Joshua Bennett’s poem, “Systema Naturae,” appears in the winter 2020 issue of The Southern Review. Here, he discusses inspiration and his creative process, alternate history, and where his work from the winter issue fits into the larger landscape of his literary projects.
Shakirah Peterson, Editorial Assistant: “Systema Naturae” opens with ‘The American Negro is an invention.’ This line reminds me of James Baldwin’s 1965 debate against William F. Buckley. Baldwin states that one’s response and reaction to the American Negro has to depend on “where you find yourself in the world, what your sense of reality is, what your system of reality is. That is, it depends on assumptions which we hold so deeply so as to be scarcely aware of them.”
For this reader, “Systema Naturae” beautifully displays the assumptions Baldwin hints at in his above statement. I am curious to know where you were in the world (mentally/emotionally/physically) when you received the inspiration for this poem?
Joshua Bennett: When I wrote this poem I was living in my apartment in Boston, fresh off of my first term teaching at Dartmouth. I had been thinking toward the possibility of a new collection for a few years, and this poem was the first to convince me that I truly had no idea what this future book might look or sound like. But the language felt true, and I eventually decided that there was enough energy in the early drafts of it to keep writing from that headspace. Later that week, I wrote “Sonnet,” which is also featured in this issue of The Southern Review. And “Abolition” a few weeks after that. The rest of the collection would come together over the course of the following months.
SP: Why did you choose the Latin title, “Systema Naturae”?
JB: The title has been on my mind for years. Largely because I’m working on a sequence of monographs at the moment that take up Carl Linnaeus’s framing of animal, mineral, and vegetable kingdoms as a kind of thematic through-line to theorize works of African American literature. The first of these, Being Property Once Myself, was published by Harvard University Press in 2020. The second in the series, on blackness and the mineral kingdom, is currently in the works.
SP: One of my favorite phrases in this poem is, “The American Negro is an invention. He is interdisciplinary & interstellar . . .”, specifically because of the use of the prefix ‘inter-’. It occurs in loanwords from Latin, meaning “between” or “in the midst of”. I love this phrase as it subtly alludes to being in a flux which ultimately speaks to the overall poem.
Can you speak about the process of choosing the adjectives you used to describe the American Negro?
JB: The process of writing “Systema Naturae” was one that recalls, for me, W.S. Merwin’s claim about poesis: “No deliberate program for writing a poem works. A poem begins to be a poem when a sequence of words starts giving off what you might describe as a kind of electric charge.” Once I had those first few lines, I was off to the races. The argument began to unfold, and I saw the language—innovates, innermost, interstellar—that would help me chart my path through the world of poem.
SP: At the end of the poem, you quote some dead man somewhere from a book you once read. The dead man said, “The indomitable soul of the Negro is an impulse toward abolition.” Why did you choose to keep the author and the book unnamed? Why did you choose this line?
JB: Oh, that’s because that particular book and author don’t exist outside of my own mind. The poem comes from a collection where these sorts of myths—alternate historical timelines, alternate texts—abound. The speaker of “Systema Naturae” is part of a much larger collective of voices giving us clues about the shape and tenor of this alternate order. And not just to help us make narrative sense of it, but to more fully immerse us in the way it feels to live within that version of things.
SP: When I queried you for this interview, you stated that this poem was especially close to you. Can you tell us why this poem holds that special place?
JB: The poem deals with a number of theoretical questions that I have been working through for years on the road to my first book projects: abolition, animality studies, black interiority, the role of blackness in the American imaginary. It’s close to me for those reasons—i.e., it is a distilled version of a much larger set of arguments, elaborated over hundreds of pages, that have been with me since I was much younger—but also because it represents what feels like a different room in my voice as a writer.
SP: You also stated that this poem is in the new collection. Your most recent book of poetry Owed was published by Penguin Books in September 2020. Are there any new projects we should keep an eye out for?
JB: Sure! Be on the lookout for my first book of narrative nonfiction, Spoken Word: A Cultural History, which is forthcoming from Knopf. I also recently had the chance to guest edit a handful of magazine and research journal special issues that I’m proud of: the February issue of Poetry Magazine, “The Practice of Freedom” (which I edited alongside Tara Betts and Sarah Ross) and a forthcoming special issue of SOULS entitled “Inheriting Black Studies” (which I co-edited with my friend and colleague, Jarvis Givens).
Lastly, “Systema Naturae” is part of a sequence from my forthcoming collection of poems, The Study of Human Life.
Joshua Bennett is the author of three books of poetry and criticism: Owed, Being Property Once Myself, and The Sobbing School, which won the National Poetry Series and was a finalist for an NAACP Image Award. He is an assistant professor of English at Dartmouth.
Shakirah Peterson is the editorial assistant for The Southern Review and an MFA candidate in creative writing at Louisiana State University. She writes across all genres: poetry, fiction, nonfiction. She is originally from Los Angeles, California, where she earned a BA in communication studies at California State University, Long Beach.