Grand Ballroom, Hilton Chicago | March 1, 2012

Episode 46: Page Meets Stage. Sponsored by Blue Flower Arts

(Roger Bonair-Agard, Mark Doty, Taylor Mali, Marilyn Nelson, Molly Peacock) Taylor Mali and the Bowery Poetry Club come to AWP with the acclaimed Page Meets Stage series. Spoken word poetry and written poetry have inched closer in recent years, but there is still a big gap between poets who write to be read and those who recite to be heard. Or is there? Join us as performance poets (Mali, Peacock, and Bonair-Agard) and page poets (Doty and Nelson) are paired together and go head-to-head, poem-for-poem, revealing the playful give-and-take between the page and the stage.

Published Date: August 1, 2012

Transcription

Speaker 1:

Welcome to the AWP Podcast series. This event originally occurred at the AWP Conference in Chicago on March 1st, 2012. The recording features Taylor Mali, Marilyn Nelson, Molly Peacock, Roger Bonair-Agard, and Mark Doty. You will now hear Alison Granucci from Blue Flower Arts provide introductions.

Alison Granucci:

Let's see if I can... Jared offered to be my podium but I'm going to try to work out with this microphone. So thank you very much for coming to our poetry event today, Page Meets Stage. As Jared said, my name is Alison Granucci. I'm the founder and president of Blue Flower Arts Literary Speakers Agency. We represent poets, authors, memoirists, filmmakers for their readings and appearances. Please visit us if you like down in Booth 400 and I'm very delighted and honored to bring you this dynamic ensemble of Blue Flower Arts poets, Taylor Mali, Roger Bonair-Agard, Mark Doty, Marilyn Nelson, and Molly Peacock. Yes, give them a round of applause.

It's my great pleasure to introduce Taylor Moll, who will then tell you a little bit more about Page Meets Stage and introduce the rest of the poets. The New York Times calls Taylor Mali a ranting comic showman and literary provocateur. He's one of the most well-known poets to have emerged from the Poetry Slam Movement. He was one of the original poets to appear on the HBO series, Russell Simmons Presents Def Poetry and he was the Armani-clad villain of the documentary film SlamNation.

His poem, What Teachers Make, has been viewed over 4 million times on YouTube and it has become the title of his newest book which will be published later this month. What Teachers Make: In Praise of the Greatest Job in the World is now an inspirational book of essays and a passionate defense of teachers and the nobility of teaching, drawing on Taylor's experiences in the classroom and as a traveling poet.

Today, Taylor Mali and the Bowery Poetry Club of New York City come to AWP with the acclaimed Page Meets Stage series. Performance poets and page poets are paired together and go head-to-head, poem for poem, revealing the playful give and take between the page and the stage and bringing a spirit of camaraderie and play to the reading of poetry. Please welcome our emcee extraordinaire, Taylor Mali.

Taylor Mali:

Whoever says he knows poetry's definition certainly doesn't know it. Because the truth is, there are as many definitions as there are people who call themselves poets. It's what often was thought but ne'er so well expressed. The best words in the order that is also best. A prayer to the otherwise unprayable. That which is left when all else has ended, a celebration of things only vaguely apprehended. It is the art of saying the unsayable. All poetry is man's rebellion. It's about the beautiful futility or it's the spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings recollected in times of tranquility. That was Wordsworth and for what it's worth, he came close to explaining what words can be worth which is to say you could do worse. Poetry is jazz. It's the devil's wine with extra sizzle. All poetry is man's rebellion against being what he-izzle, fishizzle. It's the rhythmical creation of beauty in words.

It's what ideas would be if they didn't fly like birds. It's a kind of literary mirror, a way to make things clearer. Poetry is both the substance abused as well as the key to recovery. A poem itself is therefore a kind of literate act of discovery. I'm not saying I understand it. It's a mystery. Plato was right when he said poetry is nearer vital truth than history. That's truth with a capital T. Not the facts but the truth as you know it. That's one of the most exciting aspects there is to being a poet.

You can rewrite your own life and make yourself sound smarter than you actually are. You can constellate the night sky of your own life and make yourself a star. You can make yourself sound wittier, sexier, more alive. You can pretend you said teachers make a god damn difference when the truth is you said, "We make 27.50." It's what often was thought but ne'er so well expressed. The best words in the order that's also best. A prayer to the otherwise unprayable. It is that which is left when all else has ended, a celebration of things only vaguely apprehended. It is the art of saying the unsayable. Good afternoon and welcome to Page Meets Stage, everybody. Thank you very much.

Page Meets Stage. The very first pairing of Page Meets Stage was in 2005 when Billy Collins and I met back when the series was called Page versus Stage. Our particular pairing was called the Final Smackdown. The format has always been to go back and forth, poem for poem, back and forth. It's not a competition. It's not a slam. There's no winner. There's no loser. Poetry is the winner. In the words of Bob Holman, the owner of the Bowery Poetry Club, "It is the job of Page Meets Stage to figure out whether the place of poetry is on the page, in the air, whether it is supposed to go in one ear and stay there."

Now, we always choose poets, one of whom is ostensibly a page poet and one of whom is ostensibly more of a performance poet. But I don't want you to actually read too much into the labels because the truth is we always, and when I say we, the other curator of Page Meets Stage is Marie-Elizabeth Mali and Crisitin O'Keefe Aptowicz has also put in [inaudible 00:06:58]. Thank you very much for all of your help with this.

We always choose poets who are equally accomplished on both surfaces. All the poets we choose could really be either page or stage. And in fact, some of them have done the series twice representing page one time and stage the other time. The four poets we have today and the first pairing going back and forth for two poems each, we're going to start out with ostensibly representing the page will be Marilyn Nelson who has won... Allison, you made me look bad because my introductions are much shorter. Marilyn Nelson has won numerous awards. She is a three-time National Book finalist. She won the Frost Medal this year and she will be aptly representing page. Give it up for Marilyn Nelson.

Representing stage in this first pair will be Molly Peacock. Molly Peacock has six books of poetry, at least to her name. The Second Blush is published by Norton. She is a professor or a poetry mentor at Spalding University and she was instrumental in starting the Poetry in Motion series of poems on the New York City subway. I'll introduce the next poets when it is time for their pairing. Please put your hands together for Marilyn Nelson and Molly Peacock to help us find the poetry that exists where page meets stage.

Molly Peacock:

It's fabulous to look out here at everyone here. It's an honor to be here. Thank you so much, Taylor. Thank you, Blue Flower Arts. Thank you, AWP. I know we're supposed to be going head to head but Marilyn and I are going heart-to-heart. As I look out on this audience, I can see certain people who have lost sleep over a semicolon and I am going to address this poem to you.

The Cliffs Of Mistake. To know you are making a mistake as you make it yet not be able to stop is to step off a cliff expecting to scramble backward and up through the air to stand on the outcrop you stepped from even though it can't unhappen. As you backpedal wildly with the second step looking far, far below onto the more rain of pain you anticipate later which is now only the shock of recognizing the result. There's no leaping back from. Oh, god! And this is only a metaphor. Might this be what metaphors are for? To say what it's like before you hit what it is.

Marilyn Nelson:

Well, I'm going to try to connect with the idea of the semicolon. This is a poem which tries to be one sentence so there are a couple of semicolons in it. It's called Valley High Calls Mama.

As I was putting away the groceries I'd spent the morning buying for the week's meals I'd planned around things the baby could eat, things my husband would eat, and things I should eat because they aren't too fattening late on a Saturday afternoon after flinging my coat on a chair and wiping the baby's nose while asking my husband what he'd fed it for lunch and whether the medicine I'd brought for him had made his cough improve.

Wiping the baby's nose again, checking its diaper, stepping over the baby who was reeling to and from the bottom kitchen drawer with pots, pans, and plastic cups, occasionally clutching the hem of my skirt and whining to be held. I was half listening for the phone which never rings for me to ring for me and someone's voice to say that I could forget about handing back my students' exams which I'd had for a week, that I was right about the wasteland, that I'd been given a raise. All the time wondering how my sister was doing, whatever happened to my old lovers, and why my husband wanted a certain brand of toilet paper and I wished I hadn't but I bought another fashion magazine that promised to make me beautiful by Christmas.

And there wasn't room for the creamed corn and every time I opened the refrigerator door, the baby rushed to grab whatever was on the bottom shelf which meant I constantly had to wrestle jars of its mushy food out of its sticky hands. And I stepped on the baby's hand and the baby was screaming and I dropped the bag of cake flour I bought to make cookies with. And my husband rushed in to find out what was wrong because the baby was drowning out the sound of the touchdown although I had scooped it up and was holding it in my arms. So its crying was inside my head like an echo in a barrel and I was running cold water on its hand while somewhere in the back of my mind wondering what to say about the wasteland and whether I could get away with putting broccoli in a meatloaf. When suddenly through the window, came the wild cry of geese.

Molly Peacock:

Thank you.

Now, Marilyn and I have known each other for a long, long time. I promised her I wouldn't say how long. The first poem I read of Marilyn's, I read when we met a long, long time ago and it had the image in it of a little fish. She may not even remember this. Oh, she does. And I wondered what would happen to that poet who... We were at a conference sponsored by a spiritual organization and I wondered what spirit would enter that fish and how it would swim. And it is a huge pleasure for me to be standing up with her on this stage going back and forth.

We did not prepare this but I have a poem also about food, also about love, also in a frantic narrative. And so, it's called A Favor Of Love For Marilyn. Oh, it's got a husband in it too. "Thank you for making this sacrifice," I say to my husband as I run to Kim's market. Nevermind what the sacrifice is. Sacrifices between husbands and wives are private and fill a person with simple healing water. Kim's buzzes with Sunday night customers as into my plastic basket go watercress, asparagus, garlic, pecans. When a girl throws herself through the plastic door flaps, tears streaming down her face, and her boyfriend catapults past the troughs of oranges, screaming, "Water! Water!" and Mr. Kim pierced down his quizzical nose and Mrs. Kim stands in mountain pose, openly hating that girl for dying of an overdose among the lemons, mangoes, papayas, and limes of the country of her family's origins.

Plunging among the plums and dying there. The color of a plum beneath her dark hair, for the girl is turning purple. From the back of the store by the water, the boyfriend shouts that she's swallowed a lollipop head. Now, she is almost the color of an eggplant and Mr. Kim by the register is asking her, "Should I call 911?" In a pleasant insistent whisper, "Should I call 911?" "Call 911!", I say to him as a big sound should boom from her but only a bubbles queeks at her lips and I'm raising my woolen arm aiming for her shoulder blades where I whack and whack her again and no lollipop pops out. But sound bellows out and like idiots everywhere, her boyfriend shouts, "Calm down! Calm down!" forcing water into her throat which must help dissolve the candy, my back slap dislodged. "Where's a choking victim's posterior supposed to hang?" the boyfriend demands of Mr. Kim. "I'll cancel 911," he says.

"Where is that lady?" the sobbing girl is asking. "Right here. I am right here behind you." I am putting a dive in my basket as she grabs me in a bear hug and her face has a human color and it's a hard face, long and horsey. "Oh, mommy!", she shouts. As my sister was dying, she called me mommy. So now, I stand in mountain pose and she smiles up from a pile of plastic baskets, "My name is Marisol," she says. "My name is Molly," I say, afraid she might hear those L's as M's. "Well, thank you and thank my boyfriend for saving my life!" "No. Well, don't eat any more lollipops," I say, closing the cosmic circle begun at breakfast when my husband made the promise I still won't reveal. Grown human beings making sacrifices return to the universe a favor of love.

Marilyn Nelson:

This is more difficult than I realized. I didn't bring a whole lot of poems. I'm going to read a poem which I think is also about passing years together. Molly and I have known each other indeed for many years and about sacrifice. This is a poem from a book about a village that was founded in 1827 north of Manhattan by a group of free African-American people. They bought land and started a village called Seneca Village which lasted for about 30, 35 years and was just demolished in the construction of Central Park.

So my book, Seneca Village, tries to tell the story of the village, the people who lived in the village, and this time period. And this is a poem in the voice of a woman named Nancy Morris whose name I found in the census. She was a widow. This takes place in 1838 and it's about the underground railroad but it's also about being a woman of a certain age. It's called Conductor.

When did my knees learn how to forecast rain and my hairbrush start yielding silver curls? Of late, a short walk makes me short of breath and every day begins and ends with pain. Just yesterday, I was raising my girls. Now, I'm alone and making friends with death. So let the railroad stop at my back door for a hot meal. What do I have to lose? The Lord has counted the hairs on my head and made a little space under my floor. All I ask of life is to be of use. There'll be time to be careful when I'm dead. Birth is a one way ticket to the grave. I've learned that much slowly over the years watching my body age. Time is a thief and what we give away is all we can save. So bring on the runaways, I know no fear. Let life have meaning if it must be brief.

Thanks.

Taylor Mali:

Molly Peacock and Marilyn Nelson.

We will see them again. They will switch partners. I forgot to mention that the regular Page Meets Stage happens on the third Wednesday of every non-summer month at the Bowery Poetry Club in New York City. If you come over to the book signing table after the show, if you're a New Yorker, I'll give you a card that shows the next couple of pairings. Now, the boys' turn. Ostensibly representing the stage will be Roger Bonair-Agard, a two-time National Poetry Slam champion, one of the original poets on Def Poetry Jam, the author of Gully, a Cave Canem fellow, and a former student of Marilyn Nelson. Ostensibly representing the page will be Mark Doty whose 2008 book, Fire to Fire: New and Selected Poems, won the National Book Award. He is currently a professor at Rutgers University. Put your hands together for Roger Bonair-Agard and Mark Doty.

You first. Ready?

Roger Bonair-Agard:

Yeah. Okay.

What it do, AWP? Live from Bedford-Stuyvesant, the Lifest One: Representing BK to the Fullest, Notorious B.I.G.

The night Biggie died, I, 28, dreadlocked, taut, on fire, 175 pounds. I, fast and angry and in love and Biggie cruising Wiltshire. I was kissing a woman and then another. Her tongue was incandescent and Biggie was notorious. I squared off with some dude, Biggies' Who Shot Ya blared out the speakers. Baggy blue jeans and tongue loose boots, I barked. I threw my hips into a deep far corner of the base groove. I buried the $20 in the juke. Biggie nodded to the beat on Wiltshire. Puff was at the wheel. Suge Knight in jail. My tongue in the mouth of a woman. Clinton was President. George W. Bush coked up. Biggie promenaded Wiltshire. My torso, a roll of wire. My fists stones. The night Biggie died, I rode the backseat between two women. I groped their thighs. They were leaning over the edge of my cavernous need. Their bodies taut lassos, their nipples hard as ammunition.

The radio crackled. We left the bar, the backseat stank sweat as Biggie royal waved down Wiltshire. I lied to get both women into my dorm. I pretended they both had my whole story. I loved them dearly. I hadn't learned how to say no. The night shots squealed on Wiltshire. Earlier, we'd stopped to eat. I blessed my food, black olive omelet. Made the sign of the cross. Wherever we live, God is. Biggie being rushed to hospital. Wherever we fight, God is. Who knows the science of the head nod like a bullet in weight? Biggie, a black sieve, the light of God moves through us. My tongue in the mouth of a woman. Wherever we die, God returns Biggie and a choir of sirens on his way. The love of God enraptures. She squeezed me frantic under the table. Biggie's farewell. The Brooklyn Illest. Unbelievable. The power of God protects us.

We made a raucous hosanna of our bodies that night. We sat in the car stunned when we heard the news. We didn't know if to cry. Biggie shot in Los Angeles. I made a grave of a woman. New York held us all in our public weeping, our eyes leaked blood. Our son, Biggie, dying on the streets of Los Angeles. I, dying in the bed of a woman or she dying in mine. Love went to war in both our hearts. This is the music I became a man for. This is the second line funeral I dance to as. Biggie lay I, born of the Duke. I love it when they call me Big Papa. You should have heard the woman moan for Biggie that night. You should have heard the ropes rough ripping as we lowered our caskets into graves.

Mark Doty:

Taylor, I don't know how to do this. So I got my work cut out for me, huh? Whoa. This is the music I became a man for. Whoa. Beautiful poem. I want to talk about music a little bit. I love the work that Taylor does bringing poets from different parts of the spectrum together. But to my mind, the term performance poet is sexy and glamorous. And page poet, no, come on. It sounds like the Xerox room. It's like, "Ugh! It's not going to work."

So this is my challenge to the audience. Let's figure out what to call that. Because think about the poems you love, do they dwell on a page? Where are they? They're in the page some but they're not. They move into you. They move into the body. They move into your way of understanding the world. They move into memory. They become gifts that you give to other people. Okay. So end of lecture.

This is a music poem too. And it remembers the extraordinary trumpet player, Chet Baker, who had a way of singing which in conventional terms wasn't great. He did not have a strong voice, it was a little wispy, but it could break your heart. And he would take a standard song and he would put what I could only call line breaks in another place. My funny valentine, and that little silence made all the difference in the world. He was also a heroin addict for about 27 years which is an achievement really when you think about it and he died in Amsterdam. He fell from a hotel window late in [inaudible 00:32:21]. So this is called Almost Blue. And part of the pleasure of this poem for me was trying to get as many lyrics from some of Chet's songs in here as I could.

If Hart Crane played trumpet, he'd sound like you. Your horn's dark city, miraculous and broken over and over. Scale-shimmered, every harbor-flung hour and salt-span of cable longing. Every waterfront, the night-lover's rendezvous. This is the entrance to the city of you, sleep's hellgate. And two weeks before the casual relinquishment of your hold, light needling on the canals' gleaming haze and the buds blaring like horns. Two weeks before the end, Chet, and you're playing like anything. Singing, "Stay, little valentine. Stay," and taking so long there are worlds sinking between the notes. This exhalation no longer a voice but a rush of air. Brutal from the tunnels under the river. The barges' late whistles, you only hear when the traffic's stilled by snow. A city hushed and distilled into one breath, yours, into the microphone and the ear of that girl in the leopard print scarf. One long kiss begun on the highway and carried on dangerously. The Thunderbird veering on the coast road, glamour of a perfectly splayed fender. Dazzling lipstick, a little pearl of junk, some stretch of road breathless and traveled into.

Whoever she is, she's the opposite coast of you. And just beyond the bridge, the city's long amalgam of ardor and indifference is lit like a votive and then blown out. Too many rooms unrented in this residential hotel and you don't want to know why they're making that noise in the hall. You're going to wake up in any one of the how many 10,000 locations of trouble and longing going out of business forever. Everything must go. Wake up and start wanting. It's so much better when you don't want. Nothing falls then. Nothing lost but sleep and who wanted that? In the pearl, the suspended world is in the warm suspension and glaze of this song. Everything stays up almost forever. In the long glide sung into the vein, one note held almost impossibly, almost blue. And the lyric takes so long to open a little blood blooming, there's no love song finer. But how strange the change from major to minor every time we say goodbye and you leaning into that warm haze from the window. Amsterdam, late afternoon glimmer, a blur of buds breathing in the lindens and you let go. And why not?

Roger Bonair-Agard:

Mark Doty's the realest. Thanks for saying that about page and performance too, I feel like. I just write poems and say them out loud. You all can call that what the fuck you want. So I think I'm going to stay on that heroin thread.

Mark Doty:

Yeah. You got... Got a thing going on.

Roger Bonair-Agard:

I think there's a backbeat of music to everything that happens in our lives. And so, I'm going to stay on that thread as well. This is called Defense 1988. The epigraph is from audio too. Milk is chilling, gizmos chilling, what more can I say? Seven of you. Thank you.

One, pickup. The drug dealers wear brightly colored velour sweatsuits open to the waist. Let me say, I moved to New York from Trinidad in '87 so that's also in the background of this. Okay. The drug dealers wear brightly colored velour sweatsuits open to the waist, thick gold rope chains hang past their sternums. Forefinger rings mimic a skyline on their fingers and the gazelles framing their faces under the brooding eaves of kangals are epic. They call me Young Blood or sometimes Island Boy. And they throw down bills on the pickup games we run under the lights at 116th Street. My handle is decent. My passes are money on a dime. My jump shot, almost non-existent. But my hands, my hands are fast and I stay on my man like a bad rash. The first time I hang out with the Kenny's, I'm scared to play but do so anyway. I am less than a year removed from home. These dudes ain't no joke. I'd better play D. Nobody on this court knows how sweet I am with a ball at my feet. How round and rich my baritone throat.

Two, cocaine. The two Kenny's want me to smoke crack with them. I won't so they're pissed. Still, I pool my money with theirs and in the back of an abandoned lot in an abandoned car, we take turns letting a crack whore suck us off. I returned twice more to the lot once without the Kenny's and I'm a little relieved when I do not find any of the disheveled, vacant eyed woman walking around and willing to make such an exchange.

Later in a cramped bathroom, I will smack $200 worth of cocaine out of Kenny's hand when he tries to force it down my nose and he'll want to fight me. The close quarters are the proverbial telephone booth in which I know I will bloody Kenny's whole body. And for the first time, I will fight and not be afraid of whatever United States Marines Kenny says he used to belong to. Fuck him. No one in this bathroom knows how sweet I am with a ball at my feet. How round and rich my baritone throat.

Mark Doty:

So I'm going to veer away from heroin just a little. Lest we stir up... We are triggering in this reading. But I want to talk about the shadow subject of heroin which is death, one of its shadow subjects anyway. And this is a problem that has to do with that continual weight and I want to read this especially for a young reader named Darius who is here today.

Darius is 11 years old and he is a person who absolutely gets dogs and their presence and also understands that they break our hearts because they can't live as long as we do. And what does it mean for us to attach ourselves to something that we know will disappear? So I wrote a lot of poems about dogs, poems in which a dog would do something interesting and I would use it as a occasion for a psychological reflection or a bit of moral instruction.

And I did so many of these poems they said, "You're not allowed to write those anymore. No more of that." And then, I got a new dog and I still resisted until I didn't. So the dog in this poem is named Ned. He is a now almost two year old golden retriever. This is called Deep Lane.

June 23rd, evening of the first fireflies. We're walking in the cemetery down the road and I look up from my distracted study of whatever, an unfocused gaze somewhere in the direction of my shoes and see that Ned has run on a head with the champagne plume of his tail held especially high, his head erect, which is often a sign that he has something he believes he is not allowed to have.

And in the gathering twilight, what is it that is gathered? Who is doing the harvesting? I can make out that the long horizontal between his lovely jaws is one of the four stakes planted on the slope to indicate where the backhoe will dig a new grave. Of course, my first impulse is to run after him to replace the marker out of respect for the taboo that we won't desecrate the tombs. Or at least for the particular knowledge of those who knew the woman whose name is inked on a placard in the rectangle claimed by the four poles of vanishing. Well, three poles now. And how it's within their recollection, their gathering, shall live. Evening of memory, spark lamps in the grass. I stand and watch him go in his wild figure eights. I say, "You run, darling. You tear up that hill."

Taylor Mali:

Mark Doty and Roger Bonair-Agard, give it up for them. And they will be back. Very quickly. Because Mark just got off a plane, his plane was canceled and then delayed and we weren't quite sure he was going to make it. And I want to give a shoutout to Derek Brown, the owner of Write Bloody Publishing. Derek, where are you? Derek was going to stand up and take Mark's place. Please, if you have ever been a part of a Page Meets Stage pairing, because I know there are some veterans, either scheduled to be one or have been one, would you please stand up now?

In the back is Susan B. Anthony Somers-Willett, John Sands will be doing it, Elena Bell. My eyes aren't that good. Who is that? Oh and yeah, there's a satellite series that did it somewhere and that is... I've never met you but you're probably Therese Vavoda is going to do that. And Marie-Elizabeth Mali is going to be next two weeks from yesterday at the Bowery Poetry Club and Anis Mojgani. Thank you so much veterans for doing that.

Has this ever happened to you? You work very, very hard on a paper for English Clash? Good luck with this one. And still get a very glow raid on the paper like a D or even a D equals. And all because you are the liverwurst spoiler in the whale wide word. Yes, proofreading your peppers is a matter of the the utmost impotence. Now, this is a problem that affects manly, manly students all over the word. I, myself, was such a bed spiller once upon a term that my English torturer in my sophmoric year, Mrs. Smith, she said that I was never going to get into a good colleague.

And that's all I wanted. That's all any kid wants at that age, just to get into a good colleague and not just anal community colleague. Because I am not one of those guys who would be happy at just anal community colleague. I need to be challenged, challenged menstrually. So I bet this makes me sound like a stereo. Come up here. Come up here. So I bet this makes me sound like a stereo but I always felt that I could get into an ivory legal colleague. So if I did not improvement, then gone would be my dream of going to Harvard, Jail, or Prison. You know, in Prison, New Jersey.

So I got myself a spell checker and I figured I was on Sleazy Street. But there are several missed aches that a spell checker can't can't catch catch. For instant, if you accidentally leave out word, your spell checker won't put them in you. And God for billing purposes only, you should have serial problems with Tory Spelling, your spell checkoff may end up using a word that you had absolutely no detention of using.

Because I mean, what do you want it to douche? It only does what you tell it to douche. You're the one who's sitting in front of the computer scream with your hand on the mouth going, "Clit clit clit." So do yourself a favor and follow these two Pisces of advice. One, there is no prostitute for careful editing of your own work. No prostitute whatsoever. And three, the red penis your friend.

Thank you. All right. And now, we're going to mix up the poets, mix up the partners, and bring you guys up for one more poem each. Please help me welcome back to the stage reading in this order, Mark Doty and Molly Peacock.

Mark Doty:

So you have had this experience purchasing a used book without really looking inside. Getting the book home and discovering that you have paid for somebody else's marginalia which can never be ignored from that moment on. So this happened to me with, and it saddens me to tell you this, an edition of Leaves of Grass. I was in a hurry to teach a class. I grabbed book off the bookstore shelf. I wanted to teach Section 6 of Song of Myself which begins, "A child said, "What is the grass?" fetching it to me with full hands. How could I answer the child? I do not know what it is any more than he." So this is called, What Is The Grass?

On the margin in the used text I've purchased without opening, pale, green, beautiful vessel, some unconvinced student has written in a clear looping hand, "Isn't it grass?" True. How could I answer the child? I do not exaggerate. I think of her question for years. And while first, I imagine her the very type of the incurious revealing the difference between a mind at rest and one that cannot. Later, I come to imagine that she had faith in language. That was the difference. She believed that the word settled things, the matter need not be looked into again. And he who'd written his book over and over, nearly ruining it, so enchanted by what had first compelled him. For him, the word settled nothing at all.

Molly Peacock:

In a book like that, I began to find clues to a role model that I discovered. My 311-year-old mother, Mary Delaney. And Mary Delaney invented collage in 1772 and I know you all have art books that tell you that Picasso and Matisse invented collage in the earlier 20th century. But in fact, there was a woman in a gown sitting at a table putting together hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of brightly colored pieces of paper onto deep black backgrounds to make dramatic life-size portraits of flowers.

And one of the reasons she did it is that she got stung on her foot by a net and she had to remain still and she was a busy person. And I'm going to read this next poem for every busy person in this audience which I think is everyone who hustled themselves to get in this room and whom I am so glad to see as I am so glad to be reading with all of these poets and particularly, Mark Doty right up here today. And they took her home, they carried her home. And the doctor said in 1772... She was 72 years old, by the way, when she invented a brand new art form. And I say this to you in my seventh decade. And they made her sit still and in that stillness, she watched a Geranium petal drop to the darkened surface of the table below and picked up her scissors and started her life's work and a new art form in response.

To me, that is such a poetic act. It is the act of inspiration, the thing that seizes you when you least expect it and in a moment of enforced stillness. Now, she, earlier in her life, watched Hogarth paint a portrait of her friend. And Hogarth had a theory that the S was the most beautiful letter and that it was the shape that governs the best art. Well, I guess I'm going to read you the 21st century short attention span version of S. I'm going to read you R, R & Her Egret.

"Never apologize ever!", R grew up straight in this resolve. Unlike her curly, lowercase mother who wobbled toward remorse all the time, rued her lousy job, repented her risable husband. Not R. She shot straight up one side of life to her goal of never. But eventually, she had to fall down into love and error. At the top of her line of resolve, she curved, rolled out, then reversed back, hoping to meet her oath of never but making a capital P. A P? That wasn't her at all. She reeled back down in a line to her original ground: R. "JE NE REGRET RIEN!" she tried to roar but couldn't, for she was full of regret and rien. Had she reached her essence?

Regret doesn't mean you'd change what you've done. It's a place, the negative space, a choice leaves like learning to see that the portrait of a girl in a hat can be reversed by the eye to the profile of an old woman. Regret? Just the flash of seeing both. R noticed her habit of shifting to one leg, lifting the other to hesitate partway under her body like an egret. She had a black and white bird inside her standing on one leg, lifting the other to buttress her breast. The embodiment of an R. Anchored, fishing, yet poised for flight. Such a bird dipped and flew rapidly over the roiling ocean with a quick laugh, no irony. Ever rising into rien without apology according to its nature.

Taylor Mali:

Molly Peacock and Mark Doty, give it up for them. And keep on clapping, coming back to the stage for one final poem, reading in this order, Marilyn Nelson and then Roger Bonair-Agard.

Marilyn Nelson:

My first poetry reading, I was in kindergarten. I had no front teeth and this brings it all back. And my poem was, I Want to Learn to Whiffle. I just brings it all back. I'm so pleased to be here and to be reading with this group of terrific poets and I want to thank you for naming me as an influence. Thank you. I'm honored.

So I'm going to read a poem from a book about an all girls swing band that toured the United States during the Second World War. They were called the International Sweethearts of Rhythm and that's the title of my book, Sweethearts of Rhythm. It was published as a young adult book with wonderful illustrations by the great Jerry Pinkney. This is one of the last poems in the book. It's... Let's see. I should say my book... I do history and narrative and this book tells those stories but the speakers are the instruments in the band. So this one is a poem spoken by the bass and this is at the end of the war and the bass is looking back on its glory days. The poem is called The Song is You and it identifies the bass player Lucille Dixon on bass.

Musical instruments sleep in the dark for several hours a day. The folks we belong to aren't always at play, so we can't be always at work. Our silence holds music. An undiscovered bourne, horizons which have never been viewed like undeclared love growing deeper in solitude or the crystalline heart of a stone. My sleep, however, was more like a death in the dark of an attic for years, forgetting my existence, and my glorious career with the best female swing band on the earth.

I was the great love of my sweetheart's life. A man came between us and soon, I was in the dark collecting dust and out of tune. They were pronounced man and wife. Instead of the charts, my gal read Dr. Spock. We played once a week, once a year. At first from my closet, I was able to hear her family's continual of talk. My sweetheart's grandson brought me to the shop. Something has ruined my voice. Older, not riper, I'm a sorry old bass. But that doesn't mean I've lost hope that someone will hold me in a tender embrace, her arms will encircle my neck. Someone will press her warm length to my back and pluck notes from my gut with her fingers' caress.

Roger Bonair-Agard:

Thank you, Marilyn. That was great. I'm working on a collection of poems right now. Tentatively titled, The Gospel According to St. Moses: The Black Historical Mythology of Blackness. But it started off by trying to look at the history of violence in the development of steel pan music out of Trinidad and parallel it with the history of violence on the hip hop movement.

So a little bit of background, this next poem is in Trinidadian dialect. So if you don't understand what I'm saying, that's why this time. And it's in the voice of an iconic figure out of Trinidadian culture and that is the pan tuner, the man who tunes the pans. And within the context of the history of steel pan, who especially in the '70s and '80s, every day invented new kinds of pans with new sounds. And traditionally, the steel pan was made out of discarded oil drums which is a whole other metaphor. So this is called, The Pan Tuner Answers An Important Question About His Livelihood.

If the bush calls, then the bush is my master. If the sea call, then the sea, the sand. But as neither bush nor sea call in a steel. I could hear everything in the steel. The steel could hold everything. My mother bawling and forever banning, she belly. The [foreign language 01:02:15] them restless and [foreign language 01:02:16] woman in the street strips in when they don't answer. The steel have all that. "Plant garden?" "Nah man, nothing in the bush. Whole noise like steel and a plant in no garden. You hear that noise? You hear mommy flipping the roti on the tower? You hear Ms. Mavis balling behind them hardened children? You hear Gittin's hunting dogs barking? The steel have all that."

Every now and then, daddy take the punching rum too serious, not often, and he come home and pelt a lash behind mommy. Sometimes, he connect and mommy bawl out, "Oh god!" Sometimes he miss and fall down and it's mommy shouting at him, "You [foreign language 01:02:58]!" And if I lean close to the double tenor, I find out the steel holding that too. So what else to do? Is where going? And if it's mass you want, if what you want is the almost silent whiff a woman waist make as she wind down low and if you want the noise of a thousand women waists whining at the same time that quietness underneath the bamboo knocking the steel have that too. So the steel is my master. The steel have that too.

Taylor Mali:

Roger Bonair-Agard and Marilyn Nelson, thank you so much. And Mark, I totally feel your pain about page poet is not something nobody wants to be. Academic is even worse, right? But I think if the series Page Meets Stage does nothing else, it disabuses people of the notion that slam poets don't really know how to write and that other kind of poet doesn't really know how to perform well. See us at the Bowery Poetry Club. If you're ever in town, see us over there. Thank you very much. Have a great afternoon. Goodbye.

Speaker 1:

Thank you for tuning in to the AWP podcast series. For other podcasts, please visit our website at www.awpwriter.org.

 


No Comments