Poetry MFA Alumnus Jameka Williams Reflects on the Process of Writing Her Award-Winning First Book of Poetry, American Sex Tape™

By Jameka Williams, MFA Fiction Alumnus   

With my debut collection, American Sex Tape™, I had a nagging suspicion early in my first semester in Northwestern’s MFA program that I’d have to defend what exactly I thought I was doing. Commonly, we understand poetics to be exclusively for the expression of our highest human emotions: love, grief, lust, confusion. But there I was, in an expensive creative writing program, toiling over craft devoted to analyzing Kim Kardashian, a woman who arguably had the most trivial rise to fame in Hollywood, and who arguably has offered less than nothing of cultural or spiritual value to the human experience. Who cares about Kim Kardashian? No, seriously. Who cares? A fair question, a vital question, posed to me by the poet Ed Roberson in my first semester independent study session with him. Culture writers continue to kill poetry every six months in the high literary media cycle, devoting hundreds of words to a funeral that continues to question poetry’s importance in the so-called Discourse and what poetry should actually be doing for us as human beings. Thus, a collection in which the poet’s metaphors and moods, symbols and syntax, take a banal celebrity seriously should be scrutinized. The question opened the door for me to ask deeper questions of my concerns with Kim Kardashian as a media commodity and as a consequence of my own personal struggle with self image and my personal devotion to intersectional feminism.

At the time I was panicking. Was Ed Roberson asking me to throw away poems and start anew? To turn to Whitman instead of Perez Hilton? I understand now that his challenge was for me to make Kim Kardashian matter. But in what way? First, Ed Roberson, and later Simone Muench, my thesis advisor, who saw my project through to the very end, helped me to understand that what I was writing about was not Kim Kardashian at all, but power, and its sticky nature. I find that my writing often does politics by creating reversals. In American Sex Tape™, the object becomes the subject. The poetic “I” wields the political power of Sight, holding the camera to American feminine and racial ideals, and yet impulsively continues to turn the lens back on her reflection, her own objectification and subjectivity. The challenge was to craft poems that perform a wily, yet authoritative sleight-of-hand in their language: convincing readers that they are not looking at Kim Kardashian but looking at very real issues of sexism, racism, classism, and self-liberation embodied in American popular culture.