Books: What We've Become by darlene anita scott

Blog Editor Chase Isbell interviews Shenandoah contributor darlene anita scott on her poetry chapbook What We’ve Become, a collection about love. In this interview, scott articulates the nuances of Black love in contemporary life, the intimacy between love and violence, and the body as a site for love. She also touches on the relationship between her parents—the dedicatees of the collection—and the kwansaba as a poetic form for Black love. Her poem “Watershed” was featured in Issue 74.1-2 and was the co-winner of the Graybeal-Gowen Prize for Virginia Poets. What We’ve Become was published on March 14, 2025 by Finishing Line Press.

The back of the book states that this collection is about romantic love, and it very much is. And yet, I was surprised to find how much of the chapbook foregrounds violence, loss, and conflict alongside—maybe even as part of—romantic love. How did you come to articulate this duality, these seemingly conflicting impulses toward love and destruction, that returns as a motif across many of these poems? Several of the poems feature imagery of shadows and dark spaces, suggesting a literal dark side to love, an underbelly, or a negation. Can you tell me more about how these poems speak about love but also love’s shadow?

For me, there is no way to confront romantic love among Black people without confronting this duality of conflict and communion. I’m reminded of the conversation ^# between Nikki Giovanni and James Baldwin in which they discuss, as far as Black life and Black love, the way that violence necessarily shows up in Black relationships because it’s part of the cosmos in which Black people are made to exist. So, I couldn’t escape the dark side(s)—I may be a little subjective here—but my experience has been that romance is never divorced from the darkness in which it often exists—you know, if you’re Black in this country—there’s that shadow and sometimes that shadow darkens your house and whatever’s in it. But that doesn’t mean there is no light—shadows need light to exist. So, I didn’t want to avoid or deny or ignore that duality because it speaks to how radical Black romantic love is—the ability to find and even hold onto this light inside of those shadows is remarkable to me.

I want to stay on that point for a little bit. Some moments of violence interjecting into the poems really challenged me, none more so than in “WEEDAY, 4 A.M.” In the poem, scenes of domestic unity and companionship make way for a confession of violence, of shouting and broken furniture and “clandestine passion marks.” Can you tell me about how this poem navigates this rupture into violence? And how do you hope readers can sit in a love poem that complicates our relationship to safety and comfort?

I admit that I am still torn about this but I have known love that held violence. (Or maybe it wasn’t love I was knowing at all—a therapist would have to help with that!) But, seriously, this poem is not meant to romanticize violence in domestic union but to contextualize it. This couple’s passion/desire/pleasure is found in the hidden passion marks, and they make love almost as a protection ritual before they head into a hostile world. And that hostility still manages to seep into their safe space—their home. Again, I don’t intend to romanticize but to highlight how couples often manage that. I mean, it could as easily be an indictment of the violence we accept as part of being in a relationship with a marginalized person but it also indicts the violence that instigates it. The domestic aggression might or might not exist without what happens to them in the outside world, but since the poem acknowledges that it does exist, then we get to see in this poem how it becomes part of the fabric of how they meet each other after those long days immersed in micro and not-so-micro aggressions. Unhealthy release in my estimation but still groundwork in so many long-lived relationships I have known because both people accept what’s happening even when they can’t or don’t exactly articulate it.

As a project on love, this chapbook is very much invested in the pleasures of the corporeal body. However, you also give space for the imagery and vocabulary of the body as a medical specimen, as an organism organized by particular biological structures and systems. Here I’m thinking especially of “A Series of Misunderstandings” which opens the collection with an examination of blood. I want to know about this choice to portray the body through medicalized imagery and logic. How did this language lend itself to your poetic interests for the chapbook? And how can we understand the body’s physicality not just for its capacity to make love, but also to pump blood, to consume food, to give birth, and to die? In other words, how can we see the body as a site of pleasure but also of biological function?

I think that the need to experience love is physiological, so that’s my answer to why I described it in such scientific terms. Like, pleasure cannot be separated from the body or biological functions. Our brains react to pleasure; our functional systems react to pleasure. And both seek pleasure and avoid that which is unpleasant. So, I couldn’t separate them and also wanted to demonstrate how primal pleasure is. This, of course, is coming from someone whose whole research platform is about corporeal connection to how we move through the world in trauma—the faces we make, our posture, things like that. Trauma is a mental function, but as the brain is part of the body it tracks—if only to me. So, the short answer is that pleasure is a biological function, and this poem is trying to explore that function.

You dedicate this chapbook to your parents, and their presence is very much felt throughout this collection. Can you tell me more about their relationship and how it inspired this book? What made you decide to write about them?

My parents have been married for fifty-seven years, and long marriages are a large part of the fabric of my family. The family-relationship quilt also includes divorces and lifelong singles and relationship variations between these. But my parents’ relationship, because it is the one I saw up close, is instructive and intriguing. As a serial single, I am intrigued by what it means to be in, and build union with, someone through all the lives we live inside of fifty-seven years—the stamina alone is impressive! Up close, I learned that relationships are imperfect mechanisms; the constant choosing that is required. My parents didn’t stay the hopeful and naïve twenty- and twenty-one-year-olds; they become something other than Gloria and Ernest: Mommy and Daddy; then Gloria and Ernest again; then Mom-Mom and Pop-Pop; and those are just a few of the fairly public identity shifts. And they choose the new versions of each other over and again. So intriguing but instructive because it teaches me a kind of stamina that I think is often missing when we’re feeling giddy in love and see the scrapbooks of love—those highlight reels are hardly the full story.

As a follow-up question, I spent much of the collection wondering if the speaker of these poems was literally one or both of your parents. Was I wrong for making this assumption? Or did you in fact embody your mother and father as the speaking “I” of several of these poems? If so, how did it feel to occupy their consciousnesses, their speaking voices through your own poems? How did their words become yours? And if you aren’t speaking from/for your parents, who are the speakers of these poems? And how did you come to find that “I”?

I can’t say that I thought of my parents as the speakers in the composition of any of the poems. I did spend a lot of time imagining how I would speak if I were in these relationships—very subjective, I know. In a way, I think the collection is a kind of note to them to say, “I think I get it now;” maybe even asking them if I did indeed “get it.” And wondering what I would do were I given the opportunity to love like that; for that long.

You write primarily in free verse throughout this collection, which makes “Kwansaba in Which You Stay” especially stand out as a poem employing a particular form. When did you first learn about the kwansaba and what drew you to the form? How did you decide this form was the most appropriate for the goals of this poem? And speaking much more generally, are you a writer who is drawn to form?

I have become more drawn to form in recent years, but I generally believed that I wasn’t good at it and was even restricted by it. So I started practicing first as an exercise. I started to discover that some poems seemed to ask for forms. Like the ghazal, which I have yet to master, and the quatern. Outside of exercises, I was writing poems without line breaks and, once I began shaping them, I would notice form emerging, so I would look up forms to see if what I was seeing actually had a name and rules, and I would pursue it if I found one. I don’t remember when I first learned about the kwansaba; it was before I noticed that these poems were a collection for sure and had written these poems outside “the project.” But it turns out, the kwansaba form really reinforces the subject. Eugene Redmond invented it as a praise form—it’s a form that celebrates Black imagination and invention; it’s a form of Black love.

I don’t want to sound like I am overemphasizing the more tragic dimensions of this collection. Many of these poems are very warm in tone, emphasizing the sensual and emotional ease in which love contours our everyday lives. However, again I can’t help but focus on the fact that the last poem of the collection is one of the book’s most somber. This time it is not the rupture of violence that complicates love, but cold, slow, and impersonal distancing. This chapbook about love ends with the image of the beloved falling out of love. Why did you choose this poem as the final one of the collection? And how can it inform how we read the entire book?

That’s striking that you read “Outside Clothes” as falling out of love. In fact, I thought of it differently—as a lover holding, literally and figuratively, a lover through an off-putting expression of grief—turning his back to her—also literally and figuratively—until he kind of awkwardly releases it. But if I focus on the somberness that is the tone of the poem and not what’s literally happening in my head as the writer, I am “convinced,” like the lover in this poem, that the poem, no matter its literal story, reinforces that holding the duality we spoke about earlier is part of where love expresses itself most honestly, purely, and radically.

I create so much in solitude; thanks so much for the chance to think about this collection through a different lens!