Hello, everyone.
I think we'll get started.
My name is Cybele Knowles, and I'm the events coordinator
for the Poetry Center.
And welcome to today's event, which
is our Next Word in Poetry Panel Discussion for 2010.
Next Word in Poetry is an event that we do every year.
It's in its eighth year.
For Next Word, we invite three poets
who we feel to be among the most exciting, innovative, and new,
and invite them to do a reading, and then
also to come back the next day for a public conversation
about their work.
Today-- or this year-- we have Akilah Oliver, Philip Jenks,
Brandon Shimoda, who have come from Brooklyn, Chicago,
and Seattle, respectively.
They gave a fantastic reading last night.
You were probably mostly all here.
And today, they're going to talk about their work
and how they come to it.
And our moderator is going to be our very own
Chris Nelson, graduate student in poetry
here at the U of A. OK, so thank you all for participating.
And Chris-- oh, before I give this to Chris,
I'm going to say, you're probably
wondering why we're using mics on this quiet Friday afternoon.
We don't need this technology to hear each other,
but we're recording this panel for our archive,
and the only thing that will end up on the recording
is what goes through the mics.
So that's why we're using the mics.
If you have questions, try and speak into the mic.
And I'll help you remember.
And that goes for you guys, too.
Thank you, Cybele.
So I have some questions that I've written.
Cybele has also written some topics that I have here.
But we'd like it to be a somewhat informal dialogue.
So if at any point, you want to ask us to elaborate or go
into a different topic, then just raise your hand
and we'll pass you the mic.
I thought we could start with talking about the dictions
that you use in your works.
Because this is a commonality, I think, in your works,
is that you all sometimes use unusual dictions.
In Brandon's "The Alps," for example,
we have occasionally an antiquated diction
and antiquated spellings.
And in Akilah's "A Toast in the House
of Friends," something that we could maybe call chant--
a chant sort of diction and repetition.
And in Philip's work, what has sometimes
been called an Appalachian dialect.
Can you talk about the functions of these unusual addictions
in your work and what your interests are in them?
All right.
I guess this is--
well, first, I want to thank everyone
for being here in the Poetry Center, and Cybele, and Chris,
and Akilah, and Brandon.
All right.
Well, I had to say it.
It's true.
It's real.
I'm not lying.
In terms of Appalachian dialect, as we say--
that's how we say it there, is Appalachian.
And that's neither here nor there.
But well, for one, I grew up in it.
So in a sense, it's not something I use.
It's not a tool.
But then again, it is.
That would be a cop-out.
I could just say that and then walk away.
And it's not a tool, and I don't use it.
It's just there.
But it really is there in my head.
If I go home to West Virginia for any period of time,
or talk to my sister on the phone for more than an hour,
that's the voice I speak in.
And I was trained, as were the rest of us,
to not speak in that incorrect language--
that is, not correct, proper English.
In fact, my job now, as a grammarian--
as a whistle-wolf would term it--
in composition, is to correct that all
of the time, much to my dismay.
It's one of my jobs.
But I hope that the poems function
to demarcate the absolute legitimacy of any diction--
that there is no one right way to speak.
There is no-- I mean, the amplitudes and possibilities
of language are one of the things that
make poetry so great, and that make people so great.
Oh, and on that part about it not being a tool,
it also functions in rhyme.
So "po'" sounds different than "poor."
And also in meter.
"I done did this" might add something in there.
"Was," "were."
There's all kinds of quote, "incorrect" usages that
come out-- and also, terms that I don't hear other places,
like glister.
I don't hear that outside of where I grew up.
But the water just glisters, as one guy put it.
Anyways, what a great word.
So that's my first effort.
That was one of the questions that was proposed
to us before coming out.
And I guess, to a certain extent,
I have to confess some naivete in terms
of what I'm actually doing.
So I looked back through the book
that was being referenced to actually find
some of those antiquated words.
And I think in the process of looking at these poems
so often, I don't know what's antiquated
and what's not anymore.
I look at it all as this--
I guess that continuum sort of collapses,
or again, that history sort of collapses,
and it all becomes really strange.
Or it all becomes really familiar,
which is also fairly strange.
I did find stuff in the book that was really weird.
Actually, I didn't remember how it came to be--
words that I actually didn't remember
generating or encountering at all, but somehow,
they made their way into the final thing.
And to kind of take a little bit of what Philip was saying,
that everything is available.
Everything is available.
I guess, to a certain extent, I don't necessarily
see the differences between types
of words or types of diction.
Because, I guess, to frame something as antiquated,
that really is the case in relation to something
that's contemporary.
But if you kind of drop both of those divisions out,
then it's just a bunch of really fabulous weirdness, I think,
that's available to us.
I don't know if that's also--
or I don't know if that's--
I think a variety of my answers might
be borderline cop-out, but.
Well, thanks for opening up.
I think it's a really great question to start with.
I was thinking about four different ways
of thinking about diction and the way,
maybe, that I'm approaching it.
In one of the sections of "A Toast in the House of Friends,"
the arriving guard of angels section,
it's a sounding section, and also kind of an homage section.
So there these repeating phrases, "who dat?"
"Who dem come?"
And so it was really purposeful to spell who's that, "that,"
as "D-A-T" and "them" as "D-E-M."
And I was really trying to evoke one kind of code-switching
into African-American speech.
And the sound, for me, was really important.
It was more in part to say "dem" than "them,"
because I was also kind of thinking,
in the strange kind of maybe non-linear way,
of some connection with retrieval of resistance
or histories of resistance, and reclaiming, I guess,
that kind of coded vernacular, I guess.
And that way, for me, kind of also invoked that,
and it felt kind of powerful.
Sometimes, when I read it, I read it as "who dat?"
And sometimes I read it as "who is that?"
Just depending on, I guess, both the sound that I want to evoke
and also kind of the message exchange with the audience.
And then I was thinking, too, of Harriet Mullins.
Pretty amazing poet.
She has a book called Sleeping with the Dictionary, which
is such a strange, beautiful title.
I like it quite a bit.
And in some parts of the book--
I had passed this manuscript by a friend
of mine, another writer.
And she's a great editor, and very impatient,
and will just mark things, and scribble,
and everything's in red.
And she said, why don't you find some words that do something,
for some specific words that I had.
I had this adjective about, I think
it was the "driving rain."
And she said, why don't you find a word that does something?
And I was like, OK, I guess driving is not
doing anything for the rain.
And another-- I guess she's really a fiction writer,
or prose writer, Bhanu Kapil.
Bhanu also likes to talk about bibliomancy.
And she will say, if you're looking for a word--
I'm not doing a very good Bhanu imitation, but I'm trying.
Then just think about what you want to get, and then
put your hand on the book-- or the dictionary-- and open it.
And I got the word gurning from that kind of process.
And then it became the "gurning rain," meaning something
about sheets.
And it became a very-- and it was what I wanted.
And I was like, that's interesting.
Thanks, Bhanu.
Not sure of how often I can get away with that.
But I really appreciate doing that gesture.
And then the other thing, I was thinking about how diction--
and I hope I'm not leading us into the political question
too soon--
also reflects, I guess, a kind of political intent.
I was just thinking--
I spent a little time in Berlin this summer.
And there's lots of American expats in Berlin right now.
And every once in a while, people-- like,
several times a day, would say--
have you heard from anyone in America?
As if we haven't all been on Facebook and email.
And it's like, all right.
But everyone would never say Chicago, the United States,
or Texas.
Everyone would always say America.
And it became this intentional nostalgia,
this intentional connection with this land base.
And we never corrected each other.
Like, you mean North America?
I mean, South, or like, what?
So it's also interesting how that kind of diction
became connected to a kind of nostalgic claim over a place.
And in the United States, I don't
think we would ever really use that term in quite
the same way.
Like, have you heard from Sue in Chicago in America?
So it's really interesting to me how words--
and also sound, and how they connect to different histories
and memories, as well.
Great.
Thank you.
No, I'm actually-- I'm glad you brought up the political poetry
topic right now, because I was wondering
how we would segue into that.
It's such a big thing to take on.
But I would like us to address that topic,
the topic of political poetry.
And there's a few ways we could go about that.
But maybe the easiest way would be
to just ask if you consider your poetry, or some aspect
of your poetry, political, and how or why.
Yes.
Absolutely.
I'd like to--
I think, sometimes--
I was looking back and thinking about it.
There are historical accounts of the marginalized,
including going back to the Appalachian component,
but not only--
in terms of gender, in terms of war, genocide,
the hypothetical antipodes, or "anti-podes,"
depending on how you want to say that--
poems in On the Cave You Live In,
or all about a different account of how the '60s felt
in Appalachia, when the war on poverty happened,
and situations where so-called "improved."
Within, a lot of people said, we've had enough of your help.
Because help was often tied to internal colonization.
I think of the horror of imperialism.
And try-- don't try.
I end up writing about it, both internal and external.
I don't think it extends only beyond national borders.
I think it also goes inside them,
and inside each consciousness.
And that's what I tried to do with the "Hydra"
series of poems that I wrote.
So I think we could debate definitions of the political,
right?
I don't know if I've answered--
I haven't answered the whole question.
I don't know.
There's, like, part one and part two.
OK.
Well,
Should we go down--
Maybe we can hear--
yeah.
Annie has a question.
We were talking about--
Annie, can I-- let me give you the mic, OK?
Oh, sorry.
So we were talking about how class, last night,
relates to the political poem.
And there's this question about, is that really
addressed or not?
So you could probably go in at that angle.
But it also brought up the interesting idea
that if you don't read in the cadence of the dialect
that you're adopting when you perform, what does that mean?
What does that mean about class?
And how does that reveal your stance?
So you could talk about that.
Yeah, absolutely.
One could be reading in the cadence--
either cadence.
It depends on-- it might be depending
on who the audience is and how I think
I might strike them or communicate with them,
or how I might be feeling.
I might be feeling outside myself, outside that part that
grew up wherever it grew up, in which case,
I'm alienated from myself, which is a political process.
In terms of class, I don't think--
I think these are great questions.
I don't think that I've found-- maybe someone
else could help me.
I've found poems that confront the institutional power
relations of academia that affect the world,
and affect how we consider-- what we consider political
poetry--
class, labor Relations within academia
don't seem to occupy a large component of academic poetry.
Maybe people are afraid.
Everyone's up-- look at the economic status
of where we're at.
Everyone's looking over their shoulders.
And the people who aren't within academe
often are marginalized or not listened to.
They're in another category, another class altogether.
And so I'm hoping that what I can do next
is listen to the history of how other laborers and writers--
which we are-- organized and wrote on class and power.
And that's only going to happen by listening and talking
to others.
So I don't know.
I think I've said enough.
I think it's--
I've been thinking a lot about this,
and my thoughts are totally confused.
And they only become more confused
the more I think about it.
But one thing is definitely this idea of historical accounts
of the marginalized, and giving voice
to various communities, and sub-communities,
and sub-sub-communities that are so because of some overriding
structure that makes that the case.
And I really struggled to understand whether or not
giving voice, or allowing some communities to reflect out
into the world, is political, or if the problem is that it still
kind of aligns itself, somehow, in some obverse way,
within the political system itself.
And that poetry is meant to be some other subterranean thing
that functions so far outside that system
that it, I don't know, creates another constellation
altogether.
Because I think that, for me, I'm
really struggling, again, with this idea of political
and politics, which, I don't even
really know what that means.
I mean, I don't know what it means now.
I don't know what it was originally intended to mean.
I don't know what politics was originally intended to do.
I do feel like I know it was intended to do something, which
I think is part of the problem.
I think that anything that has a goal,
or that supposes something or idealizes something
and then sets up some sort of apparatus that
satisfies that goal or that supposition, is not poetry--
or it has no relation to it.
Because for me, anyway, poetry is something that
has really no goal, I suppose.
It has-- and I don't know what its relationship is to desire,
either.
I think that poetry is some other substance,
or that it creates into a community
that functions outside of those sorts of ideas.
So I don't know.
I think we can argue infinitely about the idea
of political poetry.
I wonder what something like social poetry would mean,
or what something like--
to give just an example, and then I'll
pass the microphone-- is, in my writing,
I guess the thing that could be most easily categorized
as political poetry, though not necessarily by me,
would be the poems that address certain historical events.
Think the bombing of Japan during World War II.
And trying to imagine, based on research,
and based on interviews, and talking
with relatives and whatnot, trying
to imagine or somehow rewrite that,
or somehow inhabit that space.
And I don't think that's--
or, at least, I don't know if that's political--
if that undertaking is political.
Because I think that what I'm really interested in
is the people.
I'm interested in the environment
and those communities.
And I'm not interested in the governing apparatus
that caused that situation to have happened,
to come into being.
Because then I feel like I'm giving too much credence
to that apparatus and not enough to the people who are kind
of suffering underneath that.
I don't know what that is.
I really don't know what that might be.
But it's something I continue to think and kind of sweat
through.
Yeah.
I think that that's a really good point
that you make, Brandon, that it's a thinking through process
rather than, for me, political poetry as a conclusion
or a definition.
So I'm going to kind of skip that,
because I'm not sure what the definition of political poetry
is.
But I think that poems can act politically,
or that poems can act in various ways.
So I think, for me, what's key about that is "act."
Is that politics isn't--
to be political is to act.
So in that sense, we're all political all of the time.
And poems act, so they are also political.
But I was thinking about Haiti, actually, and the situation
that's before the world now.
And it's clearly a human situation,
and it's clearly a political situation.
Like, part of the solution for Haiti right now is political,
and that's why it's not going to be offered to them right now.
Because those politics are not in favor, even
with our present administration.
I love Obama, but the administration
is not about progressive politics,
and in the US's relationship to the Caribbean,
or to places like Haiti, or places like Cuba,
or other nation-states right now that
have a long relationship with the United States
in which they're disempowered and have
a relationship of distress.
That's a political situation.
And I was thinking, what do we do as poets?
And it's the same that we do as people.
I couldn't think of, what would I do as a poet
that I would not do as a person?
That, why would the two be separated?
Why would I ask poets to somehow be the kind of harbingers
of some kind of sublime or progressive message
that I can't be as an individual?
It's almost that division between politics and poetry
for me.
It doesn't quite work.
It's a little artificial.
But I was thinking, too, that for me, part
of what it means to be conscious of a politic when I'm writing
is to be conscious of form, and what
I'm doing outside of traditional form,
and why I'm so often breaking form,
or I'm playing with disjuncture, and I'm
playing with fracturing, and I'm playing with breaking,
both in terms of meaning and in terms of subject.
And for me, that's the world right now--
that I can go from Haiti on television
to something radically different, and something else,
and something else.
And they're all compatible.
And they're all contained within a technological discourse.
I mean, I can access pretty much any discourse at any given
time, and simultaneously.
One, I think there's this thing with even simple technologies,
like Facebook, that we use.
There are these communication systems
that have collapsed ideological borders.
To me, that's very exciting.
So that we don't have to keep repeating the old politics
that don't work.
We don't have to be, I'm the radical outside of the system,
and I'm the oppressed.
I don't find that those terms to be useful at all anymore
when we're in this age of itinerancy,
and things are moving, and things are shifting.
And I don't have to speak for Haitians.
And I don't-- I know what you meant by giving
the marginalized a voice.
But I don't have to give them their voice.
They already have it.
And they have access, in Haiti as well, to technology.
And so we're getting snippets coming across poetry--
poetry making work-- coming through, like the Buffalo
listserv and posting it.
People are just instantly posting things.
People are videotaping, even with the limited technology
that's available there.
And things are being-- they're just
crossing these ideological and physical borders.
And to me, that's a form of making meaning
and engaging in the world where we are now.
So I don't have to kind of reconstitute myself
in relationship to terms that don't work for me anymore,
i.e., the oppressed and the oppressor,
or the marginalized and who--
I mean, who is not marginalized from what?
Or that centers-- or that there is a center,
rather than, there are various centers that are always
circulating and dancing around each other,
and that power is an exchange constantly.
So I'm not trying to minimize the real poverty in Haiti right
now, or even as a working-class poet--
intellectual-- the privileges that I
have in the United States.
I mean, those are real differences.
But at the same time, there's also--
that they're not real differences, that all of that
becomes relative after a while.
So for me, form becomes really important.
And then if, for me, the world is this place of itinerancy,
there's all of this movement, borders are shifting,
things are constantly being rearranged,
and there's all of these ways to communicate that
almost instantly.
And then they shift again, and then something else is made.
Form, for me, becomes a way of being a part of that.
And if that's-- and to me, that's political.
Those are the politics of my time.
And I'm just trying to be in it.
Great.
Thank you for those thoughtful responses.
I know there's a lot of evocative ideas
there to think about.
Before we move on to a different topic,
are there any follow-up or related questions to that?
Yeah, Annie?
Well, I find myself agreeing with everyone,
but then a question comes to mind,
which is, are we just so privileged that we're
able to reject this--
someone's desire to call and collect political poetry?
Are we so privileged that we're able to say that doesn't exist?
Is that going on?
I mean-- well, I don't know.
But that's my question.
Is it, we don't know because we don't
have to become revolutionaries in our lives?
Are we so cushioned, or protected as Americans,
or in our particular--
I'm saying "our" because, like I said, I agree.
But that question comes to mind.
Because I think that there is this strong
desire to collect that into a movement.
But I also have that same resistance.
So if anybody has any ideas.
Well, I'm not sure--
I think that's a great question, Annie, that you can't just
erase privilege, and maybe a certain resistance to claiming
a political space, especially here, in this country, where
it's so easy to disclaim any kind of engaged
political space.
But for me, the question is difficult,
because I don't know what--
we haven't come up with a definition
of what political poetry is.
I think that poems can function politically,
and that I can function as a political poet.
I can go and read my poems at a fundraiser for something
specific that is a politic or cause that I support.
And then I'm being, consciously, a political poet.
And what I might choose to read at that particular gathering
might be different from what I read last night, because I want
to incite a different kind of relationship with the subject
or with the audience.
So for me, I'm not sure if there's a body of poetry
that I can say, this is political poetry,
and that's not political poetry.
We did a class visit yesterday, and we
talked about slam poetry.
And one of the things that I thought
about afterwards is that, what I didn't mention is that--
I was always talking about how, one, that's not my genre,
but I do respect it.
And that much of slam poetry, the topics are political.
The topics are contemporary.
They're political.
They're immediate.
And is that, then, a form of political poetry?
But how is it political if it stays
within the arena of the club where it's being performed?
It's performed for a receptive audience
of other political poets, and is not
part of the discourse of the world.
One of my favorite poets who I think
is a political poet is Fanny Howe.
And there's not a lot about Fanny Howe's work
on the surface that you necessarily say,
this is political poetry.
But when I look at a book like The Wedding Dress,
which is a book of essays--
and especially an essay that I love,
and I use a lot, called "Bewilderment," where she's
taking this ideal of bewilderment from Sufism,
and she's thinking about bewilderment
as this quest and this leading you into the question.
And then she goes out of that and she--
at some point in that essay, she talks about,
I'm writing this because, if someone who has no voice
could have written this, they would have.
And then she goes right back into these meditations
on just this image of the forest, and the forest
as being this place that where not only is something--
is the possibility of being lost,
but there's the possibility of rediscovery.
To me, these are the politics that are at play in my life
right now.
And privilege is relative.
In one place, I'm privileged.
In another place, I'm not.
In one place, I have some semblance of power.
In another place or position in my daily life, I don't.
And I'm always conscious of that exchange.
So for me, if the work is conscious of,
also, those exchanges, to me, it gets really kind of--
I'm not trying to evade the question.
But I don't think that there is necessarily
a political poetry that functions
outside of what any other poetry does, for me-- that it's
how the poetry is used and who it's addressed to
at any given time.
But I think that there are politics in something
like Fanny Howe's "Bewilderment,"
or throughout the other essays of The Wedding
Dress, where the intersections are
between meditations on the spiritual,
meditations on history.
Interestingly enough, she does a lot
of meditation on class and race without renaming it
in the same paradigm that keeps us in the false--
to me, the false mythologies of class and race.
Oh, I agree.
[INAUDIBLE] to do.
No, I was just saying I agree.
You are passionate about politics.
I am passionate about politics.
I know you're [INAUDIBLE].
Yeah.
And to me, one of the things I really liked about--
or made me think, when you were talking,
is Patricia Hill Collins' work.
In that Black Feminist Thought, there's
that part where she talks about not the either/or,
but the both/and, both privileged and oppressed.
And that we're always in that matrix of domination,
and that there's always a power relationship there.
And where I walk in, in one situation,
I'm completely privileged--
or not completely, but relatively privileged.
And in another context, totally not.
One thought I have about--
I mean, another perspective.
Yeah, defining political poetry, that could take a lifetime.
But another thought I have is even--
I mean, what if a poem, or any set of words,
acts, by not ever addressing anything--
let's say somebody never addresses
any of these issues whatsoever, consciously or unconsciously.
Is that not a politics?
Is that not also a politics?
Is there a reactionary poetry?
Is that not political poetry?
Is there language that isn't political?
Is there a way of speaking that does not demarcate meaning,
and as such, hegemony?
Somebody can go and give--
marvelous, great, mainstream poets who I adore--
adore their work.
But is it not also--
is there not also a politics there?
Not just what one makes an issue,
but when one makes a non-issue by not speaking it.
I don't know what the answer is.
It's easier to ask the rhetorical question
than to provide the answer.
So with that--
I can say something.
I love definitions.
I'm not afraid of them.
I mean, I guess, when I think of political poetry--
good political poetry--
I think of poems, which I feel like you all right,
where you can see people, or the speaker, whatever--
yourselves--
both as prisoners of history and as, like, human consciousness,
or human processors.
And what I like about all of your poems
is that I feel like you go back and forth between that.
So there's the wedding, but then there's
the bomb, and that they are connected.
There's a personal story of loss,
but then there's also racial politics.
And there's just--
I don't know.
There's poverty, but there's also
this kind of almost religious consciousness.
I don't know.
That's what I like in your work, and that's
why I would call you political poets, is that you see--
you can see us, as prisoners of history,
with a lot of compassion.
That was kind of intense.
Should we-- should we do a different topic now?
You've all used photographs or artwork in conjunction
to some of your poems.
In Brandon's, The Alps, art and empty frames,
maybe where pictures might go or might have been.
I'm curious if you can talk about why
you bring visual images into some of your poems.
I'll start by saying that this book, The Alps,
actually started out as only images.
It was-- for people who haven't actually
seen the book, in the middle, there's
this 30 or so-page section that has
these blank squares followed by these really short lyric poems.
And the blank squares are 3 inch-by-3 inch,
and they represent images that actually existed.
There were about 300 of them.
And I was gathering images of the Alps, and life in the Alps,
from old issues of National Geographic, and books,
and photographs from my family, and just cutting them
into 3 inch-by-3 inch squares.
And that was going to be the Alps.
I had originally planned it as an installation that was just
going to be mounted on a wall in a straight line,
and curve around the ceiling.
The fact that it's a book, I think,
is to a certain extent, proof of the failure
of that visual idea.
Lot of the work I used to do was visual.
And growing up, and then in undergraduate school,
and then after undergraduate school,
I was primarily doing visual work.
And slowly, I was adding text to that.
And ultimately, the text took over.
Again, part of that was because I
wasn't actually a very good artist--
or at least, I didn't feel like I was.
So the text was emerging from that failure.
Became increasingly interested in what the text was doing.
And then the poems broke out of that.
And they started to become actual poems
that I could call poems.
This project is a way to sort of work that into it.
And obviously, there's a few photographs
that still remain throughout the book.
The blank squares were, one, a way
to still sort of include that.
This project in particular was, I
invited 20 or so people to respond to 20 or so images,
I guess.
And literally, I gave them these images.
Everyone except for one person was a poet.
And I asked them to literally tell me what they saw.
If it was a picture of a girl running down a slope of ice,
they would write that, in whatever words
they wanted to use.
I had, maybe, 50 pages of responses that I whittled down
into these really small poems.
So all of the words in that section
were written by these other people.
And it was sort of a way--
I was sort of being dictatorial in that, and that I took
their words and just kind of wrang whatever life I
wanted out of them.
But it was also a way to invite this community of people
that I really admired to take part in the book
by way of these images--
that we were all communally looking at these things
together, and thinking about what
it was that we were looking at, and that all of that energy
would somehow make its way into the pages of this thing.
The visual is always very important to me.
Whether or not that manifests in the writing
or in the format of the poems themselves,
it's something I'm always thinking about.
Can I ask a question?
Do you mean "rang," R-A-N-G, or W-R-A-N-G?
[INAUDIBLE]
The images that I have in the house--
A Toast in the House of Friends are graffiti pictures that
are documentations my son took of his graffiti work,
which is--
I didn't know it at the time, because I wasn't really that
aware of the whole graft culture,
is really very common, is that writers
will document their art.
And they will put it online, or just have all these photographs
or scrapbooks.
Because by nature, it's public art, and it's illegal,
so it's going to be erased sooner or later.
It has a short kind of physical life.
So I came across all of these photographs
he had after he died.
And I was starting to think about graffiti
as elegiac, in a way, so that the photographs.
And the book, for me, became a conversation
with this idea about the public elegy, and that graffiti,
both by, I guess, its messiness, and because it's insurgent,
and it's illegal, that it really represents these bodies that
are really political bodies--
these bodies that are usurping political space and are--
so it's really controversial.
But then I was thinking about the unintelligibility of it,
too--
that I had to learn how to read different scrawls--
not scrawls.
Different fonts, I guess, and styles, et cetera.
They're all so individualized.
And so then I began to just think about public naming.
They're all-- and basically, graffiti is someone's name.
They're all somebody's name or their tag.
And that's exactly what it is, whether it's a small scrawl
or it's a huge kind of multicolored, almost mural-like
thing.
So I was just thinking, wow, that's really interesting,
that there's this temporal nature
that it's going to disappear.
And then it also moves.
And I was thinking, well, why do people paint trains?
Because, well, that's how you move your art,
because the trains will move right along
with the graffiti on it.
So that particular section is pretty contained.
I haven't done a lot of collaboration
with visual images, but I'd like to do more.
I've been asked questions about visual nature of my work.
And at first, I was eager to deny that there was any.
And it's kind of ridiculous.
My First Painting Will be The Accuser.
It's in the title.
And my sister did the artwork.
But quite aside from that, the "How Many of You
Are You" volume is--
that chapbook is, to me, I did--
I took the photographs in West Virginia, in Morgantown.
And actually, I did that for a political science project
that I was doing as just attendant work, kind
of in the vein--
or not that I am equal to it, but Let Us Now
Praise Famous Men.
In an attempt to kind of update that, think about that.
And then I put those photographs aside and carried on.
And then a poetry project came out of that.
I don't know if--
I don't think of the visual as separate
from any other material, sensory material, or any materiality
of the world.
So I don't know if I think of language as not being adequate
to the task, so perhaps it can never
apprehend the world fully.
Nothing can, in that sense.
But it's just one more amazing way
of conversing with the world.
And in this case, it was a weird project,
because they weren't photos that someone else took.
So it was me looking at photos that I had
taken at another point in time.
So that it was also me looking at my own perspective
and like, yeah, which was kind of a freak-out.
It was, like, a mirror of a mirror of a--
you know?
And I don't know where that's going, really.
But that's one way in which the visual works there.
Great.
Thank you for those answers.
Do you have any interests or activities outside of poetry
that you feel are essential to your poetry,
or augment it in an important way?
Like, Philip, I know you're in a musical band, the Howling Hex.
Yes.
No, absolutely.
I mean, the music and form-- well,
the poetry started my involvement with the band.
But now, the music has always informed--
sound is-- I mean, if I'm going to give anything primary,
of all of the sensory apparatuses,
sound has always been, to me, the most amazing.
And music, there's so much going on to just listen, sometimes,
or to make it.
I don't know if there's--
meditation's another one, I would
say, for me, which is just getting clear on things, which
I don't know if I ever do.
But that's it for me.
The idea of music--
this is not about me.
But the idea of music, I've been really excited
about this musicologist James Currie.
There's actually a local artist who
puts together this online magazine
space, collaborative space, called Trickhouse.
And if you don't know it, it's fantastic. trickhouse.org.
The most recent issue has this interview
with this musicologist, James Currie,
who I've never heard of before.
And I don't know very much about the theory of music.
But, Philip, it's something you should definitely check out.
He talks about-- in very rich, elaborate, and very complex
language, he talks about our relationship to music.
And I sort of read it, also, as a relationship to poetry, which
is something totally different, but there are some resonances
there.
He wrote this very long essay called "Music After All."
And then he talks a little bit about how
our relationship to music actually takes us away
from the human, how it brings us into this actually really
wonderful, generative realm of personality
in which we can function in a way that's
free from being human.
And that's actually a really awful paraphrase
of what he's actually saying.
But it's something that I started to think of in relation
to poetry.
Because I'm constantly wondering why I'm writing.
And when I read, and something hits me
in a certain way, and that bolt of energy courses
through me, what is that?
I don't know what that is.
Is that me being human?
Is that connecting, again, in a political way, or a social way,
or what's happening there?
I recommend reading that interview as a starting place.
Ditto about music.
It's very important to me.
Other than that, I just basically write and read.
I enjoy bowling, and Project Runway.
And television, unfortunately, has become something
I enjoy quite a bit lately.
And tennis.
So those are my interests.
Yeah.
Oh, we have-- yes, I have.
Both-- can I speak for us in this circumstance?
Brandon and I have also agreed that The Hills
is an important influence on our poetics--
the television show.
Much based-- my theory is because there's
great spaces of silence, or at least spaciness.
Well, we have time for a couple of more questions.
Are there any from the audience that--
anything you'd like to talk about?
Do the poets have questions for each other?
Yes.
[INAUDIBLE]
You mentioned the mainstream poets that you admire.
Who might some of those be?
Mainstream poets.
Which-- who are some of those you admire?
Living or dead?
Either way.
Oh, OK.
Oh, good.
Phew.
That makes it much easier.
Well, most anything in the Norton Anthology is--
no.
I'll narrow it down.
That's not fair.
I've caught some heat from the experimental--
some of them.
Poets have to fight about something, right?
For liking Robert Lowell.
It's really getting dangerous out there.
And I like Robert Lowell.
I'm sorry.
I think that he's tremendously skilled.
And yet his notebooks, there's a sense of the naturalness
of a voice, but at the same time,
is tremendously skilled at this practice.
And there's something horrifying about his work.
I'm not talking about his life.
And yeah.
So that's one.
Emily Dickinson, I like her.
Everything, when I-- every time I go to her poems,
there's something else there.
I don't know if she's mainstream, though, even
though she is canonized.
Those are a couple.
I could keep going.
George Meredith.
George Meredith is great.
Modern Love?
I love that.
I love Modern Love.
Anyway.
All right, I'll stop.
I could keep going, but [INAUDIBLE]..
I'm wondering, both in the creation of work
and how you relate to your work after the fact,
after it's an existent poem or collection of poems, how--
I'm trying to think how I can phrase this.
I'm interested in that kind of--
the double life of a poem, how it exists both on the page,
in a concrete form, and how it exists in a performance space,
during a reading.
And trying to narrow down my question.
I guess, if you could speak to that somehow,
what your relationship is to your work
as it exists on the page, and also
as it exists as you're reading, in that performance
aspect of it.
[INAUDIBLE]
I guess that's a big question that I'm
not totally sure about, but--
[INAUDIBLE]
Yeah.
But good.
No, I mean-- but very good.
A lot of the stuff I write is not--
I have no intention of it ever being read out loud.
And in fact, I read something in the class
yesterday that I had never read aloud.
And I hadn't even thought about whether or not
it was meant to be read aloud.
It was something that--
on the page, anyway, it's visually oriented.
You can read it.
It's composed of language.
But I actually struggle with the idea of readings.
I mean, oddly, I think that I'm not
sure what I'm supposed to do and what
the writing is supposed to do.
Sometimes, I feel like I should just kind of move aside and let
it sort of live its life and succeed and fail
on its own terms while I do something else in another room.
Sometimes, I feel like I need to coach it,
or I need to eat it and expel it in front of a bunch of people.
And then it becomes the audience's problem.
I don't really know.
But I think, for me, there are certainly
things that are not meant to be read,
and some things that I write, and as I'm writing them,
I'm thinking--
I write very much by sound.
So I think, when I find myself in a space and a poem
where I don't know--
I kind of don't know how to get myself out,
I kind of lapse into sound.
I lapse into music, and that sort of
resolves some of those problems.
And whatever the sounds--
language starts to kind of form itself around those sounds.
And then I can kind of make my way out of that poem.
So sometimes, I am very aware that it's something
that can be performed.
Frances, did you have a question you wanted to ask?
Thanks.
I really appreciate your resistance
to trying to talk about political poetry without having
a shared definition.
I think that it is hard to create
a meaningful conversation about something until we all are
talking about the same thing.
And like Cybelle, I love definitions.
And I want to float one and see if it rings true
for you or you have any resistance to it, which
is that political poetry is a matter of scope.
That when you have a very narrow scope,
you're in the realm of the personal, or the Robert Lowell.
And then when you have a very universal scope,
you might be in your Emily Dickinson, nonpolitical realm.
But then there's a realm in the middle
that is about the polity, or looking at and reflecting
on the polity either your local communities,
or your national communities, or increasingly,
our global communities, for which
we have some responsibility--
or for which we're participants in some way.
And if you think that this could be one definition that
is potential for political poetry,
that it's in that middle zone between the personal
or the universal, where we're actually discussing something
for which we have some representation,
but not all representation.
I do like what you said about scope.
That does bring another dimension to it.
And representation, too, seems to have something
to do with politics.
I like that definition.
I'll take it.
But I'm not-- for me, the problem
comes in with the personal and the political.
And I guess I'm harkening back to the old feminist
saying the personal is political.
I'm wondering if a Sexton poem is not political
because it's personal.
But it's political in that sense that women's interior lives,
or sexuality of women, has been marginalized
and not thought of as being a place for public discourse.
So then when it's put there, that becomes political.
So I think it can work--
that scope can go back and forth between the personal
and the universal.
And maybe context, too, becomes a part
of what makes it political.
I agree.
[INAUDIBLE]
Oh.
I don't know--
I noticed you wrote down Paul Celan here in your notes.
As maybe a way to think about somebody who, at least for me,
is I guess if--
I would classify him as a political poet,
in a lot of ways.
As well as a million other things.
And also, as somebody whose writing
has been important for me and trying to
think about poetry in general.
And his poems are very personal, I mean, I would say,
in the same way that Emily Dickinson's poems
are very personal-- in a totally different way.
But I gain more, I guess, political knowledge,
to a certain extent, from those very exquisitely personal poems
than I do from anything that's more universal.
And I think maybe because the very specifically personal
is more universal to me, I can make sense of things
when things are much more particular in the way
that they are with Paul Celan.
That's a gloss.
I mean, there's so much more that could be said, but.
[INAUDIBLE]
To go to the Amiri Baraka/Leroy Jones
split that seems to be going on and on and on.
Who was the better poet?
It's the same guy.
And is the Leroy Jones stuff, like, the early stuff,
is that not political?
And is the later stuff somehow more
effective as political work because it's more
outwardly that--
it's more about politics?
So I don't know.
I don't think that's been really resolved.
Does the question of aesthetics and what
makes it good come into question about political poetry or not?
Question?
Yeah.
First, a comment.
I also really like Robert Lowell's notebooks.
It's so clear, and natural, and easy, and everything.
And I feel it's a lot more effective, and it's really--
OK.
But I wanted to ask about alienation.
It was mentioned earlier.
And there's some talk about meaning, and what you say
has meaning.
But the problem is, when you are alienated,
what you say has no meaning whatsoever.
And I really was trying to figure out
how to make this into a question,
but I wasn't sure how.
I was just curious about it.
How do you break through that problem
and actually make meaning?
No, it's a great question.
I'm going to be thinking about that long after.
And I don't pretend to have anything
like an adequate answer.
Disclaimer.
But I think that one way to relate to alienation
is depiction, is description and detail.
I can observe myself as the alienated--
as an alien, almost.
I can almost observe myself, in my life, or life,
from the standpoint of alienation,
sometimes more readily than I can when I'm content.
I have a harder time writing when I'm completely satisfied.
When I'm completely satisfied, I'm in the world,
and every breath is natural.
It just-- there's not much to say
when I'm completely content.
I'm just being.
But when there's an alien thing, it's
almost as if it were other, which it's not.
It's still-- I don't know if that makes sense--
or nonsense.
[INAUDIBLE] who do I hand this to?
Brandon or Akilah, would you like
to address the topic also, or no?
OK.
I have a beginning of a thought.
It's a really important question for me.
And it's something that I think can only
be resolved in writing.
And the thing that I think about specifically
is, I also write a lot about my grandfather, who was an "enemy
alien" during World War II-- and just
to use the very essence of that word.
And he was Japanese.
He was put into a federal prison after Pearl Harbor
and so he wasn't--
he was classified as an alien.
And he dealt with that in ways that I'm still
trying to understand, throughout his life.
He wasn't able to be a-- he came to the States in 1919.
He didn't become a citizen until 1955--
not because he didn't want to.
He just wasn't able to.
And a lot of what I write about is just trying to understand--
understanding that, and understanding
the ways in which his voice was not able to carry through.
When he was in the prison, he was
subjected to a variety of hearings
at which his which the interpreters were
Korean men who didn't speak--
who didn't understand Japanese or English very well at all.
So his voice meant nothing--
absolutely nothing.
And he was a photographer.
So he converted all of that energy, I think,
into his vision, and able to create some kind of life
and some kind of voice through visual means.
But there are still a lot of things
that I'm still trying to figure out about his postwar life
and how he chose to live it.
He became very Americanized as a way
to avoid further persecution.
And he raised his three children as the model Americans--
his three Japanese children as Americans.
He had to, I suppose, out of a certain necessity.
But it's something I struggle with.
And that, for me, again, is something
that only can be resolved, if at all,
just by continuing to think about it,
and thinking about it in the writing itself.
Well, we are out of time.
But I want to thank you for your insights,
and for the conversation, and for your work,
and for the wonderful reading.
And thank you all for joining us, and your great questions.
[APPLAUSE]