The Magic of Poetry: A Journey of Self-Discovery
An interview with Hakim Bellamy
“I have to find my personal and unique connection to the subject before I even put pen to page. At the end of the day, aren’t we all just writing about ourselves?”
Poetry is an art form that many of us admire but can’t fully comprehend. Perhaps that’s the point… After all, there’s something uniquely captivating about the unknown and intangible.
To shed some light on this literary marvel, I spoke to Hakim Bellamy — the first poet to feature in Perlego’s Author Spotlight series. Hakim is a national and regional Poetry Slam Champion, as well as the Inaugural Poet Laureate of Albuquerque, New Mexico — a position he held from 2012 to 2014.
But his achievements don’t stop at poetry. Hakim is also a TV host, musician, journalist, community organiser, Hip-hop theatre producer, teacher and children’s author.
His first book, SWEAR, was awarded the Tillie Olsen Award for Creative Writing by the Working-Class Studies Association in 2014. This interview will focus on his latest collection of poems, Commissions y Corridos, which was published in 2021.
In the preface you write, ‘The poems in this collection are not all commissions. And the poems are not corridos, per se.’ For anyone unfamiliar with the term, could you explain what a corrido is?
I’m actually a transplant to New Mexico from the Philadelphia, South Jersey area. The term ‘corrido’ was introduced to me by my good friend and mentor, Levi Romero, who is the centennial poet for New Mexico and the state’s inaugural Poet Laureate. Before I was named Poet Laureate for the state centennial of New Mexico, I had already been commissioned by the city to write a poem to celebrate the centennial. When Levi mentioned the term, I asked, ‘What is this thing you speak of?’
I’ll paraphrase his response in my own words: a corrido is part song, part oral history and part legend. It does more than just tell a story about historical figures or events; it teleports the mood and energy of the time in question. It’s a melodic way of passing on words that are easier to memorise, similar to how children are taught to remember the alphabet. It’s a form of narrative song or verse — part celebratory blues and part sobering anthem — popularised in Mexico and the Southwestern United States. Corridos are all about love; they’re a distant relative of the Spanish epic ballads, known as romances. Essentially, if you don’t want something to be forgotten, put it in a corrido.
I suppose you could say that corridos are cultural artefacts.
Yeah, it really drove me into this place that I didn’t originally come from. That was attractive to me, so I started studying it. In the first poem of my book, ‘100 Years of Corridos: A Song for the New Mexico Centennial’, I did my best to create a modern-day corrido with the spirit of a 30-something black guy from Philadelphia.
Is there an overarching theme or message to these poems? Are they designed to be read as a body, or does each poem stand alone?
They are a body in the sense that they all originate either during my tenure as Laureate or in my capacity as Laureate after the fact. The poems might not have been written save for the monumental recognition I received at that point in my life — I was 33 years old when I began my term in 2012. Some of them had their genesis in a request, while others grew out of an event that happened during my time as Laureate.
In terms of subject matter, they are not so much of a unit. A good number of them are Albuquerque poems and many are commissions that never found a publishing home, until now. The rest, which I would affectionately call corridos, are about my life; they serve as markers of moments that I want to outlive me.
Do you have a favourite poem from this collection?
That’s always a tricky one, like being asked to pick your favourite kid! I don’t want to say it in front of the other poems, in case they hear me…
I’ll go with the shortest one to satisfy the self-professed purists who are hung up on the idea of poetry as ‘an economy of language’. The title, ‘New Mexico Department of Tourism’, is almost as long as the haiku itself. It goes something like:
Albuquerque. Where
the desert doesn’t get in
the way of your view.
My personal favourite is ‘Fisher Price School of Medicine’. I assume it’s a critique of the commercialisation of healthcare, as well as a remark on the youth (and perhaps inexperience) of medical professionals nowadays. What struck me was the poem’s call for prevention rather than treatment:
I will ask her to explain me the difference
between healthcare and “who cares.”
[…]
why wait till we roll into the examination room sideways
when it should profit her to protect us
while we are still standing up?
Your plea to avoid leaving it too late to tackle a problem also spills into other areas of society:
Will we wait
until more black boys die at the hands of police
than diabetes to consider violence
an institutional health issue?
This was a commission for Health Affairs’ ‘Narrative Matters’ Symposium. Can you explain the aim of the symposium and the context behind this poem? Were you given a brief before writing it or did it just flow naturally?
It’s hard to say that anything flows naturally. I’m 44 years old at the moment, so it took me 44 years to write whatever poem I write tomorrow. It’s easier to make meaning in retrospect than to connect the dots, but they’re still just dots.
I have a bachelor’s degree in biology and considered going to med school. That gives me a somewhat sophisticated understanding of institutional healthcare systems and social determinants of health. In America, there are things that make the life expectancy of a black male 10 years less than the life expectancy of a white male; it’s not just a result of bad choices, it’s systemic. A few of the poems I’d written touched on my awareness of the system and its faults.
The folks from Narrative Matters got wind of my work after I was asked to read my poetry at a SAMHSA retreat in Santa Ana Pueblo. SAMHSA stands for Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration, an agency within the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS). I shared a number of behavioural health and wellness poems during a 30-minute campfire under a starry New Mexico sky. I don’t know whether it was my poetry or the ambiance, but they dug it and recommended that the Narrative Matters folks fly me out to Washington D.C. for their conference.
At the symposium, I read ‘Fisher Price School of Medicine’ to an audience of distinguished healthcare professionals and institutional health scholars. I wrote the poem as a reminder of reality; it’s easy to get into the heady scientific stuff at academic conferences, but it doesn’t always land with the general public unless you make it really personal. Their response gave me a sense of validity and confidence: ‘You got the science correct, and the poetry feels right too. My 8th-grader and my wife or husband would read this and catch all the feels’.
I really like that poem because it’s a creative way to celebrate the work of health professionals, especially in a pandemic era. It was published in the peer-reviewed journal, Health Affairs, and they even invited me back a few months later to judge a poetry contest. I think the greatest compliment for a poet is for someone to say, ‘Hey, I wrote a poem inspired by something you did’.
I want to read another section from the preface, because I found it so compelling: ‘When I am asked how long it takes me to write a poem, my answer is always a function of whatever age I am… At the time of this writing, I am forty-two years old. Therefore… it took me forty-two years to write this’. I love the idea that the whole of your identity, experience and perspective goes into producing a piece of literature. If you look back at a poem you wrote when you were younger, are you able to adopt the same mindset? Or do you read it with fresh, more experienced eyes?
I don’t really know whether I read it with fresh eyes. Imagine a director watching their film back and remembering all the behind-the-scenes stuff. The wilful suspension of disbelief is difficult. For me, it functions more like a time portal; when I read poems from 8–10 years ago, I’m immediately transported back to where and who I was when I wrote them. I remember that version of Hakim.
I love the notion of poetry as time travel. There’s a great short story by Sandra Cisneros (‘Eleven’) that makes me think of Russian nesting dolls: when you’re 11, you have a 10-year-old inside you, and your 9-year-old self is inside the 10-year-old, and so on. It’s like the circles inside a Californian Sequoia tree or the coloured gradients of sediment in the mountains of Northern New Mexico, which demarcate the passing of time.
The old me was pedantic about style, punctuation and how the poem was laid out on the page. I made intentional decisions that I wouldn’t have made today, but I tried to retain those idiosyncrasies when proofreading the manuscript to more accurately portray the person I was back then. Reading old poems does make me reflect on who I am now, with a sense of compassion for that kid and all the things he didn’t know.
That’s a really nice way of looking at it. In a podcast interview, Somali-British writer and poet Warsan Shire said that she practised freewriting. What is your preferred approach to writing poetry? How did you discover it?
Shoutout to Warsan Shire — you’re awesome! My approach is both journalistic and scholarly because of my background. I did a master’s degree in communications and have worked in academia at various levels, but I’m a journalist by trade. I’ve worked in print, radio and TV news on and off since I moved here in 2005. So, like any good journalist or scholar, I start with research.
When I approach a new topic, I consider what has and hasn’t already been said on the subject in order to find a unique entry point. No poet is going to write the first love poem; your job isn’t to come up with something original that’s never been said before, because you can’t outdo Shakespeare or William Carlos Williams in that regard. So, think about what you can contribute to the conversation that’s interesting and offers a perspective that is yours alone.
I have to find my personal and unique connection to the subject before I even put pen to page. At the end of the day, aren’t we all just writing about ourselves? Once I find that hook, I go along for the ride to see where the somewhat free association of ideas leads me. True epiphanies don’t come with the realisation of ‘I never thought about that’, but rather ‘I never thought about it like that’.
But before I get to the creative and introspective part, I look outwards and gather information. Once I have the right vocabulary, I break down into half-words and slang. It’s a fact-finding mission before it becomes a figment of my imagination. I enjoy approaching my craft in this way because I’m a nerd. I just keep digging until something hits me, which is a daring endeavour because I often have to work to a deadline. I’ve settled into a practice of discovery, confident that something will emerge when it’s supposed to.
That’s such a poetic way of looking at it. Your research-based, analytical approach seems almost at odds with the fact that you’re a poetry slam champion. I always considered slam to be spontaneous and impulsive.
Slam is free verse for the most part, unless you’re in a haiku deathmatch to break a tie! In reality, the art of spontaneity is just practice and rehearsal; it’s the confidence that, when the moment arrives, you’ll be able to do what you need to. As I say to my students, soccer players don’t practise to know what’s going to happen in a game, because they can’t predict what the other team is going to do. Instead, they practise to be ready for whatever might happen.
It’s the same for slam poets: we rehearse, we memorise, we choreograph our poems, but everything changes when you step on stage in a room you’ve never been in before. The audience is different each time; the bartender might drop a glass. Your performance is unique, a one-off.
That makes total sense. I read somewhere that you run writing workshops for schools, churches and prisons in New Mexico and elsewhere. Why is it so important to give young people access to a creative education and a sense of community belonging?
In short, because I didn’t have these things. My parents were keen to give me and my brothers a cultural upbringing in Southern New Jersey, so we were taken to plays, ballets and live music events. But no living poet ever walked into my middle school or high school classroom. I think this kind of education expands the universe of what is possible. Although not every young person will become a poet, I am giving them a practical tool to organise their thoughts and feelings, and make sense of the world around them. Most of all, it gives them permission to express themselves in authentic ways. My real art is helping students surprise themselves.
Writing creates intimacy between you and your thoughts. The practice makes you question whether you’re sure you think what you think, whether you’re sure you said what you wanted to say. It’s a muscle of self-awareness and compassion for others that you can build — a muscle that is sorely lacking in our world today. So, I think there is a behavioural health element to teaching poetry, especially in environments where I feel most comfortable — among people younger than me and in prisons.
I know that’s an odd thing to say, but a prison is a place where people look like me and are often suffering from the same things that cause me stress on a daily basis; maybe they went left when I went right. Admittedly, some of those people are flawed, but we also need to account for the fact that the justice system isn’t perfect. They’re flawed in a world where it’s not cool to admit weakness, so it’s powerful to ask folks to consider what His Holiness the Dalai Lama once said: ‘Vulnerability is a strength’.
When I was researching you for this interview, I noticed that being a father is a significant element of your identity: your Twitter bio states, ‘Daddy & Albuquerque Poet Laureate’. Do you try to keep work and home separate, or do they inevitably feed into one another?
A fabulous writer called Nora Ephron used to say that ‘everything is copy’. Most parents can relate to comedy about children, but how would the comedian’s kids feel if they heard it? I’m sensitive to that, so I try not to use names in my performances, but my life is still my richest source of materials. The only thing I’m an expert on is my walk in this world; no one else can tell it better than me. I say to my students, ‘Your parents might think they know you, your significant other might think they know you, but no one knows you like you do. Only you can write it from your perspective’.
People are messy, but if I’m writing about heartbreak and disappointment — whether it relates to my two sons or my wife — I try to produce just as many poems about how awesome they are and how happy they make me. Some days, my son is my proudest moment, but on other days I want to challenge him to a duel!
It’s all about balance, I suppose. You mentioned earlier that there isn’t an overarching theme to this collection, but could you summarise the 3 key messages in Commissions y Corridos?
First, language is music — especially for me, as a poet in the oral tradition. I often remind my literary companions about the fact that humans spoke words long before we wrote them down. Poetry is older than writing hieroglyphics on walls.
Second, Albuquerque is magic. That’s a nod to Rudolfo Anaya and other great authors from here who pioneered this genre of magical realism, in the blurred area between fiction and non-fiction.
Finally, Black is beautiful. It’s hard not to write poems about this part of my identity. When I was younger, I felt like I had to clap back at anybody who didn’t like my writing. As I got older, I realised that not everyone has the same music taste but music is doing just fine, so I don’t need to defend poetry in that manner. I know that people will think, ‘All he writes about is race’, to which I say, ‘You try growing up black in America and see if that isn’t a huge elephant in the room of your life!’ It’s hard to write around it.
Years ago, I wrote a haiku (or rather a ‘Hak-ku’) in response to a critique of my work. It’s titled ‘America’:
I’ll stop writing about
how black I am
when you stop reminding me.
As you said before, you have to write with your whole body, personality and life experiences. Those things will inevitably have an impact on everything you produce.
Two professions that have governed most of my life are journalism and poetry. Either I chose them, or they chose me. Regardless of their similarities and differences, both fields often require an unrealistic amount of objectivity; it’s as though your decisions about what to include or exclude from a story aren’t based on biases. In the modern era of alternative facts and fake news, we know that all facts are not created equal. The idea that there is some sort of objective truth was hauled over from a positivist area where everything is either good or bad, right or wrong. I think we’re better and smarter than that now. Those days are over.
