(Kwame Dawes, Jorie Graham, Terrance Hayes) Sponsored by Blue Flower Arts. Pulitzer Prize-winner Jorie Graham and National Book Award-winner Terrance Hayes stretch language past the barriers of mind and limitations of personal experience to reinstate a kind of dignity to the world. Their creative tensions puncture the commonplace allowing the familiar to dislocate, laying bare our tenuous connection to life. Yet grace and a vivid, wakeful presence abide. Their poems demonstrate how the excavation of language itself can shape new possibilities for imagination to evolve.

Published Date: June 5, 2013

Transcription

Speaker 1 (00:00:04):

Welcome to the A W P podcast series. This event was recorded at the 2013 A W P conference in Boston. The recording features Jory Graham, Terrence Hayes, and Kwame Das. You'll now hear Alison Gucci provide introductions.

Speaker 2 (00:00:32):

Good evening everyone. Thank you for coming to our poetry event language at the breaking point, a conversation and reading with Terence Hayes and Joy Graham. My name is Alison Ucci and I am the founder of Blue Flower Arts, which is a literary speakers agency representing poets, authors, and filmmakers for their readings and appearances. And this evening we are most delighted to host Terrance Hayes and Jori Graham, it is my great pleasure to introduce Kwame Das, the moderator for this evening's conversation, and he will then in turn introduce Terrance and Jori Gian born Jamaican poet. Kwame Das is the award-winning author of 16 books of poetry most recently wheels published in 2011 and numerous books of fiction, non-fiction, criticism and drama. Elizabeth Alexander writes, Kwame Dawes is one of the most important writers of his generation who has built a mighty and lasting body of work. This year, Duppy Conqueror new and selected poems will be published by Copper Canyon Press. Dawes is currently the editor of Prairie Schooner at the University of Nebraska, where he's a chancellor's professor of English. He is also the co-founder and programming director of the Calabash International Literary Festival, which takes place in Jamaica in May of alternating years. Please join me in welcoming Kwame das and exploration this evening of the excavation of language in the shaping of imagination.

Speaker 3 (00:02:37):

Good evening. How are you doing? You doing okay? All right, lively up yourself. Now folks, this is not a funeral. This is a poetry reading. So what we're doing tonight, we're going to hear two amazing poets and then we are going to, if time allows, and this is what one must say, we're going to have a conversation of sorts. What I thought I'll do is introduce the poets before they read and then they'll read and then we'll join each other on stage and have a conversation. The introduction that I'm going to give of each poet is in many ways a kind of joint introduction, but you'll see the lines separating at some point as well, which is to say that it's not necessarily as well written as I hoped it would be. Yeah.

Speaker 3 (00:03:41):

Okay. So I'll begin with Jerry Graham who will read second, and then of course Terence Hay will read first so that when I finish reading, Terence said, I can say, ladies and gentlemen, it's Terence Hay. I could do it that way so that way it works. So I'll start with Jerry Graham. Jerry Graham must contend with the almost tyrannical demand made of the modernist to interrogate and question the very artist fist of poetry, the wonderful presence of a poem appearing as a whole and finished thing. The poet is poet. The title poet is an embarrassing label label, but necessary one for cataloging the work. If in her earlier work, she happily indulges the idea of the authors masking. By the time we encounter her later work, we see a confident, bold interruption of the confines of artifice by drawing attention to the eye as something of an interloper in the poem.

Speaker 3 (00:04:34):

For poets who are willing to remove the armor that protects us, Jerry Graham teaches us what bravery it constitutes to examine the idea of the poet. Her elliptical leaps her tumbling mutations of ideas from image and thought into new unexpected images and thoughts with much of the virtuo tightrope dance of somebody like Shakespeare. But she does it with far less adherence to the tyrannies of the sentence, to create what can only be described as a splendidly alive engagement with language and its inadequacies. And these are her gifts to us. Look at what happens in this fragment of a poem treadmill. I enter the poem here on line 28 at 6:44 PM I have been trying to stay outside, but the city itself took time off from dying to whisper into my air. We need you the complaint, which we will nail once again to the door, must be signed by everyone.

Speaker 3 (00:05:32):

Early last year, I happened to be in London when the winner of the forward poetry prize was announced. I was at the event and after the spare ceremony, the British Dew it very spare of the announcement, the British publisher of place read a poem by the winner Jerry Graham. The passage was a tender, disarmingly, welcoming walk into something akin to narrative. It was simply beautiful and these lines traveled with me on my tube journey to my hotel. It was a kind of haunting grace. Graham is making what has already been a great contribution to American poetry into what one might call monumental, a work of poetic authority and importance. She writes with an urgent sense of now as if Guantanamo Bay and Midsummer's reliable magic have everything in common, as if the violent deaths of dogs and the inscrutable silence of God are part of the same song, as if the making of poems can be the only thing in the world.

Speaker 3 (00:06:26):

In our present moment, we'll wrestle with her work. As we have wrestled with wilker, we will be bewildered and alarmed, and yet we will try to stay with her just long enough for the relief of the eye, the relief of the poet reminding us that we can breathe, be confused, and yet still be filled with pure illumination. Terence Hayes, I met Terence Hayes many years ago and became struck by the things that animated him. Basketball, jazz, music, art and poetry, the basketball you can expect he had to have an excuse for his height, but it was his wonderfully dynamic and energetic engagement with poetry, his encyclopedic knowledge and his voracious hunger to know more poetry, more poets, more writers who have fed poets completely, and all of this fascinated me and filled me with great admiration. Hayes has won his share of awards, but his work remains consistently restless, dynamic, stretching the limits of form, dancing to multiple musics, and yet paying such tender and human homage to the writers he admires and hates and those he wants to emulate and those he wants to eliminate.

Speaker 3 (00:07:38):

He is a living, breathing, driving force that grows out of a pure belief in the poetic art. Here's what I would say. His would fascinate and please a 24 year old Langston Hughes because he would be exactly the poet, not afraid of being black and not afraid of writing what it means to be American with open eyes, critical insight and hunger for truth. His titles are growing in importance, a study in what we call formal practice, but a study in a kind of human vulnerability that has turned the native word, the word of the poet, and a word like stepfather into a late motif of anxiety, loss and grace. Muscular music, hip logic, wind in the box, light head. I lived in South Carolina for almost 20 years. It's a place he is from and a place that defines him and yet it is a place, not a place out of which he has leaped with a combination of talent, labor, and drive. It is easy to be sucked into his wit and music. It is just as easy to be left breathless in the face of the raw honesty of his truth. Terence Hayes has invented forms that others are imitating. Then he turns around and suggests we find new shapes, we will hear more and more him. He will teach us who we are as Americans and as human beings. So ladies and gentlemen, Terrence Hayes and Jerry Graham. Thank you.

Speaker 4 (00:09:16):

All right. All right, so thanks Kwame. Glad y'all out. Anytime I see people out on a Friday night, I say, would I do this if I was in the audience? So Luis Rodriguez, man, that's the guy who published my first book and this wouldn't even happen anymore. I had never met him. I just met him five minutes ago. When did I publish that book? A while ago. And so think about that, like a dude publishes your book and he's never met you. That never happened. So it's an honor to meet you. I'm so happy you're in the audience and my wife's in the audience, so if you know me, I don't have to say anything else about her. That's all I talk about. So alright, so that's it. I'm just going to read you some poems and then we'll talk. I try not to talk too much between the poems so I can use the time for the poems. Alright, so New York poem

Speaker 4 (00:10:21):

In New York from a rooftop in Chinatown, one can see the sci-fi bridges and the aisles of buildings where there are more miles of shortcuts and alternative takes than there are Miles Davis alternative takes. There is a white girl who looks hijacked with feeling in her glittering jacket and her boots that look made of dinosaur skin and R is saying to her, I love you. I love you again and again on a Chinatown rooftop in New York, anything can happen. Someone says abattoir is such a pretty word for slaughterhouse. Someone says mermaids are just fish. Ladies, I am so fucking vain that I cannot believe anyone is threatened by me in New York. Not everyone is forgiven. Dear New York, dear girl, with a barcode tattooed on the side of your face and everyone writing poems about and inside and outside the subways, dear people underground in New York on the sci-fi, bridges and aisles of New York on the rooftops of Chinatown, were Miles Davis as pumping in and someone is telling me about Contras, how Cleve and Cleve are the same word, looking in opposite directions.

Speaker 4 (00:11:53):

I now know Bolt is to lock and bolt is to run away. That's how I think of New York. Jonesing for Grace Jones at the party and someone jonesing for grace. So I rarely read that outside of New York. I figure everybody's hating on New York, so I like it. I'm working on other poems about other places, they're just not as good. So I do like New York. Alright, black Confederate ghost story. Why aren't there more Black Ghost stories? Black Confederate ghost story for bugs, attention, African-American apparitions hung, burned, or drowned before anyone alive was born. Please make a mortifying midnight appearance before the handyman. Standing on my porch this morning with a beard as wild as Walt Whitman's, except he is the anti Whitman. This white man with confederate pens littering his denim cap and jacket and by Mortify Dear Ghost, I mean scare the shit out of him.

Speaker 4 (00:13:01):

I wish I were as tolerant as Walt Whitman waltzing across a battlefield like a song, covering a cry of distress. But I am. I want to be a storm covering a confederate parade. The handyman's insistence that there were brigades of black confederates as oxymoronic as terms like Civil war, free slave. It is the opposite of history. Goodbye plantations, doused in Sherman's, fire and homely, lonesome women weeping over blue and gray bodies. Goodbye colored ghost. You could have headed north if there was a south to flee in Louisiana. North begins with Mississippi, east is Alabama, west is Texas, and here is this fool telling me there were blacks who fought to preserve slavery. Goodbye slavery. Hello, black accomplices and accomplished blacks. Hello, Robert E. Lee. Bobblehead doll on the Handyman's dashboard whistling Dixie across our post-racial country. Last night I watched several hours of television and saw no blacks, NASDAQ, nascar, nada black.

Speaker 4 (00:14:09):

I wish there were more ghost stories about lynched Negroes haunting the mobs that lynched them. Do I believe no one among us was alive between 1861 and 1865? I do and I don't. We all have somewhere to go and we are probably already there. I know only one ghost story featuring a brother in Alabama dragged to the center of town in a storm for some crime he didn't commit. He was hung as lightning struck a window on the courthouse. He's been haunting ever since. Attention apparitions. This is a solicitation very much like a prayer. Your presence is requested tonight when this man is polishing his civil war relics and singing good old rebel soldier to himself. Hello sliding chairs. Hello, vicious whispering shadows. I'm a reasonable man, but I want to be as inexplicable as something hanging a dozen feet in the air. All right, so

Speaker 4 (00:15:13):

I have to set this one up, but as far as a poem goes, I would say don't ask me any questions, I'll just say that there's a line in it. I was listening to this guy on the radio when Trayvon Martin was shot and the guy had a response to the fact that all this activity was going on around him. And so he said, whenever there's something controversial, whenever something happens, calamity, pimps come out of the woodwork and start to paddle their own canoes, which I was like, wow, what a sentence. Both the most fucked up thing I've ever heard and yet the most beautiful thing. So I was like, I'm going to put that in a poem and in the poem I'm going to make sure I threaten them. But anyway, so that's in here. That's all you need to know. I guess I could say this, that it's just a reference that nobody ever gets. So I always have to make sure I say it like the difference between wigger and whack. It's a slight difference. Alright, wig frac.

Speaker 4 (00:16:16):

Sometimes I want a built-in scalp that looks and feels like skin. A form of camouflage protection against sunburn and frostbite horse hair that covers the nightmares and makes me feel civilized. Somebody slap a powdered wig on me so I can hammer a couple sentences like Louis the iv, small and bald as a boiled egg, making himself taller by means of a towering hairpiece resembling a Corinthian column or maybe a sky scraping kid with no play wig worn by someone playing niggas with attitudes at a penthouse party with no black people invited. We up in the club humming. Hey mama. In our numb skull caps underscore the brain's captivity. Somebody slap me. Norman mailer's essay. The white negro superficial reflections on the hipster never actually uses the word wigger. I'd rather say whack. It may be fruitful to consider me a philosophical psychopath. We club it in our wigs of pleases and pathological, coulda, woulda, should have oblong with longing.

Speaker 4 (00:17:24):

The ladies wear wigs of no-nos and knots. Knots of knots do not, cannot ought not step to me. Wigs dipped and died. The color of cosmopolitans citrus wheat. Beer swirling on their scalps, off their scalps side of scalps, their center parts and irrigated plats, flirty bangs dangle below a bow clip of sparkle. A lady places her bow about face to place, her face in place, which is a placebo of place. Her face is a placebo. Let's wear ready-made wigs, custom-made wigs, hand-tied wigs and machine-made wigs. No negro can saunter down the street with any real certainty. Violence will not visit him. Wrote mailer bullets. Shout through the darkness. Dumb people are dangerous. Calamity, pimps come out of the woodwork and start to paddle their own canoes. This was a white dude's response to the death of Martin Later. Let's beat that apathy wig right off him.

Speaker 4 (00:18:22):

You wear the shark head wig and I'll wear the wig of tidewater rising to the ceiling. You wear the buckaroo wig and I'll wear a wig of tumbleweed when anyone says you look beautiful. Reply, I feel beautiful like the beautiful shoulder link locks shorn by a cancer stuffed bride in need of money. Let's get higher than God tonight like the military wives of Imperial Rome, smiling in the blonde and red haired wigs cut from the scalps of enemy captives. Somebody slap me we'll wash and liquor, watching the coils curl curls. Coil coils, coil curls, curl on the girls non-slip polyurethane patches, super fine lace, ISIS wigs, Cleopatra wigs, big booty. Judy wigs under the soft radar streak. Music of climax singing the men all pause when I walk into the room. Y'all remember that the men all pause, the men all pause animals, the men all f, the men all wolfs and a little bit lost lust.

Speaker 4 (00:19:25):

Lustrous, trustless, restless as the rest of us and my life. The wigs eat me the wish to live a while on the mind of another human. It is not inhuman. The wish to slide for a while inside another human. It is not inhuman if you like I like you should wear a hairpiece. It is peace of mind. It is artistic. It is a lightweight likeness, comfortable wash and wear. Virtually looking and feeling with virtually no side effects. Let me hear you say this. Wig is terrific. A colored despair wig for your colored despair and economic despair. Wig, a sexual despair wig. A wig for expressive despair, political despair, a movable halo, new and improved. Your wig can be set upon the older wig just as the older wig when it was set, when it was newer upon the wig beneath it. Your wigs terrific. Where is your wig? Where your wig at?

Speaker 4 (00:20:28):

So those kinds of puns get me going so I put those up front so then I could calm down. So this poem, you always got to have something new to kind of keep you uncertain. So this poem is the last part of a very long poem called Instructions for a Seance or something like that. So this last section is called Collapsed lyrics of a seance and I put it with the wig poem just because I would prefer no questions about this one as well. Kwame, don't ask me nothing about it, I'd be like, I didn't read that joy. Read that poem. Alright, so collapsed lyrics of a seance, feeble heart beware, the dead are lonely, A faint witchcraft against death, self-destruction performed by stars. I am too tough to die. We are lonely. Our symptoms include metaphysical hunger. The mouth on your navel is your own.

Speaker 4 (00:21:37):

A two-dimensional weeping, a series of unacknowledged sacrifices, a mirror in the towering, dusk, groaning and brushing. One must conjure change. I have changed face, a provincial room a winter. Let's say you've gone back in time. Plague pneumonia, paranoia, intellectual starvation, spiritual exhaustion. Pratt falls, missteps. It should be 12 o'clock five. Soldiers should pass at the speed of light, negative and positive transgressions A means of disappearance. There is such a thing as too much symbolism. Distraction, cooing in the dark paneled room and uncoupled breast without windows and the mechanical soul, A certain nobility is implicit. I have two hands and they are not as similar as they seem. The glow suggests a burning, a beautiful trembling blood. What do I love and why do I know? And who will care to be unnecessary? Invite the ghost into your body. Tired people, a wonderful futuristic mood be born like it was now, before it was now even before that I remember now like it was now. The chatter of smoke and leaves and namesake and mortality and brush strokes beneath the name, the name as the sun rises. Even with life meaning world, I do not know what will happen. Dead. I may wish to be dead again.

Speaker 4 (00:23:48):

All right, so sometimes I think I'll just get rid of the previous eight pages and keep that. But you write that much, you got to leave it even if it's mediocre. So I'll put it in a book, but I'll only read that part. Alright. The deer, muscadines, I should say, is a strange ugly berry that grows in the south. You could make muscadine wine if you know what it is. Pataskala is a town in Ohio and any poet that has ever driven or seen the word potass has probably written a poem in which potass appears. So the dear, I just like saying it, that's why I kept saying Potass the dear Outside Potass, I saw the deer with a soft white belly, the deer with two eyes as blind as holes. I saw it leap from a bush beside the highway as if a moment before it lept.

Speaker 4 (00:24:55):

It had been a bush beside the highway and I saw how if I wished it, I could be the deer, a creature bony as a branch in spring and when I closed my eyes, I found the scent of muscadine, the berry. My mother plucked Sundays from the roadside where fumes toughened its speckled skin and seed slept, suspended in a mucus thick as sleep of an embryo. It is the ugliest berry along the road, but chewed. It reminded me of speed and I saw when I was the deer that I didn't have to be a deer. I could become a machine with a mother inside it. Moving at a speed that leaves a stain on the breeze and on the muscadines flesh, which is almost meat, the sweet pope. A muscadine leaves when it's crushed in the teeth of a deer or a mother for that matter, or her child waiting with something like shame to be fed.

Speaker 4 (00:26:01):

A bury uglier than shame. Though it is not like this for the deer, it is not shame because the deer is not human. It is only almost human when it looks on the road and leaps covering at least 30 feet in a blink, the dear, I cannot be the dumb dear, dumb and foolish enough to ignore anything that runs but is not alive. A trafficking machine filled with a distracted mind and body, deadly and durable enough to deconstruct the deer when it leaps. I'm telling you like someone being chased. I remember a friend told me how when he was eight or nine, a half naked woman ran to the car window crying. Her man was after her with a knife, but his mother locked the doors and sped away. Someone tell him his mother was not a coward. That's what he thinks. Tell him it was because he and his little brother were in the car. She would not let the troubled world inside. It was no one's fault. The mind separated from the body. I could almost see the holes of her eyes, the white fuzz on her tongue, the raised buzz soft as a bed of pink seeds, the hole of a mouth stretched wide enough to hold a whole baby inside. I could almost see its eyes at the back of her throat. I could definitely hear its cries.

Speaker 4 (00:27:38):

So this next one, this next one is they talked briefly last night about Lowell who liked to steal stuff. So I was reading him talking about how he stole the idea for skunk hour from Elizabeth Bishop, which everybody knows, but my favorite line in that poem, which would be like a great t-shirt, is like I myself am hell. So when people would say, do you like Lord? I would say I myself am hell. And then I discovered that that wasn't his line either man, that's Milton. Milton from Paradise lost almost exactly the same anyway, so I feel like I can steal from him, but it's just a structure. He was like when he saw the armadillo, he was like, oh, I'll just wander all over the place and wind up with an animal. So I'm doing that too. It's an ant I guess I should say too.

Speaker 4 (00:28:37):

This is new too. So I talk too much around the new poems as I figure out how to set 'em up in the south we say aunt, but I used to think it was only white people that said ant, but I'm not sure now because when I asked white people, do you say ant or aunt? They say Aunt, don't you say aunt. So I feel like they're just saying I think they're racist if they say ant instead of aunt. I don't know. So I say aunt but it's relevant to the poem. I'm going to say aunt, but you can hear ant I won't think you're racist. The carpenter aunt.

Speaker 4 (00:29:18):

It was when or because she became two kinds of mad, both a nail biting into a plank and a screw cranking into a wood beam. The aunt, I shouldn't say her name, went at the fullest hour of the night. The moon there like an un flowered bulb in a darkness like mud or covered in darkness as a bulb or a skull is covered in mud. The small brown aunt who before she went mad, taught herself to carpenter and unhinged in her madness. The walls she claimed were bugged with a tiny red eye device planted by the state or Satan's agents, ghost of atheist, her foes or worse the walls were full of the bugs she believed crawled from her former son-in-laws crooked mouth. The aunt who knows, as all creatures know, you have to be rooted in something tangible as would if you wish to dream in peace took her hammer with its claw like a mandible to her own handmade housing humming.

Speaker 4 (00:30:33):

I don't know why God keeps blessing me softly, madly, and I understood I was with her when Nepal bearers carried a box made of mahogany from her church to a hearse to a hole in the earth. It made me think of the carpenter ant who carries within its blood and evolved self-destructive property and on its face mandibles twice the size of its body and can carry on its back. As I have seen on tv, a rotted bird or branch great distances to wherever the queen is buried. Kingdom analia em ropa tribe. Campini. The species that lives on wood is like mud, rain and th the carpenter's enemy. Yes, but I would love to devour the house I live in until it is a permanent part of me. I would love to shape as Perha Chan, the master sculptor carpenter and architect of India is said to have shaped a beautiful tree into the coffin in which I am to be buried. I know whatever we place in a coffin, the coffin remains empty. I know nothing buried is buried. I don't know why God keeps blessing me. I don't know why God keeps blessing me. Alright,

Speaker 4 (00:32:09):

Two more, two more blind. Contour drawing I should say has something to do with this poem. I guess I think I'm just going to say that. Yeah, how to draw perfect circles. I can imitate the spheres of her body, the head, the nipples, the mouth, how the chin, the model rests at the bend of her elbow bends, but nothing tells me how to make her pupils spiraled from her gaze. Everything that I sees enters a circle. The world is connected to a circle. Breath spools from the nostrils and any love to be open becomes an O. The shape inside the circle is the circle, the egg falling outside the nest. The serpent circles rests in the serpent's gaze the way my gaze rests on the motto. In a blind contour drawing the eye tracks the subject without observing what the hand is doing. Everything is connected by a line curling and canceling itself.

Speaker 4 (00:33:28):

Like the shape of a snake, swallowing its own decadent tail or a mind that means to destroy itself. A man circling a railway underpass before attacking a policeman to draw the model's nipples, I have to let myself be carried away. I love all the parts of the body. There are as many curves as there are jewels of matrimony. As many whirls as there are teeth in the mouth of the future, the mute pearls abroad wears to her wedding. The sleeping ovaries like the heads of riders bunched in a tunnel. The doors of the subway car imitate and o opening and closing in the blood. The O spirals it's helix of defects, genetic shadows, but there are no instructions for identifying loved ones who go crazy when one morning a black man stabs a black transit cop in the face and the cop bleeding from his eye kills the assailant.

Speaker 4 (00:34:39):

No one traveling to the subway sees it quickly enough to make a camera phone eyewitness. The scene must be carried on the tongue. It must be carried on the news into the future where it will distract the eyes working lines into paper. This is what blind contour drawing conjures in me. At the center of God looms and oh, the devil believes justice is shaped like a zero. A militant helmet or war drum, A fist or gun barrel, a barrel of ruined eggs or skulls. To lift anything from a field, the lifter bends like an O. The weight of the body Lord into a hole can make anyone say oh the onlookers, the mother, the brothers and sisters omen begins with an O. When I looked into my past, I saw the boy I had not seen in years do a back flip. So daring the onlookers called him crazy.

Speaker 4 (00:35:42):

I did not see a moon white as an onion, but I saw a paper plate upon which the boy held a plastic knife and sopping meat and assailant is a man with history. His mother struggles to cut an onion preparing a meal to be served after the funeral. The onion is the best symbol of the O sliced. A volatile gas stings the slicers eyes like a punishment clouding them until they see what someone trapped underneath. A lid of water sees a soft edged world, a blur of blooms holding a coffin afloat. The onion is pungent, it's scent infects the air with sadness. All the Paul bearers smell it. The mourners watch each other. They watch the pastor's ambivalence. They wait for the doors to open. They wait for the appearance of the wounded. One-eyed victim and his advocates, strangers who do not consider the assailant's funeral appeasement.

Speaker 4 (00:36:45):

Before that day, the officer had never fired his gun in the line of duty, he was chatting with the cab driver beneath the tracks. When my cousin circled him holding a knife, the wound caused no brain damage, though his eyeball was severed. I'm not sure how a man with no eye weeps in the odyssey, pink eye, pink water descends the cyclops cratered face. After ESUs drives a burning log into it, anyone could do it. Anyone could begin the day with his eyes and end it blind or deceased. Anyone could lose his mind or his vision. When I go crazy, I'm afraid I will walk the streets naked. I'm afraid I will shout every fucked up thing that troubles or enchant me. I will try to murder or make love to everybody before the policemen handcuff or murder me. Though the bullet exits a perfect hole, it does not leave perfect holes in the body.

Speaker 4 (00:37:51):

A wound is a cell and portal. Without it, the blood runs with no outlet. It is possible to draw handcuffs using loops shaped like the symbol for infinity From the Latin inus meaning unbound. The way you get to anything is context. In a blind contour drawing, it is not possible to give you a subject, a disconnected gaze separated from the hand. The eye begins its own journey. It could have been the same for the cyclops, a giant whose gouged socket was so large a whole onion could fit into it. Esias might've rolled the eyeball among the cannons on his warship or buried it at sea, separated from the body. The eye begins its own journey. The world comes full circle. The hours the harvest, the cycle of the service bury whose appearance along the roads of Appalachia used to signify the earth was enough to bury those who died.

Speaker 4 (00:38:55):

In winter, when the part of the body that holds the soul is finally decomposed, it becomes a circle, a hole that holds everything parts of the body no one can see. I watch the model, pull a button loose on her jeans and step out of them as one might out of a hole in the blue valley, a c I found myself in the dark. I found myself at her body like a delicate shell or soft pill like this curved thumb of mine against her mouth. One must look without looking to make the perfect circle the line. The mind must be a blind, continuous liquid until the drawing is complete. Alright y'all, I think I'm going to stop there. Thank you.

Speaker 5 (00:40:10):

Thank you Terrance and thank you Kwame and thank you to the A W P and to Blue Flower Arts for a beautiful evening. Trying to give myself a little space between Terrance and these poems. Beautiful reading Terrance. Really moving. I'm going to start with a poem I wrote quite a few years back. It actually also has Miles Davis in it. So thought we could start there at the cabaret. Now excuse me, is there water here? Yes, I'm sorry my voice is a little raw so I'm going to do my best here.

Speaker 5 (00:41:19):

The Americans are lonely. They don't know what happened. They're still up and there's all this time yet to kill. The musicians are still being paid so they keep on the sacks pants up the ladder up. They want to be happy. They want to just let the notes come on. The mortal wounds, it's all been paid for, so what the hell Each breath going up up them thinking. Of course, will he make it? How far can he go skill the prince of the kingdom there at his table. Now is there some other master also there at a back table, A regular one we can't make out but whom the head waiter knows the one who never applauds so that it's not about the ending you see or where to go from here. It's about the breath and how it reaches the trumpeters hands. How the hands come so close to touching the breath and how the gold thing gleaming is there in between the only avenue, the long way captivity like this thing.

Speaker 5 (00:43:05):

Now slow extending the metaphor to make a place pledge allegiance by which is meant see, hear what a variety tonight. What a good crowd. Some of them saying yes, yes. Some others, no, don't they sound good Together and all around this space and seed spores and the green continuance and all along the musicians still getting paid. So let them and all around that the motion. Don't think about it though because you can't. And then the mother who stayed at home, of course because her body, farewell. Farewell. This is the story of a small strict obedience human blood and how it reved into all its bloods. Small stream really in the midst of the other ones in it, children laughing and laughing, which is the sound of ripening, which the musicians can't play. But that is another tale. Someone invited them in humanity and they came in, they said they knew and then they knew they made this bank called justice and then this other one called not they swam in the river, although sometimes it was notes and some notes are true even now.

Speaker 5 (00:44:53):

Yes, they knew each other. Then winter came which was a curtain and then spring, which was when they realized it was a curtain. Which leads us to this, the showstopper summer, the Americans. I wish I could tell you the story so-and-so holding his glass up the table around him, jittery and how then she came along, gliding between the tables, whispering it exists enough to drive them all. Mad of course, whispering sharp as salt, whispering straw on fire. Looking at you, the Americans whispering it cannot be. Stay where you are and the one in the back no one knows. Starting up the applause alone. A flat sound like flesh, beating flesh but only like it. Tell me, why did we live Lord, blood in a wind? Why were we meant to live? I am going to read another poem from a book titled Swarm from a series titled Underneath. This is underneath 13. Then I'll be reading poems from my most recent book place. I felt that these two would serve as an introduction. These have silences between the words and lines and I'll read those as well. Obviously we read the silences needed explanation

Speaker 5 (00:47:05):

Because of the mystic nature of the theory and our reliance on collective belief. I could not visualize the end. The tools that paved the way broke the body, the foundation, the exact copy of the real. Our surfaces were covered, our surfaces are all covered. Actual hands appear, but then there is waiting in the cave. We were deeply impressed as in addicted to results. Oh and dedication, training, the idea of loss of life. In our work we call this emotion how a poem enters into the world. There is nothing wrong with the instrument as here I would raise my voice, but the human being and the world cannot be equated aside from the question of whether or not we are alone and other approaches to nothingness the term subject, the term only also opinion and annihilation. The body's minute, nudist sensation of time, the world it is true, has not yet been destroyed.

Speaker 5 (00:48:57):

Intensification, void, we are amazed. Uselessness is the last form. Love takes so liquid, the foregone conclusion. Here we are, the foregone conclusion. So many messages transmitted they will never acquire. Meaning do you remember my love, my archive? Touch me here. Give birth to a single idea. Touch where it does not lead to war. Show me exact spot. Climb the stairs, lie on the bed. Have faith nerves wearing only moonlight. Lie down, lie still Patrol your cage. Be a phenomenon at the bottom below the word intention. Lick past it. Rip years. Find the burning matter. Love allows it. I think push past the freedom. Smoke, push past intelligence, smoke, helm sprawl. Favorite city, God's tiny voices. Hand over mouth. Let light arrive. Let the past strike us and go Drift, undo if it please the dawn, lean down, say hurt, undo in your mouth. Be pleased. Where does it say? Where does it say this is the mother tongue. There is in my mouth a ladder climb down presence of world impassable gap pass. I am beside myself. You are inside me. As history, we exist. Meet me and I will read four poems from place.

Speaker 5 (00:52:03):

The bird that begins it

Speaker 5 (00:52:15):

In the world of famous night, which is already flinging away. Bits of dark but not quite yet there opens a sound like a rattle, then a slicing in which even the blade is audible. And then again, even though trailing the night melt, suddenly again the rattle in the night of the return of day of next on time of shape, name field with history flapping all over it. Invisible flags or wings or winds, victory being exactly what it says the end of night. It is not right to enter time it mutters as its tatters come loose in the return. I think I am in this body. I really only think it. This body lying here is only my thought. The flat solution to the sensation question of who is it that is listening, who is it that is still?

Speaker 5 (00:53:41):

I think I am in this body. I really only think it. This body lying here is only my thought. The flat solution to the sensation question of who is it that is listening, who is it that is wanting still to speak to you. Out of the vast network of blooded things, a huge breath held candle lit, whistling, planet wide, still blood flowing, howling silent, sentence driven. Last bridge pulled up behind city of the human, the expense column of place in place, humming to have a body, a borderline of ethics and reason. Here comes the first light in leaf shaped coins. They are still being flung at our feet. We could be Judas, no problem could be the wishing well. Right here in my open mouth. The light can toss its wish right down. This spinal cord can tumble in and by awakened self. What is the job today my being asks of light.

Speaker 5 (00:55:06):

Please tell me my job. It cannot be this headless, incessant crossing of threshold. It cannot be more purchasing of more good. It cannot be more sleeplessness. The necklaces of minutes being tossed over and over my shoulders. The snake goes further into the grass as first light hits the clay in the soil. Gleams were due. Withdraws something we don't want any more of. Flourishes as never before. I feel the gravity as I sit up like a leaf growing from the stalk of the unknown, still lying there behind me where my sleep just was Daylight, crackles on the sill preparation of day everywhere underfoot across the sill, the hero unfolding in new light. The girl who would not bear the God, a son, the mother who ate her own grown flesh, the God who in exchange for time, gave as many of children as need be to the abyss. It is day the human does not fit in it. Employment, listen,

Speaker 5 (00:56:47):

The voice is American. It would reach you. It has wiring in its swan's neck where it is always turning round to see behind itself as it has no past to speak of except some nocturnal journals written in woods where the fight has just taken place or is about to take place for place. The pupils have firelight in them where the man, a surveyor or tracker still has no idea what is coming. The wall-to-wall cars on the 4 0 5 for the ride home from the cubicle or the corner office. How big the difference or the waiting all day in line till your number is called. It will be called, which means exactly nothing as no one will say to you as was promised by all eternity. Ah, son, do you know where you came from? Tell me your story as you have come to this station. No, they did away with the stations and the jobs and the way of life and your number, how you hold it, its promise on its paper.

Speaker 5 (00:58:06):

If numbers could breathe, each one of these would be an exhalation, the last breath of something and then there you have it stilled. The exactness, the number, your number. That is why they can use it because it was living and now is stilled the transition from one state to the other. They give you. Receive provides its shape. A number is always hovering over something beneath it. It is invisible, but you can feel it to make a sum. You summon a crowd. A large number is a form of mob. The larger the number, the more terrifying they are getting very large. Now the thing to do right away is to start counting to say, it is my turn, mine to step into the stream of blood for the interview to say I can't do it. To say I am not one. And then say 2, 3, 4. And feel the blood take you in from above a legion single file heading out information across a desert that will not count. Treadmill, the road keeps accepting us.

Speaker 5 (01:00:03):

It wants us to learn nowhere. Its shiny emptiness. Its smile of wide days. So swollen with void, it really means it. This is not a vacation. It wants us to let our S skull in minds. Its channel and runnels. Its slimy, stalked circuits connecting wildly it. The road wants us right now to cast it. The mind from its encasement forward to race up ahead and get a feel for what it is. This always receding this place in which you were to deposit your question, the destination. The mind is meant to want this. Isn't it meant to rage, to handle it, to turn it round, to feel all its facets, its fine accidents, death by water, death by wearing out, death by surprise, death by marriage, death, by having rummaged into the past, into the distant past death by ice core and prediction. The end trails are lying on a thousand years of tabletops.

Speaker 5 (01:01:22):

Have you not looked into them enough? Says the grayish road hissing. Or maybe that is my mind. I entered the poem here on line 28 at 6:44 PM I had been trying to stay outside. I had not wanted to put my feet here too, but the wind came up a little Achilles wind. The city took its time off from dying to whisper into my ear. We need you. The complaint, which we will nail once again to the door, must be signed by everyone. Everyone needs to be walking together. Everyone must feel the dust underfoot, death by drought, death by starvation, death by neglect, death by no cause of death by unfolding O the rose garden do still on it. The dry fields each drop held up by the petal. Look, you can see the cracks in the soil reflected right here. Puritanical, dried fields, sincerity at utmost in the fied field.

Speaker 5 (01:02:32):

The screen is empty, is full of cracked soil. The soil death by transcendent truth, death by banking practice, by blueprint, and mutually assured destruction, death by deterrent, detergent, derangement, defamation, deregulation. The end of the line where the tracks just stop. And who is that coming from? The woodshed to greet you. The end is always cheerful, says the day hurrying alongside as you splice through it, as you feel your astonishing aloneness grow funnily winged, who are you going to be someday? Who are you going to be when all this clay flowing through you has finally become a form and you catch a glimpse of yourself at daybreak there in the shiny broken faced surface who was awaiting you all day that you hurried. So what was it you were told to accomplish? Death. Rimless stare. Oh, hasn't enough time passed by now? Can the moving walkway be shut down for the night?

Speaker 5 (01:03:44):

But no, it is told. It is the universe in your mind as it expands. And it is October once again as it must be the new brightness. And again, gold lays down on them the tight rolls of hay, the long rows, the cut fields, which winter eyes hidden as it is at the core of everything. And the crows sharpen their blade calls on the morning and the frost blooms its parallel world. And the road seems to want to be spooled into your hands, into your mind. Fine yarn. You would ravel back to its place of origin. Is it true? Some people are not coming along with us. Is it really true? There is a road not taken and it is October once again as it must be the new brightness, the harvest, the dance and your dance partner be prudent. It really knows the steps. I guess real time means I spill a glass of water right in the moment. Kwame wanted me to, as I step into the poem, I spill a glass of water. That's your answer real time. A final poem and dialogue of the imagination sphere. A little argument with the imagination of which there has been a great deal of in these chambers over these past few days

Speaker 5 (01:05:49):

All around in houses near us, the layoffs, the windows shine back, sky. It is a wonder we can use the word free and have it mean anything at all to us. We stand still. Let the cold wind wrap round go into hair in between fingers. The for sale signs are bent and ripple in wind. One had fallen last fall and snow melt is re revealing it again. Rattle in ground, wind, siding, weakening on everything. Spring underneath the bulbs. Want to clear the sill of dark and find the sun? I can see now I can see them now under there in their soggy with melt and loam, which is loosening as their skins rot to let the whitest tendrils out, out they go snaking everywhere till the leaves are blurring. They fur out. They exist another years alone to time. And the bud will form in the sleeve of the silky leaf and they will quietly among the slow working pigeons.

Speaker 5 (01:07:23):

And where a dog is leaping and almost complete invisibility, make slim heads thicken. I am Ill says the man walking by his dog, pulling him so much joy and nothing will make it. More or less the flower as alive as it is dead above which the girl with earphones walking, humming. No one has warned her yet. She is free. But why says the imagination Have you sent me down here, down among the roots as they finally take hold. It is hard. They wrench. The loam is not easy to open. I cannot say it, but the smell is hope. Meeting terrifying regret, I would say do not open again. Do not go up. Stay under here. There is no epic. We are in something, but it is not the world. Why try to make us feel at home down here. Take away the poem. Take away this desire that has you entering this waste dark space.

Speaker 5 (01:08:34):

There are not even pockets of time here. There are no mysteries, there is no laughter and nothing ever dies. The foreclosure you are standing beside look to it. There is a woman crying on the second floor as she does not understand what it will be like to not have a home now. And how to explain to the children at 3 35, when the bus drops them off, the root is breaking its face open and shoving up to escape towards sun. Nothing can stop it though right now the repo men have not yet come. The school bus is only just getting loaded up the children pooling, squealing some stare out the window, kiss the soil as you pass by. It is coming up to kiss you bend down to me. You have placed me here. Look to me on all fours. Drink of the puddle. Look hard at the sky in there. It is not sky, it is not there. The flame of sun, which will come out just now for a blinding minute into your eyes is saving nothing. No one. Take your communion. Your blood is full of barren fields. They are the future in you. You should learn to feel and love. There will be no more. No more. Not enough to go around. No more around. No more. Love that. Thank you.

Speaker 3 (01:10:26):

Okay, so we know the time and those who need to take off can take off. But I'm just going to ask you to indulge us for just 10 minutes and I'll have a quick, we'll have a conversation. The conversation won't feel rushed because I'm only going to ask one question and they'll take their time and answer it. But first of all, let's thank Jerry Graham and Terence Hayes for that amazing reading. And thank you those who are staying around for the conversation or for what we'll do with it. So I had bunch of questions and they're all in here and they were questions that sort of imagined what kinds of things you would like to hear answers to, and then some that I'm desperately curious about. So now I have to choose and I will look after myself.

Speaker 3 (01:11:35):

So you're just eavesdropping. I was in Scotland about six months ago at the Stanza Poetry Festival and I visited Robert Burns. There's a wonderful museum for Robert Burns. And there was a little plaque talking about the funeral of Robert Burns. And there's a little scenario in there sort of anecdote and who knows whether it's true or not, but it tells of a boy, a nine-year-old boy at the funeral. And it's a massive funeral. People have come from all over the place. And he's looking up at his DA and he says to his father, who will be our poet now? And so I said, well, let's say it was a little girl and that will make it interesting to, and she says, who will be our poet now? And the question I have for you, and for me, this seemed like a very interesting idea and the most interesting part of that idea was the word, our idea of the our. So my question to you is, does this mean anything to you? In other words, this idea of a child standing there and making this question, asking this question on the passing of a great poet or a poet that is loved. So that's one part of the question. And the second part of the question is for you, does there exist an our hour? Who would you conceive of? Who would be the hour for you if that question, not if that question was asked of you or about you. So is that clear? Kind of.

Speaker 4 (01:13:19):

It's clear if I don't have to answer it first.

Speaker 3 (01:13:22):

Well, there's only two choices here.

Speaker 4 (01:13:25):

Joy. Should I answer that person? You answer, man. Okay. Yeah. The hour thing is interesting. I mean, most of the stuff I talk about just walking around the house is around music. So I would say who is our Miles Davis, who is our Michael Jackson Prince is still our prince, so he's still around. But there's a parallel in terms of how we think of other art forms. Who is our great painter right now? Who is our Picasso? And the difficulty of answering that in a room this size or even a room with three people in it, is the difficulty of answering that question about poetry for me. So the question would be like, who is our last hour? Adrian Rich, Lucille, Clifton, Allen Ginsburg. You know what I mean? Have to, I mean, these are the lines that have just passed on for me.

Speaker 3 (01:14:22):

I mean, if we talked about tribes, our world for you that our is America, is that our poetry world? Is that who is that collective that is making that statement? In other words, if we said we think of Adrian Rich and we think of she's our is our America, and for you who might

Speaker 4 (01:14:50):

Be Howard is like you. I'm looking at you. So the two of us, that's an hour. Yeah. Okay. Everybody else is sort of so who's

Speaker 3 (01:14:56):

There in the conversation?

Speaker 4 (01:14:57):

Everybody else is sort of theoretical. When I think about just writing poems, I always say it's like me and my shadow. I'm trying to sort of address whatever that thing laid out behind me is getting at. Because everybody else is just theory. I mean, there's a bunch of people, but people in our, they're both sort of difficult concepts for me. I mean for a writer, for someone trying to make a thing, I know that we exist and there is nationhood and there are tribes and their neighborhoods. So I know that that exists. But in the moment of just trying to conjure something very specific, I find that thinking. The other question behind that is also even thinking in terms of legacy or importance. And this is just me. I always think the last poem is the last poem I can do. And I always think that nobody's going to read it. I was thinking, did anybody hear? I don't think anybody heard me. What did I say? I don't know what I said once I sit dow