Adam has been writing poetry ever since he was a kid. “It’s funny; my mom always brings up this story about me writing a poem about my room being really messy. She said it made her cry, because that is a thing that would constantly end up happening…my folks would always get on my case about cleaning my room. Eventually, for class, I made a poem about cleaning my room and how messy and overwhelming it was. She was like ‘I understand how you feel now"
When asked what inspires him, Adam said “Everything. Every thought, people around me, current events, songs, things that are just happening to me”
Adam is strongly considering naming his chapbook Liminal. “Liminal space refers to a threshold that is often thought of as a pocket dimension. It is a threshold between two places or a transitionary period between two points in my life. The reason I decided to name it this is because most of those poems were written during the pandemic, during workshops, and I wasn’t able to get out of the house so I ended up hosting a workshop and wrote a lot of things that I liked. It almost feels like another life now because a lot has changed since then,”
In addition to being a poet, Adam was also an organizer for the group Rockland Poets, which has been run for twelve years by poet Bryan Roessel and several other talented writers. “I think being an organizer for Rockland Poets was one of the most rewarding experiences of my life, I would say. I was convinced by my friend who was a fellow organizer, Wendy, to join and just from the very beginning it was nice to be able to help and organize things and events and making sure that things are going along smoothly which satisfies the urge in my life, not to control things but to make things run well. Also, on top of that, it’s made me a better poet because I’ve gotten exposed to a lot more poetry…just different people, and in particular even hosting workshops really helped me to give better feedback and receive better feedback and even maybe elicit the feedback that I’m looking for….not in that people are going to tell me what I want to hear but that maybe there’s a particular part of the poem I’m not sure I like? I can say ‘Hey, does my imagery work well?’ or ‘Is this coherent?’ and that way I can get the specific feedback I’m looking for. Otherwise, people can be a little tightlipped”
During the pandemic, as part of Rockland Poets, Adam ran online poetry workshops weekly. “We were planning on doing it before the pandemic and then the pandemic happened so Bryan sort of gave me a little nudge like ‘When are you setting this up?’ so I said ‘Guess we’re doing it now’. And it was hosted on Zoom. We put the invitations out on Meetup and Facebook and Instagram and occasionally on Twitter…admittedly not as much as we probably should have on Twitter’ [laughs] ‘A lot of it was kind of developed as it started going on. I think you’ [me, Leigh Winters,] ‘were one of the first ones to help us develop a time frame for them, in terms of having the ten minute, then twenty minute sessions. It reminds me of a lot of art classes….if you are drawing or sketching, they want you to do gestures and this is going to be a five minute gesture, ten minute gesture, twenty minute gesture. I think that kind of gets people out of their heads with expectations that it needs to be perfect and pushes them to start. I really like that. It seemed like people really received it and it gave people at least three chances to write and get feedback. Generally there would be a range of 10-12 people. I would give them the prompts. I would look them up the day before and select prompts I felt were appropriate. I would write them down, submit them to the group and first, we would do a ten minute warm up to shake off the cobwebs and get comfortable writing. Then, we would work with the prompts or if someone had something else they were working on they could do that. It just gave them a chance to write. One thing I can say is that people say ‘I never have time to write’. I hear that all the time. Unless it’s somebody like you’ [me, Leigh Winters] ‘a lot of people say ‘I never have to write. So the purpose of the workshop was to set up time and space where people could focus on that. I feel like we were really successful with that”.
“One of my favorite exercises was writing a poem without the letter E. At the end of the day, we are writing poetry for ourselves. And it was fun. One of my philosophies is creating constraints. And the more specific the constraints, sometimes they give you a lot of latitude to really run with it. Even though you can’t use the letter E it forces you to get creative in a way you really couldn’t get be creative on your own. So that exercise was my favorite. It was silly and ridiculous but I enjoyed it”
When asked how poetry helped him through the pandemic, Adam said it helped him process some of his feelings and a lot of the events. “There were a lot of beautiful moments that happened and I felt it really captured/ immortalized a lot of those moments and there were some really painful things and it helped me process those. It made it tolerable”
Since I’m known for asking the tough questions, I asked Adam his favorite workshop poem. ”There’s so many that I liked; I don’t know if I can really choose one. I think I like them all. I think there are two that kind of stick out to me. No, three. No, four. There are a couple of ones that talked about pivotal things for me like my family with my grandmother getting Alzheimer’s. She literally has a ten second memory. She’ll see you and she’ll forget immediately. One of the poems I like is called Happy. It’s super short but it’s a very picturesque and wholesome moment that I kind of capture. And then there’s how to create a blessed object. I particularly like the ending of it because you know, it’s about how much you love something and the feeling of having something that’s precious to you, so precious it starts to rub off and get worn”
I asked Adam to tell me about his poem “Uncultured”. “For a very long time in my life, I didn’t know much about my family history. I’m black and there’s a lot of culture that’s kind of been lost, just because of being kidnapped from one place and brought to another place and not being able to record it and not being able to pass things down, so there’s a lot of culture that’s lost. And on top of that I’m mixed. I identify as a black person but I’m mixed and don’t have a tie to any specific place. And that’s a question I get a lot (‘Where are you from?’) and there’s not an easy answer. I don’t really have a lot of things to point to when they ask that. It’s freeing, maybe a little too freeing. Even if I don’t have anything that ties me to a specific place, I do have an impetus to make my own destiny”
I asked Adam about his grandparents. “They helped me to become the person that I am,” he said. “I only have one grandma still alive today but all my grandparents have really affected me with the things they wanted to pass down whether that was the lesson or the things they wanted to talk about or even just the love. I think of my Grandma Selma, she had cancer which is why is passed away, but upon her diagnosis she declared she wasn’t cooking for anybody else. She used to do these great big Sunday breakfasts. It was super delicious. She cooked grits, which is my favorite meal. We had a huge tub of grits, and my brother and I would go ham on that, and fried chicken and collared greens and she had a real spread out. She got cancer and said she wasn’t doing that anymore. Totally understandable. And to give her credit, she was pretty comfortable with technology for an older person. She didn’t have a smartphone or anything like that but she had a computer, she was all about watching her pastor preach via computer and she was working on writing out her affairs. She was working on writing her affairs which is a pretty hardcore thing to have to do. This is what I want you to do with my body etc. Then her word processing software wasn’t working. Of course. And she has a bit of a time crunch on this. She needed help and I was the resident technology person in my family. I made the trip, I took the train all the way out of to the city and after all this preamble of “I’m not cooking for anybody ever again” the first thing she says is ‘Hey are you hungry. Because I made some sphagetti’ and she had a big tub of it. And I said ‘You didn’t have to do that’. She said, in her typical Southern drawl, ‘I know I didn’t have to but I did. You came out here, you’re helping me’ And those moments stay with me.”
When I asked Adam what he wanted to convey with his poetry, he said “I want to just convey the feelings in the moment. I want to convey the way I felt in those moments whether its love or whether its sadness or whether it’s being silly or whatever. I feel like a lot of time poetry is like a snapshot and I want to bring people into that specific moment” And if you read Adam’s poetry, that’s exactly what he does.
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