One Sentence, Exactly As Given

Femi had ninety minutes and a list of eleven questions, and he lost control of the interview inside the first two.

The poet met him at the door of her house on Bell Street with flour on her hands and told him, before he had even sat down, that he was welcome to report anything she said, but that he could not quote her. Not one line. He asked whether she was serious. She said that she was extremely serious, that this was the only condition, and that the tea was nearly ready.

So Femi wrote it all down the long way. She said that she had been writing every morning since she was nineteen. She said that there were four hundred and six finished poems in the second drawer of the desk behind him, and eleven more that she didn't count, because they weren't finished and never would be.

He asked why none of them had been published. She said that she had sent six poems to a magazine in 1994, that they had printed one, and that when she saw it in print she hadn't recognized it. He asked what she meant by that. She said that a poem on her own paper was a thing she had made, and a poem in a magazine was a thing about her, and that she hadn't enjoyed being a thing.

He asked, carefully, whether she wasn't perhaps a little afraid. She said that she was very afraid, that fear was a perfectly good reason, and that people who told her otherwise usually had agents.

At the end of the ninety minutes Femi closed his notebook and admitted, in his most professional voice, that a profile with no quotation in it was going to be a difficult article to sell.

She thought about this while she washed the cups. Then she said that he could have one sentence, exactly as she gave it to him, and that he should write it down very carefully.

He wrote it down very carefully.

“The poet would rather not say.”