Her name is this kind of stand-in for everything that we see and are and how folks see us. In the book, Beyoncé is every black woman - she’s me, she’s you.
So it’s been really interesting to see that unfold. When I first started working on the poems, she was this very textbook, stock pop artist, and of course she’s something very different now. I’ve been spending a lot of time with her work in the writing of this book for the past five years. It’s been really funny, with the title of the book, to hear people, “Oh, the Beyhive is going to come after you.” But I would never say anything bad about Beyoncé. Why did you decide to use Beyoncé as a metaphor? Tell me a little bit about what she means to you. The Cut spoke with Parker about pop culture, the complexities of black femininity, and why she’s determined to create poetry that reflects her own experience. With lines like “I try to write a text message to describe my feelings but the emoticon hands are all white” (These Are Dangerous Times, Man) or “When I drink anything out of a martini glass I feel untouched by professional and sexual rejection” (Another Another Autumn in New York) and “I am exclusively post-everything” (Poem on Beyonce’s Birthday), Parker deploys Beyonce’s voice to probe themes of sex, isolation, erasure and depression.
Things Morgan Parker thinks are more beautiful than Beyoncé: “self-awareness,” “leftover mascara in clumps,” and “the fucking sky.” Which is not to say that Parker finds her uninteresting throughout her latest collection, There Are More Beautiful Things Than Beyoncé, the 28-year-old poet uses one of the world’s most famous entertainers as a device to explore what it means to be a black woman in America today.
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