WEBVTT

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So new book is, I think
the new book is about.

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Well, that book is about
noise and how noise struggles

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to become language and
literature and myth

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or something like that.

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This new thing is about
literacy and types of literacy

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and how we value literacy.

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And how we think of
skin even as a form

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of hierarchy and literacy.

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And the book is
called Skin, Inc.

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So I'm going to go through
it and talk about it.

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And it's also me
traveling through

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the American and
African-American

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literary tradition.

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So listening to the
arguments and styles.

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And so dramatic
content that I hear

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and sort of adding what my
grandmother called my own three

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cents.

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This first thing is called, and
they're meant to be percussive.

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"My Meter is Percussive."

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I'm trying to start fights
with a lot of dead people.

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[LAUGHTER]

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"My meter is percussive.

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So throughout this worry,
I am rolling my eyes.

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I am sucker punching
I. The I that

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informs these lines It's
like only I know I know how.

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I am breathing,
repairing, breathing.

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Half interested in progress and
half interested in progression.

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Never finished.

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I am not a unit of
geography or race.

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My vocal skin fragments but not
like A secretary to eloquence.

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If negritude, it fits
better than any metaphor

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for river, weary mask, or
light-skinned religion.

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I no longer write white writing.

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Yet white writing
won't stop writing me.

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In life they
clutched their purses

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because they want you to
think you've stolen something.

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In art, they clutch
their purses because they

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know you know they've
stolen something.

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[LAUGHING]

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Most times, yo.

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The flow of my own Blackness
freedoms to defend me.

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This lyric body a
prosody sentenced."

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