(Hannah Ensor, Kimiko Hahn, Adrian Matejka, Khadijah Queen) If poetry engages with spectacle, why, and in what ways? In this panel, we address increasingly ubiquitous confluences of poetics and spectacle. Is the poet's task to call attention to bright screens, to celebrity culture, to the many public-facing pleasures and pains of the 21st century? Do poets use spectacle (their understanding of audience, attention, flashing lights) to their advantage? When it comes to spectacle, do we want today's poets to decry it? Reveal it? Hold it up? Celebrate it?

Published Date: August 3, 2016

Transcription

Speaker 1 (00:00:04):

Welcome to the A W P podcast series. This event was recorded at the 2016 A W P conference in Los Angeles. The recording features Hannah Enor Kohan, Adrian Matika, and Khadija Queen. You will now hear Hannah Zer provide introductions.

Speaker 2 (00:00:33):

Okay, so hi everyone. Hello. Oh, hello. I'm really happy to see you all. So I'm Hannah er. I coordinate the reading and lecture series at the University of Arizona Poetry Center. The reading and lecture series has been ongoing since 1962 and brings about 20 ish poets of note to Tucson every year to read from their work and to share lectures on poetry and poetics. We recently just kicked off a whole new thing that we're excited about, which is the investigative reading is what we're loosely thinking of it as. And it's kind of a combination of a poetry reading and a craft talk and a poetics lecture that kind of comes at a question. It's a themed series. So this past February, we started this off with visits on four consecutive weeks in this order from Terrance Hayes, Kimmi Kohan, Khadija Queen, and Adrian Matika. And they each visited us to share their writing and their thoughts on and around overlaps of the categories of spectacle and poetics.

Speaker 2 (00:01:33):

We asked a really long set of questions, but what it boiled down to was this, if poetry engages with spectacle, why and in what ways. This question arose for us from noticing more and more poets incorporating pop culture, responding directly and indirectly to mass media events and calling our attention to large scale and very public violences. We wondered, is it the poet's task to call attention to bright screens, to celebrity culture, to the many public facing pains and pleasures of and beyond the 21st century? Do poets use spectacle, their understanding of audience or attention or bright lights or so on to their advantage? And when it comes to contemporary spectacle and spectacles, do we want today's poets to decry it, to reveal it, to hold it up, to celebrate it? So we invited four poets whose work was clicked into these questions in fascinating and complex, exciting, formally diverse and important ways.

Speaker 2 (00:02:34):

Luckily, they were all really game for this challenge. Their presentations in Tucson were wonderful. They were thought provoking, stimulating, lyrically rich, brilliant and broad in scope. And if you want to revisit them in full, they're all available online on our online audio visual resource. Sarah, our library specialist, is pumping her fist in the back. It's voca.arizona.edu. That's v O C a.arizona.edu. This panel today has two goals. One is to bring a sampling of the great thinking and writing that each of these writers did for the series to a wider audience. And the second goal is to get these three together in one place for the first time since giving their separate readings to have these thoughts and works in conversation with each other, hopefully to notice some confluences patterns and or interesting frictions across the separate processes. So we'll hear from each of them about 10 to 15 to 19 minutes, and then we'll open up to some questions and conversations across their presentations and with audience participation there.

Speaker 2 (00:03:37):

So please do take note of if anything is sparked for you, we'll bring you in also. So without further ado, I'll introduce each of these presenters with a short bio and then I'll hand it off. They'll present in the order that I introduced them. So first Kadeja queen is the author of Conduit from Akashic 2008, black Peculiar No Emmy Press 2011, and fearful beloved Argos 2015. In 2014, she won the Leslie Scallop Pino Award for innovative women performance writers for her verse play non-sequitur stage in New York City in December, 2015 and published by Litmus Press. She is core faculty for the new low residency mile high M F A program at Regis University in Denver. Kohan author of nine books often finds that disparate sources have triggered her material, whether it Flo bears sex tour in the unbearable heart, in exhumation in the artist's daughter or classical Japanese forms in the narrow road to the interior.

Speaker 2 (00:04:35):

Rarefied fields of science prompted her latest collections, toxic flora and brain fever. Han's most recent award was a Guggenheim Fellowship and she is a distinguished professor in the M F A program in creative writing and literary translation at Queen's College City, university of New York. And finally, Adrian Matika was born in Nuremberg, Germany and grew up in California and Indiana. His first collection of poems, the Devil's Garden, won the 2002 New York New England Award from Alice James books. His second collection Mixology was a winner of the 2008 National Poetry Series and was published by Penguin in 2009. Mixology was a finalist for an NAACP image award for outstanding literature in poetry. His most recent book, the Big Smoke, was awarded the 2014 Annis Field Wolf Book Award and was also a finalist for the 2013 National Book Award, the 2014 Hurston Wright Legacy Award and the 2014 Pulitzer Prize in poetry. He is the lily professor poet in residence at Indiana University in Bloomington and is currently working on a new collection of poems and two graphic novels. So these are very accomplished, amazing, brilliant people in short, and I will now pass off to Khadija.

Speaker 3 (00:05:54):

Hey, how are you guys doing? Thank you for coming. So I wanted to talk about the work and the topic together, which is what I did at the poetry center and intersperse some quotes from Gee, deboard and some art. And I've been thinking about the spectacle in terms of both theory and performance. So that will be the focus of this talk and I will read some older work and some newer work. But I think the basic thing we can think about in terms of spectacle is what exactly it is. So it's a visually striking performance or display. A E W P might be a spectacle and a spectator is a person who watches a show, a game or event. So we could be spectators, but we're also participants. So it's kind of like this thing that turns in on itself, which I find interesting. And I started thinking about whether or not life is a spectacle.

Speaker 3 (00:06:47):

And the board says that separation is the alpha and omega of the spectacle. So why are these things so fragmented in our lives that the human tendency is to separate the mundane from the spectacular. A function of poetry could be to bring them together because poets distill things and expand them and find the spectacular in small gestures and hint at meanings larger than the scene or thing or person addressed in the work. So in my latest book I went to this exhibition, it's by the artist Ann Hamilton. So it was in the Armory, which is in New York City on Park Avenue, and it's, I would say it's maybe eight times the size of this room and the ceiling is maybe four times the height of the ceiling and you'll see it in a second. But she does a lot of installation work and she invited a bunch of writers to participate.

Speaker 3 (00:07:43):

I was one of them. Marie Howe was one of them. I'll read a little bit from the book. So she had the writers write letters to fear, actually emotion, but I chose fear because I like pain, I guess. Dear fear, a sound made by a living animal is a voice. Sometimes pursuit is an animal, a swing toward the essential scream. A scream also is fire and unpleasant consumption. A salate avoidance, dear fear, true or false, you crawl into the made up skin, your priority potential, your actuality is potentate, your carbon irascible like traffic. We choose when you are an annoyance and when to fall in step with you, when to have somewhere to go on a slant, you point with hard fingers, the mirror swings. My fingerprints double in the glass, the body's encroach. I sharpen the lead and blade of my voice. Dear fear, some fears exist in space, not in the body. In some bodies you are learned, but I learned so much about you. I could never have loved you. I have careened into that knowledge like a real person. I have gathered myself into that knowledge without writing it down, but now I will write all of it down and it will mean you still exist. Your SPECT exists, your infinite, ve

Speaker 3 (00:09:26):

It's interesting that fear is so much in the body and I was thinking about the disability conversation because I have fibromyalgia and I know these kinds of conferences are very difficult to navigate for people with disabilities and who have mobility issues, et cetera, which I had a cane at a couple of AWPs and I know I didn't really participate as much as I would like to have done because I just couldn't physically. I thought I would read one of those poems and then I'll talk about that weird artwork that you see.

Speaker 3 (00:10:06):

Fibromyalgia, A k, a common syndrome, a K, a wastebasket diagnosis, a K a malingering, a K, a unknown cause a K, a innovation of the physical. A k a. No hope for a room where the wounded move, where the healthy cannot be bothered. Hospital, hospice, home beware. A death of sight awakeness. A k a Russell, A so-called civilization theatrically, an extracted source, a k a where to really see reminds fragility lines every intervening glance. A k, a lucky. If you can see from the end right back to the beginning, avoid the typical snatching up of medicated packaging, desperately swallowing the sexy glossary, a terrifying bleach. A k a pain beginning in the web of insular cortex connections where the brain's intra core ular chitchat goes awry and not enough muscle to fight any of it. A k a subtle a k a of fingerprint pressed down ink seeping staining a k a chaff city debris through unbearably intricate grates. A k a a vase of stems. The flower heads lopped off arranged in a bowl to wave their colors in the dark. If still standing, ask anyone who will listen though most. How do I look?

Speaker 3 (00:11:32):

Okay, so these images are drawings that I did when I was in art school. I'm also in art school dropout, and I was interested in the way that women's bodies were perceived as vulgar. Our bodily functions were perceived as vulgar. So I was interested in making it beautiful instead and also kind of in your face so that it couldn't be ignored or minimized. And that's what these drawings are, and that is a map of tender points on the body. If you have 11 of those, that means that you have fibromyalgia when you press down onto it, which is what was referenced in the poem.

Speaker 3 (00:12:16):

So these next images are from non-sequitur, the play performance that was in New York and performed by the relationship, and a lot of it is about race and spectacle. How does blackness figure into others' perceptions of me? How do we cover the difference between reality and perception? How do I perform as a poet? How do I perform blackness? How do I perform womanhood? How do all of us perform identity in terms of gender and race? Is it performance? How much is performance? How much is a way of being? All of those questions were very interesting to me and I don't necessarily know if I have the answers, but they're certainly things that I wrestle with in my work. So I'll read a little bit from non-sequitur

Speaker 3 (00:13:05):

Act one. Scene one, players enter from the left and lineup, evenly spaced downstage center. Each player is engulfed in a spotlight and the brown vagina says, I'm still not female. And the blonde institution says, I can never be invisible. And the online payments say your payment was rejected. And the fondled hair says, no. The white appropriation moves slightly into shadow and the brown vagina says, I am an animal to you. And the blonde institution says, I can sense your violent thoughts and the online payments say your payment was passed due. The fondled hair starts laughing and says, no. The white appropriation takes a little black notebook from his pocket and begins to write. And the brown vagina says, I am bleeding tonight. The blonde institution says, I feel afraid that something will happen to me, and the online payments say Your payment was not input correctly. The fondled hair says, my mother said, you can touch her hair, and the white appropriation begins counting on fingers and the brown vagina says, I'm still giving birth. And the blonde institution says, I should have dyed my hair. And the online payments say your payment was less than the minimum, and the fondled hair says, no, really she did. And the white appropriation licks, fingers and touch itself and the other players stand and look at the audience while he does that for a few moments then black out.

Speaker 3 (00:14:31):

So I'll just show a couple of these. So I'm not really a scholar. I don't pretend to be a scholar. I'm a working single mom. I write, I read a lot. I consider myself a practicing artist. I get up at five 30 in the morning to make breakfast and make my son's lunch because if I let him make his lunch, he's over there. He'll just be like Cheetos and Gatorade.

Speaker 3 (00:15:04):

So that's what I do. I don't do a lot of extra stuff because the fibro means I need to take it easy and not do a lot of extra stuff. So there's this outsiderness, I guess you could say to me, and it makes me think about is that a performance of identity? Is it just a habit of characterization? How can I get comfortable with that or should I be comfortable with that? I think it's valuable to question those things. I think it's important to see yourself or define yourself or even choose not to do that consciously, but I think they can all coexist, I guess is the conclusion that I came to and that I can be all of that at once and at the same time and also not at the same time. So when I was writing non-sequitur, I thought about all of those questions and the abstract characters were a way to demonstrate that without being regular about it, if that makes sense. Thinking about how we objectify ourselves, I guess those characters would be kind of a stand in. So I'm going to skip over a couple of things and I'm just going to read from the book that will be out next year. It's called I'm So Fine A list of famous men and what I had on because we're in Los Angeles and I grew up here.

Speaker 3 (00:16:24):

So poetry, I think it offers us a way to enter the spectacle from an intellectual and emotional way without having to necessarily embody it. It helps us to answer those questions about ourselves by looking at what other people are going through, and hopefully it's a little bit fun. So I'll just read a few of these. I know you're not supposed to read from your phone, but I'm going to read from my phone. So that's Marcus Chong. He's an actor. He was in this movie called Panther. That's where that's from.

Speaker 3 (00:17:05):

I met Marcus Chong on the 1 0 5 bus method acting. I was going home in a flower dress after work. I worked at Fat Burger. I was 18 and I think he was twice that I had my uniform in my backpack with my statistics homework and woman warrior. I recognized him and said I liked Panther. This was way before the Matrix. He asked for my number. We talked on the phone. He came to visit me on his bike since he didn't live far from my job. I ordered a veggie burger. I had a lemonade, and on my 15 minute break in my black fat burger outfit and ugly food service shoes, he asked me on a date. I said, yes. He called with a plan. I said, I thought we were going somewhere, but he wanted to make me dinner at his house. I said, no, I don't know you well enough to go to your house. He got angry the end, that's me and I would never be that tiny. That's prom. This is the Beverly Center. It's off of Third Street, Beverly and San Vicente. I met Cuba getting junior at the Beverly Center Food Court. I was 16 boys in the hood had just come out and I asked if I could hug him. He said I was beautiful and seemed really happy to get that hug, but I brown blushed nervously. He and his friends set a few booths away with veggie slices from Sbarro and smiled a lot. I wore my best friend's Kinte cloth, bomber jacket and red lipstick. I had perfect skin and didn't drink carbonated beverages.

Speaker 3 (00:18:22):

The Beverly Center Food Court is also where I met Devonte's brother from Jodeci. I forgot his name, but we didn't really meet. He was just looking at my eyes and looking at my ass as I kept walking. I really liked red lipstick back then. I think we both had on white jeans. It was summer. Dave Chappelle also looked at my ass and he also said, damn, we were in the frozen food section at Ralph's in North Hollywood and I have smiled. I was wearing my favorite old Levi's with the hole at the left side belt loop and just moved back to LA with my two year old. Chris Rock did the same thing, same jeans at the movie theater across from the Beverly Center, and he thought he wouldn't be recognized with that news boy cap on. But I saw him, he looked twice. Okay, hold on. It was obviously fun growing up in Los Angeles. I'm trying to find the Tupac one. Where are you? Tupac? I had you

Speaker 4 (00:19:22):

And then you left. He's right there.

Speaker 3 (00:19:24):

Oh, he's right

Speaker 4 (00:19:25):

There.

Speaker 3 (00:19:26):

And that'll be the last one I read.

Speaker 3 (00:19:30):

When we met Tupac, we had just left the arena on sunset because it was gay night and we couldn't get in. We were five of us crammed into Kelly's red hatchback, just about to get some Taco Bell and go home when we saw him in a black Mercedes equally crammed. And we screamed and yelled, we love you. And he and his friends invited us to a hotel party, which seems sketchy to me, but it was Tupac and it was Kelly's car and she wanted to go, so we went. It was not far away. Also on Sunset, by the time we got a parking space, a bunch of girls were already there talking to him and he was surrounded and shorter than all of them. His head looked like it was bigger than his body, but he had really white, perfect teeth and a leather vest with no shirt and all those hot tattoos.

Speaker 3 (00:20:05):

We asked one of the bodyguard guys where the bathroom was so we could freshen up and of course we all had to go together and Kelly started talking about how much she wanted to get at Tupac. She was from Louisiana and she lived in a house in the Hollywood Hills, the richest of us, which was easy actually because we were mostly poor and lived in apartments. But she said she wanted to go to his room and have sex with him and say he raped her. Can you believe that shit? She wanted the money and we all laughed at first,

Speaker 3 (00:20:29):

But this chick was serious. We told her we weren't going for it. She said, whatever, I'm cuter than all y'all, and I drove. I'm going to do whatever the fuck I want. She unbuttoned her top down to the lace of her white bra and walked out of the bathroom. I had on one of my least favorite outfits because it was time to do the laundry. I might be blocking it from memory, but I think it was brown or olive green or something. Yuck. And the four of us debated what to do about Kelly. So I decided to call my dad for a ride home, came out of the bathroom and asked where the payphone was back then. We all had pagers but no cell, and one of the bodyguards was blocking another girl from entering the lobby. She was at least six feet tall and barely dressed but super young in the face.

Speaker 3 (00:21:03):

He asked for id. It was a middle school id. She was only 13. He told her, go home right now, little girl. Where are your parents? We were in shock, but glad he seemed decent. We felt like we had to tell him what Kelly was doing and she saw us coming up to him and got pissed and walked away from where she was waiting in line to talk to Tupac. Yes, there were that many chicks up in there, all lined up and she said, let's just go. And in the car she called us a bunch of lame virgins, but we didn't care. I said she was a skank for trying to do that and she wanted me out of her car, but nobody will let her do that either. We never really hung out again after that. Oh, well, I didn't really like her that much anyway, when we met, it was because she said, I tried to steal her boyfriend, but I didn't. He came on to me, he was the captain of the basketball team and I didn't even know he was the basketball player at the time. I was just trying to study for my SATs and that is a whole other story. Thank you guys.

Speaker 5 (00:22:00):

Thank you, thank you. Thank you Tyler. Thank you Hannah. Thank both of you. Very exciting. Don't make a spectacle of yourself. Don't, don't do not. 1950s girl, child, Asian American, mixed to be good, meant to shut up, be clean, be still. I have written about my aesthetics in pulse and impulse, a collection of essays on motherhood and poetics and in still writing the body for Rand Keen's Seewell editors volume two of 20th century women poets and the lyric. But I hadn't thought of the word spectacle until Tyler and Hannah invited me to participate. So thank you because I had not, I first mulled over what my feelings may be, my connect, the first thing that came to mind is the word sensational. The word came to mind because poetry must engage with the whole body. And here I'd like to cite the work by Ethnomusicologist and performer Han a k a, my little sister, referring to the description of her scholarly book, sensational Knowledge.

Speaker 5 (00:23:25):

The publisher wrote, how do music and dance reveal the ways in which a community interacts with the world? How are the senses used in communicating cultural knowledge, paying particular attention to the effect of body to body transmission, and how culturally constructed processes of transmission influence our sense of self? Han that is my sister argues that the senses facilitate the construction of boundaries of existence that define our physical and social worlds. In this flowing and personal text, my little sister reveals the ways in which culture shapes our attendance to various sensoria and how our interpretation of sensory information shapes our individual realities. So sensational sensation, any art, my art must engage the whole body, the headiness of cadence, the seduction of slant rhyme for starters, the calling on sense memory, that is my desire, the point of my aesthetics, whether I exceed or not. Examples, exploring the French feminist term, writing the body, I find I depend on.

Speaker 5 (00:25:00):

I adore Elizabeth Bishops in the waiting room to explain what writing the body might mean. It is in that waiting space that the little girl, Elizabeth had a coming of age awakening, a physical reaction, vertiginous to the realization that she was connected to the African women with breasts, 20th century soft porn in National Geographic. And her silly aunt, the little girl Elizabeth, cried out. Oh, second example, Emily Dickinson's, poem number 1624. Apparently with no surprise to any happy flower, the frost beheads it at its play in accidental power. The blonde assassin passes on the sun, proceeds unmoved to measure off another day to un approving God. This is what I think Khadija has referred to as the mundane and spectacular, what I would call the dialectics of that Dickinson poem and its experience for the reader, the flower, the beheading, right? I love that stuff. My third example, and I'm going to read some of my stuff here, but my third example is from an earlyish poem of mine, from my book, mosquito and Aunt. In it, I invoke the hysteric because she possesses one of the many attributes bestowed on a woman to keep that woman, to keep us women in her place, weak and vulnerable and unchallenging in a world of don'ts.

Speaker 5 (00:26:59):

In my essay pulse and impulse, I try to claim what has been thought to keep women in their place and make an aesthetic out of say, intuition, the use of feelings as opposed to the rational and logical mind. The poem translating ancient lines into the vernacular, I want to go where the hysteric resides, the spinning a child knows when she twirls around till earth and air are inebriated and she falls, even bruises her knees as a delightful lake of sandwich and milk rises and others laugh with her or tell her now. That's enough. I have a long piece in my book, the Unbearable Heart. So I want to read an excerpt from that from the hemisphere Hanem. This long piece was written after I read Gustav Bert's letters actually on his trips to Egypt, which were really sex tours. And he wrote these incredibly sexually detailed graphic letters to his friends. So I steal some of those letters, respond to them, and I also write my own stuff in between.

Speaker 5 (00:28:30):

I'll do the thingies. When I read Bert the hemisphere I am for it is summer, mid-afternoon, my nap finished. I cannot find her. I hear the water in the bathroom, not from the faucet, but occasional splashes. I hear something like the bar of soap fall in. I cannot find her flares. Encounter fla bears encounter fla bearss encounter. I stand outside the white door reflected in the brass knob. I see my face framed by a black pixie cut more splashes I hear humming. It is mother's voice in the bathroom through the closed door, and it is mid-afternoon, no light from beneath the door. I twist the knob and hang my weight to pull it open. In the half light I see mother sitting in the bath, the white porcelain gray, the yellowish tiles gray. Her hair is coiled and pinned up. I see her breasts over the edge of the tub. I have never seen my mother without her clothes, her nipples.

Speaker 5 (00:29:54):

This is actually from Edward Saeed, sorry, not from Bert. Flare's encounter with an Egyptian essan produce a widely influential model of the Oriental woman. She never spoke of herself. She never represented her emotions, presence, or history. He spoke for and represented her. My mother's nipples appear dark and round. They are funny and beautiful. I leave perhaps to lie down on my pillow or find my bear. What did she say to me? Did she scold laugh, just smile or ignore me. My breasts have never looked like those breasts. Quote again from Saeed. Flore was foreign comparatively wealthy male. And these were historical facts of domination that allowed him not only to possess Ccha Kane physically, but to speak for her and tell his readers in what way she was typically oriental in 1850, A woman with skin, the color of sand in the shade of the sphinx, midday meant little. And of course, mine was seen more than veiled. I'm speaking now as ccha kne. I could earn a living dancing what I like best were gifts of chocolate, usually from French thinking I'd consider the evening amorous and reduce the rate. Paris must be lovely. But for the French

Speaker 5 (00:31:38):

Bert, my heart begins to pound every time I see a prostitute in low cut dresses walking under the lamplight in the rain. Just as monks in their courted robes have always excited some deep aesthetic corner of my soul. We both use our mouths professionally. So the hysteric for me performs an outpouring that the poet then crafts for you. A couple of poems from my last book, brain Fever,

Speaker 5 (00:32:24):

Actually one poem. And then I want to do something semi-new. The dream of a little occupied Japan doll among the hundred porcelain figurines. The first one with slanted eyes, fat cheeks. Q though that's Chinese. And Chinese bonnet is my favorite. Among all those in pajamas or gowns or the two in kimono, the first is my favorite of those with rickshaw, tambourine or parasol and fan I keep on my desk the first one though, she or he is not doing a darn thing here in sleep, rivalry is reserved and as dreams tune the mind for conscious awareness. Perhaps my favoritism suggests I've quit hoarding and now collect myself.

Speaker 5 (00:33:24):

12 minutes. I want to read from a erasure. So there are several sections, and I'm not going to tell you until afterwards what the original text was owed to love. You noted with excitement that the male was missing the posterior part of its body. It may be that all individuals pass through a stage in which they are males and then they're females. The head will be delivered to you. I thought that was funny. I dunno so much. Oh, bad. Feverish speculation. Love might still be a carcass in deep freeze until someone can clean and mount the skeleton. Love might still be ice in a ditch. Love can jettison bodies much the way lizards can shed their tails if something about tectonic movement is killing love. We wanted the kids to see tissue samples, skin samples and eyeball samples. A student suggests all the women in class imagine male sexuality. Okay, unpredictable, hard, long, and eellike in appearance can grow to stupendous lengths. Though ancient rumors of 55 foot specimens are probably exaggerated. A handful of love, a variety of parasite male excitement. You are a tough audience. Okay, I'm going to end soon. Elegy Milton said, left with the remains. You can only love an i theologist

Speaker 5 (00:35:48):

Fra quite near the surface, suspended vertically with head up, just passively floating and known as or messenger from the sea, God's palace. Picture it and I'll actually end with one last little section before I do. This text that I'm erasing is an article or fish offer a chance to study an elusive animal long thought, a monster from the science section of the New York Times ours poetical, designed to see in the low light of the deep ocean. The eye is unusually large. Love might still be underwater, not spotted. Thank you.

Speaker 6 (00:37:01):

This peace everybody. Thanks for staying with us. I mean, it's Saturday, right? It's like, yo, it's cocktail hour. Yeah. Yeah, that is great. Thank you. Thank you Kadeja and Kamiko and Hannah and Tyler for doing this. It was really, really awesome. It's been really useful for me to think about the idea of spectacle in general and poetry specifically. I lived here in LA as a kid, and this city is kind of a spectacle as we heard in Khadija's poems. But I'm really from the great state of Indiana, right? The modesty and openness of Indiana inform the way I approach things. Now from the various postures I try to take in my poems to the kinds of coat switching I do to the way I choose my vegetables at the farmer's market. The fact that I go to a farmer's market at all. All these gestures are informed by being black, of course.

Speaker 6 (00:37:56):

But I'm from the Midwest and that's where I learned how to interact with the world. There's this thing that my mother used to say when we'd start acting out, and Kamiko just mentioned it. Don't make a spectacle of yourself, right? I thought it was a Midwestern thing or maybe I thought it was something that my mother had come up with because she was so authoritative when she would say it. But when I was in Arizona giving a different version of this talk, I found out that a lot of people know this aphorism or maybe we were just all acting up and it was like the universal parental thing. Don't make a spectacle of yourself. She said, don't make a spectacle of yourself, boy. And then she would look over the top of her glasses and it was like her warning to stop showing out. And it was only one.

Speaker 6 (00:38:43):

You got one over the glasses, and if you didn't take the hint it was on and you get dragged out. And my mom would say, I'll snatch you by your afro. I mean, she never did it, but just the fact that she would think to say such a thing was terrifying. So I'm talking about my mother right now because every time I tried to write something about the idea of spectacle in a theoretical or figurative way, I kept hearing my mom admonishing me to not make a spectacle of myself. And I felt like I was 10 years old again. That's when I realized that for me, a spectacle is a little moment of autobiography or biography or personal understanding that becomes a catalyst for a poem. It's shown out in a literary way. The poem itself is not a spectacle necessarily, but the enactment or embodiment of a kind of personal spectacle my mama warned me against.

Speaker 6 (00:39:33):

Here's a poem from collectible blacks. It's my new book as an example. It's called From the Get-Go Blacks. It hasn't rained in three weeks, and my jaw is so tight, it clicks like my mother's heels in the early morning kitchen, every time I try to talk Indianapolis and summertime's, disreputable shimmer is all over the recalcitrant drones in this sweaty space summer, the poorest time of the year, and each August day redoes its former cooler selves. In section eight, brick fatherless masculinities mustached into colorful progressions of gutter and grin. Exhaust pipes hardly, hang on again. Scraping light from potholes. Unrelentingly like a refrigerator door opening in the heat and later when it gets even hotter. The corrugated need for role model makes facsimile on the ball court. Disco Texas sweaty arms and high top sneakers is broken in elbowed to some other city's name, one with air conditioning and deep ended swimming pools, whistling lifeguards and water fountains.

Speaker 6 (00:40:31):

Maybe I'd swim there if I knew how. So there are moments like this one, an anecdote manifests a spectacle. And the only place I would feel comfortable sharing that is in a poem. At this point, I should cop to the fact that my idea of spectacle is also decidedly analog. The peripheral epiphanies we used to use to anchor poems now appear as 140 characters or as gifts sometimes before they've even been given the kind of scrutiny that they would've gotten to become a poem. So maybe part of the contemporary spectacle involves a kind of recklessness or risk. Emotionally. It's hard to be a hero in a poem without revision, even if you have a picture next to it in his essay while the world sleeps. The great Nigerian writer, Ben o Cree referred to this kind of spectacle. And the kind of spectacle I'm talking about is all the secret and public moments of our lives, public domains of lives.

Speaker 6 (00:41:26):

And through that, we poets and readers actively participate in a spectacle of confession and mythmaking. Some participation is connected to the imagination. I can choose to edit, conjoin, reimagine, or simply omit any of those secret spectacles in my poems to create a more austere narrative. I can make things up and attribute events to my speakers. I can make the smaller spectacle more enticing or surprising. No one says my spectacle needs to be accurate or honest. It just has to be housed in the same shape that might create a pathos in the rear. Here's another poem from Collectible Blacks that is a decidedly edited spectacle so far to go. And the title comes from a J Dilla song and the purple is clutch. Between evening and more evening, boys smoke cigarettes down to their minty ends and talked about ass like mad hams and hips like pow mouths, curling with avid, a dormant in vivid hands shaping the air palms down to palms up and half circles of perplexity. The C shape, the tobacco still glowing between fingers makes is the closest thing anyone of these boys will get to a girl's hip, which is why these boys in thin tanks and hopeless shirts cut conversations easily like, watch how I'm going to get at her to knuckle up fool throwing shoulders and fists at each other, like minor superheroes with no villains to fight, no capes and bare knuckles, no saving the block either because every swing breaks something.

Speaker 6 (00:42:51):

Everything in that poem happened as best as I can remember. So I like to think of it as one of those almost true stories, more than the details of the brawl. I remember being very afraid that one of those teenagers would turn his attention to me while I sat there watching. And that way the experience of the moment is bigger than the outlines of my memory. This reliance on character driven experience is a spectacle as an engine for my second book Mixology. It includes some thin autobiography, but the lived experience in the poems frequently connects to some character and popular culture of ELA Kuti or Bob Kaufman, or in the poem I'm about to read, Tyndall Armory, the Public Enemy. It was my favorite rap group when I was in high school. And the truest most performative moments of the poem or the give and take between the speaker and the object, neither is a spectacle alone.

Speaker 6 (00:43:41):

Tyndall Armory public enemy had no idea of what to do on stage in 1987, but we didn't know what to do as a rap crowd either. Attendance was mandatory jammed into the Tyndall Armory one night after amateur boxing, and one night before bingo, a bunch of homeboys kentay together with African medallions and graffiti spray paint jeans. All of us mad at the conspiracy of conspiracy, staring each other down with a circular anger. Only black men could justify Terminator X. His one-handed power fists cut and scratch was the only thing keeping the revolution from starting right there. Baselines and warning sirens transformed into samples, refusing the wop like the black matri de at the Highlands Country Club refused to seat black people. My friend Richard was determined to be the first black president. He refused wine coolers and weeded white women and white lines because the man could hold anything against him during a campaign as president, he would buy highlands and turn it into a black thing.

Speaker 6 (00:44:34):

Terminator X had rich ray to say peace to the presidency. And Nat Turner, the first patch of white he saw. And when Chuck dugged the stage, his African medallion swinging like left hooks, his baseball cap pulled down so low. His eyes were the idea of eyes. The heat in that room was enough to make any time reconsider his friendships. So I talked to my buddy Richard this morning. I was on East Coast time still, right? And I woke up at six and it was like, oh, rich, I'm going to read that poem with you in it. And he was like, right.

Speaker 6 (00:45:06):

So Nintendo Armory autobiography mainly serves as a geographic locator. We were there because I was there, but the most effusive and relevant gestures are reserved from my friend Richard, who really did want to be the first black president, by the way. But once he saw what happens when you're the first black president, he was like, nah, it's cool. You can keep that. And also for Chuck D, who by his very position as a performer and a political advocate becomes the embodiment of Ben o Cree's Secret in public split. He's a spectacle because his job and art require it. Which brings me to Jack Johnson, the primary subject of my last book, the Big Smoke. Johnson was one of our most complex American historical figures in part because of the way he operated in the world, and in part because of the way the world chose to respond to those operations. If my mother could have found a way to get past Jack Johnson's physical attractiveness and his magnetic personality, and I really don't think she could have, this is the same woman who when she met Smokey Robinson, immediately tried to hit on him at my wedding.

Speaker 6 (00:46:13):

All right, so I'm just going to tell you this story. I shouldn't have even brought it up, especially since this is like a thing, right? It's going to be recorded and my mom's going to be like, so when I got married, we got married on the coast of Oregon and it got iced out in anybody's from the northwest. The stuff doesn't happen, and no one could get out to the coast to the wedding. So the band couldn't get there. Most of our friends couldn't get there. And my wife and I, or soon to be wife and I are just like, what is this? What kind? Maybe we shouldn't do this. It is biblical the way things are going wrong. And so one of her friends decided to save the day, and Smokey Robinson was playing at a casino and he went and met Smokey Robinson's manager and was like, yo, can Smokey Robinson come over and sing my friend a song?

Speaker 6 (00:46:59):

They don't have a band. They're trying to get married. And the guy was like, man, smokey Robinson's a hundred years old, he sleeps all day, gets up and performs and goes back to bed. But he would love to meet them. So tell 'em to come over after the show. Here's some free tickets. So great, right? So my new wife, my mother and I went over to meet Smokey Robinson and we get in there and Smokey Robinson's like, you must be the groom. He's very gracious. And then my mom walks up and he's like, and you must be the mom. And she just grabbed hold of Smokey Robinson. It was like Smokey Robinson.

Speaker 6 (00:47:40):

Yeah, she made the other one was like, mama, what are you doing right there? And then Smokey Robinson tried to look down my wife's dress and that was awkward. So anyway, so Jack Johnson. Yeah, it took the spectacle of Jack Johnson following Tommy Burns, who was the heavyweight champion of the world all over the US and Europe. Challenge him from ringside. It'd be like, I'll fight you anywhere. I'll fight you for free. Along with a purse of $50,000, which was larger than anything put up for a fight at that time to get Tommy Burns into the ring. In essence, Johnson had to make himself a spectacle that was bigger than bigotry itself to shame Tommy Burns into fighting him. And once Johnson became heavyweight champion, he had to continue to be the variations of that spectacle. It was expected of him. It was really complicated when you consider how much disdain white Americans had for black folks during Jim Crow.

Speaker 6 (00:48:35):

So lemme run down the accruments of Jack Johnson's spectacle before I read one last poem. They're all superficial, but it'll help you to understand what an event Jack Johnson was in 1908. Johnson had gold teeth like rappers do now he was married to a white woman and he had two white mistresses who traveled with him. This is all in 1908. Muhammad Ali said, and this is a direct quote from Muhammad Ali. He said Jack Johnson was the greatest. He had to be the greatest of them all. Wasn't no Black Panthers, wasn't no bodyguards. White people were lynching Negroes. And this Negro was doing all this crazy stuff in those days. He was bad. When you think about it, I know I'm bad, but he was crazy. So Jack Johnson had this white valet in a chauffeur, and he owned five cars at a time when there was no such thing as an inexpensive car.

Speaker 6 (00:49:21):

To give you a little more perspective, there were around a hundred thousand cars in the entire United States, and Jack Johnson had five. And these are all superficial things, but they speak to what Johnson valued and the things that people recognized him for. They also speak to his unparalleled ability to manipulate expectations and perceptions. Lemme tell you one more quick story about Jack Johnson because there are these things floating around. He fought a shark when he was 12 years old. He was a spy for the US government during World War I, and they're almost true. And people believe this about him. He's Jack Johnson. But the main thing I wanted to tell you about was his driving. He was a notoriously, he was a speedy driver. He would just haul everywhere, got in car accidents all the time. And so he was a notorious speeder and he was driving in his usual fast way through some small town, and this cop pulls him over and he's like, that's going to be $50, or which was inordinate amount of money. A ticket was like a dollar, really? And he was like, you're going to pay me $50. Jack Johnson. And Jack Johnson pulls out this big wad of money and gives him a hundred dollars bill and the cops, I don't have change for a hundred. And Jack Johnson's like, it's okay, keep it. I'm going to come back through here this afternoon. Go on the exact same speed.

Speaker 6 (00:50:37):

A funny dude. So the spectacle of action, the spectacle of myth, the spectacle of racism and necessary resistance, the spectacle of a publicly lived life, the little spectacles we call autobiography or confession. I'm so glad that I got to listen to Kaja and Camika talk about this. It takes as brilliant as their poetry is. I'm going to read this last poem, and this is in the voice of Jack Johnson and it's called Gold Smile. His favorite author was Shakespeare. So it's got an epigraph from Shakespeare. Teeth Had a thou and I head when Nous was born, to signify thou chemists to bite the world. That's from Henry the sixth. They call teeth dent in France, and the name makes sense the way teeth do what they do to bacon and shoulders and cakes. The French word for gold is, or so when the folks in Paris describe my smile, it sounds like what happens when I punch a door, dense door? Dense door. The French children say, when I open wide dense door, Edda said, when she locked herself in the powder room, Tommy Burns said dense door. When I was hooking, he meant to ask and for forgiveness. His people back in Canada would've said the exact same thing if they were in Sydney to witness our spectacle before we got into the ring, I told Tommy, the only reason I got these gold uppers is to make every bite of my food twice as expensive as it used to be. Thank you.

Speaker 2 (00:52:06):

Thank you. All three. How do you say that? Thank all three of you. Thank you. Thank you. You three and all of you. So we have about 15 minutes for questions and conversation. I have a big stack of 'em, but won't just plow through them. I'm hoping also maybe you have some questions for each other. Yes. Or this is my first question. Do you have questions for each other? Anything you want to say?

Speaker 6 (00:52:31):

I just got through, I just got through telling Kadija that the only reason I told that story about Smokey Robinson was because of her poems. I felt empowered to out this old man for trying to look down my wife's dress, this great luminary of music. And I'm going to tell you all about how my mom tried to hit 'em, only because there was this sort of openness and grace and those new poems. And we read together about a year or two ago, and I heard some of those early on. I just think that they're amazing. So that's not really a question. It's like a compliment.

Speaker 4 (00:53:03):

Thank you.

Speaker 2 (00:53:04):

Yeah.

Speaker 4 (00:53:06):

I guess I have a question. Yeah.

Speaker 3 (00:53:08):

So Adrian, what made you pick Jack Johnson as a figure? Did he mean something to you personally, or did you just find a story?

Speaker 6 (00:53:16):

Yeah, yeah. So my mother actually, my mom was a boxing fan and we used to watch boxing when I was a kid. And so, I mean, it goes against the gender norms that we're taught. My mom would be into these fights, man, really into 'em. I found out later that she was betting on the fights. So I had no idea that when the person that she was interested in would lose, she'd be like, F that guy. He's no Jack Johnson. And she never told me who Jack Johnson was. She would just always say that when somebody lost. And so I thought I was going to write an essay about my mom watching boxing with my mother. But the more work I did about Jack Johnson, it felt like a story I needed to spend some, it was bigger than the story I wanted to tell.

Speaker 2 (00:54:02):

I have kind of a follow up to that. So sorry, we're focusing on you. So Kadeja, you said this amazing thing, which was that poetry allows us to enter spectacle in intellectual and emotional ways without necessarily embodying it. I thought that was really interesting. And I immediately started thinking about Adrian, your work with Jack Johnson. And there are troubling aspects of his biography, of course, and these amazing aspects in these larger than life stories. And I wonder if you could talk a little bit about what that experience was for you to be so inside of these stories to write this long project.

Speaker 6 (00:54:40):

So I spent eight years working on the big smoke from the first research I did to actually being out in the world was eight years. And I spent, I think two and a half, almost three years without writing any poems. I just researched, researched, trying to figure out everything I could. I wanted to be in a space where if I wanted to write a poem, I didn't need to check my notes. I wanted to understand as best as I could, the geographies he traveled in. The difficult thing, it was really, it wasn't easy, but it was a lot more fun to write these poems. When he is talking, I bragging about himself. That's great. Not the way that I operate. So to get to spend some time being like, I'm so fast. I do this. And it was really fun. I am cracking myself up writing these things.

Speaker 6 (00:55:23):

I am so fast. I only got my shadow to play with this kind of stuff. But then when I started to get into the other things you're talking about these issues of domestic violence and things like that, it was a very difficult, it's easy to imagine fun things, but they're starting to get into a space. I'm sitting there, I've got this daughter, I'm very fortunate. I've got this wonderful family. And I think about what it would take, who snaps or what is it that happens that would get someone to want to hurt the people around them in that way. And I realized after fighting with this for a year, that I was going about the wrong way. He wasn't thinking about it like that. I mean, domestic violence at that time was very different in its construction at least. I mean, the actions were the same, but the idea culturally was very different.

Speaker 6 (00:56:08):

He's doing this as neighbors doing this. Some of my great grandparents were doing this. It was a pervasive problem. And so I had to get out of the mindset of thinking, this isn't Ray Rice, who knows? He did something wrong. He clobbered his soon to be wife, and he knew he was looking around for cameras. That's not what it was like back then. It was a horrible fact of existence. So once I got past the fact that this wasn't a 21st century judgment couldn't be imposed on it in that same way. It still was a real drag to write those poems. It was horrible. And I wouldn't do it when my wife or daughter were in the house. I'd make them, well, I wouldn't make them leave. I'd wait until they'd be be gone. So my wife is a writer, and she'd be like, no, you go sucker. I would wait until they'd go out of town to see my grandparents or somebody to see my daughter's grandparents. And they'd be gone for a few days. And then I would try to write those poems and they'd come back and I'm just leave me alone for a little bit. So I couldn't do it. I can't imagine it.

Speaker 5 (00:57:10):

Thank you. It feels like, from what you've both said, and I think from what I'm hearing and actually what I've been hearing on a couple of different panels, that part of connecting to spectacle is really giving permi