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Tonight's presentation in the
Spectacle and Poetry series

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more broadly is possible
because of the generous support

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from the UA Confluencenter,
the UA Department of Africana

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Studies, and additional
support from the NEA,

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from the Walt Whitman Circle,
and all friends of the Poetry

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Center, which, you too can be
a friend of the Poetry Center.

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There's a lucite box over there.

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So thank you all for
your generous support.

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It really makes a
big difference in us

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being able to bring such
amazing programming here

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to the Poetry Center.

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So as I mentioned, this
is the third installment

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in the Spectacle and
Poetry series, which

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asks the question, if poetry
engages with spectacle,

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why and in what ways?

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To turn now to Khadijah
Queen, who we're really glad

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is here tonight to present.

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I just want to mention that
reading Khadijah's work

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recently, I've been
thinking about how Spectacle

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is so often centered
around the female body,

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catcalls, turned heads, movie
posters, movies themselves,

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dancers moving behind a
male star, dancers moving

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behind a female star, sexualized
bodies, public bodies,

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visible bodies.

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I've been wondering, what does
it do to a body to be seen?

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When the body is, say,
punished in public,

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the body itself for
the populace thus

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becomes the proof of guilt,
the evidence of a crime.

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But what happens when
we're spectacles?

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What happens when we don't
want to be the spectacle?

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What happens when we do
want to be the spectacle?

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What happens when we try to
opt out of being seen like that

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or of being seen at all?

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Is it silly to try to introduce
the category of choice

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into this conversation
in the first place?

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Khadijah Queen wrote
about her work, quote,

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"I navigate the tension
between audience imagination

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and process in a very convoluted
manner, my understandings

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contorting and inverting.

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I relax into myself and flow
with circumstance and routine.

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And then I sometimes am shocked
out of self and out of body

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into the way someone
else sees my body,

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or my child's body that
once grew inside of my body,

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or the way I see us being seen.

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For me, the equation of language
doesn't exist without a body.

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The work is a body.

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The word is a body.

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Sound is a body," end quote.

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Khadijah Queen
rose to the surface

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when we were
planning this series,

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as a poet whose work,
whose life, whose

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formal choices and
rangy artistic practices

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bear out the reality that we are
not as separate from spectacle

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as certain poetic or
cultural gatekeepers

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might want us to believe.

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To speak specifically
here about her manuscript,

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"I'm So Fine: A List of
Famous Men & What I Had On,"

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something I grab on to from that
brilliant work is that it's not

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that celebrity culture is over
there and we're over here,

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but rather that whether Edward
Norton or Andre 3,000 is nearby

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or not, whether we're
watching the music video

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or a dancer in it, we're all
still bodies in this world.

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There's still misogyny
and desire and violence

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and looking good in going to a
friend's house and a mother's

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advice and a Nissan Sentra.

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Queen has been, herself, a
model, an actor, a US Navy

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sonar technician, a studio
installation artist, a mother,

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a professor, a poet.

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On Tuesday night, at the shop
talk here on Queen's work,

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facilitator Kristen
Nelson pointed out

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that this work comes
from a place of,

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quote, "Not just the
feminine, but the feminist,

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and specifically, the
fancy lady feminist."

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I like that.

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Khadijah Queen is a poet
whose subject matter and form

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are in the throes of
outdiversifying each other.

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She's an experimenter,
an observer whose, quote,

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"intense observation leads
to fervent invention,"

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to quote poet Graham Foust.

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Her way of witnessing
is not just

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to see but to transform, to
try a new way of experiencing

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and explaining and
expanding upon what

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is seen or felt or heard.

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This isn't too far from what
it is, either to be seen,

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to be felt, to be heard.

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Queen writes, "As I
wrote Black Peculiar,

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I studied and considered ways
of seeing and, even more so,

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the feeling of being seen,
while also not being seen.

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In particular, the
simultaneous hyper visibility

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and invisibility of Blackness."

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And from a poem she wrote, "If
the peculiar energy becomes

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complex, just call it Black."

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Please help me welcome
Khadijah Queen.

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[APPLAUSE]