Writing Against: Training, Genre, and Poetic Interference

I am trained as an academic.
I am not trained as a poet. 

And yet the poetry came first. The loose-cannon, one-and-only chance, step-to-the-mic collection of memories, abbreviated Adverse Childhood Experiences, and long-form eulogies with redwood trees thrown in. All of it, an homage to the region that I love and that holds the city where I was born in 1981:

It felt like a study in some ways: 

• How would one tell the story of Northern California in poetic form with footnotes?¹Wendy M. Thompson, Black California Gold, 3.
• What was the San Francisco Bay Area like after deindustrialization and before late-stage tech gentrification (i.e., now)?²Wendy M. Thompson, Black California Gold, 100.
• How did generations of African Americans weather the storms of urban renewal, the crack epidemic, the foreclosure crisis, and displacement?³Wendy M. Thompson, Black California Gold, 37.
• How did you learn to talk like that when you were raised by a Chinese immigrant mother from Burma?⁴Wendy M. Thompson, Black California Gold, 34.
• What did the redwood trees say after being all but obliterated after San Francisco became a global economic capital beginning in the 1850s?⁵Wendy M. Thompson, Black California Gold, 55.
• Others found it to be an example of poetry of witness.⁶Heidi Kasa, “REVIEW: Black California Gold,” The Racket, October 23, 2025.

Even here, I’m being all academicky: focused on citations, sources, organizing the driving questions, highlighting the author’s argument.

This is to say, that being an untrained poet allows you to fall into the experimental quite easily. It is all experimental. You don’t know how bad your line breaks are. You aren’t sure about form, but it’s poetry when it’s saying a lot with a little. The narrower the sentence. The smaller the footprint on the page. The point at which the wordiness and absolute need to overexplain become optional and not automatic, you feel like maybe you’re getting this, despite an MFA program not having sat you down, given you the formula, made you write it out a couple hundred times, shook you up, given you another formula and a set of rules, allowed you to break them, had you read really bad poetry and a lot of good poetry, told you what was bad and what was good, prepared you for Bread Loaf, and clapped proudly when you got your first book contract. 

After a handful of published poems in unranked, unrecognized journals and lit magazines, you are (maybe) a real poet. But you can’t quite shake the parts of you that need it to be grounded in the historical: 

On April 20, 1858, a scouting party of 35 Black San Franciscans departed the city for Vancouver Island on the steamship Commodore. During the Second World War, Black migrants from Louisiana, Texas, Arkansas, and Mississippi left the Jim Crow South for sunny California shipyards where they crafted Liberty ships for the war effort. In 1899, 1903, and 1904, the 9th Cavalry–an all-Black regiment known as Buffalo Soldiers–spent summers in Yosemite National Park as early park rangers. An alpine aster grows in the geographic center of Tuolumne Meadows, which sits at coordinates 37.8721, -119.3559.

Now how would a trained poet rewrite this paragraph in just twelve words?

_____

There is an art that comes with repetition. 
There is an art that comes with revision.

_____

There is an art that comes with repetition. 
Art comes from revision.

_____

I was writing poetry before I became an academic. Clunky, box-formed, frustrating things that ran off the page, but not in an exciting way. More like a hostage finding a window of escape: there is no other purpose outside of survival. But this was not the first lesson I learned in graduate school. It was training. Method. History of the field. Core texts. It was never about survival (even though that is what it felt like the whole time as an untrained, occasionally hyperfixated, almost gifted and talented, first-born daughter of an African American man with a city college degree and a Chinese immigrant woman who was an ESL student before she became my mother). History came with too many thick books overladen with dates and cities and magistrates and eras and demographics and townships and movements and exports and industrial booms and declines. Sociological studies came with too many graphs and statistics and author name citations biting through the seamless stretch of every simple sentence. Literary studies came with sometimes lovely passages in novels, and other times awful voice and braggy prose and dry themes and flat characters. And you were expected to find the argument, apply critical analysis, interpret it in your own voice. 

You do have your own voice, don’t you?

It would take years before I felt like I was an academic rather than someone capable of doing academic things. Yes, I could read, and really quite enjoyed it. I wrote clean and fast. And I could regurgitate someone else’s argument once I was able to cut through the tangled underbrush and see through to the verdant clearing (a difficult feat, having grown up without sharpened tools or a knowledge of how to conduct controlled burns). But to be a person who produced work that others greatly regarded as legitimate and engaged with as worthy, to be legible after having hid myself, my body, my family, my shame, my poetry all those years, was to cosign the antithesis of avoidance as survival.

So I did what other insecure people do when forced to face the public: I masked myself with layers and layers of citations, wrapped myself in other people’s theories, draped myself in other people’s takes so that mine would be the last one you finally got to if you stayed that late and watched that far into the credits. There! See it? That’s the voice. But you barely notice it under all the pontification and posturing. All of that scholarly shit.

_____

How do you write something beautiful when you are so angry? You remain logical and precise while wielding rage, and try not to shout yourself off the page. 

(It doesn’t work and all my poems seethe and preach and convict; some readers feel the latter is wrongful.)

It is important to be thorough. This is why my poems are so gluttonous. 

_____

Black women scholars and theorists 

Toni Morrison

bell hooks

Hortense Spillers

Katherine McKittrick

Saidiya Hartman

Christina Sharpe

weave the most beautiful, soft and sharp words around the transatlantic slave ship and the Atlantic as the birth transmission process and site of Black bodies as new beings in the New World. Black people and Black places are just people and places outside of the white voyeuristic gaze and scientific labeling. Black women in history had lives that were full and rich and in color and outside of archival sources that call into defiance their reduction to simple name, sex, age, and occupation in census records. There are so many ways to theorize about love and fathers and visual images and grief and place and beingness and feeling and power that do not need to be written in halted, corpse-like, stern-faced English.

Even their titles are beautiful:

Playing in the Dark: Whiteness and the Literary Imagination

Art on My Mind: Visual Politics

“Mama’s Baby, Papa’s Maybe: An American Grammar Book”

Demonic Grounds: Black Women and the Cartographies of Struggle

Wayward Lives, Beautiful Experiments: Intimate Histories of Riotous Black Girls, Troublesome Women,
and Queer Radicals

In the Wake: On Blackness and Being

_____

Academic writing is a demonstration of expertise. It is a defense. It doesn’t need to be beautiful. If the definition of poetry is

a form of literary art that uses the aesthetic and rhythmic qualities of language to evoke deep emotions, paint vivid images, or stir the imagination; it condenses meaning and prioritizes how words sound and look, not adhering to strict grammar rules, 

then academic writing is rigorous labor that requires serious formal engagement with qualitative or quantitative sources rather than a preoccupation with the art and flowers of language. It prioritizes a critical understanding and dissemination of knowledge (the function) wherein one (1) presents data, (2) argues theoretical viewpoint(s), and (3) provides a final assessment rather than prompting a sweeping sensorial awakening of meaning and purpose and feeling in the body. It follows strict grammar rules, seeking specifically to contribute rational, evidence-supported knowledge to the discipline (pay attention to your appropriate style guide!). There is only logic, 

argument, 

credible sources, 

legitimate citations, 

and a deep marination in 

bigly worded, 

haughty jargon.

In more technical terms, academic writing is a formal, objective, and structured style of communication used by scholars to present, interpret, and evaluate new findings or concepts. It is characterized by its precise vocabulary, logical flow, evidence-based reasoning, and proper citation of credible sources. (This last point is very important!)

So, to be a serious scholar and a taken-serious poet, I separated my two selves—the one that had something to prove and the other that imagined it had the capability of producing something that was tender, grass-fed, and beautiful—and I created two separate books.

Rigor is rigor is rigor (until mortis). 

_____

When your poetry book doesn’t win an award, you feel like maybe your work is terrible. Maybe you aren’t cut out for this. This must be because you cut corners. Because you falsely believed that being self-taught and having some editors run your piece alongside a list of other writerly people, you somehow were the real thing. But you weren’t trained right to know how to write something that would be recognized by the right people who were trained to read the right writing. So you go back to the formal, heavy-handed, thick-soled mess that commits itself to formal inquiry and peer-reviewed proof, and try to sneak in some of the poetry, as though that will offer you refuge and validate your ability while giving you small dopamine hits to tide you over.

You do have your own voice, don’t you?

Yes. And it likes to cut off sentences at 

the knees, 

articulate itself using strangely picked

metaphors,      break 

      lines, 

strike out words and insert images abruptly, take       sharp turns to cut       narrow 

corners, 

use long unnecessarily descriptive and obtuse titles, and interject with poetry.

Like interrupt?

Yes, interrupt. Interfere. Integrate.

I begin writing a book that traces the Second Great Migration west through paternal family lines:  my father’s people left Louisiana—the heel and the top of the boot—for California when war was declared in the Pacific. It is a historical overview of the Black Southern experience in the San Francisco Bay Area, but in large-font vignettes told over multiple generations: 

1. The San Francisco Bay Area as a site of Black stagework beginning with the Second World War and spanning into the contemporary time of massive tech wealth and gentrification;
2. The migrant generation arriving and staging their arrival and status as newcomers through photography and album keeping;
3. The migrant generation and their children using the domestic space of the living room as a set to stage their progress;
4. The migrant generation and their children watching their stages being demolished by city leaders building movie sets of the future, driving modern freeway and rapid transit lines through their front yards and over Black business districts, and they in turn (the migrants’ children and grandchildren) staging resistance by coopting some of these sets;
5. The descendant generation and non-Black media reporters appropriating the language of extinction to collaboratively stage the story of the Black Bay Area in the afterlife of deindustrialization, recession, crack, reverse migration, the foreclosure crisis, and widescale redevelopment.

All the sources are there. The bare thread of an argument fraying at the edge of methodological application. Structure. Form. Rigor. I say this and quote that scholar. I include this segment of an op-ed. I explain the meaning of an object or choice and back it up with five other scholars saying, Yes, that is so. But, then, I also drop in sentences that melt into poetic lines. A statistic that bleeds into unrhymed couplets. Metaphors to carry other metaphors. It takes a lot of creative forces to build this story in a similar style that my poetry was built: 

Freeways are landmarks. The Pacific Ocean is a symbol of the possibility of freedom. Storefronts and intersections are stages. Everything is a prop. Two photographs stand as witnesses. A black page represents a rift between the Second Great Migration and its twilight. The words are always evidence. 

(Because of this, there are parts of the academic book that my family 
tells me to redact.) 

The book is contracted with a university press and the acquisitions editor and production team go along with it, albeit with reservations at every stage. There are too many abstract thoughts and partial sentences (the poetry). Too much deviation from academic form and style. The formatting drives half the text off the page. There is too much redaction. The designer is confused. 

I didn’t ask permission to include the poetry in the body. Just like I didn’t ask permission to  include the historical footnotes in the poetry, the heavy-handed observations dragging through the soft native grass of sensory details, the critical sociological lens stomping on the cool repetition of lines worthy of being a dramatic conclusion. Instead, I told them: This is what I am going to do. Or rather, showed them, and then told them: This is what I am doing.

Does it work? Do I have to give in? I push, they shove. I reduce and rewrite; they relent. But this is what it actually feels like to do interdisciplinary or experimental work. It’s too hard. No one gets it. Unless you’re a crowdsourced celebrity who brings your own social media consumer base. 

Then it’s fascinating.                                             You become a bigger star.

_____

I am a poet.
I am an academic.

I am a poetic academic.
I am an academic who lives in poetry.

_____

To be honest, and if you ask my dissertation advisor, I was always a difficult person to train. Asked good questions, yes. Saw through to the bottom of a project. Lopped off things that didn’t belong. Nice revision! Extended storylines into a future that hadn’t come. But resistant to traditional form, exact discipline, formal training. Resistant to style guide, jury expectation, and forced requirement. Resistant to structure and grammar because, Look at how ugly these two lines are when you drag in the third wheel of a citation. Resistant to audience demand, structured criticism, program fundamentals. Resistant to formula, to standard, to functionality, to order. 

I suppose the truth about interdisciplinary work and mixed genres and experimental form is that you can be trained and taught to produce legitimate, solid, recognizable art; and it will be good. Very good. Anchored in various methods and mediums and fields and schools and theories and calibrated to the exact appetite of art galleries and consumers and patrons and readers (or at least their commercially adjusted palate). It will be properly staged and mounted and framed and timed. It will be properly received. And that is the part that will always have me feeling like an imposter. Because while I create and pitch and apply and submit and draft outside of these parameters, every rejection will always come with an unspoken doubt and that itching assumption that crawls beneath the skin: Am I even good enough? and Do they already know?

But then there is also some truth to accidentally stumbling upon (what?), discovering through ignorance or insubordination, or meeting another human who resonates with you, the work: all of it a confirmation, that for some of us, we are exactly where we are supposed to be: too difficult to discipline into genre, too stubborn to convince into form. 

Because what is experimentation anyway but resistance in reverse?

—

Wendy M. Thompson is an Associate Professor of African American Studies at San José State University and a poet who hails from Oakland, California. Her forthcoming scholarly book, Chasing the Sun: Staging Black Life and Belonging in California’s Bay Area, looks at the cultural and performative worlds of black Southern migrants and their descendants and how these worlds impacted the region. Her debut poetry collection, Black California Gold, was a finalist for the 2025 Martin Cruz Smith Award: Emerging Diverse Voices prize. She previously wrote and performed an original poem for the Suzanne Jackson: What is Love retrospective at SFMOMA and contributed an essay in the catalog for the Routed West: Twentieth-Century African American Quilts in California exhibit at BAMPFA. Wendy is on Instagram @thegreatblackoutdoors.

Cover image credit: “Redwood National Park, fog in the forest” by Michael Schweppe is licensed under CC BY-SA 2.0.