 Good evening and welcome. Welcome, everyone, to Mechanics Institute. My name is Alyssa Stone. I am the senior director of programs and community engagement here at the Mechanics Institute. And I am so excited to look out on this fabulous sea of faces for National Poetry Month. We are so excited to celebrate National Poetry Month here at the Mechanics Institute with, of course, these incredible guests that we have. I'm going to read out their files, but I would love to give a warm mechanics Institute welcome to California Poet Laureate Lee Harris, San Francisco Poet Laureate, Tonga-Edson-Martin, and Oakland's inaugural Poet Laureate, Dr. Ayadel Nzinga. Could you join me in welcoming us? We are truly so honored to welcome these incredible guests here to our fair institution, since you're for the very first time. Fabulous. Welcome. I love how many hands shoot up. I hope that it is the first of many visits to Mechanics Institute for those who are less familiar with our institution. Mechanics Institute was founded in 1854. So we are celebrating our 170th anniversary this year. We are a cultural center, historical landmark, gorgeous multi-story library, world-renowned chess program, and events centers like what we're doing this very evening. We are a hub for writers, readers, cinephiles, chess players, and lifelong learners. We have anywhere from five to 15 events per week here at Mechanics Institute something for everyone. I hope that this is for those of you who are joining us for the first time, the first of many, many visits here to Mechanics Institute. We are a membership institution. So people join us to have access to our whole service library, writers groups, book groups, cinema events, chess tournaments, and classes, and community events. So I hope that you will consider joining us by visiting milibrary.org and joining us as a member or as a guest again at one of our future events. I just want to highlight a couple things we do have coming up. Next Thursday, we have our Music at Mechanics concert series with cellist Rebecca Rust and bassoonist Friedrich Edelman in concert together, that's next Thursday, April 11th. The following Thursday, April 18th, we have an Earth Day panel celebrating innovators creating sustainable communities. So I hope that you'll join us for one of those featured speaker events. We also have a few special things just for April for National Poetry Month. We have a newly formed poetry writers group that is seeking a few additional members. Our writers groups are an incredible way to connect and build a trust-based community of writing. And if you are interested in that, please let us know. We can get you more information. And I want to highlight something new in the library. We have all of our new poetry books on feature on the second floor of the library. So if you are feeling the spirit of poetry this month and every month, do check out our new poetry books on the second floor of the library. With that, I'm very excited to introduce our special guests for this evening who are going to read from their work and be in conversation with one another. And towards the end of our program, we will open it up for Q and A question and answer. And we do love questions and less so comments. So think about what questions you might have for our esteemed guests and we'll have time for Q and A towards the end of our program. And with that, I'm very excited to introduce Lee Herrick, who is the California Poet Laureate. He is the author of three books of poems, Scar and Flower, finalists for the 2020 Northern California Book Award, Gargene's Secrets of the Dead, and This Many Miles from Desire. He is co-editor of The World I Leave You, Asian American Poems on Faith and Spirit. His poems appear widely in the Poetry Foundation, Academy of American Poets, The Place that Inhabits Us, Homes from the San Francisco Bay Watershed, Invisible, Homes of Social Justice, with a forward by Common, Here, Poems for the Planet, with a forward from the Dalai Lama, and Dear America, Letters of Hope, Habitat, Defiant, and Democracy, among others. We also are pleased to welcome Tongo Esen-Martin, originally from San Francisco. Tongo is a poet, movement worker, and educator. His curriculum on the extrajudicial killing of black people we charge gem-side again has been used as an educational and organizing tool throughout the country. His book, Someone's Dead Already, was nominated for a California Book Award. His book, Prevent is All Good Fives, was published by the City Lights Pocket Poets Series, and was shortlisted for the Griffin's Poetry Prize, and won a California Book Award and an American Book Award. His latest book, Blood on the Fog, was named one of the New York Times poetry books of the year. In 2020, he co-founded Black Freighter Press to publish revolutionary works. He is San Francisco's eighth poet laureate. And we are pleased to introduce Dr. Aya Dell and Zeta, who is a multi-hyphenated artist, poet, educator, and community advocate. She is the director of the Lower Bottoms Played in Inc., co-founder of Jenga House Black Women Arts Collective, and a founding member of Black Space Cooperative. She is the executive director of the Black Arts Movement Business District Community Development Corporation of Oakland. And Zeta is the inaugural poet laureate of Oakland, California. She is the author of Performing Literacy, a Narrative Inquiry into Performance Pedagogy, The Horse Eaters, Sorrowland, Inc. Oracle, and Incendiscence. And her work can be found in numerous journals and anthologies. Please join me in welcoming Lee, Tongo, and Aya Dell. We're in the cheekbones of the Mask Army. Hillbottle, whose name is yours, named Tag on the side of a factory of risk. I mean teeth of the mask now. Back at the head of the mask now, a new phase of anti-antipermorphism fended for real faces, stuck with one of those cultures that believes, I chose this family, I'm not creative. Just the silliest of the revolutionaries, my blood's drying on my own ejection. Police say psychic middlemen evangelize and put a creation of a unmasked and unmeasured blood of a lamb that's racialized. But awesome prison sentence. Right angle made between the point on a Louisiana plantation and a five-year-old rubber ball three feet high and falling like a deportee plane that complete my interpretation of a large variety genocide. I just want to talk about loving your enemies and a little more realistically. About paper time, you can also go. I need my left hand back. Broke my neck on a piano key. Found paradise in a fist fight. Maybe I should check in to the Cuba line. Watching the universe last metronome, some called Black Jack of Injustice. People in this business will start resigning in a decade or two. Some color fleece, some transaction, in a cotton gothic society. Class betrayal, gone glasses. I mean ironically my window started falling over too. And I was trying to figure out which hay to give me through the winter, which pond, how's it sold? Which shows to those breakthroughs. And the breakthroughs like taking 10 steps back and finally trying stillness. Like introducing Gabriel Price of the Longest Month. I remember childhood. Remember the word childhood being the beginning. Scribbling on an amazing grace already, this body from some circumference slightly remember being kicked out the Midwest. Strange booth theater, lithium and surfaces, like minor stomachs, the ruling class and their playing sex with Levy phone. And with opioid fever. Since years I'm dealing with each other pocket to pocket. Tell us there's nothing loose in there. My mother raised me with a simple thing. Poor loser's his mind. Like the room has weather. My first girlfriend grabbed me. There's between me and you. The madness won't be forever. I'm here in apartments defining both my family and political composure. Those behind my back, bail money paid into the streets, playing you for your, you for your cliche. Bracing for the medicines, three-core sharing, a dirty deli sandwich with more things. Black Jackabins, grandmother's hands, psychophagy of the mask now. Teeth of the mask again. You know, that's my cousin. He was jobs now, literary history. What wasn't pretty is this effect on my eternal soul. Like the ladies parenting, we haunt each other in quick birth, sample the drugs, rest of the eddies who know depth of settings. Imagine what defines the creatures. We're ridden as a concrete to another world except slams of a deadbeat nationalism or bloodline making the news again true. I have an absence of style. I'm just a doorstep moving dead body to dead body. Picture 1960s newspaper clippings and teeth hanging on a string like a book of life. Cigarette in a pen, calling black fire a prayer. Us room on the blues, I'm placed down. Ladies and gentlemen, we know what you all are not doing. Many of you all are not leaving the universe to his childhood. The spirit world up and starts murdering city trees or sighting, grief, race, sleeping in my car, setting their children up for allegory and new hard hearts. No going to regular people jail. No going to getting hunted by regular people cops. I mean, all my dreams is physical death. And thinking about God and God in the incomes of prison, my poems, my Cubist remade scar, my Saturn for adults, my junkie industrialism. I knew my father as much as I want to be known. While the ruling class is printing judges. Fiat kangaroos, making judges hand over fist. Raps with cop packs and opposition whites all above the thawing stem. Cast plans picked out like vans for the murder show. Any love sex addicted you to a power structure, you want me to raise a little slave, don't you? Put a little brain in and send them to your civil rights. Like normal speed bullets changing a normal life. Like walking back to the United States. You hear a tango poem, all the best ways, you know. So I think the plan is that we'll have a few minutes of conversation after the poem. So, I mean, tango, good to see you and to hear you always. I was listening to that and some of the things where my mind goes first often in your poems is the sociopolitical. I notice maybe I was just tonight but there's a lot of family, childhood, fatherhood, motherhood. Can you talk a little bit about that? How that appears in a poem like that for you? Yeah, you know, I think especially in a time where heightening social contradictions creates so much more violence. The kind of, the tightening or the constricting of your consciousness or psyche, like it lands on your immediate kind of work. The first couple tears of your closest relationships. And so, you know, my last little batch of poems were written in a time of accelerated. Violence, the cousin I referenced was A.J. Stewart, who was killed by white supremacists in St. Paul, Minnesota for parking behind his house and not spent, you know, a couple of years bouncing back and forth between here and St. Paul and trying to organize and, you know. I mean, what I enjoy, justice is impossible for murder. You know, it's like an anguish. But they don't tell you, it's an expanded hope, you know. Like they die every day or they're murdered every day. Like, well, anytime somebody wants to talk to somebody or, you know, wants to see someone or in the rhythm of family, every time that person is not there, it's like they're murdered all over the weekend. So, you know, transmuting this kind of energy became the task of releasing the innocent homeless. I think I heard a, you want me to raise a little slave? And that's her, and so, so many did I think and that has to do with the fact that we now have it gone. Pums are a really interesting web of complete familial and community love and extreme violence against systems of oppression. So, along with that self-edited engendering of that point, becoming a father, does it make you hold that web, that web of extreme love and extreme violence in a different way? Will that offer new points? Will that put another perspective in future work? But it's definitely a strange, just a position getting to know this new fellow traveler while watching the scenes of carnage and Gaza that involve so many children. So that's like you watching like, you know, I've got my baby right here, and I'm looking at dead babies or dying babies or main babies and children. It is like, you know, this almost like enough. Press fatherhood, what you learn is that like, you know, what's supposed to be, what should be just a kind of a sacred window for me and my family to just hang out in or a sacred portal or a nice little private universe to hang out in, uninterfered with, you know, it means nothing to this system. And I think about, you know, I mean, it really just, it points me to like the barbarism of capitalism, even if it's just that slow death of having alienate your labor for eight hours a day, like it's ridiculous that life doesn't get a chance to be prioritized, let alone like exalted or in view with good social energy. So it's definitely this like, these different divergences of consciousness, but at the same time, she's such a kind of a powerful orientation and the best guy from multiple people who's wisdom, the respect and enjoy it, all said just like, you just lean into it, you know? And so in that leaning, there is this, this weakness, the, you know, this kind of the atmosphere, like the change in atmosphere is pretty, you know, stands pretty, stands pretty invincible. But eventually, you know, she's gonna have to leave this living room, you know, or leave these two rooms. The bedroom and the living room will be left in. We're gonna be in this big, bad world. So a big, bad and farcical world. So the, my kind of practice remains the same cause ultimately we can, I can try to play it safe a million ways or hedge my bets and try to dance, you know, dance in between the repression and try to provide some kind of semblance of sanity, the same environment. But ultimately it's not until this, you know, society, really these societies are completely transformed that there's even that safety and nurturing and we wish for our children is even truly possible. So, you know, I'm really not one to operate with blindfolds in general, but the, you know, the light. The eyesight has definitely got even sharper and more urgent with this new board. I wanted to just say thanks to Alyssa for all of the work and Laura, Kathy, everybody at the institute. And thank you all for coming out tonight. My California, here an olive votive keeps the sunset lit and the Korean 20-somethings talk about hyphens, graduate school and good pop. And a group of four at a window table in Carventeria discuss the quality of wines in Napa Valley versus Long Island. Here in my California, the streets remember the Chicano poet whose songs still bank off Fresno's beer-soaked gutters and almond treats and partial blossom. Here in my California, we fish out long noodles from the foe with such accuracy, you know we've done this before. In Fresno, the bullets tire of themselves and begin to pray five times a day. In Fresno, we hope for less of the police state and more of a state of grace. In my California, you can watch the sun go down like in your California on the ledge of the pregnant 22nd century. The one with a bounty of pitches and grapes, red onions and the good salsa, wine and jocche. Here in my California, paperbacks are free. Farmers' markets are 24 hours a day and always packed. The trees and water have no nails in them. The priests eat well, the homeless eat well. Here in my California, everywhere is Chinatown, everywhere is K-town, everywhere is Armenia-town, everywhere a little Italy, less Confederacy, no internment in the valley, better history texts for the juniors. In my California, free sounds and free touch, free questions, free answers, free songs from parents and poets, those hopeful bodies of life. And then I'm gonna read another one of these. Acclamation, my first language was the ocean. It sounded like my first mother's body, wave, storm, vanish. I love what wind does to the trees. I want nature to move me like that. My name is a song. In it, there are horses fed by a man who says, I feel American when I kill a row of ants and say they asked for it. We are this many miles from desire. We are immigrants turned imperialists. I love what wind does to the bay, wave to me, smile with me, like you know my name, like you love the ocean too, or at least the way I glisten under the stars. I have such a, I was so happy, and there hasn't been a boy in California for a while, right? Yeah, a few years where there was no one to finish. And there's nothing wrong with that microphone I've been trying it all over the internet, half strength. You have such a, like a grasp, and almost like stewardship of collective biography. And I remember it in a previous conversation, tell me, maybe you've been told in the room how you experience sound differently. I wonder for one, I'm interested in hearing more about that, but also I wonder like how do you experience people on the front end, just looking for actionable intent. I appreciate the kind words. And I'll get to your question, but when you're reading, because I experienced the world first through sound so much, it feels like only part poetry experience for me and hearing you, right? Just go somewhere else with your voice and the way you're just the music and the language. Yeah, so as an adoptee, I was never privy to my birth records or my medical history. And probably about five years ago, I did a DNA test, which I have mixed feelings about, but I discovered that I have a hearing condition and I learned the name of it. And I always knew there was something different with the way I processed the world, mainly through hearing. And so thank goodness for poetry for so many different reasons, but that's how I filter the world and then back out through a poem. How I experienced people on the front end, I mean, if I were to think about it in a sonic way. I just see the music, I think of everybody, this could sound, I hope it doesn't sound trite, but I do experience people as music or sound. You know, somebody asked me recently, when did you first hear Paul? Or what was your first Paul that was read to you? And I started saying recently that I think I had to have heard poetry in Korea as an infant before I was adopted and became a leer. I mean, I have no way of proving that, but I believe it and sometimes that's meaningful enough. Oh yeah. I've also started to think of it as reclamation. I can't access a lot and that's helped me a lot, the writing and the reclamation in the poem. I'm interested in your relationship with the place, the ocean, the land and how you weave political observations into your observation and your relationship with the landscape, the environment around you too. Interesting. So, in this laureate ship, I was talking to somebody earlier, I'm really discovering how big this place is, California, bear with me. I've learned these numbers, but we're almost 40 million people here, 10 million more than the next most popular state, which is Texas. We have more people here than Canada and more people in California than the least 21 most popular states. So, with the place, I actually grew up in Danville in the East Bay. I don't know, is that in the 30s Bay? Yeah. In the 70s and I lived in Fresno now almost 30 years. Fresno is a place, I think it's just gonna make its way into our work. Very gritty, hot, a lot of great work ethic in Fresno, but I always feel best near the water. I need the ocean, I'll take a lake, a creek, put things in perspective. I used to think it's just free and open, but there aren't realizing how much politics ought to still be part of that conversation. It's not just the days that we've been together, but yeah, and then it all just makes its way into politics. Budget plans are all smashed together. Your job is to keep up and see if you can tell when we're at a different point. Compound complex fractures to the psyche, 100 miles an hour fireflies on the dashboard, blueberries and cherries in the rear view, and I'm still behind. Those warm, wrapped in cotton comfort, softly sleeping, dreaming, soilates. No keys for the car. Don't matter, there's no engine. A present from the government to ensure I arrive on time for my failure to rise. Confusion woke me, dreaming someone else's dreams of an ill-fitting soup I could not shrink into. They followed the trail of stars falling from my hair. I became a long-distance runner, cloaked in a North Star frame of mind. It didn't matter that they ate the moss off the trees because the path remembered me, pounded by blueberries and cherries and ragged dogs in the swamp. Defenders of property and crooked lies, lawless, law-streaming, lay down dead. Don't make me shoot you. Stop resisting being invisible. They'll never see me coming. In my dreams, when I fall, I learn to fly. In my grandparents' dreams, I was born flying. It's the song from the graveyard in the ocean that waves to me. In the midst of falling stars, I claim myself, remembering to remember, planted like a tree, only sky above. My gods faith in me and thunder, some like tea and others like rum. The drum vibrates the wind. The path is clear before my LA. The child guards the road. That's where it shone cold above my front door. I walk in the rain. Nah, you don't wanna talk away. 40 white, 40 white. I'm closet white, smelling of cotton. Eyes lit by torchlight. The redeemer come to lift the dream that never was. Exceptional manifest, natural selection, pushing the purchase of firepower. Bang, bang, hurry, hurry, the pair is here. That's the result of wolves and cadillacs with lambo upgrades, crazy in the daylight. Rubbing your eyes will not change the channel. Normal insanity, interrupted for naked man. Look, see. She say, you got to see farther than just looking. And all that got lost in the crowd. Everybody turned backwards, eyes closed, trying to understand how the day got here. Ain't no pity's in that door. The dresser lives on the sidewalk. The sidewalk is melting and don't look. Maybe you won't fall through. You remember, there ain't nothing underneath. Even the graveyard moved. You forgot everything and it's too late now. Penny's paid the very man. Hope lives on the other side of the river. Think hard, it might stick out. Charts, lucky powder, and time. How did today get here? Face in the mirror. Got stars for eyes. Wolves in Lamborghini's issue orders for new worlds. Crane and bull, those are dreams. Neocolonial blueprints for cultural renaissance. Bones grounded the feathers trending on eBay and Etsy. All artists report immediately to Homeland Security. RFPs required before completing your current thought. Where are you, blueprints? They didn't see the crash. Come and chase in the wave overhead, underwater after potting the guns in rage. Your breath on the outside of the window, steaming the surface, you wrote tonight. The sun came up on your dresser, living on the sidewalk. You broke the mirror because your grandfather kept trying to escape, but those North Star odds. Praise turned American blues. Fingers moved, looking for pennies in the door. Speaking hope like fragments of language forgotten in shards of mirror on melted sidewalk. Roots in a pouch hanging near your ribcage, dangling from the cord suspended from your third eye. Your poetry is such a cross-browse. You're such a conduit with this very nuanced channeling. Like practices, you also are like channeling as leadership. I wonder how do you experience the contradiction of what's value in this society? So at a time where fascism is so culturally shallow and simple and just about the emotionally charging, simple thing, and simple ideas, how does your practice stand so triumphantly in contradiction with the way the society is organized right now? And has that evolved over time? I run errands for dead people. And with that as a foundation, there's not a lot of room to be reactive because dead people are seeing everything. So it's an action-based process. I have a mission. And that mission existed before I drew breath. The pack has been cleared. My job is just to stay on it. Mostly I'm engaged in a conversation that's at least 400 years old here. And until that conversation is resolved in some sort of satisfactory way, then my ancestors are old. And I can't offer the future bankruptcy. There has to be some way of remembering to remember. I think that a lot of confusion is caused by our failure to remember. We're often even involved in conversations where we're told we should forget history because history is history. Is it Baldwin who said history is in history, history is right now, and it's always present? And so I think that attention is very fragile in this world. I think that there's too much stimuli with social media and the instant gratification, the 32 channels. And you can have anything brought to you and delivered within 24 hours with little or no effort. I think that that creates such a distraction until we are able to live the events of our lives without ever really engaging in all the wonderful things that could happen in the space of a lifetime. A lot of horrors spring up in a generation. So if it takes centuries for solutions to spring up, you've got to pay attention. You can't allow the channel to be changed. So easily. Can I fuck? Because it's funny, the last thing you said, I'm sorry, I didn't mean to step on the, please, applaud this. The last thing you said really reminded me of this observation of looking at the newborn. And that is that we really are supposed to live in a comfortable, gentle, humane world. Like, we really do come out not jerks. Like, this little kid, she just doesn't want to be uncomfortable. You know, 10 times out of 10 is just something digestive, as long as the digestive situation is cool. She is just third, smiling at people and just a gentilist. Really, her communication is really just godly in a way. And so you see, like, in what's going to happen, we're all going to just dump a mind soon. Excuse my language, I would like to keep you scientific. We're going to dump a mind soon bullshit on her. And then she's going to adjust her nature to said bullshit. But you just see how artificial it is. When you look at someone first, I just wonder, like, being so solid on the pad, when you were super young, how did you feel to you? And how did the dance begin? You bring up a poem I did not bring with me. I understood that the world was magic when I was little. I've always paid attention to things that were small. One of my favorite things to do is to lay on the ground and to look at the ants and the insects moving down in the grass and wonder about their families and their plans and their thoughts and their histories and their relatives, because I'm sure they had them. I remember very, very clearly incidents of astral projection when I was younger. The idea that children are open and they get closed up is something that I can very much relate to. The astral projection incidents were a thing I remembered when I got older. And when I remembered them in great detail, I realized that you somehow developed the ability not to be in the room that you were in. And you actually played with this ability. As an adult, when I try to do that, it does not come that easy. There is something that wants you not to fully understand the fragility, the beauty, the majesty, and the magic of being human. And when I was little, I dreamed exactly the life I am now in a circumstance of great, great difficulty. And I have no doubt that that is a result of some sort of personal force, some sort of personal magic, but that narrowing they talk about. I think I purposely, I'm one of the broken ones. I wouldn't close the prison. You know, my mama told me I shouldn't do what I do. I shouldn't be a teacher. I didn't listen. And I teach in some ways, but you know, I'm much more of a rainbow chaser. But I tell you, I work for dead people. This is how I was done. So I remember childhood very vividly. And I wish, I wish we all remembered childhood that way. I think growing up does a weird thing to you. You then have children. And somehow you don't remember surviving all the dangerous things you did when you were younger in order to learn the world. I think if we remembered being children, we would raise children better. And we would understand the sacredness of what children carry with them. And we would do a better job of guarding it for as long as we possibly could. Or perhaps we would go ahead and change the world so that it would be safe for children. I'd love to hear your poems from each of you one more time. And then we can start to shift to our Q&A. And it follows in to the station of my enemies, a cobalt-toothed man pitches pennies at my mug shot negative all over the United States. There are toddlers in the rock. I see why everyone out here got in the big cosmic basket and why blood remains to me a lot and why it gets shot back at. I understand the psycho-spiritual refusal to write white history or take the glass freeway. White skin tattooed on my right forearm. River shade sewage where I collapsed into a rat-infested manhood. My new existence is living in feedy. And the kitchen with a lot of guns cylinders to hack up. House of God impart no constant part my body brings down to Christmas. The new bullets, pray over Blake's name from the old bullets. Pray over the $28,000 next beauty mark, extra judicial Confederate statue restoration, the waistband before the next protest post. By the way, time is not illusion, Your Honor. I would say that this is the last. You are witty, Your Honor. You're moving money again, Your Honor. It's only running one thing. Nine white cops in prison guard shadows remind me of the spoiled little boy on the oil spill. A neighborhood making a lot of fuss over his demise in New York for a Black Panther party. Nopal nexus, ballroom jackets slung over my son's shoulder to fit in the village and new news to a new white preacher all in a NASVAC painting for president of off-slavery some time in. Intentious screeches of military post-election Tuesday cards of code letter study and leg arms proof for some white people have asked me father loses. And Sunday, our couples made their vows of love of an opaque piece of plastic and bold action artist. The mingler every second is definitely my favorite law of science. The father lose clippings of primitive methodists, my heart takes imperialism. Simple policing versus structural frenzies. Elementary school script first even wider white spectrums. Artists bleeding in the challenge of watching civilians think terrible rituals they have around the corner. They let their elders beg for public mercy. I'm going to go ahead and sharpen these kids' heads in the air with myself. And see how much gravy spills out of family crests, modern fans of warms, with their t-shirt poems and t-shirt gills. And you have no chiefs pair of shoes on the bus. I have no choice but to breathe city walls for signs of my life. No, apparently too much of San Francisco was not there in the first place. This dream requires more condemned Africans to put another way of saying violence rises down. Or still life is just getting warmed up. Our Harvey Lodge is looking for a new church to ignore all of the suggestions. Our folk tale writers are not mad at their minds as to who is going to be their friends. You know, this is the worst downtown yet. And I borrow a cigarette everywhere. I'm taking many a walk to the back of a bus that let on out the back of a story, tell us a prison sentence. They don't have the back of slave scores, but this is my comeback face. I left my watch on the public bathroom, thinking it took the toilet with me. Do it at the first bus I saw. Any single mother's half alive. It flew through the bus my number then on out to the front of the White House. Hopefully you find comfort downtown, but if not, we brought you enough cigarette filters to make a decent winter coat. A special species of handshake that's all know who's came and what's the lifespan of uniform cloth. This coffee needs to quit acting like those birds singing. Rusty Nails have no wings. Have no woods other than that of a white girl guy. There are book pages in the gas pump. That's the isn't it. The way three loses is the rule. Or the way potato sack masks go so well with radio calls. Or the way condemned Africans fought their way back to the ocean on the five ways. Made the 1920s burnt up piano parts, European backdoor deals and red flowers for widows who spent all day in the sun mumbling in San Francisco. Red flowers, but what is the color of a doctor visit? There are book titles in the streets. Book titles like Hero, You Make a Better Zero. A Hey, First Cold Lady, the President is Dead. Or Pemmy, Back and Children. Or they hung up their bodies in their own museums. Another book title's pulled from a drum solo. Run Here, Hero, Lie at the Highland Place. All the bullets in 10 precincts know where to go. There's no heaven or any other good idea in the sky. Politics means that people did it and people do it. Understand that when in San Francisco, one of the places that was never really there. I bet this ocean thinks it's an ocean, but it's not. It's just 60 Mission Street. I don't know who's king. King of thin things, you know, like America, I'm proud to deserve to die. I'm gonna eat my dinner extra slow tonight. In this police state candy dispensary, you all call the neighborhood of it. No set of manners, those of police. Nevermind a murder is the sound of you. Or the tea kettle pan, everyone's a police. So I can't remember where we were having dinner once after the event. Maybe Northern or the state, Northern area. But I wanted to ask you this question then, and I'm remembering it now. You know, poets sometimes are asked, I was asked once, what were you listening to when you wrote that book? And I think, I hope it's not lost on the readers or listeners, but the grace and the beauty in those lines. But the question's about the political sensibilities, the consciousness. This isn't a question like who inspires you, but if there are some go-tos for you that you return to time and time again, whether it's a book or a musician, I know you do a lot of music around the country, around the world. But are there some that you just go to and kind of get you thinking and get you writing? Yeah, yeah, there are so many people who pray to us ridiculous and also kind of steal the tactics and strategies from us. But the best relationship I've ever had to watching the great work of Jesus and Linda from different eras is fulfilling the permission. So like when I read R.G. Lord, it's un-influenced with this permission to just, you know, throw everyone around, push anything, you know, that there's, you know, to take all the breaks off or a R.K. Dalton as well, the last poets. I go on and on, Coltrane, Innocent Lone. But yeah, it's that, you know, it's watching somebody, it's watching someone else's reckless abandonment. That is the best, the kind of life, the best influence to return to. The work is heavy, it's heavy. One might say in some ways even dark. You, again, there's web of, there's agape love and then there's rage. People often, they have misconceptions, I think, about Black joy. I sort of think that the joy is omnipresent. And so my question to you is, where do you find your light in all that darkness? And you don't get the answer with your daughter. How did you do it before? Where's the light? What makes you smile? What makes you feel light? I think it's in a, it's in a lucidity and a kind of a clarity and like a fun fact. As I'm writing, it's really not as, it's not much of a matter of emotion. Just like it's not personal as they intend for me, it's not personal what I'm saying back. You know? And if you didn't want me to think about it, you shouldn't have done it. You shouldn't have mass murdered millions of people. You shouldn't have put millions of people in a chain. I would be happy to talk about something else. So it's, I think it's, you know, actually centering an internal peace is the ideal, is where I hope to operate from in art, in a random conversation, in a walk by myself down the street in all kind of, in all seconds. So, you know, I'm actually pretty, I'm actually pretty easy going in my experience of this genocide or multiple genocides because it's, you know, until they punch me, until I'm punched out, until they punch my ticket, I'm going to take my time carving it up. I was born, I think Alissa mentioned, I was born in Korea and adopted when I was somewhere around 10 or 11 months. I don't know my exact birth date, which is fairly common for transnational, transracial adoptees, especially from Asian countries, have not met my birth mother or first mother, we call them. So this poem is sort of a love song for her and then it became a love song for adoptees everywhere. How music stays in the body. Your body is a song called birth or first mother, a miracle that gave birth to another exquisite song. One song raises three boys with a white husband. One song fought an American war overseas. One song leapt from 14 stories high and like a dead bird, shattered into the clouds. Most forgot the lyrics to their own bodies or decided to paint abstracts of mountains or moons in the shape of your face. I've been told mothers don't forget the body. I can't remember your face, the shape or story or how you held me the day I was born. So I wrote 1,000 poems to survive. I want to sing with you in an open field, a simple room or quiet bar. I want to hear your opinions about angels. Truth is, angels drink too. So juice spilled on the halo, white wings sticky with gin as if any mother could forget the music that left her. You should hear how loudly I sing now. I become a ballad of wild dreams and coping mechanisms. I can breathe now to lay fire. I imagine I got this from him or you, my earthly inheritance. Your arms, your sigh, your heavy song. I know all the lyrics. I know all the blood. I know why angels howl into the moonlight. Just gonna read one more, little change of pace. Do any of you like word games, scrabble, crosswords? Will you show a hand? Do you like world, whatever you mean? All right, how do a few of you? I use the word word. Yeah. World? Yeah, I always wanted my people. Any time I'm around people who love word games. I grew up, my mom was an artist and she was a really big crossword puzzle person. Every day, especially on Sunday, was an exciting day for her. But anyway, this poem is sort of started with that. A crossword puzzle on a flight where two other people had already begun the crossword puzzle. Flight. The in-flight magazine crossword partially done, a corner begun here, scratched out answers there, one set of answers in pencil, another in the green. And the woman with the green ballpoint knew the all-time hit king is Rose. And the CM Reed treasure is Angkor Wat. And the woman, perhaps en route to hold her dying mother's hand in Seattle, forgot about death for 10 minutes while remembering her husband's Cincinnati Reds hat while gardening after the diagnosis. Her handwriting was so clean. Maybe she was a surgeon, maybe a painter. No, what painter wouldn't know 17 down? Diego's love, five letters. In a rush, her dying mother's voice came back to her or maybe she was a Chinese adoptee and her first mother's imagined voice said, whoa, I mean, at 30,000 feet, you focus on 33 across. Asian American classic, the woman with a stranger in the window seat sees the clue, watches me write in W and she says, warrior. And for a moment you forget it is your favorite memoir. And she reminds you of Lily's or Rose's, Van Gogh or stems with thorns, art galleries in the romantic cities where she is headed, but you should not go. And the flight attendant grazes my shoulder. The crossword squares, the letters, the chairs and tiles seem so tight in flight, but there is nothing here but room really. Maybe the next passenger will know what I do not. 64 down, five letters. And why do we remember what we do? We know the buzz of Dickinson's fly and the number of years and Marquez's solitude, but some things we will never know as it should be. Why the body sometimes rumbles like a plane hurtling over Southern Oregon. How exactly we fall in love or if Frida and Maxine Holm Kingston would have loved the same kind of tea. I'll ask you about kind of the, it's almost like this gravity, a dynamic of gravity and writing in which, especially on the, like earlier in the journey of writing, you feel pulled or drawn to, you know, subjects, people, things, but then there's kind of a turn and you can almost sense the poem pulling people and fakes to you. How do you, you know, how has that experience been and maybe what's your take on, you know, that fabric? Yeah, I love that. That's the best. I don't know about you too, but I was feeling that in both of your readings when this velocity kind of takes over. I mean, there's a little bit of a craft element, I mean, at least in the later versions of the poem for me, you know, I mean, I love syllabics and beat. The first 10 concerts I went to were all rap shows. Actually, that shut me recently. So I have a nice 87 and I just love the verses and the beat and then I should, you know what I saw after the 10 rap shows was you two and the pretenders. They were sharing their hummests and then. But a line like, I want to sing with you in an open field, simple road, quiet bar. And then once I can get in there and then something I hope just kind of takes over and then people and disparate lives, I'm sure any psychologist worth or so could probably say that it relates to my adoption and not knowing a lot of things with family, but I do like thinking about people's lives and how they intertwine and things like that. So, yeah, if that could happen in a poem, that feels good. I mean, that feels good for me just as a person, not even as a writer. I like thinking of synthesis more than division, you know. My question is kind of the same question, it's just a phrase differently. You, at least small details, that sort of tell a story you named, strike me as a person who collects details. I bet if I looked at your left pocket, you'd be full of details, right? So my question is sort of about where is the tipping point for all of the details to become a piece or is the process more, I am in a piece and all of a sudden it would be nice to contemplate what kind of tea you'd drink and then you'd pull it out of the pocket. Yeah, that's a great question. I was reading a poem called The End of Poetry where this poet writes about, it's just a list, a whole thing. It's just refrain, enough of this, enough of this, enough of this, enough of this. And then it's about a 30 line poem. And then the end it says, I want you to touch me. I was like, you know, I think it's intuitive maybe for each poet. Let's see, you know, I think about songs, for example. You know, those fans that, you know, Mars Volta or Led Zeppelin or whatever other group that plays like 10, 15 minute songs that kind of launder and their own kind of journey. I mean, if it's just detail, then, you know, what separates that from like a grocery list or something, right? So there has to be something to take it out of the list or the detail, whatever that might be. And those are fun places to see where it goes, you know. Thank you. We'll have our final poem read by Iodelle and then we'll shift into our audience Q&A. And just as a reminder for folks, we do have books for all three of our poet laureates for sale this evening. So please make sure you grab some of their incredible works. This is the year in which James Baldwin would be 100 years old. And so I've been immersed in Baldwin, a couple of Baldwin activities and Baldwin is actually a total work for 10 people. Baldwin is a resident inside of my venue for this year. So I like intertextual connection. And there's a poem that I urge you to go home and read to fully understand the point that I'm about to share, which is a new piece. This is about the third time that I've read it. And it is a letter written to James Baldwin in response to his poem, Stagalli Wonders. My poem is called As regards Stagalli Wonders. Dear Jimmy, Earth year 2024 by the European calendar. I am aware that there are other ways of telling time here in the belly. Now I'm running on the back of Ann Asgard Stagalli. And if you wonder, we have not wandered far from the yellow line of which you last observed us dancing. Having completed the payments on a deferred dream, which is now permanently out of stock, no refunds, profit, free, unsolicited, but you should have anticipated it, start raving mad scent, searching for the out-of-town. And telling Susanna, don't wait for weed. As niggas calculate degrees of freedom, siphon in dead black and brown bodies and political devolutions. If you catch up, they pull the track back. Ethics circling the drain like a crack-hole's bathwater. And though of peak pragmatistic, they're still contradicting the restless meddling and arranging of ideology, not baptized in a weary funk of sugar-spun democracy. It's defaulted to a long-running carnival. And niggas ain't cracked this code yet. Maybe running into the future and beyond, trying not to be crazier than you got to be, on a low-energy turn, on a planet consuming itself, led by those least equipped for epiphanies or authoring the contours of sanity. Three. My son goes to Paris to pay on Victor Hugo's waltz. He returns to the land of La La. His life, a canvas dreamed in brushstrokes. He's of a quitsilver chariot, say. Moving without borders, set him sail and returning to this place. Deracinated smoke, still funneling the whirlwind, fugitive in still life. And if one wonders what the niggas are doing, we're marching, sculpting, protesting, painting, filming, singing, writing, rioting, installing spells together that dispossess. We are prayer warriors and timekeepers, waiting for time to get his shit together and right its wrongs. Waiting for the truth to arrive alive. Waiting for history to change the channel itself. Us, back in the loony bin, slipping in a slime of capitalism over everything, no exceptions over big mama's dreams, over the blue ball on which we stand, over the future of children, over children. Aging would be God's, but not good men. Battle in the crumbling halls of Camelot. And we dazed. Days spit laboring to fit into a derailed dream, running and rerunning on the backs of the throne away. And do you wonder what the niggas are doing? We are calling a poet. We are channeling the dead and dancing life from grandma's prayers. And while history don't change, we defiantly pick our teeth with thunderbolts. We remember to remember those that come out of the road passage, calling for law and order. Like law and order, ever made anything over the bunch of niggas on that rock. As if ever made anything but sanctioned war on a delayed gratification. We remain ungratified. And Susanna ain't never cried for us. Time, history, and truth did hide together. They're actually the same character in the country song they should keep changing the name. And all of us are mostly the same. And this is all a wedding. And no one has discussed it. I asked us to still speak to us. They said, niggas, if you could read my ways. Did they not block my brother's view? Did they not block my view of my brother? Did they not block the view between my brother and I? Did they not block the view? We've been made no offers. And we should not refuse. We continue to resist imitation, creating life everlasting from day to day in the belly, looking through third eyes, waiting outside the birthing room, waiting for time to get dressed and come for history, waiting for the truth to come on and shine a new day, waiting while history changes for tomorrow, hurricanes and dynamite, sawn in silk pads. And Joey, if you can, much less likely things will happen in it. We've shipped to our audience Q&A, and I do have a microphone that I'll bring around. We have time for just a few questions. And remember, we love questions, less so comments. Well, great to hear all three of you, wonderful. I'm a fellow poet laureate at Bellows, California, in your hand, though. And my question is, what have you learned about your poetry and about the state of poetry in your roles as Poets Laureate? Who are you? Can you raise your hand? Oh, okay, thank you. All right. I already knew about poetry. That's why they let me be the Poet Laureate. And I think I was supposed to learn, perhaps the art of saying the right thing in the right room at the right time, a fragmented individual. I think we all are more fragmented than we'd like to admit to. I found that I paid attention to that for about five minutes, and now I decided I'd be myself in all the rooms. It was too late, I was already the Laureate. So that's me. What did you guys learn? So, in 2023, I had about, it was like 120 events. And I've always thought of myself as giving, try to be a given person. And I call it like a high engine, like a lifetime ago I used to play soccer. And just, it was challenging that year. And I learned that about myself, where my time and energies had to be conserved so I could be present at each event. Because I didn't want to sell any event short, whether it was a massive thing with this person or this group or some little library with 20 people there. I really want, for better or worse, I'm not saying I'm personally in the month or something, but I really wanted to try to be present for each one. I am remembering and no one ever wanted to forget that I'm a poet first. And so I am glad, just on the personal note that I'm writing. And as far as the state of poetry, I always fuck it, try to offer something on that one. But I will say that there's, you can go anywhere and you wouldn't think it, but it's how, you know, 3,000 people and there will be 80 of them at the library, friends of the library event or a poetry group. You know, of all ages, I did an event for an organization of DC called the Center for to redefine or against social isolation and loneliness. They basically work with people experiencing social isolation and loneliness. So I love that part of it. But the one thing I keep coming back to is how many young people are really writing a lot of poetry and a lot of really great poetry. I co-judged the Get Lits, Slam Finals in LA and that's an incredible organization or groups like Brave New Voice, you know, all over high school. I just emcee the Poetry Out Loud Finals in California. That's a recitation contest, but it's everywhere. And maybe I'm biased, I've seen a lot of it, but I like to talk about it in the same way we ought to think about music or film. Poetry is a pretty vibrant art form, so it's nice to see it wherever I can find it, you know. And I'll just real quick, I'll just say, I don't think the state of poetry is ever separate from the state of social contradiction. And the general disposition of the Gemini in this country, you know, I think, would typify this little sub-depict as just this hyper-individualism. And in that way, I think I fear that the arts in general has doubled down on this, it'd be the grumpy, the grumpy cousin. But you know, you have, like you see with the Trumpism that was well-funded by billionaires, you know, it's not just out of Trump's imagination. This neo-Confederate tendency that would like to save capitalism with some kind of handmade tune. And then you have another setting of the ruling class that would like to double down on this kind of classic neo-liberalism that requires tokenism, as it requires nine white people to play alone. And so I saw, well, you know, maybe I'm the hungry thing, and I was there with a kind of balloon. But all of a sudden, there were all kinds of lorries, and that was the position people were gunning for, and there was also a civic manipulation. And then in a time where policies are getting more and more of a right wing, and I'm pushing more and more kind of austerity, attention gets pointed to this groovy poetry that might stand outside of a classic white supremacist definition of intelligence. And people are doing so terrible or need bourgeois permission or the bourgeois stance to feel like they're even doing something in the first place, but you have a whole gang of people including apparently myself lined up to let that be enough for my praxis, at least concerning art. It's okay, I'm arty. As opposed to how can I really recapture means of cultural production, put them on the creation of cultural reality, put it back where all of this poetry came from in the first place, because we are the non-commercial art. We're supposed to be in a way we almost transcend the ambitions of people and even the brainwashing of people. We're kind of just like this trickster boy sitting back making fun of everything, right? But unfortunately, as these times get more and more desperate, that power is inhibited. So as you like, the state of poetry, to me the state of mass culture in general is very inhibited, very weak, so ruling class agenda. And in conclusion, my favorite airport to fly out of is Boston. United, specifically. As a six-act person, I depend on the realness of people that counters to just go ahead and give me an exit road, even though I didn't pay for it. And so I've been dancing this dance for years and years and people are more and more frightened to give me that exit road. But you know, who does not care, there are these old school, all white working class, all white women. And this one United, this little pocket is a Boston airport. They never remember me, but every single time, they don't even wait for me to ask, let me get you a better seat right now. And they don't give a fuck with the system, and they don't give a fuck if they were told to charge people or they don't care at all. They don't out of their way, they turn the screen around. This is what, what do you want, you know? That is faded. That spirit is faded, you know? Used to be, if you were a revolutionary, you could get shot and get stitched up without having to go to the hospital by a real doctor. We used to really take care of each other, you know what I mean? But now we're just all in this, there's these, we're coloring, coloring within the corporate lines and poetry has, or poets have unfortunately not put up enough of resistance. We'll have one more question here in the back. Thank you so much. Oliver, you've heard your reading and your conversation. Yeah. I just wanted to bring a voice into the room. I saw Hanee Chowdhury actually speak yesterday and something he said was, yes, it'll even, just that she's not propelled by hope or joy, but honesty. And a lot of his talk was about trying to, or I was struck by how he was trying to balance sort of the need to be present and once joy and pleasure and also to be present in the urgency of responding to a current moment. And so my question is, I wonder how y'all are orienting around the subjunctive mood these days in terms of things that should have been, things that could be, things that you dream of and also sort of like what I think of as this double-sided sword of the subjunctive mood, those like shame and hope and like, resignment and hope. Yeah, just like how you write towards that and even maybe like how you move towards that beyond the page. Thank you so much. Well, I'll just say a brief comment on part of what you were saying about the subjunctive mood and if you're talking about politically and in the country, what concerns me is, there's not gonna be the death of poetry or the death of music or it is a very more good rock music. The artists are gonna be all right despite the funding for it. The logic is what concerns me. And that's a big problem I see where to take the statement Black Lives Matter and then someone would say, well, what about this? That's a logic aside from maybe racism, it's just logic, plot logic. And I tell I'm telling a class of the day, if I say I love broccoli, it doesn't mean I hate corn. I like it too, but I'm saying broccoli's important. But you know what I mean? But yeah, what about these lines? Okay, what's on them? So with, that's what I worry about. I'm sure that the gadgets don't help. I just wonder about our ability to just pay attention or relax or get lost for a little while without panicking. Just the pace of things is so fundamentally different now and then along with that, a lot of other things fall by the wayside. I know that doesn't directly relate to these quotes, but I hope I'm short for what you're asking. A quick one, and it really is, in craft, I'll just make a voice out of it or an narrator out of all of it, out of every facet of the psyche. They asked even Vico how did our people live with oppression as severe as apartheid? And he said, the human psyche has to experience the full range of its emotion, and so it is gonna conform, because you can't just be in a rage all the time, even physiologically, right? Where art is good for consciousness is, we can then take these different facets of our psyche and actually do a critical analysis of the energy and of what is energizing them or what is attaching themselves to. And so it's actually why we're lucky, especially as opposed because we just thought, thought, thought, thought, is that really every aspect of yourself can become actually several characters that you can just put emotion on the page and see what happens and they'll have almost their own evolution. Everything is always happening at the same time. People are being born while people are dying. You can experience great joy or personal pride or appreciation or something at the same time that horrible things are happening in the world. It is a matter of where you choose to shine your attention and always all of these doors are accessible. It is an individual choice of whether you close doors behind you, whether you leave all the doors open or if you go into one room and never come out of it. Life has an amazing amount of fullness and I think that, I think that sometimes we crave constant happiness or constant joy or we feel like the world is in turmoil. Everything is always happening at the same time. Every basket that gets handed to an infant in the world has sugar and salt in it. The proportion of those things might vary as does the appreciation of each of those things. And so I think, again, as an artist, you say conversation after conversation after conversation and I'll talk to you about the detail of state you collect. I think that your periphery of observation, of gathering the color of experiences expands because no matter what you do, paint, film, sing, living humanity is actually your medium. The things that matter to humans are the things that you sing about or create symphonies around or paint great pieces of art around or write books or poetry around. So I personally never have to go and look for joy. It's always there right beside the rage and the pain. It's giving myself permission to know that there are other rooms. I don't have to stay in one of them. But that, I know what you're doing. I just want to say one thing. If there is some kind of, you know, there might be someone in the room, right, who wants to go run, tell how we are, terrarium or, you know, too radical for this glorious position or whatever you want to put, you can tell them all of that, anything. Kagu is a communist scum, I don't care. Just whatever you do, please do not tell United Airlines. That in Boston, there is a renegade you in it. To these extraordinary poets, we'll keep your secrets and we'll share the ones that you don't want to keep secret. Please give a huge, joyful around there incredible work and please make sure that you spend a little bit of every day thinking of a poem for yourself and sharing that with the world and have a wonderful national poetry month. We hope to see you again here at McKinnon Institute and have a wonderful.