Danez Smith: She’s the girl whose oat milk brings all the hipsters to the yard, Franny Choi.

Franny Choi: And they’re a bridge between starshine and poppers, Danez Smith.

Danez Smith: And you’re listening to VS, the podcast where poets confront the ideas that move them.

Franny Choi: Brought to you by the Poetry Foundation and Postloudness.

Danez Smith: Hey Fran, my friend.

Franny Choi: Hello Danez, my… dad.

Danez Smith: Yes.

Franny Choi: That’s correct right? Is that accurate? You are my father?

Danez Smith: I am, I am. You got my nose, you got my hoes. How you doing this afternoon, Franny?

Franny Choi: I’m doing good. How are you?

Danez Smith:  I’m doing really good. I’m super excited to get into our conversation with Don Share.

Franny Choi: Yes. Editor of Poetry magazine.

Danez Smith: Writer of things. Translator.

Franny Choi: Translator, yeah! That’s a part of his work that I’d sort of forgotten about until this interview.

Danez Smith: Yeah. Person who put both of us in Poetry magazine for the first time.

Franny Choi: And several years and publications and pounds later, here we are hosting this podcast for the Poetry Foundation.

Danez Smith: Yeah, I’m excited to have this, because I feel like editors are often sort of the silent partner in all this. Poets often get a chance to speak, speak, speak, publish, publish, publish. Editors sometimes feel rather faceless.

Franny Choi: Yeah, it’s true.

Danez Smith: Or unheard behind the curtain.

Franny Choi: Yeah, he’s the Wizard of Oz, pulling the levers a little bit.

Danez Smith: Mm-hmm.

Franny Choi: But not even really pulling the levers, you know?

Danez Smith: Yeah.

Franny Choi: I’m sure that there’s some lever pulling involved. I don’t really know how editing machines work. But, you know, he talks in this about how he sees his job as opening space for various voices to happen, which I think is a beautiful way of thinking about it.

Danez Smith: And I think he’s done a beautiful job of that, right? There’s so many of us of a younger, browner, queerer generation who wouldn’t have been published in Poetry magazine 15 years ago, as well as people who I can’t believe it was their first time in Poetry magazine under the tenure of Don Share. Like Cornelius Eady, or Martín Espada, or Sonia Sanchez. It’s just like, what? They weren’t in Poetry magazine?

Franny Choi: Yeah. Legends who had not been in Poetry until just a few years ago or this year, with Don Share at the helm.

Danez Smith: And like, so great. And I love Don, but also, does not make him infallible.

Franny Choi: Sure. I mean, I think that’s a really tricky, difficult position to be in, to be the kind of gatekeeper or gate opener. However you frame it, there’s still a gate, and you’re still standing next to it or behind it.

Danez Smith: Mm-hmm. Sometimes that gate is attached to a very large institution.

Franny Choi: Yeah.

Danez Smith: You know, thank you Poetry Foundation for letting us do this. We come from people who—institutions have always been dangerous for us, right?

Franny Choi: Yeah, and sometimes I think we’ve been dangerous to institutions. And I think that it’s important for me to not be an easily assimilable tool for any particular institution. Especially one that’s founded—like 99 percent of them—in the tenets of racism, heteropatriarchy, etcetera, etcetera.

Danez Smith: Mm-hmm.

Franny Choi: And I think that difficult position that Don—and other people in similar positions as Don—find themselves in also means that sometimes, some things get through the gate that probably shouldn’t have gotten through the gate. You know what I mean? Some folks who are involved in conversations around poetry—you know, maybe you’re one of them—might have heard about a poem that was published in Poetry magazine in the November issue—

Danez Smith: November 2018 issue.

Franny Choi: —that other poets launched a critique against, saying that it contained imagery that was connected to neo-Nazi imagery.

Danez Smith: Mm-hmm.

Franny Choi:  And, you know, when something like that breaks—we’ve been in a lot of these conversations, Danez—that process of figuring out what the right move is, being not always the easiest to figure out.

Danez Smith: Not always. Especially when you are trying to hold accountability and tenderness for multiple people at the same time. You know?

Franny Choi: Yeah, totally.

Danez Smith: Yeah. Very hard conversation, but I’m glad it’s a conversation that we get to have.

Franny Choi: Yeah, and you know, we had been excited to talk to Don Share on the show months ago, before any of this happened. Although, you know, this is not the first controversy around Poetry magazine. But, especially after November, we were especially excited to get a chance to chat with him, and you know, if not about that poem specifically—although we do talk about the poem specifically—just sort of talk about the process of what to do when something like that breaks.

Danez Smith: Mm-hmm. And the duty of an editor, you know?

Franny Choi: Yeah.

Danez Smith: Both how an editor steps up and how an editor steps back.

Franny Choi: Yeah. Totally.

Danez Smith: We’re very excited to get into this. So let’s just go ahead and get into this conversation with Don, who is not only an editor, but [also] an amazing poet. He’s going to start us of with a poem.

Don Share: This is a from a long sequence. It’s from a whole book, actually, called Crown Decline. The book is a collaboration with the Australian poet John Kinsella, but the pieces I’ll read are my own, so that he isn’t faulted for their deficiencies.

Franny Choi and Danez Smith: (LAUGH)

Don Share: (READS POEM)

from Crown Decline

The epigraph is from Julius Caeser by William Shakespeare: “We, at the height, are ready to decline.”

Dreamers, we called them.  But who

Elected you to shift dream into nightmare?

Who made humanity a dream, and who?

Dreamers, we called them.  Who

Enacted this question of legality?  Who?

When we are born, we each must fare…

Dreamers, we called them.  But who

Elected you to shift dream into nightmare?

*

A monument is not history.

History is not a monument.

A statue is not liberty.

A monument is not history.

There’s no epiphany in bigotry.

History is not heaven-sent.

A monument is not history.

History is not a monument.

*

Robert E. Lee, still in bronze —

Will you surrender again?

Dismount, Sir, for the Union.

[Here insert emoticons]

*

Uncivil wars: if you’re not

With me, you’re antifa me.

No one leads in effigy.

Let these crowds part, and depart.

*

All the new thinking is un-

Like the old thinking: That is

Because it appears that our

Brains are melting like glaciers.

*

The farther away in time

I get from my late father

The more interesting he gets

Founding Fathers: not so much.

*

You have to walk slow

In dreams so nobody sees

You; the great fires are

No longer in our souls but

Outside us altogether.

Danez Smith: That was “from Crown Decline” by Don Share. Don Share is the editor of Poetry magazine, the editor of The Poems of Basil Bunting, and the author of Wishbone, as well as the editor of Who Reads Poetry with Fred Sasaki. Don, welcome to VS. Thank you for coming.

Don Share: Thank you for asking me to be here.

Danez Smith: Yeah. One of my favorite requests we’ve ever made.

Franny Choi: Yes

Danez Smith: What’s moving you right now?

Don Share: I know what you mean in the emotional sense, but I think what’s moving me is moving me almost in a physical sense. I’m being pushed along with the currents of things that are going on all around us.

Danez Smith: Okay.

Franny Choi: Yeah.

Don Share: Something happens and you have to move with it, figure out how to feel about it, what you need to do. How to support what needs to be done if there isn’t support for it, and on and on and on. So, what I’m moved by is other people being moved to address things ingeniously and imaginatively that they didn’t know they were gonna be called upon to address. In every moment, something calls upon us to respond—or, in many cases, resist—and people have to think up how to do it. For me—because I’m somebody who thinks about poetry like 99.8 percent of the time—

Franny Choi and Danez Smith: (LAUGH)

Don Share: —I’m used to thinking of poets and artists and musicians doing this work, but actually, everybody’s doing the work. And it feels like poetry, in a way, to me, that people are having to think up things that need to be said that weren’t said before. There wasn’t a language for it. So, what moves me now is the kinds of things people are saying and doing. The kind of poems that people are writing. I’m so lucky, because they come in!

Franny Choi and Danez Smith: (LAUGH)

Don Share: I sit at a desk and the poems come in, and I see them. They come in like every minute. And even if they don’t end up in the pages of Poetry magazine or some other home, I’m moved that people want to say things and find ways to say them and figure out how the words should look, and how people should feel about them. It wasn’t always like that. There have been great stagnant periods of poetry, I think, in American poetry, where poetry was not something that you could really be moved by. It was sort of narrow in scope, and there were only certain people who were seen to be producing it, for the most part. The multiplicity of people and spirits and presences in poetry at any given moment now moves me incredibly.

Franny Choi: I want to ask a question that I don’t if is possible to answer, but what does that mean? What does it mean to be moved by a poem in particular?

Don Share: That’s such a good question. I should ask that of everybody who sends poems or reads them too, right?

Franny Choi and Danez Smith: (LAUGH)

Don Share: Being an editor, a lot of times people say, well what kind work are you looking for? And I have to say, I’m looking for things I didn’t know I was looking for.

Franny Choi: Yeah, totally.

Don Share: I’m moved by the unexpected. Because I think the grimmer part of what we experience in life is when it’s just the relentless like, I’ve heard that before, I’ve seen that before, oh we have to go through that again? And you almost can forget the ingenuity of human imagination is endlessly resourceful.

Danez Smith: Mm-hmm.

Don Share: So what I’m moved by is when people make that reach and push past the language that’s sort of deadening to people or that is used to sloganize something or to convince people of things for a particular purpose. It’s like Keats saying, you know, we hate poetry that has designs on us. So, I think what it means to be moved by a poem is to find yourself affected and overwhelmed and awakened when you thought you weren’t gonna be. All of a sudden, you are reminded that you’re a human being, and you have feelings and energy and capability, and that you have a responsibility to go out in the world. I think one way of moving people is that—and we’ve seen this, like, just in the last three years or so—great words and images move people to put their bodies on the line for something. You’ll get like, thousands of people, and we’ll stand in a street somewhere.

Franny Choi: Mm-hmm.

Don Share: We’ll just put ourselves where our words were. That, to me, is connected to poetry.

Danez Smith: Hmm.

Don Share: That you put not only your words on the line, but you put your body on the line, too. People realize the power of that. That it moves other people.

Danez Smith: Who are some of the people or poems who have surprised you the most?

Don Share: I hope it’s okay to say our hosts.

Franny Choi and Danez Smith: (LAUGH)

Danez Smith: Well thank you.

Franny Choi: Aw-shucks.

Don Share: But it’s true, it’s true. There’s a whole, almost like a generation or cohort or constellation of people, because poets are also community builders, which is not always the way it was. They are educators, they are activists. What that means is that they bring with them other poets. I mean, what’s really exciting now is that we’ve moved past the idea of like, who’s the great poet? You know, like is it Robert Lowell or Robert Frost or whoever. Like, we don’t have that now.

Franny Choi: Really? You think we’ve moved past that question of the great poet?

Don Share: Well, who would you say the great poet of our time is?

Franny Choi: Oh, I don’t know.

Danez Smith: It’s different by the day.

Franny Choi: Yeah, that’s true! (LAUGHS)

Danez Smith: (LAUGHS)

Don Share: That’s what I mean. And I mean, I’m old enough now to know about this. When I started coming up, I mean, Robert Lowell was alive. Milosz, you know, whoever. Derek Walcott, who was my mentor. I mean there were times when there were these famous Nobel Prize-winning poets, you know? We all had to look up. And that, in a way, was a kind of an inspiration. But it was also a pressure. It’s like, your idea of what a poet should be would derive from observing the person with the great awards and attention and the bearing of a figure. I think now there aren’t figures like that.

Franny Choi: Mm-hmm.

Don Share: A price we pay for that, if there is one, you don’t necessarily have a figure who guides you into your own world for poetry. So like, I had mentors, you know? There was somebody who could sort of move you to what your own best impulse was. Somebody who could say, keep going, or do this, and learn this, and show you stuff. But I don’t think we do that now, to become like a great person.

Danez Smith: I definitely feel like I’ve followed folks.

Franny Choi: Yeah.

Danez Smith: But I think the good part about those people is that they also point to others.

Franny Choi: Sure, sure. Totally.

Danez Smith: There was a point where I was like, oh, gotta be on the Terrance Hayes plan.

Franny Choi: Right, exactly, that’s who I was—

Danez Smith: Or the Khadijah Queen plan or whatever. But it’s like, those folks have been so democratic and open with their love for others that they point you in the directions of the many people you should be paying attention to.

Franny Choi: Right.

Danez Smith: It maybe feels like we’re ascending as a group together.

Franny Choi: Right.

Don Share: That’s the best way to put it. That’s exactly right. I think before it was the cult of the individual personality, which is silly, because you know, for us in a lot of places like music or—it’s sort of natural, you know, there’s always like, a celebrity aspect to it. But I would say again that that’s the difference. That someone like Terrance Hayes will bring people on board. And also, you know, I’m not going to try to sound like an expert on Terrance Hayes or something, but I’ve never observed someone like that to say, it’s about me.

Danez Smith: No. Terrance Hayes will tell you it’s about Wanda Coleman. (LAUGHS)

Franny Choi: Right.

Don Share: Precisely.

Franny Choi: Right, and the first time I heard someone talking about the idea of a peer mentor was Hanif talking about Terrance, actually. He was like, my generation was always reaching up toward the mentor who was like, ten steps ahead; I want to encourage people are who writing now to look kind of laterally. That is so meaningful if you’re somebody who occupies a position like Terrance Hayes to say that to people, you know? Don’t just reach for your heroes.

Don Share: I mean, there are many implications to this. Again, when I was coming up, nobody would have been in communication with the editor of Poetry magazine. When I started sending poems out, the editor was John Frederick Nims. And it was like, nobody knew what he looked like. He didn’t write letters. He wasn’t tweeting or emailing.

Danez Smith: (LAUGHS)

Franny Choi: (LAUGHS) What do you mean, nobody knew what he looked like?

Don Share: I mean it was like, you would send shit off to a big magazine, and there’d be like a George Plimpton at Paris Review, or some personage, you know? And you didn’t know anything, and you would wait, and it would come back, or maybe never come back, or a rejection. But you were not in communication with people who occupied important literary positions. You know what I mean?

Franny Choi: Mm-hmm. They were just on Mount Olympus. (LAUGHS)

Don Share: Yeah, they were on Mount Olympus, exactly. And you’d just wait and wait and wait and, I hope I hear. And then if you got in, you know it’d be like, oh, I made it. But see, it’s not—I don’t feel like it’s that way anymore. I mean, one of the reasons I do what I do in the way that I do it is because I know what it feels like to have an invisible, seemingly all-powerful presence at the other end who might or might not be able to read different kinds of work by different kinds of people.

Franny Choi: Sure.

Danez Smith: Mm-hmm.

Don Share: You had no way of knowing what they were thinking. I mean, you could look at the magazine and determine it. Like, oh I see.

Danez Smith: Yeah.

Don Share: We used to even get advice. Like, read the magazine, see what’s in there. And the implication is, write stuff like that, and then they’ll put you in there too, because it’s like what’s already in there.

Franny Choi: Right, right.

Don Share: Well nobody does that anymore. You couldn’t. Well actually some people do this. But they would sort of pick an allegiance and write to it. They’d say, I want to be like so-and-so. And then they would try to write like so-and-so.

Franny Choi: Right.

Don Share: And you could get pretty far along with that. It won’t do you any good to write like Louise Glück. She’s already doing that.

Franny Choi: We’ve already got one of those! (LAUGHS)

Don Share: Yeah, exactly. But it’s a big principle, too. It’s like when I see poems and there are a lot of dashes in them. I’m like, well Emily Dickinson already did the dashes so that you don’t have to.

Franny Choi and Danez Smith: (LAUGH)

Don Share: It’s like, you are free! You don’t have to do it. You’re like, you don’t have to sound like another poet. Because that’s what they did. The freedom is now you invent and determine what you want to do, what you want to be, and with whom you want to do it.

Danez Smith: Can we talk a little bit about how you do what you do? Your first issue, right, which was October of 2013?

Don Share: Yes.

Danez Smith: You were lead editor. And seeing Nate Marshall’s name on the cover. And like, ever since then, you know, how those four names on the back of Poetry can kind of be just a little marker of where we’re at, right?

Franny Choi: Right.

Danez Smith: For me it’s wow, what an incredible day that the magazine that is named after the genre can present us with such a complex and rich and lush picture of what poetry is today, which I don’t feel like has—no disrespect to the previous editors of Poetry magazine—but I don’t feel like it’s always been true.

Don Share: Mm-hmm.

Danez Smith: Why?

(ALL LAUGH)

Don Share: There are two ways that I can reply to this. The more fun one will be the second that I get into.

Danez Smith: Okay.

Don Share: But the first thing is like, to me, this is reality. Like you said, it’s a lush, rich reality, and the magazine has to reflect it. If it doesn’t do that, it’s weird, right? But the more fun way to look at it—and I have to sort of figure out how to put this a little carefully. When I came to Poetry magazine—I wasn’t looking to be at it, but through a series of events, it became a possibility, let’s say—I got into conversations with the editorial team at that time. And at one point, you know, somebody said, well what do you think of Poetry magazine? And I said, I hate it. It makes me furious.

Danez Smith: (LAUGHS)

Franny Choi: Wow, incredible. (LAUGHS)

Don Share: And there was this long silence, and I thought well, that’s the end of that. But after the long silence—so the thing is like, why? And I said because I look in its pages and I’m not seeing reality. I’m not seeing the world that I walk around in. I’m not seeing the streets that I live on. I’m not seeing the people that I see every day on the train. I’m not hearing the voices that I hear wherever I might be. Several months went by, and I just thought, well that’s the end of that.

Danez Smith: Yeah.

Don Share: But then the call came, and they said will you come to Chicago and talk to us more about that. And we did. I don’t take what I do for granted. I’m not going to—you know, some people stay the editor of a magazine for like a billion trillion years and it gets old and stale and horrible, and I’m not doing that. This for me, what I’m doing, it’s a transition. It’s like, I’m steering the ship.

Danez Smith: Like, interim editor or something?

Don Share: Well, yeah. Because as a caretaker you are an interim person. I have to leave something for the next editor to do.

Franny Choi: Hmm.

Don Share: When I was interviewing for the job—you know, I had to have sort of a business plan—and I said, I’ll tell you what’s going to happen is all the subscribers are gonna bail. Most of the readers were a certain kind of reader, let me say.

Franny Choi: Yeah.

Don Share: What was good about that reader was they were people who had money and could afford to subscribe to a magazine and leisure time to read it.

Franny Choi: Mm-hmm.

Don Share: It’s a good demographic for many products. (LAUGHS)

Franny Choi: Yeah, totally.

Danez Smith: (LAUGHS)

Don Share: But for me, when I got a load of the numbers, I was like, oh boy, oh man, what are we gonna do? This is an odd demographic. Like, where’s the rest of the world in this? I flipped out. I just thought, oh man. But as you can imagine, it was mostly affluent white males between the age of 62 and 82 or something like that. And I thought, oh, that’s not right either. I mean there’s nothing wrong with those readers, and we still have them.

Danez Smith: No, no, no. Love me an old rich white.

Franny Choi: Yes, please. Thank you old rich whites for everything you’ve done for us. (LAUGHS)

Danez Smith: I’m available for a marriage, you know?

Franny Choi: (LAUGHS)

Don Share: I’m not even saying—there’s nothing wrong with that—I’m just saying that can’t be the only readership.

Franny Choi: Sure.

Danez Smith: That can’t be who the poetry magazine is pointed towards.

Don Share: Right. And I don’t think that it was intentionally. It’s just that was what gravitated to that. Because that is the mission of the magazine—it’s not my brilliant idea—is to not be beholden to any particular kind of poetry, to be eclectic, to be reflective of the rich diversity that exists in poetry and in the whole world. So it was sort of like, for me, it’s just a way to go back to our founding vision and really be serious about it in a different way than it had been approached. A lot of readers bailed. It was bad.

Franny Choi: What was that experience like of getting backlash for the things that you were starting to do in the magazine?

Don Share: There were two things about it. The immediate thing was that I got racist hate mail for a solid three years. I still get it, but it’s only now. Some of was shocking in the way that just the brutality of it is. But some of it was shocking because it wasn’t brutality, it was people saying things thinking that they were okay to say.

Franny Choi: Totally. Right.

Don Share: And then you’re like, well I know what you’re really saying. And I get these letters every day. I should’ve brought one. I got one yesterday.

Franny Choi: That would have been so fun.

Don Share: And they write them out and everything, and it’s very elaborate, and they’re trying to sound pretty reasonable about it.

Danez Smith: Wow.

Don Share: But the essence of it is, I could say to them in a room like, what are you really telling me? What you’re really telling me is you have an idea of who should be a writer, and who should be a poet, who should be in a magazine. And the kinds of people that you’re really objecting to, you’re not objecting to on literary grounds, because there aren’t any that I can see. You’re really saying something else: those aren’t poets. Of course my glib response is well if it’s in Poetry magazine, they are poets.

Franny Choi and Danez Smith: (LAUGH)

Don Share: Because that just goes without saying, doesn’t it?

Danez Smith: They’re not dancers.

Franny Choi: (LAUGHS)

Don Share: But this thing about something isn’t being poetry. We had a very small piece of Claudia Rankine’s Citizen in the magazine in 2014.

Franny Choi: Right, right.

Danez Smith: The first time we were both in Poetry.

Franny Choi: Oh yeah, that’s right. Wow.

Don Share: That’s right. And I thought, this is really important. And of course, it was before people were really constantly saying stuff. And I always fight against this thing that people say—they must say it to you as they do to me—like, oh, poets are having a moment because they’re pushing back. Like, no, poets have always been there. Poets were talking about this stuff before the media, before everyday people were just sort of getting that into the conversation. Poets were there. And I got letters, for instance, saying, why did you publish that, it isn’t poetry. I thought that’s sort of funny. Claudia Rankine is a well-known poet. Of course it’s poetry. The only explanations I could find were to figure out, you know, in whose interest is it to say that something isn’t poetry, or somebody isn’t a poet? So I got a lot of that. But, to reassure people—if they need it, which I don’t think they should—I went back and studied up on this question of what is and isn’t poetry. What I found out was that when Carl Sandburg’s Chicago poems were published in Poetry in 1914, the accusation was, it isn’t poetry.

Danez Smith: Really?

Don Share: Well the phrase “Hog Butcher for the World” was shocking to readers at the time. And people wrote in saying it isn’t poetry.

Danez Smith: Hmm.

Franny Choi: Wow.

Don Share: When “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock” was in the magazine in 1915, they got hate mail for years. Not one positive response has been locatable in the archives. People wrote—including literary critics at the time—they would write to Harriet Monroe and say, that’s not a poem. I mean, Eliot was in his 20s. It was his first adult real publication outside of a school magazine. You can go read those letters.

Franny Choi: Wow, that was his first publication? Amazing.

Danez Smith: Right out of the gate. (LAUGHS)

Franny Choi: I know!

Don Share: But I mean, it’s weird. Like, there’s this great letter. There was a literary critic and reviewer and anthologist named Louis Untermeyer and he wrote to Harriet about “Prufrock” and he said you know, he was at a dinner party and they were all talking about how this wasn’t poetry, and the only one who thought it was an interesting poem was a guy who liked it because he thought T. S. Eliot would be a good patient. He was a shrink.

Franny Choi and Danez Smith: (LAUGH)

Don Share: He thought that Eliot was sick in the head.

Franny Choi and Danez Smith: (LAUGH)

Don Share: So, then I realized, when somebody says somebody isn’t a poet or something isn’t a poem, then it really is. But I mean, this is the accusation that happens, and there is certainly racism and misogyny and other kinds of things involved. But on the other hand, it is a time-honored way of discrediting fresh, new, valuable work that will hold up. So now, when I get these things, I actually feel pretty good about them. But for a while I was like, I was innocent. I couldn’t understand what motivates somebody to make the accusation that somebody isn’t a poet or this isn’t a poem.

Franny Choi: There’s the kind of feedback that you can write off because it’s obviously racist or misogynist, and then there’s perhaps feedback also to really consider, that maybe, you know, shakes up the way that you think about the editing and reading process. I wonder if you could talk about that feedback.

Don Share: One of the things that I get reminded of when there’s a controversy about a poem—and there should be controversies about poems. There should be controversy about everything. I think it’s easy to forget that when you write a poem—when you send it out and put it in front of somebody, and you send it out and then it’s published, and it’s out there and doesn’t evaporate—I think poets, editors, readers alike forget that you can’t always anticipate the way a poem is read and understood. Imagery, to me, might mean—you know, someone else has a certain set of references for it. And in an ideal world—and we don’t live in an ideal world—we share that. In other words, the generous thing is to say, maybe you didn’t know that that imagery is harmful and hurtful to people. And then you could say, I did not know that, but now I do. And I wish I had known, and now I know. There are other things that are ambiguous. Like an image—and this has been the subject of much discussion—an image like a black sun, it could be neo-Nazi. I didn’t know that at one time, and now of course I do. But it occurs in Mandelstam’s poems, who’s a Jewish poet murdered by the Soviets. It’s in the Book of Luke, Matthew, and so on. That image has been controversial in my work and people will know that discussion, I imagine. I think what happens then is, you read something, and if you read it in good faith, it’s almost like that innocence—which is desirable in a reader and a writer and in humanity—the innocence means that you don’t know what lurks behind things if there is intent behind them that is evil, or uncomprehending, or even inadvertently. I mean, you can’t know how a poem affects people, and it affects everybody very differently because of wherever it is they might be coming from. There are so many individual experiences that feed into not just the writing and publishing of a poem, but the reading of it. And over time it changes, so that poems that seemed really great a hundred years ago, now they don’t seem so good. Poems that didn’t seem to be problematic a hundred years ago, now they are. Over time, we read with hindsight. A poem is unleashed upon an unsuspecting world. And mostly, that’s good. Mostly, the result is that people are able to feel and think things they didn’t before. They might get comfort, they might get excitement, they might laugh and have joy. But sometimes, it’s like, when I read this and reread it and look at it, I feel hurt and harmed by this. And you know, that is something we don’t talk about very much, but that is a possible outcome of the reading of a poem. Honestly, there are poems, when I think of it now, that have been published in the past—and not just by me, but also by me—where I often wonder if people might have said something that they didn’t—. Like, looking back at it now, with hindsight, I’m like, oh. Over time, it’s clearer to me what’s happening with this, but at that time, we didn’t see it, or I didn’t see it, or someone else didn’t see it. The meaning of a poem unfolds, and it unfolds over very long periods of time. But it takes time for people to really understand truth and reality. And to arrive at that, there are discussions that are sometimes very hard. And I don’t put things out into the world to harm people, to trigger them, to upset them. I mean, you could do that. Somebody could make the case, like publishing controversial work, even if you disagree with it, you know, it should be there so people can see it and talk about it? I don’t do that. I would never do that. But I can’t know everything. I’m fallible. I’ve made decisions I deeply regret, actually. Like in my job, I think I’m okay at judging poems, but not perfect. It’s hard for me to judge a person who submits a poem.

Danez Smith: Mm-hmm.

Don Share: Like I don’t want to empower abusers or terrible people. I don’t want their publications in Poetry magazine to give them more power if they’re doing bad things. But I don’t honestly always know what people are up to. Sometimes people tell me, and if they tell me, I think a lot about it. I’m like, I could turn pages over to somebody like this, or I can turn pages over to somebody like that. That’s my goal. But sometimes, you know, you look back. There are people I’ve published, and then later you find out stuff. I won’t say people I’m thinking of, but I think everybody kind of realizes this. And then if somebody says, would you publish them over again, my answer is no.

Danez Smith: Mm-hmm.

Franny Choi: Yeah.

Don Share: I’m not here to do that. But I usually don’t know a lot about somebody who’s done something bad until it’s out there, and then it could be too late.

Franny Choi: Too late, yeah.

Don Share: But a lot of times—and you have no way to know this—I’m weeding it out the best I can so you never know. There are secrets I know about poets’ work. Well-known poets have sent me things that I have rejected, and they get mad because their feeling is, I’m famous or well-known and who the hell are you? You know, I get that.

Danez Smith: Mm-hmm. I was here before you. (LAUGHS)

Don Share: But I’m like, I’m doing you a favor, because if the world knew you wrote something like that—it wasn’t on purpose—but if somebody saw that, man, you would be in some shit and deserve it. So, my feeling is like, I try to do a good job of judging character of people. And I work with a team that is pretty good at it. Like, we look for ableist language. I’m hearing impaired, you know. I have a hearing thing that can’t be fixed, and as I get older, someday I won’t hear at all. But when I see somebody say something obviously in a poem, like just a thoughtless cliché, that’s not like some glib thing for your poetry, you know? So we do actually—before something happens, we say to the poet, you know, think about this. Can we think through what you’ve said here? Are you sure that’s the best language? Usually it’s just bad writing. Like if somebody says they turn a blind eye to something, that’s just bad. It is also ableist.

Franny Choi: Right, right.

Don Share: We do a lot of work to try to get people to think about what it is they’re saying, because they often don’t realize it. But sometimes, it slips through or slips by. Or things change. The larger issue is the question of, how do we read a poem, how do we evaluate it, how do we talk about it, how do we decide what’s honorable in the work, and what is dishonorable? How do we connect the character of the person who wrote a poem with the work on its own? Can you? Those are questions that have no answers. Everybody is just doing what they can to sort of work that out.

(MUSIC PLAYS)

Danez Smith: I wanted to pivot and talk about you as a writer for a little bit. Oftentimes—you know, I kind of hate this idea—sometimes I hear students say it, like, well I don’t read poetry, because I don’t want it to influence my work. And I think that’s the dumbest thing ever. And I immediately kick those students out of class.

Franny Choi: Really? You’ve heard that before?

Danez Smith: Yeah, I mean not necessarily from my students but from other folks too, right? Which I think you know, there is nothing but greater abundance for yourself as a writer to come from a greater life as a reader. But you read so freaking much. How many submissions do y’all get a year? It’s a ridiculous number.

Don Share: It’s 150,000 individual poems that are submitted. If you think of a submission as being like three to five poems, that’s where that number comes from. And of course I read books, magazines, stuff online. I feel like if there was a Guinness World Records book for reading poems, I should get it.

Franny Choi: (LAUGHS)

Danez Smith: (LAUGHS) I think so! You and Kaveh Akbar.

Franny Choi: Yeah, you and Kaveh.

Danez Smith: How has reading that volume of work changed your relationship to your own writing?

Don Share: Well, there are two things. One is, in this job, I’m in service to other writers. That’s the main thing. I can’t multitask that. At any moment of the day or night—I think about poems when I’m asleep too, honestly.

Danez Smith: Do you dream about poems?

Don Share: Yeah. But right now, what I’m doing has to do with other people’s work. So, I don’t do a lot of my own work, because I feel guilty. I feel like I really need to be working with these other poets that are sending me things to think about. So I do a lot of less of that. Because in this time for me, I’m not so much a writer. For most practical purposes, and most people, I’m an editor. And it’s a great thing, so I’m not sorry about it.

Danez Smith: Mm-hmm.

Don Share: But as a practical matter, and sort of more what you were asking me, if I see things that I don’t think work in somebody else’s poem, I can’t do it in mine. I can’t turn around—

Franny Choi: (LAUGHS)

Danez Smith: Yeah.

Don Share: You know that? I think teachers feel that way too. It’s like well, if I just critiqued someone for doing this, then if you do it in your own poem, you’re like, oop.

Franny Choi and Danez Smith: (LAUGH)

Don Share: So it slows me down a lot. Because I think there is a pressure. You gotta keep sending work out, you gotta keep writing, you gotta keep pushing, you gotta beat the door down, you gotta get attention. You have to have readers and an audience. That’s a lot of pressure. You see, I don’t feel that. There’s a quote that is in my mind always, and I thought it was from the Irish poet Paul Durcan, but I can’t find it. And I don’t know if he really said it. It might be I made up that he said it or something. But it goes like this. He says—I think he said—“my job as a poet is to be here, which I am, not to lay some kind of curate’s egg.”

Franny Choi and Danez Smith: (LAUGH)

Don Share: Which is great, you know.

Danez Smith: Yeah.

Franny Choi: What’s a curate’s egg?

Don Share: Like an oddity, you know.

Franny Choi: Oh!

Don Share: Sort of like an embellished, you know—like a Fabergé. For me, that’s really wonderful. That means I don’t always have to be writing, writing, writing, churning stuff out. A lot of the poets that we love the most, if you look around, you’ll find that silence is a part of poetry just as much as writing. So for me, this is a time when I should sort of shut up and let other people have their voices be in poetry. I don’t think the world needs mine so much, honestly.

Danez Smith: Well, I think there’s a lot of people who need that poem that you read at the top of the podcast, because our identities are not divorced from who we are. I think, you know, there’s a lot of things—I’m like, it’s important that there is a mature white man writing that poem.

Franny Choi: (LAUGHS)

Don Share: White Jewish man.

Danez Smith: White Jewish man, white Jewish man. But it’s still important that you’re writing that poem. So I’m wondering what are you discovering—if you have spent time away from writing to do this intense fellowship in reading and publishing—how does it feel to be returning to the page now with these new poems in this upcoming collection, especially in a collaboration?

Don Share: It’s just tentative. I really am serious about the idea that like, on the face of it, new poems by a mature white guy in the room is not—I mean, it’s fine, right? It’s okay. I appreciate that you’re making me feel like it’s okay, because I don’t, but—

Franny Choi and Danez Smith: (LAUGH)

Don Share: But on the other hand, I don’t feel any urgency about it. Because I, all my life, wanted to be somehow connected with poetry, as a reader and writer, which, as you said, are the same thing really, right? But I don’t have any goals for it. I feel rusty at it. I feel like one of the happiest about what I do, is that all the work that I see makes me rethink what I would do if I could do it. Like if somebody said, send your next manuscript, we’ll publish it, we’ll take a look. I would have to think like, what should it be? I can’t do it divorced from what we’ve been talking about, or the kind of poets or readers we’re talking about. It has to fit in somehow. And I’m not convinced that the world needs to hear from a person like me, because they already have. So I want to hear from somebody else. So there’s a part of me that is really reluctant to feel that it’s important for me to weigh in in the form of a poem.

Danez Smith: Mm-hmm.

Franny Choi: Hmm.

Don Share: I’m weighing in in the shape or presence of an editor, and that’s a lot, and I’m happy about that. But it’s hard, you know, I don’t have this thing where I need to be—

Danez Smith: Yeah. Not so self-important.

Franny Choi: Mm-hmm.

Don Share: No, no.

Franny Choi: You talked, as a reader and an editor, of the importance of newness when it comes to reading poems. How does that figure into the way you look at your own poems?

Don Share: The weird thing about novelty and newness—so Ezra Pound says “make it new,” but he stole it. It’s actually a very—it’s from a Chinese phrase from antiquity, I believe. Here’s the thing. Like, the word “original” —people just think, this is original, this has never existed before, but the word “original” has “origin” in it.

Danez Smith: Wow.

Don Share: I think to be original, it’s like you’re going to an origin, whatever that is for somebody. It’s like they are also moving something forward that they came with. So the novelty—or the best kind of novelty in a poem—is when I see people being true to that. The voices that they grew up with or they live with now, or both, or the food, or the music, or the rhythms, or the bodies. It isn’t invention out of nothing and there’s a blank space that’s now occupied. It’s very different from that. It’s like moving things ahead. Going back to the idea of being moved, it’s like taking something that was maybe there—maybe it wasn’t visible to people, but it was there, maybe it was hidden, maybe people didn’t know how to put words to it—but you take that, and put it in your work, and then it feels new, but it’s rooted in something. It’s not just new for the sake of being new. It’s new because people didn’t figure out how to do that before. Like going back to the dashes in Emily Dickinson. Where I used to work, we had Emily Dickinson’s papers there. If you look at the dashes, they’re never the same size. Like everybody thinks it’s a dash. And they change, depending on her age, and maybe her mood. We don’t know. It’s a mystery right? There’s nothing new about a dash.

Franny Choi: Yeah.

Danez Smith: Hmm.

Don Share: When she started putting dashes in there, there was nothing new. What was new was she took a dash that people tended not to use in that way in a poem and used them in the way that we now all know. So again, what was new was that something had been kind of done in a way that people hadn’t known before. But it wasn’t out of nowhere. She didn’t invent punctuation.

Franny Choi and Danez Smith: (LAUGH)

Franny Choi: Emily Dickinson invented punctuation. (LAUGHS)

Danez Smith: That’s a very millennial statement. (LAUGHS)

Franny Choi: Yeah, I know! But I love that idea that originality is due to being as close as possible to whatever’s rooted most deeply in you. You said that part of that is bringing the voices that a writer has grown up with and lived with. Who are those voices for you?

Don Share: When I grew up, I didn’t know there were living poets. I thought they were all dead white guys with long beards and white hair like Whitman.

Danez Smith: Same. (LAUGHS)

Don Share: I’m serious.

Danez Smith: Me too!

Franny Choi: Yeah.

Don Share: When I was kid, Allen Ginsberg came to Memphis. I got a load of him, and he was reading “Kaddish,” and there was Yiddish stuff in his poems. So my voices—I’m the grandson of immigrants, grew up in a bilingual family. My impulse as a young writer was to get rid of all that. I remember—and I’m deeply ashamed, and I don’t guess I’ve ever really told anybody this before—but I was walking around somewhere, I was 12, I was walking around somewhere with my grandmother, and she had an accent, like a really heavy accent, and I was like, embarrassed.

Franny Choi: Totally.

Don Share: And I’m like, I’m an American. See, listen to my voice. It doesn’t sound like I’m from Memphis or anywhere. I made sure I got rid of voices. That’s how I wanted to be a poet at that time was if I get rid of accents, whether they’re Southern or related to coming from another country and coming over here. And to be fair, my ancestors wanted to be American so we would be safe. Like, if people didn’t know that I grew up—you know, obviously my grandparents came from somewhere else—well then I’m an American. They wouldn’t attack me. You wouldn’t hear anything in my voice to try to shame me, humiliate me, or denigrate me. So I worked to bleed my own existence, my voice, my even appearance maybe, but certainly my poems. I tried to get everything out, so that I could be—this is a poem, just like Auden, or whoever it was, you know? You know, now, I’m happy. I don’t know if the world is better place. But you don’t have to do that anymore. But my parents and grandparents wanted so bad for us to be assimilated, so that we would be okay. My brother couldn’t get into a famous Ivy League school because there were quotas on my kind of people. That was 1970. Not so long ago. My father wanted to be a doctor, but they had quotas. He couldn’t go to medical school. They only took so many people. So for me, sadly, I was the American dream come true, where you have no identity. That’s how it was perceived. If you just are bland and fit in and look like everybody else and sound like everybody else, and ate all the same food that the prevailing culture ate without fuss, you’d be alright. The sad thing is that we’ve given up—or I gave up everything for that. And I can’t get it back. My grandmother’s not around. My grandparents are long gone. My father is gone. And they didn’t talk about the old stuff, because it was painful. They fled persecution. They came from places where they were stateless, and they didn’t tell me about it. I know some things now because you can sort of research things, but only so far. So for me, the struggle has been to sound like myself, the person kind of blathering away sitting with you, but also to be truer to something that I can never get back. To me, it’s lost. I wasn’t given my culture. I wasn’t given my background. I wasn’t given my diet. I wasn’t given any of it, because the idea was, don’t go there, it’s dangerous. And it worked, but it’s devastating. I’m the first person to be completely ignorant of my own ancestry in my family.

Franny Choi: Hmm.

Danez Smith: Wow.

Franny Choi: So how did Allen Ginsberg swoop in and change— (LAUGHS)

Don Share: He just came by, and I was a kid, and I thought, oh my god. So this is the first thing he did—and this was in the early 70s—he played the harmonium. He couldn’t play the harmonium, but he did anyway.

Franny Choi and Danez Smith: (LAUGH)

Don Share: And then he meditated like, “ommm,” and this went on for like a half hour. It was really weird.

Danez Smith: What!

Don Share: He just went “ommm.” You should try it like, before you do a reading, for twenty minutes. Just, “ommm.”

Franny Choi: (LAUGHS)

Danez Smith:  I don’t know, because I want more readings. People would start being like, yo Danez is just like, omin’ at these expensive shows. (LAUGHS)

Franny Choi: (LAUGHS) Omin’.

Don Share: Om away. It was an omen. But then the harmonium, because he was doing Blake songs at that time. There’s actually a—you can hear him sing Blake to the harmonium, which he plays in the most rudimentary way. So he did that for a while. But then, you know, he read “Howl,” which of course was the first sort of modern poem that I knew about, because we were not taught contemporary poems, not at that time. He read “Kaddish” and I saw, oh, my family’s in there. Like, they came over, and they’re using some of the same words, and I thought, whoa, I had no clue, no one told me about this.

Franny Choi: Yeah.

Don Share: So I bought this little City Lights Pocket [Poets] book. I bought all these Allen Ginsberg books, and then I started buying the Frank O’Hara, and then I went from there. You know, but that—I was never an English major. I never took a class in poetry. So, he was an eye-opener. He was alive, he was Jewish, he was out there, he was crazy, he was emotional. Afterwards, I went up to him, because I just wanted to reach this person. So I go up to him and I’m like, this young person, and I introduce myself, and he says, oh, you should come to New York City. So when I was seventeen, I did. I left Memphis to go to New York, because Allen Ginsberg put it in my mind to go to New York, which I sort of—it became my obsession: go to New York, go to New York. And he wrote his address down on a little piece of paper. What I didn’t know at the time was he liked—I thought I was special! (LAUGHS)

Franny Choi and Danez Smith: (LAUGH)

Franny Choi: Oh!

Don Share: I thought he liked me so much, and then I thought, oh okay. But because I had his address, I started typing up a poem. I still have this. I thought it was a poem. It was just—you know what you do when you’re starting? You don’t know what you’re doing. But it was sort of a little Ginsberg in there, some completely dumb emotions, like teenage emotions, you know.

Franny Choi: (LAUGHS)

Don Share: I put it in the mail. I sent it to Allen Ginsberg at that address, and then a little time goes by. And I thought oh, I shouldn’t have done that! But he wrote me back. And I opened it up, and my poem is there. And the whole poem is crossed out—

Franny Choi: What!

Don Share: —in increments. At the bottom he wrote, “I crossed out some excess verbiage,” but it was everything in the poem. There was nothing left. (LAUGHS)

Franny Choi: Wow.

Danez Smith: Wow.

Franny Choi: The shade of it all! (LAUGHS)

Don Share: But that was my first poetry teacher.

Franny Choi: Allen Ginsberg being mean. (LAUGHS)

Don Share: But it wasn’t mean. It was generous, because first, he didn’t have to do it. I was so dumb. I didn’t know I should’ve put a self-addressed stamped envelope in there with it. I didn’t do that. He just did it. He probably did it to everybody. If anyone wrote him, he would write back. And he was doing me a favor. You could almost do that if you teach now. I mean, it would be harsh, right? But it was magnificent. Because it was a way of sort of saying, why don’t you start over.

Franny Choi: Hmm.

Don Share: Because when you come from nowhere—Memphis isn’t exactly the middle of nowhere, but it kind of felt like it—you know, all the people that I knew are still there. You know, people I went to school with, with a couple exceptions, they’re still there. My family is still there and everything. And it’s like, oh, you could move around. You could go to New York. You could go—wherever a dream takes you, wherever a poetry dream takes you, you could go there. I mean, you have done that. Both of you. So many poets have. All over the world, right?

Danez Smith: Mm-hmm.

Don Share: But someone has to sort of say, you know what, you can get outta town.

Danez Smith: That’s true.

Franny Choi: Right. You know, Allen Ginsberg was the poet that made me realize that I wanted to write poetry and be in the world of poetry.

Danez Smith: Oh wow.

Don Share: Wow.

Franny Choi: But I came to Allen Ginsberg through my high school English class, you know? My A.P. English class. And for school, we were assigned to write a “Howl” for our generation. And that was the first poem that I read out loud to the poets in college the following year, who would eventually be my biggest writing friends. Like Fati and Jamila were in that writing group, you know? Reading “Howl” and writing that “Howl” was what made me say like, I want to be in places where poems like this are being read out loud.

Don Share: Exactly.

Franny Choi: And what led me to my first open mic and stuff. But it’s so funny to know that this poem, across these generations, led us basically to this room, you know?

Don Share: I couldn’t get over it. I couldn’t get over it.

Danez Smith: I have a “Howl” story.

Franny Choi: Yeah? What’s your “Howl” story?

Danez Smith: So I was already writing. I was in this program called First Wave in the University of Wisconsin, which was like this weird and tight spoken word hip-hop collective. And the first poem that we were charged to write together—like 15 of us—we had to make a “Howl” for our generation.

Don Share: Wow.

Franny Choi: It’s a great assignment for young poets!

Danez Smith: It was. And I think writing that really tied us together. Because I was going to leave Wisconsin for a little while, and I think working on that particular project, I was like, oh, maybe there’s something here to stay with. Allen Ginsberg also made me want to start reading poetry more.

Don Share: Yeah, yeah.

Danez Smith: Because I wasn’t reading poetry at the time. I was listening. And I started to ask those little questions to every poet I could meet, like, how are you a poet? How are you doing this? You say that, and you mean it, and you have a life that has formed around it. How is that even possible?

Franny Choi: Right. Yeah, I remember after reading “Howl,” following up, like, I want to read some other stuff. I don’t even remember what poem it is where he just catalogues different things that have been in his ass. You know I was like, 17. I was a 17-year-old Asian girl in suburban Atlanta being like, whoa, my world has completely been opened up!

Danez Smith:  Thank you, Allen Ginsberg.

Franny Choi: Yeah, shout out to Allen!

Don Share: It’s so weird, isn’t it?

(ALL LAUGH)

(MUSIC PLAYS)

Danez Smith: On every episode, we like to play a little game, since we are called VS, which is a clever double entendre if I do say so myself.

Franny Choi: I feel like maybe seven people get it. (LAUGHS)

Danez Smith: Yeah. Every once in a while, there’s someone who’s like, I just got it. We like to put two things or people or whatever in different corners, to make a fight, and you have to be the judge of—

Don Share: The referee?

Danez Smith: Yeah the referee. Or the judges with the cards, you know? Who’s winning in the game of fisticuffs. For this game, we have in this corner, Allen Ginsberg, and in that corner, we have Basil Bunting. Who is winning in a fight?

(BELL RINGS)

Don Share: Basil Bunting.

Franny Choi: (LAUGHS)

Danez Smith: Why?

Don Share: Basil Bunting, in 1938, was the first person to write a letter to Ezra Pound saying, “I hate to see you cover yourself with such filth.”

Franny Choi: Oof! Amazing.

Don Share: He saw through shit like that and called people on it.

Franny Choi: Wow.

Danez Smith: Hmm.

Don Share: Years before other people did. I mean it’s difficult, because we’re all fond of Allen Ginsberg. And I feel almost a love for Ginsberg, but recognize his deficiencies, too.

Franny Choi: Sure, sure.

Don Share: And Basil Bunting had them as well. He wasn’t perfect, and he wasn’t like, the greatest human being or any of that kind of stuff. Not by a long shot. Not at all. But I feel like, you know, when there’s a fight, you go for the underdog.

Franny Choi: Mm-hmm.

Don Share: And in that fight, Basil is the underdog, because most people have never heard of him.

Franny Choi: (LAUGHS)

Don Share: And I’m devoted in my work—and it’s my inclination apart from that—to give a lift to people who are not being seen quite yet. So it’s Basil Bunting for me. I think Basil came from the north of England. To get ahead in his culture, you had to speak standard Estuary English and go to Oxford or Cambridge. He didn’t do that, and he didn’t believe in it.

Danez Smith: Amen.

Don Share: So, boom.

Danez Smith: Y’all heard it here first: Basil Bunting wins the fight, although Allen Ginsberg lives another day to put things up his butt.

(ALL LAUGH)

Franny Choi: Amazing. Will you do us the honor of closing us out with one last poem?

Don Share: Yes. Because it’s my curatorial instinct and all that, I feel much more comfortable doing translation work. What I’m going to read you is kind of my poem, because I came up with the English for it, and the poet would say, what? What’s that? But I feel comfortable getting other people’s work into a kind of intelligible space if they’re not in possession of languages. And so many people are not taught languages in this country. After Ginsberg, for me, the first poetry I was read was in the Spanish language. I found this poem when I was 17, and I translated it for myself. And it just shook me up. And that poet is Miguel Hernández. He’s a 20th century poet from Spain, and he was caught up in the Spanish Civil War. It’s like the American Civil War in so far as family was often fighting against family. And that was true in his life, too. At any rate, in that culture, which was eventually to become the dictatorship of Franco, poets were dangerous people. In most cultures, poets are dangerous. Even right now, I urge people to follow the PEN accounts on Twitter.

Danez Smith: Yeah.

Franny Choi: Yeah.

Don Share: And you will see that in almost every culture you can think of—except at the moment, the U.S.—it is quite dangerous to be a poet, and to have that power with words that the politicians want to reserve for themselves. Miguel Hernández was seen to be very dangerous as a poet, and he was arrested, and there was a death sentence. They were supposed to kill him, but he was imprisoned and moved around prison to prison to prison. He acquired treatable diseases, but was not treated for them. Got typhus, horrible diseases—and this is in the 20th century. He actually only lived to be 31 years old.

Danez Smith: Wow.

Franny Choi: Wow.

Don Share: So he was a very young poet. But he is one of the great poets of world literature, but you don’t hear too much about him. So Hernández was put in all these prisons. And he was young and married. And when they were first married, he and his wife had a baby who died. And they tried again, but because of the interventions of the Civil War, he never saw this baby. And one day, when he was in prison for poetry, he got a letter from his wife in which she said that the baby and mother had nothing to eat but onions and a little bit of bread. You know, Miguel was a resister, but he felt sweetness, and love was resistance, too. So instead of writing a poem being furious with somebody or some system, he wrote a lullaby. This is called “Lullaby of the Onion.” It’s dedicated to his son, after receiving a letter from his wife in which she said she had nothing to eat but bread and onion.

(READS POEM)

The onion is frost
shut in and poor.
Frost of your days
and of my nights.
Hunger and onion,
black ice and frost
large and round.

My little boy
was in hunger’s cradle.
He was nursed
on onion blood.
But your blood
is frosted with sugar,
onion and hunger.

A dark woman
dissolved in moonlight
pours herself thread by thread
into the cradle.
Laugh, son,
you can swallow the moon
when you want to.

Lark of my house,
keep laughing.
The laughter in your eyes
is the light of the world.
Laugh so much
that my soul, hearing you,
will beat in space.

Your laughter frees me,
gives me wings.
It sweeps away my loneliness,
knocks down my cell.
Mouth that flies,
heart that turns
to lightning on your lips.

Your laughter is
the sharpest sword,
conqueror of flowers
and larks.
Rival of the sun.
Future of my bones
and of my love.

The flesh fluttering,
the sudden eyelid,
and the baby is rosier
than ever.
How many linnets
take off, wings fluttering,
from your body!

I woke up from childhood:
don't you wake up.
I have to frown:
always laugh.
Keep to your cradle,
defending laughter
feather by feather.

Yours is a flight so high,
so wide,
that your body is a sky
newly born.
If only I could climb
to the origin
of your flight!

Eight months old you laugh
with five orange blossoms.
With five little
ferocities.
With five teeth
like five young
jasmine blossoms.

They will be the frontier
of tomorrow's kisses
when you feel your teeth
as weapons,
when you feel a flame
running under your gums
driving toward the centre.

Fly away, son, on the double
moon of the breast:
it is saddened by onion,
you are satisfied.
Don't let go.
Don't find out what's happening,
or what goes on.

(MUSIC PLAYS)

Franny Choi: I am so grateful that we got an opportunity to talk with the Don Share. Great uncle to all of our then tiny careers, now in-puberty careers. Pubescent careers.

Danez Smith: In-puberty careers, yeah, yeah.

Franny Choi: Speaking of adolescence—what? Danez started holding their nipples gently.

Danez Smith: Well, you said puberty and then I just had a thought, you know?

Franny Choi and Danez Smith: (LAUGH)

Danez Smith: And when I have a thought, I rub my nipples? (LAUGHS) No, I—

Franny Choi: Fun facts about your favorite poet, Danez Smith.

Danez Smith: Yeah, when I have a thought, I hold my nipples. And sometimes I rub my butthole. Speaking of buttholes, Allen Ginsberg. (LAUGHS)

Franny Choi: (LAUGHS) What about Allen Ginsberg?

Danez Smith: Well I really enjoyed that story that Don told about Allen Ginsberg crossing out his entire poem.

Franny Choi: Yeah, that was really good.

Danez Smith: And also just being the first poet to kind of ignite something in person for him.

Franny Choi: Yeah.

Danez Smith: Who was the first poet, Franny, to make you feel possible?

Franny Choi: I think the first time that I thought that being a poet was possible—the first time I saw a poet read out of a book was this poet Sawako Nakayasu, who read at Brown when I was an undergrad in my sophomore year or something. I guess I thought that everyone who had books was old and white.

Danez Smith: Mm-hmm.

Franny Choi: Even though I knew all these amazing poets who performed. But she had a book, and she was like, this young Asian American woman, and was reading these really weird poems out of this book. And I was like, my future, face to face. (LAUGHS)

Danez Smith: One day I will still be Asian, but with a book. (LAUGHS)

Franny Choi: (LAUGHS) I hope that I remain Asian. But yeah, I think it was sort of a Ghost of Christmas Future moment for me.

Danez Smith: Word. Beautiful. Beautiful.

Franny Choi: What about for you?

Danez Smith: You know, all things lead back to Def Poetry for me.

Franny Choi: Truly. All roads lead—

Danez Smith: Yeah. It does. And I liked poems for a while. You know, the first poet that really made me go, what the fuck is this poetry thing, is a poet out of the Bay Area named Paul Flores. And Rafael Casal, who became a mentor of mine, recently was in the movie “Blindspotting.”

Franny Choi: Oh cool!

Danez Smith: Yeah. Wrote and starred in it. But the first poet who was like my favorite poet, who was like, I want to know everything they do, is L.A. legend, host and founder of Da Poetry Lounge, Shihan.

Franny Choi: Totally, totally.

Danez Smith: Yeah. Like every episode I would watch of Def Poetry, I was just like, is Shihan going to be there this time? I was like, why don’t they bring him every episode?

Franny Choi: Yeah.

Danez Smith: He was so alive and funny and black as hell, and just like, low-key cute.

Franny Choi: Mm-hmm!

Danez Smith: And all those things just made me—I just gravitated towards him. And he was the first person who I felt like I was studying.

Franny Choi: That makes total sense to me. He’s also so present as a performer.

Danez Smith: Mm-hmm.

Franny Choi: Like, he’s definitely performing, but he’s not not himself.

Danez Smith: No.

Franny Choi: He’s like, 100 percent himself. He’s there.

Danez Smith: 100 percent himself, but he’s an excellent performer. So, yeah.

Franny Choi: I can totally see it! Of course, of course. Shout out to all of the poets who made us who we are by existing and being 100 percent themselves.

Danez Smith: Yeah. Thank you for your bright examples.

Franny Choi: (LAUGHS) Yes. Let’s get outta here.

Danez Smith: Yeah

Franny Choi: Do you want to thank anyone?

Danez Smith: Yeah. I’d like to thank Betty Crocker.

Franny Choi: Okay.

Danez Smith: You know, I don’t know if that bitch is real, but goddamn her shit be tasty. The other day, I was real high, and I just had kinda stale cookies that I still had in my house, and a like, tub of Betty Crocker frosting. And goddamn it, if that white bitch didn’t hook me up that night.

Franny Choi: Man, depression is a bitch. (LAUGHS)

Danez Smith: I wasn’t even depressed, girl. (LAUGHS) If anything, I was jubilant. It was just too late to go to the grocery and bitch was hungry, and I had frosting and stale cookies. And guess what? Betty hooked my ass up. So, Betty Crocker, for making sure I didn’t starve that night, we salute you, bitch.

Franny Choi: Thank you, Betty. I want to thank store brands of short grain white rice.

Danez Smith: Okay.

Franny Choi: For approximating the rice of my people, so that I can make a rice that’s sort of like the way Koreans make rice, even when I don’t live near an Asian grocery store. Shout out, alternative generic Korean proximity, shout out to you.

Danez Smith: Amen. Let’s do some real thank-yous now.

Franny Choi: We’d like to thank the Poetry Foundation, especially Ydalmi Noriega, for making this possible.

Danez Smith: Yes.

Franny Choi: Thank you to Postloudness. Thank you to our producer, Daniel Kisslinger. And thank you to you, our listeners and subscribers, for continuing to make us possible.

Danez Smith: Subscribe and comment and rate if you like us on Apple Podcast if that’s where you are listening to this thing. And make sure you follow us on social media @Vsthepodcast on Twitter, @vspodcast on Facebook. Make sure you follow Don Share @don_share on Twitter. Also, make sure you hop over to the Poetry magazine podcast and listen to him do his thing over there.

Franny Choi: Yeah, with Lindsay Garbutt and Christina Pugh, which you can also find wherever you listen to podcasts.

Danez Smith: With that being said, we’re gonna get on outta here, and you’re either going to go about your day or listen to another episode of VS that you have not heard yet. So, I guess we’ll see ya next time, or maybe we’ll see ya soon. Bye y’all.

Franny Choi: Bye.