AUDIO TRANSCRIPT

The Poetry Magazine Podcast: "Without the Blues There Would Be No Jazz"

(If you notice a mistake in the transcript, please let us know by emailing [email protected].)

(MUSIC PLAYING)

Don Share: This is the Poetry Magazine Podcast for March 2014. I’m Don Share, editor of Poetry magazine.

Lindsay Garbutt: And I’m Lindsay Garbutt, assistant editor for the magazine. On the podcast this month, we’ll hear readings from Franny Choi,

Franny Choi: (READS EXCERPT FROM “To the Man Who Shouted ‘I Like Pork Fried Rice’ at Me on the Street.”)

what does it
taste like: a takeout box
between my legs.

Don Share: And from Claudia Rankine.

Claudia Rankine:

(READS EXCERPT FROM Citizen)

It’s as if a wounded Doberman pinscher or a German shepherd has gained the power of speech.

Lindsay Garbutt: We’re also speak with Nikky Finney about the poetry of James Baldwin.

Nikky Finney: I think he thought that, really this is where it all began for him as a writer.

Slavoj Žižek: I want to tell you, present here, some of the signs of this dimension, of the end of the world.

Don Share: That’s Slavoj Žižek, the exuberant philosopher and cultural critic whose lectures and videos have quite a following.

Slavoj Žižek: There is on the horizon, a certain zero level where things reach a limit.

Lindsay Garbutt: Slavoj Žižek is not on the podcast this month, but he is in the March issue with a provocative essay on poets and political violence.

Don Share: Also in the issue, we have poems by Yusef Komunyakaa, Anne Waldman, and Joy Harjo. These poems, in fact, all the poems in the March issue were selected in collaboration with Split This Rock, an organization of poets, artists, and activists that grew out of the Poets Against the War movement.

Lindsay Garbutt: Sarah Browning is the director of Split This Rock. And she joins us now from a studio in Washington, DC to talk about the issue and to read one of the poems in it. Hi, Sarah.

Sarah Browning: Hello.

Don Share: Sarah, as you explain in your introduction to the poems Split This Rock calls poets to a greater role in public life, and fosters a national network of socially engaged poets. So exactly what kind of poetry are you trying to celebrate and encourage?

Sarah Browning: Split This Rock promotes poetry of provocation and witness. This is poetry that bears witness to injustice and provokes change. Of course, there are many, many ways to do both those things. And the poetry in this month’s issue of Poetry magazine shows that kind of variety of ways that poets approach the world.

Don Share: You know, that diversity, not just of people and poets, but of kinds of poetry, is really represented very well in the March issue, and of course, in the Split This Rock Festival. And we asked you to read one of the poems in the issue, and you chose “alternate names for black boys” by Danez Smith. Can you tell us a bit about Danez Smith and his poem before you read it?

Sarah Browning: Absolutely. Danez got his start in the spoken word scene. He is a Cave Canem fellow. He moves easily back and forth between literary and spoken word worlds. He’s gay and African American. He writes about those intersecting identities quite a bit. He’s very young. The poems move me tremendously. And I chose this one because of the epidemic of murders of young Black men in our country, and the frequency with which their murderers have been let off without punishment or with light punishment recently. And so, let me read for you “alternate names for black boys.”

(READS POEM)

1.   smoke above the burning bush
2.   archnemesis of summer night
3.   first son of soil
4.   coal awaiting spark & wind
5.   guilty until proven dead
6.   oil heavy starlight
7.   monster until proven ghost
8.   gone
9.   phoenix who forgets to un-ash
10. going, going, gone
11. gods of shovels & black veils
12. what once passed for kindling
13. fireworks at dawn
14. brilliant, shadow hued coral
15. (I thought to leave this blank
       but who am I to name us nothing?)
16. prayer who learned to bite & sprint
17. a mother’s joy & clutched breath

Don Share: Hm. Poets kind of talk about list poems as a kind of cliché thing to do. The idea there being that list just goes on and on and it’s sort of inanimate. But this list, he really modulates the tone so that there aren’t even discrete items in the list. It’s like Stevens’s, you know, “Ways of Looking Blackbird.” Each part of it is surprising, and the cumulative effect is really powerful. It just evokes so many different images and feelings and thoughts, as you said, Sarah, about the things that are all too frequent in the news today.

Sarah Browning: And also I love how it goes back and forth between direct statement and the startling images. “what once passed for kindling,” “gods of shovels & black veils,” but then, “gone.”

Don Share: Yeah.

Lindsay Garbutt: Right.

Sarah Browning: So it’s, it’s unafraid to say it directly. But it also evokes it in so many ways.

Lindsay Garbutt: Yeah. And I think, you know, there’s a danger with a list poem that there will be a sort of remove from what you’re writing about, and the lyric quality of it kind of gets past that. But also, I think, number 15, where in parentheses it says, “(I thought to leave this blank / but who am I to name us nothing?)” introduces the voice of the poem in such an intimate way, that, as you said, the cumulative effect is something that’s so personal and, and moving.

Sarah Browning: One of the reasons I chose the poem is that I am the mother of a teenage boy. And I am the white mother of a white teenage boy. And I think all the time about what Black mothers of boys and young men face every day. And so the “clutched breath” at the end of the poem is both the devastation when a child is killed, but also the breath that is held every day until the child comes safely home.

Don Share: Mm-hmm.

Sarah Browning: And it’s coupled with the joy of being a mother of a child. But that is what moved me so much about the closing of the poem.

(MUSIC PLAYING)

Lindsay Garbutt: Franny Choi is a writer, performer, and teaching artist. Her debut collection, Floating, Brilliant, Gone, is coming out this month.

Don Share: We have two of her poems in the March issue. Since Franny Choi is a performer, we asked her what she says to an audience before reading her poem, “Second Mouth.”

Franny Choi: Usually when I’m, when I’m performing it, I just shout “vagina poem,” to signify that that is what’s happening.

Lindsay Garbutt: Here is Franny Choi reading “Second Mouth.”

Franny Choi:

(READS POEM)

Other-lips     whispering     between my legs.
What they called black hole     not-thing
is really packed full of secrets.     A rebel mouth

testifying from the underside.     Careful
not to let it     speak too loudly.     Only hum
demure     in polite company — never laugh

or spit on the sidewalk     or complain
lest we both be dragged     under the wheels of
one of those.     Or worse     coddled

smiled at     as at a lapdog acting wolf.
Or worse     called ugly     a cruel joke. Or — 
there are always     worse things.

Too many messengers     shot.     But then
who wouldn’t fear     an eyeless face
whose ghost stories     always     come true?

Don Share: This poem really marks an amount of progress in which women really can talk about their bodies and, you know, they become instruments, not of another person, but of their own freedom and also of poetry.

Sarah Browning: I think there’s so many feminist poets who paved the way for women to write freely. Or more freely. I think there’s still an enormous amount of shaming that goes on, an enormous attempt to control women’s bodies and women’s minds, and how they think and feel about their bodies. But the poets, like in so many realms, are busting through, and are saying exactly what you said: No, our bodies belong to us, and we control how we write about them.

Don Share: Well, that courageousness is really heartening to me. Franny, in this poem, talks about “a rebel mouth testifying from the underside” and she’s taking something that is private and is supposed to be kept private and demure, as she said, in polite company,

Franny Choi:

(EXCERPT REPLAYS)

Careful
not to let it     speak too loudly.     Only hum
demure     in polite company — never laugh

or spit on the sidewalk    

Don Share: And she’s proclaiming it very loudly. It really takes on all of the clichés of reticence and purity.

Franny Choi:

(EXCERPT REPLAYS)

Or worse     called ugly     a cruel joke. Or — 
there are always     worse things.

Don Share: And that women endure these worse things all the time just underscores how admirable it is for somebody like Franny—and there are many poets now like Franny Choi, who get up and basically turn that inside out and put it out there. And I know it’s an electrifying effect, too, when you break the silence. And then there’s almost the palpable relief that people experience. But you know, the last lines of the poem are amazing to me.

Franny Choi:

(EXCERPT REPLAYS)

But then
who wouldn’t fear     an eyeless face
whose ghost stories     always     come true?

Don Share: You know, that’s just pure, incredible poetry to me.

Lindsay Garbutt: Yeah. And Sarah, you talked about shaming at one point. And that’s really what this poem is all about. It’s counteracting that and talking about the experience of that, you know, how you can’t “complain / lest we both be dragged     under the wheels of / one of those.” Being called “one of those” if you’re talking or, or even allowing this second mouth to reveal itself. I also think that the concept of second mouth is really interesting to me here. Men are allowed to talk about their other head. And the concept of calling, for a woman, “a second mouth” really gives it agency and a power to talk, and also allow it to be something that’s part of you, but separate from you in a way that you’re not normally allowed to talk about it, in that sort of way.

Don Share: Mm-hmm.

Lindsay Garbutt: She says in the last stanza, “too many messengers shot.” Is she a messenger, and what is her relationship to this second mouth?

Sarah Browning: Right, the threat of violence that women live with all the time.

Don Share: Mm-hmm. Well let’s hear another poem from Franny Choi. This one’s called "To the Man Who Shouted 'I Like Pork Fried Rice' at Me on the Street." She told us the poem is based on a true story.

Franny Choi: The title really does describe what happened. As an Asian American woman, it also wasn’t the first time that somebody just yelled the name of a Chinese food dish at me on the street. And I think this poem was an attempt to understand everything that I heard in that moment, and the things that I would say to this person if I hadn’t just run off nervously.

Lindsay Garbutt: Here’s Franny Choi reading “To the Man Who Shouted ‘I Like Pork Fried Rice’ at Me on the Street.”

Franny Choi:

(READS POEM)

you want to eat me
out. right. what does it taste like
you want to eat me right out
of these jeans & into something
a little cheaper. more digestible.
more bite-sized. more thank you

come: i am greasy
for you. i slick my hair with msg
every morning. i’m bad for you.
got some red-light district between
your teeth. what does it
taste like: a takeout box
between my legs.
plastic bag lady. flimsy white fork
to snap in half. dispose of me.

taste like dried squid. lips puffy
with salt. lips brimming
with foreign so call me
pork. curly-tailed obscenity
been playing in the mud. dirty meat.
worms in your stomach. give you

a fever. dead meat. butchered girl
chopped up & cradled
in styrofoam. you candid cannibal.
you want me bite-sized
no eyes clogging your throat.

but i’ve been watching
from the slaughterhouse. ever since
you named me edible. tossed in
a cookie at the end. lucky man.
go & take what’s yours.
name yourself archaeologist     but

listen carefully
to the squelches in
your teeth & hear my sow squeal
scream murder between
molars. watch salt awaken
writhe, synapse.
watch me kick
back to life. watch me tentacles
& teeth. watch me
resurrected electric.

what does it
                                    taste like: revenge
squirming alive in your mouth
strangling you quiet
from the inside out.

Sarah Browning: Ah, talk about revenge.

Don Share: Yeah.

Lindsay Garbutt: Mm-hmm.

Sarah Browning: The sweetest.

Don Share: You would think, well, this puts that one to rest. But sadly, it doesn’t. I mean, as she pointed out, it’s what she would say or would have said or, you know, thought to say in a poem. And what’s admirable about it is that instead of being shocked and insulted into silence, it turns out Franny takes the weapons of poetry, you know, to turn it back around.

Sarah Browning: Well, it’s striking back. And for how long have women not striked back out of fear, out of shame? Again, speaking to the conversation we had about the previous poem, that she, as you say, Don, she takes her voice and she uses it.

Don Share: It’s not just throwing something back at an assailant, but it’s saying “If I take this thing you’re saying seriously, guess what would happen to you?”

Franny Choi:

(EXCERPT REPLAYS)

what does it
                                    taste like: revenge
squirming alive in your mouth
strangling you quiet
from the inside out.

Lindsay Garbutt: It’s taking something insidious that someone has said to you, that feels very intimate to you and making it intimate to them, that, you know, I, okay, if you want to eat me, if I’m disposable, here’s what I’m going to do to you.

Don Share: Right.

Lindsay Garbutt: You know?

Don Share: Well, it’s, the poem is a way of kind of literally digesting

Lindsay Garbutt: Right, right.

Don Share: you know, the, what’s happened. It’s a way of digesting this terrible and stupid experience.

(MUSIC PLAYING)

Lindsay Garbutt: This is Claudia Rankine’s first appearance in Poetry. She is the author of four poetry collections, and she has two new books coming out later this year.

Don Share: In the March issue, we have an excerpt from a larger prose work of Claudia Rankine’s called Citizen.

Claudia Rankine: Citizen is a collection of moments that inhabit microaggressions that have to do with race.

Lindsay Garbutt: Microaggression is a term coined in the 1970s to describe nonviolent yet aggressive interactions between people of different races, cultures, or genders.

Claudia Rankine: They’re on a kind of small social level. Not a lynching, or a shooting or hosing. But they’re small cuts at one.

Don Share: Yelling “I like pork fried rice” at an Asian woman would be a good example of microaggression. And like Franny Choi, Claudia Rankine didn’t have to search far for her material.

Claudia Rankine: In many ways, this piece is nonfiction in the sense that I didn’t make any of this up. So the persona of the speaker is that of an academic.

Lindsay Garbutt: like Claudia Rankine herself, who teaches at Pomona College in California. Let’s listen to one of the excerpts from Citizen. This one is about a visit to a therapist.

Claudia Rankine:

(READS EXCERPT)

The new therapist specializes in trauma counseling. You have only ever spoken on the phone. Her house has a side gate that leads to a back entrance she uses for patients. You walk down a path bordered on both sides with deer grass and rosemary to the gate, which turns out to be locked.

At the front door the bell is a small round disc that you press firmly. When the door finally opens, the woman standing there yells, at the top of her lungs, Get away from my house. What are you doing in my yard?

It’s as if a wounded Doberman pinscher or a German shepherd has gained the power of speech. And though you back up a few steps, you manage to tell her you have an appointment. You have an appointment? she spits back. Then she pauses. Everything pauses. Oh, she says, followed by, oh, yes, that’s right. I am sorry.

I am so sorry, so, so sorry.

Don Share: This part of the longer piece brings to life that anger. You know, one of the things you wonder about when you hear the news, whether it’s news stories, or, or micro incidents like this that almost anybody can have experienced or witnessed, you just wonder where’s this anger come from? “It’s as if a wounded Doberman pinscher or a German shepherd has gained the power of speech.” But implicit in that is that we have the power of speech, but this is how we are using it. So what’s going on with that?

Sarah Browning: Well, I think fear has always been in the mix of race in America. So it’s just shocking how often people of color are subjected to the fear of white people.

Don Share: Yeah. And also how easy it is for people to just say, “Oh, I’m sorry. I’m sorry. I’m so sorry.”

Lindsay Garbutt: Right.

Sarah Browning: I love that she specializes in trauma counseling.

Don Share: Right.

Lindsay Garbutt: Right.

Don Share: It’s too much!

Lindsay Garbutt: Yes, it’s too much. Well, and it’s interesting that you say that Don because that line, “I’m so sorry, so, so sorry” is off on its own line, whereas the rest of it is, you know, in sort of prose paragraphs, and it makes that phrase, you know, sort of disembodied, like, what does this mean? This doesn’t really relate to anything that’s just happened. How can that make up

Don Share: It’s just a line.

Lindsay Garbutt: Yeah.

Don Share: I mean, literally, it’s just a line.

Sarah Browning: Right. Well, and it speaks to many interactions between white people who may think of themselves as well-meaning and people of color.

Lindsay Garbutt: Right.

Sarah Browning: And that the white people don’t recognize their own prejudices that they bring. So they are sometimes themselves shocked at what comes out of their mouths.

Don Share: Well, Sarah, thank you for listening to these poems with us.

Sarah Browning: My enormous pleasure.

Lindsay Garbutt: Sarah Browning is the director of Split This Rock and she co edited the poetry in the March issue.

(MUSIC PLAYING)

(CLIP PLAYS)

James Baldwin: You, enemy of all tribes, known, unknown, past, present, or, perhaps, above all, to come.

Lindsay Garbutt: That’s James Baldwin reading his poetry on a CD from 1987 called A Lover’s Question.

Don Share: We tend to think of James Baldwin as a novelist and essayist, but that may be about to change. In April, a new collection of his poetry, Jimmy’s Blues and Other Poems, is coming out. Nikky Finney wrote the book’s introduction, and we were lucky enough to get it for our March issue.

Lindsay Garbutt: Nikky Finney’s own poetry won a National Book Award in 2011. She teaches at the University of South Carolina, and she joins us now from a studio in Columbia. Hi, Nikky.

Nikky Finney: Hi, how are you guys?

Lindsay Garbutt: Good. How are you?

Don Share: Great.

Nikky Finney: Wonderful, wonderful. So glad to be here for this conversation.

Don Share: Well, you know, as I said a moment ago, it does seem like a lot of people will be surprised to find out that he wrote poetry. And so one question is, did James Baldwin think of himself as a poet? Or, you know, was this just one of many things that he did?

Nikky Finney: I think, yes on both counts of that, Don. I think he did consider himself a poet. But I also believe passionately that he saw himself as many things, and he was many things. I do think that he held a certain brilliant light in his eye for poetry. I mean, he really believed that without the poet in the society, without the poet writing those books, and without people listening to poetry, all was lost.

Lindsay Garbutt: Would you mind reading one of his poems for us?

Nikky Finney: Not at all. I love this poem for many reasons. It’s called “Inventory / On Being 52.” And it’s James Baldwin taking stock of his life at the age of 52.

(READS POEM – please note this poem was not available online so we are unsure of line breaks, formatting, etc.)

My progress report
concerning my journey to the palace of wisdom
is discouraging.
I lack certain indispensable aptitudes.
Furthermore, it appears
that I packed the wrong things.

I thought I packed what was necessary, or what little I had. But there is always something one overlooks, something one was told, was not told, or did not hear. Furthermore, some time ago, I seem to have made an error in judgment, turned this way instead of that, and now I cannot radio my position. I am not sure that my radio is working. No voice has answered me for a long time now. How long? I do not know. It may have been that day in Norman’s gardens uptown somewhere, when I did not hear someone trying to say I love you. I packed for the journey in great haste. I have never had any time to spare. I left behind me all that I could not carry. I seem to remember now a green bobble, a worthless stone slimy with the rain. My mother said that I should take it with me. But I left it behind. The world is full of green stones, I said. Funny that I should think of it now. I never saw another one like it. Now that I think of it. There was a red piece of altar cloth, which had belonged to my father, but I was much too old for it. And I left it behind. There was a little brown ball belonging to a neighbor’s little boy. I still remember his face brown like the ball and shining like the sun the day he threw it to me. And I caught it and turned my back and dropped it and left it behind. I was on my way, drums and trumpets called me, my universe was thunder. My eye was fixed on the far place of the palace.

Lindsay Garbutt: Wow, that’s incredible.

Don Share: Yeah. That’s amazing.

Nikky Finney: It’s a beautiful poem, it goes on and on. Some of the most beautiful for me of Baldwin’s poems are long journeys with words and this is one of them.

Don Share: Yeah. You know, one of the things that I love that you say about Baldwin’s work is he knew that without the blues, there would be no jazz.

Nikky Finney: Yeah.

Don Share: And I take that as a metaphor that his style is really rooted in blues.

Nikky Finney: Yes.

Don Share: Even when you see pictures of him, there’s such a compelling, deep sadness. And yet there’s such exuberance and joy in his work. And what you describe is what he’s really employing in this work is what you call “the high historic Black art of laughing to keep from crying.”

Nikky Finney: Don, I love that, I’m just so glad you cite that because I grew up in that community. I saw the people in my community and the people in my family employ that high art of laughing to keep from crying. I mean, how else will you survive the day? How else will you get up in the morning, and face another day of what you have to face? And Baldwin was brilliant at this. I mean, I’ve looked at, I think, just about everything on film that was ever made about his life. And what you do notice is his amazing laughter.

Don Share: Mm-hmm.

Nikky Finney: I mean, once those brilliant, beautiful eyes got going, and once you could find him through the cigarette smoke on the screen, which, always you would see,

(ALL LAUGH LIGHTLY)

Nikky Finney: you would, you would hear his searing honesty. And then you would see this sly smile creeping through, before you got to the end of what he was saying.

Don Share: In the piece, you quote the poem “Imagination.” And it says, “Imagination / creates the situation, / and then, the situation / creates imagination. // It may, of course, / be the other way around: /  Columbus was discovered / by what he found.”

Nikky Finney: (LAUGHS) There’s that humor again, right?

Don Share: (LAUGHS) Yeah.

Nikky Finney: There’s that power, that I’m not going to flinch when I say this. I mean, he was saying that back then. We laugh, and we think, “Wow, that was very important. That was profound,” but we’re also laughing at the same time. And that’s the door he kind of sneaks in on.

Don Share: I happened to be with my teacher, Derek Walcott, when we got word that James Baldwin had died. And Derek is a tough guy, as everybody knows, but I will never forget his face. He wept when he heard the news.

Nikky Finney: Mm.

Don Share: And there’s something emblematic in that, for me, which is, in the images that you can find or the films of Baldwin in all of his work, that real humanity in spite of hardship, and witnessing and thinking about terrible, terrible things, that’s really what’s so wonderful about this. And in a way, the poems kind of crystallize all that. I mean, reading through this book, it really is an illumination, to see this poetry, which is quite different from his other kinds of writing. And so that leads to the question, why wasn’t he better known as a poet? Is it just that his poetry was overshadowed by his prose? Or would you say his poetry has been unjustly ignored?

Nikky Finney: I think we have to look at it from the realm of poetry first. You know, take Baldwin out of it. And just look at the regard that the country had for poetry, still does not have enough of. You know, I’m a poet. So I understand the power of it. But that doesn’t mean that the country that I live in or the society that I live in understands the power of it. I mean, you know this, you guys know this well.

Don Share: Yeah.

Nikky Finney: So I think that partly it is the genre itself being ignored, yes. I also think Baldwin wrote in so many different kinds of poetic ways. I mean, that poem you read about imagination is, has that simple rhyme scheme. And yet that amazing, powerful theme about it. This is a part of the brilliance and contradiction, I think, of Baldwin as human and Baldwin as writer, that he wrote for the poem itself and what he wanted it to say, and he was not going to be pressed into “This is how a brilliant poem or literary poem sounds,” this is how I sound. And I think he stood his ground on that. And I also think—and this is totally my own take on it—I think he was protective of his poetry.

Don Share: Yeah.

Nikky Finney: I think, I think he thought that, really, this is where it all began for him as a writer through those poetic lines and thoughts. And the essays, I do believe the essays came from those thoughts and the novels came from, from those thoughts. And so I think, really, because Jimmy’s Blues was the only book of poetry he wrote, that that was not a mistake. I think that something about it had a very conscious air, so that he would, could protect that voice of his that was really the birthplace perhaps of all the other things he came to say.

Don Share: Well, thank you so much, Nikky.

Nikky Finney: Yes, thank you.

(MUSIC PLAYING)

Don Share: You can read Nikky Finney’s essay on James Baldwin’s poetry and everything else you heard on the podcast in the March 2014 issue of Poetry magazine.

Lindsay Garbutt: Let us know what you thought of this program. Email us at [email protected].

Don Share: The Poetry Magazine Podcast is recorded by Ed Herman and produced by Curtis Fox.

Lindsay Garbutt: The theme music for this program comes from the Claudia Quintet. I’m Lindsay Garbutt.

Don Share: And I’m Don Share. Thank you for listening.

(MUSIC FADES OUT)