Catching Lightning with Ariana Benson

Ariana Benson (she/they) is a Southern Black, award-winning eco-poet from Norfolk, Virginia. Black Pastoral (University of Georgia Press, 2023) is her debut collection of poetry, which has won several prestigious awards. She is a recipient of the Kate Tufts Discovery Award (2025), the Academy of American Poets Lenore Marshall Poetry Prize (2024), Cave Canem Poetry Prize (2022), Furious Flower Poetry Prize, and Porter House Review Poetry Prize and a National Book Critics Circle John Leonard Prize finalist (2023). In 2021, she won the Graybeal-Gowen Award for Virginia Poets. Her poetry has been published in leading, top-tier journals such as World Literature Today, Kenyon Review, and others.

She is a graduate of Spelman College and Royal Holloway, University of London, where she studied poetic practice as a 2019 Marshall Scholar. Having written poetry since her youth, Benson exhibits linguistic prowess in her poems, with a keen awareness and sensitivity of the history and childhood memories of the rich pastoral surroundings where her love for poetry was fostered.

Black Pastoral is a beautiful compilation of stunning evocative imagery and story about Black bodies, trees, and the southern ecological environment that helped to shape her literary genius. She has coaxed beauty from the ashes of unspeakable historical suffering and secured a place of recognition in literature. In writing about the pastoral with its history of joy and pain, she presents work that considers the treasures and secrets forests hold about Black love, trauma, and survival.

Angela M. Franklin: First of all, I want to say, welcome back to Antioch! We first met your beautiful poems “Recipe for Dream Deferred Jambalaya after Langston Hughes,” one of my favorites, and “Swimming Lessons” when they were featured in our Lunch Ticket Issue 17, Summer/Fall 2020.

Ariana Benson: I knew about Lunch Ticket because my mentor had done her MFA at Antioch. She’s a screenwriter. And so, she was like, Have you heard of Lunch Ticket?

Lunch Ticket was actually the first time that I ever used Submittable, and I was shocked to see it turn green the first time, and I still have it in my account. And then you go back, and you just look at it like Wow, that’s really where I started and when I started. You know, building the confidence that there are people who want to read these poems, and that’s what kept me writing more. And so, before I knew, maybe October 2021, I set that as a deadline for myself, and I had a full manuscript, and I started sending it out.

AMF: And here we are. Can you explain how Black Pastoral has garnered so many incredible accolades and literati love it so rightly deserves? Although I see why, speak to that, and did you think that this collection would bring you to this place? Did you have any inkling, any clue of that?

AB: No, it’s been such an honor and a surprise to have the book embraced this way in these rooms where they talk about you, and you don’t know, because when I was writing it, I had no knowledge of any of that, and I think that was greatly to my benefit, honestly, because it allowed me to just write from a very honest and passionate place… I didn’t know any of this stuff existed when I was writing this book. So let me tell you really what happened and how this book even came to be. I had gone to the UK for grad school. So this is 2020. I got to study poetic practice, which was amazing because we started really reading about poetic theory, how to read a poem. We were looking at experimental stuff. I got to write my thesis about putting Gertrude Stein in conversation with Dionne Brand—Brand’s book Ossuaries—and talking about object poetics and, specifically, using Fred Moten’s idea of Aunt Hester’s scream, the Black woman as object. This idea, that persona, right, that if we make objects talk—that can be a form of Black poetics, or any kind of marginalized poetics, for folks who have been seen as objects in the way that we were once seen as objects, right? So I got into all the nitty gritty of poetry and theory in this degree, for most of it, until the pandemic happened. And so then I was briskly shuttled back to the United States in March 2020. I’d been in the UK for a little less than six months at that time. And I finished the degree online, and I decided not to go back in the fall and to do the second degree virtually. I didn’t want to be living in London in lockdown and stuck in the buildings. I figured I’d just take a year off, which I probably needed. Anyway, I was pretty burnt out after undergrad, and for the first time in my life, I wasn’t in school.

I didn’t have anybody else’s assignments to do. I didn’t have other responsibilities. I was living at home with my wonderful, supporting parents. My brother was also home from college, so it was a fun time. And that’s when I started writing these poems. I started taking online classes. I got a lot of scholarships and am very grateful to the Palm Beach Poetry Festival. They have a Langston Hughes scholarship that allowed me to study with Vievee Francis… I went on to study with Amber McBride, Flora Thomas, and Tiana Clark and Patricia Smith—all through this Zoom format, which was so accessible, and I wouldn’t have been able to otherwise. And the poems just kept coming.

And then Patricia Smith goes, Ariana, okay, so you have a book. Are you ready? I’ll take you to Northwestern. I’ll take you wherever, and I actually told her no. I was like, I’m not ready yet. This is all happening really fast. I was just writing these poems. I don’t really know anything about this, and I just want to feel a little bit more on solid ground or a little bit more sure of my own work. Frankly, I am very confident now, and I’m glad for that growth. But I really wasn’t always, like when I went to Tin House. I had turned the camera off on Zoom when they were reading their feedback on my work because I was so nervous.

AMF: Before beginning the work of Black Pastoral, what questions did you seek to answer? Were they answered?

AB: It is a book about Black as nature, Black as the trees, Black as the water—like, what does that even look like? And so, yeah, and then it all comes together, hopefully, in that last section… I was thinking of it as understanding a way to kind of organize the poems in the collection and also to take us through a very layered journey of how I understand the Black pastoral.

AMF: Will future works also speak to what you found that didn’t necessarily fit into the current book?

AB: That’s a great question. It’s a little tough. To answer, just because, again, you know by the time I’m thinking Oh, I’ve written a book, the book is written, right, like I was just really in process, just writing the poems. But I definitely think there were some key questions on my mind, one of which was just: How do I write about the intersection of Blackness and nature in the context of slavery?

What slavery was physically as an element on the earth was weaponizing nature and the land against people. You know, in a way that it really hadn’t been done, in a context that also denigrated those people as less valuable than nature itself. Right. That bag of cotton at the end of the day might have been more valuable, probably was, than who picked it. So reconciling that with my clearly undying love for nature and its beauty and the serenity and Black people’s undying love for nature. You know, you would think that relationship would be terminal and so broken. And yet it’s not… still, we look to the earth for answers.

So much has been written, and so much and not enough at the same time about the experiences of slavery, the brutality, the suffering, the just profound loss. Every day you were enslaved. You lost something every day and understood that somehow love still existed. In all of that, there are love stories of enslaved people. There are love stories of children of the enslaved. And we’re the product of that, right. We wouldn’t have survived if the love had died, and so, finding a way to write about the love just because I feel like I hadn’t seen that. And I feel like I knew it existed and wanted to find a way to balance them and to hold them both in our hands at once.

AMF: Your poetry is educational, evocative, and educational. How do you balance educating and maintaining artistry without being pedantic?

AB: It’s one of the things that I really take pains to do, and it’s why I also often use nature or setting as either metaphor or speaker—because it wasn’t me. You know, I wasn’t there. I wasn’t enslaved. I wasn’t in the fields. I wasn’t hanging from the tree. I don’t know what that was like.

And so there are clear limits to what I feel. It is within my purview to imagine and speak upon.

I can’t imagine what the trees might have seen. I can imagine what the tobacco might have felt being rolled up in someone’s hand that was being forced to pick it. I say that to say, specifically, with anything that has to do with history, real stories, the most important thing that I do first is find the right way into the poem, and that’s probably the hardest thing to do, because you really have to take a specific kind of oblique angle at it a lot of the time. You know, with the poem about the little boy and the tulip, it really is just focusing on the setting.

There was the irony that there was so much beauty in that beautiful moment that made something so ugly. Right? That’s the angle or the way into the love poem, in the Black field in Chesapeake. The way in, right, is the love—is imagining what someone in love might do, because I can’t imagine, you know, what the brutality was.

What does a Black man in love waiting to bring some flowers to his woman look like, you know? And so I think that finding the way into the emotional core that you feel and that you’re trying to get to—that’s, for me, the bottom line of it. And if I can’t find the right angle—and sometimes that happens where I can’t find the right angle, maybe even for years—I’ll just put the poem down. I’ll come back to it, and I’ll try again. I’ll try a new angle. I’ll try something else.

AMF: A red cord of love stitches the unique tapestry of poems about Black love that is rich with imagery and reflection. There’s so much more that can be said about the anti-elegies and pastoral you present. I know you hear this a lot. But how does a person identify in their writing that they’re in their own way, and how do they get out of it? Can you speak to that?

AB: Yeah, I think you know when you’re in your own way. When you feel the poem fighting you back, when you feel it’s like you’re trying to, you know, steer. And it’s like you’re driving a car with lane correction. And the poem’s like We’re going this way, and you’re trying to get it to a certain point, but either sonically or narratively, it’s forcing you away from that mode. I’m a very big proponent of putting something down and walking away if it’s not feeling it and trying something from a new angle, writing the poem backwards. Just write the lines backwards and see what happens. Cut up the lines and rearrange them and see what that does. One of the main editing techniques that I do is I’ll just try as best as I can to get a draft out and not hit that backspace button. That’s why a lot of the time I start by hand. Not always, but a lot of the time, because I will delete something that probably would have been useful later. But if I am typing and don’t exactly know what I want to put there, but I don’t want to get stuck worrying about it… This isn’t the right word, but I don’t “have” it yet. I just throw some parentheses around it and keep going.

AMF: Wow. There is so much wealth you just shared in your writing process.

Circling back to nature, for me, there was something that was always frightening about forests and trees. A lot of times, when I saw something related to our history in nature, it was in the context of Black men swinging from trees. So why would I want to go to a place like that? But like you said, holding both the ugliness and the beauty at the same time. There’s been so much brutality against Black bodies, why would I want to go to a place and end up disappeared?

What your work has done has caused me to re-examine and think, why shouldn’t I embrace nature? Why shouldn’t I enjoy what nature has to offer? Because it’s beautiful.

AB: Whatever I’m able to do with poetry is genuinely a gift from God, because half the time I don’t remember writing these poems; I don’t remember what I was doing. It’s just something that happens, but I’ve certainly put in the work to be ready, and I think that’s really what it is. You put in the work to be ready so that when lightning strikes, you can catch it. That’s how I feel about writing and creating in general.