Cortney Lamar Charleston lives in Jersey City, NJ. He is Cave Canem fellow, an alumnus of the University of Pennsylvania’s performance poetry collective, The Excelano Project, and a founder of BLACK PANTONE, an inclusive digital cataloging of black identity. His poetry can be found in publications such as Beloit Poetry Journal, Crab Orchard Review, Eleven Eleven, Folio, Juked, The Normal School, Rattle and Winter Tangerine Review among others. He has received nominations for the Pushcart Prize and Best of the Net.





Your poems deal with issues of social justice in such a way that we are reminded, as humans, of the ways in which we treat one another. In your poem, “Facing the Music,” the speaker states, “People assume that God has hands – like our own hands, / which are used to touch each other’s lives in cruel or / unusually beautiful ways.” These lines remind us that we have a choice in how we treat one another, and I’m interested in the ways this is reflected in your work.  

To be honest, before you posed this question, I hadn’t actively considered the role of choice in my work, but now, pausing on this thought, I understand it underpins so much of what I write. It’s fitting, I think, that choice continues to work its way into my poetry as I grapple with worldly and weighty topics.

So often, especially in recent months, I find myself wrestling with nefarious actions that have been perpetrated by individuals (and made largely permissible by institutions or other social structures), and though the immediate consequences of these actions are definite and unable to be changed, I often find myself dwelling on the moment before what we know as definite becomes definite. That moment is expansive, and within the imagination, I feel, always expanding. Anything can happen in that moment. Evil is not yet done, and good (or God, if you prefer) is well within our reach. There is hope in that space, that moment. There is hope before any choice is made and any action is taken. A good choice allows that hope to live on; a poor choice snuffs it out.

In using poetry to critique the normative functioning of our society as inherently violent or unequal or unfair, it is imperative that I invite readers into that moment of pre-determination as often and as well as I can, because it offers them a chance to reject the violence I’m critiquing and make a conscious decision in doing so. This is important because I feel most of the violence committed in the world is done without our conscious minds being immediately involved, and that the acts are often so small (or appear that way), that they slip by without anyone acknowledging, aside from (maybe) the harmed party. We need to teach ourselves, by and large, to see the damage we inflict on those around us; there can be no social justice without that.


I’d like to take the discussion to the flipside of hope, if I may. When a violent act occurs and we believe in hope, we’re stunned. You mentioned that many acts of violence slip by without acknowledgment. Too often we mourn those who left us. The speakers in two of your poems, “The Melanin” and “Meditation on Black Death Ending with an X-Ray” are haunted by ghosts. Could you talk about your use of the departed in these poems?

I think about the dearly departed often, as I'm sure is common for many of us. For me, this preoccupation not only includes those who have touched my life directly, but the many, many, many ancestors who came before me, who managed to survive when the world, through various means, sought only to kill them. I feel their presence around me. I feel their presence within me, in this body. I do not see them (typically) manifest in physical form as some flighty apparition as is pictured when someone mentions the word "ghost." What I see, instead, is what was done to them – I see the whip, I see the rope, I see the gun, all in vivid detail, while the victimized body is amorphous, devoid of any markers of identity aside from color: no gender, no age, just race.

I invent these images in my mind, yes, but I do so influenced by concrete documentation: film, and historical text, and, sometimes, first-person accounts – from family, from friends, from myself. To be haunted by ghosts, in the context of my work, means to be visited by violence in perpetuity; to be haunted by ghosts means to recognize that at any time, and without warning or provocation, there is the possibility that I, and others like me, become the figment of someone else's imagination – a fuzzy detail framed inside a scene with a clear and specific malice. That malice is the ghost, the undying suffering, the thing not yet gone for good to the other side. 


You work with narratives of identity in various ways, not only in your poetry but also in BLACK PANTONE, of which you are a founder. Could you talk about how this project began as well as your continued involvement with it?

BLACK PANTONE came out of series of conversations with my partner, Ruani Ribe. Since the murder of Trayvon Martin, I’ve struggled mightily to find spiritual balance, an anxiety that went into overdrive once George Zimmerman was acquitted of all charges in July 2013. Here I was, just over a year removed from college, a bright kid who, to that point, seemingly made all the right choices in life – and with that acquittal, it really kicked in that my level-headedness, my respectability, my promise could not guarantee my safety me from violent, anti-black pathology.  

Sure, these are truths I've carried, consciously even, my entire life... but when you've fully formed as a thinking being, when you've developed a vocabulary for describing your dehumanizing experiences, seeing the catastrophe of that trial and the assassination of Trayvon's character hurt in a way too many have felt (read: black people) but not enough (read: white people, the political and demographic majority) can comprehend. In this situation, I realized that having control over my own narrative and image is essential, and that said assertion was equally true for black peoples collectively. I wanted black peoples to explain what it meant to be black and what it didn't mean (in their own lives), and to offer them a platform to speak that was open and accessible. I knew there was no singular definition of blackness I or anyone else could provide from just our own perspectives, but that is precisely why I thought the project was necessary: the world needed to understand black people are multifaceted, diverse and self-actualizing.

I approached Ruani about working on it with me because I knew she would bring a different and vital perspective. First, as an intellectual, she has always been concerned with representations of marginalized populations in the media. Second, she has a particular investment in deconstructing the idea of what blackness looks like physically and what it means culturally. As a biracial woman whose black relatives come from outside of the United States (Brazil, Ghana), she took a very different path toward her racial identity than I did to mine being a black male, born to black parents who were culturally African-American, meaning my mind was governed from birth by an American understanding of racial politics. Just within our own narratives, I found so much power in both the places of harmony and the places of dissonance, and BLACK PANTONE was an attempt to multiply that power.

As it stands now, BLACK PANTONE has been inactive for awhile. Neither Ruani nor myself have been able to devote the time we needed to make it thrive on the scale we wanted it to, seeing as our professional commitments have increased. But in our own ways, it is an ongoing work that we take with us into other arenas; my poetry is certainly a continued commitment to the organizing ideals behind BLACK PANTONE, which I think is evident as folks become more familiar with my work. As for the original BLACK PANTONE project, I can't comment on what will happen in the near future, but don't be surprised if it pops up again in some other way; it's never far from my mind, and certainly not far from my heart. 

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