And because I got that buildup from Carmen,
I must leave you with this.
Let's see what I got here.
[MUSIC PLAYING]
So I had a whole riff.
I'm the poet Stephen Jonas, but all I have is this.
It's a salad bowl with a piece of ginger.
The salad bowl belongs to the poet Gerrit Lansing,
somewhere on the outskirts of Gloucester.
Jonas and Lansing were two of the members of the Boston
Poetry School.
They were queer.
Supposedly, Jonas was Black.
No, Jonas is Black.
He says at one point his mom was from San Juan.
That would make him Boricua.
He says at one point his father was Portuguese,
but that might have been from Cape Verde.
That might make him Latino or Cape Verde and Latino.
I have no idea.
I'm improvising this.
You didn't pay me enough to actually prepare or write
something new.
So you're getting smartphone improvisation.
Smartphone improvisation is my nation.
Shout out to Lehua.
Those of us who are from non-incorporated territories
must find our nations elsewhere.
1898, we're going to party, baby.
So getting back to Stephen Jonas.
Jonas may or may not have been Boricua.
He may or may not have been Latino.
He claimed so.
But all his friends insist he passed as White.
Here's a problem.
All his friends were White.
Therefore, we have no idea.
[LAUGHTER]
Stephen Jonas died in 1970.
[INAUDIBLE] is finally coming out next year with City Lights.
I look forward to that.
But maybe you see lights as in light-skinned.
Get it?
City Lights.
Light-skinned.
That was really bad.
[LAUGHTER]
So why does this matter here?
Partly, think about this.
It's the ephemeral archive.
I came to Gloucester looking for some guidance
from Gerrit Lansing who's 90 and saw TS Eliot read
and Wallace Stevens.
Ask me about that.
He says TS Eliot was cool.
He says autumn was whack.
Ask me about that.
He was really uncomfortable when I asked him, raised questions.
And this is a guy who thought as Charlie that Poppy Z Brite was
way better than Anne Rice.
That's how cool this viejito was.
And so he couldn't figure Stephen Jonas out,
although they were BFFs.
Here's the thing.
So Stephen Jonas had these shoutouts to Baraka,
where he riffed on their shared Blackness.
I wanted to know more.
I wanted to find the archive.
And Joseph Torra, who edited the selected Jonas that's
out of print, read from a letter that Jonas wrote to Baraka
when he was doing--
What was it?
"Floating Bear" with Diane di Prima,
who was the poet that said in a letter
that Steve Jonas is the great Puerto Rican poet.
Diane di Prima, where are you?
I need your archive.
But I didn't know that the archive was ephemeral.
And of course, there's huge permissions issues
because Jonas was queer.
Right?
There's no progeny.
There is no estate.
These folks are the estate.
So Joe Torra read to me from a distance
of the outside of the room this letter
where Jonas cusses Baraka out for not publishing or giving
love--
I forget which.
--to his boy.
His boy's name was Jack Spicer.
I'm not kidding.
Jonas has this poem where he uses the phrase, "Us Latins."
Here's the problem.
Us Latins is him and Jack Spicer.
[LAUGHTER]
And the poet that they're reading is Lorca.
Going back to Baraka's Lorca.
I have no idea if any of this is related.
I hope I would figure this out and be
able to report back something from the archive,
but it was too ephemeral.
So I got nothing for you, but smartphone improvisations.
Maybe before the reader comes out, I'll publish it,
but nobody will care.
Again, City Lights might whitewash it,
so it'll become part of the, I guess,
not so ephemeral archive of Thinking Its Presence.
So why is this relevant here?
Let me put it to you this way.
This guy was thought of, Jonas, I mean, passing as White.
And what a better guide than him to my own,
serving as a guide for you to the queer Afro-Latino
experience.
For what better guide to that experience than a blanquito
de la isla, among so many blanquitos in the field.
What a better guide.
But the paths of guidance are kind of messed up.
Blanquito de la isla may or may not have been--
I won't tell you.
That's part of my ephemeral archive.
--a phrase of the late great one, Flores.
When he was on, they asked him about me.
"Oh, Urayoan is OK for a blanquito de la isla."
At least he takes diaspora seriously.
Flores may or may not have been--
You figure it out. --on my committee at NYU,
where Muñoz taught.
I was a student of José Esteban also.
I think both of them found me annoying.
I would get exasperated and ask these really difficult
questions.
When José wanted to phone it in.
I'm sorry, José Esteban.
I'm on the other side now.
Some days, I want to phone it in.
I was eager.
I was hungry.
I didn't get it maybe.
But I'm trying to give you a shout out here.
So these guys may or may not have been my professors.
And now, I guess I'm a confessor.
And José Esteban told me--
I did a paper on Edwin Torres for his class.
He told me this is really good as a paper,
but you're still doing lit.
I'm like, what does it mean I'm still doing lit?
I'm writing about experimental poetics and a performer
and sound artist.
You're doing lit.
It took me weeks and months, and then I
realized, oh, he means write from the body, not about
the body.
Close read bodies and text will disappear.
They'll become something like me playing
like Jimi Hendrix with guitar.
There are no shoutouts to Jimi Hendrix.
I don't think in Jonas' poetry.
And if they are, I missed them.
They must have gotten lost with the salad bowl.
I promise I'm almost ending.
I know that Kearney is coming up next, who's actually really
Black and really a performer.
I'm just reading a paper.
But after that intro from Carmen,
I thought I had to give you a sense of my flow, which
is kind of wack.
But again, you're not paying me for this.
I'm just holding time, until your next commitment.
I'm thinking about the ephemeral archive.
And I once thought I would start a journal called Arc Hive.
And a friend told me that's the worst name ever, and I agreed.
And so I thought I would just divorce my archival politics
from my poetic ones, until you invited me here.
Curse you, Thinking Its Presence.
We call UFOs OVNIs in Puerto Rico,
objeto volador no identificado.
So think of this as an OVNI that came to the sky
and made you think about its absence.
Maybe I got it.
OVNI presence.
Thinking Its OVNI Presence.
This is my present to you.
It's my own complicity with an ephemeral archive
that I may or may not be able to riff as an app.
The app that perhaps is my nation as arnification.
I'm running out of riffs.
I'm running out of flow.
At least, this tech part was better than that tech part.
What the fuck was that?
Give it out to the ghosts of José Esteban and Juan.
Gracias, maestros.
I figured it out somehow.
I can't wait to have a student as annoying
as I was in your classes.
OK.
But there's a kind of institutional politics here.
And I'll keep working on the salad bowl
with or without ginger.
I keep hearing from all the Nielsen
there's some stuff in the UCLA.
Maybe that'll help me, but I have a sense that not.
I have a sense that
Stephen Jonas took that one to the grave.
But he really thought he was Latin.
He thought Lorca was, too.
I think he has this thing where he thinks the South of Spain
equals California.
I'm not making that up.
It's in this Lorca poem, which is called something
about cante jondo, which may not be tied to the letter
to Baraka, where he's pissed off,
which I couldn't read because the archive was ephemeral.
And time was a memorial, except I didn't get the memo.
And I kept going and it was time to stop.
And I'll stop now.
Gracias.
[APPLAUSE]