Writer Morgan Parker examines personal and political topics in new essay collection

This story is part of a series about arts and culture in Washtenaw County. It is made possible by the Ann Arbor Art Center, the Ann Arbor Summer Festival, Destination Ann Arbor, Larry and Lucie Nisson, and the University Musical Society.

"When I didn't even know if my poems [were] good, I knew they [were] funny," says award-winning poet, novelist, and essayist Morgan Parker. "Humor is what drew me to poems in the first place."

Parker will give a reading at the University of Michigan Museum of Art (UMMA)’s Helmut Stern Auditorium, 525 S. State St. in Ann Arbor, from 5:30-6:30 p.m. Dec. 5 as part of the Zell Visiting Writers Series. The recipient of a 2016 Pushcart Prize, as well as fellowships from Cave Canem and the National Endowment of the Arts, Parker is the author of multiple poetry collections, including "There Are More Beautiful Things Than Beyoncé" and "Magical Negro," which won the 2019 National Book Critics Circle Award; the young adult novel "Who Put This Song On?"; and, most recently, an essay collection published last spring, "You Get What You Pay For."

As an undergraduate, Parker says, she might write a poem "about a martini," or "something scathing about [her] college roommate." But she’d do so in the form of a sonnet, a tightly-regimented, 14-line poem with a fixed rhyme scheme — casually undermining centuries of poetic tradition in the process.
 
"I’m definitely a person that wants to challenge myself," she says of her work in multiple genres. "I have to take a step back, let the writing lead, and be down to follow it to whatever form it holds."
 
In "You Get What You Pay For," Parker’s subject matter ranges from the personal to the political, with frequent forays into pop culture. She discusses Bill Cosby’s recent trials, Kanye West’s statement after Hurricane Katrina that George W. Bush "doesn’t care about Black people," police brutality, the long legacy of slavery, white supremacy, and her own experiences in therapy.
 
But to list the subjects individually is to do the book a disservice. Parker doubles back on her subjects again and again. She also shows how each one is intertwined and interconnected: how, for example, her own mental health is inseparable from institutionalized white supremacy and the legacy left behind by slavery.
 
In the book’s first essay, Parker writes, "[E]ven as a child I understood that there was always a me I desperately needed to keep secret, dark patches to tuck away under my public self; a performance that sometimes required rising to the occasion of myself, and with each occasion the dark parts dug deeper into a sinking feeling."
 
Over the phone, Parker describes the process of writing the essay collection as "connecting all of the dots that a poem doesn’t need." Where she says "a poem just puts two images next to each other," the same topic might take 20 pages to unravel in an essay.
 
"For me, that’s often frustrating, because … I don’t understand why we need to [connect] all the dots," Parker says.
 
But, she adds, it was precisely that process, "as frustrating as that was," that proved to be "a very good American lesson."
 
"A lot of what I talk about in the book is our inability to think very critically and to apply lessons from the past," she says.
 
And while Parker says "there’s something about the poem that lends itself to our communication age," something reminiscent of "sound bites and snippets," she says she found "unexpected value" in scrupulously delineating the points "in between the lines of poetry."
 
"I know there are parts in the book that feel painstaking, and I kind of wanted them to, because the more I realized how much I was writing, [and] had already written, the more I felt, ‘Wow, how important is it to say these same things over and over, and deeper, and in new ways,'" she says.
 
One idea that comes up in several of the essays is the notion of cultural, or ancestral, memory — which Parker often describes through the image of the slave ship.
 
She writes, "When I insist to a white friend now that ‘I was on the slave ship,’ that I remember it in ancestral flashbacks, when I name it Trauma, when I argue about the delineation of past and present—it isn’t just that he doesn’t understand, it’s that the ‘rules’ are on his side to say otherwise."
 
Throughout the book, Parker insists that the idea of linear time — a forward-moving progression — is not one that resonates with her.
 
"Everything is so collapsed," she says.
 
As for her own next projects, Parker says she’s "playing around with" an idea that could become a novel.
 
And, she adds, "I’ve got some scribbles, but I can’t call them poems yet."

Natalia Holtzman is a freelance writer based in Ann Arbor. Her work has appeared in publications such as the Minneapolis Star Tribune, the Los Angeles Review of Books, Literary Hub, The Millions, and others.

Photo by James Michael Juarez.