This conversation originally aired in the Feb. 23, 2025 episode of Inside Appalachia.
There is a rich tradition of Black Appalachian poets and writers. One of the newest is Torli Bush, who grew up in Webster Springs, West Virginia. Bush has won poetry slams in the region, and now has a new book, Requiem for a Redbird.
Producer Bill Lynch spoke with Bush about the book.
Courtesy Photo
Lynch: Would you like to read something?
Bush: Sure I can, I can read something from, from the book I’ve there’s also been a ton of, ton of new stuff that I’ve been been working on. But I guess I’ll start off with this one. And…actually, I want to try to get through this without…
(Recites “Whereas Appalachia was always Black, queer and wild”)
Lynch: That was remarkable. Thank you. Just to say this so that my listeners understand this. You didn’t read that. You did that off the top of your head, and the cadence, and there’s so much in there. Wow. Do you do all your poems like that, or just a couple?
Bush: So the way that I got started into poetry was I’d taken some creative writing workshops here at WVU. I think it was my junior year, my undergrad. And long story short, I wound up performing at Steel City Slam in Pittsburgh. I got involved in that slam scene and I met a guy there who was originally from Clarksburg named Joe Weimer.
He was of mixed descent like me, but he was a Filipino American.
He graduated from WVU Law, was teaching out at San Marcos at Palomar College in California, but he would come back and go to go to the slam at Pittsburgh. He started mentoring me a bit, and got me into these different drills on how to work on your poetry, and performing it like that. That’s where that sort of stemmed from. The other form and craft, like how that poem has that “whereas” structure, that sort of came from grad school work later on that I had at West Virginia Wesleyan.
Lynch: Tell me about the poem itself. It seems very personal. It feels like you’re describing your life in a lot of ways.
Bush: Yeah, yeah. So like the place that I’ve gotten the structure of that poem from the collection called, “Whereas.” It’s by Layli Long Soldier. And throughout that collection she makes use of the whereas in that resolution form, but I wanted to kind of play on it as a resolution that also does tell a story. And that’s what I wanted to mix in, because I just have such a love for growing up here, and like everything that I’ve experienced here.
I don’t know… of the poems in this collection, this one actually might be my favorite one that I’ve written –partly because it gets into speaking into Appalachia as being such a complex place, and it talks about race and faith and everything else that I’m interested in, but it does do it through this lens of bringing someone in through a story.
This goes back to me talking about Joe earlier, like one of the first things that he taught me was you’re not wanting to explicitly preach with your poetry. You’re wanting to bring people in. You’re wanting to let them in on your life, and maybe shift their perspective that way. There has to be a place for them as the reader to connect with you as a person.
Lynch: Tell me about growing up in West Virginia.
Bush: I grew up in Webster springs. I was raised by my grandparents on my father’s side. I had good friends coming up through school. It was odd, and I didn’t realize, like, some of these things until later. For a long time, coming up through school, I was the only black person in my grade. And the way that I view race, I think that there’s a lot of bridges that can be built along the lines of class, between people.
I think that you have a history of that here in West Virginia, in terms like what the unions were able to do, obviously, met with, with all sorts of conflict from the powers that be. But that’s been one thing that, whenever I got into slam, I kind of noticed was just sort of the different perspectives that I had about race from, like, growing up here.
Apart from that, my own experience, I guess you could say with racism, it’s only ever been verbal. I’ve never been physically attacked for my race, but I’ve had some just slurs and things of that nature come up, but been able to navigate it. And I think it’s also part of what I was trying to navigate in the book, and then like, also taking it into the bigger context of how it is across the country.
Lynch: So what are your days like these days?
Bush: My day job is, I’m working as a construction inspector.
I guess I should mention that my undergrad from WVU is in mechanical engineering. There’s a whole thing about going from that to doing both in terms of the engineering and the writing, but my that’s what my days mostly look like.
I’m currently on a streetscape project, and it’s a lot of just refurbishing of sidewalks, planning landscape, that sort of thing. I really do like to see all the people that are working as the contractors, doing different jobs, because people will just often drive by and not really see a lot. Even though all the products come out to look like these really simple things, there’s a lot of precision in terms of what they’re having to do with drawing strings and cutting boards. Even though everything is simple, there’s this meditative, almost poetic arc to what they’re doing, even if it is messy.
Lynch: What happens next for you as far as your poetry?
Bush: Yeah, I’m actually close to getting the first draft of the second collection done. Actually, if you give me a minute, this one is one that I’ll have to pull up to read. But one of the poems I had actually just finished the other day was sort of in response to a prompt. I’ve been reading “Conflict Resolution for Holy Beings.”
It’s a collection by Joy Harjo. She’s the U.S. Poet Laureate from the Muskogee Creek tribe. And this one was just good to read with the moment that we’re in. The title of this one is “Post Election Prayer.”
(Reads poem)
Bush: That’s one of the most recent pieces that I’ve gotten done.
Lynch: Yeah, I can almost feel the ink still drying on that one. That’s amazing.
Bush: And that’s, that’s another thing that I’ve been trying to do. There’s been a lot of stuff that I’ve had to, I guess, process over the course of this whole cycle as a writer, as a poet. I’m trying to really maintain what I managed to strike with my first collection in terms of having a sense of balance, of like knowing when and how to express a focus and a calling out of what is wrong, and balancing that with the joy that you can still see in your life and the good around you and like trying to strike a balance with that.
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Requiem for a Redbird is available from Pulley Press, an imprint of Clyde Hill Publishing.