Well, no.
[LAUGHTER]
The answer is, yes, but I'm from PG County.
And so anybody can actually from DC, everybody
know you actually aren't from DC, you're from [INAUDIBLE]
I'm actually from DC--
Say that louder.
[INAUDIBLE] also from DC.
I'll take it.
[LAUGHTER]
Reason I asked are references, but it
felt like that one came from the inside of DC.
And no one who isn't from DC familiar with [INAUDIBLE]..
Thank you.
So I believe we shouldn't have all [INAUDIBLE]
Thank you.
I'm also from the [INAUDIBLE]
[COUGH]
[GIGGLE]
I'm from [INAUDIBLE]
And so did you just do poetry, or do you like hip hop as well?
You've got a good voice for it, you're
good at [INAUDIBLE] stuff?
Yeah.
I'm one of those people that come
from a world of failed MCs.
[LAUGHTER]
And it's really strange too, because young rapping
and freestyle and stuff like that, you've actually
got to have a kind of audacity, a willingness to fail.
And it's strange that now the public all the time
[? we fry our voices ?] But I do think it's
a different skill set, though.
And I just haven't fixed my mind on figuring out
how to change that.
I recorded poetry to music before.
But honestly, like as artistic genre,
I think there is more possibility for me
and poetry, and nonfiction, and play writing, than ever
could be really in music.
Because I was just [INAUDIBLE]
If I was you, I'd give it another try, man.
[LAUGHTER]
I appreciate that I might, then I've got to get your cut.
[LAUGHTER]
Now I don't want to press you guys to ask questions,
but that time it was only two people who came to the ring.
We literally had a three-hour conversation.
[LAUGHTER]
That's not a bad option.
So you write wonderful long poems,
and so what keeps you going through a really long poem?
Like how do you keep that thought moving forward?
So I want to say two things, one is obnoxious
and I shouldn't say but I'm saying for the writers
in our audience.
And other is true--
[LAUGHTER]
And it's even useful.
So I'm going to say three things.
[LAUGHTER]
So one, I think we always have to have models for the work
that we do.
And in a good way that his is so good,
that his model is very in work.
And it even disappears.
But I think going into it, we should
have a sense of the scope, and pacing,
and what it is that we envision.
So my model with some of the stuff
is [INAUDIBLE] and the Odyssey, but some of it
was Robert Hayden.
And the title poem started out as a poem in rhymed couplets,
and then it was just bad.
I liked it a lot but it was just bad.
Somebody was like, "Well, why don't
you you make a free verse?"
And I was just like, that seems like a cop out.
But the rhyming couplets weren't giving me the flexibility
to do what I wanted to do, and so I made it into blank verse.
And and I fundamentally believe that form is a freedom.
And so the poem is like 300 or so lines,
and it's all in blank verse.
And that was one of the things that propelled me.
And then the last thing I would say
is, also I think you could be more playful with a poem.
So like I read that first poem, and I said,
I rarely read in public, and I improvised like 20% of it.
And I was just, like, straight up making shit up.
Like that last-- some words.
I just straight up made it up.
And I thought, what I'm saying is,
like you know, it would be really cool if I
had parentheticals here, where like the speaker was commenting
on the text from the Senator.
And I was like, well, fuck it, why don't you just do it?
That's the kind of thing that you do.
Right?
But it's the kind of thing that you could do with a long poem
that you just can't do with a short poem,
and it's the kind of way for me to--
and I knew it was recording, so I was like, well,
if it works even a little bit, then
I could probably go back and see some of the things that I did.
And I actually wrote something that,
you could think of a long poem as a living piece of art
in a way that a short poem isn't.
If you change a short poem, you've
changed it so drastically that it's
a completely different kind of beast, right?
And it's hard to do it in a coherent way,
because you can kind of slip up on improvisation but then
finally back on course when you go back to the actual text,
but you can't do that with a short poem.
So those are sort of the three things
I think about, how to sustain my work in a long poem.
And of course, the last thing I said about improvisation
is more about when you're reading a statement in public.
But it's the way in which one of my teachers
want to say that the poem should be like,
and we should write the way that you live.
And so a lot of times you write standing up, sitting up,
sitting down, and we write in these quiet places,
but we don't live in quiet places.
So it was just, like, every once in a while,
you should kind of get up and try to do to your poem
what you do to yourself.
So write when you're walking around.
You could read it, and you could improvise it in the end,
even if nobody's there.
So I would say that those three things helped
me prepare moving forward, and that's
what I would give people advice to if they wanted to.
All right.
We've got time for two more questions.
Right behind you.
So here's one.
So I'm interested in the dichotomy between rhetoric
and speaking that way, and then like the creative side
of poetry.
So I guess I kind of have a two part
question of if there was a style that you kind of like developed
first, and then also how the differences
between those styles of speaking influence each other in what
you do, in both your writing and when you're speaking?
Yeah.
I don't know.
One, I would like to think that they aren't that different.
I was really happy today when people
laughed at lines in a poem, because people always
laugh when I speak, right?
Because I just, whatever.
But sometimes I find it difficult to write
poetry that is funny.
So I was kind of pleased that I was
able to pull that off, at least one time,
to say something that was funny, and then the audience hears
it as funny.
But I don't necessarily think that--
it's a better question for somebody
who saw me speak publicly over the past couple of days,
because I would like to think that I'm
the same person in both contexts.
And I know it's a very, very--
but I would actually like to think
I'm the same person in both contexts.
And the main reason is like, I think
I'm pushing for honesty in either form.
And so the poem is trying to be honest,
and the poem is trying to admit that there are no easy answers
and I don't really have the easy answers.
And that's one of the messages behind the long poem,
is like what we choose to criticize
and how we frame the issue.
I think those are the same kinds of things
that I do when I'm just speaking more generally
on any given topic publicly.
So I don't know, but my head is, the closer I
am in being the podium in both venues,
the closer I am in having something meaningful to say
in both venues.
All right.
Last question.
Thank you for your part tonight I
wonder it seems sort of awkward to have a Q and A after poetry
for me, because there's so much mystery to it.
To me, it seems like you should just let it wash over,
and it takes me a while, and just for all the things
you said.
So I wonder when you're writing, do you ever come to a place
where you're like, what did I just write, like,
that doesn't even make sense?
Or you get the sense where you put it down,
and you look at it later, and you're like,
yeah, I quite don't know what that was,
and maybe it's a mystery to you at the same time,
and you have to sort of digest what
words came out of your head?
Do you have that?
Yeah, so I can speak specifically, really,
to that poem, "Motherhood."
So that started out as a poem in my first book.
It was called "The Sound of your Mother Crying."
And I literally rewrote the entire poem,
but I didn't re-write it whole cloth, right?
I thought of something, added it, and I was like, ah,
it would be cool if I added this revision.
Then I thought of something, added it.
Then like three or four months later,
I was thinking about using it in a project,
and I changed the first line.
I was like, damn, I don't like this either.
What was I thinking about when I said that?
And in this case, it was like, this thing
doesn't even make sense anymore.
And then I talked to my homeboy, and I
was like, you know I already published this
during my first book, but I'd like
to think I'm going to publish it again in my new book.
Oh, X that part out about the poem being previously published
so nobody reads this or hears this.
No, but then he was like, you can publish the same poem
twice.
And I was, you know, it's funny.
Let me look at it.
And I looked at the two poems side by side,
and they are literally completely different.
Like, every word has been changed.
And so I definitely go back in poems
and change them, and change them all the time.
I got one, that I'm not saying it's--
I won three Pushcart Prizes, right?
Each time the poem that won the Pushcart
was changed drastically before it appeared in the book.
Like, every single time, it was changed drastically
before it ended up in a book.
And so I say that to say that for me the writing part,
it's about thinking.
I'm writing something.
I'm thinking as I'm writing.
And then when I go back to work it, I get to, like,
reflect on what my thoughts look like.
And sometimes those-- I have to be clear, too,
because like the one thing about the poem is when
you use I all the time people think
that every "I" in the book is you.
And that's not the case, but I think that's the poet's burden.
I think that, like, one of the things that challenges writers
is that they become heroes in their own work.
It's a challenge with memoir, because it's obviously
about you.
And it's easy to write a memoir and make
yourself the hero in the book.
But it's also a challenge amongst poets,
because we all recognize that when we say "I" in public,
or when we say "I" in a book, the contemporary people will
think that "I" is you.
30 years from now, when I'm dead, they won't care.
But right now, they would think that "I" is me.
So I think some writers, I think,
block ourselves from saying certain things
because we don't want to be associated
with certain kind of things.
I had a reviewer say Betts's Bastards of the Reagan Era
is a searingly powerful work.
In it, he admits to selling crack to pregnant women.
[LAUGHTER]
I was like, I don't even like drugs.
I didn't admit to selling crack to pregnant women.
And like, and this woman clearly didn't
read every "I" in the book as me,
but that "I" she chose to read as me,
decide it's me in her review, so that my mom could read it
and be like--
but I don't have any control over that, though.
So then the question becomes, in the next book I write,
am I afraid to write that line?
And you can't be afraid to write that line.
So some of that going back and rereading a poem
too is checking for the way my biases creep into how
I write narratives, to how I write lyrics,
to check into the way my fear of how the world will
perceive me creeps in to how I sing a particular song.
And then the whole thing about-- and the last thing I'll say,
since I got to run to the airport, one,
I apologize for leaving in a hurry.
I work in a public defender's office,
and I got to go to court tomorrow morning,
and so the only flight that I can
get on that will get me home in time to be at court by 10:00
is a red-eye that unfortunately isn't leaving from Tuscon,
it's leaving from Phoenix.
But the last thing that I want to say about this whole project
of writing is that the challenge for me
is always how to imagine a space where
I could be as authentic on a page
as I am when I'm talking to my folks in a bar.
Right?
And so what I say to all these is, when they listen to poetry,
that Caesar line.
You know, you weren't supposed to catch that,
but it was about this part in "Julius Caesar"
where Brutus and Cassius are talking about the fact
that they done killed Caesar, and they're
trying to rationalize it.
And what I'm saying, well, isn't life just
years of fear and death?
Right?
And so I put that in a poem, and it was just a small nod
to myself.
There's no way that you could hear that, necessarily, and get
it on the first listen.
But we have been trained to listen
to poetry in a way that is different from how
we listen to music.
You listen to a song on a radio, and you
good with just catching a hook.
You just hear four words.
You're like, I love those four words.
But when we listen to poetry, you
tell yourself, if I didn't hear the whole poem, I hate it, man.
That was way too complicated for me.
But if I read you a poem-- that last poem I read
was, like, six sections long.
You know?
I hope that what you did was hear a few things,
and like the one thing stuck with you,
and one the line resonates with you, and then you go back
and you read it again.
And that is why you should buy the book.
I mean, you should buy, like, three or four copies
of the book.
[LAUGHTER]
Anyway, thank you guys for coming.
[APPLAUSE]