So "The Stuff of Hollywood" began as--
it was really supposed to be a book
about gun violence in America.
And the longer it took for me to write these poems,
it kind of morphed into a book about America, violence,
Hollywood, and Trump.
Part of the project or part of my own project
as a poet that writes political work
is, how can I interrogate myself?
I think that memoirs do this.
But I don't think poets do it much.
And particularly, I don't think political poets do it much,
where we're always rightfully so kind of pointing
the finger this way at things that need to be called out.
But we don't often look at the ways that we're complicit.
And so part of my project was to interrogate my own complicity.
So I'm going to read a poem, a section from "The Stuff
of Hollywood."
I spoke with this morning earlier
today Claire McLane's honors class.
And a student asked me which poem in this book
was my favorite poem.
And it's this piece that I'm going
to write right now because I think it's working in a way
as a political poem that's a little bit more complex.
Every summer as a child, I burned ants, hordes of them.
A needle is stuck into my bruised skin,
this with the pills thins the blood.
There is so much blood everywhere.
The medical chart reads hypoxia.
Hypoxia means a body deprived of adequate oxygen.
They are Black boys, my nephews.
I want to call each of them.
I don't know what I would say.
The officer in the Michael Brown case
lost it, not the indictment but his mind.
It was the temperature, the heat.
I am familiar with numbers.
Barack Hussein Obama became the 44th president of the United
States.
Eric Garner was 43 when killed.
He said "I can't breathe" 11 times.
It feels like the '60s--
the temperature, the heat.
The '60s-- decade of dogs, fire hoses, batons,
crosses adorned with fire.
The ants posed no threat to me, no bites or stings on skin.
In front of the house, they congregated on the sidewalks
where the ice cream was placed.
Then I would set them on fire.
Chokehold, barred unilaterally in New York City in 1993,
the same year Eric Garner turned 23.
The criminal justice system is little less than a postmodern
auction block.
Matches, ants-- the only power I had.
At the beginning of the workweek,
the custodian saunters into the office,
upset about those illegals who will cause a government
shutdown.
He is Black.
I tell him, he should know better,
only after he has walked away.
Do I admit too much to say I probably
would have shot him dead too in Missouri, not because of skin
or poverty but because of anger, pungent blossom planted deep
in dirt the color of blood?
Three months after Garner's murder
on the streets of Staten Island, while bedridden in the nation's
capital with three blood clots in my right leg
and one in each lung, I began to think about power,
what it means to have it and what
it means to misuse it against another living thing.
Their deaths were quick, ant bodies
crumpling like paper in a hand.
The lungs can be drawn as if they were butterfly wings.
Butterflies are good luck but their lives span generally
no more than a month.
At some point, the ant burning stopped.
Reciting the pledge ended too.
In thinking about power and my own complicities,
maybe the story about ants is too easy.
Yes, someone on the opposite side of the camera shouts,
give or take a couple of numbers,
the oxygen level of a human shouldn't fall below 90%.
As oxygen lessens from the pressure of an arm braced
around a neck or as a bullet settles
into its resting place in the body, time moves in slow motion.
I can't breathe.
Three stresses or beats, two if the eye is swallowed up,
rendered virtually non-existent.
Cigarettes, Staten Island, and Minneapolis
are bad for one's health.
The untaxed cigarette-- didn't we fight the British over taxes?
Did I say we?
Yeah, I said we.
[APPLAUSE]