 Welcome to the Resumption of Lunch Poems in 2021. I'm Jeffrey Gio-Brayen, I direct the series along with a tremendous amount of help from Noah Warren. And we're really glad to resume and to resume with this amazing poet, Kiki Petrosino, who's in error just so many different kinds of form and shows the continuity across experimental and traditional form throughout her books and to many kinds of thematic concern as well. And I think to perfectly balanced coordinations between formal choices and thematic concerns. I'm gonna talk really briefly about White Blood, a lyric of Virginia. Kiki's newest book just came out in 2020 in the fall. Yeah, I think so. Spring, okay. So White Blood, a lyric of Virginia, the first part of the title is a legal fiction with all two real and terrible results, both past and present. And the second half of the title, A Lyrical Virginia, instantly partially converts White Blood into a poetic genre and then kicks us out of that into a state of the union, a lyric of Virginia. It's an amazing weaving of the law and of place and of writing that lets us know how contingent and artifice, something like White Blood is, without thinking that poetry has scored any decisive points against it or undone any of it. It opens inquiry rather than believing it does something. And I think that that's a crucial way that Petrosino works in the book as well. Form is there to pry open the past and render its presentness even more present. The book is therefore both a genealogy of the poet herself, of the union and all of the legacies of the slavery on which it thrived for so long. And again, a form itself. There are these amazing erasures. I'm gonna show you what they look like from DNA tests. You can see so that all that's left is that which has not been erased. And it's so satisfyingly multiple even though it seems so simple as a form, right? It indicates how difficult it is to recover history. It indicates how much is erased, made silent, burnt, buried and struck out. It looks like diaspora on the page, but it's also a re-yathering, especially when there's instance after instance of it, right? Diaspora is not only about dispersal, it's also about solidarity and reacquisition. There's an incredible double crown of sonnets in the book in which the 15th sonnet is made up of all the last lines of the first 14, which are of course themselves linked last line to first line, last line to first line. And it occurs to me that incredibly traditional and in fact, archaic form, isn't that different from erasure and reconstitution? One of the things I love about this book is how diverse the forms are, but how you start to see correspondences across them even though they seem to come from different parts of the literary family tree. Anyway, it's so well made. It's so beautiful and moving in its rottenness. And I'm really excited to hear what all that rottenness sounds like when performed. And I think we should do that right now. So please join me in welcoming Kiki Petresino. Thanks so much, Jeffrey and everybody at UC Berkeley. It's really nice to read for you and share poetry over your lunchtime. So I'm gonna read poems from white blood, a lyric of Virginia. Prelude, you're on a train and your ancestors are in the quiet car. The quiet car is locked with a password you can't decrypt. You're a professional password decrypter but your ancestors are demolition experts. You're wearing black tactical gear and your ancestors are wearing black tactical gear. You're dashing through each component, slamming compartment, slamming doors open while your ancestors lay small explosives. As heat expands within the carriage, you escape through a picture window. You climb to the top of the train and your ancestors repel down the sides. You're repelling down one side of the train when you glimpse your ancestors above you. They leap from carriage to carriage as if weightless, as if drifting, as if curling tongues of snow. You cling to the side of the train as each of your ancestors lifts away from you. They float into the cloud of themselves. In the rushing light, you perceive them as hundreds of slow snake doctors. Oh, you begin. What your results mean? Western Africa, 28%. The West African you is a hunter. Try, try, carry this. The West African you has split and expanded a mixture historic as a gene. The West African component of your lineage, the out of Africa event, the new world slave scene in this genetic print. You are likely a mixture, a cluster, a high number. Your DNA has roots that cluster and spread and trade and carry. The West African you spanning more than more. Regions of time in people. Oh, between this cluster and this cluster in African, oh, oh, Niger and Chad, oh, fingerprint. African, you span most of Africa. African America, African diaspora and the Southern African forests out of Africa, East, South and then Southeast within Africa throughout Africa, the historic African world. Well, so, so, well, so. So the next couple of poems will be from a section called Albemarle. Albemarle County is where I'm broadcasting from is County in Central Virginia and it's where the University of Virginia is located and it's also where Thomas Jefferson's Monticello is home on the mountain. That's where it's located probably about a five minute drive from where I'm sitting right now. Instructions for time travel. You must go through Mr. Jefferson along his row of China berry trees behind the ruined smokehouse in unmarked tracks under field stones with no carvings, no monuments with a few leaves shadowing the mulch near scattered weeds in sunken lines while the sun walks in the day at the end of the day in an oval of brushed earth just as the soft path finishes under branches where the dead are always saying what they always say, right about me. La cuisine hier bourgeois. Mr. Jefferson loved early green peas almost as much as I love complaining. I pick at his recipes and their French alphabets larded in light. We know Mr. Jefferson loved early green peas almost translucent and gone by July. Didn't the French believe delight and temperance marry in the mouth? I'll hold my peace as much as I love complaining. I pick at the recipes Mr. Jefferson loved early green peas almost. The next poem takes its title from one of Jefferson's own statements in writing to a friend while constructing the home, the plantation. He describes Monticello as his essay in architecture. And in thinking about the word essay we're of course reminded that essay comes from a French word that means to try. So an essay is an attempt or a try at something. And thus it is true really that Jefferson's Monticello is his attempt of his essay in architecture and all the many complex senses of that word. Essay in architecture. The human face. It's pine doors painted like mahogany. Human face with horses under each veranda. Perfect parquet tetragons of the human face. Human face still legible in old French. Sealed closet of the human face lit by Oculus. Design face, tinker face, factory face. Twine and bare wood comprising a pulley system for the human face. Woodwork face with sunbeams settling in. Revolving buffet supporting the human face. Entire pewter plate collection in the face. Human face as soupdereen, as paint chip as spit jack. Smoke rings textured like the human face. Human face cured, human face pickled. Human face brushed with olive oil and chovies and parmesan. Green floor of the dome room just above the human face. Floating view of the face. It's quarter farms. Rough cabins dotting a sloped face partly visible. Human face built to resemble a great clock. Great pendulum drawn faces in the air. Terror. Every night I go back to Mr. Jefferson's place searching still his kitchens behind staircases in a patch of shade somewhere. Beside his joinery and within his small ice house till I get down that pit lined with straw where Mr. Jefferson once stacked frozen slabs of river water until summer. Then visitors would come to him to ask about a peculiar green star or help him open up his maps. They'd kneel together on the floor among his books, lavish hunks of ice and melting like the preserved tears of some antique mammal who must have wept to leave Albemarle. Just as I wept when I landed in Milan for the first time. Stone city where Mr. Jefferson began to learn the science of ice houses, how you dig into the dark flank of the land, how you seal the cavity. Leave open just one small hatch through which I might lift through gratings Mr. Jefferson's cold dressed victuals his expensive butter and salads. The sealed jars sweating clear gems of condensation white blood appearing from warm air. As if air could break and slough revealing the curved arc of our shared Milan. There I wore silver rings on each thumb. I studied and spoke in fine houses of ice. I knew a kind of crying which sealed me to such realms for good. Old magic weep, old throb in throat. How much of my fondness for any place is water still bound to darkness. The word to worm of course it's Latin and it comes from another one that's lifted again from another one of Jefferson's writings. There was a moment in his life as a person who enslaved people where there were some young boys that were working in the nail factory that he had created in Monticello. And there had been a fight, something had happened and he decided to sell one of the voice to make him an example in terorum to the others. So the point was to sell this young man who had been in this conflict as an example to strike terror in the other enslaved people who were of course always afraid that they would be sold away from their families, the Virginia housewife. Methodical nicety is the essence of true elegance. To grill a calf's head, you must clean and divide it. When the mistress gives out everything there is methodical nicety, the essence of true elegance in a sauce boat, a spoonful in a sieve, boil it tender, take the eyes out, hole and cut flesh from skull. Cover these with breadcrumbs and chopped parsley. True, essential nicety is the elegant method. Divide a clean calf, then grill its head, the shop at Monticello. I'm a black body in this commonwealth which turned black bodies into money. Now I have money to spend on little trinkets to remind me of this fact. I'm a money machine and my body constitutes the commonwealth. I spend and spend in order to support this. I support this mountain with my black money, strange mountain in late bloom, strange mansion built on mountains of wealth. I spend so much I'm late for the tour where I'm a blooming black dollar sign. I look good in the dome room prowling its high gloss floor. It's common to desire such flooring for my own home but owning a home is still strange. My blackness makes strange tools for a living rakes the strangeness like dirt. I like to rake my hands over merchandise. Bayberry votives, English, Hisop and crisp sachets. I like this engraved pewter bookmark so much suddenly I line up for it clenching my upright fist. I pay cash to prove myself no shoplifter. Still I abscond with my black feelings, crisp toast points dunked in fig jam on one hand. I must think very highly of myself to come here. And again, that sounds like something I would say. Leaving Albemarle behind for a little bit. I'll move to the county next door to Albemarle which is called Louisa. Now Louisa County also has a very, very deep history going back all the way to the colonial era. It happens to be the county where my own ancestors lived as enslaved and free people before and after the Civil War. Like I say, it's the county that's right next door to Albemarle. So there's just a lot of resonances and a lot of ways that the histories of these two counties, you know, Jefferson's Albemarle and then my family's Louisa, they overlap and there's a lot of traffic back and forth between the two counties of course. A lot of the people in the same families like owned properties in both counties, things like that. Anyway, my family was focused in Louisa County and you know, I'm gonna read some poems from that section. A guide to the Louisa County Free Negro and Slave Records 1770 to 1865. The first box is for all the good white men, the ones who freed their slaves on Christmas. It's always Christmas in the first box. The day Delphi shall go out, the day Viny shall go out. These good white men only desire the guardian care of those underage. After that they shall go out, just as Winnie shall go out at the age of 21, entirely free from me or mine or any person whatsoever. Delphi, Viny and Winnie shall go out on Christmas day. The first box slides open to show their certificates. The good white men of this county believing that all men are by nature equally free have left many of these. One certificate is for Viny, one for Winnie, one for Delphi, but these good white men can only free the slaves they truly own. One man observes the above mentioned Negroes are disputed in their titles to me, namely Delphi, Viny and Winnie. He doesn't say more about the dispute. He doesn't say what happens on Christmas day. This good white man has said all three should go out precisely on Christmas day, but now it is different. It's very different now, even though Christmas has come. The good white man writes, I only free as to my right and title given under my hand. The box slides open to show certificate after certificate. It's Christmas. So that's up on my road after I visited the library of Virginia, which is located in Richmond. Of course, that's the capital of Virginia. And the library of Virginia collects the free Negro and slave records from the many county courthouses in Virginia. And the reason why the library did that was so that those court archives would be preserved even after slavery was over, for historical purposes. So these records take up a lot of space, certificates of manumission and things like that, records from slave patrols that had been paid out, receipts and things like that. And so it would be so easy, quote unquote, right? It would be comparatively easy to say, we don't need these records anymore. Let's de-accession these records from the courthouse, but that's where the library of Virginia came in at one point and said, send them all here. Send these records here. We're going to keep them for archival purposes. So I was able to go visit and look up the Louisa County free Negro slave records. There were three boxes I found. And that was the poem that I wrote about the first box going back all the way to the period of time in which the, after which the Virginia Assembly had made it possible to do private manumissions of enslaved people that started in the 1780s. This is a poem about the second box, which contained a lot of claims and receipts for people who had, for white men who had worked on the slave patrols on the road throughout this exact same period of time. So this poem is called Louisa County Patrol Claims 1770 to 1863. I pry open the files still packed with liquor and strange brine. Midnight seeps from the cracks, slow pulp of arithmetic. Four or five or six at a time, the white men draw along the Gordon'sville road on foot or on horseback, clustered close. Each man counting up his hours, the knife of each man's tongue at the hinge of his own mouth. For 93 years and every time I slip away to read those white men lying the roadway, secreting themselves in the night air, feeding and breathing in their private column. Why belly up to their pay stubs, scraping my teeth on the chipped flat of each page. This dim drink only blights me, but I do it. I'll read some poems about these actual ancestors that I found. The family name is Smith. So I wrote some poems in the voices of the free Smiths. And they kind of speak as a first person plural and kind of, I hear them speaking very much in a choral voice to the genealogist poet in this book. Message from the free Smiths of Louisa County. You want to know who owned us and where, but when you type your searches return no results. Bondage was grown folks business, then old folks. We saw no reason to hum old master's name to our grandchildren or point out his overgrown gates, but you want to know who owned us and where we got free. You keep typing our names into oblongs of digital white. You plant a unicode tree and climb up into grown folks business. You know old folks don't want you rummaging here. So you pile sweet jam in your prettiest dish, you light candles and pray, tell me who owned you and where I might find your graves. Little child, we're at rest in the acres we purchase. Those days of bondage were old folks business. The grown folks buried us deep, only a few of our names survive. We left you this sudden glimpse in the grass. The rest is grown folks business we say, yet you keep asking who owned us? The origins of Harriet Smith. Old master writes her name in his ledgers or might. It depends on what old master sees, what subtleties he tracks, which gifts. Suki walked to your dome, he writes, but you need to read Harriet walked. You need her to come up from a quarter and step through the narrow bell of old master's attention, a light girl with ears bored for rings. But Harriet is prudent. She never wastes her scant yard of brown ticklingberg or breaks her tools in the field. For a whole page in his daybook, instead of writing about Harriet, old master counts his glass decanters from France. He orders every hand to finish harvest without saying whose. You search for Harriet until the yellow globes of old master's script go dim, gummed like the fallen seed pods about his house. Well, well, it's a good thing you're a finch now. You were born to Gorge. A message from the free smiths of Louisa County. You ask why we didn't register as required, why we failed to appear before the provost marshal, why we avoided the courthouse, the census, the bank. You ask where we sheltered while battles sieved, where our mothers gave birth in which hidden houses and why we didn't register as required. While so many Paris and other counties were rage with Nat and Southampton, how did we manage? We avoided the courthouse, the census, the bank. Whatever we had, we held. Whatever we knew, we told no one who counted. We kept back our names. We didn't register as required. When you search for us now, you find silence. You may trace us back to a moment, no further. We avoided the courthouse, the census, the bank with its clock tracking everyone's time but our own. We chose inward passages. We kept deep counsel. We didn't register as required, which disappoints you. Why do you trust the courthouse, the census, the bank? Moving along here, I'll read another set of erasures. What your results mean, North and East Africa, 5%. For millennia, the Mediterranean Sea was as one. Despite the constant movement of people across people. This component traveled across logical connection, remnants all numb. North of the world, the earliest people saw Africa evident in the eye. Place of first migration, mitochondrial flux, the savanna frequency. This component of you includes a great rift, influx of lists. Mediterranean, Mediterranean most traveled, Mediterranean biological old and in pain. The sea saw, the South saw, the South see. South, oldest home, wide open, high. South of the great valley and west of Lucy, here, the pen. Birthplace as well as departure point, ocean. This is historically where we from. And now I'll read the last poem, last poem of lunch poems and the last poem from the book. This book, I've basically gone chronologically, I know kind of linear way, the way the book is arranged. This is the last poem and it's written very much from the time that I was living in Louisville and during a time when some of the racial unrest that we saw last summer, for example, was just sort of starting to kind of gear up in the city. And there was an incident where a white supremacist came and came to a Kroger that was right near, actually right near my house. And unfortunately he did end up killing, he took the lives of two elderly African-American Louisvillians who were just in the Kroger shopping for groceries that afternoon. And it was really a reckoning for the whole city and it's a process of contemplation and work that the whole nation is going through now. But at the moment, I felt like I needed to write some kind of a prayer for the memory of those who were lost, but also for the city of Louisville and all the work that we needed to do and still do. Psalm. Dear Lord, dear high Remembrancer, dear providential love, have mercy. Have mercy thou surveyor of wildflowers, assessor of royal and exquisite v-realms. Have mercy, ledger, who tracks us in the night, who measures without speaking our dark trespasses. For nothing here survives, not the gold-legged deer, browsing the bleached office park at dawn, nor the minute finch on her branch of long division, but thou, thou, thou absorb it all. O gazer, be kind in thy absorbing calculus. Won't be long before thy reckoning curve arrives at the junction of our error. How, beneath thy mineral eye, we walk abroad forgetting the cartographer of sparrows. Hi, my name is Noah and I work with Jeffrey on the series. Kiki, thank you for the merry delight and temperance of these poems. I'm haunted and moved, and I know our audience is too. And I wanna thank, before we go, our audience for coming and being here. It's the highlight of my month every month. And I wanna thank the Berkeley libraries for their generous support as always. And thank you too to our wonderful AV team. You can review this reading as other readings on our YouTube channel, search LaunchPombs Berkeley and you'll find it. You can also find links at our website, launchpoms.berkeley.edu, where you can sign up for the mailing list as well. We hope you'll join us for our next LaunchPoms, which will be on March 4th with Mary Jo Bang. Again, details on our website. Thank you all.