(James Allen Hall, Jennifer Chang, Sarah Blake, Jehanne Dubrow, Gary Jackson) Explore the craft of myth and archetype in our own work and in poems we love, to better understand how re/making myths can change and expand our concept of the mythopoetic and of the self.

Published Date: April 5, 2017

Transcription

Speaker 1 (00:00:05):

Welcome to the A W P podcast series. This event was recorded at the 2017 A W P conference in Washington dc. The recording features Sarah Blake, Jennifer Chang, John Dubrow, Gary Jackson, and James Allen Hall. You're now here. James Allen Hall provide introductions.

Speaker 2 (00:00:32):

Hi, I am your host for the evening because still evening. It's still evening. This is late evening for some of us everywhere. I'm your host Madonna and I'm going to use a fake British accent through this whole thing. This is contemporary Mytho poetics, so if you're in the wrong panel you can go. It's fine. I won't think anything about it. So I'm going to introduce the panel a little bit and then introduce all of the panelists, including myself, which isn't weird at all, and then we'll go in alphabetical order. Saving time for questions at the end. CD writes says an essay that it is a function of poetry to locate the zones inside us that would be free and declare them. So she also writes that there is a freedom in words, which is the larger fact that in poetry where formal restrictions can bear down heavily.

Speaker 2 (00:01:36):

It's also important to remember the cage is never locked. I think of myth as that which bears down heavily since it accrues the weight of meaning over time. And since it itself is a big box of odds and ends shuffled from one age to another, always being added to never really divested of the way these stories bear is archival heft. What we don't want to forget about ourselves as a culture or as a species the poets assembled here today are but a few of the many poets working to make sure that the cage is never locked. I also want to have a shout out. So this panel really began, I began thinking about this panel because I'm working with a student at Washington College who's writing her thesis on a contemporary use of myth. She's here right now. We should just give her a round of applause for being fabulous.

Speaker 2 (00:02:30):

It has Lily star all, so it's just true. She's the reason this panel exists, the bios. So Sarah Blake is the author of Ms. Sarah West. Sarah West. Sarah Blake is the author of ms. Do people do that to you often? Mary you off to Kanye. Your husband would be super pissed about that. Sarah Blake is the author of Mr. West, an unauthorized lyric biography of Kanye West. Her book, let's Not Live On Earth, will be published hopefully by December. Her poems have appeared in the LA Review of Books, Kenyan Review, and others. She was awarded an n e A Fellowship for poetry in 2013. Co-founder of Submitters and the Philadelphia Poetry Collaboration. Give everyone a wave. Sarah. Alright, good. Jennifer Chang is the author of The History of Anonymity, her second book, some Say The Lark is forthcoming from Alice James in October, right around your birthday. Yeah, that'd be great. Co-chair of the advisory board of Kund Man. She is an assistant professor of English and creative writing at George Washington University. Yay.

Speaker 2 (00:03:44):

Jean Dubrow is the author of six poetry collections, including most recently the Arranged Marriage, red Army, red and Stateside, and forthcoming from in this fall, Dotson Dashes, which is a sequel to Stateside. She's an associate professor of creative writing at the University of North Texas. I'm the author of a book of poems. Now you're the Enemy and a new book of essays called I Liked You Better Before I knew You So Well. My titles are Just Mean to people. And that's just out from Cleveland State. Gary Jackson is the author of Missing You Metropolis, which was the winner of the 2009 Cave KA Poetry Prize. His poems have appeared in Callaloo, the Low Review Tin House and elsewhere as of fall 2013. He teaches at the College of Charleston and both of you should give waves. I'm sorry that I didn't. There we go. You can probably tell us some part. Yay. Maybe a little. Yeah. Alright, so up first will be Sarah. We're going to go in alphabet order. So it's be Sarah, Jen, John, me, Gary. Alright, cool. Thank you all for being here.

Speaker 3 (00:04:52):

Hi. Yeah, I'm thrilled. I thought I was like 9:00 AM on Thursday and end a snowstorm. It'll be empty, but no, so this is amazing. So yeah, I'm going to take you on kind of a windy journey through my relationship with Mr. West. This is what it looks like all nice. I'm going to read from my reading copy, which is pretty beat up at this point. Okay, so writing this book about Kanye West really changed my understanding of Mythmaking. But before I get to that, I think I need to start with the understanding of myths. I started with before getting involved with Kanye West. I don't remember my first exposure to myths, but I know that by the time I was seven I was jealous of my classmates who all seemed to believe in God. I asked my mother to drive me around to churches and synagogues in South Jersey and every weekend for months I attended different services, but still true to my atheism.

Speaker 3 (00:05:50):

I found myself partial to a Quaker meeting where everyone was silent When I was 10, I learned about Greek myths in school. The punishment of Prometheus getting his liver eaten out of him alive every day was my favorite. And I swooned. And then when I was 13 I did a project on Islam. I don't really remember how it happened, but it did and I totally fell in love with Islam more than that, it led me to the whirling Dervishes, Sufism and Rumi and I identified as a Sufi for a long time, maybe an eighth grade reading level version of a Sufi, but a Sufi nonetheless. And I still fully connect to ideas of mysticism that suggests God is in everything and there's an experiential bridge to that version of God in this life. Two years later, I took a world religions class that learned about Jainism, Confucianism, Buddhism and more. A few years after that, my roommate in college was a devout Hindu. She still is. We're just not roommates anymore and she taught me a lot about Hinduism that textbooks didn't cover, which always surprised me. Sometimes I would offer her chicken and she could say yes and sometimes no because they follow this incredible calendar with dietary restrictions and anyway, it's just an incredible religion. Okay, so a few years after that, somehow I started writing about Kanye West.

Speaker 3 (00:07:15):

So Kanye loves Jesus. One of the songs that made him famous off his first studio album, the College Dropout is Jesus walks where he raps and excuse me for trying to quote a rap and I'm not going to try to rap, but I think this quote reflects the kind of genuine relationship he has to his faith. They say you can rap about anything except for Jesus. That means guns, sex lies, videotapes. But if I talk about God, my record won't get played well. If this takeaway from my spins, which will probably take away from my ends, then I hope this takeaway from my sins. He also believes in angels. He believes his mother is in heaven. He is all the way Christian, especially to a non-religious person like me. So I want to pause here for a second and read a poem in the book that tries to pull together Kanye's beliefs with my Jewish grandfather's beliefs plus some of the portrayals of life and death that I see around me.

Speaker 3 (00:08:16):

So this is called, so Kanye transformed himself, producer to superstar. What do I know about being saved? In one video game I watch Noah play, he points his gun at his friend and shoots him to heal him. My grandfather died despite treatment. My mother's treatment did everything it should and I've never been in danger. I've hardly ever been on high balconies or rooftops, but Kanye's been at risk. In an interview he was asked, given that you had a near-death experience as you recount on through the wire, what are your beliefs on death? Reincarnation, he answered, I feel like I'm here for a reason. Why Kanye? What's the reason Kanye said, I don't believe in reincarnation. Sometimes I wonder if I believe in heaven. I know I believe in Jesus. I know you believe angels are with you. This was not your first car accident. My grandfather was never in car accidents though he was legally blind in one eye.

Speaker 3 (00:09:19):

An instance of saving. I failed to notice maybe my grandfather believed. He looked at the stars as proof long after he stopped going to synagogue. Kanye understood his belief. I think 50% because it was instilled in me. That's what we call on 50% because you were saved. What is it about saved, about being saved? The best I know about saving is from childhood. Jesus resurrected Moses parting the sea, a Holocaust survivor or one friend who refused to wear her seatbelt because a relative lived when he didn't wear one miraculous survival shock tumble through the air and I thought my friend was unreasonable. I don't know how to be shaken to embrace a new belief, but Kanye does. So that's the last poem in my section about Kanye's second car accident, the one in 2002 that nearly killed him where he fell asleep at the wheel after a long night in the studio and when he came out of all of his surgeries and he had survived and would make a full recovery, he set his mind to making sure his own record would come out making sure he would no longer be just a producer.

Speaker 3 (00:10:31):

He talks about this as a transformative event for him. It's one of the first times Kanye partakes in a myth-making of his own life. It's in his song Through The Wire, and in countless interviews that I listened to where he talks about the accident like a creation myth of sorts. When people interviewed me about my book, I got a lot of questions about this section. For example, one was you write about Kanye as a creature of mythic proportions. Can you explain what inspired you to do so? As this particular type of question appeared over and over, I realized that the underlying questions here were, do you worship Kanye? Do you think Kanye is a god?

Speaker 3 (00:11:13):

And in a lot of ways these questions caught me off guard. I wrote most of the book in 2010, but by the time it came out in 2015, Kanye had released an album actually titled Jesus and had spoken in many interviews about he thought of himself as capital G, God very directly and candidly, and having followed mythmaking of his own stardom for so many years, it wasn't a surprising development for me and how I individually felt about his godliness seemed pretty inconsequential. The way Kanye participated in mythmaking made sense to me. Especially as an artist, we have the ability to craft our careers ourselves. Anywhere stories involved, we can take part in making that story. We can mark beginnings, noteworthy, middles and ends. But what did not make sense to me was how the media is involved in mythmaking. Before this book, I only really thought about the media's reporting, investigative journalism like strictly the news and it was probably because I mostly avoided the media my whole life, but for this book, it was my best source for all of my research.

Speaker 3 (00:12:23):

I had daily contact with it, often with it consuming me for hours. Sometimes I watched a very small story overtake my Google news alert about Kanye West, for example, how he recently dyed his hair that was all over my news alert for three days. I imagine journalists reaching word counts, giving story to a pretty story list moment in his life in order to fill web pages, but that's a harmless example. Other times they vilified him, other times they glorified him. Sometimes one rumor explained another, the information felt distracting and while things didn't often read as lies, they often read as truth less. It made me want to make my poems even with zero access to Kanye feel as real as they could, as true as they could be from exploring and the media's mythmaking and the public mythmaking. I felt the presence of our incessant desire for a narrative to be made out of any information presented to us.

Speaker 3 (00:13:26):

But it seemed like a chicken and egg problem paired against how incessantly narratives are pushed on us. And what seems crucial to this moment for poets is our understanding of narrative as lyric and experimental, fractured and flawed with our ability to create a feeling of a beginning for something that doesn't start anything to create the feeling of an ending for something that doesn't conclude anything we might call attention to both the superficiality of narrative and to the many possibilities of it. With this election cycle which was so dominated by narratives believed, not believed, supported by fact and by rumor, I think it's all the more necessary. We work to subvert and deconstruct narrative and if we start with the stories that are most familiar, such as the myths, then we're offering the building blocks to untangle the more complicated stories, the ones that are a combination of true and false, the ones that are told in conflicting ways by various different news outlets, the ones with parts missing, the ones that continue into the future. We might build toward a time where we can celebrate narrative, take joy in it, strength from it, everything. I love narrative for and I really love narrative, but also a time when we are not beholden to narrative at all. Okay, thank you very much. I'm excited to hear the others.

Speaker 4 (00:15:01):

I don't have a title for my talk, is that okay?

Speaker 4 (00:15:11):

Although this panel focuses on the contemporary, the burden of myth is ancient. Myth is foundational to how we think of ourselves as a people and a culture. And in this sense, myth is also time worn, intractable in its old age and perhaps a bit too stubborn to wholly discover from our lives as writers and citizens. When James asked me to contribute to this panel in contemporary myth of poiesis, I wasn't sure I'd have anything to say about myth other than some vague thoughts about Sylvia Plath and Anne Carson. This was back in April, 2016 when it seemed that we as a country were in the process of shedding among other carcasses, the myth of America, which is a myth of whiteness, masculinity, heteronormativity, and cultural superiority. Well, it is a new year, a new president that's blocked from our safe space or art inquiry and our nation.

Speaker 4 (00:16:06):

Oh America the beautiful is aging back into its worst habits of myth, which is to say this is a good time to talk about myth and in particular myth OUIs the work of making myths. My talk today arises out of Frank Remos conception of myth as a sacred cultural artifact that is fundamentally opposed to fiction's fluidity. In his book, A sense of an ending Kermode explains, this is a fairly long quote, we have to distinguish between myths and fictions. Fictions can degenerate into myths whenever they're not consciously held to be fiction. In this sense, antisemitism is a degenerate fiction a myth, and King Lear is a fiction myth operates within the diagrams of ritual which presupposes total and adequate explanations of things as they are and were. It's a sequence of radically unchangeable gestures. Fictions are for finding things out and they change as the needs of sense-making change.

Speaker 4 (00:17:04):

Myths are the agents of stability. Fictions are the agents of change. Myths call for absolute fictions for conditional ascent. Myths make sense in terms of a lost order of time. Ilu Tempus as a historian, Marcia iata calls it fictions if successful make sense of the here and now hook. Tempus myths according to Kermode, subscribe to systems of power without question or doubt in myth, our faith becomes rigid and stable and risks evolving into a degenerate fiction. CMOs example of antisemitism As a degenerate fiction, a myth resonates with the myths that now seem to darken our everyday lives. In this new year myth justifies the Muslim ban reinforces the notion that Elizabeth Warren is impugning on her just confirmed Attorney General Jeff Sessions simply because as a woman she's vocalizing well-founded indeed historical doubt on his juri competency or because she's vocalizing as a woman. The myth of America is a myth of whiteness. It is also a myth that necessarily excludes difference and dissent. After all, what is the myth of American exceptionalism, if not the belief that there can be no exceptions to what constitutes American culture, American identity, and the troubling moral rectitude that we associate with being American and living in America.

Speaker 4 (00:18:29):

Sorry, I'm pregnant, I'm out of breath. The question then is how do we as writers and readers, citizens of the word challenge culturally monolithic myths and write new ones? Or more precisely, how do we rid ourselves of the myths that refuse to become obsolete? I'm going to give just two literary examples and hopefully they'll be provocative. For my first example, I'll turn to a poet who broke with literary modernism through an imaginative engagement with myth ESIS in the 1960s. Shortly before her death, Sylvia Plath wrote a series of poems about bees. Critics have read the bee poems as allegories in which Plath works through social constructions of gender, but Plath goes much further reenacting the phenomenon of post-war American life. She creates a myth of power that is in a revisionary slight of hand, female based in the figure of the queen bee. Each poem rehearses a myth of America in which each individual asserts their instrumentality to the village, the rector, the midwife, the sexton, the agent for bees and the speaker vacillates between presence and absence.

Speaker 4 (00:19:40):

In the first poem of the sequence, the bee meeting the speaker is milkweed rooted and exhausted, made powerless by her gender due to the forces of social life. By the second poem, the arrival of the bee box, the speaker has chosen another hive where she proclaims. I ordered this and then def finally refuses conventional roles of power. Plath writes, I Am Not Caesar, and then the box is temporary. The old standards of authority will not suffice. The position of power is not perpetual nor in Dissoluble and the hive can be in the end. Vanquished and the final bee poem wintering the speaker achieved self-possession and solitude. Her explanation it is they who own me, neither cruel nor indifferent, only ignorant plus accomplishment in the Mytho poetic project of the bee poems is imagining a life after myth. But even as she exposes the box of the hive and the box of power is extinguishable, her freedom is possible because society has been abandoned rather than changed, she's destroyed the rigid structures of thought.

Speaker 4 (00:20:45):

That myth imposes on us but also in a sense destroyed herself. My second example of myth turns on a line in Anne Carson's 2009 book. In Oriah, the poet translator tackles the plays of is esophagus and yur that recount the stories of the house of Atrius, that mythical family responsible for the fall of Troy. In her translation of Aon Carson makes extraordinary decision to leave Cassandra's speech untranslated. These lines are prophecy. They speak of the perty of Aon and esra. Each plotting the death of the other. Cassandra's lines speak the truth. And readers who don't know Greek, including this one, are confronted with unintelligible the silence of our own ignorance, the vast distance between what is and what ought to be. It is a powerful moment in which thought and which through an action the refusal to translate. Carson dismisses the very notion that we can learn from myth.

Speaker 4 (00:21:45):

That myth can prevent us from replaying the mistakes of the path. She marks myth as illegible. It's as if Carson is saying we cannot translate the truth. We can only speak it the pressure she places on the readers. Then it's to speak in the brutal language of the brutal contemporary. We cannot believe the myths we've been given. We cannot be seduced, we cannot lose ourselves in myth lest we lose ourselves. We must overpower and reject the degenerate fictions that are now the myths we face daily. To quote Kermode trenchant words, the agent of change is the human imagination. For years I believe the myth of America, which is to say, I believe the myth that I do not belong. That as a daughter of immigrants I have no voice, no recourse, no language that might ever be inherently mine. I believe that I was invisible. Even the American poems I first loved, I believed said no to me. Just as a myth of America says no to me. This makes writing poems immensely difficult and writing myths even more so. If we are to embolden ourselves to the challenges of contemporary myth of ois, we must recognize the historical failures of myth to bring people together and to reform our culture for a new age. In conclusion, I'll read a poem that I wrote in which I grapple with these questions of American belonging, mythmaking and the possibilities of human connectedness.

Speaker 4 (00:23:17):

It's actually set in DC Mount Pleasant all night. Six vagrants stood at her stoop, chewing the fat out of a two stout story. She did this, did that, took that she never, never, never, never, never. A white fluttering a thought like headlights from a passing car. Lights up this room where I've never been restful, never, still outside. The buses must be unroot. I hear their slow going screech around the corner. Engines dying. My neighbor's a dinosaur. Bonnie, she's lived here since the commune days. Eats hemp seeds. I bet always nods at me. It's not her out there, but she's in my head. The lonely field I imagine each night awake again, nowhere else to go. Never is a strange design to name what can't be or won't begin the hours quickening never asleep or the trees silence. Enc canting I'll never belong. My silent habit is to listen for I knew these trees once as a different self.

Speaker 4 (00:24:32):

I'll never speak to her again or stand outside like the trees attending to what's limitless. The skies stray faces at stray windows I couldn't hear back then walking the night farce, not trusting how to follow how to wind. Now it's the noise of mastery. The mastery of being alive, annoyed. I've said my peace is what I'd like to say or my peace is still a part of there. I'm bad at idiom as anyone can hear, as anyone can see, there's an immigrant on my face who makes me stray, makes me tired of you and you and you the never outside my window. Here I turn to stone, turn to the body in the dark. I turn mortal and loathsome as beum and blacking out a new roof. I turn at Florida Avenue up 16th I turn like milk, unforgivably sour. A sudden turncoat, I'll turn on you.

Speaker 4 (00:25:32):

My ideology a tourniquet. I turn my face towards your light. Alas, the last of which will not return to me. I'm turning off now. Goodnight America. Goodnight neighbor. I did not know your art was law or that you sailed a boat on the Potomac could harsh the grammar of daffodils. Tonight is Sunday. On Friday you died crowding the mail room with you. Last week I wondered whether to note the winter drag the government shut down again by brief falling snow neighbor, I jumped circulars and lost hope. I sighed. Let my son cry too loudly. Bonnie. Bonnie rather than turn to you to wish you goodnight. Dear Bonnie, I wish you goodnight. Thank you.

Speaker 5 (00:26:30):

That was so great Jennifer. So in preparing for today's panel, I kept changing my mind about what element of Mytho poetics I might address. Much of my work deals, for instance with Greek mythology with Jewish and Slavic folklore and with literary representations of female trauma. But the fact is I can't stop thinking about our current moment in the last few months. I've often reflected on the years that I lived with my family behind the iron curtain. So today I wanted to talk about the ways that myth-making can function as a coded language to be used by the poet in resistance. The archetypes of myth, an effective way to speak truth to truth publicly, even if and when the censor is at work in service to the state. My family lived in Poland from 1980 to 83 during the imposition of martial law and the rise of the solidarity movement.

Speaker 5 (00:27:31):

We returned in 1987 and stayed through 1991, which went, we saw the fall of communism in eastern Europe happening just outside the gates of the US embassy. During those years, my parents' friends were journalists, artists, academics, the Polish inte Genia, the night that martial law was declared December 13th, 1981, my parents were holding a dinner party. Most of the guests at that dinner couldn't go home that night for fear that they would be arrested by the police at their front doors. When I think about those years what my family called the battle days, I can picture the underground ephemera and souvenirs that my parents often showed me. Homemade stickers and posters decorated with the iconic logo of solidarity. The top part of the N in ash transformed into a polish flag. Red and white. The protest stamps mailed illegally onto envelopes through the state post office, the small pins and buttons that read Warsaw 1944, A reference as Lawrence Wexler explains to the valiant, tragic attempts of the Polish home army to liberate the capitol in advance of the Soviet arrival, one could get arrested for possession of such objects, these ephemera of samist and then there were the paintings and the plays and the films and of course the poems which had to speak in a more coated language.

Speaker 5 (00:29:02):

Look for instance, to Herbert and the persona he invented Panto, Mr. Cogito Cartesian thought given human body, Mr. Kato functions as the poet's alter ego, one who rejects the blurred compromised landscape of communism, a place where truth and the solidity of language have been eroded. Here's the envoy of Mr. Kato. Go where those others went to the dark boundary for the golden fleece of nothingness. Your last prize go upright among those who are on their knees. Among those with their backs turned and those toppled in the dust, you were saved not in order to live. You have little time. You must give testimony. Be courageous When the mind deceives you, be courageous in the final account only this is important and let your helpless anger be like the sea. Whenever you hear the voice of the insulted and the beaten, let your sister scorn not leave you for the informers, executioners, cowards.

Speaker 5 (00:30:08):

They will win. They will go to your funeral and with relief will throw a lump of earth. The wood borrower will write your smooth over biography and do not forgive. Truly it is not in your power to forgive in the names of those betrayed at dawn, beware however of unnecessary pride. Keep looking at your clown's face in the mirror. Repeat I was called. Weren't there better ones than I beware of dryness of heart. Love the morning spring, the bird with an unknown name. The winter oak light on a wall, the splendor of the sky. They don't need your warm breath. They're there to say No one will console you. Be vigilant when the light on the mountains gives the sign a rise and go, as long as blood turns in the breast, your dark star, repeat old incantations of humanity, fables and legends because this is how you will attain the good you will not attain.

Speaker 5 (00:31:11):

Repeat great words, repeat them stubbornly like those crossing the desert who perished in the sand and they will reward you with what they've had at hand with the whip of laughter, with murder on the garbage heap. Go because only in this way will you be admitted to the company of cold skulls, to the company of your ancestors, Gilgamesh Hector Roland, the defenders of the kingdom without limit and the city of ashes be faithful, go Envoy comes from Herbert's. Mr. Cogito, A collection first published in 1974, Herbert wrote dozens and dozens of Mr. Cogito poems which appeared in a number of collections over more than two decades. The character himself becomes a mythical figure while embedded in many of the cogito poems are also allusions to classical mythology, legend and history. Of course, it's important to note that Envoy begins with an allusion to the golden fleece, a famed object, which King Palius instructed Jason and the Argonauts to find and bring back in what might be called a near suicide mission.

Speaker 5 (00:32:22):

Later Mr. Cojito tells himself to repeat old incantations of humanity, fables and legends because this is how you'll attain the good you will not attain. And near the end of the poem, Herbert asserts that totalitarianism cannot take the speaker's literary ancestors away from him, Gilgamesh, Hector, and Roland, who he depicts as defenders of the polls, even if the civilizations they're protecting have become a regime of ashes. Envoy works by giving and taking away. In a review of Herbert's report from the besiege city, that city being Warsaw under the junta of martial law, Ava Hoffman explains that Herbert not only uses historical illusion to mask references to events in Poland, but in his poetry, the past becomes a unity in which events repeat and reflect on one another. In Envoy mythology becomes a stand-in for the abiding narratives of this world which are placed in opposition to the mutable ever-changing narratives of the state.

Speaker 5 (00:33:26):

What today we might call alternative facts. These ancient stories are solid, they exist and they have permanence, but they don't rescue us from totalitarianism. The poet has not been saved to live, but rather has been given a stay of execution in order to provide testimony to those who will survive him. In another poem, Mr. Cogito and the Imagination, Herbert's alter ego longs to fully understand a whole litany of literary, cultural and mythological references including Pascal's Night, the prophet's melancholy, the wrath of Achilles, the last Aztecs despair, Nietzsche's long dying, the rise and fall of an oak, the rise and fall of Rome, the individual, the state, the single mind, the collective, the birth and death of empire. All are brought together here in this list. Mr. Cogito asking almost heretical questions that an unmasked BNI of Herbert cannot ask directly and in the monster of Mr.

Speaker 5 (00:34:31):

Cogito cogito is depicted as a modern day St. George battling the dragon of the state. Herbert describes the monster as an immense depression spread out over the country. Near the end of the palm, Mr. Cogito decides he must fight the dragon. So he walks out at dawn into a sleepy suburb, carefully equipped with a long, sharp object, that sharp object, perhaps a sword, perhaps a ballpoint or fountain pen allows him to fight something immense and fire breathing. As we know from the legend's, say George does indeed kill the dragon religious faith of the kind that supported tremendous resistance in communist era, Poland eventually conquering a terrifying beast. In this way, Herbert is able to fight the Soviet regime while disguising his verse in the medieval velvets of verse. I want to end by reading a recent poem. Last year I started writing poems that were set in the academy, a landscape populated by mythical archetypes such as the bitter professor, the department chair, and the ruthless administrator.

Speaker 5 (00:35:41):

But after the election I began to see how I might use this same mythology of academia as a way of obliquely addressing our current political moment. So this is self-portrait with cable news, graffiti weather. When I see the woman on TV so calm in her porcelain white suit, I remember that I too smiled while a man talked over that I bore the persistent tar of his voice. In those meetings I watched the veins in his face like cracks in a disappointed street. Were it not for his cruelty? I might've said, I'm sorry for your loss. Who knows? That year my husband would overhear me talking in my sleep and though he couldn't open the shut door of dreaming, he told me that I said, fuck you into the dark quite clearly. Fuck you night and waking were locked rooms the only exit, a stuck window and the heat was always going or the cold next order of business.

Speaker 5 (00:36:44):

A colleague said, I noted every conversation on the page, no one interrupted. Often remembering that year I hold a serving bowl, touch its surface limbed with flowers. This thing I've dropped or knocked against a shelf the way it refuses decorative to break. Now I can say fuck you quite clearly to that year, although there was also the kindness of friends who brought over cherries, they knew I loved the sweetness of a stone. I can say fuck you, I will not lose the taste for it. In that year I was truth be told, willing to punch a fist through glass if it meant my escape. I walked down Greenwood Avenue past the house where someone had sprayed fuck you on the road and someone else had tried to exit out pale lines on top of lines. I understood wanting to write once fury on a place I understood even the impulse to erase it.

Speaker 5 (00:37:48):

Walking each day across the purity of imperative, how it disturbed the concrete silence. Most of us are not the woman on TV who keeps talking while the man is shouting wrong into a mic. She keeps talking while he stands beside her like a mugger in the alleyway and who knows what he wants to take. Most of us are the audience watching the debate. We comply when the moderator says, no applause, no interruptions. Please. Most of us wait for night to write, fuck you on a cream pla of asphalt. All of this to say I could have said much more. I could have written something on the man's sad face. I think of him, I think of Greenwood Avenue. Its unremarkable houses that I learned to hate always moving toward a meeting or coming late from one. I think of the sound that spray paint makes the rattles shake of the can.

Speaker 5 (00:38:48):

The aerosols soft his the words emerging slowly on a path jagged perhaps, but large enough remaining legible through rain. I don't claim that my words work quite as obliquely as does Herbert's in his Mr. Cogito poems or that my words could evade sensor's sharp gaze. But I suspect that in this poem a reader's attention may be drawn more to my representation of academic archetypes, the cruelty of the mediocre professor, for instance, than to the depiction of the recent presidential debates as an encounter between second wave feminism and misogyny. I can't predict what will be done to the freedoms of the press in the next few years, but I would suggest that we may need to start looking to the examples of poets who learn to evade the scrutiny of the censor. If we want to continue to write and to publish, we may have to follow a model such as the one provided by Polish poets like Herbert, choosing a poetry of mask and mythology over the more naked direct poetics that we've employed under previous administrations in this country. Thank you.

Speaker 2 (00:40:19):

I do have a title, it's called the Supposed Person Notes on queering archetypes. Emily Dickinson, my queer aunt that atypical arche typist writes, when I state myself as representative of the verse, it does not mean me but a supposed person. What does it mean to be a supposed person or even I think now a representative? I realize I'm asking this question standing less than a mile from the White House where I think many of us here would be supposed persons and though the shadow of our current presidential administration is casting its cold weight upon our shoulders, I think poetry provides a particular escape route because poetry is a broken thing. It allows us to play in the gaps to toggle back and forth between the personal and the forces which shape or presuppose personhood.

Speaker 2 (00:41:22):

Once I was reading some kind of mini profile, perhaps on the back cover of the Atlantic, you can say, oh, she reads the Atlantic. Oh and the more I read this profile, I was actually cat sitting and so it was like my friends. Anyway, not that I'm ashamed to read the Atlantic anyway, the more I read this profile in an organization called the Republic of Texas and its conservative ties and its radical methods, the more I thought this sounds a lot like my mom. And so I wrote a poem called Portrait of my Mother as the Republic of Texas after my mother won independence in 1836, she dysfunction as her own nation passed laws erected monuments to men who would never again be slaves to order and pain. Remember the Alamo that was my mother then in 1845 that always pleasing church mouse voted for annexation.

Speaker 2 (00:42:25):

My mother had too many selves and the desire to enslave them all pregnant, she was forced to become the 28th child of the American family, lone star. No longer. She joined a lineage of jacked to Jesus' hair, developed insatiable cravings for honey barbecue. Her uncles sauntered up stroked the thin lace of her declared she looked mighty good. She let them say mighty good while grinning at one another. Nothing grew on the prairies of my mother. Then she learned descent, demanded men recognized her sovereignty. She organized an embassy in a silver trailer shaped like a virgin bullet. My mother renamed herself the Republic of Texas, unfurled her flag all the way into the 1980s when the republic kidnapped her neighbors, Joe and Margaret Rowe to highlight abuses she'd suffered. My mother was an American terrorist, don't mess with Texas. She died in the standoff. My new mother was elected by a landslide and moved to Cuero, a city whose large depends on retirement pensions.

Speaker 2 (00:43:48):

My peaceful mother holds weekly rallies. What do we want? When do we want it? Her lipstick stains the bullhorn mve. In her spare time, my mother receives foreign ind dignitaries and does drywall. The global conglomerate of my mother opened her first staffed consulate in Barcelona. She insists Visitors speak American. Currently the republic is facing lean times. The former treasurer, neglected Maze Utilities refuses to return the funds pledge Your support today, my motherland is standing by the rotary phone waiting for your call. Love her or leave her. I should say to the facts of that poem are not the alternative. They're all true. You can call the Republic of Texas and leave a message. They don't call you back like your senators. Anyway, the poem uses these little mono stitch single line stances that play off the anthemic or atheistic slogans or catchphrases. Public speech then can be a kind of nod to let culture voice, which is I think the function of myth.

Speaker 2 (00:45:04):

When I say don't mess with Texas, I mean both the state and its offspring. My mother, by conflating them, I can archly subvert the idea that the state is unimpeachable. I inflate my mother's personhood to contain statehood in order to show how the personal contains the political and vice versa. And how that burden terrifies the person then is always supposed and that ness casts its shade back upon the artifice, which makes it. In other words, when poets play with archetype, they have the opportunity to subvert the very forces which heap upon them the baggage of supposition. In my own work I find myself drawn to queering archetype. One of these is the supposition that the queer cannot inhabit the universal. It's always a gay love poem or a gay marriage or queer bashing. There's some particular always attached to the queer, and I've heard this since graduate school when a writer, I won't name called my poems campy as if that was a bad thing.

Speaker 2 (00:46:24):

His poems were not campy. That is a bad thing. Alright, what an odd thing to think that a supposed particularized identity can't represent the universal, especially since Freud identifies homosexuality as one of the basis for social organization. Oh, now she's going to talk about Freud. In Toman Taboo, he tells a kind of myth about a band of brothers who kill their father and who renounced the women whom they desired and who had been their chief motive for dispatching their father like he was there. In this way, they rescued the organization which had made them strong and which may have been based on homosexual feelings and acts originating perhaps during the period of their expulsion from the hoard. Again, that's from totem and taboo that the homosexual has to be denied or repressed is fundamental to Freud's understanding of the archetypal. But what's fascinating is that the desire itself, the homosexual feeling he cites fre completely mis attributes.

Speaker 2 (00:47:29):

The universal, the repression is normal, he seems to say, but not the thing that inspires the repression. That's strange. I think the archetype is best defined as that figure in which the several and the single converge or the lines between or where the lines between what is singular and plural blur. And so I wrote a poem about it. I'd like to hear it. Here it goes. Irregular plurals, a pile of sticks bound for the pyre. It's easy to forget. Faggot is already plural. Every plural, scissors, it's singular. Everything pieces back to one. The problem of oranges and orchards. The problem a cut apple spits out to its seeds. Example, the plural of story is history. I is add infinitum. The plural of thinking is feeling. My problem is the article I read yesterday about the window and the boy, I'll come back for them. I'm sorry I can't stop a thing from accumulating.

Speaker 2 (00:48:42):

Add an Ss an e es archaic. How we think adding more makes a story bearable. The plural of broken is suicide. The plural of string is harping just as the plural of hand is Jobs. Shiver of quiver in. There is no one pleasure when words fail. This is true of pain as well, and that is the plural of epiphany. It feels monstrous to be saved more than once. So the plural of we must be Jesus. The plural of once I was raped is every day after the plural victim growing inside me garden proliferating past its seed. Think of the 16 year old boy jumping from the building's. Fourth story window limbs seeking singularity. The moment the John unties, the restraints that keep him the plural of bed cruelty is its own plural. It makes me glad to say he survived. That boy is somewhere breathing, making my lives shudder into focus. All too clear.

Speaker 2 (00:50:08):

Stan Plumley in an essay called Autobiography and Archetype says, I want the experience in the poem to be fair to memory and larger than life. The poem has two allegiances to the personal and to the larger than life. The sociocultural sphere that situates the self or the speaker in the poem. Poets do this using line, mitigating the social sentence with the personal line break or by varying image with interpretive statement. Sometimes it's point of view finding in the first person a little room for the third as I do in that Republic of Texas poem, the archetypal allows the lens of the poems to shift and then to microscope back down into the personal with new meaning to juxtapose and to metabolize in the same gesture. If you'll permit one last illustration, I have a poem about Anita Bryant, who was a beauty queen, turned political opponent of L G B T rights in Florida in the late seventies.

Speaker 2 (00:51:09):

Also the third person ever to sing the national anthem at a Super Bowl game. I just recently learned on dark days I imagine my parents' wedding video. I like how my mother Anita Bryant waves to the cameras without looking at the men behind them, keeping her chastity intact, unassailable as her perfect fure, dark as coffee, the white saucer of her powdered face. I like the news conference. It's swirling choreography of men and microphones always on the periphery. A vulgar joke declaring itself in the throng of serious journalists, one of whom is my father. The pretender. I like the irony of Save the Children blared on a banner behind her. I'm waiting to be born a child, unlike others, one my mother would not save. I like the reporter's blazer's, plaid unbuttoned like the man approaching Anita's Deis from her, right? I love my mother innocent like this.

Speaker 2 (00:52:18):

Smiling back at some softball political question. I like the hiding in plain sight that the man and the Anita are doing before they become my parents. I like knowing more than the camera or my mother. I am like my father, the spy who will be arrested. And here is the moment lifting the veil. Now their kiss, the man slaps a pie square in Anita's face. She hadn't seen him coming. She was saying what they want is the right to propose to our children that theirs is an acceptable life. Then it's time for cake. I like his hate, which hates her back. She's my mother because she says at least it's a fruit pie, then begins to sob. I like watching her beauty dissolve and revolt against its tyranny. 30 years ago now, my father dead buried and no one remembers his name. Thank you.

Speaker 6 (00:53:42):

How's everybody? Thank you all for being here at 9:00 AM on a Thursday morning. Y'all are awesome. How many of y'all are, yeah, we should give you all a round. Thank you.

Speaker 6 (00:53:54):

Half of you guys are probably hungover. That's cool. So I'll be quick because I know we're going to have time for questions too at the end. So I don't have a title either for what I'm going to talk about really, but we can make one of blackness and superheroes or something that works. But when James invited me to be part of this, I immediately thought about, because I ride primarily about superheroes, but it made me kind of think about the origin of just myth in general. And superhero stories all have their origins. Superman's an orphan, Batman's an orphan. You guys know this shit. Great power comes great responsibility, batterman. But really traditionally myth was created to explain what is unexplainable and to somehow make meaning out of things that are seemingly meaningless or chaotic. And Greek myth trying to explain things like the seasons, what happens after we die.

Speaker 6 (00:54:59):

And then there is fable, which is similar to myth, but fable is also designed to be instructive. So this is why you don't do this thing. And superhero myths seem to do both of those things simultaneously in this strange way, right? You too can learn with great power comes great responsibility. Don't blame yourself for your parents' death. And then Superman, of course, which is a truth justice in the American way, which I will get back to. But so I wanted to actually quote Carl Phillips has a essay that's from his book, coin of the Realm, but the title of the essay is Myth and Fable and their place in Poetry. And he talks a lot about traditional Greek myth. And I'm just going to quote a kind of lengthy passage where he kind of explains how African-American poets and writers take myth. He says there's another category of poem in which the existing myth is used as scaffolding across which a larger argument is laid out.

Speaker 6 (00:56:11):

And his example, a Robert Hayden poem about dataless. It's called OD Dataless Flyaway Home, which uses the myth of Icarus to deepen the discussion about freedom and to generate further examination of the history of African-Americans in this country. And the course of which he gives us a window into African-American psyche, which in turn can resonate beyond that particular race of people to be an examination of the psychology of the exiled, the displaced, the alienated as well by aligning African-American experience with Greek mythology, there's an implicit statement being made about the experience of historically outcast people. Namely that their experience, their history is of mythic proportions that is no less resonant and instructive.

Speaker 6 (00:56:57):

And it made me also think about even beyond that, right? And when I think about myth now, now I'm thinking specifically about superheroes, but also Greek, this idea of kind of reclamation. And especially today, it seems like so often people are willing to want to take some or they want to recognize something as being taken away from them and given to someone else. And I think that a lot about, especially today with, I don't know if you guys watch a lot of movies, but Michael B. Jordan played Johnny Story and the Fantastic four movie black kid. And everybody got mad because it was like you can't make the human torch black. The same thing happened with one in the comic book door is Jane Foster, who's a woman. And so people got mad about that. Captain America's black now. So all these people get really upset and really when I say all these people, I mean straight white men. And this tradition has been going on for a long time. And African-American poets have been in a way actively doing this for as long as I can remember trying to say that you don't get to own these myths. We read these myths and we experienced them too. And we can also make them ours. So I'm going to read a poem actually that is one of the first poets period that I read that dealt with superheroes and it's Lucille Clifton, and it's from her book, the Book of Light.

Speaker 6 (00:58:36):

And it's called, if I Should to Clark Kent Enter the Darkest Room in my House and speak with my own voice at last about its awful furniture pulling apart the covering over the dusty bodies, the Randy father, the husband holding ice in his hand like a blessing, the mother bleeding into herself and the small imploding girl. I say, if I should walk into that web, who will come flying after me, leaping tall buildings you.

Speaker 6 (00:59:12):

And then the other question that I thought about a lot was why superheroes in particular. And that made me think going back to w B de Bos, the Soul of black folk in that, and I won't quote the whole thing, but basically the idea, maybe I will fuck it. He says this about kind of the American Negro gifted with second sight in this American world, a world which yields him no true, but only lets him see himself through the revelation of the other world. It is a peculiar sensation, this double consciousness, the sense of always looking at oneself through the eyes of others. Measuring one soul by the tape of a world that looks on an amused, contempt and pity one ever feels its ness. An American, a negro, two souls, two thoughts, two unreconciled strivings, two warring ideals in one dark body.

Speaker 6 (01:00:09):

And after reading that, I think about this idea of a dual identity and why not superheroes, it makes sense in a very logical way. And if we go back to that definition of myth being used to kind of explain what is unexplainable, what else is more unexplainable than being a person of color in this country and constantly dealing with that idea of being hated, feared, desired at times simultaneously. And so I'll end with a quick poem and it's called Tryouts. And I should say I wrote it I guess, but it has two quotes that open it. And the inspiration for this poem is actually a, there's an old cover to Justice League of America 173. Now on the front cover is Superman with his hand out and he's trying to shake Black Lightning's hand and Black Lightning is slapping his hand away. And he says with that Jive bunch of turkeys at the J l a, forget it, which is a great cover. But the comic itself deals with Black lightning. He has to perform tryouts to be part of the Justice League. So they make him go through all this shit. And the only one and the only member that recognizes how kind of fucked up it is, is Green Arrow. But the rest of 'em are like, no, he should totally have to do this. And Green Air was like, we never make anyone else do this. This is bullshit.

Speaker 6 (01:01:38):

So it made me want to write a poem about this. And so it has that epigraph with black lining and also an epigraph from Audrey Lorde from a litany for survival for those of us who live at the shoreline, standing upon the constant edges of decision, crucial and alone. And this poem really kind of plays with that idea of Superman and it's kind of my way of reclaiming and remixing and kind of reappropriating that symbol of truth justice in the American way. There's one boy on fire and another drowning. You only get to save one for your final exam, so you lift the wet boy from the lake and don't realize your mistake until Superman touches down. Sorry son. We can't have someone who chooses their own over everyone else. The boys brown fingers. Hold tight to your emblem. Leave wet impressions on your chest next year the same and the same after that. Every time you choose wrong, blame it on Empire Superman. His arm rang around your neck. We're trying to save the world here he says his eyes pure blue. Confirming wha