Evie, thanks.
I really enjoyed your reading.
You know, I wonder in semiautomatic.
I mean, there are a number of longer poems and poems that
deal with the general theme of violence against black bodies,
and then, Alison was talking about a number of other poems
that deal with language in different forms
and a variety of other topics.
And they're scattered in throughout, and I wonder,
did you consider, say, grouping them all thematically together
and keeping the ones that were on theme in sections
by themselves and putting the others in sections?
Or, obviously, you made a conscious choice
to mix it all up, and I wondered about your process for that.
Can you all hear me?
Yeah?
So thank you, I mean, for thinking
about the book and this organization with such care.
You're right.
The organization, threading the poems that
were on similar themes through the sections
rather than collecting them together was very purposeful.
Part of what I was thinking about with semiautomatic
was how the various forms of violence that I was working
with, violence to Black bodies, particularly police brutality,
but also, violence to women, violence to the planet,
the violence of war, that they are inseparable,
that we're not going to solve one of these problems
without solving the others.
So that was very much going through my head
and informing my decision to mix the themes so to speak.
The individual poems are meant to show
some of those connections, but I hope
that threading them together through the book
would also kind of highlight that aspect of it,
that you would see ideas surface.
Not just in other poems that were
on the same immediate topic, but across topics.
Thanks.
I have tons of questions, but Patrick,
can you talk a little bit about how
you kind of came into your own in terms of how you perform?
There's a lot of poet--
you know, people talk about how poets present their work.
And you have a very distinct way of presenting your work,
and I just want to know if you kind of were born that way
or how that evolved know.
Because it's very powerful, so if you
could just share a little bit about that.
Sure, my father was a Catholic priest.
He left-- my mom and him had an affair in Chicago.
Out of shame, my mom fled to Canada
and gave birth to my brother pretty much alone,
mostly homeless.
They eventually-- well, they were still in touch.
And my father would visit her there,
and they continued their affair.
She got pregnant, again, with me,
and that's when my father, finally, left the priesthood.
But my father sort of--
he had the rhetorical power of the pulpit as complicated
of a man as he was.
And then I grew up with that power, the power of the pulpit.
I grew up with the power of hip-hop and soul music.
I grew up with the power of storytellers.
When I went back home to the Philippines,
I remember my uncle Charlie.
This is just so deeply ingrained in my head.
I bought him a machete.
He's a farmer, and the day that I left,
he was sharpening his machete on his wet stone.
And he was telling me stories about my grandfather and World
War II, as he was sharpening his machete, so that's my poetry,
you know?
Like all this stuff that I do with books, Guggenheim,
everything like that, that's a translation.
My poetry is the body.
My poetry is gathering with folks.
My poetry is singing, and dancing, and laughing,
and cussing.
[APPLAUSE]
I was wondering if each of you could
speak to how you thought about approaching the work that you
read tonight, where these projects that you were already
thinking about before taking the commission,
and it seems like, perhaps, a daunting task to be given
a topic and say, OK, now, go write something.
So anything you wanted to share about how
you arrived at what you read tonight would be great.
So I don't know if you were a plant.
We have two diametrically opposed answers.
I took the commission thinking, well, yes, I'm
already thinking about these issues in a certain way.
I'll just keep writing poems on the subject, and you know,
it's a year from now.
Sure, and pretty quickly realized,
oh, it's a very different thing to set out with an expectation
that I'm going to have something to say that I didn't say
already, first of all, and to fulfill that goal that I always
have for my poetry, which is to learn something
in the process of writing it.
You know, I really--
it was much harder to come up with a series of poems
on a very, in some ways, particularly defined topic.
Although, there's so much in it at the same time,
I still have now thousands of poems
that I want to write for this commission that are not
necessarily going to be a part of this commission,
but that I'll be writing for years to come
on a much gentler time pace.
But yeah, it was definitely unlike any of my writing
before.
I'm going to write to this topic by this date, so let me dive in
and sort of make it happen.
And it was a good stretching of some muscles
that I haven't usually used.
Yeah, I've been reading and writing
about the intersections between Filipinos
and Black folks, Filipinos and a lot of other communities, too,
for a long, long time, and specifically
the role of Black soldiers in the Philippine-American war.
And I could talk for another hour, which
I won't, about those connections,
and this was an opportunity to sort of make
that research materialize.
But also, I made the realization last year
that I might be having these conversations with the dead,
and I wanted to transcribe it.
I wanted to--
I don't know.
But yet, it's something that has been ongoing.
It's going to go on for a long time.
After tonight, it doesn't make it any less
daunting than the fact that I had already
entered into something that was related to it, you know?
You say understanding that music--
I want to go back to a little bit of process.
And I think music and rhythm really informs both your works,
and I just had more of a question
if you could talk about your process.
I mean, do you write something and then recite it
or put the music in and change it
in any ways based on the rhythm that seems
to be very important to you?
What is that process?
Oh, I'm so sorry.
I'll say, yeah, I mean, music is--
we talked about this morning that it's my--
it's really my guide, pace and music in a technical sense.
But I also want to just--
there are all these-- this is a concurrent text that runs along
these kinds of story, these transcriptions
that I'm working on.
And I just want to--
I think that I can recite it from memory.
This is from the Senate record in 1901.
Let it be remembered that most of these Filipinos
are musicians, and the character of their music
is of the sentimental and appealing to passion story.
Filipinos dress flashily, spend their money lavishly
on the girls.
They are just as dangerous when given free social contact
with women as that of a negro.
Chief Toppenish-- sorry, I spoke to one
of the prominent men of Toppenish, Washington,
where another riot against Filipinos happened.
I spoke to another prominent man in Toppenish yesterday,
and he said, if I had my way, I would declare open season
on all Filipinos.
And there would be no bag limit, which
is to say that music and sound were
part of our criminality in 1902, and I relish in making music.
[APPLAUSE]
Yes, OK, hmm, I'm just going to think about that one
for awhile.
The music is on shuffle in my head,
and there's a playlist of pop songs, jazz songs,
commercial jingles, TV theme songs.
Just all the things that we hear that have rhythm are--
my brain is full of them.
And as I start to write, I don't know when in that poem,
Jury Duty, for example, I started hearing Prufrock.
But it was something about, and in the room,
the women come and go, speaking of Michelangelo.
And the next thing I know, I've got speaking of boys who
are no angels, no, you know?
And it's just in my head, and what
happens is, if I don't get in the way of it,
it tells me something about the ways
that we can get swept up in language.
And I can either allow myself in the poem to be swept up,
or I can hear it and intervene, hear it and make
sure you hear it, work with it.
But that sort of becoming conscious of it
is a defense against my inability
to stop hearing it in the first place.
That's about it.
[APPLAUSE]