Stacey Balkun: Thank you for sharing this beautiful book with all of us! I feel the presence of Lucille Clifton, Nikki Giovanni, and Mona Lisa Saloy in these deceptively simple, vulnerable lines. Who are some poets (and artists of other mediums) who influenced/inspired the poems in Libre, and in what ways?

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Skye Jackson: That is such an incredible compliment! I’m honored to even be mentioned within that illustrious group of poets! When I was younger, I was really shaped by the work of Frank O’Hara. I would spend weeks pouring over his poems and overwriting them so that I could learn the essential ingredients for writing a good poem. So I always feel like his influence is baked in somewhere quite deeply within the DNA of my work…just from a foundational structure. Another poet who really changed my relationship to writing poetry is Toi Derricotte. I remember reading her collection, I, and just being so affected by her work. I thought…Wow! This is what I’ve been trying to do and this is what I want to do. I was actually just texting her the other day that Libre would not even exist without her. Her work just absolutely lit me up. I was activated by it.
 

SB: Skye, I love that answer. I can hear the narrative, observational O’Hara voice come through for sure. Speaking of artists, poems like “the women in the wood,” “under the shadow of a golden clock,” and “#medusawasblackyall” are ekphrastic, written in response to specific pieces of art or experiences in museums. Can you speak more about visiting museums as part of your poetic practice?

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SJ: Yes! I love a museum! I find myself often inspired by different works of art that I see. There’s nothing like losing yourself in a piece of art that is so beautiful and arresting. As a poet, I just want to be a part of that world of beauty. I want to try to get closer to it…to understand it better. Because that understanding helps me to perceive the world. Sometimes going to a museum helps me to get out of my head and step inside another artist’s world or experience. Museums remind me that artists are real people with their own unique backgrounds and lives…and I love digging into that kind of research as well. Usually when I go to a new city, I will visit a museum. That is my ritual. For instance, I was just in South Africa back in December and I took a trip to the Zeitz Museum of Contemporary Art in Cape Town. I learned so much about the pulse of the city from just being inside those walls. A museum helps me to be able to understand a place better.
 

SB: A museum is definitely a conduit to place. It is a vessel, capturing something, almost like structure or form. As a poet, I am intrigued by form. There is so much formal play in Libre--from the sonnet crown to the duplex and beyond--and I especially love your list poem, “grocery list for when my ex comes to visit.” How did the poem come into being, and how does a list hold so much power?

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SJ: Ah! I do love a list poem as well! The fascinating thing about that poem was that it truly began as just a list. I was living in Kansas City at the time and my favorite ex-boyfriend was coming to visit me…and I just started making a list of items I needed to buy from the store in the Notes on my phone. Months later, I was scrolling through those very same Notes and read that list. Then a part of me thought…this (in a different form) would make an excellent poem! So, I started shaping it and trying to elevate it from just beyond a regular list. I loved everything that a list like that implied…I was interested in what it began to reveal about the speaker and her own desires. I am of the mind that a love poem always tells us more about the speaker than it does about the beloved. The speaker betrays herself every time. The speaker sees what they want to see…and that is sort of the beautiful delusion that love presents us with: love as this sort of aspirational delight that we’re always chasing.
 

SB: Libre is itself a sort of list of loves and experiences and objects. There is so much mourning, loss, growth, travel, confusion, celebration: the complications of living in the city of New Orleans, of being a Black woman moving through so many places, cultures, and roles. Through memory, description, and even dialogue, these poems make the personal universal. Do these poems begin in the personal, or with the universal idea? Is there even a distinction?

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SJ: I believe that the universal is rooted within the personal. The more specific we are about our lives, the more other people can see themselves reflected in the mirror of that. I would say that the poems in Libre definitely begin within the realm of the personal. I was trying to record the speaker’s world—their perception of the world is so rooted in the personal. My poetic speaker takes everything personally and I sort of love that about them! I really try to make a concerted effort to not do that or be that way in my own real life. But for some reason, in poetry, it just works!
 

SB: Everything is personal! Lately, the poet Miriam Calleja has me thinking of everything as prayer, too. Your poem “on housesitting for seven days” ends with the word “amen,” and, through its cataloging, feels like an incantation. Is this poem a prayer? Is any/all poetry prayer?

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SJ: I’ve often said that my poetry is like a cosmic letter to HR. I do believe that it is some kind of petition…some desire to be heard and understood by something or someone. The poem “on housesitting for seven days” is rooted in the ordinary moments of every day. Sometimes our routines are all that we have to pull us through our days…and so those daily rituals become like prayers in a sense. In that poem, the speaker is experiencing a level of suffering, so the routines that she has are what is keeping her going and moving forward. The speaker is relishing the routine of life…I believe, in that poem, it’s what’s keeping her from totally falling apart. Her routines remind her that she is alive now. Even if she is suffering, she is alive now. She has that. To answer your question, I do believe poetry is prayer…we are using it as a vehicle to access something beyond ourselves.
 

SB: A “cosmic letter to HR” is way better than a prayer! Love that. You write, “survival: / the only language / all of our tongues / speak.” There is so much beauty and power and vulnerability in Libre, in its detailing your experience navigating the world (and literally the entire world--from a childhood bedroom to foreign countries and everywhere in between). These poems have a quiet resistance. How is language a method of survival? What else can it be?

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SJ: Thank you so much, Stacey. For me, language is the way that we all connect with other. It’s the ultimate bridge. So I try to think of my poetry as the vehicle that is traversing that bridge. We need each other to survive in this world. As human beings, we all need different things in order to survive…so it’s not just limited to language. But for me and who I am, and for who we are as poets, it’s everything.
 

SB: Even the book’s cover blends beauty, power, grace, and vulnerability. Tell us about Libre’s cover, and the title. You've talked about the title poem on Bear Review before, but how did it become the title of the collection? What is the significance of the word “libre,” and how do the title and cover work together?

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SJ: Thank you so much! I obsessed over the cover for such a long time. It is a cyanotype photograph that was taken back in 2019 in a friend’s coastal home in Bay St. Louis. It felt like a photo that is firmly rooted in the past and I loved the haunting Southern Gothic imagery it presents, particularly the trees dripping with moss outside of the window. It is also fiercely and undeniably Black. I wanted the cover to feel almost like an album cover: moody, somber, beautiful, arresting. Something that you just couldn’t walk by on a shelf without engaging with it. I feel like it is presenting some sort of mystery. There is something sort of melancholic about it that speaks to the heart of poetry for me. There are other fun Easter eggs about the cover too…but perhaps I’ll leave those unspoken for now.

 

The title, of course, comes from the poem Libre in the book. It is a contemplation of microaggressions in America and the way they are infringing upon the speaker’s constant pursuit of freedom. It seemed appropriate to title the collection that, as I was looking for one word in the book that encompassed the themes, fixations and desires of the poetic speaker. It just seemed to fit. To me, it felt like the title of a debut collection of poetry.

 

In the poem, the speaker reveals that she is wearing a perfume called Libre…and I just felt that it represented so many important elements of the speaker’s world. Her goals and motivations lead her towards this constant contemplation of what freedom is…and we see her working through that…or rather racing towards that idea in so many of the poems in the collection.
 

SB: Skye, Libre is definitely all of these things: moody, somber, beautiful, arresting. It is freeing, too. Thank you so much for spending time with these questions, and for leaving us with this cliffhanger on the cover! This book is truly special, and it’s an honor to discuss it in-depth with you.

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SJ: Thank you, Stacey. I appreciate the care that you gave in reading the collection and asking these phenomenal questions. It means so much.