Tonight's presentation in the Spectacle and Poetry series
more broadly is possible because of the generous support
from the UA Confluencenter, the UA Department of Africana
Studies, and additional support from the NEA,
from the Walt Whitman Circle, and all friends of the Poetry
Center, which, you too can be a friend of the Poetry Center.
There's a lucite box over there.
So thank you all for your generous support.
It really makes a big difference in us
being able to bring such amazing programming here
to the Poetry Center.
So as I mentioned, this is the third installment
in the Spectacle and Poetry series, which
asks the question, if poetry engages with spectacle,
why and in what ways?
To turn now to Khadijah Queen, who we're really glad
is here tonight to present.
I just want to mention that reading Khadijah's work
recently, I've been thinking about how Spectacle
is so often centered around the female body,
catcalls, turned heads, movie posters, movies themselves,
dancers moving behind a male star, dancers moving
behind a female star, sexualized bodies, public bodies,
visible bodies.
I've been wondering, what does it do to a body to be seen?
When the body is, say, punished in public,
the body itself for the populace thus
becomes the proof of guilt, the evidence of a crime.
But what happens when we're spectacles?
What happens when we don't want to be the spectacle?
What happens when we do want to be the spectacle?
What happens when we try to opt out of being seen like that
or of being seen at all?
Is it silly to try to introduce the category of choice
into this conversation in the first place?
Khadijah Queen wrote about her work, quote,
"I navigate the tension between audience imagination
and process in a very convoluted manner, my understandings
contorting and inverting.
I relax into myself and flow with circumstance and routine.
And then I sometimes am shocked out of self and out of body
into the way someone else sees my body,
or my child's body that once grew inside of my body,
or the way I see us being seen.
For me, the equation of language doesn't exist without a body.
The work is a body.
The word is a body.
Sound is a body," end quote.
Khadijah Queen rose to the surface
when we were planning this series,
as a poet whose work, whose life, whose
formal choices and rangy artistic practices
bear out the reality that we are not as separate from spectacle
as certain poetic or cultural gatekeepers
might want us to believe.
To speak specifically here about her manuscript,
"I'm So Fine: A List of Famous Men & What I Had On,"
something I grab on to from that brilliant work is that it's not
that celebrity culture is over there and we're over here,
but rather that whether Edward Norton or Andre 3,000 is nearby
or not, whether we're watching the music video
or a dancer in it, we're all still bodies in this world.
There's still misogyny and desire and violence
and looking good in going to a friend's house and a mother's
advice and a Nissan Sentra.
Queen has been, herself, a model, an actor, a US Navy
sonar technician, a studio installation artist, a mother,
a professor, a poet.
On Tuesday night, at the shop talk here on Queen's work,
facilitator Kristen Nelson pointed out
that this work comes from a place of,
quote, "Not just the feminine, but the feminist,
and specifically, the fancy lady feminist."
I like that.
Khadijah Queen is a poet whose subject matter and form
are in the throes of outdiversifying each other.
She's an experimenter, an observer whose, quote,
"intense observation leads to fervent invention,"
to quote poet Graham Foust.
Her way of witnessing is not just
to see but to transform, to try a new way of experiencing
and explaining and expanding upon what
is seen or felt or heard.
This isn't too far from what it is, either to be seen,
to be felt, to be heard.
Queen writes, "As I wrote Black Peculiar,
I studied and considered ways of seeing and, even more so,
the feeling of being seen, while also not being seen.
In particular, the simultaneous hyper visibility
and invisibility of Blackness."
And from a poem she wrote, "If the peculiar energy becomes
complex, just call it Black."
Please help me welcome Khadijah Queen.
[APPLAUSE]