…And I Sing
From her upbringing near Churchill Downs to her role as a leading voice in contemporary Southern poetry, Joy Priest shares, in this conversation with Chuck Reece, how writing became both her salvation and her rebellion.
Joy Priest. Southern poetry. "Horsepower" poetry collection.
Joy Priest became a poet on the evening of November 16, 2011. Or perhaps it is more accurate to say, on that particular Wednesday evening fourteen years ago, Joy Priest gave herself permission to become a poet. To fully inhabit the skin of a woman wielding words of ferocity and power.
All her life she had carried a pen and a notebook, growing up a rock’s throw from Churchill Downs in Louisville, the home of the Kentucky Derby. But she didn’t believe she could make a career from writing, so she chose another course when she moved to Lexington to enroll at the University of Kentucky.
“I thought I wanted to be a veterinarian because I loved animals. My dad called me Dr. Doolittle growing up. I always had animals,” she says. “I grew up across the street from horses, you know. So I enrolled in the College of Agriculture as an agricultural biotechnology major and pre-veterinary science. And then I switched to human nutrition and pre-med.”
But after two years in the sciences, she says, she found herself “miserable.” she says.
Joy Priest. Southern poetry. "Horsepower" poetry collection.
“And my compromise was to do journalism rather than English, because there were still—even though they were not great in 2010—still job prospects for journalists,” she says. She went to work at the Kentucky Kernel, UK’s student newspaper, rose to the post of features editor. And that’s where she was on November 16, 2011, looking for stories to fill out the features section of the Kernel.
“I was looking for stories, and I discovered there was a professor from our university who was a finalist for the National Book Award,” Priest remembers. “And the ceremony was that evening. So I said, I’m going to stay in the newsroom tonight and watch this. If she wins, I got to write the story up. You know, we can’t wait till tomorrow. I stayed up, watched it, and sure enough, she won.”
Watching the internet broadcast of the awards ceremony in Manhattan, Priest saw the South Carolina-born poet Nikky Finney, who at the time was a professor at UK, bring home the National Book Award in Poetry for her collection Head Off & Split. When she rose to accept it, Finney did so in the name of her enslaved ancestors—“the ones who longed to read and write but were forbidden.”
“Tonight, these forbidden ones move around the room as they please,” Finney told the crowd. “They sit at whatever table they want and wear camel-colored field hats and tomato-red kerchiefs. They are bold in their Sunday-go-to-meetin’ best. Their cotton croker-sack shirts are black-wash-pot clean and irreverently not tucked in. Some have even come in white Victorian collars and bustiers. Some have even climbed out of the cold, wet Atlantic just to be here.
“We shiver together.”
When the actor John Lithgow took back the podium from Finney, he declared her words “the best acceptance speech ever for anything.”
In the Kernel newsroom, young Joy Priest wrote her story.
“I actually beat the wire services on that story,” she recalls.
But her story wasn’t only a scoop. It was also a prompt—for Priest to consider how she wanted to spend the rest of her life.
“I just remember being sort of like spiritually struck by the sequence of events for me at the time,” Priest says. “And Nikky’s presence, I mean, the speech she gave, how she talked about being a writer, it was like, this was a real person. It wasn’t about the market or the industry. I felt very moved and sort of…”
Priest pauses, searching for the right words.
“You know, it was like the way one feels when they walk up to the front of the church to join the church and be saved.”
Poetry, she decided, might be her salvation.
“I felt very moved and sort of…you know...it was like the way one feels when they walk up to the front of the church to join the church and be saved.”
Priest had never heard of Nikky Finney before that night, but she did know that the advisor to her student chapter of the National Association of Black Journalists was a poet, a widely renowned one: Frank X. Walker, whose legendary first volume of poetry, Affrilachia, had destroyed the myth that to be Appalachian was to be white. Walker was also the founder of the Affrilachian Poets, one of the longest standing groups of African American writers in America.
In that fall semester of 2011, Priest approached Walker after an NABJ meeting.
“I went up to him and said, ‘Hey, I write poetry, too.’ And he said, ’Let me see some.’ So I brought him the folder, and I was like, “You know, he’s not going to read it.” But he said, “I’ll read it and get back to you.” And he did. He was like, “You have something important to say, but you need some craft classes.”
The next semester, Priest enrolled in Walker’s Introduction to Poetry—and in one of Nikky Finney’s literature classes. Only a few years later, she was publishing one poem after the other and was officially inducted into the Affrilachian Poets.
All the while, Priest was working on a book-length collection she would call Horsepower—a cinematic, three-part narrative told in poems. The main character is a young, mixed-race girl named Sparkle who is leaving home and learning how to assert her own power (which is considerable) and “learning how to own yourself,” as Priest writes in “American Honey,” the first poem in Part I.
It’s not difficult to see bits of the poet’s own youth in the character of Sparkle. Priest’s mother is white, and her father is Black. But for the first eight years of her life, she was raised by her mother and her maternal grandfather—her “pappaw,” who purposely kept Priest’s father out of her life, often by force or threat, because he did not want his granddaughter to know that she was Black.
But Priest is careful to note the book should never be considered a memoir.
“While the collection of poems is based on my life,” Priest says, “it is a collection of poems and not a memoir.”
In 2019, Priest finished Horsepower, and entered it in the competition for the Donald Hall Prize for Poetry. For almost thirty years, the Association of Writers and Writing Programs has awarded the Hall Prize to a young poet chosen from hundreds who submit book-length collections of their work. The AWP asks an eminent poet to pick the winner, who receives a prize of more than $5,000—and publication of their book by the University of Pittsburgh Press.
The judge for that year’s Hall Prize was eminent indeed: the Georgia-born poet Natasha Trethewey, a Pulitzer Prize winner and the nineteenth Poet Laureate of the United States. In August of ’19, the AWP announced Trethewey’s choice: Horsepower.
Trethewey called Priest’s book “an urgent grappling with the desire to both remember and outrun the past, with history both personal and communal, and the complexities of American racism in its most intimate manifestation—familial love.” Trethewey also took note of the ferocity with which Priest’s work asserted personal power. Horsepower, in Trethewey’s words, demonstrated “what it means to clear the stall, break out of the traces, and run unbridled into life.”
For two years now, Priest has been the Assistant Professor of African American and African Diasporic Poetry at the same school whose press published her first book: University of Pittsburgh. She is also the curator of community programs and practice at Pitt’s Center for African American Poetry & Poetics.
Priest has finished a second collection she hopes will soon be published—poems written, she says, by a woman who lives her life differently than did the author of Horsepower. A little over four years ago, after years of struggling with the disease of addiction, Priest got clean and sober.
Our interview has been edited for length and clarity.
Joy Priest. Southern poetry. "Horsepower" poetry collection.
Chuck Reece: I interviewed your teacher Frank X. Walker recently for an episode of the Salvation South Deluxe podcast, and he had some awfully kind things to say about you and your work. He said, and I quote, “Some of the confidence she left my course with has helped power her through her many accomplishments since way back then.” I’m curious: Did you feel like you were lacking confidence at that point?
Joy Priest: I knew writing was the one thing I could do well, the thing that I had always heard I did well from my teachers in high school. I always knew writing was a place I could go if I wanted positive encouragement. However, I think what I left Frank’s class with was a confidence that I could do this as a vocation, that I had acquired technique and skill, that I could continue to pursue it. It was like a reinforcement of the confidence I already had.
CR: How did you wind up in a class with Frank?
JP: The semester when Nikky Finney won the National Book Award, I was also president of [the student chapter of] the National Association of Black Journalists, which is the organization that Frank was my advisor for. After one of those meetings one night, I went up to him and said, “Hey, I write poetry, too.” And he said, “Let me see some.” So I brought him the folder and I was like, “You know, he’s not going to read it.” But he said, “I’ll read it and get back to you.” And he did—he was like, you have something important to say, but you need some craft classes. And so I enrolled in his class the next semester and Nikky’s class.
That next spring I enrolled in Frank’s Intro to Poetry class, and Nikki Finney’s Intermediate Fiction class. And yep, then she was my teacher for the next ten years.
CR: For the next ten years?
JP: Yeah, because I did my MFA. studied my masters with her as well. [In 2013, Finney left Kentucky and returned to her native South Carolina to become the John H. Bennett Jr. Chair in Southern Letters and Literature at the University of South Carolina, where Priest earned her MFA degree.]
CR: You told me Nikky’s speech accepting the National Book Award was a genuine transformative moment in your life. You know, we’re lucky if we have just a few moments like that over the course of a lifetime.
JP: If we’re lucky, and the older you get, the further away from them you feel. But that was certainly one of those moments of my younger life. I mean, yeah, it inspired me into the life that I’m living.
“I feel I’ve struggled in early sobriety to have that feeling of inspiration, because I don’t have substances to help me feel that…because it’s like feeling high, feeling spiritually moved or lifted or whatever.”
CR: Talking about moments of inspiration like that, I’m curious what keeps you inspired now.
JP: That’s a good question. Sometimes I feel I’ve struggled in early sobriety to have that feeling of inspiration, because I don’t have substances to help me feel that…because it’s like feeling high, feeling spiritually moved or lifted or whatever. When I have those moments now, sometimes I wonder if I’ve outgrown or I’ve aged out of that phenomenon of that feeling.
CR: Right? You know, it’s funny. After I got clean, I felt the same way. I found all that again when I got into the eleventh-step stuff. [In twelve-step recovery programs, the eleventh step reads, in part, “We sought through prayer and meditation to improve our conscious contact with God as we understood him…”]
JP: Yeah, you’re right. When I’m doing that real intensively and consistently, I have had those moments. Especially when specifically when I just start to kind of rote say my prayers, like the Serenity Prayer, the Third Step Prayer, the Seven Step Prayer. I’m just kind of saying those rote and then there’s been moments where I start to improv in the prayer and it feels genuine. I’m really...
CR: Talking to God.
JP: I’ve really really entered the prayer. And so that’s an example of a time when I might feel like that, for sure.
CR: Yeah, that’s what happens to me.
Joy Priest. Southern poetry. "Horsepower" poetry collection.
JP: You just made some connections for me. If I can bring it back to writing, I also feel that when I’m working on a poem and everything clicks into place. I feel that feeling. And I feel it through stories. And one example I give, just because all these things are kind of resonating at the moment, is something my father recently told me. I was feeling really discouraged about sobriety. I just got four years, and those third and fourth years can be a little rough. He just casually mentioned—recently and randomly, for the first time in my life—that his father, my grandfather who I never met, decided at forty-two years old that alcohol had taken control of his life and he needed to stop drinking and he started going to meetings.
CR: Wow.
JP: I guess he was forty-something. I think he said it was 1972. One of the reasons I was feeling discouraged is because I was like, Is this the right place? Because I wasn’t seeing Black people in the meetings. When he told me that, it was like perfect timing, like a higher power moment. I felt that feeling. And it was through a story. I had asked him to talk about my grandfather because I never met him.
CR: I’d like to go back to your childhood for a minute. How close to Churchill Downs did you actually grow up?
JP: I grew up on the back side, the stable side. The back side is Longfield Avenue. And so my house was facing Longfield. There was an alley behind and then my backyard butted up to the alley. So I could throw a rock maybe and hit it. I could definitely smell the horses when I stepped outside.
CR: The back side is its own culture, right?
JP: Mm-hmm.
CR: The people who work back there, it’s really a stark contrast. You got all the pretty, mostly white people with lots of money and pretty clothes. It’s part of the whole moonlight-and-magnolias mythic South.
”I think about myself as a Southern writer primarily. I think I feel that so intensely because I’m kind of at a level now where I’m always in spaces where I feel like the only one who’s Southern. And that our work is sometimes overlooked.”
JP: Absolutely.
CR: One thing that really struck me when reading Horsepower was how I got this immediate sense that you were trying to get underneath all of that.
JP: Absolutely. And thanks for that reading. I teach a class called literary mapping where I talk about what it means to remap a place or to re-narrativize it. The idea that there’s this sort of common story or like, common narrative that’s told about it. So like we see the front side of the racetrack on the news. We see the prince of Saudi Arabia flying in, all the Hollywood celebrities, but you don’t see these peripheral cultures that happen on the backside, the hustlers, the people that park the cars and sell things and the people that groom the horses and all that stuff, like the back side of the track. It’s its own culture. And that felt to me just as much a part of the culture as the actual horse race.
CR: I love that idea of literary mapping. What was the word you used? “Re-narrativizing” a place? We live in a region whose entire narrative needs to be remapped.
JP: Exactly. Yeah.
CR: How do you think about your Southern-ness as a writer?
JP: I think about myself as a Southern writer primarily. I think I feel that so intensely because I’m kind of at a level now where I’m always in spaces where I feel like the only one who’s Southern. And that our work is sometimes overlooked in a certain way, or it doesn’t feel important in the conversations. But I really don’t know how to answer that. It’s kind of like I would need perspective on what isn’t Southern. One thing about Kentucky writers specifically—but perhaps all Southern writers—is that we’re still hooked by narrative, by story. I write about my grandparents’ roots in Alabama, the historical lineage. and yeah, I just, mean, I love Southern culture, so I don’t really know how else to write or what else to write about. Even when I go to Paris, I’m writing as a Southern writer, you know.
Joy Priest. Southern poetry. "Horsepower" poetry collection.
CR: Do you feel like you’re part of a group of writers who are sort of chipping away at the old untruthful Southern narratives?
JP: That’s a really interesting question. I think about this a lot in my scholarship because I’m always troubled by the pastoral—a genre that was more about looking away from the violence of the landscape than it was about just being a part of nature. At the same time, am I able to say what is someone’s truth and honesty or not? But I do feel that my answer to your question would be yes. You know, Frank’s work is a part of that; the Affrilachian Poets are a part of that, obviously. I think a lot of the writers I meet at the Appalachian Writers Workshop don’t read Hillbilly Elegy, but read fifty other books that have a more honest framing of things. Like I just got Kin by Shawna Kay Rodenberg. It’s an amazing memoir. And I think about someone like Richard Wright, who was writing about the experience of labor in Mississippi at the same time that certain other people were writing the pastoral romantic version of Mississippi. So that work is always being throughout history. And yeah, I would consider myself a part of that.
CR: In the new poems you sent us to publish along with this interview, there is one called “Houston,” which made it very clear to me that this big change in your life, getting sober, has an effect on what you write. The ending of that poem is such a raw, honest depiction of an addict getting to the end of their rope.
& this was the city where it happened.
Where I rode an ambulance
to the almost-end, where I came-to driving
down the street blastedthat one last drunk
Maybe it’s because I personally related to that because of my own experience, but I think there’s a fearlessness in doing that kind of thing. And I think with the way the country is right now and the way the South is right now, that kind of fearlessness in writing is important. And I’m not trying to blow too much smoke up your skirt here, but I hope you see what I’m trying to get at.
JP: Well, I think fearlessness is a part of my brand—for lack of a better word—right? That’s what I was getting at with Horsepower. There’s a mental fortitude that I’ve had that allowed me to move through my circumstances. So I appreciate your comment. I don’t know if I’ve always managed it in the best ways, but I appreciate that.
“I think fearlessness is a part of my brand—for lack of a better word—right? That’s what I was getting at with Horsepower. There’s a mental fortitude that I’ve had that allowed me to move through my circumstances.”
CR: I really felt, from the first time I picked up Horsepower…I mean…you don’t pick up every book of poetry and expect it to tell you a story. But immediately I got the feeling you were telling me about your own life. In the opening poem, the title poem, you have these beautiful descriptions of the stable side of Churchill Downs, your neighbors who “sell horchata in Styrofoam cups, street tacos in paper baskets w/ cilantro & lime,” who are the “motors of our economy.” And then you put your family in there, and I felt you trying to figure out what your own place was in this scene. There is that passage that feels so honest to me:
But all I know for now
is my grandfather,
the white one,& I know my mother, who I can hear now, roaring
home from work in her muscle car.
& wait—
I know the horses,the horses & their restless minds.
That writing puts readers inside your life, like literally inside the picture of where you were at the time, both in the physical world and inside yourself. When you set out to write that book, did you know it was going to be sort of the story of your life up until that point?
JP: I didn’t say, “I’m going to write a book,” and then start writing the poems. I had a lot of poems that I had been writing over a whole decade. Coming from Kentucky, coming from the South and that school of writing, I was initially taught, you know, to write what you know. And there’s that George Ella Lyon poem, “Where I’m From.” [Lyon is another Kentucky poet.] So that’s what I was doing. And when it came time to put a book together, I was working at an indie art house theater. I worked there for a few years and I was obsessed with film. I was obsessed with these independent, non-linear films. I thought one of my favorite terms used to describe my book was “cinematic,” because that’s what I was going for. I knew that there was a story here, and I was interested in demanding that this kind of a life be seen. I actually gave the speaker in the book a name, which is Sparkle, and that comes in “American Honey.”
CR: Yeah. Sparkle begins talking in “American Honey,” which is the first poem after you begin with “Horsepower.” You divide the thirty-one poems after “Horsepower” into three parts.
JP: It’s a filmic series of poems. “Horsepower” was the last poem I wrote. When it was titled and I was looking at it, I said, “This is the title of the book.” This poem has everything in it—all the themes, all the threads. This is going to be the establishing shot. And when you get to American Honey, you’re jumping into the action, right? The speaker’s running. We don’t know what she’s running from, but the first section kind of tells you. And the second section is this flashback to childhood—to deepen the origins of the story. And then the third section brings us to the speaker who’s talking in “Horsepower,” who’s looking at her younger self. That’s how I was thinking: wanted to take the reader through the story, through the experience.
“I’m kind of having an identity crisis because now I got a job and health insurance and a car and I can pay my bills. I don’t know if my story changes. There are new developments in my story, I guess.”
CR: Well, that book came out almost five years ago now, right? I sense in the three new poems we’re publishing, along with this interview, that your story is a different one now. Is that right?
JP: I don’t know. I’m kind of having an identity crisis because now I got a job and health insurance and a car and I can pay my bills. I don’t know if my story changes. There are new developments in my story, I guess.
CR: Well, you talked about getting sober. And that’s a line people draw in their lives with a very distinct before and after—and with a distinct imperative to live differently after. Let’s talk a little bit about the role of recovery in your work now. You know, I said this to you before, but I don’t know that I’ve ever read as vivid a description of somebody hitting a bottom as the one that you have near the end of that poem, “Houston.” You know, “this was the city where it happened, where I rode an ambulance to the almost-end.” That’s the kind of stuff I generally hear in meetings.
JP: Yeah, am I going to get in trouble? Am I violating the traditions?
CR: Valid question. You know, I’ve never officially outed myself in my own publication, but honestly, I think because of this interview I’m going to have to. And I’m okay with that.
JP: I always think of it like, my membership in my specific recovery program is anonymous. I never mention the specifics of the program. But if I have someone ask me directly—do you go to meetings?—I’ll say, yeah, I have a recovery program, but I don’t really advertise what that is. But I think it would be really hard for me to avoid talking about being sober. That’s part of the work. But it’s funny you say that because I didn’t think that I had a bottom.
CR: Really?
JP: Yeah. I didn’t know. Especially in the beginning, I was like, “I don’t know if I’m an alcoholic,” but then you get reminded again. I realized, “I can’t stop on my own.”
CR: Is there another collection on the way?
JP: Yeah, hopefully. Someone is looking at it at the moment. It’s called The Black Outside. Most of the title series poems are out there, published already. Sobriety is an aspect of it. But it’s also a love letter to Black music—Black classic musical forms like the blues, funk, spirituals, jazz, soul—and Black people’s relationship to nature. With some family stuff thrown in there.
Joy Priest. Southern poetry. "Horsepower" poetry collection.
CR: I’m curious to read it. you but you don’t have a sense yet of when we’re gonna be seeing it, right?
JP: I’m waiting to see if they’re gonna publish it or not, if they’re gonna take it or not. I had been holding on to it a while. But, you know, I guess I started writing these poems a year before I got sober. I was at the Fine Arts Works Center [in Provincetown, Massachusetts]. At the very beginning of the pandemic, I was at the Fine Arts Works Center. I remember I was in quarantine and I was in this online writing group with some writers out in Oakland, and I wrote some of the first poems then. I finished it last May. And so, a year after I started writing the earliest poems in the book is when I got sober. At that time, I had a poem due to The Atlantic in a few days. You can imagine the state of mind I was in: I was like, there’s no way I’m going to be able to write a poem. I don’t have my stuff. And I read this essay by Leslie Jamison [“Does Recovery Kill Great Writing?” in The New York Times Magazine] that really just turned my mind around about it all really quickly.
CR: What was that poem?
JP: It’s called “Ghosts in Schools.”
CR: So that was the first poem you wrote sober?
JP: Yeah.
CR: When we were talking a little bit earlier about dealing with all the problematic pieces of the Southern narrative, do you think there are certain things that only poets can do to shed light on the truth about the South?
JP: I don’t know. James Baldwin said, “The poets (by which I mean all artists) are finally the only people who know the truth about us. Soldiers don’t. Statesmen don’t. Priests don’t. Union leaders don’t. Only poets.” He was talking about all makers, you know, not just poets. I think I would have to really make something up here to distinguish what it is that poets do that fiction writers don’t do.
“Maybe the thing that makes poets different is the degree to which they become obsessed. I feel possessed when I write a poem. To bring it back to church, I catch the spirit.”
CR: I guess what made me ask the question is my own recent experience reading a lot of Southern poetry. There were so many falsehoods and so much myth in what my generation was taught in the public schools about the Civil War, right? And about slavery. The history of the U.S. Colored Troops is something I only knew anything about because I saw that movie Glory when it came out thirty-five years ago. But in Frank Walker’s latest book, Load in Nine Times, all those poems based on his historical research into those troops and their families, that’s amazing. I guess what it comes down to is that I feel like poems are hitting me as hard as songs these days. .
JP: I would say that’s one distinction. The other one, I guess, would be space—the short duration and the small amount of space that poems take up. But I think that’s also about the kind of poet that Frank is, which is a poet that does research like a journalist.
CR: And he does.
JP: It’s not just pretty words on the page, but something in history is excavated. Another poet like that is Roger Reeves, who is from southern New Jersey, but I don’t know, the brother is Southern. I don’t know how to explain it. He teaches at the University of Texas at Austin, but it’s like, I don’t know, maybe 90 percent of him is a Southern ancestor or something. He brings the research into the poem. Like in the latest book, Best Barbarian, there’s a long poem in the middle called “Domestic Violence” and it’s in the voice of Emmett Till’s father, who I learned through this poem was imprisoned and who shared a cell with the poet Ezra Pound in Italy during World War II. Maybe the thing that makes poets different is the degree to which they become obsessed. Maybe the only other thing like it is method acting—how we move in and out of these personas.
I feel possessed when I write a poem. To bring it back to church, I catch the spirit.
And I sing.
Chuck Reece is the co-founder and editor-in-chief of Salvation South, the weekly web magazine you're reading right now. He was the founding editor of The Bitter Southerner. He grew up in the north Georgia mountains in a little town called Ellijay.
