Duality’s holding place

An interview with Tope Folarin

In Tope Folarin’s genre-crossing work, truth exists somewhere between life’s push and pull. “Poetry allows you to just be,” he says, a resistance to our culture’s bent for stiff categories and forward motion. The Executive Director of the Institute of Policy Studies in D.C., he shares how poetic thinking can enhance policy creation—ratifying Percy Shelley’s claim that “poets are the world’s unacknowledged legislators.”

You’ve become a well-known name across literary fields from novels to poetry to nonfiction. What drew you to poetry, and how did your career form from there?

Before going to Oxford, I’d decided that I would turn away from literature. The primary reason was that my dad had made it abundantly clear that he expected me to succeed in college. I also had a drive to do as well as I could academically, and literature seemed like a barrier to that. I did take a couple of fiction classes in college, but for the most part I focused on foreign policy and political science.

But once I got to grad school, I noticed that many of my friends were deeply enmeshed in the art world. Around then, I got it in my mind that I wanted to write a novel. But I quickly realized I just didn't have the craft I needed to write the way I wanted. So I started reading voraciously, and as I researched the biographies of writers I admired, I noticed that many of them were also poets. In this way, poetry started as a means to an end.

As I read more poetry, I fell deeply in love, convincing myself that I was actually a poet. Through a six- or seven-year journey, I read and wrote poetry exclusively.  

I was especially taken with image and metaphor. When I first encountered Dennis Johnson for example, his writing was a north star for what to take from the world of poetry into prose.

Poetry has long been recognized for its ability to capture multiple sides of the story—“buts” can become “ands,” creating a space where life doesn’t have to flow logically. You often write against binaries, asking, “Why are we in the West so deeply uncomfortable with and?” How do you think poetry plays a role, at both a personal and political level, in shaping our ideas of “truth”?  

The poem is a site of intense thinking and intellectualism, but it's also a site where the spirit becomes manifest.

That’s what I loved about the great poetry I engaged with—I was encountering how I am in the world on the page. Great poets are bright: they're thinking about society, the way we’re all situated in society and what we encounter. But they're also allowing the deepest and lightest and darkest parts of themselves to be expressed.

It’s distinct from the locomotive action of narrative, which is always about the next thing, the next thing, the next thing. Instead, poetry allows you to just be.

Poems are also a space of negative capability, the place where opposites can correspond. I try to import that sense into prose all the time, but it resides most naturally in poetry.

I love that idea of poetry as presence. I've been reading Jenny Odell’s How to Do Nothing where she talks about resisting the attention economy, and I think we all struggle with that. As you say, the poem can help us push back because we have to sit with it for a minute. It’s not there for immediate consumption.

Absolutely. Prose is like a dog: it kind of comes to you. But poetry is more like a cat—you have to go to it. It forces you to deal with it on its own terms.

On the subject of binaries, as art and technology become more and more entwined, lines between the real and unreal are blurring. How can human creativity inform and work with this shapeshifting environment?

It’s a question I think we're all grappling with as artists and creative people. A century ago, artists were facing a similar set of challenges. With the rise of photography, for example, you have painters saying, What are we going to do? This photography thing can put us out of business. And of course, photography has since become interesting and important.

There were similar revolutions in literature as well—Modernism, the Harlem Renaissance. Today, I suspect that advances will inspire a new set of responses from artists. 

I just don't think you can ever do away with human ingenuity. Instead, we'll find a way to incorporate technology into art and come up with new ways of rendering and depicting the world, what's happening within us.

I also think these changes give us an opportunity to reckon with certain things we haven't dealt with recently, especially as humans in the West. Spirituality and religion are great examples. Often when people talk with ChatGPT or other chatbots, there’s a sense of loneliness, a hole that some of us have. With religion now displaced by other cultural institutions, I wonder if the advent of AI technologies will force us to reckon with our need for connection.

We’d love to learn more about your work as Executive Director of the Institute of Policy Studies. How can the arts contribute to the development and perception of social policy? Conversely, what can be policy’s impact on the arts? 

For my entire adult life, I've been obsessed with politics and art, and I've been trying to find a way to do both at a really high level—even though a lot of people said, no, you have to choose one or the other.

I started working at the Institute for Policy Studies back in 2010. I was excited about the role because the chair of the board was a poet, a guy named Ethelbert Miller. He’s a legend in DC—everybody who's made it as a writer has sat at his feet.

I found it incredible that this place dedicated to thinking deeply about politics and policy was led by a poet. He brought his poetic sensibilities to very serious meetings, sharing poems that spoke to the moment. I loved his fearlessness, the way he integrated that sort of knowledge into a space where many people aren't as convinced of the merits of the arts. He showed people that the arts are essential.

That's what I try to do now as a director. We’re on the progressive side of the spectrum and deal with a range of policies—inequality and the environment and race. We deal with international issues as well. 

What I've had to learn is that many people on staff have been working on these issues for decades, so there's no possible way that I can catch up to their level of fluency on various topics. Instead, my responsibility is to braid the many aspects of our work into a cohesive narrative, and I'm able to do so because of my work as an artist.

I'm constantly trying to figure out how to merge art and policy and demonstrate to people on both sides of the divide that politics is as important to artists as art is to folks in policy.

Your work reminds me of something Percy Shelly said, that poets are the world’s unacknowledged legislators.

I love that. There isn't enough respect for the arts in this country. I have friends, for example, who’ve moved to Berlin where writers receive stipends and a national health insurance plan.

It makes me wonder what we’re embracing in the States by instead failing to provide people with opportunities to create, regardless of how much money they or their parents have. Part of why there's an empathy gap is that we aren't aware of people’s stories from the other side of the tracks—we aren't getting as much art from them. So many stories aren't reaching the surface.

You’ve spoken about the importance of new artistic movements such as autofiction, the genre in which your novel operates. Throughout your literary career, what changes—from backslides to progress—have you seen in the poetic field?

There've been so many changes. In part, writers are aware of losing space in the attention economy. Instead, people are playing video games or scrolling on the internet or watching movies.

Novelists and writers in general have been grappling with ways to demonstrate that we're still doing important work that speaks in real ways to contemporary experiences. I’ve seen a trend, for example, towards confession culture, to write about the most embarrassing moments or what we usually keep out of the public square. I think that’s a viable pathway because it helps people see that our strange and weird thoughts are part of the human condition.

Obviously, I’m a big fan of autofiction and what it represents for the future of fiction. But there's been a turn in the past couple of years where a lot of the folks who’ve become famous for autofiction are moving in new directions.

I hope the publishing world doesn't say, well, this is the end of autofiction, because there are so many more stories that should be highlighted and surfaced.

Definitely—it’s a funny juxtaposition where on the one hand, people are getting tired of the egocentric internet ‘I’. Yet on the other hand, there are so many untold stories left to be spotlighted.

Absolutely. I think it would be incredibly interesting to read autofiction from a Uyghur perspective or something from the Congo. Again, getting a sense of the granular experience of people who we don't often hear from would be fascinating.

In both your creative work and cultural criticism, what are some projects or subjects you’re hoping to explore next?

I've been thinking a lot recently about experiences that aren't entirely logical or rational. For example, in my novel, there's something that happens that doesn't adhere to the rules of reality.

Especially since religion isn't the force it once was, there’s a general pining to read about experiences we have and perhaps don't always talk about, or that we’ve sidelined in an attempt to adhere to the rules of reality.

I go back to the film Contact, which I've seen many times. It centers around spirituality and science and how they merge. While I believe in science, I hope we're not leaving out other ways of experiencing life and being. When I was at Oxford, I read a lot of Jung and Joseph Campbell, who were incredibly important to me in terms of my own personal development and how to think about the broader questions. When it comes to the mythic underpinnings of our consciousness, there's still so much left to be unearthed and examined.