I was thrilled to get some time to talk to Anthony Thomas Lombardi about murmurations, mostly because I see things in this book that I’m so incredibly drawn to within my own work. Namely, there’s a comfort with obsession, a comfort with staying in one place and not seeking answers, or seeking a way out. I felt like I was both looking into a sort of warped mirror of my own excitements and obsessions and also still learning from what the reflection was telling me.
It was exciting for me to sit and pick the brain of this writer who, like me, has working class origins, who came up in a way that many would call, quote, “untraditional,” but I think that’s foolish. The tradition that we both came up in is one of self-made community, a tradition of open mics and poetry slams, and passing printouts of poems across a room to someone who liked them. And I think that tradition is more useful than any.
I love this book, too, for how richly it is populated. It’s bursting not only with brilliance, and formal inventiveness, but also with a real sense of care for everyone who has a voice, or a body in the work. To write in this way suggests a real tender relationship with a world that often does not deserve it, and I think that is worth learning from, too.
Hanif Abdurraqib: It’s been so long since I put out my first book, I’m wondering what the process has been like and what it’s felt like and how long you feel like you’ve been working on the book.
Anthony Thomas Lombardi: I feel like I’ve been working on the book my entire life. I consider when I got sober, ten years ago, as the true embryonic stage of the book. I wouldn’t have been able to write the book if I wasn’t processing all of that. I remember telling my analyst, who I’ve been working with for a decade now, I’m ready to tell my story! Before that, I was white knuckling life. I was working in a bar the day after I got out of detox, I was in an abusive relationship. But writing isn’t only putting fingers to the keyboard or pen to paper. We’re always writing—we’re writing right now.
The first poem I wrote for the book was the closing “self-portrait as murmuration” in 2019. At that point, I was being taken under the wing of Hala Alyan. Pretty much this whole book was written in her backyard at Kan Yama Kan’s open mics, her reading series, alongside my generation of poets, my community, [where] we’re all reading at these open mics and cutting our teeth and writing our poems. Now we all have books out or coming out, and they’re books that we all wrote at that open mic, in Hala’s backyard.
I got my book deal with YesYes in 2023, and it’s been such a drawn out process. KMA Sullivan is such a loving, tender editor, and first round draft edits took six months—they refer to my book as “the brick” there, it’s such a big book. I’m navigating all of this now as a debut author at the age of thirty-six.
HA: It’s funny, I was maybe thirty-two. Everyone has all these platitudes about writers who began their careers “late” and that’s meant to placate folks, but sometimes you’re there already and the work’s just arriving to you. My first book came much later [than other people’s], and I spent a lot of time in poetry slams not really wanting to write a book. I think it’s interesting to live that long and know when you have a book or know when it’s ready.
You say the work of the book began when you got sober. I’m wondering if there’s any part in the book where you see a line of demarcation between the themes that you were interested in or excited about. Maybe not now, but in the drafting process was there a point where you were like, oh, I’m approaching the work differently or my interests or segments have changed?
Some of my favorite poems in the world are poems that people just emailed to me because I heard them in a slam.
ATL: All these musicians in the book who are no longer with us, they’re that throughline. Most of them are jazz musicians, which is a headspace I find myself in often, for whatever reason. They became this chorus of dead folks that I love and revere. How could they not come out in my work? From the beginning, it all feels like it was such a storm, I had all these poems and didn’t know what to do with them. All I had was the rough idea of the stepwork poems, structurally, but that was it. In 2021, I won a fellowship with the Poetry Project based on a sample of my manuscript and Celina Su was my mentor. She came up with ideas about what poems go where, which poems go with which step. It was Celina who pushed me to put together the steps as more of an emotional compass in recovery, the messiness of it all. That was the big breakthrough. I give all credit to her for that. After that, it didn’t really change much.
How did you come around to writing a book of poetry if you didn’t wanna write a book?
HA: I got asked to submit some poems to Button Poetry’s chapbook competition in 2014, and I had maybe twelve poems that were orbiting a theme. I think Button saw something in [them] and asked if I’d be interested in making a full length book out of it.
One thing that’s a shame is that there aren’t a lot of ways for young poets specifically to stumble into books in that same way. I talk to young poets often who want to get their books in front of people, but they can’t do it without paying exorbitant fees for multiple contests or sending poems out and waiting for them to reach someone. One thing about the immediacy of slam that I really loved was that your work was getting heard, and if it moved someone, they would ask you for more of it. Some of my favorite poems in the world are poems that people just emailed to me because I heard them in a slam and wanted to see the poem on the page.
ATL: Some of my closest friendships started that way. Like, will you email that poem to me? I need it. My friend, Malik Crumpler, I met him in Paris at an open mic he was MCing. His energy was intoxicating, so I decided to read. One of the poems I read was “self-portrait as murmuration” and Malik slipped me a tiny piece of paper that said, I want them poems. He’s an editor on top of everything else he does, and although the poems were already getting published, it opened that door. We just started talking like maniacs, you couldn’t pry us apart. He was really interested in what I was doing, we knew all the same people, we’re both vocal in our work about being sober. These kinds of relationships start with the poems but go past them.
That’s the kind of communal thing I think is not happening, or happening less. After quarantines and the messes that we’ve dealt with all over the place, whether it’s the George Floyd uprisings or the Palestinian resistance against genocide, people are tired. It’s a deliberate outcome of deliberate measures by the state. And it’s working. It breaks my heart because those kinds of connections are life-saving. They’ve saved my life. I’m sure they’ve saved yours. Malik, in a lot of ways, helped and continues to help me get through so many hard periods in my life, and that never would have happened if he didn’t slip me that piece of paper.
HA: I think about this in my organizing work often. Community is being built through radical resistance, that’s always been the case, but I think it’s even more so in the past five years. People are building artistic community in a reactionary way, in response to the harms of the state, and there’s a point that that’s necessary, but it also does not feel entirely sustainable to me because state violence endures and shifts. Those of us who make art need to make art in response to those shifts while also building space for art-making practices that welcome in and invite people across the spectrum.
I work with a lot of young writers who are politically active but might not be as tapped into everything that I’m tapped into. Art is kind of a bridge we build. If I bring in a June Jordan poem, if I bring in a poem about police violence, we can talk about police abolition more effectively, and that’s actually letting art guide the way instead of allowing responses to state violence to guide the way, or even having a conversation about how our art can be informed by recalculating our position as artists in the core—at the core—of empire working, but also benefiting from all of empire’s violences. That’s a big June Jordan thing: I paid these taxes and these taxes are going to kill others, and yet I am here.
ATL: Using art as a bridge, that’s in everything I try to do, not just in the classroom but on the subway or at a crosswalk waiting for the light to change. I’ve taught editorial apprenticeship programs with students and, in our one-on-ones, we end up talking about folks like June Jordan or Angela Davis or Fannie Lou Hamer. I ended up like, We’ve talked enough about your editorial assignments, what do you want to discuss? What interests you? At that age especially, they’re so eager, so hungry to learn more.
It’s part of redirecting our own resources to those who are young enough to make an impact within their own generations and communities, our future, and underserved and targeted communities. I teach a workshop at Brooklyn Poets entirely based on June Jordan essays. June was a target her whole life. Her essay, “Waking Up in the Middle of Some American Dreams,” changed my world, sharpened my way of thinking, gave me avenues to travel and pursue that kind of redirectorial justice. So much of this was going on while I was writing the book, the community of the birds throughout, the dead musicians, the hunted—it’s all very much a storm of someone coming into themselves, with all this knowledge, guidance, inspiration, all at once. The dead people that I know, or knew, were forming a murmuration. That came from June Jordan, almost single-handedly. There’s real hope in art, even when everything feels devastating because you’re connecting with another human being. Nothing is more important.
HA: There’s a real rage in June’s work too, a vessel of care and tenderness. It’s very much an understanding of the world as unsettling and unsatisfying, but how much better could we love people in it if we did not have to place ourselves into the gears of empire to some degree. Anyone of conscience right now, I hope, questions the rumbling underneath: how much better and more effective a person who loves the world could I be if I did not have to love the world not only bearing witness to a genocide, but trying to put ourselves between empire and the furthering of the genocide.
Using art as a bridge, that’s in everything I try to do.
The book is so richly populated with musicians and pop culture artifacts. It can be hard to know what the tipping point is in any book when you come to, I’ve maybe written too many people into this or I’ve maybe built too many worlds. How did you edit your way to a tipping point that felt manageable?
ATL: At the time, I was living alone in a studio apartment, and I would go weeks without hearing another human being’s voice directed at me. I just listened to records every day—Miles Davis, Sonny Rollins, Dexter Gordon—that Gordon album, Our Man in Paris? There’s such warmth to those records and we’re always writing and engaging with the things that we love or that we’re probing or exploring, but it wasn’t just records—I would watch documentaries about these people constantly. Music is one thing, but I needed to hear a human being’s voice talking to another human being—docs about Nina Simone, Eric Dolphy, Jaco Pastorius, Lisa “Left Eye” Lopes, they’re all in the book. They made me cry so hard. I feel like I needed them to tap my tenderness, to let out that kind of grief, and then those kinds of things started orbiting the Amy Winehouse poems. I wrote the poems in the book five years ago, and I recently wrote something like thirteen new poems [that are] all really lucid, fairly long. I’m never going to stop writing Amy poems. I’m learning I might go years without writing them, but I’m always going to come back to them.
I started writing them because I had a dream that I was quarantining with her, during early COVID lockdowns, and I wrote a persona poem about it. I took it into a workshop I was taking with Shira Ehrlichman, and we kinda butted heads about who we’re able to give voice to, when it’s uplifting, when it isn’t, and me being a male and Amy obviously not. She was also like, this doesn’t sound like her, this sounds like you, and she was absolutely right, so I rewrote it in second person, which is what shows up in so much of the book.
HA: I love that Dexter Gordon record. One of my favorite players in history, Bud Powell, plays keys on it. It ends with “Night in Tunisia,” and I think about the closure of that record all the time, which feels like they’ve wrung everything they can out of it. There’s a category of done that exists in your book which feels that way too, but we’re not quite done. Keeping people engaged in a poem where it feels like you’re trying to work out some things with yourself, that’s a real skill, because so often it does feel like we are in our own brains, but people have to come along and bear with us through that. You do an incredible job of that in this book. I’m wondering if there’s some jazz influence in that process of having to listen to people fight to keep something going.
ATL: I always think of that James Baldwin quote—how he helplessly models himself after jazz musicians, trying to write the way they sound. Jazz is my bread and butter. Part of it is that excitability. That’s what jazz is to me, no matter how balladic it gets.
You were the one who taught me that not everything needs to go in one poem. That was such an important piece of advice for me. Now I always listen for the severance on the page, the seams, and as I’m writing new poems, different rhythms emerge. Jazz is slithery, in a way, and supple, you can’t get your hands all the way around it. That’s how I used syntax in murmurations, or at least I can hear myself trying to on the page.
I started listening to jazz when I was pretty young, but I was listening to rap even before that. Where I grew up, you would hang out your window and hear the new Jay-Z single or deep cuts from the new Nas. I cannot say this enough: Illmatic by Nas taught me how to write, almost single-handedly. I worship Frank O’Hara, Rimbaud, Sylvia Plath, Anne Sexton, Louise Glück—but they didn’t teach me how to write. It was Nas. Nas’s flow was the flow that I wrote to when I was younger, that I’ve come back to recently. I bounce around different records and types of music as I’m writing, but there will always be those I return to.
HA: I can hear that. You learned to write from Nas, but have you found that your writing style has changed or become more adventurous depending on what artist you’re setting your ears on? I’m always interested in how the rhythms of my writing shift depending on how I’m hearing the world, which is why I think I seek out new music so vigorously. Do you feel like your writing style is locked into what it was when you first heard the thing that made you wanna write, or does it evolve alongside your constant listening?
ATL: That’s a good question. I like to think I’m aware of where my writing is going, but you can never look back, not directly. For the last year or so, I’ve been writing extremely detailed and lucid narrative poems. There’s not a lot of linear narrative in murmurations. It’s mostly surreal, dreamscapes, whereas these poems that I’m writing now are visceral, concrete, and rooted in the present.
I’m always interested and excited to be like, I wonder what comes after this? I went from here to there. What next? That question has ruled not only my music and writing, it’s run my life—relationships, where I live, jobs. It’s one thing—you hear one line, and you just start writing. I do that every day.
HA: Yeah, the thing with a debut book is that you spend your whole lifetime up to that point writing it, and the second one ends up coming out so much differently. How are you finding your abilities to maybe write or be a writer, or make the things you wanna make, as you are also trying to bring this book into the world well?
I cannot say this enough: Illmatic by Nas taught me how to write, almost single-handedly.
ATL: I often take on too much and run myself into the ground. I’m always working on a lot of different projects, and I get excited about a lot of different stuff. Even the memoir that you helped me get started back in late 2023? I hadn’t even started it yet, but once I did, in a month and a half, I wrote 130,000 words. I fixate, and it’s a blessing and a curse. I was like, oh, I think I’m done with poetry! and my friends were just like, uh huh, okay Toney, you couldn’t be done with poetry if you tried. And they were right. I need other things to break it all up, or else I’m just gonna run my tank down to fumes. My whole life I’ve said that I have a novel in me but had sort of given up that idea. Then recently I had a breakthrough, out in Montauk, on the beach on a rainy day, and somewhere in that mist and cold I just said, I’m gonna write a novel. It was so cliche I found myself cackling. I have enough for two new poetry books, over 600 pages of a memoir, and now I’m scoping out a novel. I need to be doing all those things.
But I don’t think about where it’s going to go. I just have to trust that it’s gonna get somewhere, right?
HA: Yeah. I do the same thing.
ATL: Right, we just trust that it’s gonna work out. I’m running around, doing all this work for this book right now, and I’m tired, man, but I trust that when it comes out and I’m able to share it with my community, that it’s gonna work out, it’s going to get into the right hands. I’ve had so many folks in recovery tell me they need my work, that they teach my work to addicts, and folks at AWP telling me they needed this book, that our whole community needs it. One of them put a broadside of “relapse dream” on her wall and said it kept her from relapsing. That, right there, is it. That’s everything. Nothing else matters.
HA: That’s the real thing, you know, how you can only take the work so far on your own. If you believe that you’re someone who is writing alongside your ancestors, then you have to keep the faith that they’ll keep being able to find them and find you.
ATL: People who are new to spaces ask me all the time, especially at Brooklyn Poets, about how to find community, and I’m just like, look around you. Lift your head. When people want to force something or put their nose to the grind, they don’t look at what’s right in front of their faces. They don’t see what’s beautiful between me and you.
