Charles Street Chats: Q&A with Steven Leyva
Steven Leyva, associate professor for the Yale Gordon College of Arts and Sciences, first came to UBalt as a student and graduated from the same program in which he now teaches, M.F.A. in Creative Writing & Publishing Arts. This spring, Leyva earned tenure, becoming the first Black professor in his college to reach the milestone.
Behind the Chat
Order: turmeric and ginger tea
Location: Coffee Olivia
Distance from campus: 0.1 mile
Q: What does it mean to you to earn tenure here at UBalt?
A: Practically, it means I have a job essentially, for life. And one of the things that I think tenure does for anybody who is also in the arts is that it creates a situation or a context by which there's a kind of maximum amount of stability and that sort of runs counter to the narrative of ‘starving artists’. I really think that's a myth that should be confronted and let go of. It’s amazing what art you can create, what poems you can write when you've got a regular paycheck, health care, and you don't have to worry about keeping your job. There's space in the imagination to fill what was occupied by worry or what was occupied by how to make money; now it’s occupied by what might be and what one might imagine.
I'm someone who doesn't like to think about money a whole lot, so, stability is high on my list of values and tenure sort of goes hand in hand with that. But it also is a complicated thing, because of being the first Black faculty member to go from tenure track to tenure in the College of Arts and Sciences. Anytime anyone is the first of anything, it's always a little complicated because it means that you've got to confront history a bit and sometimes a very complicated history. But I mostly am excited because it's an opportunity to say that the institution is investing in someone who is not from rich parents, not white, and that may look a little bit more like the city that we live in. And I think that is one way to make the door ajar for helping other people come in too.
It's such a small thing, but a big thing at the same time. I get to make the case for the entirety of my time until I retire that UBalt is a place that you could be a Black scholar at, and I think that's a valuable thing for me to consider. There are, in the country, if you add up all of the Black faculty that have tenure, it's under 5 percent, so you're talking about me entering into a category of a select few, and that means that I've got some responsibilities to myself and to those who weren't able to make that kind of transition or weren't recommended by their institutions, and it means that there's work to do, that there's continuing work to do.
Watch: Steven discusses helping his students connect with poetry
Q: What first drew you to poetry as a reader?
A: I thought I was going to be the next Denzel Washington. I was studying to be an actor, but none of y'all have seen me on TV, so you can see how that worked out [laughs]. But when I was in undergrad and I was studying theater, a friend of mine was switching majors from theater to doing creative writing, and he asked if I would write some poems with him, so that he would have someone to talk with about it. So, in order to do that with him, I just asked him who I should be reading. I had had experiences with individual poems in high school ... but I don't think I'd read a book of poems until undergrad. And cliche as it as it sounds, my friend was like, well, why don't you start with Leaves of Grass by Walt Whitman, but it was wonderful. I just had such a revelatory experience with language. I had already had a relationship with language because of theater, but the idea that that relationship could be renewed is one thing that I've held on to from that initial experience. So as a reader, it started with wanting to be in community with a friend. I came from reading Walt Whitman and Mary Oliver, and just on and on and on, I kind of never looked back.
Q: How did poetry become your preferred genre as a writer?
A: I always tell people I was late to it. I don't have this narrative of like, since I was 4 I knew I wanted to be a writer and it's the only thing I ever wanted to do. Those are great narratives to sell like novels and books, but that just wasn’t me. I was late to it because I didn't think that was what I was going to do. But it's connected to theatre in some ways. And in fact, I use that as a metaphor for my students so much. What I realized that I loved about theater was not necessarily the performances, which there's nothing like it, but what am I actually liked, is all of the prep. I've liked all the rehearsals. I liked all the well, what is this piece of dialogue mean? What's underneath it? What's the subtext? Much later, I realized I was already thinking like a poet, considering all the possible ways that something could mean something, but also like a scholar. Looking at what a playwright had done through language is what actually invigorated me. And so it was an easy thing to come to that as a writer. The blank page is little theater that you mount a production of language on and then present that to the reader.
Q: Coming back to Walt Whitman, you’ve said you teach students in the Creative Writing & Publishing Arts program how to synthesize what Whitman calls the “multitudes” contained within their identities, histories and interests. How do you teach them to reach within themselves and write about subjects that are outside of their comfort zone?
A: Whitman is saying, basically, do I contradict myself? Yes, I contradict myself; I'm not contained between my hat and my boots—the idea being that I am larger than even the body that I inhabit.
What I'm interested in is how can I use what the students are already curious about to build a pathway out of navel gazing or any preaching or anything didactic. Curiosity begins with a space in which you know something and something that you don't know. And that pursuit of the part that you don't know, through something that you might have an expertise in, ends up creating a space for synthesis to happen. So if I say, hey, you grew up as a ballet dancer, talk to me about the way that in ballet, maybe through Laban movement analysis, they make notations so they can pass knowledge about choreography from one person to another, other than a video, right? We can use Laban’s movement analysis to create other kinds of notation that suggest something and then renew people's experience with language.
Some people come from a science background, so talk to me all about the science diction that you think you need to compartmentalize because of context that you can really bring into the poem, even if the poem is about you and your kids thinking about the chemical makeup of what's in this Taharka Brothers ice cream that's the best in the city [laughs] Whatever it might be, it comes to thinking about not compartmentalizing the selves that we have, or the interests that we have, or the obsessions that we have, and bringing that all into the art.
Really what you're actually having is not an experience with content, but an experience with syntax. I'll give you an example. There's a famous poem by Paul Celan. Celan is writing in German. He's a Holocaust survivor, and he's got famous poem called Death Fugue and it's about the Holocaust, it's about the death camps. You might imagine being a survivor writing in German, writing in the language of the people who oppressed you, how complicated that whole situation might be, but I came to Celan through English translation, and the first line of Paul Celan’s Death Fugue is:
Black milk of daybreak we drink you at sundown.
So before you even think about, well, what the heck is black milk of daybreak, you're already hearing the music of those words and you're hearing them in translation! In German, they have a different music. And that's the thing that I try to get my students to realize. If you begin with the music of language, you begin with bringing your whole self to something, you have the chance to enlarge our capacity to relate. So rather than saying, I'm not Jewish, I don't know anything about the Holocaust, this poem isn't for me, the music of the poem invites you to have an experience that's larger than yourself.
That's what I want students to kind of enter in to. It's in that way that we can write for a lifetime, not just for a season. They can write beyond, which many of them do, the particular traumas that they may be experiencing in the moment or in the past, but write into the joys that they might experience in the future.
What Charms Us
We end all of our Charles Street Chats with the same question: What do you love most about Baltimore? Here's Steven's answer.
It is one of the best places to be a writer. It's unpretentious. It's hardscrabble and it will adopt anyone.