Kemi Alabi
My writing process is usually very improvisational. I love to play with mood or questions through sound and image until something emerges. This poem was a little different. It was the first poem I wrote after hearing my other work talk to each other. I started writing into their conversation, and that led me to a series of poems all titled Against Heaven. The title became a kaleidoscope. I could turn it and find more patterns, more colors — more themes, more arguments — that traveled through the work as a whole.
I wanted this poem to approach “against” less like opposed to, more like right beside. Heaven lives in our popular imagination in so many ways, and the golden shovel form let me have an intertextual conversation with Saba’s “Heaven All Around Me” and Nick Hakim’s “Heaven.” (I love the Golden Shovel as imagined by Terrance Hayes, which honors the poetry of Gwendolyn Brooks. I also love a remix.)
My first draft began once I landed on the lyrics “there’s heaven all around me” and “what if heaven’s right here?” as beginning and end-words for each line. I brainstormed moods, tones, movements, and images to prime my pump. Then I poured into the container I built. For first drafts, I like to think of poems as a function of time, not space, and write without picking up my pen for a while. This first draft is wild and playful. Several revisions clarified what emerged with special attention to surprise and delight— sounds, images, observations, and other unexpected gifts language revealed. I stopped revising once I could repeat the poem over and over again, and it felt like a somatic intervention. An exhale.
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This poem was originally published November 29, 2020 in The Atlantic.
< draft 1 >
< final version >
against heaven
a double golden shovel with Saba and Nick Hakim
