The Center is Everywhere

Jake Skeets’s debut collection, Eyes Bottle Dark with a Mouthful of Flowers (Milkweed, 2019), is devastating. The imagery chokes and bruises: a fragmented skull, a blackened scalp, “cracked hawkweed sacrum.” The rhythm meanders and slants as Skeets examines place, belonging, Diné masculinities, toxicity, and love. Set on the Colorado Plateau, the book takes readers to the fictional Drunktown and Indian Town, New Mexico, and dwells on scenes that are easily overlooked: a bar “at the end of the world,” a field of bones, a drifter. Skeets also breathes new life into stock representations of Native Americans, such as the real-life encounter between the author’s uncle Benson James and photographer Richard Avedon, whose portrait of James appears on the book’s cover. Skeets’s poems capture furtive glances, queer lust, and the threads that link these various images. The book is not so much a reflection on queerness as an enactment of desire in iterative, emergent bursts, such as “this man has me oceaned.”

Kathy Fagan selected the book as a winner of the 2018 National Poetry Series competition. Skeets also won the 2018 Discovery/Boston Review poetry contest. He edits the online publication Cloudthroat and teaches at Diné College in Tsaile, Arizona. This conversation was condensed and edited.

One thing readers often expect from “Native poetry” is a meditation on the land or on place. There are so many beautiful images of plants and the landscape in your book but also an insistence on violence. What does place mean to you? 

I came into the book with the realization that if I was going to write about land, there would be some mytho-spiritual elements, but I tried to find a balance. In terms of place, there are two ways that I begin to navigate it. One is imagery. I wanted to have a push and pull between land and the more violent images in the book. And the other way I navigate place is by looking at the negative space or the white space of the page and deciding where to place my text and where to have line breaks. I wanted the lines to be purposefully placed on the page spatially.

But white space is also sort of dangerous. I wonder if there is something to fear about it too.

Generally when I refer to white space, it’s the white space of the page. But as I’ve been discussing my work, when I say white space, people often hear whiteness, which gave it a new layer for me. There is a danger in whiteness and in how it takes up space and language. The poems reached a new level for me in that relationship, so the way I was framing the poems in relationship to negative or white space had to do with the idea of language trying to find its way through, especially regarding the type of imagery and violence that the book deals with. In my family, this violence is difficult to talk about. And poetry was a way, an attempt, to give language to things that we see. But how do we begin to talk about it? When I was writing the book and researching it, I had to talk to my mom about my uncle and read stories in our newspaper. It was a journey.

Your uncle is a haunting presence in the collection.

I’ve been obsessed with the interaction between my uncle and Richard Avedon when he took the image I use for the cover. What did Avedon say? What did my uncle say? When I asked my parents and my aunties, it wasn’t so much, “What was it like losing a brother?” It was more trying to know what had happened between Avedon and my uncle. Avedon was drifting through Gallup [New Mexico], and he came across my uncle. And I wanted to showcase that story, but it doesn’t necessarily belong to just me. My mom and her sisters can tell that story better than me. I don’t want to take that away from them. Even though he’s my uncle, they have a stronger connection to that story. I wanted to include one specific poem about my uncle and that image, though, which I do in “Drift(er).”

Avedon often used a white backdrop for his portraits so his subjects wouldn’t be exposed to the orientation of light. He wanted the orientation of light to be invisible so viewers didn’t know where the subject was. I don’t want to call it racist, but it is a way of erasing history.

In the titular poem, “Eyes Bottle Dark with a Mouthful of Flowers,” the plant names take up a structural role. What do those names mean to you?

At first, I didn’t know the names of all these flowers and plants, so I went through a lot of archaeology textbooks of the Navajo Nation, trying to match them to pictures on my phone. For example, the cactus flower is yellow-white, and you can eat the buds and the flowers. I tried to have a plant that was edible and ones that are medicine. Mormon Tea is another one. I wanted to use the plants that had particular meanings and sounded poetic.

This has me thinking about the English names and the Diné names and how you use Navajo in some poems.

In terms of the usage of Navajo, I’m not a fluent speaker, although I can read and write it. My partner is fluent. I’ve thought about using Navajo more, but at the end of the day, I choose to respect the language. I don’t want to use Navajo just to use it. I understand the beauty it has, but I don’t want to represent myself as a fluent speaker. As a poet, and as a person, I was a little standoffish with myself. I understand the depth that Navajo has, and I incorporate that into my poems, using Navajo’s depth to unlock components of the English language that may not be visible at first. Navajo is a verb-heavy and image-heavy language, and it plays with time in interesting ways. In “Buffalograss,” I say, “The Navajo word for eye hardens / into the word for war.” My dad actually showed me the similarities between the words anáá’ (eye) and anaa’ (war). In Diné, we are very beauty-based and balanced-based. We avoid talking about death. Death is very taboo. So, within the poems, the eye can become a literal shield or act of war against the things you see. Even if you see violence in your daily life, your eye can become a protector.

Your line “The only time men are close to each other is when they are covered in blood” expresses a dangerous magnetism. How are you imagining desire between men in this context?

I wanted to think about a framework that didn’t see masculinity as this binary, as the polar opposite to femininity. I didn’t want to see it as a spectrum either. In a way, I wanted to talk about masculinity outside of a Western understanding of gender because Diné believe all of us have elements of femininity and masculinity. This is in a lot of our stories. I didn’t want to focus only on the sort of toxic masculinity we see now either. I wanted to focus on a masculinity that is uniquely tied to the land, to Diné prayer and story. What happens when those two ideas of masculinity come in contact with each other? What sparks? I wanted to give some life to those relationships.

When we’re talking about American toxic masculinity, we need to talk about the ways it is violent. Yet there is also masculinity here in Diné that is one of beauty, one of balance, one that has a specific function within communities. And I wanted to get back to that. For me, the hardest thing was how to infuse desire into all of that. And I think the basis of that was touch. Men touch other men daily, and it’s not necessarily sexual or intimate or familial. It may just be a handshake or a high-five. But when you hold somebody or shake someone’s hand, you are sort of engaging with the person’s entire life experience as Diné.

When you shake someone’s hand, you don’t know where the person has been. Perhaps coming from a hospital or a cemetery or from handling old pottery? You don’t know what the person was doing. For Diné, that is a big deal because we try to avoid coming into contact with negative things. But when you shake a hand, a part of that person becomes a part of you. So I played with that idea of touch—and also the intimate touch. The desirous touch. And what causes that.

The word toxic really struck me because one thing you write about powerfully is extractive economies—of coal, for example—in relation to gender. What’s the relationship between toxicity, masculinity, and those economies?

When I was writing the book, I was thinking a lot about manhood. I think that’s where the toxic comes from. I went through my own history of asking friends and family what it means to become a man. The answers were all surrounded by the idea of sports, or they would say, “I’m going to become a railroad worker” or a pipeline worker or an iron worker. These physical, extractive jobs reminded me of the táchééh, a sweat ceremony used in puberty ceremonies. The word táchééh means a kind of suffering with fire. There is the idea that becoming a man means suffering. And I was playing with that idea, of how young boys learning to become men would mean learning how to suffer or how to become charcoal. There is a relationship between the use of the body and becoming a man.

You mentioned earlier that Diné is a very image-based or action-based language. Can you speak about the actions of objects and the life and agency of those other-than-human beings?

In terms of objects, one base for me as a poet is first knowing that objects are not just objects. They have connection to a deeper core of who we are as a people. For example, in our stories, one of the guiding things is wind.

For us, living our daily life, we don’t necessarily ponder the presence that wind has in our lives, unless it’s destructive. But wind is more than just destruction. The wind brings the monsoons, the rains. The wind pollinates plants; it brings life. It is tied to our creation story; humans were created with wind. Nouns and verbs become representative of the core of who we are. Language is the perfect place for us to experiment with that. To try to open language up. To give it depth.

You use a lot of images that have to do with elements that merge or transform: coiling, seeping, unfurling. A core quality of your poems is that they reach out beyond the limits of where I am into where you are; it’s like touch.

I learned that from Sherwin Bitsui. Part of the craft involves how a poem moves across the page, how a poem should always be in movement. In Diné, traditionally, you would wake up before the sun and pray, you would run to the East, you would take care of your livestock, and when the sun set, you would go to bed. Our language, and the depths of language, is about that movement. How do I make sure that things are constantly moving? We have to be able to see it and listen to it. If you go anywhere, things are always around you, moving. You are not in the center of everything; the center is elsewhere. I wanted to think about the land and the energies of the land and its movement.

Do you have a spiritual practice?

I do. It’s not super traditional but a more personal relationship that I have with spirituality. I drive a lot with my partner. We are always driving across the rez to see friends or family, and we will see a coyote every now and then. And I used to call my dad all the time and say, “We just saw a coyote; we need to do a ceremony.” But my dad would remind me that I have that power inside me. In truth, my dad taught me how to pray. He taught me that as long as you respect the power that prayer has, you can do it in your own way. So I have an intimate relationship with prayer and medicine. Especially now as the book is coming out, I want to think about how I negotiate moving forward while taking care of my spiritual wellbeing.

One last thing I want to ask has to do with addiction in Indian Town and Drunktown. I think as indigenous people, we are constantly negotiating these stereotypes, of the drunk Indian, because it is a reality for many people. It is also very difficult to talk about. How did you approach that?

It is hard to talk about, but a lot of us face it. Because I was talking about masculinity and looking at my own life, I was looking at the role alcohol plays in all our lives. And I thought that any one of us could become the person who is walking around on the street. That’s why I place the speaker of the poem as a reflection of his uncle. It is so easy to cross that line. It was an attempt to destigmatize addiction. It is so easy to fall into that. A lot of times we hear, “How did they get there? How do we help them?” I always try to say that this can happen to any of us. This could happen so easily. I wanted to talk about alcoholism head-on, so I simply made it a focus of the book and dealt with it.