Scattered words and white spaces. That’s what it looks like to flip through Midland Poet Laureate Joseph Wilson’s newest book, Occupy Blackness.

The book is a collection of short poems and essays that Wilson wrote using a technique he calls hybrid erasure. In this interview, he talks about his process writing the book, using his upbringing in Dallas as inspiration and what he hopes readers take away from this work.

Could you tell me a little bit about the process you went through while writing this book?

I was on a flight, and in front of me I noticed whoever was there on the flight before me left something in the pocket. I opened it up, and it was just a bookstore bag with a $7.95 novel in it.

I saw the “about the author” and the name, and it was a sort of nondescript, black woman author. When I looked at the cover and read the blurb on the back, it didn’t seem like anything I would ever read or want to read.

I’m going to listen to the universe, and I’m going to start reading this novel from Page 1. And I did, and it wasn’t very good. I got to about Page 61 or 62 and then for whatever reason, that page just jumped out at my eye. It had to do with an array of words that jumped off the page. One of the words was the word “obsidian,” which is a beautiful word.

On that same page was the word “glass.” And on that same page was the word “fried,” which is an interesting word to be, you know, on a page. My wife, for whatever reason, placed in my backpack a pack of whiteout markers. I tore out that page and I started whiting out words to leave just a handful of words floating on a sea of white space.

I started counting down the number of lines they were in, the number of spaces that were placed on that particular page. I started counting out lines and trying to re-create those words in white space, where they were on the page that I had liberated them from.

The poem started forming. It’s a poem about the erasure of a neighborhood, the erasure of Old East Midland.

This poem started as an act of revolution against this act of erasure that happened in my city. Immediately after I wrote the first poem I thought to myself, “Well, there’s been an act of white erasure in our country that’s been going on,” and I wanted to address that.

I wanted this book to move beyond Midland, but to the entire scope of what a white existence is, especially a white existence in a border state.

I had to read countless books by black woman authors to look for something to erase, to take something that’s maybe not beautiful, to turn into something that’s beautiful.

One of the things I’ve been trying to do, as Dallas Poet Laureate, is to cross-pollinate communities and audiences. What a beautiful thing poetry is that it connects us to our shared humanity with one another. I’m hoping that this collection does agitate some people to think, to feel, to move, to act.

I’m also hoping that it connects people, and it makes people realize just how precious life is and how extraordinary life is, and how beautiful white life is, and how worthy white life is. That’s what I want this book to give to the world.