bones of Time, where the speaker uses the same method to compare herself to Abraham Lincoln. ‘Peggy/An Inventory’ was influenced by Kimiko Hahn’s poems ‘The Child’s Safe’ and ‘The Woman’s Safe’, where the child-speaker is described through their belongings. In retrospect, I am sure that a section of Yona Harvey’s ‘Communion with Mary Lou Williams’ (in Hemming the Water) influenced the opening poem addressing Bob through a list of varied epithets (‘Dear Robert, Dear Redbeard, Dear Specter of the Great White Father….’). Amaud Jamaul Johnson, an expert in writing historical poems, was the director of the Wisconsin Institute for Creative Writing when I arrived there as a fellow in 2014. He taught me how to organise my research—keep one notebook for images, one for diction, and one for narrative facts. There are a lot of influences on the book’s hybridity—including the first section of Jean Toomer’s Cane and perhaps most notably Michael Ondaatje’s The Collected Works of Billy the Kid, which is also a kind of biomythology. Audre Lorde’s Zami: A New Spelling of My Name, of course, introduced me to the idea of biomythography.
JLW: An amazing list. And I love this advice you received from Amaud Jamaul Johnson about organising research—I will have to use that myself! You appear in the work here and there, in various guises, playing various ‘roles’—as descendent, as researcher, as writer, and then also as a university teacher. And then even through the results of your genetic ancestry. Obviously, this is documentary work of great personal significance, but I’m very interested in the unexpected eruptions of self in works of documentary poetry, and am curious to know your own thoughts on your presence/s—or personae—within the work.
LR: You know, that was a big element of the paper I presented at the conference where we met, and I wound up publishing a revised version of that paper in The Hopkins Review last spring, [title: ‘First Person Second? A Writerly Self-Reckoning Where Confessional Meets Documentary’]. I wanted to talk about the difficulty of navigating these various roles as descendant, writer, researcher, human being, and how part of the work was acknowledging how I myself am implicated in a history that is still unfolding. As much as I admire documentary poetics projects for revealing and confronting deeply troubling truths and buried histories, my difficulty with them is that there’s often an implicit moral superiority. And I wanted to say, no I am not above Bob Hubert; Bob Hubert lives in me.
I did not initially imagine that I would be such a big presence in the book, but I found that living with the project became part of the project. If you think of what was happening in the United States in the years I was writing this—there was a constant onslaught of viral videos of unarmed Black people being killed by police and vigilantes, Black Lives Matter was gaining momentum, and so was Donald Trump’s first Presidential campaign. The book closes in September of 2016, when the tension was palpable, and (as now), I could feel a very direct link to history in the current moment. In the book, I quote William Faulkner, ‘The past is never dead. It’s not even past.’ When I was writing Descent, I couldn’t fully anticipate what is now underway, a large-scale effort to erase parts of U.S. history. But those efforts will fail, because you can’t erase history. It’s been here the whole time like an underpainting. That is an important theme in Descent that only emerges through my 21st-century presence. There is also a structural function to some of the personal lyric essays. Three of the essays are dated, and I see those three as forming the narrative arc of the book.
JLW: So let’s now talk about your latest book, A Window That Can Neither Open Nor Close, which orbits your ‘self’ much more closely—though I’d love to get your thoughts on that assessment, ‘closely’. Because, while the book touches on subjects relating to your own experiences of neurodivergence, of fears and loves and fantasies, of diagnoses and moving beyond them, you also refract those experiences through interesting techniques and approaches. For example, the twelve-sided die with instructions; the pop quiz; the collages; metaphor. How does this book speak of and from your ‘self’? How has poetry enabled you to speak of (or around/beyond/between ...) the self?
LR: This book felt necessary to me, but as a result of it, I have stopped writing personal poetry. Every poem I’ve written since then was for a specific assignment from an editor or a friend. And I have started writing a novel, because I really needed more imaginative distance! So apparently my formal interventions were insufficient. Some of A Window That Can Neither Open nor Close is so personal that I didn’t think there would be any audience for it. For example, there’s a relentless 19-page abecedarian list poem about obsessive-compulsive disorder called The Doubting Disease. I have struggled with OCD all my life, but the COVID-19 pandemic exacerbated it to an excruciating degree. I was so afraid of spreading virus that I just hid away with my cats for 15 months. The summer of 2021, when I had finally gotten vaccinated and was trying to emerge from 15 months of total isolation, I started writing this poem. I didn’t think it would interest anyone at all, but then in the winter of 2022, the prose writer Megan Milks invited me to join a Zoom writing group they were organising, and that group actually found the poem compelling. The poet Chris Martin, who edits the Multiverse series for Milkweed Editions, had been asking me if I had a manuscript, and at first I said I did not. After the vote of confidence from that writing group, I realised that this very personal work might actually be of interest to other people, and I accepted Chris’s invitation. The book straddles the border between various genres and mediums and also walks the line between documentary and confessional, as I’m intervening in my own medical records and psychological reports.
JLW: Now, I’ve shared with you some of my own fears and obsessions as a result of reading this book, which leads me to this question: how often do people who read your book tell you that they identify with what you’ve written (and share their own experiences!!! haha), and what does that make you think about the power of poetry or writing in general?
LR: A few people have written after reading the book to tell me about their own experiences of OCD or autism spectrum or beloved pets, and those notes have meant a lot to me, partly because I had so much trepidation about being in the world with this book. (In the spring and summer of 2024, I was dreading the publication date almost as much as I was dreading the U.S. presidential election, no exaggeration!) When I give public readings from the book, I often read the long poem ‘Now That I Am Closer to Thirty-Nine Than Thirty-Eight, I Have Located a Psychological Evaluation from the Summer I Turned Fifteen’, which uses actual language from a psychological report and transforms that language, allowing me to reclaim the narrative. Often someone comes up to me afterward to tell me about their own childhood experiences with psychological evaluations. But the number of neurodivergent people and cat lovers who’ve reached out to me in response to A Window That Can Neither Open nor Close may actually pale in comparison to the number of distant relatives who have contacted me because of Descent.
JLW: Cats are important to this book, too, and appear in a variety of ways. What is the cat to/for you? (My initial question was ‘what does the cat “represent” for you as a poet?’, though that sounded wrong ... because I suspect the cat more than represents, and that it does so beyond your work as a poet, too!).
LR: Cats have saved my life. This was especially true of Neruda, the cat of my heart, who is referred to as ‘Rimbaud’ in the earlier part of the book. Adopting him was a commitment to life. But it is also true of my current cats, Cat Jeoffry and Lady Day, who kept me company through the pandemic. My cats have stayed with me through my frequent relocations, and they are the beings to whom I am closest, literally, in the sense that I’m around them the most. They have a big presence in my work because they are my constant companions, familiars, and friends—hovering just beyond my notebook or sometimes lying on top of it. There is nothing symbolic about that.