Poetically Thunderstruck: An Interview with Natalie Diaz
An Interview With Natalie Diaz, Conducted By Jefferson Navicky
Natalie Diaz was the keynote speaker for the 2025 Plunkett Poetry Festival at the University of Maine at Augusta in April 2025. Diaz thrilled the audience with her generosity and individualized attention to seemingly everyone in the crowded auditorium. I have never seen a poet who inhabited the poetic craft so gracefully and so expansively. In the month preceding Diaz’s arrival in Maine, I conducted this interview with her via email. I wanted to talk with Diaz about basketball. I don’t mention it very often, and people can’t usually tell by looking at me, because I guess I no longer put out the ‘basketball player’ vibe, but I used to be a pretty high level basketball player. Nowhere near the level Diaz reached as a player at Division I Old Dominion and later playing abroad as a pro. But the thing about basketball is, if you play it long enough and hard enough when you’re young, it lodges inside you somewhere and doesn’t go away even when you’re almost fifty and your hair is thinning like crazy and you’ve lost most of the cartilage in your knees. As a poet, I’ve always struggled with ways to bring basketball to the page, like I used to think poetry and basketball just didn’t go together, and plus, my basketball career ended up mired in a lot of the toxic stuff that can drag down so many of the things we once loved. But when I read Natalie’s basketball poems, I’m right back to the joy I felt as a kid growing up in Southeastern Ohio in a basketball-crazy town playing down at the outdoor courts in the Cambridge city park.
Jefferson Navicky: I love your poem “Run’n’Gun” in Postcolonial Love Poem. It’s full of details basketball fans will appreciate (Clyde the Glyde! (Clyde “The Glide” Drexler – legendary Portland Trailblazer forward in the 1980’s and 1990’s known for his high-flying dunks.)), but also a poetry that transcends basketball: “We became coyotes and rivers…we became the weather.” I also love how the poem is a version of an origin story, how it includes “how I got run by my older brother in our slanted driveway…who blocked every shot I took against him until I was about twelve years old.” It makes me wonder, were there ways that your sports education, your coming up as a basketball player, later benefited you, or maybe even possibly hindered you, when you began your life in poetry?
ND: For me, poetry and basketball are very similar fields and energies. I find many of the same joys and heartbreaks in poetry that I found in basketball—there is a simplistic way to think about the page and the court as two like structures, with a capacity to hold any emotion or momentum you bring to them. There is also a more complex way to think about the way the structures and forms of basketball and poetry are most capacious of time, space and possibility in regard to my body and my life experiences. I was good at basketball because a hunger for what it offered of imagination and physicality was seeded in me on my reservation and in my desert—I believe the same is true of the way I write poetry. My mind and heart, the way I fight and love, were all built from my desert and river and community and family. If anything, basketball helped me understand that poetry, the language we make that becomes poetry, has stakes and the stakes must be my body and the body of my beloveds and strangers in some way. Both have not just given me a future, but they have shown me how the future occurs, and that it isn’t only an abstraction somewhere down the road, but that it arrives, is here, and I am so lucky when I find myself in it, again and again.
JN: This next question feels very hard to me, and if someone asked it to me, I would have no idea how to answer, so that’s why I want to ask you the question (!): Do you see any parallels between your game as a basketball player and your “game” as a poet? Do you have any similar moves on the page that might be able to be traced back to that slanted driveway where you played with your brother, or “in the rez park against a tagged backboard with a chain for a net”?
ND: I think I answered part of this above, but I write muscular, sensual poetry, which is how I played basketball. I understand momentum. How to withstand it, how to reorganize it, even how to bend so I don’t break, in my body or in a line. I think I write with a kind of excess and ecstatic presence, and that is very much the way I moved in the court. And defense was my specialty—I love tension, I love the unlanguageable feeling of pressing up against resistance and then releasing and finding yourself becoming what was once unimaginable to you, in space.
JN: I would love to hear you talk about your transition from basketball to poetry. From what I can tell from some research, it seems like your pro career ended overseas and you launched yourself into poetry. I wonder what that transition was like. When I moved from basketball toward writing, I felt incredibly behind, like I knew this one world of sweat and jump shots very well, but now here was this other world where you can’t measure success on a scoreboard. This was both a relief to me and a mystery. How did it feel for you? How did your body you’d built from basketball, (or as you say in your beautiful introduction for Bodies Built for Game: “I am the game’s machine”) react to poetry?
ND: We might say it ended painfully because I suffered a major injury that turned me back toward school. But even once I tilted toward the possibility of going to graduate school for an MFA I had opportunities to return overseas to play, but I chose not to. I think it was very lucky to have come from a few very black and white measurements of winning and losing. I’ve never felt competitive in poetry, which has given me freedom. The mystery, the puzzle, the chase, is very selfish and very personal when I’m writing a poem or story or essay—and I love it the way I loved practice. I love the rigor of it, the labor of it, to be able to thrive in and bloom in the unknown, which is first encountered in my body of flesh and language and imagination and memory. It lets me be patient with my work and not chase books. Practice is a hard thing to teach because it is more than just sitting and reading or writing poems, it is devotional, and it helps you love yourself, at least in so far as you must at times recognize your limitations and the miracle of your capabilities simultaneously.
JN: Another poem I really admire is “Mustangs.” I love your description of AC/DC’s song “Thunderstruck” at the Needles Mustangs gymnasium: “It begins with an unhinged, chant-like yell, followed by the strike of the word thunder…The word thunder is growled fifteen times followed by nineteen war-cried versions of thunderstruck.” And then I love how the poem moves towards its conclusion that somehow this thunderous song allows you to see how the game of basketball “might have the power to set the fantastic beasts trampling our hearts loose.” As someone who has run out into a gymnasium accompanied by that thrilling (yet now a little cringy) song, I wonder if you’ve felt anything like that in poetry. Is that even possible?
ND: I find great pleasure in reading poetry aloud and even in writing it. As I said in the previous question, I like practice. I believe the mundane is a kind of practice for poetry. And I find language to be physical. It doesn’t burn the kind of calories I once burned and doesn’t exhaust or injure me the way basketball did, but it does exhaust me in a pleasurable way, by confounding me, by surprising me with myself, by demanding I consider myself of consequence to this world and to other living beings in it.
JN: And finally, in your acknowledgments for Postcolonial Love Poem, you thank poet and editor Kwame Dawes “for always pushing and sparking and helping me bring the basketball to the page.” As someone who has struggled to bring the basketball to the page, I wonder what your struggles were around this, and how Dawes helped you.
ND: Kwame simply asked me to write about basketball. And I hadn’t at that point. I hadn’t found the language, even as simple a word as “sensuality” was not something I had ever applied to basketball. Despite how it shaped and affected and became my body and how my body became itself through it. My mind still functions like it’s on a court and capable, which is lucky, to have a periphery beyond myself that is rooted firmly in a confidence and trust in myself and my own body. Some of this is tongue in cheek since I was terribly late on my deadline to turn in the “small gathering” of a few poems about basketball to Kwame, which suddenly became over 200 pages of poems and prose, since almost everyone I asked to send me something did actually send me something, and then my own essay grew so much. Kwame didn’t flinch, but did what all great athletes do, he absorbed the momentum, reorganized it quickly, and then offered an entirely new opportunity, and the floor opened up to an entire anthology dedicated to sports in the ways I had asked people to consider them, as complex relationships of intimacy, citizenship, belonging, power, and future.