Intentional Offerings: jaamil olawale kosoko interviews Nicholas Goodly

In this intimate conversation for The Common, jaamil olawale kosoko sits down with poet and interdisciplinary artist Nicholas Goodly to explore creative practice, artistic freedom, rest, and the many forms that expression can take.

Published in February 2023, “Intentional Offerings” brings together two artists whose practices move across disciplines and resist rigid boundaries between forms. Their conversation considers what it means to prioritize creative work within institutional structures, make intentional space for rest and dreaming, and remain open to the unexpected directions an idea may take.

Nicholas Goodly is the author of Black Swim, their debut full-length poetry collection published by Copper Canyon Press in 2022. An interdisciplinary artist whose creative life began with dance, Goodly speaks with jaamil about poetry as a practice that can remain in conversation with movement, visual art, performance, and other forms of making. Their work has appeared in publications including The New Yorker, Boston Review, BOMB, The Poetry Project, and Lambda Literary. Goodly has also been recognized by the Poetry Society of America, Cave Canem, and the Jake Adam York Prize.

Throughout the interview, jaamil and Goodly reflect on the importance of protecting creative expression from the pressures of constant productivity. They discuss the necessity of making room for unstructured time, the political dimensions of rest, and the challenge of creating spaces where imagination and dreaming can flourish.

The conversation also moves toward questions central to jaamil’s own interdisciplinary practice: how an idea reveals the form it wants to take, how poetry, image, gesture, movement, and performance can emerge from the same creative source, and how artists shape the experiences they offer to others.

At its core, “Intentional Offerings” is a conversation about permission: permission to be strange, to move between disciplines, to rest, to experiment, and to trust the creative impulses that lead artists toward new forms of expression.

Read the full conversation, “Intentional Offerings: jaamil olawale kosoko interviews Nicholas Goodly,” published by The Common.