So, thank you all.
So now, Q&A, very briefly, I guess
we have a couple of minutes.
I don't want to hold to keep you from your lunch and everything.
Anybody?
Oh, yes, my dear, yes.
How long does it take you to design a poem like Well Hung?
Well Hung, from kind of the--
like, figuring out how I wanted it to look--
and I actually can show some of that process.
It took a little while because I was
trying to figure out how I wanted to make the biggest
possible mess on the page.
There is also some other work happening in there.
Here we are, miss talk and taking messages.
All right, so here is--
oh, here we go, sorry.
All right, so this is one of the first sketches of it
that I did.
And I knew I wanted a kind of cascading bunch of phrases
because one of my personal complaints
to myself after I published the Black Automaton was
I felt like those poems were very neat.
Even when they were scattered across the page,
I felt they were really kind of clean.
And I wanted to make things a little bit more messy.
I want to make a little bit more ambivalence.
So I knew that I wanted these large words
kind of cascading down.
Because I wanted them to block other texts
and for things to be overlapping.
Once I did that, once I started figuring that out
and I realized that, I thought, oh,
it's going to end with a bunch of questions, which it didn't,
I realized that within Hung, we have
certain other words that can be connected to other phrases.
So hung becomes hunger for Black stiffs about pink cat saying
get back, and hungry for get back pink cats,
say Black stiffs, black and pink cat, up,up,up, up,up.
And once I figured stuff like that out, it
became a matter of which hung, will there
be a hung in the place where I could place that.
And then how do I want to create different sorts
of relationships.
So once I have the shell, certain things
can begin to sort of fill up.
And most of the rest of writing this
felt fairly improvisational.
I would just kind of come up with a different sort of phrase
and eliminate sort of set of variations of words
that I felt I could, I would allow myself to use.
And that's kind of the chopping wall of samples aspect of it,
to create a very low, what I call a word bank, a small word
bank with hardly any money in it.
And then just deal with that.
And use that to the point where when I begin
to add other words, it feels--
and I'm not exaggerating-- it feels almost like nauseating,
like I'm cheating, like, oh, fuck, this can't work.
Even if it's a great image or line,
if it doesn't exist in my kind of ecosystem
that I've already set up, then it's
difficult for me to introduce it and feel that I have it
damaged something.
And so after that, it begins to become
around creating kind of proximities, a syntax of space,
as opposed to, say, a syntax strictly of the sentence.
And then it all kind of gets about fine tuning and tweaking
the faps, for example.
There are a couple of things hidden
in the faps that were a little bit more like fine tuning.
But I tend to think a lot.
So that's how it looked.
And then before it got--
that was how it looked at my computer.
And then when I put it into the chapbook
I wanted to make it even messier.
So that's how it looks clean.
And then I went back into the chapbook.
I printed it out, scanned it at a lower resolution,
and went over certain things with pen
to roughen it up a little bit more,
to make it really look F'd up.
And there's even some Letraset transfer lettering in there.
But I didn't really like it because it was so much bolder
than the other typeface that it drew
too much attention to itself.
Yeah, may I respond?
OK.
First of all, I mean, I think that, honestly,
the idea of African point of view
is a complete product of colonialism.
That's a European idea, that this whole place was one place.
There were weapons, there were wars
before Europeans came to Africa.
So the idea of the monolithic African world view
is problematic to me.
Because it doesn't really exist, except in a romanticization
of it, that is a byproduct of African-American culture.
I have good family.
I have people who have come before me, who have showed
how to wrestle with this work.
Julie, Sonia Sanchez, Amiri Baraka, Harriet Mullen
are working with it in an artistic way, Wanda Coleman.
And to me the idea of civilization
is not one of rest, like civilization isn't comfortable.
All that civilization is supposed to do is make it
so that we don't have to go kill things to eat.
But the rest of it is actually harder.
It's easier to live in an environment
where you just kind of go like, I don't deal with those people
because they're over here.
And so I'm going to kill them when I see them.
But it's harder at that point to subsist.
I think this is what, to a certain extent,
that idea of civilization isn't a modern concept.
I think this is what that idea is,
that larger sense of the scope of the world--
and I'm sorry I was slow in understanding your question--
that larger sense of the world of interaction
besides just humans, but the full interaction
of existing in a place.
Because if you are not treating the place well,
then there will be no place for you and your people
to run around.
So for me, it's a kind of practice at civilization
and learning how to deal with and confront
these sorts of questions.
And from a performative standpoint, releasing it
isn't necessarily cathartic for me.
But it is a way to do something with an energy
that I would rather diffuse over a large room of people
than to people close to me.
I think from a strictly performance step--
and I'm just going to say it so I get it out
of the way of my brain thinking--
it's harder to do a quiet, slower moment, for me,
and hold it.
Not harder in the sense that it's not worth the effort,
but it's like harder to feel like I have that connection
in that moment of quiet.
So there's always this tension between the silences
and, as you put it really, really gracefully,
the unamplified.
There is-- when I'm making something
like this, the question of legibility
takes on a character that's not only visual,
can I read this, but also communicative,
can I understand something of this?
I'm interested in using the kind of graphic design, as I said,
it's a kind of a spatial syntax.
Because I'm trying to remove as much language as I can.
I would rather, in a poem like--
oh, I can show you, sorry.
I would rather be able to look at a poem like this,
and each typeface creates a kind of genealogy.
The voices are connected to different, again,
another echo of Julie's observation,
echoes of kind of like folk characters
from African-American folk cultural traditions.
So the italicized is the voice of the singer,
but the voice of the victim is also italicized,
but in large capitals.
The voice of the authority is in large capitals.
So the victim is a blend of the singer and the authority.
It's the offspring of the singer or the authority.
Because I would rather create a visual effect
to do that than to write a poem that-- somebody
could do this very elegantly, but they
write a poem that says the victim is
the offspring of the singer and the authority.
So I try to use the space to eliminate words and create
spatial sort of relationships and recognitions
that may be legible at a level of identifying shape, pattern,
and form, which so many of us are extraordinarily
literate in, having many of us growing up in a culture that's
full of advertisement and design.
So the silences are oftentimes, in these kinds
of poems, around what I don't want to have to say,
not out of a fear of saying it, but out of a self-disgust
and back to that failure, that if I have
to make this statement like this,
in a way that sounds like prose, somehow
I haven't done my job as a poet.
And yet, I want to make statements
that you might see in an essay.
So dealing with that ambivalence becomes
part of the tension between how the words are organized,
but also what's voiced and what's left out.
There are highfalutin reasons and low falutin reasons.
The low falutin reason is you do a lot of readings
and you come into a space and you
have these poems that are like internally, really
kind of violent and horrible.
And somebody reads before you and they were
reading really funny poems.
And you kind of want to make the audience happy.
Not happy in the sense of like, I'm
going to do whatever you want, but like, yeah, people
should leave with delight.
So I'm like, I'm funny.
Well, let me be funny.
And so the cruelty of the humor, in some ways, is about that.
So that's the low brow.
But the highfalutin reason is really,
is what is actually more interesting.
And that's this, that I want people to feel unbalanced.
I want people to have to ask, how am I
supposed to respond to this?
A poem I didn't read today is, I always
call it a peppy poem about the middle passage.
I want people to feel like, that should be, no, this is--
because I feel like it's the equivalent to pulling down
somebody's guard and actually leaving
them open for what you're saying,
and then having to process that.
So, to me, the humor acts as a kind of way of disarming,
but it's, as you say, it's cruel, it's hostile.
So people are disarmed but they're still
ready to receive something.
They think something's coming.
So they're tensed up for it, so it can hurt more.
So that cruelty is a part of that,
just to kind of keeping off balance.
And I know that I've completely gone over time.
I'd be happy to answer any more questions.
But everybody should feel free to go and eat.
But thank you.
[APPLAUSE]