Douglas Kearney on the "Performative Typography" of His New Poetry Collection

In late February, Professor Douglas Kearney spoke with Washington Post book critic Ron Charles about his new collection of visual poems, I Imagine I Been Science Fiction Always (Wave Books, 2025). After an hour's worth of thoughtful conversation at the Library of Congress about the poems' "performative typography" (with layers of juxtaposed advertising images, text, dialogue bubbles, and other graphic elements), Charles says bluntly, "I've never seen anything like it." Indeed, Kearney's collection represents an innovative, path-breaking new chapter in "vispo." While hearkening back to his 2009 collection The Black Automaton, which first featured the use of InDesign graphics software, the new poems "exceed the page and turn into the third dimension" (Poetry Northwest) to further expand, as Kearney once said, "a sense of space and movement and proximity and composition."

Poets & Writers admiringly described the collection as "astounding....a trickster of a book, one that requires its reader to pay close attention to what is overt as well as what lurks beneath. It plays with and on words, challenging its own methodology in a way that speaks to the precarious nature of Black life in America." Kearney's own suggestion for the reader of these visually thick poems is to approach them as one might navigate and engage with, say, "a raucous house party" or "a briar patch." It's not about "solving" a poem, but more about "how do you make your way through a situation that may feel at some level impassible?" he has noted. "I’m hoping that there’s pleasure in the sounds that people encounter, in seeing how there’s arrangement, the way things have lined up." There's pleasure too in recognizing the snippets, or samples, of language and image Kearney is deliberately pulling into relationship, and pleasure in thinking about those relationships. 

Kearney has published nine books ranging from poetry to essays. In 2023, Optic Subwoof, a collection of his Bagley Wright lectures, won the Poetry Foundation’s Pegasus Prize for Poetry Criticism and the CLMP Firecracker Award for Creative Nonfiction. His 2021 poetry collection Sho won the Griffin Poetry Prize and the Minnesota Book Award. The CLA Samuel Russell Chair in the Humanities graciously answered our questions via email.

What led to the genesis of the new collection?

I’ve been interested in the idea of making hip hop sampling a component of my written poetry for decades. Much of my second collection, The Black Automaton, was an attempt to work with those techniques in play. But I realized that in those poems I was often quoting songs, which seems more like covering or replaying than sampling. Also, the composition of those poems gestured toward collage (which characterizes the way I think of the instrumentals of De La Soul), but didn’t really “go there.” Like, what appeals to me about hip hop sampling isn't the existence of a baseline, but in the literal sound of a bassline played in a studio in 1981 by a particular player who has a particular setup: the timbre, or texture, of a sample in tension with other recorded sounds. I Imagine I Been Science Fiction Always is rooted in realizing that I was just as interested in texture as text.

Regarding the cutting I loved in J Dilla or Madlib production, when I saw Susan Howe’s work in Debths, I felt like I was looking at a visual analog. 

How else has hip hop made an impact on this collection?

Aesthetically, there’s the collaging of found material. Thematically, there are questions of the Black body at risk, deep play with language, speculations about technology and being, memory. Then there are visual tropes that allude to or reference Black vernacular cultures and socialities.

Hip hop had to begin paying for samples. In gathering graphics, such as certain dialogue bubbles and vintage advertisements, etc., were you worried about copyright?

I checked in quite a bit with my publisher about this. The images are often doctored, fragmented, and recollaged. (Prosecuting hip hop sampling is likely bigger business than vispo.)

When did you become aware of graphic design as a intentional practice?

I took a weekend course in graphic design back in my teens. The Art Center College of Design held it. My other choice was capoeira. I’m not sure what led to my final decision. But I loved how the instructor differentiated illustration from design—I had assumed they were the same. Design did multiple things simultaneously and with complexity in the ways it communicated with an audience. Even typeface choices addressed the present of the designed object/image and the past from which the font was drawn. My project was a redesign of the poster for An American Werewolf in London. I remember when I selected the font for the poster (which I had to hand letter), I chose “Baskerville” because of its associative connection to a supernatural British hound—which “slant rhymed” with the werewolf.

Could you talk about reading from this collection? In the conversation with Ron Charles, you showed the audience one visual poem and said, "You are literally imagining this piece in your head better than I could perform it."

I think that trying to read most of these poems aloud—as an individual doing a performance—creates interesting questions. For example, one poem makes use of an image of an altimeter. There are numbers and markings/divisions. Do I read the markings? They’re not dashes. What do I call them. Do I say “altimeter”? Are those markings “silent”? Do I say “comma” when I see a comma in a more conventional line of poetry? At the same time, I am interested in what a robust alt-text version would be of one of what I call "the armor poems." I think about accessibility and these poems as an unsettled question.

Different modes of “reading” create different texts. When I consider the poems read aloud collectively, I am excited about what that group would decide to do with the markings. They would approach it with an understanding that they are interpreting, trying things—that’s a very different proposition than the guy who composed the thing “showing how it goes.”

You've mentioned that Assistant Professor Jessica Horvath Williams' idea of "neurodivergent poetics" has impacted your thinking about your work. In what ways?

Dr. Horvath Williams is a scholar of Nineteenth Century literature in English and a theorist in Critical Disability Studies. In her research, she has described five paradigms of neurodivergent hermeneutics that can operate as interpretive strategies as well as techne for composition. It’s exciting to be in conversation with her, and I would rather set her stage than steal her thunder. One thing that chimed with me was her idea of simultaneity in neurodivergent cognition and how that presents in the visuality of my poems. And simultaneity is one of the five she theorizes. You’ll have to ask her about the other four!