Dr. Cheryl Hopson: A Lifetime on the Pages
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Hello. I'm Sydney Wagner, an editorial assistant with Roanoke review. Today. I'm in the Miller Hall reading room on the lovely campus of Roanoke College in Salem, Virginia. And I'm speaking with the poet and scholar Cheryl Hopson. Doctor Cheryl R. Hopson received her PhD in English from the University of Kentucky in 2008. She's an associate Professor of English and African American Studies at Western Kentucky University in Bowling Green.
Cheryl is a scholar and a poet and has published on womanist novelist, Alice Walker, third wave feminist writer and intellectual, Rebecca Walker, and African American novelist, folklorist, and anthropologist Zora Neale Hurston, on whom she is writing a monograph. Cheryl's chapbooks, Fragile and Black Notes were published by Finishing Line Press. Her poems can be found in the Toronto Quarterly, The Indianapolis Review, Not Very Quiet, Rise Up Review, Dovetail, Refugees and the Displaced, and other venues.
Cheryl, welcome back to Roanoke College. We are proud to claim you as a graduate of our English Department. Could you speak a bit about your experiences at Roanoke College and how those experiences may have contributed to your development as a poet and a scholar?
Absolutely. Well, let's see, I started writing actually in high school poetry, but I was reading poetry and novels probably as early as ten years old because my mother and my grandmother, they're readers, and my sisters were readers and love poetry in particular. My middle sister loved Walt Whitman. And so I came from a reading family, and when I enrolled at Roanoke College in 1991, I had already been on campus for several years because my mother also graduated from Roanoke College. So in ’92--I better get that right--I think it was ‘92.
But she had been here for years, part-time at first, working full time, etc. So I've always had an affinity for the college, and the setting, even, because I'm a romantic both in the sort of conventional sense, but also in the fact that my master's at Radford University was in British romanticism.
So Roanoke College was the opening. What it did. It was because I was both in the English department and in the concert choir; it allowed me to take two things that I love tremendously, which is music and words and literature and song and combine them. And I had professors, Dr. Michael Heller, Dr. Anita Turpin, Dr. Virginia Stewart, Dr. Katherine Hoffman, all of whom love language, all of whom absolutely adored literature.
And I absorbed that because I started from a place where I was very receptive to words from early on. I think most writers, we respond differently to language, and I met people who had the same relationship to language that I did here. My professors, but also some of my classmates.
And so, yeah, from the age of eighteen until almost twenty-two years of age, I was immersed in this sort of love affair with literature and engaged in the reading of classics with people who loved it as much as I did. We often read outside when it was warm enough. So I sometimes would teach classes outside because that is my habit; like I said, I'm influenced by the British romantics and also the American romantics if I think about Walt Whitman and Emily Dickinson even, by degrees.
Your first book of poetry, Black Notes, came out in 2013 from Finishing Line Press. Of that book, Nikki Finney writes, "to be a daughter to know the deep, pure sweetness of blackness, to feel its music, terror and wonder to understand all its abbreviations and letters. That is what Cheryl Hopson poets and reports in her Black Notes chapbook with her steadfast poetic breath. She moves from the death of Lena Horne to the life of Sartre ... Sartre to the Sexy Blues. Lucky us." Could you talk a bit about how you developed Black Notes as a manuscript?
I started writing Black Notes in 2011, when I was living and teaching in Augusta, Georgia. I lived about five minutes from where the Masters golf tournament is held. So you know, where you see the billionaires flying in, Tiger Woods, where they're all playing. So it was a rich environment for me, monetarily for them, but also just the beauty of the landscape and being that close to that space.
And I was teaching at a university there on a heavy teaching load, and I would get home in the evenings, generally speaking. And I would do work which was graded and write essays because I was publishing, for tenure and between writing the essays and grading, these moments of exhaustion would yield to poetry. I would overhear a phrase or something, and I would write it down and that's actually where the title comes from, too.
It began as a series of notes. The notes did sort of coalesce into this chapbook. But also, because I love music, I was playing with the notion of in a whole note, I can find a storyline. I might hear it, and I live with the sound, and words come from the sound, and that's how I arrive at poetry, often.
Yeah, I like that. The first time I read the book, I did not register the actual music notes on the cover. But then when you were talking about music, I was holding the book and I was like, oh, that's what that meant.
It's so ingrained. I've been in choirs from the time I was--pre-consciousness really. I was raised holiness. My grandmother had us in the children's church choir before I was even aware of what I was singing. And then I went on from elementary to junior high to high school.
Then Roanoke was concert choir. So reading and singing and writing, those three things are connected. They've always been. I think I arrive at language, actually, through song.
Yeah. I definitely think music has such a huge impact on us that we don't think about, especially when writing.
Especially when writing. For that reason, I sometimes have to tune it out just to get at my own thoughts first, and then I bring it back in. But the music is the first inspiration, or it could be. I'm reading a poem by Lucille Clifton, [“homage to my hips”], and there's a line in it where she says “these hips cannot be contained”, or I forget the line, exactly. And you feel that line and you feel the energy of that line and the just absolute assuredness that I will not be stopped, regardless.
And you feel that, and then that generates new work. So for me, it could be a poem that I'm reading or teaching. It could be this conversation with you. Like, for example, I might leave here and just go jot down some notes, and five weeks from now, there's a poem. It takes a while, because we're busy. Right? You're a student; I’m a teacher, and so it takes a while but I'm open to it, and I think that's part of it, because I love it so much.
Would you mind reading a poem from Black Notes for us?
Okay. This poem is titled “This Womanhood.” I wrote this when I was teaching at Augusta University in Augusta, Georgia. It was a 4-4 course load. And I barely had time to lift my head from my desk. But periodically, because I grew up outside and in the Blue Ridge Mountains, I would just go outside and look at the students on campus, which always gave me life. And this poem came about as a result.
[Cheryl Hopson reads “This Womanhood.”]
Thank you. I really like that poem. And I think it's such a good example of being a person who's doing the things, but not necessarily always being present when you're doing that.
Absolutely, yes--I love the way you said that. Because both of these, Black Notes and Fragile, were written during a heavy grief period after I lost both my older sisters. And so I do feel like there was a moment of remoteness. And so the poetry allowed me to speak when I was unable to really find words.
I think sometimes being able to write trauma helps us eventually learn how to speak the trauma.
There it is. Yes. Oh, that's beautiful. Also, thank you.
Your second book of poems, Fragile, came out from Finishing Line Press in 2017. Did your approach in creating Fragile differ from the approach you took with Black Notes?
Yes. Fragile I think of as fragments. I always have an artist design my covers I like to work with; this is Tad Branham, he designed both covers. I will give him an idea. He'll read the collection; I'll say what I'm thinking. And then he comes up with something.
My first full-length collection, which is coming out in 2023, is titled In Case You Get This. And I have a new woman artist who's created a remarkable visual that's going to go with that. So we are out in the world together. That's Keats: This idea of poetry as a collaborative effort, right? Even the visual. Fragile was me really lost, truly lost. And I think that is reflected in the collection and trying to find my way back.
And so I was trying to demonstrate with the collection the breakdown of language that occurs when we are in a trauma state and we can't find our way. When we can't even arrive at language that we're so accustomed to. I was so adept at language and speaking, and then all of a sudden there was an inability to use what I knew I had within me.
So it's not equivalent to what Maya Angelou experienced when she was a child and she went mute for years. But I did feel like I did. I kind of lost the ability, but also the will, by measures, to speak. And so Fragile was me allowing myself to open up again, or trying to. So it was almost like a breaking open. And that's why I think that book often for me to read is painful.
But I so value it, and I'm so happy that it is in the world as my gift to my older sister. Which is where I got the title from, this idea that she was so tough and she would take care of everyone, and people thought she was impenetrable, that nothing could touch her. But she was also fragile, because she loved so freely.
And so that book is really a song. I'm singing to her, in a way, and I'm also singing myself back to life by way of that book, which is also a way for me to reach out to people who are experiencing or will experience some of what I did. And so there's an anchor there if they need it. That makes sense.
Yeah, I definitely would describe this book as kind of an anchor for people who've experienced grief, because I think it touches a lot on the feelings of knowing versus feeling. In your brain you know that something has passed. But in your heart it is much harder to catch up.
Right. And I don't know if we ever catch up in our hearts. I don't know. And I love the way you phrased that I think that's why people get to the end of the end of their days, and there's a feeling there, when you experience loss at whatever period, for a little while you get trapped in that space and you can stay trapped in that space.
But the hope is that with language and with friends and with community and with poetry, we open up. We open up again. We learn to blossom in other ways.
Would you mind reading a poem from the book?
Not at all.
Let's see. Let's read this one.
Ok. And this is “My Sister's Bones.”
[Cheryl Hopson reads “My Sister’s Bones.”]
Thank you. I really love that poem, too.
Thank you so much.
It actually helps inspire a question that I kind of struggle with my own writing. How do you balance being true to your feelings and your poetry and making sure that any negative feelings don't put strains on the relationships that they may be referencing?
Well, there are poems that haven't been published, and I think a lot of poets will tell you that, right? We have poems that will wait, but then there are also poems that need to be published. Anne Lamott says, “If people wanted you to write warmly about them, they should have behaved better.” Not to say that people misbehave or anything like that, but that we're human and we're fallible.
So if my students, for example, write poems about me, I have to recognize that that's their art. That's an expression of their experience of me. There are poems that will not be published, but they needed to be written. I have a poem titled. 'Upon receiving a gift from my mother' and--
I loved that poem. I very much related to that poem, or at least my younger self.
Your younger self, that's what it is. And I think that poem is speaking for my younger self and what she couldn't say but needed to say. Which is that there's a stranger that exists between us, whether it's an actual physical person or being or just this sense of, we don't know each other. And I don't want that in this relationship with this person that I value. Who created me, in fact.
So the poem was an attempt to break open, right? And to sort of showcase that can be painful. I mean, my mother doesn't necessarily appreciate that poem, right? But June Jordan said poetry does not lie. So if you can't tell it, or tell it slant as Emily Dickinson says, then you write about something else.
So you do have to be aware of those things. But also I think having lost my sisters made me braver. I know it did. I don't equivocate when it comes to certain things. If it's important, and I think it works as art, and other people are moved by it in a way that is useful, then it has to be out there in the world.
It's also kind of nice to write poems like that because then you discover things that you didn't know bothered you.
Yes, absolutely. That's what our poetry reveals to us often as the writers of it. So I will read something that I wrote ten years ago and can't believe what that kid knew, right? She knew something that it took me ten years to come to full awareness about.
But I think our poetry is who we are. Which is why poetry resonates across generations, across centuries, even in the context of our various differences. I can have a classroom with twenty-five people, and I could put a poem down in front of them that initially they're saying, I have no idea what's happening here.
And then we start singing it together, which is the way I think of it. We start just playing with it, line by line. Sometimes we do a round. You read a line, you read a line. What are you hearing? What words are resonating? Language, right? It's like a bell. You say one word, “black notes.” It has, it has all these connotations, and so there's reverberations. It's our job as poets to catch them as writers. But it's going to be different for each of us.
And that's what I love. That’s why I teach, to be honest. Because when I get in the classroom, and we're doing this like what we're doing here, and you can see that light just coming. And that's the moment. It doesn't happen all the time, but it does happen. The goal is to capture it, and then you just work with what you have.
What do you think makes certain poems so long lasting? We still read a lot of Emily Dickinson. We read Walt Whitman. Why do you think that those people and their poetry, stay with us?
Rita Dove for me. Rita Dove stays with me. “If you can't be free, be a mystery.” She's writing about Billie Holiday. Langston Hughes stays with me.
[Cheryl Hopson recites Langston Hughes’ “Hard Daddy” from memory.]
Woo! Some poems resonate at the time when I read that I was eighteen and mad at my dad, right? You see some poems resonate. Emily Dickinson poems resonate.
Dr. Deborah McDowell, who's at UVA, is a scholar whose work has really helped my work become what it is. She posted a poem the other day on Twitter by Emily Dickinson, a poem that I hadn't read in decades and hadn't seen from that view. She just put one line there, and it opened up that poem for me.
I think that's the heart. Walt Whitman when he says “I celebrate myself and sing myself.” And when Wordsworth says “what we have loved, others will love, and we will teach them how,” and you're going, who are these people? They know something even if they don't know they know it.
That resonates across. Shakespeare: “love is not love which alters when it alteration finds nor bends with remover to remove. No, it is an ever fixed mark which looks on tempest and is never shaken.” He is telling you what love is. If I can lose your love that fast, you never loved me. And “love is not time’s fool,” which means as Maya Angelou writes, “I may cry, and I will die but my spirit is the soul of every spring.”
When [Shakespeare] says “love is not time’s fool,” I will remember you, is what he says, long after you have forgotten me, right? Long after time has passed. Because love, that's Shakespeare. I think of poets as kind of Casanovas in some ways, because we have to learn to speak to people in a way they can hear us and also feel us. Because if you're just catching them by the ear and there's no feeling, you lose them. And that's why I think those poems stay with us over the years. They're taught more often, but also because of the music in them.
You could say that all poets have a way of making you hear them. But there's only certain poets who make you listen to them.
Look at that. Yes, indeed. Absolutely.
Are there any other writers that you as a poet and a scholar admire?
Well, Alice Walker from the beginning; I was reading Alice Walker at twelve years old. Not only because she was in my home. So my mother was reading her, which meant I was reading her. June Jordan is a writer I greatly admire. I just had an essay that came out on the thirty-year friendship between Alice Walker and June Jordan. Jordan was a poet. She was the most prolific black woman writer at the time of her death. She published over twenty-eight books, and very few people know her. And in almost every genre. She taught at UC Berkeley.
So June Jordan, Alice Walker, Zora Neale Hurston, Lucille Clifton, Bobbie Ann Mason, who is a Kentucky writer--Shiloh and Other Stories. Nivky Finney, who was my professor, Nikki Giovanni, Maya Angelou, Ernest Gaines Ishmael Reed. Charles Johnson. My master's was in British literature, but my PhD and so forth has been in twentieth-century African-American literature and culture, and Black feminist theory.
So those writers sort of occupy those spaces, they speak to me. But Robert Frost has always been at the forefront of my mind. I said yesterday, “tears in the writer, tears in the reader.” It is. He has always been there when I go to write. I hear that, and ever I sort of lose track of sometimes, and T.S. Eliot, his essay “Tradition and the Individual Talent.”
Walt Whitman is definitely, because June Jordan was such an admirer of Walt Whitman that it took me back to him and made me look at him again. And, of course, Phillis Wheatley, just because she was one of the first and I just want to thank her for her words.
There are a lot of people who come before us that we don't think about.
Exactly. Or even know about. I think about the anonymous ones, right? All the way back. So we read Agamemnon, we read The Iliad and The Odyssey. But there were others writing, you know? Sappho. I try to bring Sappho back.
Yes, I love Sappho. It is a shame that a lot of her work was lost.
I taught a women writers class here several times. But the last time was in 2009, and I loved it because I was able to bring her in. I started with Sappho and we brought in Dorothy Allison and Jewel Gomez, all of whom would have been thought of as radical only because of their sexuality.
So it's different. But there's so much out there, we've been given so much. Virginia Woolf. We've been given so much by them. And what you learn to do is, as Alice Walker says, “Take what you can use and let the rest rot.”
So there are moments in, for example, Virginia Woolf's theory, that I, as a Black woman, I'm struggling. But I also look and see what she does. This woman was brilliant. So here's the idol right? Here's the one I can look at and see and model my work after and then because I'm looking back from a twenty-first century perspective, I can alter, right? I can see places where she might have gone, but I might want to go differently.
And I hope ten years, twenty years from now, someone will look back and say, oh, look at what Hopson did. Let's see where we can take this. That's always the goal, not to end with myself because I'm an aunt and a great aunt and I've taught stuff at twenty-four. So I have students that go way back. So I'm always trying to leave a model of what's possible or sort of makes younger people aware of trajectories that their life and career can take. That can be just remarkable and beautiful and everything you never knew you wanted.
Yeah, especially with what you said about people kind of remixing poetry and learning how to change things as we go on. I think social media has had a huge impact on that.
Absolutely. I have a world reading audience now, and that's primarily because of the internet on a daily basis. I get reading reports. So last month's reading report on my articles alone, essays, book chapters, articles worldwide. Singapore; Honolulu; Berkeley, California;, New York, New York; the Netherlands. All parts of Africa, all parts of India, Korea. My readers are everywhere, and that's the internet. I make my work accessible to a wider reading audience by making it available on the web.
And I have a YouTube poetry channel. It's 'Blacknotes2013', I think. So that has allowed me to build my audience and the poetry. I wrote a poem in 2011 that was published in Toronto Quarterly. And it is my most famous and most popular. That poem has traveled the world now for almost twelve years. And I still get daily reports on it. It's called “Conversation Begets.” And I wrote it after 9/11 because it was such a moment for all of us who were here and who saw it. An awakening. Which is how I ended up where I am.
After seeing what we all saw on 9/11, I, I remember saying to my colleague, Dr. Anita Turpin, that my life needed to have more meaning. I needed to do something bigger because I had seen those people hold hands together and just go toward what they knew was going to be their ultimate end, and they did it together. And so that's how I ended up where I am. I get teary-eyed thinking about it because . . . their bravery, you know. Yeah.
Yeah. It is definitely having a moment in your life where you realize that there is something needs to change. If you were to give advice to your students, what would you say in terms of how to find your meaning in life?
It's found you already. The thing is you don't know it yet and it will keep finding you. I think we come into this world with so many gifts. So each one of us, whatever your gift is, you came here with it. And then once we are made aware of it--like your parents, for example, saw you write--it becomes our responsibility and those who love us when we're younger to harness it.
And so my advice would be to say, listen, don't run from yourself. You know what's best for you almost more often than not. If you go quiet and you listen, you know what you want to write, you know why you're not writing it and you know what can get you closer to it. One word on the page. Sometimes it's just one word and, and I say that to students often, okay, you don't want to write that poem about your experience of sexual assault.
I get it. Totally. And you don't want to workshop it in front of your classmates. Absolutely. But here's the thing: it's coming out already. It starts to show in the work. Right? So, the student, their classmates are looking, going where is all this sadness coming from? So when we stay in that sadness, there's a poem, there's something in there that wants to be said.
And it's just you having to decide when you're ready to say it. I never push. If that's as close as you get to that moment, then we stay with that and we work on that. I think we all come to it in our own time. But I truly, wholeheartedly believe that you came into this world as your full self, already like that.
How do you think then life kind of shapes that?
Well, that's the thing, right? So then you go into the world or you get born into these families and, you know, I was singing all the time. Or talking. My mother says that I got lost in Sears when I was a baby. I don't know how they lost me, but they did. And she said she told the workers to just go quiet.
And I was talking to someone, I was just a little girl just talking, and that's how they found me. So I just think sometimes whoever we are, whatever we are, isn't convenient for others. And as we grow into our power, we get better at saying, so what?
So as we become more fiscally independent, where we develop ourselves independent of our immediate families or our friendship networks or whatever it is, right? You just get to the point where you start saying this is who I am, and this is actually pretty great, imperfect in all ways. That is all of us, right? And so I think we get to “so what” as quick as we can, if what you are doing is not hurting you and it's not hurting another, right? Physically or in other ways. So what?
Yeah, I agree. For me personally, I define happiness as having important things to worry about, and having that “so what” attitude aligns with that. So what if this one thing went wrong? I have more important, consequential things to focus attention on.
I like the “focus attention,” because the worry will eat at you. So this is me being an aunt. But Aretha Franklin, who is my mother singer she said, “Don't put worry on you until worry gets to you.” Worry will find you. It will, it will and in the meantime, it will eat up your brain space. So it makes it very difficult to do other things well. So our challenge as human beings is to find the middle ground where the worry can fall away a little bit more because you are confident that it will work out, whatever it is. Now, that's Alice Walker, that's womanist and I identify as womanist. womanist says I am capable. Whatever comes my way, I can face it.
For our listeners would you define what “womanist” is to you?
Well, Alice Walker defines it in a four-part definition in her collection In Search of Our Mother's Gardens in 1983. But she first coined the term I think as early as 1978 to mean a Black feminist or feminist of color. I identify as both Black feminist and as womanist. And that's because I never want to separate myself out from the work of say Audre Lorde, who identified as Black feminist, and Alice Walker, who identifies as womanist. She is a writer who likes to create, so for a word to be applied to her, she says it feels wrong, it has to be organic. And so womanist comes from the word womanish, which means you're acting grown or beyond your age limit, right? But she refashioned it to mean a woman or a little girl who is curious beyond her years, she is capable. She is adventurous and she loves herself, regardless.
That's what a woman isn’t, is she loves other people too, but she can't love other people more than she loves herself. So it starts with self love and then it reverberates, right? That's what womanist is. It is a real valuation of the self. Absolutely. And one's life and one's culture and one's people. For Alice Walker, “people” is expansive, right? Because she has primarily African American, but also native American roots or indigenous. And she has white American roots. So she embraces many people, she does embrace all of who she is. And so I think womanist has allowed me also to embrace those aspects of my own history that that I, I beforehand wasn't wholly excited about embracing, you know, my Virginia roots.
And my grandmother's grandfather, I believe it was a white man. He's not living, of course. And so to recognize that, even in my own family there is an expansiveness that, if I'm honest, I have to be aware of and acknowledge, right? And so, not as an impediment, but as a gift, all of who I am is what I offer to the world. And my mother taught me that. Yeah, and that is the only gift that I have to give, which is me and that's your gift and we can give monetary gifts and all sorts of things. But your presence, to me, that's the gift.
I love that. I think we undervalue ourselves.
Absolutely. Full on attention, us having a conversation, two people connecting.
What are you working on now? I know you mentioned like a collection coming out soon. Considering 2023 is only like a month away.
I have that Hurston biography that's under contract with Reaktion Books in London. And so the editor currently has the first draft of the book, and the goal is to have that out by summer or fall of 2023. My first full-length collection of poetry. The biography is titled Zora Neale Hurston: A Womanist Biography.
And I use all of my research on Walker. I'm an Alice Walker scholar, so I use that. And I bring it to my reading of Hurston. And then the collection, I wrote it during the pandemic, which we're still kind of in, but I wrote it in 2020. I sent it off at the end of 2021. So that's how long it takes, really. And again, it's titled In Case You Get This. And those poems were written because I lost my mom twice. She came back. But I lost my mom twice during 2020.
And it dawned on me that that may have been the last time that we spoke. The one time that we spoke before she went into a coma, was perhaps the last time. And so when she came out of the coma, I started writing the book, and it was really just a way of saying all of the things through poetry that I've been shoring up. And unable, probably, to say until that age and that time.
Yeah, I think it goes back to the events that shape us and shape our poetry.
Absolutely. I always think that my books are love songs. That's the way I think of my poems and my poetry. And so right now I'm working on an advanced graduate-level poetry workshop I’ll teach in the spring. And what I do typically is when they write, I write, and I only share if they ask me to share. Because they have to leave that class with a book, but they don't know that yet.
Guess they'll find out.
Right, they'll find out. But with at least sixteen exceptional poems. More, if possible. Sixteen to twenty-five. I'm doing that with them. It's not that I necessarily want to, but I want to model that is possible for them in the midst of everything else they're doing, because they have big lives like you, they have all sorts of other stuff, they have all sorts of other things going on. And so do I. And usually what happens is I come out of my classes with my own work. And so writing and teaching for me go hand in hand. It’s a marriage, really. To be honest, when I'm not teaching, it feels different to me.
Sometimes when we have that one thing that we know we're meant to do or like the few things we know we're meant to do.
Yes. So I, for example, I'm not an accountant, and I'm not a chemist. I am very good at what I am good at and I love it and I value it so much. And so I recognize it as my gift, and my mother has always said to me, when you've been given a gift, it is your responsibility to share it. Now, she has her religious background. But I have that belief also. Probably because I'm her daughter, but also because my grandmother said the same. And whatever that gift is, if you are really good at making people laugh--I love comedians. I do. Probably because of all the trauma, but for me, laughter is healing. So if you can also read one of my poems and smile or laugh, that's awesome. I like that.
I love that, ending on that note. We really have covered a lot in this interview. I really appreciate you talking about some of your process and how different writers inspired you. And thank you so much for spending time with us today. For our listeners, please check out Cheryl Hopson's poetry and scholarship.
You can order her books, Black Notes and Fragile, from your local bookstore or online. Thank you so much for listening. This has been Sydney Wagner with Roanoke review and I hope you have a lovely day.
Cheryl Hopson’s latest collection, In Case You Get This (2023), is available from Finishing Line Press. Her biography of Zora Neale Hurston, Critical Lives (2024), is available from Reaktion Books.
