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AUDIO TRANSCRIPT

AL FILREIS: I'm Al Filreis and this is Poem Talk at the Writers House where I have the pleasure of convening three friends to collaborate on a close but not too close reading of a poem. We'll talk, maybe even disagree a bit, and perhaps open up the verse to a few new possibilities and we hope gain for a poem that interests us some new readers and listeners. And I say listeners because Poem Talk poems are available in recordings made by the poets themselves as part of our PennSound archive, writing.upenn.edu/pennsound. Today I'm joined here in Philadelphia at the Kelly Writers House in our Wexler studio by Abdulhamit Arvas. Teacher, scholar, critic whose focus is early modern literature and culture, comparative histories of sexuality and race, queer theory, cross-cultural encounters and Islam in the Renaissance. And whose current book is tentatively titled 'Abducted Boys: The Homoerotics of Race and Empire in Early Modernity' which concerns early modern sexuality and race in a global context. And who, I am thrilled to say, is a colleague here at the University of Pennsylvania. And by Dagmawi Woubshet, scholar of African-American literature in art, working at the intersections of African-American, LGBTQIA plus and African Studies. His 2015 book, published by Hopkins is 'The Calendar of Loss: Race, Sexuality, and Mourning in the Early Era of AIDS', and whose many other publications include the co-edited volume 'Ethiopia: Literature, Art, and Culture', a special issue of Callaloo (2010) And who is also, I'm happy to say, a colleague here at Penn. And by special guests, coming not from Penn, but from Rutgers today: Carlos Decena, an interdisciplinary scholar and writer who is a member of Rutgers University's Department of Latino and Caribbean Studies and the Department of Women's Gender and Sexuality Study. Whose publications include the book 'Tacit Subjects: Belonging and Same-Sex Desire among Dominican Immigrant Men'. And his new book, to be published by Duke in 2023, is titled 'Circuits of the Sacred: A Faggotology in the Black Latinx Caribbean'. He spent many years in Philadelphia and indeed at Penn, and who is being warmly, warmly, very warmly welcomed on this very day back to the Kelly Writers House. Carlos, it is a joy to see you. Thank you for making the trip. 

CARLOS DECENA: It's great to be home. 

AL FILREIS: Yeah, home. I love it. 

CARLOS DECENA: Yeah. 

AL FILREIS: Oh, it's a warm, warm, warm welcome. That's fantastic. Thank you. Hamit. good to see you. 

ABDULHAMIT ARVAS: Thanks so much. 

AL FILREIS: Thanks for coming down. This is your first Poem Talk. I hope of many to come. 

ABDULHAMIT ARVAS: It is indeed. And I hope so, too. 

AL FILREIS: Fantastic. Dag, good to see you. 

DAGMAWI WOUBSHET: Good to see you Al. 

AL FILREIS: Well, today, the four of us have gathered here to talk about a poem by John Ashbery. It's called 'Some Trees' and first appeared in a book in 1956, His first book titled 'Some Trees'. But the poem had been written when Ashbery was an undergraduate at Harvard and first published in The Harvard Advocate. It was written during the evening of November 16th 1948, when the poet was just 21 years old. PennSound's John Ashbery page is an extensive collection of hundreds of recordings organized with the blessing of John himself and with fantastic assistance from his spouse, David Kermani. This vast gathering includes two recordings of the poet reading our poem. The one we'll hear now was part of a radio interview conducted by John Tranter and broadcast in Australia, and then later recorded and captured here for PennSound. And that recording was made in June of 1988. So here now is John Ashbery performing 'Some Trees'. 

JOHN ASHBERRY: Hey, this poem is called 'Some Trees' and this is I, I think, well, if not the oldest poem I kept, at least the second oldest. It was in fact written 40 years ago, 1948. 'Some Trees'. 

These are amazing: each

Joining a neighbor, as though speech

Were a still performance.

Arranging by chance

To meet as far this morning

From the world as agreeing

With it, you and I

Are suddenly what the trees try

To tell us we are:

That their merely being there

Means something; that soon

We may touch, love, explain.

And glad not to have invented

Such comeliness, we are surrounded:

A silence already filled with noises,

A canvas on which emerges

A chorus of smiles, a winter morning.

Placed in a puzzling light, and moving,

Our days put on such reticence

These accents seem their own defense.

AL FILREIS: So, what could be amazing about trees? I mean, they're probably five or six senses of amazing, but let's try some out. Carlos, what could be amazing about trees? 

CARLOS DECENA: Something about their girth... amazing as in awesome. That strikes you, it reminds me a lot of the sublime in Byron, that sense of this sort of… or even Shelley. 

AL FILREIS: So, it's a romantic gesture. Possibly at the first. 

CARLOS DECENA: Maybe. But it just it strikes me... you know, I read this poem in one of your classes, right? 

AL FILREIS: Oh, you're just going to say that, right from the start. 

CARLOS DECENA: Oh, yeah, I will because… 

AL FILREIS: Hey, for the record, you were his. You were just about the age of the poet when you were actually younger. 

CARLOS DECENA: I was younger when I first read him because I think I read him when I was 15, because I took your your summer class. And I was still I was still transitioning to English at the time. And, and it strikes me as... it strikes me that the it's a it's kind of an editorial comment that, that precedes descriptive language. He opens with these are amazing, but you don't know what you're looking at. So, it's it sets you up in a way to say, well, what exactly is it that you think is so amazing? 

AL FILREIS: Perfect thank you for starting there. Other sense, Dag of amazing? 

DAGMAWI WOUBSHET: Yeah. I was just going to say, even before you get to the trees, I love how inviting that first line is. It is one of the most ordinary ways everybody, whether you literate, the literati or not, express or used to express astonishment, awe. So I love how inviting and ordinary it is. But then that simplicity will flip on you. Syntactically, it's very simple beginning. So I like that tension, too, of that. The simplicity of the opening line. The invitation of the opening line. 

AL FILREIS: Fantastic. Hamit. Now, now, soon we realize that the physical relationship of these trees is complicated. So, is there a sense of amazement? The origin of the word amazement has to do with our word maze; confusing, complicated. Is it possible that amazing refers to the complication and and maybe you can start us on to what the trees are doing. How could trees join a neighbor? What's. What's. What's the physical description we're trying to get here? 

ABDULHAMIT ARVAS: Yeah, I think. I think the first sentence, no matter how simple it is, as Dag said, is also as complex. Especially I'm struck by its thoughts Starts with these are amazing each the moment from the plural these and ending with each which forces it to move to the next line. But if you don't move to the next line still these are amazing each are they amazing together. Or are they amazing individually. 

AL FILREIS: That is the whole point of the poem. 

ABDULHAMIT ARVAS: Exactly. So this is why I'm moving from the first line to the I think, complex it is, because at the same time you don't even know the is talking about trees. If we didn't know the title. 

AL FILREIS: Yeah. I'm going to guess that there isn't an arborist among the four of us, so let's just bullshit then. As sort of educated non-specialists, trees can join neighbors. What kind of tree and how, under what circumstances are trees actually collaborating either at the root structure or in the branches? 

[CROSSTALK]

AL FILREIS: Arborist number one.

CARLOS DECENA:  Well so here's the thing I was thinking about… Good fences make good neighbors that that like what is the cronon... just to kind of get a sense of the chronology because what joining a neighbor is… 

AL FILREIS: Oh, the neighbor…

CARLOS DECENA: right? It's the neighbor and also the neighbor could be joining a neighbor of trees, but it's also joining neighboring plots, if you will, that are separated. So I kept thinking that there was a real slide in the in the phrasing that between, you know, the anthropomorphic vision of neighbor being a neighbor and the non-anthropomorphic that like this is about trees. 

AL FILREIS: This is, you are amazing. This is great. I've never thought of it this way. So, if Frost is making the conservative argument one way or other, that good for what we use, we use nature and we supplement nature with things like walls in order to keep ourselves separate and apart and subjectively distinct. And we know that John Ashbery is arguing the opposite. He's arguing for convergence, he's arguing for meeting, he's arguing for love that means connection. And so, it begins with a kind of counterargument to mending wall right, 

CARLOS DECENA: Yeah. Yeah, that’s kinda what I was thinking. 

AL FILREIS: Alright, Hamit, where were you going to go? 

ABDULHAMIT ARVAS: No. That's brilliant, Carlos. What? What I was thinking, I was imagining where the speaker stands in relation to trees. Are you just looking at them directly on the same level to the trunk, or are you lying down on the ground and looking at branches? If that's so, branches, maybe neighboring, touching each other as if like presenting this silent, still performance as speech or implicitly all trees are connected deep down underground through roots. So, this is like how I read it, like trees having this relationship with one another. Which is still but is kind of like noisy that you hear a little bit of sound as if like 

AL FILREIS: Rustle. 

ABDULHAMIT ARVAS: Yeah. Yeah. Like branches and roots. 

AL FILREIS: Yeah. So now, Dag, suddenly we switch from what is seems to be the observation of nature these trees. The speaker could possibly be alone having one of these reveries. Maybe a romantic reverie and then suddenly we realize that there's a you and I. There's a you along with the I, and that we've met here by these trees, presumably. So, there are humans Presumably. And so, Dag, start us on this. This trail from the observation of nature to a relationship that seems to be just forming. 

DAGMAWI WOUBSHET: Yeah. Like that nature. Human kinship. What I love about it is it's the couple are corroborated by what they see or reflected by what they see. But there isn't this imposition of a kind of anthropomorphic language to characterize the trees per say. 

AL FILREIS: They're not making the trees more human. They're making themselves more tree like. 

DAGMAWI WOUBSHET: Absolutely. Or communion and corroborate reflection. We see something alive in nature and the way in which it corroborates and reflects other forms of life right that's what I see. 

AL FILREIS: Yeah.

SPEAKER: I was thinking the speech was still a performance. What if. What if that rustling of leaves in that movement, that combination of movement with the body of the tree. And it's all in that small dimensionality. Was in the poem being made akin to the kind of language that. Humans use, because part of it is about. It seems to me that part of it is about discerning where the communication happens. But and in what and in what terms. And this is a non-anthropomorphic like the he's the he ain't making trees into humans that's not the project of this point. 

AL FILREIS: Might even be anti- anthropomorphic. 

SPEAKER: In fact, it's closer to making humans into trees, if you will, or sort of capturing the, the work of language. 

AL FILREIS: Is it possible? I'm sorry to interrupt. 

SPEAKER: Go ahead. 

AL FILREIS: Is it possible that what you say leads us to understanding a certain different, sorry for that bland word. Different making or difference, depending relationship of the two who seems to have seemed to have left a place maybe a city, and come to this place and met by accident at these trees. That the relation, the quality of this relationship of these two who are pretty unspecified, depends on that reversal that you're describing and if so, what is that difference? What makes it possibly, I'm sorry to use the word better, but deeper and more meaningful?

SPEAKER: I you know, it's funny because even the way that he reads it, I don't there's one way of of thinking, well, this is kind of a bland reading of a bland poem or nonblack a bland reading of a non-bland poem. I actually found his reading very much of the aesthetic of what the poem is trying to do. So, I actually appreciated that he read it in this very kind of almost monotone. And so, this goes to the meet of what I want to say regarding in response to you as a Maybe there is no love in this relationship. Maybe that relationship that's being set up here is not doesn't have that level of depth, because it seems to me that the deeper relationship would require a different kind of reading and a different kind of lyric if you will. And that's not here that's not what I'm reading, I'm reading the I'm hearing the cooler. And I recall when we were reading this, we were thinking of it very much in relationship to the other school at the time, which was the kind of confessional, the...

AL FILREIS: Yes, this is an anti confessional. 

SPEAKER: Right. So, there is so that depth the way I read this, it's like. No to surface. 

AL FILREIS: So maybe just to turn it into a sexuality or to into desire, physical desire. Is it possible that they have met? They're not to have a deep romantic love. But to have sex. 

ABDULHAMIT ARVAS: When I read it the paranoid queer reader in me it said they are meeting in trees for sex hook up stuff. 

[CROSSTALK]

AL FILREIS: And you'll provide what.?

ABDULHAMIT ARVAS: Some, some lines that where I. I'm seeing this is happening and I love non entrepot centric part of it when you and I are suddenly what the tree is try to tell us we are I was struck by what. Not who not who we are but to what and the food is. What they tell is that they are merely being there means something. So the first thing trees are telling us about the trees, not about them. So tree is becomes a part of them. 

SPEAKER: Yes. What? Right. 

AL FILREIS: Oh, my gosh. 

ABDULHAMIT ARVAS: Soon we may touch. 

AL FILREIS: Yes. Yes. First things. First touch. Yeah. 

SPEAKER: And usually like this. Right, 

ABDULHAMIT ARVAS: Love. And here, love. I don't think it's love. It's fuck. 

AL FILREIS: Yeah. 

SPEAKER: And last play. 

SPEAKER: Right. So like lust. 

SPEAKER: Oh yeah 

SPEAKER: we're not about. 

SPEAKER: We'll figure that out later. 

ABDULHAMIT ARVAS: But here. Have to read May is it. We can we are able to, or we are in love to. So where I love to touch love explain here. 

SPEAKER: In nature and we may in that it may be that we may not. Because remember, I mean if you're thinking I'm thinking here, this is the poet sitting in the Ramble in Central Park or and Judy Garland Park or in some other. 

AL FILREIS: Somewhere at Harvard Yard. 

SPEAKER: Bush it right bushy location right. Figuring out whether, whether that encounter may or may not …

AL FILREIS: Yeah 

SPEAKER: the may is really about that the, the, the conjunction of desire with the space. 

AL FILREIS: So so turning to Dag for a second. Let's try to understand how the hookup occurred. I mean in the terms of the weird logic of this and Hamit, you look like you're going to add to this too So here we go. So, arranging by chance to meet. First of all, that is a hard thing to do, arranged by chance to meet or it's a wink, wink. Oh, funny to see you here. Arrange my chance to meet where? As far this morning from the world as agreeing with it, which is grammatically weird. And New York school and avant garde. But still it's saying we know how much we are not part of the world and how far away we have to leave the world in order to meet each other. And that… So if I pace off the distance of my difference from the conventional meet up culture at Harvard, let's say, or in Rochester, this may be a reflection of his lonely boyhood. I'll go to that spot and you'll be there because you have the same difference. First question does that make sense? Second, what more do we want to say about this amazing arranging by chance? 

ABDULHAMIT ARVAS: Yeah. With so the to follow up on that question and the queer reading, it's you know it's hard to glean gender from trees to me I was just trying to flag these moments of how I read this as a kind of queering. And then it's when I get to calmly this calmly, this delicate beauty, feminine beauty, that's a term that's such a gendered term that it just it raises my antenna and like my queer whatever hat is on. Does that term. 

CARLOS DECENA: Does it sound like pearl clutching? Like it just the calmness, like I read it as I mean, what, what I think is amazing about the arranging by chance is that of course you don't arrange by chance right. So that's impossible that don't happen. 

SPEAKER: Yes. 

CARLOS DECENA: And if it does happen it's the only fancy meeting you here. 

AL FILREIS: That's funny Meeting you here. 

CARLOS DECENA: And it may be that by the time that that funny Jew, you already know, you're already taking a nosedive somewhere in the park. And it just so happens that you know, your fellow professor or your fellow poet shows up. But what the, the glad not to have invented such cleanliness feels to me and I may be mispronouncing the term here, but the completeness to me strikes me it strikes me as at the mannered, the mannered, the drag of manners we must wear to but to work our way through the regular world. I mean, it is this is 1948. I'm also thinking about the time. I'm thinking about code, how much code he's deploying in the poem to say something that he can't really say explicitly, but not about homosexuality itself, but maybe simply about the, the, the, the geographies of queer desire at large. 

AL FILREIS: Isn't a definition of cruising spots. In fact, aren't they arranged by chance? 

SPEAKER: Yeah, that's exactly right. Yeah. That's actually a very succinct and apt definition. 

SPEAKER: Yeah. 

ABDULHAMIT ARVAS: And usually happening under trees in nature. 

SPEAKER: Right. Right. 

ABDULHAMIT ARVAS: And I like how the sentence starting with arranging by chance to meet as far this morning from the world as agreeing with it and all you called it like weird. I would call it a queer structure. Starting is not a straight structure, right? 

AL FILREIS: Hearing conventional idiomatic English by using the two as comparisons. Right. 

SPEAKER: Exactly. 

AL FILREIS: As far this morning from as right. So, he's doubled the comparison and he's created a negativity. Hamit you're saying basically we don't agree with the world. I am running away from the world as far as to the extent that I don't agree with it. 

SPEAKER: Yeah. Or stealing or anybody for it. 

AL FILREIS: Can't agree with me. 

ABDULHAMIT ARVAS: Yeah, that's a different question. I think you are posing this line as like structurally comes at kind of a Yeah. Not totally inverted, but queer in a sense. It's not straight. Makes us think, you and I, in the realm of straightness and in the realm of sort of queerness and queer language. 

SPEAKER: It's a kind of code I just, I think that that's the kind of the to me, it suggests that when you stumble, depending on how your ear is structured, like the move the movement through these, you know, weird setups. Depends on you could you could say arranging by chance to meet us for this morning from the or you could just read them by verse by verse and of course they're going to sound different but it's what seems to be going on here is there is some trees, right It's the, it's the whatever you have in front of you, plus the layers of weirdness, queerness. I mean, it's really set up for you to kind of catch that there is something else going on. And that perhaps it's really the quote unquote awkwardness that hints at this other narrative or set of narratives that could be permeating this. Some of it is about cruising, but that still keeps it at the human level. It could be about the trees. It's the language of the tree. I mean, we have all that together. 

AL FILREIS: I want to think about cruising in distinction from or in relation to merely being there because the trees can't cruise. They are rooted, right. And so you go to the trees and you say, Damn, that's amazing that they get to stay here. They don't have to cruise the trees, don't cruise. They have a.. they have there's a whole lot of neighboring going on among the trees. In fact, I think if we understood the sexuality of trees, which none of the four of us do, we didn't do our homework. There's probably a whole lot of sex set of reproduction that goes on without having to cruise because they just trees don't have that option. And there is insofar as that line is sincere, it not and ironic these two who've met are kind of momentarily jealous that the trees are already there. And that means something. That the that they're merely being there means something. What do you think of all that? 

DAGMAWI WOUBSHET: I was thinking a lot about that earlier when as I, as I was, you know, coming here and thinking about the way he reads it, there is a question about being. And this is something I think about a lot. The question in Spanish there is a split. The verb to be is split into two. There is a Some which is the ontological being, and there is a star, which is to be somewhere right. And there is something there that where the verse reads that there merely being there means something. It's as if that that location. It is ontologically significant not just to the tree, but to the two who find themselves in front of the trees. And what I mean is this, that there is a lot of the if we think of this as potentially a, you know, closeted semi-closed or whatever sort of poem young poet there is sort of the park, the bushes, etc., etc., becomes a space of possibility for a kind of ontology that does not exist outside because the ontology outside is all about the absence of the trees, if you will, that it's in the being there next to the tree, potentially being touched, loved or whatever that a a certain sense of being can be realized. A being there, if you will. That is about nature because it's also like, you know, two trees Is he signifying on trees? Is he talking about what is natural and what is natural in this context? It is is about sort of a libidinal freedom that is not available, that is unavailable in other spaces where that ontology presents itself as… 

AL FILREIS: That's really great. There's another reversal that's going on here then, which is I'm writing a poem and it's a lyric poem. And if you just stand about a hundred feet away from it, it's a fairly it's, it's new and it's use of idiomatic, nontraditional, idiomatic. But it's a.. it's a lyric poem. It is a lyric poem. And you get closer to it you see the things that we've been talking about. But then there is this anti poetic line that we instead of being happy to have invented beauty in a poem, we are both glad not to have invented this beauty that we've come upon usually say that around. Why would they be glad not to invent it is the key metaphor Poetic word I'm thinking. 

SPEAKER: But again, I see this is the thing. I don't know if such comeliness refers to being in the company of these trees. If because it follows immediately, we'll be together Yeah. Or of each other. And I don't know, again, I think of a certain kind of generationally, right. Like how you communicate or express desire, queer desire. Discreetly. It may be a gesture. It may be a glance. And not to have invented that, to be relieved... 

AL FILREIS: Be relieved by your colleagues in this sub society. Right? 

SPEAKER: Yeah, almost definitely. 

AL FILREIS: I can use that. And that is, I don't have to invent this thing. I don't have invented one before. The other people have met by these trees before. 

SPEAKER: Absolutely. 

SPEAKER: And I cannot stop hearing come in comeliness. If we are really arguing that. Well. 

AL FILREIS: I also think suddenly, suddenly too.- I've been puzzling about suddenly for years. You and I are suddenly with the trees. Try to tell us we are the trees are saying, you know, we just we just hang out here all the time, that's what we do. Say the trees to the It's almost like a Dr. Seuss, a queer Dr. Seuss story. 

DAGMAWI WOUBSHET: But you know, the other thing but the other thing that I was thinking about and in light of what that just said and that's a sort of commentary around this and like I was initially thinking of the completeness more in in a kind of hegemonic guys like this is what we pretend, except that here I'm thinking in light of the conversation, the drift in the conversation, there's an Essex poem where he talks about how we know the languages of our tribe and I and he and he goes on about it's not the national anthem and it's not this, it's not that. But there is a kind of knowing and desire that is passed on through these sites like. And the other thing when you. 

AL FILREIS: Go to the you go to the site in order to gather the knowledge that has preceded you, 

DAGMAWI WOUBSHET: Right, you’re not just fucking. You're kind of participating in a kind of generational handoff, if you will, because that's actually part of what queer folk do when we gather to be it to mess around or to to jump around or to go, pride is pass on these forms of knowledge. Some of this is to me also very reminiscent of Sam Delaney when he talks about, you know, the first time that he went to a bathhouse and realizing that as, you know, black gay man growing up in the 1950s, he used to think of himself as sort of an isolated pervert. But then there were these moments when even in a police raid in some of these parks and the peers or whatever people were when he when he saw how many men were like running away from the cops, that it sort of helped them sense that connectivity, that form of community. That is not it's not about a flag or whatever It's about this sort of community and desire. And so much of the movement work has been about building on something that is not about desire and what you can locate by being near the tree. Right. 

AL FILREIS: I was just going to say there's no prime like in 1940, there's no primer, there's no right. There was no porn to look at, 

SPEAKER: Right? 

SPEAKER: There's no kind of you know, there's. There's not even everything you always wanted to know about sex. 

CARLOS DECENA: So even that. It just it to your point it is true it's. These sites have been so crucial in terms of one's own initiation. Also, what to do. One can harbor desire, queer desire. Right. But in terms of how to articulate it, how to express it with sex entails these are things we also pick up by watching other people, you know, doing. 

AL FILREIS: And if we make this if we think of this as a Harvard poem, because he was at Harvard, it was published. Talk about coded. It was published in The Harvard Advocate, which had been which was a pretty straight group, but it was also going back to the 1890s when George Santayana was like the faculty advisor. It was a kind of place to go to meet other queer people. So, he's writing this poem at Harvard. He's also saying, I can't get the hell out of Harvard in a way. I mean, there is a biographical reading possible I'm sorry, I'm not familiar with the biographies, but I assume that's what's going on here. 

Can we deal with the last two lines? They strike me because the last line strikes me as a meta poetic reference to these very accents. These things I'm writing on this page are days put on such reticence. And here he was, John Ashbery, whom I knew a little bit, a reticent person, shy and really shy about it for four decades. You know, our days put on such reticence. These accents seem their own defense. I mean, what do you do with it? Get us started Sorry I threw that to you. 

ABDULHAMIT ARVAS: That that is, I think, one of the hardest lines in in this poem. And they are truly one combined. They're puzzling and puzzling because I wrote there. I think that is a signal for us to think about it as a puzzle. But, you know, as an early modernist, when I read that line, when I, also read excellence as lines and about this is a line about writing lines seem their own defense immediately reminded me of sort of Philip Sidney's, you know, defense of Poesy. And that's a Problem with that is not surprising that Carlos you started the first line it to Percy Bysshe Shelley that who also wrote a kind of defense of poetry. 

AL FILREIS: Right. 

ABDULHAMIT ARVAS:  So, in that sense, this poem suddenly becomes aligned in a romantic tradition that that kind of like looking at the nature and you and meditating about human existence and this becomes a defense of poetry itself, that these lines will speak in reticence. And then, and then this poem will speak for itself in a way and ending up making poetry more beautiful than nature. 

AL FILREIS: You really did that. Can we pause for a second and say, Hamit, where have you been all my life? I mean, it's such a really, such a really, really amazing thing. You just said there's literary history in it. Yeah. Dag, you were going to say something. 

DAGMAWI WOUBSHET: So, I'm just following up on Hammett's point where exactly that enigmatic line, it reprised a lot of the tent, like what we think of things that are ostensibly opposites, speech and still performance silenced, filled with noises, a chorus of smiles right. So, to come back to that line, these accents, accents I was thinking of, this is such a poem about speech, but that's reticent or so how one not kind of accent in a sense, like a mark, a critical mark, but modulation of voice, temper, pitch, how we communicate via accent. So, I like how that word picks up on this tension that's been building up throughout the poem. And then also that last line, I thought it's like it's truth. Value is in its declaration. I like it, these accents seem their own defense. There's a way in which, Al, you said something meta about it, something self-reflexive about the whole poem. And that line seems to encapsulate via declaring it right… encapsulates the poem's value or truth value I don't want to. 

AL FILREIS: Yeah. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. That's really great. I mean, I think 1948 is and he's an English major at Harvard. This was the heyday, the first heyday of the new criticism and and the buzz word. And he was taking all these courses from these old historicist and then the younger people, the more attractive people would be the new critics because they were against the old historicist. And The buzzword was pretty slick. Poems can be their own worlds. They don't refer to that those trees over there at the end of Harvard Yard. They don't refer to your boyhood in Rochester, their lonely boyhood, they refer to themselves. And he's using that to create a really great poem, a home that's very memorable about an experience that would not be typical of any of those new critics who were really trying to hide from the world politically and ethically otherwise. So these accents seem their own defense as a way of turning that around and saying, I can make this difference into a piece of beauty written in words and you can have what you want from it. I'd like to do two things as we wrap up the conversation. One is to go all the way around all four of us, a lightning round saying anything at all about the use of pronouns in this poem. There's a lot of pronouns going on, just anything at all, just to orient those who are listening. We've been talking about it but be a little more specific. And then I'd like to invite us each to offer a final thought, something that you wanted to say today, but you haven't had a chance to yet because the conversation didn't go that way. OK. Pronouns Who wants to start, Hamit, pronouns? Nope. Dag. 

DAGMAWI WOUBSHET: I like we begin with. These are amazing, right? The kind of demonstrative pronouns. And then we return to these accents and I think that juxtaposition is what's amazing. Then the poem, right? Like, if we were just to collapse, what comes between and then just juxtapose how ‘these’ appears at the first line and the very last line. 

AL FILREIS: Yeah, it seems to me that I'm holding up a piece of paper. Let it be stipulated. And I'm drawing some accents, I'm drawing lines. It's a little bit painterly. There's a lot of painterly stuff going on there. So, we end with these accents seems in our own defense and with this wind-up winds up doing is justifying writing, justifying poetic writing, poetic speech as a way of approximating the all the sudden lift, the excitement, the sort of unconventional sudden feeling that one has. And that's the thing that creates the poem and the poem preserves that suddenness. And it starts with something that's amazing and ends with something that's an accent. So, when somebody says, I had this experience and I wrote a poem about it, all that's left later is of course the poem, and they will have to serve as their own defense. So, I think the parallel ‘these’ really does that. Now I interrupt you, especially a lightning round. I wound up saying something a lot. So, I mean, no Pronouns, 

ABDULHAMIT ARVAS: Beautiful. I mean, that made me then go back and rethink you and I. Who is you? Like Is it is it possible that the reader and the narrator's telling us the relationship between you and I

AL FILREIS: He’s telling us where to meet, he's left the poem as if I bottle all these years later, John Ashbery, who came out sort of to his friends and he's saying, you want me, you know where to find me. 

SPEAKER: I'm going to Cambridge right now 

AL FILREIS: Find some trees. It's like a treasure hunt. We know where he is now. You. I love that you. So that reading of you, just to be really specific, is possibly us. 

SPEAKER: I actually find the US the we really interesting here because it, it, it appears a few times, but it, it can refer to you and I, but clearly, as you said, the, the you can be a triangulation with the reader. So, it's a you who might be a, a love object, if you will, or lust object or whatever. And potentially the love object or the object of desire could be the reader, you and I. Because it's a this is kind of a stranger intimacy kind of setup. The poet is developing this sense of intimacy with the reader, the poetic voice. So it may be that the poem is actually cruising the reader, but the we because it's,… it could be that you and I, whatever that you is, So it could be you, but that you is clearly multiple ‘you’s. And so, there is something there about you know holding multitudes if you will, in that 

AL FILREIS: A favorite topic of yours or your way. I just read your book. It's all in there. OK. My lightning round then we'll do final thoughts. I want to compare the we in. We are surrounded to the hour in our day. So, we are surrounded, I think is the you and I, the two of them. Let's stipulate for a second that the you is not the reader, but someone that the eye has met there at this spot, this best special spot. So we are surrounded is a kind of a it's elation, it's ecstasy, It's that sudden, you know, we're surrounded by nature. We're surrounded by each other, part of the common us. But then Our days, I think broadens out to a more general, not all the way to our days, the entire era of the late forties, everyone but to those who are in the prospective community that's being invited to come out and try the trees. So, our days is addressed to the community, which fits with the meta poetic reading of the end, which is to say, we are going to start making poems like this. And so, we invite you and this is what our days are like, reticent or not. So, I like the move from a specific we of this couple, presumably loving or having sex to Our in our days. 

SPEAKER: And how are you more than two, you know. 

AL FILREIS: And it could be more than two and don't forget the trees 

ABDULHAMIT ARVAS:  Right and I love that. Oh, and especially our days. Not like all human community, but still, if we continue with the queerness, what if it's just a queer life puts on such reticence, such kind of silence that poetry is its defense. Let it speak to unspeakable through poetry Love that there's not speak as slaves exists in poetry right. 

AL FILREIS: Fantastic. Yeah. Yeah. I think that our day, if days is like epoch era time, this is our time. And I think I have a roadmap and it's not conventional. 

SPEAKER: How about thinking about accents, as in not just traces, but also ways of speaking? Code again, these accordions. 

SPEAKER: Oh, yeah, yeah. 

SPEAKER: These accents, it's like these are ways of of moving through the world with language. 

AL FILREIS: Final thoughts So each of us gets a final thought. Something you wanted to say but didn't have a chance to yet. 

ABDULHAMIT ARVAS: Well I can start. First time I read this was last night, the poem. And I must say when reading it closely for the first time, it being about tree and me being a Shakespearean, I couldn't kind of like stop going back to Shakespeare. That reminds me as you like it. You know, the stupid lover. Orlando writes poetry on trees and writes sonnets and hang them on trees. Kind of like speaking his love to Rosaline. Whereas Rosaline is cross-dressed as a beautiful boy in the force of Arden that he cannot even see his lover. But he pretends loving poetry and carving roses on this name on trees. I'm like, this poem is almost saying how stupid you are, Orlando. You have to be united with trees. You have to learn from trees, not project your love that obviously you don't even know true love, which you do not even recognize the person that. Let me show you, Orlando, how you can contemplate about love through nature and learn from nature. So this is my final thought about this poem.

AL FILREIS: Love that Can you turn that into an essay? Because I think all you have to do is find out what courses he took that semester. I'm sure Shakespeare is in there. He knew his Shakespearean. But that's such a great response to Shakespeare. Thank you all. Yeah. Dag, final thought. 

DAGMAWI WOUBSHET: Alright, so I was thinking a canvas on which emerges that turn. I mean, I'm not… I don't know. Ashbery’s poetry all too well, but I know his two passions are visual art, the criticism he did and poetry. And this is his earliest poem. 

AL FILREIS: Actually the earliest poem he made a mistake the earliest poem is called The Painter. 

DAGMAWI WOUBSHET: The Painter. Yes. So that these two loves and passions are there in that work. And, you know, when I see a canvas on which emerges, is it about to pivot into a kind of acrostic poem Like what's emerging? Are we all of a sudden looking at a canvas So I love the ambivalence of that of that word. And then I'm going to say two things. I'm sorry that. 

AL FILREIS: You're breaking the rules. 

DAGMAWI WOUBSHET: OK. 

AL FILREIS: OK. No, no. I'm being silly. 

DAGMAWI WOUBSHET: This is the thing. So hearing him read it in a kind of flat way, you know, because it's a rhymed poem, but the way he uses you hear the enchantment so clearly when he reads it. So that almost reads like free verse. But I had to It's here because I was I wanted to read it where I'm emphasizing that, you know, the rhyme scheme. But then hearing him freed me up and give love to the encampment of how the sentence. 

SPEAKER: He’s all about… he’s all about enchantment. I dare you to hear this as a poem. Yes, that's what he's always saying. 

SPEAKER: Yes. 

AL FILREIS: Carlos, final thought. 

CARLOS DECENA: I'm going to ask you a question. Did you ever read this in class when you were teaching it? 

AL FILREIS: Yeah. 

CARLOS DECENA: Because I recall…

AL FILREIS: Because we didn't have access to the recording. 

CARLOS DECENA: Because I recall …I recall you reading poems a little bit like this. And when I heard Ashbery. Yeah, I knew the poem I was familiar with the poem. But when I heard him, I actually thought of Al, the way you and it may have been that you read Ashbery in a little bit in the style. One of the things that really struck me about even the conversation that unfolded here, is that I don't think I would have gone in to do two to kind of quote unquote execute that this particular kind of reading without the partnership that we develop here, partly because I've always been stumped with Ashbery, with his reticence. That's always been… 

AL FILREIS: You being not a very reticent person. 

CARLOS DECENA: Right. Like being the exact opposite. I remember you did say one time that I flew out of the closet, didn't come out. Well, I heard. You go around saying things about me, it comes back to me. 

AL FILREIS: I said that to someone else?

CARLOS DECENA: Yes, you did. Many, many years ago. And I wish somebody said to me. Yeah, Al said. Al said that you didn't come out You flew out of the closet I'm like, that's about right. 

AL FILREIS: So, it's OK that I said that? 

CARLOS DECENA: Oh Yeah, it's OK. It's totally okay because I drove everybody insane. No, no, no. I remember. I, I drove everybody insane when I came out because I. I was sort of very adamant. You remember this. So the blonde wig and the modern and contemporary American poetry stuff, and you remember that. Anyway, so what I. What I found is that the aesthetic here and the posture of the poetic voice. And it may be that, of course, that it varied throughout his career, but I was always I've always really struggled with him going into his work precisely because there is so much in the work that's being held. It's a bit that sense what he talks about. We are surrounded and so whatever joy you get out of Ashbery, it is about finding these places of apparent sloppiness. That's not sloppiness at all that's intentional. That's about a kind of work in the path, if you will, to get through the reticence, because otherwise he doesn't… he really doesn't give you a lot. He doesn't give you a lot emotionally. He wants you to do all this other work. 

AL FILREIS: He wasn’t you to do the work and of course, you are totally willing to do the work. And that that works out is a good arrangement. Well, we like to end poem talk with a minute or two of Gathering Paradise, which is a chance for all of us, if you're quick, to gather a little something really poetically good to hail or commend someone or something going on in the poetry world or the music world. Or the fiction world or the film world. So, who wants to gather some paradise this is a recommendation. 

DAGMAWI WOUBSHET: I can start. I want to… I'm very much looking forward to reading Ocean Vuong's new book, ‘Time Is a Mother’. And partly because I think he's a national treasure. 

AL FILREIS: Say that again.

DAGMAWI WOUBSHET: And there is something about his I listen to him in. Krista Tippett on being so he he did a duo with her right at the beginning of the pandemic. And I remember being completely undone by the way Ocean approaches, writing the way he thinks about writing and the way he thinks about vulnerability. There is just something in the work that I find really, really compelling, like he lets you in in a way that's very unusual for a writer. So, I'm really looking forward to being a hot mess reading Ocean Vuong because that's actually what happens to me when I read people like that, 

AL FILREIS: Great recommendation. 

CARLOS DECENA: I actually brought the same… Ocean Vuong .Time Is a Mother.. 

AL FILREIS: Amazing. 

CARLOS DECENA: Yeah, and I heard an interview, I think it was last week or week before, and he was on Terry Gross and I found myself crying. Just listen. I just couldn't stop. 

AL FILREIS: Yeah, I can't stop crying when I listen to it. 

CARLOS DECENA: And three days later, I ran into him in the neighborhood. He was coming with a friend for coffee, and I was a total fanboy. I was like, “are you Ocean Vuong?. I love your work. I think you are a light in this world. Yeah. Keep doing what you're doing.” 

AL FILREIS: Yeah. A double recommendation. We haven't had that happen. 

CARLOS DECENA: And we did not talk before.

SPEAKER: And it is right here. 

AL FILREIS: Yeah, you've got it. Proof. Very good. OK, Hamit?

ABDULHAMIT ARVAS: When I thought what I can bring. I try to think what I have on my desk to read and unfortunately none of them are about contemporary or modern literature about all renaissance. So, but I thought I can recommend something from Renaissance Porter that can kind of bring the question what Renaissance point to teach us about our problems today? So yeah, I would like to recommend the most recent issue of the Journal of Spenser Studies, which is on Spenser and Race, edited by Dennis Britton and Kim Coles. So, it's really brings us, you know, Spencer's writing. Multiple chapters on Faerie Queene as much as I can tell about thinking about anti-black racism and its origins in Spanish literature, how English poetry is contributing to two race making projects. What that will be my recommendation, I guess. 

AL FILREIS: Excellent. And you're referring to the period in which you work. Makes me want to ask extracurricularly, you know, what it was like to be told Come on, let's talk about a, you know, modern poem. No, no hesitation, no anxiety. Read it last night. You clearly didn't prepare. 

ABDULHAMIT ARVAS:  Now I know for both hesitation and anxiety was there. But with such an excellent company, I'm like, I'll take the risk. So thank you for inviting me, Al. 

AL FILREIS: And now you'll come back. 

ABDULHAMIT ARVAS:  I will. 

AL FILREIS: OK. That's great. My gathering paradise I am sitting to my left is paradise, Carlos Desano, whose second book is coming out from Duke University Press in early 2023, I guess we should just say spring 2023. It's called ‘Circuits of the Sacred’. You'll remember it from my introduction at the beginning. ‘A Faggotology in the Black Latinx Caribbean’. I have now read it twice. I think I read it in an earlier version and then another one that Carlos sent me, I guess this past summer. Very excited about it, It's fantastic work, It's multi genre. It's sort of deliberately all over the place. I wondered if I could cede my time and ask you to read just a couple of paragraphs from it for us, would you? 

CARLOS DECENA: Yes, thank you. And I just happen to have it right in front of me. 

AL FILREIS: Arranging by chance to meet 

CARLOS DECENA: Exactly. So that we may know who we are. So, I'll read from a section that's rather the beginning of the book where I'm actually paying tribute to the ancestors. But I'm in ritual fashion. You start a ceremony by paying tribute to the ancestors and asking for their blessing. But in the book, I actually talk about the queer child that I was as an ancestor, so as an ancestral figure and pay respects to that queer child. So, there is a lot of dissociative thinking and practices throughout the book where I kind of split myself into different pronouns and whatnot. I'm talking… I may be talking about myself, but I use things like I may use the I, but I may talk about you or I may talk about the scholar. So, this is really about growing up in my working class neighborhood in Santo Domingo. So, I'll just read a little bit from that. 

I visited with some friends, especially after joining the Boy Scouts and getting to know more community children. But for the most part, I went out to run errands for my mother, who sensed the danger of sending me out for too long and instructed me on how best to go from home to the cold model of the bodega, to school and back. Note that parts literally don't break figuratively act like a man. She couldn't have said it like that. Parties to break must have been an expression I picked up coming and going from Danielle Road Bodega. Maybe I picked it up from my cousins. Or maybe the expression was floated loudly enough by one of the neighborhood Tigres who so I would hear as I walked while the person pretended to be talking to themselves. A master class in Dominican in direction with a crushing brutality of banal heteronormativity. Baraka mujeres mojitos kiss a parting. There are a lot of swishy little boys around here. You know, this comment is about you, but the person just opens their mouth to release its venom into the air. And if you turn and if you twitch and if your body registers its impact, then the statement and its sequela stay with you. A scarlet M burned into your aura, corralling you into a designation. Morricone, that's you and the degree or the Donia did not even have to use the word to turn France pronounces phrase that quote To speak is to exist absolutely for the other unquote towards what I describe. The disciplinary power of indirection resides in how it sanctions, class, race and gender normativity in the overall texture of the social, resulting in structural conditions that legitimize not breaking while rendering vulnerable or punishing femininity cast. Oh as always, imminent vulnerability. Indirect speech acts cement asymmetrical force fields that all bodies navigate, that all bodies have to navigate. Thus, such acts might be released into the air as warnings to be metabolized unevenly by all bodies within spitting distance from their source. Mommy was concerned about how I moved, but she would have said no coming is I see coming up being don't walk like that walk correctly. This may have been where her love for me held her back from decreeing that my voice frame did not and could not signify man. But she figured out ways to signal her disapproval of my attempts with a scowl, punctuating by denying me access to her eyes, not the parts, as if memory was a membrane, not a part, as is tattooed in the recollection of who I was. A remembrance of that queer child brings me back to Fanon's discussion of racial strict duration with a twist drawn out from heteronormativity and gender dissent in an already black and working class setting a slow construction and I'm quoting Fanon here a slow construction of myself as a body in a spatial and temporal world Such seems to be the schema. It is not imposed on me. It is rather a definitive structuring of myself and the world definitive because it carries it creates a genuine dialectic between my body and the world, unquote. The guiding handsome words of my parents could only take me so far, since it was my central task to discern accurately the topographies of my surroundings a structural portion of the body I was to approximate, and for which I ingested as codes, interdictions, enclosures, a whole grammar for being and moving in my world. 

AL FILREIS: Thank you, Carlos. That's amazing. And it's such a brilliant that passage. So I sort of requested that passage. And then you found a good way to leave yet to lead into it. And it's such a great explanation of form intentions of indirection It's really amazing the book. 

CARLOS DECENA: Thank you. 

AL FILREIS: The book is thank You. The book is coming out from Duke and it's called Circuits of the Sacred Faggots Orgy in the Black Latin X Caribbean. Well, that's all the touching, loving and explaining we have time for on Poem Talk today. Poem Talk at the Writers House is a collaboration of the Center for Programs and Contemporary Writing in the Kelly Writers House at the University of Pennsylvania and the Poetry Foundation poetryfoundation.org thanks so much to my guests. Amit AMAs that Mouchette and Carlos to Seena and to Poem Talk's director and engineer Today Zach Carduner and two poem talks Editor The same Amazing, amazing is a significant word today. Zach Carduner Next time on Poem Talk, I'll be joined by Eric Falcone, visiting us from Berkeley, along with Julia Bloch and Charles Bernstein, to talk with me about two poems by Maggie O'Sullivan from her amazing book, Another amazing In the House of the Shaman. This is Al Filreis, and I hope you'll join us next month for that or another episode of Poem Talk.