Camille T. Dungy is a poet, non-fiction writer, editor, professor, and, as of this year, host of The Met’s podcast about the materials of art, Immaterial.
Author and editor of numerous volumes of non-fiction and poetry, including Trophic Cascade, Suck on the Marrow, and What to Eat, What to Drink, and What to Leave for Poison, Dungy is the recipient of the 2019 Guggenheim Fellowship and a National Book Critics Circle Award Finalist. She is also known for her work as an editor at Orion Magazine, and has recently collaborated with The 1619 Project and MoMA Magazine. Immaterial is her first foray into audio storytelling.
Her knack for digging into ideas and examining their component parts makes her an ideal guide to the deep and varied topics Immaterial uncovers—stories of identity, humanity, nature, power, tragedy, science, and history.
Dungy invites us to join her in an exploration of the ways concrete’s liquid tendencies yield to an immutability that makes it ideal for memorials, why a breezy piece of linen assured perfection in the afterlife, and how the sound of air passing through a conch shell is a link to the mysteries of the past.
I spoke with Dungy about her practice as her writer, the transition from poet to podcaster, and the lines that connect art, science, and human experience.
Benjamin Korman: In Immaterial, you serve as a sort of guide to the listener. There are moments where you insert your own experiences into the writing of the show. What was it like sharing your reflections on creativity in the podcast?
Camille T. Dungy: When I get excited about things, I make personal connections to my own life, I’m reminded of something important to me. In Immaterial, I’m excited about the people we’re speaking to and the objects and materials we’re exploring. When we’re talking about the materials that we’re using to describe the world, it’s not enough to just say one thing and move on. There’s very little about the way the real world works that can be summed up in just one thought. It just felt natural to me to draw out my own connections and share them.
Korman: In your 2017 essay collection, Guidebook to Relative Strangers, you wrote, “my poems are informed by displacement and oppression, but they are also informed by peace, by self-possession.” It feels like you always find a way to contextualize yourself in these larger systems: systems of nature, systems of society, through various outside forces. Racism is a very large theme, as are motherhood and language. Do you feel that you were able to bring these dualities of displacement and peace to Immaterial? What was that like, that experience of trying to make that balance?
Dungy: I think the reason that duality shows up in all my work is that it is the reality of my experience in life: this kind of movement between dislocation and location, or between a sense of difficulty and triumph. However you want to say it, that sort of motion back and forth is a regular function of my experience of the world, and I think that is true for many people. I feel like the podcast is a nesting site for that kind of multiplicity of experience because so many of the objects, techniques, and materials we speak about are used as methods of creating, celebration, communication, and community. But they are also made as receptacles for grief and as instruments of war and colonialism, right? So the materials themselves contain contradiction and duality. To me, it felt exciting to think about the ways that sense of two-ness is contained in so much of how humans have expressed themselves creatively through time.
Korman: Materials imply ecology, the natural world, and natural science, and the series touches on social issues, issues of justice and history, psychology, and all of these things. I think it’s undeniable that there’s overlap between the podcast and your writing in terms of themes. But in your first thoughts about the podcast, was that synergy apparent? Did it feel like this was something you needed to do?
Dungy: Absolutely. At the time, I was writing a book that was very much about experiencing the world while traveling away from my home and understanding my sense of place and my sense of self. And my current writing project is a work grounded and centered at home, thinking about how I create my sense of self and my understanding of community through the things that grow up around me.
Immaterial is doing both of those things. We travel to New Zealand, to a town outside of Guadalajara, Mexico, to Spain, to Paris, all over the world. Then we examine these travels through the artwork housed at The Met, and investigate how all those really far-flung artists, traditions, and stories come back home to the Museum.
Korman: What first attracted you to Immaterial and working with The Met?
Dungy: There were real connections in terms of interest and intention all along the way. The first contact I had was through Jesse Baker [co-founder of Magnificent Noise, the production company that worked with The Met to create the series], who sent me an email asking if I was interested. And I will be honest to say that I had to make sure that it was a real thing and not just some sort of a very complex spam call. Jesse and I had a conversation and she described to me the concept for the podcast. From that moment, I was hooked. I mean, the concept of a podcast about the materials we use to create art and what those materials teach us, and the opportunity to talk with different artists and makers and curators and historians, and understand all these odd and necessary interconnections of the materials of our lives… I was like, ‘well, that sounds exactly up my alley. It’s exactly the kind of thing I’m interested in, the kind of thing I write about, and the kind of thing I want to talk about over cocktails. So let’s make this happen.’
Korman: From your perspective as a poet, how did it feel to work in the podcast medium?
Dungy: [Laughs] I have to say, I really enjoyed it… I’m hooked now. There was a lot that was very similar to poetry because of that distillation of information. There are these large chunks of information, long interviews, histories, et cetera, and I have to get all of that down to thirty-something minutes.
And so that distillation and compression—which does not mean omission, but just like a tightening down—that feels just like poetry.
When I’m writing, I really want to engage with my readers. I’m not the kind of poet who’s like, ‘I don’t care about the reader. They can just figure it out.’ I think readers could figure it out… or they could go bake a cake if they don’t feel engaged. They’re not necessarily going to bother to try and figure it out.
So it is important to me always to have that connection with an audience and with the reader in my writing. In making the podcast, I needed to think about the audience much earlier in the process than I do when I am writing contemporary American literature.
I’ve been writing in a dedicated way for so many years that some of the processes are so intuitive as to almost be invisible. They became visible again when I was writing collaboratively in the way that has to happen for the podcast. And so it made me pay attention to my own way of working. That’s always good, to come back and renew your attention.
I loved the production crew, also. I felt this warm connection with everyone I worked with and spoke with in the making of the podcast, so it didn’t feel at all vulnerable. And it felt obvious that that those kinds of connections would be revealed in the final work.
Korman: What was it like shifting from the role of writer to the role of narrator?
Dungy: It was a pleasure to make speaking an integral part of my writing process! Often as a producer of literature, of books, the idea is the words just stay on the page. But I also trained as a musician. And so I often read my work out loud as I’m writing it, because the sonic quality of that work is really important. But part of the nature of writing a podcast is to say what you’re writing out loud to make sure it sounds as we speak. It was honestly pleasurable to just spend time thinking about language as music and how we orchestrate sound and arrange words so that words sound good.
Korman: How do you see materials as a means of critiquing and reflecting on the world around us?
Dungy: I think it’s a matter of looking. It’s difficult for most of us to find the time to really look deeply at the details of the world around us. The curators, conservators, scientists, everyone else at The Met are like professors. Making the podcast, we spent hundreds of hours taking everything in, the years of effort they spent learning in these fields, and tried our best to distill it. It was just nice to be able to make these little thirty-five- to thirty-seven-minute snippets that help listeners slow down and pay attention a little bit more acutely and brightly to the world around us. I feel like I’m looking at some of these materials differently because I’ve had the opportunity to take these little mini-courses in where they come from, what they mean, and how they’ve been used. It’s an effort towards building a broader and more informed community.
Korman: What are some of your favorite moments from the series?
Dungy: The opening of Shells still knocks me out. I just love it. I listen to it and think, why does it feel so centering and calming? To me, this is a beautiful moment. Over and over again throughout the episodes, these objects and materials expand or expand themselves and enrich themselves as we’re engaging with them.
When we did the Linen episode, I realized I had never really thought about the Giorgio Armani suit as a shaper of culture. But wow, that’s a fascinating concept. There are a couple moments inside of the Jade episode in which some of the people who we interviewed in that process are so funny and fascinating and I wish that it wasn’t just an interview, that we could actually sit down and share a meal and really share time. They had delightful minds that I would like to spend more time with.
Left: Length of Very Sheer Linen Cloth, ca. 1492–1473 B.C. Egypt. New Kingdom. Linen, Greatest length 515 cm (202 3/4 in); greatest width 161 cm (63 3/8 in); Weight 140 grams (5 oz.); 46 warp x 30 weft per sq. cm. The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, Rogers Fund, 1936 (36.3.111). Right: Greenstone pendant, 19th century. Maori; Aotearoa New Zealand. Nephrite jade (pounamu), shell, pigment, and wax, H. 6 1/8 in. (15.5 cm); W. 3 in. (7.6 cm); D. 1 in. (2.5 cm). The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, Gift of Heber R. Bishop, 1902 (02.18.315)
Korman: What experience do you hope listeners have?
Dungy: I hope that after listening to this season and these individual podcasts our audience feels more centrally located in the world. I hope that they see these materials that are found all through The Met collection, materials that are all around us, in a new way. Sometimes we speak about materials that feel perhaps more obscure, but we also find how integrally connected they are to us. I’m always seeking connection, and I hope that listening to the podcast, those kinds of interweavings and threads that tie us together become more accessible and more visible.
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Photo credit: Beowulf Sheehan
