Chaun Ballard’s Second Nature, winner of the 23rd annual Poulin Prize, was published in April 2025 through BOA editions. This debut collection is full of questions, traversing centuries of history through the ghostly voices of ancestors, musical inspirations, and more. Richly descriptive and playful, Ballard’s myriad forays into form lead readers toward a deeper and more compassionate understanding not only of the American cultural, racial, and political climate, but also of human nature—how we define ourselves, rooted and sown as we are into this earth. ​

 

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Jordan Kramarsky: Many of the poems in this collection play with, allude to, or even strictly adhere to increasingly complex poetic forms—strambottos, centos, turnkey sonnets, and more. Can you speak about working within the constraints of these forms? What does the process look like, creatively or logistically? Do you find that these forms allow you to access something previously buried?

 

Chaun Ballard: Ah, “[d]o [I] find that these forms allow [me] to access something previously buried?”

 

This is a great question and one that leads into a conversation about formal structures and dramatic monologue, both of which allow for the poet to step into various discourses. I recently wrote an essay titled “The Complexities of Personhood: An Essay on Craft, and the Soul” that will be published in Prairie Schooner in October 2025, and I believe it parallels to your question. This essay cites a few of my poetic influences, where I consider how my engagement with the persona poem “The Ghost [of the singer] Johnnie Taylor”—which “contains emulative echoes of [Hanif] Abdurraqib’s ‘One Side of an Interview with the Ghost of Marvin Gaye,’ which is itself after Eve L. Ewing’s poem ‘Excerpts from an Interview with Metta World Peace, a.k.a. Ron Artest, a.k.a. the Panda’s Friend’”—steps into a conversation about the soul and soul music.

 

Structurally, I find that I tend to lean into forms that work on multiple levels or planes. For example, my employment of the acrostic and golden shovel, or acrostic-golden shovel, reflects how received formal structures might exist along the margins and serve as context for the content that is being explored within said margins. In other words, the acrostic-golden shovel reveals, for me, what has been made peripheral, but if one does not know to look to the margins for what has been embedded as context, they may miss a significant piece of the conversation, or a “small needful fact,” in echo of Ross Gay’s title “A Small Needful Fact.”

 

Therefore, my hope is to consider how formal elements can be further amplified (made visible) on the page. Of course, I did not come up with the acrostic-golden shovel on my own; I have received these formal examples from my poetic antecedents: Terrance Hayes’ “The Golden Shovel,” Michael Kleber-Diggs “America Is Loving Me to Death,” and Patricia Smith’s “Black, Poured Directly into the Wound.”

 

 

JK: Many of the poems in this collection also have double or triple titles. One poem, “Possible Titles for a Love Poem,” contains all titles. In “Working Title” (excerpt below), you suggest that “without a working title, a poem could muddle meaning, confuse / purpose, become / vicious…” Is there a particular way that you navigate the titling process? What does the movement from a working title to a published title look like?

What I'm saying here is, without a working title, a poem could muddle meaning, confuse 

purpose, become

 

vicious

 

or a 

 

world-rocking

 

super split from a singular form similar to a black hole. Which, after receiving a charge is fired

like a gunshot. Like an

 

x-ray revealing

 

the shadow of a fragment in the back of another, which could have been 

 

your

 

name (in theory). An all-black universe with stars circling in halo after a wild haymaker sent

a body to the canvas, knees buckling Good night at best – at worst, a Bang! into someone else’s

 

zodiac. 

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CB: I love titles. I believe that a thoughtfully constructed title can remedy most drafts that have been left to collect dust within a less-frequented desk drawer. I also find the act of strengthening or clarifying a poem with multiple titles a delightful practice. It is a practice that I find wonderfully present within spoken word communities. From the Nebraska spoken word community, for example, I know an amazing poet, Bianca Swift, who uses every space available to her to place the necessary within her spoken texts. I value the closeness of her attention and how she considers the whole poem as significant workspace. Wendy Xu is another poet that I delight in. Her collection You Are Not Dead is filled with great titles. One of my favorite poems of hers is titled “This Year I Mean to Be an Elephant.” I am awed by the way she walks her reader from the title to the final line of the poem. It is nothing short of brilliant.

 

I can go on about titles, but it may be best to share what I have turned to for guidance for myself and for my students of poetry and that is the article from the Poets & Writers’ “Craft Capsules” series, written by poet Dante Di Stefano, titled: “A Few Approaches to Titling Your Poem.” Di Stefano does an excellent job explaining the purpose and expectations of formal titles, emblematic titles, expository titles, allusive titles, metapoetic titles, perspectival titles, etc. His craft article is a useful resource—many of my titles developed out of my engagement with his article. Since my desire is to be intentional and to consider what a particular title can offer me when it comes to framing my poems, I try to construct them in a way I would like them to be read. Understanding what title(s) to use and why aids me in my attempts to connect with my imagined reader.

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JK: Some of the most visually striking moments in this collection are communicated via a variety of erasure poems. The first ones, “[John] Adams’ Argument for the Defense: 3 – 4 December 1770 | The Ghost of Crispus Attucks Stands Outside the Old State House and Speaks for Himself” and “Squire—The Outlaw! 19 July 1837 | The Legend of Bras-Coupé Speaks on the Creation of Frankenstein; or, the Modern Prometheus” appear somewhat more traditional, pulling lyric out of the erasure (or to be more visually accurate, the grey-scaling) of historical documents. They also give significant space to the original documents, showcasing them twice: once unedited and then again with the erasure poem appearing in black type to contrast with the grey.

 

The final two erasure poems, however, “Ars Poetica or American Pastoral as Opening Scene for a Micro-Documentary after Flipping the Script and Keeping the Darkness for Ourselves” and “Ars Poetica or Self-Portrait Beginning with a Haiku before Shaking the Polaroid into Image and Keeping the Darkness for Ourselves” are comprised of multiple stanzas, each one an erasure poem found by visually blacking out a previous poem in the collection. The primary sources of these second two erasure poems obviously appear in the collection, but we don’t see them in the same side-by-side or grey scale as their counterparts. I’m struck by the process of erasure here, and what it means to “keep the darkness for ourselves.”

 

How did these four poems come to be, and what did you find formally important about the contrasting stylizations—was it evident from the start that these different primary sources wanted to be something new, or did they resist erasure? How did that differ between your own work and the historical documents? Did you find anything surprising or subconscious in the act of creating these poems?

 

CB: This is a beautiful close reading. I am honored and grateful for it. Second Nature is a collection that is meant to be read slowly. I understand that much of what I attempt to do through my formal engagement may go unnoticed until one happens upon the Notes section. My hope with this collection was to not only conspire to embed historical documentation within the pages, but also to share my story of family, Black cultural production, my own complicity in erasure, and my belief that the past is not finished, but rather, contains echoes or reverberations in our present moment. It is with this understanding that, I hope, the collection reveals pivotal threads that connect us to what came before us and what persists still. 

 

For this reason, as you have outlined within the generous framing of your question, I made the stylistic decision to encourage these personas to give voice to their own historical moment, with the end goal of cultivating a poetic landscape where the personal archive converses with documented accounts and is amplified by that which is provided by oral historians. In other words, I want to situate my family within the historical timeline as if to say, This is what has happened / is happening, and this is how we were and are living inside it.

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JK: This collection deals heavily with the after-life imagination—ghosts question and respond, are replaced in new homes, and guide us, as readers, through history and present. Some are family members, some historical figures, and some are both. Often, these ghosts are defined as speakers only in the title of the poem. In the collection's penultimate poem, “the key: Johnnie Taylor’s Ghost Writer Speaks,” the speaker calls upon some of these ghosts.

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                                                                                                                                                 …. we into

creation, ain’t we? & who can do it better than us? so riotous to bring you along. your

rhythm’s better than mine. soul on the page. called it a cage once. tried to make it new.

only, i’m over that now. give me sunrise in the mornin’. heat of days. all that splendor.

we want what was sown back. can i say that? well, there it is. we’ve been all-day-long

noddin’ between starshine & clay, rhyme & reason—just so i can say: we-work-that-song.

 

How did these ghosts inform the conceptions of their poems, and how do you feel that they help us get “what was sown back”? What, if anything, did they help to open up that a traditional speaker might have left alone? How did you find yourself accessing their voices?

 

CB: Yes, this is a question about how the collection opens with a gesture, or a nod, to the strambotto. In the Notes section of Second Nature, I share how

 

The final stanza of the [introductory] poem gestures to the strambotto. The strambotto is an eight-line stanza that was sung by Sicilian peasants and appropriated by Giacomo da Lentino, “the senior poet in the Sicilian School of court poetry” and one of fourteen notaries working in the thirteenth-century court of Frederick II. According to Phillis Levin’s The Penguin Book of the Sonnet: 500 Years of a Classic Tradition in English, da Lentino expanded the strambotto’s eight-line structure into what we now know as the fourteen-line sonnet.

 

With this in mind, and since I engage with and expand upon the possibilities present within the sonnet’s received structure throughout the collection, I thought it best to open with a nod to the sonnet’s precursor and to give a shout out to the Sicilian peasants, who sang their sorrow songs, at the same time.

 

In the second section of Second Nature, I try my hand at what A. Van Jordan and Natasha Trethewey offers to us as a blues sonnet, which, too, includes Jericho Brown’s “Duplex,” and gestures back to Langston Hughes’ “Seven Moments of Love: An Un-Sonnet Sequence in Blues.” I title my sorrow song “Blues Sonnet on What I Don’t Have to Tell You in the Absence of Porches.” Through this poem, I attempt to situate my own grandmother within the timeline, or archives, of Mississippi history, a state that I know only through familial narratives and academic study, and one I have yet to visit. This poem, then, is a lament for what is unattainable or a sorrow song about what I cannot know about my grandmother’s life among the cotton fields, because she is no longer physically present to provide me access to her story.

 

This brings me to the turnkey sonnet, which is too a sorrow song sung through the strings of the guitar itself. The final sonnet of Second Nature seeks to unify content and form together as a single conspiratory entity. Therefore, in the “key” the speaker outs himself. This final sonnet is a twist on the sonnet crown, as it takes the golden shovel from the fifteenth sonnet within the crown and turns it horizontal so that the sonnet rhyme pattern appears as sheet music. In the Notes of the collection, I explain it this way:

 

Here, for example, are the turnkey sonnets with their Shakespearean rhyming patterns explicitly identified, either using single words or common word phrases:

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turnkey sonnet 1. // we thought:

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misunderstood                mahogany              wood—               we         string   a           rustlin’   may​

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a                                         b                                a                         b            c           d            c               d

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into       your                    new                          splendor.             all day long                  we work that song.     ​

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e            f                           e                               f                            g                                       g

 

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turnkey sonnet 2. // we say:

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we work that song    good.        we            should.           erry body                  plantin’& pickin’.            dey

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g                                        a               b               a                     b                                  c                                           d

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pickin’                a          blue       chor’                         to           underscore        ‘good-as-gon’.

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c                          d           e            f                                e             f                           g

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‘the key: Johnnie Taylor’s Ghost Writer Speaks’ is the fifteenth turnkey sonnet that completes the crown, as the acrostic letters read ‘THE SONNET CROWN’ vertically. A sonnet crown consists of repeated lines that connect the preceding sonnets to the subsequent sonnets. The turnkey connects the preceding horizontal sonnets to the subsequent horizontal sonnets as they turn—linking the chain of sonnets together—while also allowing each sonnet to exist autonomously like the couplets of a ghazal. This fifteenth sonnet is labeled ‘the key’ since the first couplet of the horizontal turnkey sonnet (‘misunderstood mahogany wood—we string a rustlin’ may into your new splendor. all day long we work that song’) can be read vertically since it is a golden shovel. The Shakespearean rhyming pattern, or golden shovel, in the fifteenth sonnet acts as a key that can be inserted and turned horizontally—thus, unlocking and/or revealing the rhyming pattern (which, in this case, follows an English or Shakespearean order). The term ‘key’ also doubles as a nod to the musicality of the sonnet itself.

 

I share this explanation of the turnkey sonnet in order to, I hope, demonstrate that the conversation that the ghost writer is having is one that reveals his intentions throughout the collection.

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JK: A central theme of this collection, of course, is nature. These poems explore not only what the present natural world looks like in contrast to the white-washed pastoralism of early American literature, but also the beauty of a more complex understanding of nature, an understanding that holds the incredible importance of our ecology alongside the labor, both voluntary and exploitative, that’s been used to develop it. In a period where we’re beginning to respond more and more to the climate crisis in America, we’re seeing an oddly pastoral homesteading renaissance occur simultaneously with a continued uptick in exploitative farm labor practices, especially towards migrant workers. In “Second Nature,” this collection's eponymous poem, you write about questions of land and ownership. Throughout your work on these poems, what, if anything, has changed in your feelings about land and nature? What do we “owe” to nature? What does it “owe” to us?

 

CB: This is a generous reading and a massive framing, one that deserves more space than I can do justice to, but what I hope comes through in Second Nature as a whole is what I conclude with in my essay “The Complexities of Personhood: An Essay on Craft, and the Soul”:

 

Second Nature is a collection of poems that imagines and reflects upon personal experiences and inherited narratives that have been passed down through familial carriers. These poems seek to explore the intersections between land and labor, migration and song. Through a contextualization of historical events, I see the autobiographical and formal or stanzaic innovations as a window into cross-generational discourses and their relevance within our contemporary moment.

 

In other words, through the poems in Second Nature, I hope to demonstrate that I am continuously considering how the notions of land, labor, migration, and song are inherited ideals that are often made fraught by the taught perceptions of ownership.

 

The want for ownership, and the romanticized conception of the term, of course, stems from centuries of exclusion and exploitation, all of which aimed at portraying privatization as benign. I hope to trouble these notions that I have received as a resident of the United States, and, instead, consider how to cultivate a personal relationship with the land that is not based on extraction and deed-holding, but rather, care, community, and regeneration.

 

I think about how I have been taught to aspire to ownership. I have a document that shares that one of my ancestors received forty acres, and I wonder if this receipt was tied to Field Order No. 15, as a promise after Emancipation. This complicates the conversation of ownership. If I am to consider how one views the land, then I must ask myself—Does one’s vision of land ownership exist with or without borders? This question is in no way meant to negate that fact that my ancestors worked this land without compensation, but it is to say that the land belonged to non-European communities before my ancestors were “emancipated.”

 

In the title poem “Second Nature,” as you mentioned, I am working through questions such as this. My father grew up in a small town in Alabama, not far from where his great-grandmother—who was still alive during his childhood years—was freed, and her husband was said to be sold into slavery by his own father—who was said to be the chief of his tribe. My maternal grandmother, born and raised in Mississippi, raised my aunts and at least two uncles within the state, but I have never lived there myself, so my ideas of land and ownership are limited by what I am unable to currently imagine.

 

All of these ideas remind me of a writer often deemed foundational to the US-American discourse on nature writing. The Waldon Pond naturalist and Concord, Massachusetts, local, Henry David Thoreau, in his essay “Huckleberries,” posits, “I think that it would be well if the Indian names, were as far as possible restored and applied…instead of the very inadequate Greek and Latin or English ones at present” (Thoreau 185). In this statement, Thoreau makes the case for restoring Indigenous names to the New England plant life—more specifically, the various wild berries he gathered since his youth, and were, at the time of his writing, left unpicked and rotting inside “the temples [of] private property” under U.S. manifestations of the British Acts of Enclosure (198). I think it is pertinent to mention here that Thoreau’s preoccupation with the restoration of pre-colonial identifiers may have been fueled by what he perceived as an encroachment on his own rights and liberties as a European settler upon Massachusetts soil. It should be noted, then, that scholar Renato Rosaldo might call Thoreau’s proposition to strike Latinate names from New England’s berry population an echo of “imperialist nostalgia”—rather than a dedication to decolonizing nomenclature—which is described as a hearkening back to a time “where people mourn the passing of what they themselves have transformed” (108). Rosaldo describes “nostalgia” as being that of Greek origin, with nostos meaning “to return home” and algia meaning “a painful condition” (108). Rosaldo suggests that the combination of nosto and algia “dates from the late seventh century when it was coined to describe a medical condition. The term describes…a pathological homesickness among Swiss mercenaries who were fighting far from their homeland” (108). Whether in an act of solidarity or out of an effort to align himself with the land’s pre-European occupants after the encroachment of privatization laws threatened to inconvenience his way of life, throughout “Huckleberries,” for example, Thoreau may be said to complicate his own comprehension of his relationship with the land, while considering what he has received. I hope to lean into these complications myself in the title poem of Second Nature, so that I, too, may make visible my own wrestling with received perceptions of land, the connections between the human and nonhuman, and the myriad ways in which conceptions of relationality have been impacted by historical and contemporary ideological teachings. I know there is much for me to learn and unlearn through such a practice.

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