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So I love Q and A. I know I've kept you long.
And if you'd like to ask anything, or say anything,
we can do that for maybe five minutes.
And then--
Just raise your hand and I'll come around
with the microphone.
Yeah, one of the things I was saying before I started
was there are always these amazingly brave people who
stand up and talk about how the prison industrial complex
affects them.
And I think that more of us have to join that army of people.
More of us have to understand that we don't, as Wendell Berry
says, "We don't live away from each other.
We live with each other."
And everything that happens in this society,
even if we can lock our doors and put on our new security
system, and our air filters can work and run all night,
it affects us.
You can't have a country of people imprisoned
for various things, for various reasons,
and stay there for hundreds of years,
and that not come back to affect the society that we live in.
And I think so many conversations
that I have with people, it's about them and us, right?
There's an isthmus between us.
And I don't think that isthmus exists.
I think we want it there to feel safe.
But the privatization of violence and injustice
is affecting all of us every day.
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And it might seem like a stretch to talk
about a horrific thing that happened in 1944,
but I don't think so.
I think it's still happening.
I know it's still happening.
And it's happening in different kinds of ways.
And we don't see it.
You're not going to see a camera on it.
You're not going to see a report given on what
happens behind those walls.
We have to open our eyes.
I really think we have to get involved.
And I really think we have to not
say that this is-- not give $100 and say this is somebody else's
problem.
I think we have to say this is our problem.
I didn't know that Arizona had those kind of statistics
that you read that were so striking.
And I'm not pulling Arizona out of any lineup, right?
The whole country has its own numbers like that.
South Carolina certainly does.
So I don't know if I was giving you time to ask a question,
but I don't know if you have any.
Thank you for enduring this cold.
I hope the heaters are working back there.
You've written about George Bush and Condoleezza Rice.
Have you been tempted to write about our current president
and his administration?
Yes.
[LAUGHTER]
There's a poem in the new book about that.
I'll say that.
If it wasn't 8:30 I'd read it.
But I feel very, very strongly about what's going on
in my country right now.
I feel very strongly that art and poetry,
and being conscious, and walking through this with my eyes
open, and licking the tip of my pen every day to pen something
is very important.
I remember when the election happened in 2006
and the great American writer Toni Morrison
was asked, what should we do?
And she said, "Get to work."
And I love that.
And I think about that every day.
How important it is to not be of heavy heart.
Well, you can be of heavy heart, but don't
be dissuaded from action.
And there are so many amazing things
happening across the country and across the world that
reminds me every day of how good we are
and how much we need each other.
And how much we have to link arms and, as my father would
say, fight the good fight.
I saw, did you have a question?
Sure.
You don't have to, I just saw your hand.
You made it.
Do you feel better?
Yes.
Well, you've been answering my question all along.
But it's just about the relationship between memory
and the need to remember.
And at the same time to move forward.
The balance between those two, that story is so necessary.
I think your understanding of what
the question is that I'm getting at, the way you work straddles
that.
And do you you balance those two?
History is critical to me.
I'm always looking in the stacks.
When this story came up about George Stinney Jr.
I knew I wanted to be in the courtroom
to see what the modern day response would
be in South Carolina.
So I had to be there.
I didn't know-- and when Tyler and the program
called to say I had been invited to be
a part of the Art for Justice, I was both mad and inspired,
because this was waiting in the wings.
I knew this was the moment to sort of flesh it out,
what had happened.
This happened in 2014.
So I had the notes from the courtroom
and I got to work immediately on it.
So as I composed it, I was thinking, this is 70 years ago.
People will say this has nothing to do with today.
And I vehemently disagree with that.
And there's a story before this one about somebody else
that that moment was built on.
And we keep doing this.
We keep saying that we will say I'm sorry.
Then 70 years later, and I think, that's not good enough.
I think we have to stop.
We have to stop this kind of treatment of people,
and throwing them aside and thinking
that the mistakes that we have made won't live on.
And in fact they do live on.
And they inform and educate us in all the wrong ways
about 2019.
And 2020.
And going forward.
So I study history.
I'm a student of history.
And I'm also a student of the history nobody
wants to talk about.
The history that is buried.
And they try to stack everything on top of it
so that we don't know what we did.
Because we don't want to turn-- we want 18 words or less.
We want 10 years back.
Not 20, not 30.
Oh, did we do that?
Yes.
We did that.
And there's a reason we did it.
And there must be a reason we don't do it again.
I'm sorry it's cold.
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Last one?
This is the last one and then we'll
hit the fireplace or something.
Yeah it's working over here.
I appreciate you coming out here, sister.
I appreciate you.
Earlier before you were introduced,
Stephanie spoke about Teré, who's one of our favorite local
poets.
Several years back when Donald Trump first
became president there was a rally that we had downtown.
Black Lives Matter.
And a few of us spoke, obviously,
with an alignment of where our spirits were at the time.
Because it was in February.
Teré was the only one that spoke about love.
I'm going to ask you to, next time you speak with Teré,
to share that poem with you, because it's probably
my favorite one by him.
OK.
Speaking about their wife.
But I wanted to ask you as a poet something that I've found
is difficult, is for people to say they need love.
Conversations about love tend to be either pasty romanticized
versions.
Or they tend to be something amiss, if you will.
Right.
And I think that people are afraid to be vulnerable,
to admit that we do need it.
That it's at the center of what is missing out
of pretty much all voices that are standing and holding
platforms.
So as a poet and everything that you've
been charged to speak to, especially when times
they charge like they are right now,
do you feel maybe in your spirit,
like the thing we need more than anything is love?
Absolutely.
You just said--
How do you overcome it?
You don't overcome it.
You just keep trying to live it.
Today we were trying to live it at Cape.
We went in there and those kids were like walled up.
You know, like-- everything they could throw on themselves
to come in that room, they tried to do that.
And what I was doing was looking at them in their eye,
and I didn't say I love you.
But I was telling them with every inch of me, I love you.
And I was telling them--
I was being vulnerable.
And I was telling them about my family.
I was telling about what I was like at 13, and 14, and 15.
And why did I want to write?
Because I was the outlier.
Because I was outside of everything.
And adults would tell me, you don't
know what you're talking about.
And then I'd get their attention.
You know?
Because I was like, that happened to me!
You know, so I was telling them in every way I could
in 62 minutes, I love you.
I started to cry.
And I was like, don't do that!
You don't need to-- and I was like, forget it.
I'm doing it.
It's what I do.
You know?
And then the little brother down front said, "She's crying!"
[LAUGHTER]
And I was like, [SNIFFS] And so if I can't be vulnerable,
they're not going to be vulnerable back.
And if you don't understand that-- it is a give and take.
Love is a conversation.
Love is not something you give me.
Love is something we make together.
And too many people get afraid.
And they run for the hills when you start talking about that.
And we're not talking about social media love.
We're not talking about Twitter love.
We're talking about what do you need from me?
What I wanted to do today was go up to those young people
and hug them.
And I couldn't touch them.
I coming from a family where people put their hands on you.
They don't have to say anything.
You just know they're there, right?
I do that to my students at the University of South Carolina.
I did it at University of Kentucky.
And my colleagues are saying, you're going to get fired.
Or you're going to get-- like somebody's going
to come at you with a lawsuit.
I was like, come on at it.
Come on, bring it!
Bring it!
If I have to go down because I hugged my student?
I'm going down!
[LAUGHTER]
And I will be proud of that, and I will stand alone
in that valley.
You know, so sometimes it's not the popular thing.
But you still have to do it.
You still have to put that in front of you.
Even when you're talking about difficult things,
even when you're calling people out about stuff.
My arms are open.
I think that's the only way we're
going to move off this iceberg into a better place where
we remember that we all live here together.
We don't live on islands.
You can't lock the door that I'm talking about.
Because we breathe the same air, and we need each other.
So I'm so glad you talked about love.
I think it's a beautiful place to end.
And thank you all for coming out and for participating.
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