Dior Stephens’ CRUEL/CRUEL is a meticulously arranged series of poems that contrasts playful lightness with the heavy weight of racial conflict and tension in a form that is both startling and familiar in its restrained mix of anger and hope. Each poem’s eye is turned inward with an intensity that burns through the self, revealing a brilliant mirror reflecting the world through the Black body. To watch Stephens perform is an ecstatic delight, and I was fortunate enough to speak with them after their initial tour.
This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
Stephen Patrick Bell (SPB): I want to share that my first connection to contemporary poetry is oftentimes through performance. I was fortunate enough to see and hear you perform work from CRUEL/CRUEL during the early part of your tour, and it was a delight to witness the ways you managed to expand, contract, twist, and create tensions within these poems that aren’t always there from a reader’s perspective. After your performance, I wasn’t surprised to learn you have a theater background. Did your theater training influence the way you wrote this book? How did you intend for this work to enter the world? Was Cruel/Cruel written with performance in mind?
In my mind, language is always moving, fast and erratically.
Dior Stephens (DS): I always attribute much of the visual aspects of my work to my time spent in theater and dance/movement. I detest static words. In my mind, language is always moving, fast and erratically. So, when it comes to the page, part of my work is attempting to create some sort of visual landscape of how the language dances throughout its own thoughts. Theater and performance art absolutely influence my reading and performance style. I’m grateful to have had theater training that, in part, was so focused on the breath. How to hold it, move it, use it to convey a message or a feeling. This book is very much a hybrid literary-visual — and I might add performance — object. In an ideal world, readers would encounter CRUEL/CRUEL through performance first. But knowing that that isn’t always possible places an extra emphasis on the movement that happens on the page. It becomes its own performance outside of me.
SPB: With such profoundly personal work in this book, I’m curious which pieces you were eager to read first and which ones, if any, you’ve found yourself reluctant to revisit. How has performing this work in public been? Have reader/listener responses surprised you?
DS: Personal? This entire book is persona… Ok, I’m done joking now. I was always real hype to read “Once Again,” and it’s one of the pieces I’ve read the most. After all those readings, I think I finally got it right when I read it at the Cave Canem retreat last week. A friend (who has attended a fair amount of my readings– you know who you are, and I love you) told me that was the best reading I’d done of that particular poem. That felt good. Felt realized.
Others? “04/14/2020 to be or not to be not; queerfag sweeter than moschino——“. That poem is so wild to me– it still manages to surprise and excite me. I selfishly love “UYP 7.”
There’s a certain elevated power/impact the work has when it’s heard that I celebrate and find intriguing.
There’s not really any poem I’m reluctant to revisit in this book, which is surprising. However, there are some I believe to be the best for reading/performing and some others not so much. Performing the work has been one of my favorite parts of this experience. It just feels the most ‘right’ to me. I don’t think I’ve been surprised as much as I’ve been reinvigorated and inspired by listener/audience responses. There’s a certain elevated power/impact the work has when it’s heard that I celebrate and find intriguing.
SPB: Moving beyond performance, what conceptual nucleus did you build CRUEL/CRUEL around?
DS: God, was there one? I’ve said this in a few other spaces, but this book was really for me. I had to get this book out of me if I wanted to have any hopes of reaching for a certain depth of healing that I desperately needed while writing the collection. 2020 was a massive year of reckoning for the world and for myself personally. We all know what it was / what happened, and I knew I wasn’t particularly interested in being a part of the “2020” conversation. However, I wanted to write something that featured, highlighted, whatever, a Black, queer personhood surviving through these massive world-shifts whilst meandering through their labyrinth of self. If 2020 was the stage, the speaker of the poems is the star of the one-act show. (Or, is it a one-act? Hmm).
So, thinking of that and/with all of the racial tension that popped off in 2020, I asked myself, what might happen when we invert this presupposition? What happens when Blackness is foregrounded (and everything else, the text, comes out from that)?
Outside of that, the most conceptually-led part of the book (in my mind) is the middle section, what I affectionately refer to as the “vortex/black hole.” While pursuing my MFA, I also dabbled in an MA in Visual/Critical Studies. We were having a lot of discussions about the implications of gallery spaces almost always having the same look: White walls with images/art on top of/imposed onto it. So, thinking of that and/with all of the racial tension that popped off in 2020, I asked myself, what might happen when we invert this presupposition? What happens when Blackness is foregrounded (and everything else, the text, comes out from that)?
SPB: When did the structure of the book come into play? We have delineated sections marked not only by their titles but a whole section printed on black pages and another playfully titled “Untitled Yellow Pages,” printed on white paper. Can you talk a bit about the importance of color on the page?
DS: Regarding structure: I knew very early on that I wanted to adopt a three-act structure. Yet another way theater comes into play. It’s a classic structure, one I’m familiar with and one I thought would contain the sort of abstract lyric density that the book holds.
One way I angle myself towards that end of the creative spectrum in my written work is through color. I love color. Color is one of those consistent, quotidian blessings for which I’m eternally grateful. With this book, color comes at the reader in obvious ways: considerations of Blackness in white heteropatriarchy.
Regarding color: I’m a big art nerd. I wish I was more of a painter or sculptor or anything a bit more hands-on. Alas, I am what I am, so I admire from afar. One way I angle myself towards that end of the creative spectrum in my written work is through color. I love color. Color is one of those consistent, quotidian blessings for which I’m eternally grateful. With this book, color comes at the reader in obvious ways: considerations of Blackness in white heteropatriarchy. It also comes in abstract ways: the middle section, UYP (which is a callout to a period of writing in 2020 when I had ran out of journals to write in and had to resort to writing on yellow legal paper– which I hated, but then proved very generative). And, honestly, sometimes I just want to plop some color into a piece. Again, I wish I was a painter.
SPB: So much of the explosiveness of 2020 was so broad in scope and scale that it feels almost counterintuitive to take that time to explore the labyrinth of self, although understanding oneself often makes one a better community member. Still, the early months of the COVID-19 pandemic were a time of deep isolation. I feel like a lot of us got those calls, those texts, from (mostly) white friends in 2020. Those “Oh, how’s the whole institutionalized racism thing going for you” messages often felt more about the caller than anything else. Messages that, personally, left me feeling more isolated from the people who were simply dipping their toes into the pool of trauma that many of us are forced to marinate in. Running with the idea of 2020 being the speaker’s stage, your stage, who did you picture to be in the audience?
DS: I love how you crafted this. Are you a writer? 2020 is sorta the stage, isn’t it? I was incredibly hesitant about this while I was writing these poems. 2020 is such a massive phenomenon that I wanted to acknowledge but not center. And yet, it’s kind of inescapable, isn’t it? Which is how I ended up leaving the dates in the middle “vortex” section. We all know what was going on, and when I say we (to finally get to your question), I mean Black folk. I mean queer Black folx. I mean, we know exactly what stage is set when you turn the page from “Once Again” and see “04/02/2020…” From there, the audience broadens to people of color and, of course, QPOC. That’s about where the red velvet rope is drawn for me. Everyone else outside those lines is, for the purposes of this work (and my work, in general), an outsider. A witness. And I’m not saying those people shouldn’t bear witness, but they also have to know that this work is not for them. I worried for a long time that this sounded antagonistic, but at some point, I stopped caring. The table is set.
SPB: CRUEL/CRUEL opens with “Once Again,” which reads like an assessment of worth and value. I found myself asking, through whose eyes are we viewing ourselves? Who is speaking? Who is being addressed?
DS: I think it’s a whole lot of eyes. One of the blurbs of the book (from the incredible Divya Victor) mentions that the work “patch[es] a self frayed and fuming under the gaze of white heteropatriarchy,” and I remember reading that for the first time and being so moved at how simple and spot on it was. So much of what’s happening in the book is a speaker moving through a labyrinth of the self whilst under the thousand-eyed gaze of white heteropatriarchy. In fact, “thousand-eyed” isn’t enough. It’s more Orwellian than that– it’s everywhere. It’s in our own thoughts. And that’s exhausting. Yet still, we move. Sometimes forward. At other times scattered, frantic. And so on.
As for who’s speaking? That’s a question I’m afraid to answer.
Who’s being addressed? All of those eyes, and the I trying to escape it.
SPB: There’s a line I love, “a poet is a poem, is a keeper.” What are you keeping? What have you given us? Now that the book is out of you, and I hope releasing it has been cathartic, what’s left inside to give?
…what am I keeping? A frayed, dizzied record of life. Of persistence and perseverance. Of strife and struggle and triumph and love. A Black, queer record of life at a time where living is/can be one of the most difficult things people like myself can do.
DS: Nothing, I’m retiring. Jk. I’m kinda amazed and grateful that folks seem to gravitate toward that line. It was one that I couldn’t let go of but had deep worries about not landing in any meaningful way. Just reminds me that you never really know how the work is gonna sail. Anyway, what am I keeping? A frayed, dizzied record of life. Of persistence and perseverance. Of strife and struggle and triumph and love. A Black, queer record of life at a time where living is/can be one of the most difficult things people like myself can do.
It has been wildly cathartic to get this book out of me. What’s left inside to give? I’m working on my next collection, where I’m hyper-interested in deconstructing/destroying the lyric I that I’ve been writing through/crafting over the past eight years or so. And, funnily enough, I’m visually thinking of ways to execute this in a labyrinthian form. So, I think once that’s done, I won’t know what’s left to give. Maybe there won’t be anything left. I doubt it, but some part of me does think that would be nice. Maybe there’ll be something else to give. I don’t necessarily want to write another CRUEL/CRUEL.
SPB: On the note of future work, do you think colored paper may be something you return to for other projects?
DS: You only wish you knew; xoxo, Gossip Dior. Jk again (kinda). We’ll see ;)
