 I'm going to actually start with a poem that is not mine. It's a poem by Gwendolyn Brooks. I'm terribly excited by what's happening in the publishing world right now and the literary world, all of the wonderful boundaries that are coming down. And as we can just look around this room and see, it's just an extraordinarily exciting time in the history, not only of American literature, but Western literature as well. So, and even if that were not true, it's always a good thing to begin any reading with Gwendolyn Brooks, Kitchenette Building. We are things of dry hours and the involuntary plan. Grayed in and gray, dream makes a giddy sound, not strong like rent, feeding a wife, satisfying a man. But could dream send up through onion fumes, its white and violet, fight with fried potatoes and yesterday's garbage ripening in the hall. Flutter or sing an aria down these rooms. Even if we were willing to let it in, had time to warm it and keep it very clean, anticipate a message, let it begin. We wonder, but not well, not for a minute since number five is out of the bathroom now. We think of lukewarm water, hope to get in it. I'm just curious, have any of you heard that poem before? One person, wow. So Gwendolyn Brooks was, of course, one of the most canonical African-American poets in American history and this is one of her most iconic poems and it's about what it means to grow up in a building that doesn't have, to grow up poor in the south side of Chicago and in a building that doesn't have bathrooms, the apartments that don't have bathrooms so that people have to share bathrooms and so when she says, we wonder well, but not for a minute since number five is out of the bathroom now, we rush, we hope to get in it. Families are trying to rush to get in their bathrooms, to share their bathrooms. So I love Gwendolyn Brooks. Please, I encourage you all to read her. She's an extraordinarily talented poet and her breath goes across the entire, I would say, modernist American sentry all the way into the postmodern. She's really extraordinary. So I decided, since I love her so much, to apprentice myself to her work and in doing that, I decided to rewrite Kitchenette Building with a poem called The Mothers and this is that. We meet, yes, ma'am. I sure can. Thank you for asking. Is this better? Is this better? I'm so sorry. Thank you for asking. I appreciate that. The Mothers, for and after Gwendolyn Brooks. We meet sometimes between the dry hours, between clefts in the involuntary plan, refusing to think of rent or food, how civic the slick to satisfied from man and democratic. A lucky strike each we sponge each other off while what's grayed in and gray slinks ashamed down the drain. No need to articulate great restraint. No need to see each other's lip, mouth, the obvious, giddy. Fingers garnish with fumes and onions and garlic. I slip back into my shift, then watch her hands, wordless, reattach her stockings to the martyred, rubbered moons wavering at her garter. Summer. Last summer, two discreet young snakes left their skin on my small porch two mornings in a row. Being post-modern now, I pretended as if I did not see them nor understand what I understood, what I knew to be circling inside me. Instead, every hour I told my son to stop with his incessant back chat. I peeled a banana and cursed God, his arrogance, his gall to still expect our devotion after creating love and mosquitoes. I showed my son the papery dead skins, so he would know too what it feels like when something shows up at your door twice, telling you what you already know. The title poem of my collection is Voyage of the Sablevenus. It's too long to go into around the kind of huge arc of the poem. It's a 70-page poem, and it spans 38,000 BC to the present. It's about the history of how Western art has used the black female figure as a subject and object. The crux of the matter, however, is that I used the titles of the artwork themselves after years and years and years of research. I culled all the titles and then rearranged them all. I rearranged them all to create a narrative of the history of that representation. The rules I set for myself were quite simple. No title could be broken ever. I could not fragment them for my own convenience that pushed some pressure on what a narrative meant. The concept of art had to be expanded to include lots of horrific things like a tripod leg, the bathroom foot, things like that. It was terrifying to realize how long black women's bodies had been used in art to decorate it. I also used the work of black women artists when I got to the postmodern section and the work of black queer artists because I felt that the contributions that these artists had made to Western art was some of the richest and most elegant in terms of engaging ideas about race and representation and desire. Sometimes I included women who I thought the Western world had not realized was a black woman passing for a white woman. In the case of Henri Matisse's work, I often think that a lot of his figures are actually black. And then finally, no title was repeated. It begins with two epigraphs. I'm going to quote those epigraphs, and I'm going to read two short poems. One is from, so there's eight catalogs. One is from the catalog one, which is Ancient Greece and Ancient Rome. And the second one is from catalog eight, and it's a self-portrait, but I'll tell you about it in a little bit. Here are the two epigraphs from the long poem. The Metropolitan Museum of Art Employees Association, Minstrel Show and Dance will be held in the American Women's Association, 36 West 57th Street, Saturday evening, October 17th. Happy anniversary, Minstrel Show, 1936. A second is an ad from a paper. I am anxious to buy a small healthy negro girl, 10 or 12 years old, and would like to know if you can let me have one. From catalog one, Ancient Greece and Ancient Rome. Standing female reliquary figure with crested coiffure and hands, clasped in front of torso, holding a staff surmounted by a human head. Figure has prominent vagina bended, knees and oversized head with half open eyes, and semi-circle mouth that juts out from the face some, fine scarification on chest and belly, dark brown, almost black, patina with oil oozing in several places, numerous cracks on back of head and hole on the coiffure, a nipple appears to be shaved off or damaged, black woman standing on tiptoe on one end of a seesaw while caricatured figure jumps on the other end. This is from the postmodern catalog and it begins with another epigraph by our beloved Lou Reed and the color girls go do, do, do, do, do, do, do, do, do. Landscape, Western hemisphere, Le Timot Noir. Spiral odories in the female body, evidence of accumulation, empirical construction, extending horizontal form. Delirium wake and resurrection, landscape allegories, suprematist evasion, black city convalescence from somewhere. My irony surpasses all others. Have you any flesh colored silk stockings, young man? Silk, still, life, wild, foul, death witness while you wait. I embody everything you most hate and fear, african, africaint, an anti-slavery meeting, black tie, cement ball, an opera in three acts. I have special reservations between me and the rest of the land. There are bar, something brown, Carmine and blue, middle gray, gray area, green heads, brown heads, untitled brigade, stadia circulation style in spades, rotopistic, trouble island, zero canyon typology. Do you think A is B, boy is girl, red ball slave girl in holiday attire, slave girl with jave duds, comb with birds, phoenix segregation, enough, refrain in the past. I sell the shadow to support the substance runway. I'm gonna read two more poems and then I'll stop. Actually, I'm just gonna read one. I think time is up, yeah? Okay, I'll read two more. Self-portrait in studio, this is also from the postmodern section. Self-portrait in studio, courtesy of the artist, the upper room one. I should also say, in addition to all the words you're hearing from this poem that are titles, the titles, the subtitles of the poems are also titles from art as well, so it's all titles. So self-portrait in the studio, courtesy of the artist, the upper room one. My grandmother and aunts outside of church, sisters of the holy family, three seated figures, guarded conditions, firefighter, fire birds, light in the window, portraits with sunflowers, nine lives, pageant of birds, torchy in heartbeats. Anonymous homage to an unknown suburban black girl, self-portrait with Mingus mask, untitled self-portrait spirit, untitled book page, untitled woman in a sardine can, emerging, rocking, merry woman wearing a fish hat, black wear, pot maiden, fatiche et fleur, lay on top of me, baby, untitled woman laying down, anonymous, touching her breast. And then I'm gonna close with the first poem of the collection, titled Plantation. It's not a part of the project, Voice of the Sable Venus. Thank you again for letting me be here. It's pretty amazing to be back. Plantation. And then one morning we woke up embracing on the bare floor of a large cage. To keep you happy, I decorated the bars. Because you had never been hungry, I knew I could tell you the black side of my family owned slaves. I realized this is perhaps the one reason why I love you because I told you this and you still wanted to kiss me. We laughed when I said Plantation, fell into our chairs when I said Cain. There were fingers on the floor and the split bodies of women who had been torn apart by horses during the Inquisition. You'd said, well, I'll be damned. Every now and then you'd change from a prancing black buck into a small high yellow girl, pigtailed, patent leather, eye-spitting gossamer, begging for egg salad and banana pudding. Or just as quickly you'd become the girl's mother, pulling yourself away from yourself. Because my whole head was covered in a heaving beehive, you thought I didn't notice. I noticed. I cried, honey. And then you were 14 and you had grown a glorious steel cock under your skirt. To brag, you rubbed yourself against me. Then your tongue was inside my mouth and I wanted to say, please ask me first, but it was your tongue. So who cared suddenly about your poor manners? We had books and a waterfall was falling in the corner. I didn't tell you, I couldn't remember what that thing was. You said to me once, that tender thing you'd said, I should never forget. The moment you said it, I forgot it. I wondered if you thought we were lost. We weren't lost. We were lost. And meanwhile, all I could think about were the innumerable ways I would've loved to have eaten you. How being devoured can make one cry. And I hoped you liked the fresh, pleasant taste of juiced cane. You pulled my pubic bone toward you. I didn't say, it's still broken. I didn't tell you, there's still this crack. I stayed silent. I was sore because you were smiling. And you said, the bars look pretty, baby. And pulled my hind legs up against you. Thank you.