Danez Smith: All the girlies say she’s pretty fly for a white guy, Franny Choi!

Franny Choi: And they’re a drama queen, but the drama is a Greek tragedy, Danez Smith!

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

Franny Choi: First of all, I can’t believe that you started the show by calling me a white man. But I-also, I guess it’s unfortunately like, kind of true. It’s not not true. You know what I mean?

Danez Smith: Yeah. Frances is indeed a dead white man.

Franny Choi: No, no, Francis with an ‘i’.

Danez Smith: Oh Francis with an ‘i’, that’s right.

Franny Choi: Yeah.

Danez Smith: You take it the other way. You feminize that ghost. (LAUGHS)

Franny Choi: (LAUGHS) I take it both ways, girl.

Danez Smith: Oh wow! How are you, though?

Franny Choi: I’m doing okay. But now I am—

Danez Smith: —My favorite white friend.

Franny Choi: Well, exactly, now I’m haunted by the idea that there is a white man inside of me.

Danez Smith: We all got the demons within us, and outside of us. Do you believe in ghosts? Does your house have ghosts?

Franny Choi: Oh my god, yes.

Danez Smith: I thought my house had a ghost, but it was actually just a mouse.

Franny Choi: (LAUGHS) I love this … do you have a ghost, or do you just need an exterminator?

Danez Smith: Yeah. (LAUGHS) I just need to clean up.

Franny Choi: (LAUGHS) Or are you just a messy bitch? (LAUGHS)

Danez Smith: I know where he lives. He either lives under the fridge, where many things have disappeared and probably, you know, is feasted upon, or he lives in this pile of clothes that, no matter how much laundry I do, just keeps on, you know, refurbishing itself. (LAUGHS)

Franny Choi: Damn. Refurbishing. (LAUGHS) I think that the idea of a mouse in your laundry is terrifying, but, unclear whether there’s actually a ghost, but there’s something like a ghost. And I think that if she lives anywhere, it’s in the wall between our bedroom and the office, which has a very rhythmic clicking sound that happens, kind of like year-round, mostly in the winter, so it might just be a furnace thing. But it just like … it doesn’t sound like pipes, right? It sounds like somebody’s—

Danez Smith: Got their little pocket watch?

Franny Choi: Yeah! It literally sounds like someone’s going (TAPS). They’re just going at it. But, there are two kind of ghostly incidents that happened in this apartment. One, which was kind of soon after I moved in, Cameron and I were cooking, and the Pyrex lid that we were using on the stovetop, it just like, exploded.

Danez Smith: Hm.

Franny Choi: And he had been cooking with it for like years. And it just like, exploded soon after I moved in. And we were like, okay, um, maybe a jealous ghost. Maybe not. Okay. Don’t know what it is.

Danez Smith: Hm.

Franny Choi: And then also then a few months later, I lost my keys, I just couldn’t find my keys one day. But I’m just like a losing things-ass bitch. You know, I just lose things constantly, so I was like, okay, I just lost them somewhere, but where, I haven’t gone anywhere. And we looked literally everywhere, did all these things. We looked inside all of my bags, all of the pockets of all of my bags, Cameron included. And then, one day right after I called my landlord to get a new set of keys, I walked past my bag in the living room, and there they were, sitting in my bag, right in the middle, completely open.

Danez Smith: Nah.

Franny Choi: Like— I walked past and could see them.

Danez Smith: That’s evil.

Franny Choi: Sitting right there. And Cameron had looked in that pocket. So we were like, “Okay, ghost, we get it, you exist. Like go back to sleep now.”

Danez Smith: But that’s a thing ghosts do. Ghosts steal things. That’s like a common ghost thing, that they will steal things from you and put it in different places, or just keep it for a couple of days, or for however long they want to.

Franny Choi: It’s so annoying!

Danez Smith: Yeah.

Franny Choi: Just like, talk to me!

Danez Smith: Ghosts are the original keeping having your phone in your hand while you are looking for it.

Franny Choi: (LAUGHS)

Danez Smith: Only this time, your keys were in the hands of the haunted. (LAUGHS)

Franny Choi: How about you, Nezzy? Do you have any ghosts in the house? Are you being haunted? Have you been haunted?

Danez Smith: Well, you know, besides the mouse …

Franny Choi: Yeah, besides the mouse, besides the mouse. (LAUGHS)

Danez Smith: Besides the mouse. I’m not sure if I’m haunted or I just need a new prescription, because a great many times, I will look at something in my house, and it will be like a fox, or like a man, for a little bit too long.

Franny Choi: (LAUGHS)

Danez Smith: Me and the mouse have looked at each other eye to eye. Like yesterday, he walked by the door and just stared at me and kinda casually went about his business.

Franny Choi: Yeah, yeah.

Danez Smith: So sometimes I see things out of the corner of my eye that are a little bit too big to be him and I feel like they’re just like the little sprites running around the joint.

Franny Choi: Okay.

Danez Smith: But I don’t question them. Because I feel like that’s part of part of, I feel like being a poet is just trusting all the spiders and the ghosts in your house, that they have their business, and actually they’ll be good to be called upon whenever they’re needed.

Franny Choi: Yeah, I love the idea of forming a healthy relationship with the ghosts that you cohabitate with. And I think that our guest today, Airea D. Matthews, is one who is absolutely skilled at living with and learning from the ghosts that are haunting her work. We’re so excited to talk to Airea D. Matthews, who we have known through the world of slam before knowing her through the world of poetry publishing accolade upon poetry publishing accolade, and briefly also overlapped at the University of Michigan’s Helen Zell Writers’ Program, which Danez and I spun about into and out of in various ways.

Danez Smith: Yeah, Airea’s always been somebody that I’ve looked up to for such a long time, and especially because no matter what door she’s sort of entering poetry from, she’s so good and wild at it.

Franny Choi: She’s so good, she’s so good.

Danez Smith: I feel like she’s always been one of the best poets I know, but has always been a different poet, you know?

Franny Choi: Right!

Danez Smith: Is never scared to, like you know, do the whole thing new. And I’m so excited to get into this interview with her.

Franny Choi: The range. The range.

Danez Smith: The range. Not only has the range, but she’s maybe the range, you know? (LAUGHS)

Franny Choi: Yeah, she is the range. (LAUGHS)

Danez Smith: She is the range. Airea D. Matthews’s first collection of poems Simulacra, recipient of the 2016 Yale Series of Younger Poets Award, has received praise from outlets including the New Yorker and the Washington Post. Her work has appeared in Night Heron Banks, Harvard Review, Callaloo, Tin House, American Poet, The Rumpus, Best American Poets, and elsewhere. Matthews is working on her second poetry collection, Mundane Gods. She decolonizes poetry at Bryn Mawr College, and her tweets can be found @airead. Y’all, Airea D. Matthews is so brilliant, smart, intelligent. This is a really exciting interview we’re about to get into, and she will start us off with a poem.

(SOUND EFFECT)

Airea D. Matthews:

(READS POEM)

etymology

because my mother named me after a child borne still

to a godmother I’ve never met I took another way to be

known—something easier to remember inevitable

to forget something that rolls over the surface of thrush

because I grew tired of saying

no it’s pronounced… now I’m tired of not

conjuring that ghost I honor say it with me: Airea

rhymes with sarah

sarah from the latin meaning a “woman of high rank”

which also means whenever I ask anyone to hold me

on their lips [sic] I sound like what I almost am

hear me out: I’m not a dee or a river

charging through working-class towns where union folk

cogwedge for plots & barely any house at all

where bosses mangle ethnic phonemes & nobody says one

word because checks in the mail so let’s end this

classist pretend where names don’t matter

& language is too heavy a lift my “e” is silent

like most people should be the consonant is sonorant

is a Black woman or one might say the spine

I translate to ‘wind’ in a country known for its iron

imply “lioness of God” in Jesus’ tongue

mean “apex predator” free of known enemy

fierce enough to harm or fast enough to run

all I’m saying is this:

the tongue has no wings to flee what syllables it fears

the mouth is no womb has no right to swallow up

what it did not make

* * *

Danez Smith: (LAUGHS)

Franny Choi: Yeah … I love that poem.

Danez Smith: Wow!

Franny Choi: I love that poem so much. My goodness.

Airea D. Matthews: Thank you.

Franny Choi: “my ‘e’ is silent / like most people should be”

Airea D. Matthews: (LAUGHS)

Franny Choi: (LAUGHS) The audacity! I love it, I love it.

Danez Smith: It’s like, kind, firm, cusses you out, dazzles you, kinda takes you to a Grecian mountain top and then calls you a nigga—

Airea D. Matthews: (LAUGHS)

Danez Smith: And then … (LAUGHS) It’s doing a lot of things.

Airea D. Matthews: It’s doing all the things.

Danez Smith: I really love it. It’s doing all the things.

Airea D. Matthews: Takes you up to a Grecian mountain top and then calls you a nigga. That is my shit! (LAUGHS)

Danez Smith: (LAUGHS) I offer this blurb to you. Just take it, just take it.

Franny Choi: Oh my god.

Airea D. Matthews: Thank you.

Danez Smith: You gotta quote me.

Airea D. Matthews: Thank you.

Franny Choi: Amazing.

Danez Smith: That poem does, I think, what I’ve seen you do for a very long time, which is never be scared of a reintroduction or a transformation of the self, right? Even in like, I guess how I know you and call you, right?

Airea D. Matthews: Mm-hmm.

Danez Smith: I think there was a moment, in the poem, where you say “I’m not a dee”, and Dee is kinda how I met you.

Airea D. Matthews: Mm-hmm.

Danez Smith: Right? It was everybody sorta saying this. And then, you know, I feel like I did re-meet you as Airea.

Airea D. Matthews: Yeah.

Danez Smith: Who you had been the whole time, but it was about … you finally were like, “This is who I am and I’m not gonna let you have this easy route out.” And I’ve seen you take your self, I guess, through that same thing, with leaving manuscripts behind, and just never being scared to tackle a new art. When did you come to that poem, and when did you come to the moment when you were not gonna allow folks even what that poem is about, the easy way out of your name?

Airea D. Matthews: That’s a great question. So, that poem took root in Edinburgh, Scotland. I was there, doing research actually, on Adam Smith, the 18th century moral philosopher who wrote The Wealth of Nations, which is basically the fundamental text that every capitalist uses to build their capitalist systems. And across the street from the University of Edinburgh, there’s a series of shops, and there was a Starbucks, so I was like, “Ah, might as well give them my money.” 

Danez Smith: (LAUGHS)

Airea D. Matthews: So, I went in there to sit and talk to myself for a minute. Because I was hearing different things, like different usages of language. And as I was reading his texts, they were all, you know, they were written in the 18th century, most of them. And so—Because it was his full library, so there were some that were even older than that. And I was trying to get used to a new way of understanding language, even in the way that the language was written, like the old English s’s look like f’s, you know?

Danez Smith: Mm.

Airea D. Matthews: And trying to re-circuit my brain in that way. And I got tired, I was like, I gotta go across the street and get some coffee. So I was sitting there and I was listening to these people talk. And they were talking about where these houses were. They were Scottish, and they were talking about where these houses were located. And one of them said, “It’s across the Dee.” Which, Dee is like a waterway. I was like, huh. That’s not as beautiful a name as Airea. You know, it doesn’t have the richness that my actual name has. And I started thinking that … it’s still beautiful, no doubt, but it just didn’t have the richness, it didn’t resonate with me. When I heard someone else say it, and when I heard the meaning of it, it didn’t resonate with me as meaningful as my actual name was. And then, so I started to think back to when did I actually become Dee? I became Dee … as a kid, right? My grandmother and my uncle could not pronounce my name for the life of them. My grandmother thought my name was way too complicated. (LAUGHS)

Franny Choi: (LAUGHS)

Airea D. Matthews: Had too many vowels.

Danez Smith: That’s such a specific Black trauma, of your grandma can’t say your name.

Airea D. Matthews: Just like, I can’t say your name—you are Dee. Deedee. You’re Deedee. Because my middle name—Dee is derived from Dionne. There’s a whole story, or mythology in my family, an origin myth in my family about the name Dionne. Dionne Warwick would have been my aunt. She was in love with my uncle.

Franny Choi: What!

Airea D. Matthews: They were both raised in north New Jersey, right?

Danez Smith: This is a New Jersey-ass story. (LAUGHS)

Airea D. Matthews: This is a New Jersey-ass story. Both raised in north New Jersey. She really loved my Uncle Willy. And wanted to get married to him. And my Uncle Willy was like, “Um … I’m not really diggin’ her because I’m not attracted to her.” He wasn’t physically attracted to Dionne Warwick. And I was like, “That was the biggest fuckin’ mistake you made of your absolute short life.”

Franny Choi: (LAUGHS)

Airea D. Matthews: And so, he wasn’t reciprocating her ardor. To Dionne Warwick, who went on to win many Grammys, (LAUGHS) and all kinds of music awards, have so many number one hits, platinum and gold albums.

Danez Smith: Mm-hmm.

Airea D. Matthews: And my uncle died on top of a garage in a small apartment in north New Jersey from, I don’t know, he died suddenly and dropped dead, and we didn’t find his body ’til like two months later, so.

Danez Smith: Could’ve been Dionne Warwick’s garage.

Airea D. Matthews: Could’ve been Dionne Warwick’s garage, actually. (LAUGHS)

Danez Smith: (LAUGHS)

Airea D. Matthews: You know? So my middle name is Dionne. In paying homage to Dionne Warwick.

Danez Smith: Wow.

Airea D. Matthews: And then it was shortened to Dee. Because my grandmother also, my uncle’s mother really liked Dionne. So then it was shortened to Dee. So they would call me Deedee. And that’s where many years later, when I’m at an open mic, and I’m thinking about putting my name down there, and I was like, the last thing I feel like hearing is somebody mispronouncing my name at an open mic. And I just didn’t want to do that to anybody. I didn’t wanna make anyone feel uncomfortable, so I made myself Dee. I put Dee Matthews down on the sheet. And it was Dee Matthews from now on out. And I just became Dee Matthews. I never actually published under Dee Matthews, but I did do spoken word and slam as Dee Matthews. I just kind of buried my name. I don’t want it to be a big thing, like, “Should I call you Airea, should I call you Dee?” Just call me what comes out of your mouth, but understand that there’s a whole ’nother entity there. There’s a whole ’nother name.

Danez Smith: Mm.

Airea D. Matthews: It’s a name that my mother stole from my god—well, who would’ve been my godmother. My godmother had a child that was stillborn, and had named the child Airea. My mother was pregnant and was like, “I like that name, I’m taking it.” (LAUGHS) So she took my name, and they are no longer friends. Nor should they be.

Danez Smith: No, you can’t take your homegirl’s baby name.

Airea D. Matthews: That’s your homegirl’s dead baby. How savage is that?

Franny Choi: Oh my goodness.

Airea D. Matthews: So she took her homegirl’s dead baby name and gave it to me, and I was like, well, I might as well just honor the ghost, so.

Danez Smith: I love all the ghosts in your name. The ghost of a love like foregone, you know?

Airea D. Matthews: Yeah.

Danez Smith: The ghost of a homegirl’s baby. Wow. And that makes so much sense for you. That’s beautiful.

Airea D. Matthews: Yeah.

Danez Smith: Matthews, which is the ghost of—

Airea D. Matthews: (LAUGHS) Right!

Danez Smith: Slavery. (LAUGHS)

Airea D. Matthews: Exactly, it’s the ghost of slavery. Slave owner’s name, and then you got Dionne Warwick in the mix, and then you got this dead child in the mix. A whole lot going on.

Franny Choi: And a Scottish waterway.

Airea D. Matthews: And a Scottish waterway, and Adam Smith, and then I just kinda let it sit, which what I usually do with pieces. I let poems sit for a pretty long time. And I don’t know why that is. I want to make it into some like, philosophical reason that makes sense. The poem must breathe, and it must—I don’t know if it’s as much that, or if it’s just insecurity. I don’t think it’s ready. I don’t want it to fail. I don’t know, I just have these weird beliefs that I don’t even know are beliefs, because I don’t think I’ve ever actually confronted them, so. Maybe it’s superstition. But I just let them sit for a while. And that could be tied to insecurity, or it just could be that … I’m lazy. (LAUGHS) I haven’t sent anything out.

Danez Smith: (LAUGHS)

Franny Choi: I don’t think it’s that, you know. I mean, I think that … I wonder if insecurity can be part of the process. I mean, I guess insecurity already is part of the process, so why not let it be part of the process, you know?

Airea D. Matthews: I think it almost has to be. And not insecurity framed in kind of like the psychological jargon where it’s a bad thing. But insecurity in terms of like, uncertainty. Which is what I actually think insecurity is. It’s a degree of not being completely sure. And so, that’s okay, because what poem do you know that is completely sure of itself?

Danez Smith: Mm.

Franny Choi: Not a good one.

Danez Smith: Especially not a rough draft.

Airea D. Matthews: Right! Exactly. No poem is completely sure of itself, because I don’t know of any poet that is completely sure of themselves. And how can the thing that’s made be better than the thing who makes it? I know there are some parents who probably take umbrage with me saying “How can a thing that’s made be better than the thing that makes it,” but I think there’s some truth to that. We carry on the ghosts of our beliefs inside of our children, too, so. I think about it a lot, like what gives you the gumption to go ahead and send something along. And then why do you hold stuff. I hold a lot of poems.

Franny Choi: Mm.

Danez Smith: Well, like you’re saying you hold a lot of stuff, you’ve literally burned a manuscript before.

Airea D. Matthews: Mm-hmm.

Danez Smith: And, sort of you know said, this thing like, you know, here’s this thing I’ve taken to this point. Ima just get rid of it and release it from scratch. Because what you do release is so strong, is it that you know you can make something better sometimes? Or that you know that you trust your second mind maybe a little bit better than your first mind, and so that’s why you’re holding on, in order to see what else is to come? Cause to me that feels deliciously selfish to know that something better—

Airea D. Matthews: Yeah.

Danez Smith: So is it that you’re sort of just waiting on your second mind or waiting to see what else you can do? Or is that you’re holding onto an insecurity about the work?

Airea D. Matthews: I think it’s probably a little column A, a little column B. I think I’m holding on to see what the poem wants to do next. And I really only do that for very specific types of poems. There are other poems I let go very quickly. Like dissociative poems, I let them go quickly. And I let them go because I think too much tweaking of a dissociative poem turns it into what it wasn’t meant to be.

Franny Choi: Can you just say what you mean by a dissociative poem?

Airea D. Matthews: So, when I think about dissociative poems, I think about poems that it’s like the first thought, best thought. So you have a string … think about Stein, to some degree. Stein’s poems. You have a number of different thoughts that are juxtaposing one another, a number of different images that are juxtaposing one another. And they’re disjunctive. They don’t necessarily make sense together, but when you get to the end of the thread, which was your original thought thread, you’re like, “Oh, okay, these actually make sense together somehow.” So those dissociative poems are poems that don’t— that are a little bit wild, have a little bit of ferociousness to them, but don’t necessarily make perfect sense. It’s a poem you come out, and you’re like, “What the fuck did I just read?”

Franny Choi: (LAUGHS)

Danez Smith: Yeah.

Airea D. Matthews: Those are what I would—like when you read Stein, you come out of it, you’re like, “Hm. I don’t really know what she’s talkin’ about.” And so, for those dissociative poems, I leave them alone. The only thing I work on, editing-wise, with dissociative poems is sequencing. So the sequencing of the lines. And they usually come out in prose blocks, and I think that’s just like, the perfect picture of what my prose block mind does. It’s just like, bloop. It’s this one small prose block, and they come out like that. So I’ll work on sequencing, so I might change like, the third sentence and make it the first sentence or do something like that. But I don’t do too much tweaking to those, because I think that they are just meant to be what they are. They’re like distinct, discrete moments in time that are thought bubbles, or thought experiments in some way.

Franny Choi: Right.

Airea D. Matthews: With kind of more lyrical poems, or what I would call an Apollonian poem, the typical lyric poem, I do spend more time with those.

Franny Choi: Did you say Apollon—

Airea D. Matthews: I call them Apollonian poems. So if there’s two different views about how poems are, there’s the Apollonian poem, which comes from the idea of Apollo. The Greek god Apollo, which was the god of music and could shoot a bow with perfect precision, and could play the lyre. And kind of this beautiful, melodic, lyrical poem. The poem that we know, when we encounter the poem on the page, “Oh, that’s a poem.” And then there’s the Dionysian poem, which is a little bit different. Those are the wild poems. Those are the dissociative poems. Those are the poems where, if you try to employ Gregg Orr’s “The Four Temperaments”—there are four temperaments in poetry, but if you try to impose those on a dissociative poem, it’s a little bit wonky. I think that model only works for Apollonian poems, or true lyric poems. So, in Orr’s vision of how the poems works, or how the temperaments work in poetry, there’s story, there’s structure, there’s music, and there’s imagination. And poets will gravitate, naturally, toward one of those quadrants. Story is up in the upper left hand quadrant, structure is right below it, and then music is up above in the upper right hand quadrant, and imagination is right below it. And naturally a poet will gravitate toward one of those quadrants. For me, I will almost always gravitate toward the right side of the quadrant. I’ll gravitate toward music and imagination. Some folks with gravitate toward story and structure. What Orr posits is that, the more well-balanced poem, will strike a balance between one quadrant on the right and one on the left.

Danez Smith: Hm.

Airea D. Matthews: So the balanced poem will strike a balance between story and imagination, or between music and structure. And the very balanced poem strikes holistically, you know, at each quadrant, so it’ll have a little bit of all those things.

Franny Choi: Hm.

Airea D. Matthews: I think the best example that I can think of is … just in terms of a poet who consistently strikes at those quadrants, is like, Robert Hayden. And Auden, just constantly striking at all four quadrants. Whereas a poet like Hart Crane would be striking at music and imagination more.

Franny Choi: Hmm.

Airea D. Matthews: And you might even say like the Dionysian poem—if I’m even pronouncing that right, and I hope that I’m pronouncing that right, so whatever—are the disjunctive poems, are the dissociative poems, right? Because it’s a wild ride, you don’t actually know where you are. Temporally, you feel off. When a poem is just centered around music and imagination, you feel off temporally, you don’t know where you are. So back to the question. When I’m dealing with Apollonian poems, or the more lyric poems, I will absolutely spend more time with them, and edit them, and then second-guess them. Because my wheelhouse is a dissociative poem. Because I told you, I’m on that right side of the quadrant. I’m in music and imagination. That’s where I dwell, and I’m like, ooo, I’m comfortable in there. But when I have to insert a story in there … oh hell, all bets off. I mean, I’m trying, but—

Danez Smith: (LAUGHS)

Airea D. Matthews: I just need to spend more time with it.

Franny Choi: That’s super, super fascinating. I mean but I think that I also totally relate to it. I remember the poems that I brought into workshop that were more dissociative or Dionysian, there was no helpful feedback that anyone would give, you know?

Airea D. Matthews: No! They can’t get into it.

Franny Choi: No.

Airea D. Matthews: It’s hard to find an entry into those poems, right? And those poems are necessary, don’t get me wrong. But it’s hard for someone who is not in your head to find an entry point into that poem. So what they wind up doing is going along for a ride.

Danez Smith: Hmm.

Airea D. Matthews: You get on a rollercoaster—it’s like Space Mountain at Disney.

Franny Choi: (LAUGHS)

Airea D. Matthews: It’s like an inside rollercoaster where you don’t know where the turns are coming, but you know it’s coming, so.

Danez Smith: Well, because you’re experiencing the poet at their rawest form, right?

Airea D. Matthews: Right. (LAUGHS)

Danez Smith: Where the poet, they didn’t know what they were doing, too.

Airea D. Matthews: Right.

Danez Smith: I love those poems of mine, because I can’t explain. I’m like, I don’t know, it’s funky, it’s doing something, it made sense to me at the time. Don’t ask even me to explain it to you. I know it took me a while to even learn to trust those poems. How do you trust yourself to even go there? You know, like, what takes you all the way into, let’s say, the video poetry that you’ve been working on?

Airea D. Matthews: Yeah.

Danez Smith: Sort of, what kind of questions or limitations, or even sort of appetite gets you all the way to there, where you’re saying, you know what the fuck I need to do? I do need to fuck up this Future video.

Airea D. Matthews: Yeah. Yeah.

Danez Smith: And make this into a poem. (LAUGHS)

Airea D. Matthews: Yeah. Yeah. So I’ve been really into, most recently, Derrida’s ontology, the idea that Derrida forwards in his 1993 book Spectres of Marx. And in it, he talks about what is absent is also present, right? It’s a new way to think about being. It’s not ontological, it’s hauntological. And actually, Jonah Mixon Webster just wrote this fantastic dissertation on Black hauntology. It is unbelievably good. What Derrida was talking about was kind of like, we’re constantly haunted by stuff, right? We’re constantly—the past haunts the present, which informs the future. So we can’t get away from it. So it’s kinda like this idea of it is that, there’s no part in time that we live in or that we experience which has not somehow been influenced by some other thing. Some other experience, some other known or unknown quantity. So, we’re constantly haunted by something.

Danez Smith: Hm.

Airea D. Matthews: Whatever that something is. And so, with this idea of conceptual blending, which I kinda like a lot—and I can’t remember what philosopher forwarded conceptual blending, but it’s just kinda this idea that, so you take the best of the inputs, and you meld it into something different. And so that’s the idea of conceptual blending, where you take these different concepts, and it could be from various other disciplines. It could be from the visual arts, it could be from sculpture, it could be from music, it could be from anything. And you think about, how do you tweak it, to make it different than what it originally was. And in that tweaking, you change what is being signified. You change the meaning of it. Just that simple pattern. So with the Future video that I tweaked, it’s just basically taking the visual capital from Future’s video, and transposing it with a sound poem. And so what happens when you do that, then it becomes capital for the sound poem. Whatever the original meaning that Future had in the “Mask Off” video, changes.

Danez Smith: Mm-hmm. Mhm.

Airea D. Matthews: Just by changing the words. You’re looking at the same visual capital, but it changes becuas the words have changed, so the input’s changed. And that’s

the idea of conceptual blending that I’m into. And you do have to be careful with conceptual blending, right, because you have to get permissions and all that shit. But it’s an interesting concept to me, cause it’s just like … have you ever watched a film where you put the closed captioning on in a different language?

Danez Smith: Yeah. Tbh I gotta do that with British films sometimes.

Airea D. Matthews: For sure!

Danez Smith: I was watching I May Destroy You the other day, and I had to turn the closed captioning on. Cause I didn’t know what the—

Airea D. Matthews: (LAUGHS) You don’t know what they be talkin’ about, right!

Danez Smith: I didn’t! There was like five minutes I was like, I don’t know what these niggas just said.

Airea D. Matthews: (LAUGHS) I don’t know what they sayin’! But I’m here for it, right? So here’s a challenge: watch a foreign film, but don’t put the closed captioning on. See if you can figure out what’s going on.

Franny Choi: Hm.

Airea D. Matthews: You know what I’m saying? That’s like this idea of conceptual blending, where you take your own input, whatever your input is—your experience is part of your input. You take the film, which is another input, and then you come out with this whole different third product.

Franny Choi: I love the idea of like taking some of the input away so that there’s room for what you need to put in. To create something new.

Airea D. Matthews: Yeah! There’s room for new meaning.

Franny Choi: And it becomes completely different, but doesn’t … at the same time, doesn’t lose the original.

Airea D. Matthews: It doesn’t lose the original.

Franny Choi: Which I think is so cool about that Future video, is that the Future video is still there, and everything about it is still there, and it’s like, just become layered and complicated with the advent of the sound poem.

Airea D. Matthews: Right. And I mean that’s the thing, it’s just like, you still carry with you—getting back to hauntology, when you look at that video, if you have experience with the video, you’re still carrying the experience of that video forward. It’s absent as music, but the presence of the music is still there.

Franny Choi: Mmm. Mm-hmm.

Airea D. Matthews: It’s absent, but it’s still being haunted by what you remember from it. The idea of hauntology is fascinating to me for exactly that reason. Like, how can you take something out of something else and make it mean something completely different, you know?

Danez Smith: Right.

Airea D. Matthews: Make it signify at a different level.

Danez Smith: Well I was gonna say, you do that in your first book so well, right? I think like, what does it mean to make Anne Sexton text. You know, all these ways in which you’re picking up different ghosts, both personal and literary, and making them do things that are sort of out of their ghostly element, or at least how we understand them.

Airea D. Matthews: Right.

Danez Smith: I know—So you’re working on second book. Or you’re just working on all the things, right? These video poems going on. You’re just thinking—

Airea D. Matthews: I have no idea where they’ll go, they’re just out there.

Danez Smith: I think … one, I think, I think we need more permission to do that, that your art doesn’t need to sort of have a final vehicle that it’s going to. It can just be like, here is this thing that I experimented in, and I feel good enough about it that y’all need to see it. (LAUGHS)

Airea D. Matthews: Right. Right!

Danez Smith: And experience it. And that’s what art should do. It doesn’t need to have, like, you know, a barcode on it that makes it … 

Airea D. Matthews: Right on!

Danez Smith: That makes it worth something. But, I’m wondering what ghosts are feeling necessary, or are walking with you right now, through the new work you’re doing. And, side question: Is your second manuscript still on the level of class that I know you were thinking about, or has it expanded outside of thinking about working class and all these other things.

Airea D. Matthews: That’s a great question. So, yeah, it’s still primarily dealing with the intersections of capital and race, which often illustrate themselves in society as class.

Danez Smith: Mm-hmm.

Airea D. Matthews: It’s interesting, like in America, race is de facto class. I don’t think it’s so in some European countries. I think it’s a little bit different, like, class means a lot. And I think a lot of that just has to do with they’ve had hierarchies in place for years where they had monarchies. So, class means something— a different thing to them. But, here, I’ve been thinking about the ways that race and capital intersect, the way consumerism and race intersect, the ways that, in a nutshell, the ways that capitalism and race intersect. And its kind of detrimental impacts. And that was one of the reasons I went to Scotland a couple years ago, was because, I was trying to get to the heart of like, what did Adam Smith mean when he talked about the invisible hand, you know? So, in his theory of capital, he was talking about— or capitalism, he was talking about well, things will happen that will create an optimal outcome for everybody. And the reality of that is, it doesn’t actually. Like, it’s supposed to be the high tide lifts all boats, but the reality is some people ain’t got a boat (LAUGHS), some people don’t live close to a shore. There’s all kinds of things I’m thinking about inside the book. It’s primarily dealing with class, and it’s dealing with erasures, and it’s dealing with forgetting. Because I think that we forget that our systems are based on men. Our systems are based on the ideas of men. And the ideas of men are always flawed. And they’re also implemented by men. In that forgetting, I kinda want to reconfigure how we think about Adam Smith. So I’ve taken quite a bit of the Wealth of Nations and made it a huge erasure. Because I think that the initial ideas of capitalism erased large swaths of our global population. They weren’t thinking about them. They became sort of sacrificial lambs. And so, there’s some erasures in there, but there’s also some poems that are dealing explicitly with race and history and the erasures that happen there.

Franny Choi: It sounds like to erase Adam Smith is like, to me that seems like an act of haunting going the other way. That like you Airea D. Matthews are turning around and haunting one of the progenitors of capitalism.

Airea D. Matthews: Absolutely. I hope so.

Franny Choi: Is that how you feel?

Airea D. Matthews: I hope so.

Franny Choi: Yeah.

Airea D. Matthews: Yeah, I wanna erase that motherfucker from the dead.

(ALL LAUGH)

Airea D. Matthews: I really do. He’s … I mean, it’s so … the ideas of capitalism are so intertwined with everything we do globally, and so fucking pernicious. It’s so harmful to think about, like, the haves and the have-nots, and the amount of ridiculous amounts of wealth that we give people under the presumption that they’ll do the right thing with that wealth, which is never done. That’s really what it is. Like you’ll assume—it’s like, it’s okay for people to have great amounts of wealth, but they’ll do the right thing with it. No, they don’t. Because at the end of the day, people are human. And selfish. Many people are selfish. So, no, that’s not always the case. And then to think about people who are entirely and historically disassociated, who’ve never dealt with wealth. One of the markers of wealth in the United States is home ownership. If you look at the home ownership rates among races, or breakouts in ethnicities, you’ll see, Black folks have some of the lowest home ownership rates. And a lot of that just has to do with history. We were pushed out. We were not allowed to buy homes. We were encouraged to rent. You know, I just … all those concepts are kind of up in the air and at play right now. And I’m trying to figure out, like, how do you make it cohere? That’s the thing for a collection. You can have all these amazing lofty concepts, but how do you make that shit cohere? How do you make it make sense in a collection? And that’s where I am right now. Like that’s my everyday work is like, the poems are there, but how do you make them tell the story that you’re trying to tell. Which is a little bit manipulative, but it’s actually the work of poetry. You’re trying to shape a— or like a poetry collection— you’re trying to shape the narrative.

Danez Smith: Hm. So you feel now you’re at the structuring stage, of just really trying to figure out what the shape looks like, instead of … are there still poems to write, or is it just figuring—because that is sometimes the hardest part, is just how do these Legos go together, you know.

Airea D. Matthews: Yeah. I think right now I’m trying to figure out how the Legos go together and before I can write more poems, I have to figure out how they cohere right now. Does that make sense?-

Danez Smith: -Yeah.

Airea D. Matthews: - Like I think there’s more poems to be written, but I have to figure out how they cohere in the here and now before I can get to that point. So, with the Yale, one of the things, the manuscript that was published was not the original manuscript, of course. Manuscripts change. But there were a couple of points where Carl was like, “You should take this out and just whip up a new poem.” (LAUGHS) And I loved how he said, “Just whip up a new poem.” And because it’s Carl, that’s what the fuck I did.

Danez Smith: Like you’ve read it. (LAUGHS)

Airea D. Matthews: I mean, it’s Carl Phillips. He tells you to whip up a new poem, you better whip up a new poem.

Franny Choi: (LAUGHS) Right, right.

Danez Smith: (LAUGHS)

Airea D. Matthews: So I whipped up some new poems, and kinda put them in strategic places in the collection, but I already knew the direction that the collection was going. So it was easier to whip up a new poem. So that’s where I am right now, is like trying to figure out, okay, you got this concept, how do you make the concept into something that makes sense.

Franny Choi: Aside from the erasures, what other, like, things are you experimenting with formally, or … yeah, we’ve been talking a lot about concept, but what about the forms and how the poems look?

Airea D. Matthews: That’s such a great question, because I think one of the things I hit a wall with is my imagination, and what I wanna do, with what I have the current skill set to do. Or what the publishing world can do. That’s really what it is. It’s what publishing can do.

Franny Choi: That’s the limitation.

Airea D. Matthews: That’s the limitation. It’s like, publishing can’t do some of this stuff that I’m trying to do. It would have to be a multimedia type of publishing situation. It’s not like a book.

Franny Choi: Like what? What kind of stuff are you trying to do that’s beyond the realm of publishing?

Airea D. Matthews: So, okay, imagine a newspaper. And you cut out the center into a square, so there’s an empty hole in the center, there’s a square. And you have a video playing up through the square, projecting through the square. The movement of the video is inserted into the stasis of the paper. Like there’s no way to—

Danez Smith: Oh your book got batteries!

Franny Choi: (LAUGHS)

Airea D. Matthews: Batteries.

Danez Smith: (LAUGHS)

Airea D. Matthews: Bitch got batteries. How the fuck do you do that? Like you can’t … who can do that, you know? And I have this other concept for … I went to an art exhibit this one time, and it was this, gosh, I believe she was an amazing Lebanese artist, and she had—you just stood in the middle, the center of the room, and the wall revolved around you. And then my idea was like—and this is future concept, this is not anything that I can do right now. Like, could you write a book like that? Could a book just be projected on the wall? Rather than on a page. Why can’t it?

Danez Smith: I think it could. I think, you know, because I think even going back to your … you know, thinking about this concept blending, right, like the medium is also a collaborator in that, right?

Airea D. Matthews: Yeah. Yeah.

Danez Smith: Even when you were talking about that, I was wondering like, when did … for some of these things, like paper, become an un-useful collaborator, right?

Airea D. Matthews: Right!

Danez Smith: Like, actually I can’t use this flat space, because it’s not gonna let me do what I do. And what you’re talking about is like … you know, I wanna see that static book page with that video coming through, and I think it’s just that you—it’s an installation right?

Airea D. Matthews: It’s an installation.

Danez Smith: In order to read this book, and it can still even be framed as you’re going to read this book, but you need to go to this space. You know, my book is gonna be posted up here for a month at this gallery, please come read it, you know?

Airea D. Matthews: Right.

Franny Choi: (LAUGHS)

Airea D. Matthews: Right.

Danez Smith: The future is them figuring out a way to put gifs on paper, right?

Airea D. Matthews: That’s it.

Danez Smith: Like electric paper that like can have images and stuff like that in some weird way.

Airea D. Matthews: Right.

Danez Smith: And until then, you’re a visual artist. (LAUGHS)

Airea D. Matthews: Exactly right. I mean, that’s the dream for me, is like, at some point, the only paper that I wanna use is an invitation to come read the book.

Franny Choi: Oof!

Danez Smith: Hmm.

Airea D. Matthews: You know? I don’t want to deal in that medium. Because I think we lose so much in that medium, and have lost so much in that medium. You know, we’ve lost entire histories because they haven’t been written down. A couple of quick facts. Like, thinking about … I asked myself the question, I was like, okay—I’m still really into Tudor England, so I asked myself the question, “Were there Black people in Tudor, England?” And it turns out there’s a whole-ass book called Black Tudors. (LAUGHS) And it talks about the Black people that were in Tudor England. Henry VIII’s trumpeter was a Black man.

Danez Smith: Whoa.

Airea D. Matthews: John Blank, I believe his name was. He had a free—

Danez Smith: John Blank?

Airea D. Matthews: John Blank, I believe.

Danez Smith: Oh he’s asking for poems.

Airea D. Matthews: Yes!

Danez Smith: (LAUGHS)

Airea D. Matthews: Asking for poems.

Franny Choi: (LAUGHS)

Airea D. Matthews: There was another one named John Francis, who was Henry VIII’s official diver. Now mind you, he was diving—

Danez Smith: What?

Airea D. Matthews: Yes, he would go diving to recoup whatever was lost in shipwrecks.

Franny Choi: Ohh.

Airea D. Matthews: Which means, my man was free diving in the 1500s.

Danez Smith: Wow.

Airea D. Matthews: Down to the depths, you know? He was one of the divers that went into the Mary Rose, which was one of the war ships that sunk. It sunk in like 40 feet of water, but you have to imagine, like, you going 40 feet down with no gear on at all, inside of a diving bell, maybe? Where you have a few minutes—

Danez Smith: Just lungs and eyes.

Airea D. Matthews: Lungs and eyes, right? But then when I read that narrative about him, it kinda challenged the ongoing narrative I’ve had in my head about, “Oh, Black people don’t swim.”

Danez Smith: Mm-hmm.

Airea D. Matthews: Actually, we do.

Danez Smith: (LAUGHS)

Airea D. Matthews: And have been for very many years, you know? So—(LAUGHS) I mean, what?

Danez Smith: Actually, I was the kingdom’s best swimmer. (LAUGHS)

Airea D. Matthews: Actually, I was the kingdom’s best swimmer. I got paid to swim! You know what I’m saying? Like that kind of stuff! It’s just like, how can you challenge these historical narratives? Because they’re not currently, you know, en masse being challenged. And so, I’m like, you can challenge it through the mediums that are kind of the current mediums of the age. And for us, that’s video. That is sight. We are in the sense age of sight. So how do we make poetry catch up to the sense age of sight?

Franny Choi: Hmm.

Airea D. Matthews: We make poems that are meant to be seen, and heard.. and read. We don’t just read on paper. We read on screens all the time. So that’s kinda what I’m thinking about.

Franny Choi: I need to stand in the middle of that book and walk around as the walls revolve around me.

Airea D. Matthews: (LAUGHS)

Franny Choi: (LAUGHS)

Airea D. Matthews: As the walls revolve around me.

Franny Choi: I didn’t know that’s what I needed, but I need it.

Airea D. Matthews: (LAUGHS)

Danez Smith: Yeah.

Airea D. Matthews: That’s what poetry needs.

Franny Choi: Yeah.

Danez Smith: Yeah.

Franny Choi: For sure. For sure.

Airea D. Matthews: You know?

Danez Smith: And maybe that’s the future, right? The book that can only be experience either by ticket to the show, or by e-book exclusive. Like actually like—

Franny Choi: Wow, e-book exclusive.

Airea D. Matthews: E-book exclusive.

Danez Smith: (LAUGHS)

Airea D. Matthews: You know what I’m saying? How revelatory would it be for you to be a reader, you come on stage to read a poem, and walk off, and then the whole reading is projected. You don’t have to say anything. (LAUGHS) You know what I mean?

Danez Smith: Wow.

Airea D. Matthews: It frees you. It takes you out of the equation, and it becomes a more intimate engagement with your listener, or your viewer, and your-and the-the the poem, and the art. We take the middleman out of the equation.

Danez Smith: Hmm.

Airea D. Matthews: That’s always been my thing. Why do we need a middleman?

Franny Choi: Hmm.

Danez Smith: Hmm.

Airea D. Matthews: We’ve always been as talented as we’ve ever been. More so. And to take the middleman is to take out a part of the system that doesn’t serve, that polices, that gatekeeps. And keeps others out, while pulls others in. That’s largely the system that we’ve grown up in. It’s the system that we’ve come to know, but we recognize it as broken, so why don’t we just take the middleman out? The middleman has a job because someone says they have a job.

Danez Smith: Yeah.

Airea D. Matthews: Unemploy them.

Franny Choi and Airea D. Matthews: (LAUGH)

Franny Choi: Man.

Airea D. Matthews: We can do some of this stuff ourselves, if we just kind of think outside of the box and think about poetry in a whole new way, that we haven’t been thinking about it before. Beyoncé does these visual albums. Why do we not have visual poetry albums?

Danez Smith: I’ve thought about that, yo. Because the last one was legit half poetry. (LAUGHS)

Airea D. Matthews: Right. I think that she’s a thought leader for sure, and so I’m not gonna get the whatever they call them—what they call themselves? The Hearse Squad?

Danez Smith and Franny Choi: Beyhive.

Airea D. Matthews: Yeah, I’m not trying to get none of them … I’m not trying to get none of that smoke. All I’m saying is, it’s not a new idea. And Beyoncé didn’t create the idea. She just implemented the idea, and she did it well. And that’s what we could be doing. And she’s at a certain point in her career where she doesn’t have to wait for the record companies to release her. She just does it. She sets her release dates. (LAUGHS)

Danez Smith: Yeah. She’s made her gate, right. She’s passed it, she’s the gatekeeper now. She can do whatever the hell she wants.

Airea D. Matthews: She can do what she wants.

Danez Smith: She can do what she wants. And I think uhm…it’s the energy … I think the most exciting writers that I know are those people that have always felt like that from jump. Like from the time they were 17, they were like, “I can do what I want.” And I think, you know, all of us, the quicker we grow into that sense, the quicker our writing and our work, whatever it may be gets free.

Airea D. Matthews: So true.

Danez Smith: The sad part, you know, thinking about gatekeepers, I think about how it affects me. I do think deeply about how it affects me as a creator, right, the one who gets to walk through that gate from time to time, often. But also, as a consumer, right? And like who have I not seen because I was waiting at the gate to see who they would show me.

Airea D. Matthews: Right.

Danez Smith: Right? I don’t want actually a control on what I think is good, you know? How do I relinquish this idea that like, I’m waiting on somebody else to tell me that it’s dope, for me to try it out, right?

Airea D. Matthews: Mm-hmm.

Danez Smith: And, you know, I’ve been thinking about this, now that I have a little bit of power, right, like who do I shine a light on. Because there’s so many people that are just like, too kinda free (LAUGHS)—

Airea D. Matthews: Right.

Danez Smith: —to even be seen by some of these particular kinds of gatekeepers, right, that are looking for things that, you know, maybe are radical in some ways, but that they can recognize, and that they can, you know, put a handle on.

Airea D. Matthews: Absolutely. Absolutely.

Danez Smith: And there’s people’s work that I think, you know, maybe doesn’t please the gatekeeper but I know please the people.

Franny Choi: I think also like institutions are rightfully afraid of people who are making their own freedom. You know what I mean? Who are making their own permission.

Airea D. Matthews: Absolutely.

Franny Choi: For their work. You know?

Airea D. Matthews: Absolutely.

Franny Choi: And so … I think that we have to recognize that, that fear as a sign that the power is effective. The power that’s being built by the artist, who are refusing the input of the middleman.

Airea D. Matthews: Absolutely. Because it’s essentially, when people take their own freedom, when they walk in their own power, in the power of their own work, whatever their work is doing, what that essentially does is takes one pillar of power away from someone who grants it.

Franny Choi: Mm-hmm.

Danez Smith: Mm-hmm.

Airea D. Matthews: And you realize that you don’t need a grant-making agency to make you powerful, that you were born powerful, that you walk inside of your power every time you create, every time you make. And you don’t have to be acknowledged as such from some entity that may or may not see your value. You have to see it for yourself, you know? And people don’t take well to any part of their power being taken. Not people. Let me backtrack. Institutions don’t take well to any part of their power being trespassed. But that’s exactly what we have to do. Those types of refusals, when you refuse to easily fit into some sort of essential model of what an artist does, or what an artist can do, or what art is. When we get away from the essential models of art. Because those essential models of art are created—here it comes back to capitalism—are created to make commodities. It’s created to make a market. What happens when you get away from the market dynamics and move into what art is actually essentially meant to be, which is the gift economy. It really is. It’s, I make to give you a gift. I don’t make so I can make money off of it. I wanna give you this gift.

Danez Smith: Mm-hmm.

Airea D. Matthews: And so, the gift economy is very different than the market economy.

Franny Choi: Hm.

Airea D. Matthews: At the point that art moves into more market economies, which it already has, and is already there, we begin to see kings being made. We begin to see power shifting towards people rather than power shifting toward the entity. Power should shift toward art and not toward people, if that makes sense.

Franny Choi: Hm.

Airea D. Matthews: You know, it’s not about the people, it’s about the work. That’s why I’m saying I wanna at some point take myself completely out of the equation and when I do a reading, I’m not even there. You’re watching a video, or you’re seeing some sort of presentation, some sort of projection, an art exhibit. Because it puts my ego in check for sure as an artist, because I realize that I’m just the maker. You know, it’s like, what’s better, a god you can see or one you can’t?

Danez Smith: The maker and the giver, right?

Airea D. Matthews: Right.

Danez Smith: It’s like, you know, even just putting that market versus gift, that dichotomy, it’s super useful, right? Because … I needed that language. Because, you know, I think people also, in that market mentality are like, “When’s your next book? When’s your next book?”

Airea D. Matthews: Oh come on. Yes!

Danez Smith: You know? And it’s like, when I have something to give, yo!

Airea D. Matthews: Yes! Come on. Right.

Danez Smith: Literally … I’ve been quiet, it’s like, when I reach, when I wrote—I’ve been saying this on the show like 80 times, but when I finished writing my third book, I didn’t have nothing else to say, and I wasn’t scared of it all the way, I was just like, okay, cool I said it.

Airea D. Matthews: Right.

Danez Smith: So when I have something to say again, when I have something to give, that’s when the next thing will be.

Airea D. Matthews: Right.

Danez Smith: And that’s such a relief, because there is no relief in the market system for that type of patience, and that type of knowing that it is about giving something of value, and not just, “I wrote 60 more pages, here you go.” (LAUGHS)

Airea D. Matthews: Exactly. Exactly. It really has to be … it has to center the art. It’s not centering production, you know? Leave that for people who want to start corporations. Poetry is not a corporation. It’s a fucking art. (LAUGHS) You know? It’s a craft.

Danez Smith: Wow, I need that on a t-shirt. “Poetry is not a corporation.”

Airea D. Matthews: It’s not a corporation.

Franny Choi: And if it looks like a corporation, then be suspicious.

Airea D. Matthews: Run!

Danez Smith: (LAUGHS)

Franny Choi: Right. (LAUGHS)

Airea D. Matthews: Run, don’t walk. You know? And it’s just like, it’s an art. And anything that has you thinking about frequency of production as the primary motivator in the art is a problem.

Danez Smith: Mm-hmm.

Airea D. Matthews: Art takes time. It’s like life. You’re not born and then somebody’s like, “Okay, die already.” (LAUGHS) You know? It’s like, it takes time. I gotta live in between. It’s not life and death, it’s living in between. And that’s what happens between books. You’re living. You’re digesting.

Danez Smith: Mhm.

Airea D. Matthews: You’re understanding and getting new experiences. You’re figuring things out. You’re rethinking. When I read authors, the things that are most interesting to me are authors that change their minds. Like, come out with one book, and then a couple years later … maybe not even a couple years later. It could be 10 years, 20 years later, they’re like, “Nevermind. Here’s something different.”

(ALL LAUGH)

Airea D. Matthews: You know? That shows that you’re living. And that you’re growing. That’s a beautiful thing. It’s not about production, it’s about life.

(MUSIC PLAYS)

Danez Smith: Alright, so now we’re at the part of our show where we gonna play some goddamn games. Airea D. Matthews, are you ready?

Airea D. Matthews: I’m so ready.

Danez Smith: That was the first time I got to say your whole name. You’re a whole name person.

Airea D. Matthews: (LAUGHS)

Franny Choi: You are a whole name person, it’s true.

Danez Smith: (LAUGHS)

Airea D. Matthews: What’s up. Thank you. (LAUGHS)

Danez Smith: Our first game is called Fast Punch. So we are going to give you a quick list of 10 categories, either the worst of or the best of all these things. And just, quick as you can, off the top of your head, you’ll give us your answer. Alright? Do you want to be an optimist or a pessimist today?

Airea D. Matthews: Optimist.

Danez Smith: Optimist? Everybody chooses optimist. I think we should (LAUGHS)—

Airea D. Matthews: Okay, pessimist. I’ll be pessimist.

Danez Smith: No, no!

Airea D. Matthews: I don’t mind pessimist, that’s actually closer to who I am as a person.

(ALL LAUGH)

Danez Smith: You said pessimist. Let’s do pessimist. Alright, I’ll go first.

(TIMER TICKS)

Danez Smith: This is the worst word to start your poem with.

Airea D. Matthews: Oh.

Franny Choi: Oh. Wow. Yeah.

Danez Smith: Oh.

Franny Choi: Okay. Worst Greek god.

Airea D. Matthews: Uhhh.. Hades.

Danez Smith: Worst midnight snack.

Airea D. Matthews: Macaroni and cheese.

Danez Smith: Oh, that is horrible.

Airea D. Matthews: Horrible.

Franny Choi: Worst kind of sandwich.

Airea D. Matthews: Uhhh, anything with ham.

Franny Choi: Okay. (LAUGHS)

Danez Smith: Worst animal in a poem.

Airea D. Matthews: Pigs.

Franny Choi: (LAUGHS) Worst dead white theorist.

Airea D. Matthews: Oh … so many.

Franny Choi: (LAUGHS)

Airea D. Matthews: Less a theorist, more a philosopher. I’m not a big fan of Sartre. John Paul Sartre.

Franny Choi: Oh wow, shots fired. Shots fired. Amazing.

Airea D. Matthews: Mm-hmm. (LAUGHS)

Danez Smith: ‘Aight. Worst person at the poetry slam.

Airea D. Matthews: Oh! The fucker that just keeps doing the fingers when somebody forgets like that’s gonna help. I hate that!

Franny Choi: (LAUGHS)

Airea D. Matthews and Danez Smith: (LAUGH)

Airea D. Matthews: Shut up!

Danez Smith: What is that? That is not—that does not help.

Airea D. Matthews: That doesn’t help! The finger snappers? Come on, sit down. Shut up!

Airea D. Matthews and Danez Smith: (LAUGH)

Franny Choi: I find- I find it encouraging, but that’s cool. Worst bird.

Airea D. Matthews: A wren. I don’t why. Just … I don’t like them. (LAUGHS)

Franny Choi: Great. Fuck a wren.

Airea D. Matthews: Fuck a wren.

Danez Smith: Fuck wrens, and that is Fast Punch.

Franny Choi: (LAUGHS)

(TIMER DINGS)

Franny Choi: We ended on worst bird. I didn’t realize that that was the last one. Om my god.

Danez Smith: That was great—

Airea D. Matthews: (LAUGHS) Oh my god, also ostriches. I have a—

Franny Choi: Oh ostriches are terrible.

Airea D. Matthews: I have a hate-hate relationship with an ostrich. Can’t stand ’em.

Danez Smith: I saw a YouTube video of these people roasting a whole ostrich. Amazing.

Airea D. Matthews: Mm. I heard the meat is good, but I just don’t like ostriches. They’re dinosaurs.

Danez Smith: The meet is very good. I’ve had an ostrich burger.

Franny Choi: How do you feel about emus?

Airea D. Matthews: They’re cute.

Franny Choi: Yeah, I think emus are okay.

Airea D. Matthews: They don’t have the same strong dinosaur feet as an ostrich. An ostrich can hit you in the center of your chest and kill you. They have so much power, and they’re quick, so you can’t really get away from ’em. And they’re dumb.

Franny Choi and Airea D. Matthews: (LAUGH)

Danez Smith: They are the worst of the flightless birds, I think.

Airea D. Matthews: They really are.

Franny Choi: Oh yeah, definitely are the worst of the flightless birds. For sure.

Airea D. Matthews: They got these big bodies and these little heads with little brains, and they can’t process.

Franny Choi: Poor ostrich.

Airea D. Matthews: (LAUGHS)

Danez Smith: Damn. They deserve to be meat.

Franny Choi: Well, I don’t know …

Airea D. Matthews: (LAUGHS)

Franny Choi: “Deserve to be meat” is quite a statement, but.

Airea D. Matthews: (LAUGHS)

Danez Smith: What’s PETA gonna do? Throw red paint on this podcast?

Airea D. Matthews: (LAUGHS) Probably!

Danez Smith: (LAUGHS) Fuck up they routers.

Airea D. Matthews and Danez Smith: (LAUGH)

Franny Choi: Alright…

Danez Smith: Naw, ostriches, y’all cool. Y’all all delicious. I will see y’all at the Minnesota state fair this year.

Franny Choi: Wow.

Airea D. Matthews: Get you some.

Franny Choi: Okay, we are going to play a game now called This vs. That, where we’ll put two things, people, objects, concepts into two different corners, and then you have to tell us who would win in a fight. So for this episode of This vs. That, we have, in this corner, Greek god Apollo, and in that corner, we have Greek god Dionysus. Who would win in a fight?

(BELL RINGS)

Airea D. Matthews: Dionysus.

Franny Choi: Yeah? Why?

Airea D. Matthews: Yeah, cuz he’s drunk and crazy.

Franny Choi: (LAUGHS)

Airea D. Matthews: You know, have you ever seen a drunk, crazy person fight? They will fuck you up. (LAUGHS)

Danez Smith: (LAUGHS) That’s true.

Airea D. Matthews: Apollo’s just too busy being beautiful and you know, playing his lyre and shit. Dionysus gonna be like, “Listen.”

Franny Choi: Even with the precision of the arrow? Still no?

Danez Smith: No, cuz that’s always the person in the Kung Fu movie that always fucks it up.

Airea D. Matthews: Mm-hmm.

Danez Smith: He’s always drunk and something style, and then they just start moving all over the place, and then …

Airea D. Matthews: Yeah. Yeah. He’s too … he’s too zigzag. My boy D is too zigzag. He will zigzag that arrow, and then it won’t even, you know … he’s crazy.

Franny Choi: (LAUGHS)

Airea D. Matthews: I just kinda like him, actually, as a god. Lives in the forest, wild.

Danez Smith: Okay, now let’s do this other version of this.

Airea D. Matthews: Okay.

Danez Smith: Would you rather. If visited by a Greek god, would you rather Apollo or Dionysus?

Airea D. Matthews: Oh, Dionysus is much more fun.

Danez Smith: Yeah.

Airea D. Matthews: Yeah, you gotta … you gonna be drunk, hanging out with the nymphs and the maidens in the forest and getting it all in. That sounds satisfying as hell to me.

Franny Choi: (LAUGHS)

Airea D. Matthews: (LAUGHS)

Danez Smith: You don’t like Apollo singing to you a little bit? Right like…

Airea D. Matthews: Yeah, Apollo is like … he’s like an R&B singer. He’s like a ’90s R&B singer. (LAUGHS)

Danez Smith: (LAUGHS)

Airea D. Matthews: You would get real bored of his ass and be like, Ne-Yo, go ahead on.

(ALL LAUGH)

Franny Choi: Oh. I do love Ne-Yo.

Airea D. Matthews: I do too. I do too. But I think if I was in a room with him for too long, I’d just be like, “Wow I’m bored.” (LAUGHS)

Danez Smith: Yeah. I love Ne-Yo, but I would rather fuck Ol’ Dirty Bastard, you know?

Airea D. Matthews: That’s what I’m saying.

Danez Smith: Cuz Ol’ Dirty Bastard you know, be a little crazy, and it’d be a story, but it’s probably real good.

Airea D. Matthews: Mm-hmm.

Franny Choi: Wow. I love the Ne-Yo to Ol’ Dirty Bastard spectrum.

Airea D. Matthews: (LAUGHS)

Franny Choi: In referring to —maybe that’s how we should refer to lyric poems from now on.

Danez Smith: (LAUGHS)

Airea D. Matthews: Yes. Yes.

Franny Choi: ODB poems.

Danez Smith: Neo poems.

Airea D. Matthews: ODB poem. (LAUGHS)

Danez Smith: (LAUGHS) That does look like an ODB poem, when I finished it I didn’t know what the fuck was going on.

Airea D. Matthews: I didn’t know what the fuck was going on!

Danez Smith: (LAUGHS)

Airea D. Matthews: (LAUGHS)

Danez Smith: It just kinda got away from me, but it’s cool. (LAUGHS)

Airea D. Matthews: Leave it alone, doing its thing over there. (LAUGHS)

Franny Choi: Incredible. Airea D. Matthews, thank you so much for spending this hour with us.

Airea D. Matthews: Thank you, so much fun.

Franny Choi: It has been a fucking blast. Will you close us out with one last poem for us?

Airea D. Matthews: I absolutely will. I wrote this poem, “His Eye on the Sparrow.” It is after Hanif’s poem about Black people writing about flowers.

(READS POEM)

His Eye on the Sparrow

after Hanif

I guess black people can write about flowers at a time like this since every poem turns on itself. Starts one way to

end another. We see it in nature, too. How seed turns to leaf regardless of its earth or my rambling thoughts

blossom into a hyacinth with as sweet a scent. I dream of Mamie Till often. She walks the church aisle toward her

son’s body while wisteria bloats the casket’s brim and papered bougainvillea bracts emerge from where his eye

once was. An entire garden from the nutrients of the body’s soil. And not to mention all those awed birds circling

Emmett’s pillowed corpse. So many in the tabernacle. Not harbingers of his God’s descent, not refugees fleeing his

body exilic but ecstasy’s round arrows. We, living, have it all wrong. When eternity’s concerned, sparrows don’t take leave. They fly into us.

* * *

(MUSIC PLAYS)

Danez Smith: What a poet.

Franny Choi: What a fucking poet. Airea D. Matthews, everyone.

Danez Smith: She’s my Greek god.

Franny Choi: Right?

Danez Smith: (LAUGHS)

Franny Choi: What an impossibly good poet, honestly.

Danez Smith: Mm-hmm.

Franny Choi: Like, like, I feel like she is constantly pushing the boundary of what is possible to do and imagine in the realm of poetry.

Danez Smith: And maybe more so than anybody … or just like, one of the top people who is like, just limited by the century that she was born into. Like can you imagine who like Dee would be with like, you know, 400 years from now technology?

Franny Choi: Whoa.

Danez Smith: You know, making that video book that she was talking about.

Franny Choi: Yeah!

Danez Smith: You know like, that’d be some shit.

Franny Choi: Oh my god.

Danez Smith: That’d be some shit. Franny, you’re also weird, brilliant. I wanted to ask you this earlier in the conversation too.

Franny Choi: Thanks.

Danez Smith: Yeah. What is—yeah, you are. (LAUGHS) I think those things go hand in hand. Are you really brilliant if you’re not weird? What is the book that you want to make that like isn’t possible yet?

Franny Choi: You know, I don’t know very much about computer programming, and I’m not myself a coder, but I have had this idea for a while to make a—this isn’t exactly writing. In fact it’s sort of like anti-writing. It’s like giving up writing.

Danez Smith: Huh.

Franny Choi: In that the idea is to create a chat bot or a voice bot, so something like an Alexa or Siri with my voice, so that you could have a conversation with like a computer voice version of me, and program her to say things. So, you know, she would be like, to read audio books, or to give readings, or to host podcasts. (LAUGHS) Because so much of my career has to do not just with the things I write, but like, my ability to say them with my voice.

Danez Smith: Yeah.

Franny Choi: And so, I’ve had this idea for like the past year to make a bot with the goal of sort of putting myself out of business.

Danez Smith: Wow.

Franny Choi: To start to think about the politics of labor when it comes to being a spoken word poet who hosts a podcast. (LAUGHS) Yeah. The name of the project is FranCES. F-r-a-n-C-E-S. The CES stands for computer engineered speech. (LAUGHS)

Danez Smith: Wow. Wow. (LAUGHS)

Franny Choi: That’s the idea that I’ve been working on, yeah. What about what about you? I mean, you also are constantly experimenting with form, and dreaming big and dreaming weird. What are you uh— what impossible book are you dreaming up these days?

Danez Smith: Well now I’m just dreaming about the impossible podcast where I just fire you and just like, take this computer program.

Franny Choi: (LAUGHS)

Danez Smith: (LAUGHS) Nobody ever knows.

Franny Choi: Yeah. It would be much cheaper.

Danez Smith: Yeah.

Franny Choi: She doesn’t need a hotel room.

Danez Smith: Exactly.

Franny Choi: She doesn’t need a flight. Yeah.

Danez Smith: You know? Don’t even need to schedule with her. (LAUGHS)

Franny Choi: No.

Danez Smith: “Hey Franny, you will be free on Wednesday.” (LAUGHS)

Franny Choi: Yeah. Yeah I will. Excuse me, FranCES will be free on Wednesday.

Danez Smith: FranCES. FranCES, yes, wow.

Franny Choi: Yeah.

Danez Smith: Wow, wow.

Franny Choi: You could schedule with Franny, or for 20 percent cheaper, you can schedule with FranCES.

Danez Smith: (LAUGHS) Wow, can’t wait.

Franny Choi: (LAUGHS)

Danez Smith: No, I would miss it so much. It wouldn’t be the same.

Franny Choi: You never know.

Danez Smith: Maybe if she has a face I could do it.

Franny Choi: (LAUGHS)

Danez Smith: Well, one thing I always wanted to do … and I don’t know if this is as impossible as it is just stupid, is that I wanted to have a little chapbook printed on ..uh…rolling papers.

Franny Choi: Oh my god. (LAUGHS)

Danez Smith: Yeah. You know, very delicate paper, so probably very delicate poems, you know. And then you just read it and roll up on it. And then eventually, the goal is that the book is gone.

Franny Choi: Wow.

Danez Smith: Yeah. Little disappearing book of rolling papers, you know.

Franny Choi: That is amazing.

Danez Smith: Right?

Franny Choi: Yeah. Because also then like, everything that you experience while high is your book.

Danez Smith: Yeah. Now the problem with this is that it’s right in the market for Urban Outfitters, and …

Franny Choi: (LAUGHS)

Danez Smith: … and like…I really, you know, I really don’t want to be an Urban Outfitters poet, as lucrative as it seems.

Franny Choi: Well this is the problem, right? One does, and one doesn’t.

Danez Smith: So I think that’s the book. Maybe it’s actually within my grasp. So maybe one day I will make this impossible book, and then I will get computer Franny high with it.

Franny Choi: Yeah.

Danez Smith: (LAUGHS)

Franny Choi: Well I hope y’all have a lovely time.

Danez Smith: I’m excited for this future, and maybe by the next time we have this podcast, we will be living in it. But until then, we should do some thank-yous and get the hell on outta here, don’t you think?

Franny Choi: Alright. Yeah, absolutely. Speaking of Greek gods and Greek mythology, I would like to thank the muses of the Disney animated film Hercules—

Danez Smith: (GASPS) Wow.

Franny Choi: —for holding that shit the fuck down. Thank you, Muses.

Danez Smith: They really the fuck did did.

Franny Choi: They really did. (LAUGHS)

Danez Smith: They better not get the muses wrong when they do this live action Hercules.

Franny Choi: Oh my god, no.

Danez Smith: They have to be perfectly casted.

Franny Choi: The muses are—

Danez Smith: I want their movie. That is the Hercules 2 I want.

Franny Choi: Oh, absolutely.

Danez Smith: Just like, who are the muses at their day jobs. Okay since you thanked the muses, I am going to thank everybody who was ever in Destiny’s Child.

Franny Choi: (LAUGHS)

Danez Smith: (LAUGHS) I love Beyoncé and Kelly and all them. But I really also just want to take a moment to shout out all the girls who were in there for like two weeks. Or like two months. Or maybe only for like the Portland date, you know.

Franny Choi: (LAUGHS)

Danez Smith: (LAUGHS)

Franny Choi: Maybe only for the Portland date.

Danez Smith: You know, you was in Destiny’s Child for one concert, but girl, you was there.

Franny Choi: Oh my god.

Danez Smith: You know—

Franny Choi: You were an independent contractor with Destiny’s Child. (LAUGHS)

Danez Smith: Yo, you gave Destiny’s Child—you filled out that W-9. (LAUGHS)

Franny Choi: (LAUGHS)

Danez Smith: You sent them that invoice. For that kick ball change and harmony. And you go girl. (LAUGHS) So shout out to LaTavia, LeToya, to Farrah, and to all the other girls, may you be nameless, who were in Destiny’s Child for a little bit.

Franny Choi: (LAUGHS)

(MUSIC PLAYS)

Franny Choi: We would also like to thank Ydalmi Noriega and Itzel Blancas at the Poetry Foundation. And thank you, as always, to our producer, Daniel Kisslinger. And thank you, as always, to you for continuing to listen to our podcast.

Danez Smith: Make sure you like, rate, and subscribe wherever you listen to podcasts. If you wanna follow us on Twitter we are on there @Vsthepodcast. We will see you in another two weeks with an interview with a great poet that we are excited to bring to y’all. And until then, y’all be safe, stay sane, stay prayed up, we love ya, see you soon.

Franny Choi: Text us when you get home. Bye