Wow.
I know that scene well.
I know the show well.
This is dope.
Thank you, Diana.
I want to echo Nicole's thank you to the Poetry Center,
to Tyler, to Dwayne, and this opportunity to get to read
with these two people.
Nicole and I go back a little ways.
And Hanif is one of the most generous dudes I know.
When Diana was reading the bio, and she mentioned the essay
collection, They Can't Kill Us Until They Kill Us,
and the first time I met Hanif was actually at AWP.
And I was literally on my way to the book
fair to purchase that book.
And we ran into each other.
And I remembered telling you, Hanif,
that I'm about to go get your book.
And Hanif, you guys, just pulled the book out of his bag
and just handed it to me, and was like, here, here you go.
And that was special.
That was a special moment.
You don't really get that kind of vibe at AWP often.
So it was just a magical moment and I'm
glad to have built a friendship with you.
And I'm glad that we had this time together to read.
I'm actually going to change directions a little bit.
I was going to read something from the project,
and I'll come back to it maybe and say some words about it.
But I wanted to read something that kind of piggyback off
Hanif's poem.
You know, I don't pretend to be an expert
at all on the carceral state.
But I do know that it begins long before prison, right?
And Hanif's poem about the police, and our interaction
and perception of the police, I think is right on point.
Because for a lot of us, that's our first interaction
with the law, but also law, yeah?
And it really sets a precedence, I think,
for the way we process that and live through that.
And the way that it sets up this adversarial relationship
between the community and the people policing the community,
it's set early on.
And then everything we do is kind of a reaction to that,
for better or worse.
And yeah, in my first book, I wrote
a poem called Enter the Dragon.
Enter the Dragon was the name of a Bruce Lee movie,
as many people watching will know.
In that movie, the most compelling character--
most compelling actor for me and a lot of my peers
was not Bruce Lee, but Jim Kelly.
Jim Kelly, in the '70s, before we had positive filmmakers
putting positive images on the screen,
like Lee Daniels, and Tyler Perry, and people like that,
we were kind of left to our own devices.
And one of the first people we had to look to was Jim Kelly.
In this film, there's a scene early
on where he's either walking down the street
or driving down the street and is accosted by some police
officers.
And I think the police officers are on the take from this mob
boss or something.
And they go to jack Jim Kelly up,
but Jim Kelly is a martial artist, and it's a movie.
So he beats all their asses, jumps in the police car,
and drives off.
And I remember being at the movies with my father
and watching that scene, and being really affected by it.
So that was one of the first images
that I saw of resistance.
And that's where the poem starts.
It starts in a movie theater in 1976.
For me, the movie starts with a Black man
leaping into an orbit of badges, tiny moons catching the sheen
of his perfect Black Afro.
Arc kicks, karate chops, and 30 cops on their backs.
It starts with the swagger, the cool lean into the leather
front seat of the black and white he takes off in.
Deep hallelujahs of moviegoers drowning out
the wah wah guitar.
Salt & butter, high fives, right on, brother!
and Daddy glowing so bright, he can light the screen
all by himself.
This is how it goes down.
Friday night and my father drives us
home from the late show, two heroes Cadillacking
across King Boulevard.
In the car's dark cab, we jab and clutch, Jim Kelly
and Bruce Lee with popcorn breath,
and almost miss the lights flashing in the cracked side
mirror.
I know what's under the seat, but when the uniforms approach
from the rear quarter panel, when the fat one leans
so far into my father's window I can smell his long day's
work, when my father, this John Henry of a man, hides
his hammer, doesn't buck, tucks away his baritone, license
and registration shaking as if showing a bathroom
pass to a grade school principal,
I learn the difference between cinema and city,
between the movie house cheers of old men
and the silence that gets us home.
Thank you so much for that, John.
And thank you also for talking a little bit
of a very known fact.
But it's sort of overlooked that the incarceration
and that pipeline starts sometimes at birth.
It sometimes starts at birth in the neighborhood.
So it's not just the first engagement with law enforcement
when someone is arrested.
It's kind of like this thing that's
been going on for a long time.
So thank you for sharing that poem.