LINE LEVEL #15 CHAT
Welcome to LINE LEVEL CHAT!
Launched in 2023, LINE LEVEL is a monthly column started by writer, editor, and educator Joanna Acevedo, focusing on craft lessons from the recent or forthcoming work of contemporary poets of color. LINE LEVEL CHAT invites contributors to answer a few questions about craft which will continue to add to the conversation, create more resources and more accessibility, and serve as further context for the goals which LINE LEVEL aspires to achieve.
This month, our February LINE LEVEL #15 contributor Adesiyan Oluwapelumi is giving us a preview of his thoughts on craft before his LINE LEVEL feature later in the month, and his New Voices poem (always open and always free for emerging poets), which will be published on February 21st. His poetry is also forthcoming in Akashic Books’ New-Generation African Poets Chapbook Box Set, edited by Kwame Dawes and Chris Abani, and Akashic Books is generously offering a 30% discount on these sets for those who submit to our next 10-Day Challenge, which will open on February 6th. Keep an eye out for information on our site, newsletter, and social media! We can’t wait to read your submissions and hope these resources connect with you.
These Box Sets have featured a number of Frontier poets over the years, and Akashic is where Editor in Chief Joanna Acevedo got her start in literary publishing, working three days a week as an intern in the Brooklyn offices in the fall of 2019. Thanks, Akashic!
Adesiyan bravely took on these questions, and he stayed inside his assigned 650 word limit. Read his thoughtful and lyric responses, then stay tuned for more of his work and the work of our other fantastic poets and our next challenge, opening just a few days into the new month.
What was the first poem you read that connected with you?
A tricky one but I believe it was Danusha Lameris’ poem “Nothing Wants To Suffer”. It was a moment of pure intimacy and an invitation to empathy. To the prescience that everything wants to live, and live abundantly—a chord struck within all of us. Of all the poem embodies, it is mostly a prayer to me. To be embraced daily in wholeness with a soft and kind grace, in intricate simplicity and evoking a sense of rapturous wonder in a way that transcends words. I want this. Poetry holds that possibility through its poignant experience of reality. Aesthetically, the reward of a good poem is a sensuous, heightened experience of language but a poem, such as Lameris’, that constantly “reveals [itself in its] subtle recesses” (to quote Edward Hirsch) is a great poem!
Tell us the same story you just told us, but start at the end and end at the beginning.
Self-consciousness is a theater. Not of a singular, but plural minds commingling to build an ecosystem. Like a mantra, the possibility of existence reverberates through all of us. I am reminded of that line from Maggie Smith’s “You Could Make This Place Beautiful”—We’re all little fountains—soft pulsing. We all come into the world unfinished, still stitching ourselves together. It is an energy. It is our most powerful technology. To be filled with a spirited carefreeness and tender joy. To riot against the onslaught of bane and of flesh akin to a rebel of wildflowers. I want this. To live and to live abundantly. As I reflect upon the subtextual implication of Danusha Lameris’ poem “Nothing Wants To Suffer”, I am made participant to an intimate conversation in the liminal spaces where tenderness dwells, not as a specimen, but as an animate, breeding thing.
What does poetry mean to you? You can only use the words from your previous answers. You don’t have to use all of them, but you can’t use any others, and you can’t repeat.
The poem is an invitation to intimacy. It inhabits liminal spaces where tenderness dwells, evoking a sense of rapturous wonder. The poem is an animate, breeding thing. It constantly reveals the possibility of itself in subtle recesses. Its prescience—a chord struck within us. The poignant experience of its language is a theater: an ecosystem of energy. Reality in intricate simplicity is the sensuous specimen of poetry. It reverberates a kind of subtextual grace, pulsing through us. Of all the poem embodies, it is mostly a prayer to me: a stitching of tenderness.
Adesiyan Oluwapelumi, TPC XI, is a medical student, poet, essayist & Poetry Editor of Fiery Scribe Review from Nigeria. He & his works are featured in The Republic, Electric Literature, 20.35 Africa, Isele Magazine, A Long House, Brittle Paper, Fantasy Magazine, Poet Lore, Tab Journal, Poetry Wales & elsewhere. His chapbook Mouthful with Cinders was selected by Chris Abani and Kwame Dawes for the APBF New-Generation African Poets Chapbook Box-set Series (forthcoming Akashic Books, 2025). He tweets @ademindpoems.
If you want to read more of Oluwapelumi’s work, you find his LINE LEVEL column here.
Joanna Acevedo
Joanna Acevedo is the Editor in Chief of Frontier Poetry. She is the author of three books and two chapbooks, and her writing in multiple genres can be found across the web and in print, most recently (or forthcoming) in The North American Review, Hunger Mountain, and Cream City Review. Nominated for Best of the Net and Pushcart Prizes, she teaches workshops and creates resources for emerging writers on numerous platforms, receiving her MFA from NYU in 2021. She also holds degrees from Bard College and the New School. To learn more about her and her work, please visit her at https://www.joannaacevedo.net/.
