Thank you so much, Mark.
So we have time--
[GIGGLING]
They're here for us.
We have time for a few questions.
If you have a question, please raise your hand,
and I'll come to you with this.
It might take me a second tonight but bear with me.
Do we have any questions?
I see a hand.
Give me seven minutes.
[LAUGHTER]
Hi.
Hey.
Have you heard of the Mongrel Coalition Against Gringpo?
Against?
Have you heard of the Mongrel Coalition?
No.
You should look them up on Facebook
if you have a Facebook--
OK.
And read what they say about aestheticization
of racial violence.
I think it's important.
Oh.
Did you feel that poem aestheticized racial violence?
I think it's important to read.
OK.
Well, just in my own defense, the only way
that I could talk about what happened to Tamir Rice
was to have some kind-- a means of approach
that made it possible to speak, and for me that means
is to think about time.
And what happens in time when a life into which so much energy
has been funneled and which has such potential
to continue in time is cut off, something collapses.
In physics, you would call it the wave function.
The many things can happen suddenly can't happen
and one thing does.
So my means of being able to examine an atrocity
and speak about something that's fundamentally unspeakable
is to use the collapse of time as a way to doing that.
So I don't mean it as--
I'm not trying to make it pretty.
I'm trying to simply find a way to speak it.
Hello.
Hey.
Can you hear me?
Uh huh.
I'm just noticing there's a change in elevation
in a lot of your poems.
They start up, and they go down, even things that [INAUDIBLE]
down into your brain.
Yep, yep.
I just wondered [INAUDIBLE]
Sure.
One of the-- now I'm going to talk about it first
in a very this-worldly way, then I'll metaphorize it.
My garden is on the very tail end of the Ronkonkoma Moraine,
and the Ronkonkoma Moraine is a line of stone and sand
that was pushed up by the last glacier 20,000 years ago.
And it makes--
Long Island's pretty flat, but what spine it
has is that moraine.
So in my garden, it tails down to an end,
and it's about six feet high so--
maybe 10 feet high-- so from the bottom of the garden,
you look up.
And that slope has always felt-- it's
the reason I wanted to be there.
It's something about that slope that felt magical to me.
And the wind comes over it at night.
The cold air changes, and you feel the weather coming in
from the sea there.
It's something to do with having different perspectives
on the world, upper and lower, and these poems
are very much concerned with dissent,
what it is to go down into the garden
into the earth both as a gardener, someone nurturing
life and potentially as a part of that earth.
It's also very concerned with going down into personal
history, back into the past to demons I thought I'd conquered,
things I thought I had set aside, and I haven't.
They're still with me very much.
So those are there.
And the idea that buried griefs, buried feeling
follow us so that in the barbershop,
you're in a place of comfort, but there's
that door and the dead are waiting behind it.
And they're with you, too.
Your grief does not leave you.
So that's I guess what I'm thinking
about with these dissents.
That makes it sound like a very conscious project.
I write the poems, and they take me somewhere.
And as you start to recognize that, you might work with it
and extend it, but I don't feel that the matter of poetry
is chosen.
It comes to us, and we choose what to do with it I guess.
Does that answer your question?
Yeah.
Hi.
Hey.
I just want to thank you really for--
I did not expect to be so emotional tonight,
but I want to thank you for acknowledging
one of the very many hideous things
that are happening in the nation right now--
Thank you.
In a room of people where maybe it's
not the first thing on your mind every day.
And I really appreciate you for that.
So thank you.
Thank you.
I feel that for too long, we have regarded it
as the province of writers of color to write about race.
It's not the problem of people of color.
It's white people's problem.
We got to fix that.
We got to change that, and I am not willing to be silent.
And it means-- it's scary.
It means taking risks as an artist.
I might fall on my face writing a poem
about the murder of a Black child,
but doesn't mean I'm going to shut up.
I'm just going to find a way to take that risk as best I can.
I would never have written that poem except that two dear
friends of mine, poets Marie Howe and Tina Chang,
organized a rally in New York City in Washington Square
around Black Lives Matter, and 100 poets show up
and we read our poems.
There was nobody there but us.
We read our poems to each other.
A wonderful young Hispanic cop came over
and said what's going on here, and I said, well,
these are poets writing about racially motivated violence.
He said great.
Good.
Glad you're doing that.
It was a wonderful experience.
I needed the push of that rally, the invitation
to make the poem, and I discovered
when I did it that I had so much to say about this.
And it was so crucial to me because all our lives are
distorted by racism, and I think that's just
a fact of American life.
And we need now-- this is an opportunity for us,
the visibility of racism gives us
a chance to try to act, try to make what change we can.
It's not easy.
Yeah.
[APPLAUSE]
Hey.
Are you utilizing the platform that you have in any way
to speak more about the racial discrimin--
the racial violence that goes on continually
on a daily basis in our country?
And if so, what are those things?
Well, I think I'm just starting to.
I am-- I'm a lyric poet who has been--
my interiority has been intruded upon by the social sphere
I would say.
And so during the late '80s and early '90s,
I began to write poems that were very pressurized by the AIDS
epidemic, and it was crucial to me
to represent what I saw in my community that was not
like the mainstream narrative.
What I saw was compassion, generosity, profound courage,
people helping each other, and I wanted my poems
to reflect that.
It took me a while to begin to think I even
could write about race because of this notion
that is very common among white writers
that, who are we to talk?
Would I be appropriating somebody's experience?
Would I be aestheticizing the violence or pain in some way?
Would I be getting something out of it
for myself, which is not my intent.
But those things pressurize your head, your writing process.
They make you think I can't talk about that.
And things just got so outrageous
that I said, well, maybe I have to talk about that.
Yes, I have the reservations, but I don't have a choice now.
So I'm starting.
And I think-- I hope it will continue to be a subject.
It certainly will continue to be an occasion in my work.
Yeah.
Thank you, Mark.
And thank you all-- there are 200--
over 200 people out for poetry on Thursday night so--
Great.
Thank you for being here.
[APPLAUSE]