 Good afternoon, everyone. Thank you for being here on this lovely day to celebrate poetry with Derek Austin and Keith Wilson. I'm Shauna Sherman, manager of the African American Center. Before we get started with our program, I want to acknowledge that we are on the unceded ancestral homeland of the Ramaytush Oloni who are the original inhabitants of the San Francisco Peninsula and continue to live, work and play here today. As the indigenous stewards of this land and in accordance with their traditions, the Ramaytush Oloni have never ceded, lost nor forgotten their responsibilities as the caretakers of this place, as well as for all the peoples who reside in their traditional territory. We wish to pay our respects by acknowledging the ancestors, elders and relatives of the Ramaytush community and affirm their sovereign rights as First Peoples. We also honor the gifts, resilience and sacrifices of our black ancestors, particularly those who toiled the land and built the institutions that established this country's wealth and freedom despite never being compensated nor fully realizing their own sovereignty. We acknowledge this exploitation of not only labor, but of our humanity and are working to repair some of the harms done by public and private actors. Because of their work, we are here and will invest in the descendants of their legacy. Again, welcome to the African American Center on the third floor of the San Francisco Public Library's main library, where for 25 years we've held space dedicated to the history, art and culture of black people. Our center includes a diverse collection of more than 5,000 books and we host programs like these in exhibits like the one you see behind me, right here, celebrating black excellence and invention. This exhibit will be up through May 7th and is accompanied by the black excellence bookmark, which are available at all library locations and I hope you pick one up today or pick one up when the next time you're at your local library. So for today's program, the black poetry tradition in this country is long and deep. We invite you to come to the library and see the vast collection of poetry we have on our shelves and are honored here today to have two bright stars of the modern poetry scene here today with us. We will be hearing readings from Derrick Austin and Keith Wilson after which they'll be in conversation and at the end we'll have a little time for questions and answers. I want to thank the Museum of the African Diaspora for their partnership in coordinating this program. So reading for us first is Derrick Austin. Mr. Austin is the author of Tenderness, Boa Editions 2021, winner of the 2020 Isabella Gardner Poetry Award and the Golden Papi Award nominee and Troubled the Water, Boa Editions 2016, selected by Mary Cisbis for the A. Paul & Junior Poetry Prize. The debut collection was honored as a finalist for the 2017 Kate Tufts Discovery Award, the 2017 Tom Gunn Award for Gay Poetry, and the 2017 Lambda Literary Award for Gay Poetry and the 2017 Norma Faber First Book Award. And his new book Tenderness was also nominated for a Lambda Literary Award for Gay Poetry this year. His first chapbook, Black Sand, will be released by Foundling's Press in February 2022. Keith Wilson is an Afro-Lation poet and Kave Kahnem Fellow. He is a recipient of the NEA Fellowship and Elizabeth George Foundation Grant and an Illinois Arts Council Agency Award and has received both a Kenyan Review Fellowship and a Stegner Fellowship. Additionally, he has received fellowships or grants from Bredloaf, Tin House, and the McDowell Colony, among others. His book Field Notes on Ordinary Love by Copper Canyon Press was recognized by the New York Times as the best new poetry book of that year. Please join me in welcoming our first reader, Derek Austin. Hi. Can everybody hear me? Fabulous. I'm so excited to be here this afternoon to read some poems with y'all. Thank you to Shauna. Thank you to the SF Public Library for organizing all of this. And thanks to Keith for reading with me. I'm so excited to hear your poems. So yeah, I'm just going to read from Tenderness mainly and maybe I'll close out with something new. So this first poem I'm going to read is called Days of 2014. He had told me to circle the lake, smell of pepper and pine resin. Black people died or went missing that summer. Every day it seemed. And here was someone who wanted to find me. We drank red wine, heavy and bitter. Sunlight moved across the lake with the hours. Turns mixed their shadows and bodies in the water. When he laughed, a little foam gathered on his incisors. He helped me into the wild grass and slash pines when I couldn't walk. There is a roof. One man's body makes over another. Pine needles and sharp grains. This is what I remember. This is how I escaped the world. A little foam. Tenderness. That summer I was a body. I was that body. The body. Overnight, a fog of linen inside the Moe Victorian down the block. Another house empty for the season, for the season, for the season. Hours built up on both sides of my bedroom door. Morgan and Dinez rode in the Grand Canal at Versailles. Morgan filled a postcard with her hands and memory. Rose quartz, a diary, holy water, with what belief, what could I have asked for? Leaving my apartment for the first time in days, I walked five minutes to Lake Mendota. Barking, honking, shrieking, grunting, men tested their bodies for each other and themselves. Open doors to admit the breeze, the possibility of that one guest. When Emily Bronte wrote, they've gone through and threw me like wine through water and altered the color of my mind, she wasn't talking about my depression. Double tapped a photo of Morgan and Angel posing near a green door with hinges older than the Constitution. They read their black poems in English to black people who spoke English and French and Arabic. If I sent a postcard to everyone I loved, it'd say, sometimes I think you're just too good for me. The most personal question I'm consistently asked, why are you so quiet? That I'm getting this all down wrong, that I'm getting it down at all. So this next poem is called Epithelameum, which is just a poetry term for a wedding poem. There's two poems called Epithelameum in Tenderness, and one is actually a poem I wrote for a friend's wedding. I'm not reading that one, I'm reading the other one, which isn't a conventional wedding poem, but it is thinking about union of things, history mainly, I think. Yeah, Epithelameum. Today I'm happy by myself, wandering this creek's paths of sand and crushed shells, what used to be submerged. Mosquitoes drain me good. Before this river was redirected, it joined two others and flowed into the gulf. But we cannot change, we evade and call new, we delay. I could call the irrigation works at the headwater bog and obaude against flooding. There are picnic spots nearby, gazebos and grills emerging from palmettoes and bindweed. A storm blew down the oak I'd climbed to watch fireworks for free. Men still cruise out here. In this lush expanse, a man was lynched at the beginning of the century I was born in. Moving off the trail, I wade into the river, time feels suspended. My bare feet shuffle pebbles like some grubbing shore bird, screeching insects thickets of sweet bay and tie-tie, moldering scent. All this will be gone someday. Gone the paths and signs, gone the milkweed, gone the armadillos and the field and the lynching tree when this river rejoins the others and washes this away. No, not gone, but come together. History, nature, love and loss, wrought to scale in a glorious algal bloom. A brightness of jade and amber, all this water moving toward where it's always belonged. Where I cannot be, where I am. So there are a couple of letter poems and tenderness that are addressed to actual friends of mine. So much of this book is a celebration of friendship, particularly friendship among queer people and uplifting the ways that we can save each other. And this is one of them, Letter to Brandon. I wish you were with me when I saw the most stylish black woman stroll down State Street in a red velvet coat. It was like a scene out of the hours. Carrying a bouquet, she entered those apartments near her favorite Italian place. Remember our muscular waiter's gentle voice. Her lilies, for her bae I hoped, brightened an afternoon of two women detangling hair. Is this how you write fiction? Plot isn't fate exactly. Drinking Roseate Gibbs, I thought of you typing in your dream house near Canada, the shadows of spruces on a lake. I'd be somewhere else, who knows where, waiting for your stories where no choice is barred or above consideration. Black Dandy. Under the shaggy honeysuckle, its sweet bruised heat, its migraine of scent, I remember the first time I tasted a flower. Playing with the other kids, we beset whole shrubs with our sticky, silly hands. We pretended to be knights, carried a stolen cabbage called old pilgrim, and took turns holding the head until it fell apart. Even though it rained that morning, the sky was bright and the air humid in the shade of trees we played under. When one of the boys scraped himself, I'd split dandelions and rubbed the milky halves into the cuts on his knee. I often didn't look them in the eyes, jealous of their eagerness to rejoin the others and climb a new branch. In my bedroom that night, listening to Phyllis Hyman, I admired my quartz collection. I finished my slurry of gin and ice. The pills that rescue my mind make sleep difficult. Palm trees like glaives. Wind to the east. Overhead, white and yellow flowers shift one way. Another, if I turn my face. Blue core. Being chased by a white man on the second floor of Sears is my earliest memory of panic. I was the age a kid could get lost in a rack of clothes. Kids got lost all the time in the 90s. Back then, the neighbor's son taught me to sip honeysuckles. We were inseparable until he moved. Where my childhood home should be, there's now a lot, which isn't notable. Homes flood. Homes packed with chemicals leveled into the dirt. The blizzard of 97 left a mountain at the park. We crawled through a hole at its base and laughed inside the blue core. Collecting snow, our multi-colored sleds looked like clothes by a ditch. January 2017. You are the safest child in the world, I say to plastic Jesus in the nativity. My Facebook timeline is a villain now of suffering. The boy from Aleppo whose dust skin is the color of water pouring still from faucets and flint. Drunk, recovering from last year my eyes are wet moonflowers. Christmas tide is over. No carolers approach the well-lit houses. No one knocks on a stranger's door. And who would admit them? Sadness isn't the only muse. I can't imagine myself reading bedtime stories to a toddler. And I'm older than my father was when he read those brightly colored books to me. His voice is deeper than mine will ever be, but just as sweet. I always picked freight train. I loved the black caboose. A train runs across this track through tunnels and cities, darkness and light forever. I still love books where nothing happens good or bad. The page is one landscape I move through. Lilting, in bed, we are lavender together. We watch the little theater of ours. Walking her dogs, our neighbor crosses the lakeside corner. Hoop earrings echoing the birches' colors. Tend your joy, you whisper, as if a charm against eviction or some harm we might inflict on each other. For once, I don't hear you from the room called memory. Open the window. Risk, breath, our seasons. Let them in, let them in. And I'm just going to close with a new poem, a newish, newer poem. It's called The Birthday Interviews, and I wrote it because I had a poetry homework assignment where I had to write about the day of my birth, which is like, I was like, who cares, like nothing, like I was born. Like it was fine, it was just a day in August. So what I did to make it fun for myself was I looked up what was happening at the time, so like, that's what this is about. So we're going to travel back in time to late August in 1989. The Birthday Interviews. Mom said I want to name him Patrick. Dad said he looks like a frog. The moon said, waning crescent. The thermostat said, it's South Florida. Cumulonimbus clouds were not in attendance. Mosquitoes said, sugar of life. The night said, welcome young blood. Magazines in the waiting room said Jackie O and Charles and Di and Axel Rose and Cher and Madonna and Oprah. Skinny and a sparkling purple gown is the richest woman on TV. Ebony said, 25 years after the Civil Rights Act of 1964, what has and hasn't changed. That dance played on the radio. The TV said war on drugs. The TV said drought. The TV saying, thank you for being a friend. Travel down the road and back again. Dade County said snakes and amphibians mangled by lawnmowers. The United States said the life expectancy of black men is 64.8 years. 1989 said the following for the first time. Latte, caffeinate, cyber porn, viral marketing, generation X. Karen was the last thing the Atlantic Ocean said that hurricane season. Voyager 2 said of Neptune, what is this ring? What is this great dark spot? Saturn and Capricorn squaring Venus and Libra said hello, small bachelor. Here's your near fetishistic desire for classical beauty. Said it'll take your sad and return a whole revolution to begin loving yourself. Jesus didn't say anything, but a senator said he did. On a break, the attendant nurse brought a Dr. Pepper from the vending machine. Then she went outside with her menthols and Walkman to listen to self-help tapes. The cassette skipped and skipped and skipped. Thank you. Hello, everyone. So that was just beautiful. I also think that tenderness is like one of the all-time great titles for a book of poetry. I love that title as well. Thank you all for coming. Thank you to the library. As a coincidence, I'm going to have to find it. I actually also did that exercise at Derrick and I happened to bring my poem for that. So this poem is called Memorial. And it starts with a quote from Ann Chin, who's the founder of the Middle Passage Project. And the quote is, we're just simply saying mark the place where it began. Memorial. When I was born, the pipes froze white. I edged to midnight but didn't step over. They were already married. My father and my mother playing cards. My name was to be winter. The ceiling up against the sky. Ten years before they were married, they could have never married. When my father saw my body, he gave his name. In Mississippi, where the wooden ships came, water sat warm in every pot. So I'm going to read, that's like the very newest thing. And then I'm going to read two, if I can remember where I put... Oh, sorry, one second. I'm at the remote over there. I'm going to read two visual poems. These are newer poems. And then I'm going to go to my book and for the rest of the time, read for my book. And I don't know how visible these are. This is always an experiment, sharing these in public, which is part of the reason I try to do that. But I'm also going to try to describe it a little bit so that even if you can't see it, maybe you can sort of get a sense of what it looks like. This first poem is actually the very first visual poem I ever wrote. It's called Uncanny Emmett Till and Spaced. An idea that I feel like when I first started writing about it, maybe it felt like less people knew about it. It feels like more and more people know about this concept of the Uncanny Valley. It's sort of a concept in robotics and in... Especially I think people know it from animation at this point, from CG. And it's this idea that people are very comfortable when they can tell with certainty that something isn't human, so when it's like a teddy bear or a cartoon. And they're also comfortable when they're so convinced that something is human that they actually can't tell that it's not human. So an example of this is when CG in a Marvel movie is so good that you actually can't tell if the actor is not really there. In that case, you just accept it as a human. And then there's this trough in the middle in this graph of the Uncanny Valley where people are unsettled when something is so close to being human that it almost passes for human. And this idea maps to me onto ideas of just binaries in general and identity that people really want to know. So I used this graph and reimagined it to tell the story of Emmett Till because in addition to being this conceptual idea, it also looks a little bit like the mapping of a narrative. So this is called Uncanny Emmett Till. There's a legend and the dotted lines are labeled boy and the solid lines are labeled a world. Only in retrospect is an animal worth recognizing. Something surely filled the time before the gunshot. A wolf whistle. Here lies the bullet, call him Ishmael, laying like a nail in the esophagus of the Tallahatchee River. The body. Let the people see what they did to my boy. Lord Willen and the creek don't rise. God is good all the time. And this is the second poem that I'll share. That's sort of a visual poem. This one is called Angles of Incidence. And it's about the Central Park Five. And the graph itself is sort of an abstraction of Central Park and it's literally from like an old geometry textbook. And it happens to sort of map onto a bunch of the paths and things in Central Park. The body is a haunt and non-Euclidean. Parallel paths will meet. Is a tree growing down the block? Is it the moon to you? Is the other side dark and small as the trouble it would take? And if you could, what might you? 84th and 5th? See nothing? A jog? An epiphany? And what does it take to turn an angle to a blade? Trisha Miley? A holy name? Sparrow's Eye? 110th and 5th? By Corey Wise? Raymond Santana? Yusuf Salam? Kevin Richardson? Antron McRae? So I'm going to transition to some of the poems from my book. I'm going to start with field notes. The name of my book is Field Notes on Ordinary Love. And that's sort of like the way that it's not exactly divided, but there's sort of two kinds of poems largely in the book. There's the poems that are sort of about race and growing up in Kentucky and in my family, and there's sort of love poems. And this is about the first part of the title, Field Notes. All these scenes take place in Kentucky. Field notes. One, in physics, dark matter isn't made of anything. It's a free citizen that passes unburdened through the field, through itself, through you. Two, it helps to observe from a distance, the field, for instance, as a statement the South has chosen to make. The way whiteness, too, is often rhetorical, as when in older student remarks, in those beginning days that only he observed MLK's holiday while his black friends working did not. Three, sometimes love is a black dot in a field, sometimes suddenly it is not. Four, or how can black be the absence of all color? Take this cruiser, see the light strike blue off the car like copper through a fountain. Five, there's a difference between what is fair and what is just. For instance, it is fair that I try to love your skin, even when it is not touching my own. Six, whiteness is an alibi, the way the officer was like a steam engine only I could see. Seven, inside where nothing shows, I am of course not black, but that does not matter to the field. Eight, some colors are indistinguishable at night. Put your hands behind your back, a different cop once asked me. It was so sincere, he was so polite. Nine, as a boy you learn to know the inside without being required to feel it, as when now I understand a bucket or a hood. Ten, he asks my girlfriend not if she is white, since even in this light what we are is obvious, but instead he speaks philosophically. Ten, he asks, are you here of your own free will? Eleven, sometimes whiteness is a form itself of hyperbole. Try this, sit in a field, then try reading Andrew Jackson's quotes on liberty, only pretend they are being written by his slaves. Twelve, look at the word black on the paper and you will see a definite black, a kind, a certainty, or if you see nothing at all, of course is a kind of black too. Thirteen, by the road my father showed me cotton once. Look at that, he said. This next poem is called The Way I Hold My Hands. I can't imagine my father wishing he would rather be anything. Once upon a time he was a watermelon growing from a box. His mother died. His father beat the blush out of him and teardrops dripped black from his face into his food. My father's father made him eat his dinner through himself. The miracle whip salad spangled like the garden in dew. This isn't a figure of speech, my father ate his blood. It's hard to think he must have been young. He made me stop all my life. He told me not to be a girl. Whatever I was doing, of course I stopped. He kissed me on the top of the head before I went to bed each night. He was always there. He read to my brother. He read to me from a book of animals. This is a fox's paw. This is a bear's. He told me I'll give you something to cry about. He never touched me. Bear claw, I said. Winters are easier for bears. I spread my fingers over his. No, my father said. I'm going to read and decide, or even see if I have it. I think two more poems. I think I'm going to read one longer poem. This is my final poem. This is a poem that closes my collection. It's a poem called Heliocentric. It has an epigraph from the Odyssey. If I beg and pray to set me free, then bind me more tightly still. This is the scene in the Odyssey when Odysseus asks his crew to strap him to the mast so that he won't sort of be like attracted by the muses and crash them all. This is called Heliocentric. I'm striving to be a better astronaut, but consider where I'm coming from. The exosphere, a desk where the bluest air thins to a lip. Impossible to know the difference from where I sit in space. I promise I still dream of coming back to you, settling on your yellow for the kitchen. Don't fight. Let it not manifest. Not over the crumpled bodies of laundry. Let us not row over the nail polish its color, the spilled sun. Inspiration is the deadliest radiation. It never completely leaves the bones. You know, from here there are no obstructions but the radiant nothingness. An aurora borealis opens like a fish. This, to the pyramids, yes, to a great wall. And there you are, moving from curtain to curtain. Oh, to fantasize of having chosen some design with you. But the moons of Rajupiter, but asteroids like gods deadened by the weight of waiting. I remember you said pastel for the cabinet where the spice rack lives, that I ought to pick you up flowers when I had a chance. Daisy, Iris, Sun, red roses, ultraviolet, the color of love. What else but this startles the air open like an egg. I'm really trying to be better to commit to memory the old songs about the ground, to better sense your latitudes, see the corona of your face, take your light as it arrives. Earth is heavenly too, but know that time is precious here. How wine waits years and years to peak. What is there to do? I've made love to satellites in your name. I'm saying I can't say I'll return. Remember me for here are dragons in the noble songs of sirens, stars that sway Elysian, ships that will not mour, lovers who are filled with blood, and nothing more. Who could love you like this? Who else will sew you in the stars? Who better knows your gravity and goes otherwise to catastrophe? I've schemed and promised to bring you back a ring from Saturn, but a weak passes or doesn't manage. Everything steers impossible against the boundless curb of light. Believe I tried for you, against space. Time takes almost everything away. To you. For you. A toast to the incredible. I almost wish I'd never seen the sky when always there was you. Sincerely. Thank you all. So yeah, I guess we can just like oh, how good are we on time? I guess is the real question. Okay. Let's just like Kiki for a minute. If folks have questions. Yeah. It was really amazing hearing you read in the world. Thank you. This has been amazing. I'm glad. This is like the first time that I've done a live reading in as long as I can remember so. Oh my god, really? I can't remember the last time I did one. So yeah. Welcome back to the world. Yeah, I guess like I one of the things I'm always mesmerized about you and your work is your visual poems. I'm just like I'm just so fascinated by how you come about your forms. Like do you like how do you find them? Do you start with the image like you just see like a form and it's like oh I get like poems in here. Or do you like work on a like you know a regular poem and you feel like something's missing and then you're like I need a visual thing. Yeah, I feel like at this point, so part of the answer is just that I write like a whole whole lot and and sometimes there's I just have a feeling sometimes like like what am I doing with all this because you know when you write in general I think the majority of what you write you're like not feeling or whatever and the more that you write the more that you have of it so sometimes I think I just started changing the way they look at the stuff I'm writing is like maybe this can be like material for a different thing like if it's not working as a poem I'll just like keep it in the back of my mind if there's anything about it that I think is interesting and so sometimes I'll come across like a graph or something and I'll be like yeah just something about it I'll be like this sort of like maybe this could work with this other idea that I have and so I'll like take snippets of things so in some ways it's like more like collage at least at first than some of my other you know sort of traditional poems yeah I mean I got a chance to sort of see I think it's especially interesting when something sort of comes from like a writing prompt because I am also sort of interested in what your writing process is like because I remember the writing prompt that we both got was sort of like yeah it was right about the day that you were born and I took it sort of I like literally just asked my mom some questions and you like arrived at such a different point so I'm sort of wondering yeah like what your what your thought process is when you're writing or in general sort of how your poems come about I mean like that one because I don't I don't often I'm not a prompt kind of person like prompts usually get on my nerves so like with that case I just had to find somebody to make it fun for me and I was like okay what's the most interesting way I can go about this plus like we had a timeline we had a week to write this thing so I'm like how can I like do something real quick so yeah I mean I think and I think that really speaks to like I guess my process overall is like just trying to entertain myself more or less like I just don't want to bore myself as I think where I'm at with my writing process like it usually starts with like an image or just like something it's usually just something that gets stuck in my head like whether it's like an image I can't shake or like a line that I think sounds really interesting and I just like roll it around until finally I commit to writing it down like I like I don't write a lot really like I which is it's annoying but like so it usually takes me a while to like get something from my head to the page like the drafting part is like the most terrifying thing for me like I love revising things so like once it's on the page and it's like okay now I can like look at it 360 and like figure out what I need to do but drafting is terrifying and I think like I'm trying to get to a space where I can find the fun in that which I think is like something I really admire about you and your work and just like your spirit of play with your poems like you'll just like do a thing and see what happens with it and I think I just think that's the coolest thing in the world and I'm wondering if you could like talk about you know play in your work and like how that influences you yeah and that's a huge a huge part of I think the way I think about writing which is so interesting about hearing you talk about like making it be interesting to you and enjoying it because I feel like it's actually really rare that we hear right at least that I hear poets or artists talk about like like the enjoyment of writing like I think maybe part of it too is like a lot of people's projects are like very just like sad or dark or whatever sometimes it's sort of hard to talk around around that like the subject matter itself is really hard and it's true of like maybe all the poems I read today is not like funny but there is something about like the act of creating that that I think for most people I hope anyway like brings some sense of like of joy and I think plays is the best word for it because play has all these other definitions right like it means like to play a game but also is what you use to describe like playing an instrument and anyone who's ever practiced an instrument knows sometimes it's fun and sometimes it's like the most miserable thing in the entire world and they're both like both those experiences are both play like in both instances you're playing the instrument and so I don't know that's like part of the way that I sort of think about writing as well is that it has to be like if it's not engaging for me like I don't know how I can expect it to be engaging for anyone else and so it's just like oftentimes trying to find the way that that that can happen and sometimes that's through language it's like my book is entirely through sort of traditional poems and more and more lately it also includes all these other things but it's always just like doing things I think to like push myself and continue to care about the thing that I'm that I'm working on so yeah yeah that's so interesting like that point about like poets not finding fun in this thing like no like it's so real like I talked to friends of mine and like the way they talk about writing it's like as if they're walking on glass and I'm like like why like why do you keep doing this then like we're not making money off this like why are you doing this to yourself so many other things you could be doing but like I think like that raises like such an interesting well like it brought to mind like sort of like what I'm finding fun in poems right now so I'm just curious like what you're finding fun about like your work or just like poems you're reading in general like what's exciting to you right now yeah I also want to know what you find what you're like finding interesting and fun one of the seven reading a huge amount lately and and so that's part of what I think I'm reading more and more experimental stuff and when I was younger I would read something that was really like sort of out there and just feel like I had failed on some level because like I don't know what's going on here and that means that like I wasted my time or I just don't know where to go from here like I don't know how to receive this thing and the thing is that I've like come to sort of decide on or settle into is that like I don't know that I'm any better at figuring it out sometimes like I still read things many times I'm reading and Carson and there's just many times where I'm like I don't know what's going on here um many times where I feel like I do but like also many times where I'm like I don't know what's happening and sort of being comfortable with that like like that I don't have to always know and and it's actually there's a way in which it's I'm like more interested now in things that are interesting as opposed to things that I can like answer for like like I think about some of the things I'm reading way more when I actually don't know the answers to them and I'm like sort of excited by that and so maybe that's part of the reason that I'm like pushing myself into these other mediums that that I know less about because there's more to think about when you're like challenged in that way and so that's one of the things that's been exciting me a lot but yeah what do you either in stuff that you've been reading or in what you've been writing what's been sort of interesting for you or fun yeah I mean I wish I were reading more my brain is still just like wrought um so like I still need to like make myself read but I think like in the poems I'm writing um I'm really interested in shapes which is like a weird thing to say but like I like the way that my new poems look like I'm trying to write poems that don't look like the poems I've written before like like literally on the page yeah just like their shapes like um because like typically like I'm like my stanzas tend to be pretty orderly and like everything tends to be fairly symmetrical and now I'm like well what happens if I write like a really short tiny poem like what happens if I like radically shrink the line or if I like make the line really long um like I've just been really interested in like raggedy looking shapes in my poems because it makes my poems move in a different way which is really exciting and I think that it opens up new possibilities for me um and I think that in a way it's uh making me better at playing in poems I think like I the thing that I maybe dislike the most about myself as a poet is like uh like being obsessed with making a thing perfect and now I'm just like I'm less interested in that and just like have I gone somewhere new with myself like whether it's like the way that the poem is ordered or you know like have I pushed myself into something different and like did I did I do that work you know I think like the work of fun is I think I'm trying to do yeah I love that I mean one of the things that I realized um a little while ago was I think there's a way in which even when you feel like you're pushing your work or being experimental that you still fall into like habits oh yeah and I noticed that like all my poems like if they if they're not kind of the same length I start to become uncomfortable like if they're if they're short I'm like have I really said anything yet and if they become too long I'm like I must be rambling um and like that's not like that's not how poems work like there's not like a length that they're supposed to be um and so yeah it's really interesting like the shape of the poem you like you like receive it you're like when you're writing and you look at your own thing you're like oh this is the way that that I need to be writing like like my lines need to be this length or my stanzas need to be um and just changing that up can really yeah I agree that like really change um how it feels and and makes your work um it's like it just changes your work I one of the things that um that I've tried doing is like changing the um orientation on the on the computer where it's like landscape so though the pages are really wide and then it makes it makes you like not know how long your lines are anymore because my life that's one of the things about my my work is my line lengths are almost always exactly the same length and it's like really hard me to stop myself from doing that um so that's really interesting thinking about like the shape itself of the poem because that's like a visual element it's like um we don't think about I you know the poems I shared are like extremely visual but um but I think most poems are visual to an extent um and that's like one of them is like how it looks on the page yeah absolutely like I and I think that's the reason why for a long time it was so invested in making sure my poems looked symmetrical because like you get so much information before you even read the poem just looking at it like seeing a block of tax and it's just like no it's like I can't this is too long this is too much yeah um yeah it makes a big difference and like a thing that I was thinking about um today I think that yeah because there was a Lucille Clifton poem that I retweeted that I had never read before called Palm Sunday which is really short and I read it and I liked it a lot and and to me I'm like this was like a good and I had I'm like this was like a good meal like it was like a like it's not one of her best poems I don't think but like it still felt good to read it and it was just like I think a big part of it was how short it was and it's like not every poem then this is the thing I always have to tell myself is like not every poem needs to be like paradise lost like you don't have to like reinvent the wheel sometimes just like do what the poem needs you to do and like that's good yeah she's such a she's such a good example she's one of my favorite poets and one of the things that blows my mind like every time I read when I like one of her especially really short poems I'm always like there's so many ways in which I would never have written this poem like just her like confidence and ability to pull off a really short poem is just something I like never do I the moment that I can't say anything that I feel comfortable enough being like that's all that I'm gonna say and she does it all it's just amazing her like her short poems in particular her like very short poems yeah I love that so good oh gosh so yeah um should we open it up to folks folks have questions yeah totally like that's my favorite one of my favorite things about writing poems is just the way that they shift over time is more often than not like the thing the thing that I think is the poem and like when I'm finally comfortable to like put it on the page like by the time I finish like actually finish the poem like almost none of that was there like the thing that I think is the poem is is rarely if ever the thing and so so much of revising for me is like figuring figuring out what the poem needs to do and like research is a fun part of that like I it's one of my favorite things about being a poet is that research is like almost like procrastination so like I still feel like I'm doing work even though I'm just like looking at things on Wikipedia so yeah that's definitely like a big part of my process is just like research too thank you I also wanted to ask Keith um yeah well I guess first question is just like how you got started with the visual homes and I know a lot of them are kind of based on like um like sciencey things and I kind of come from a science background too and I was just wondering like um I'm just curious about like the way your brain works and like um like shapes and how you see things in different disciplines and yeah um well so so there's like a in some ways a very direct answer which is um is like the poet and artist is like to a large degree the reason I'm working in visual poetry partially because that's what she does and like I think a lot of times you just you almost just need someone to give you permission or to like show you that this thing can be done um and so she did that but I also like was going to be so I met up with her one day and we were talking about potentially collaborating on something and we were just talking about things that we thought were interesting and we were talking about robots and race and uh like aphorophrygias and essentially and I can't remember exactly how it even happened but um I felt like I could not describe I felt like I was both kind of describing what I was trying to say and couldn't really describe it and so I like made the uncanny Emmett Till poem was like notes to like show her what I was trying to describe um and we ended up not meeting up again and like many years later someone asked if I had anything to share um for a journal uh uh Shaila Lawson um who is another amazing poet who is also a visual poet uh and I was just like looking through things and I was like I was like this is maybe a poem um so it's kind of just like happenstance combined with um with having worked with Krista um and then to answer the sort of like like the inspiration or how I'm sort of thinking about these yeah my dad was an electrical engineer um I went to school for four years in computer science before I switched um which was like in many ways the like a terrible decision like I should have finished that degree probably um but yeah so like I have like a background in science and and like grew up talking about science and I think for whatever reason like growing up I never I like just didn't differentiate between my interests they were like all equally things that I thought were cool and there was no reason that they like might not belong together um so like I played video games I made games I made poems I made I made lots of things I made like greeting cards and things like I just made lots of things as a child I don't like I was just like a person who liked making things um and to this day like I when I'm making something um and I run across something else there's just like the moment where I'm like can I just add this to the thing that I'm working on like is with this work and I try it out so it's like a lot of experimentation just like things that are sort of interesting to me yeah yeah thank you yeah that's really cool um yeah I feel like I also come from like science and math background and then but I feel like recently just doing more like creative things I find that like some of those ideas kind of transcend any discipline and I think it's cool that in art you're able to kind of combine whatever you want yeah I mean one of the unfortunate things about the way that those many of the subjects are taught or maybe all subjects are taught in school is that they're like differentiated in classes and so in a computer programming class or in a science class you will never talk about anything other than that subject in like a very abstract way and so it's like outside of the class where you can actually be like what is it like to think about computer programming in the humanities or what is it like to think about physics like from the perspective of like an artist as opposed to like purely you know an experiment to talk about how fast something travels or whatever because like we actually live our lives like holistically we don't live them the way that they're sort of taught in class and so yeah I'm just interested in like letting those things bleed out and mix together and so on yeah yeah I totally agree I feel like I envy like those old philosophers who kind of did everything yeah back before they were like yeah when like the philosopher or mathematician or whatever did like everything yeah they were like painter, poet, painter, sculptor doctor yeah I love that I was wondering how you both define yourself as black poets and like you both went to Kave Kahnem if you could talk about that experience as well yeah well so I went to school in Kentucky and when I was very young until I was like 13 I grew up in Southern California and went to a very diverse school and when we moved to Kentucky it was like just me and my brother basically there were very few black people where I grew up as like a teenager and young adult and so in many ways the afterlatch and poets which introduced me to Kave Kahnem are like the reason that I'm a poet like it was just like there are many ways in which the place where I was in Kentucky was overtly racist but there were in many ways the like more devastating thing was the ways that I felt alienated in ways that no one was intending but like I just felt very alone and couldn't write the things that I wrote no one felt like no one understood and or like had any access to and so it was like Kave Kahnem where I felt like I could literally share anything and there was someone who understood where I was coming from and that like includes like those math poems and stuff because Kave Kahnem is not just like black folks it's like black folks it's like a ton of different backgrounds and so like I could be black and weird as like part of the thing that like Kave Kahnem and a lot of these different like Kalu is another thing I took part in that they like really freed me up to that like blackness comes in all these different comes from all these different directions and all these different interests and includes all these different things that I think is like so important to to the reason that I'm even making art just sort of like still in Kentucky working at the Amazon warehouse or whatever just thinking one day maybe I'll write a novel or whatever at Kave Kahnem is a big part of why I am an artist. Yeah I mean similar to me it was it was liberatory for me like I'm from a military family so like I grew up just moving around all the time and so like I sort of grew up without like a stable sense of community and it wasn't my family and I went to college and I was an English major and you know I had like a great education like undergrad but I was often like the only black person in my workshops so you know like I had such at the time I had such like a limited understanding of like the potential of black poetry and what it could be like to like all I knew was like the Harlem Renaissance poets and the black arts movement poets and I'm like love them but like what do I do now so like I remember getting to Kave Kahnem when I was a grad student and it just like he said just like seeing like the plinitude of black poets and just like everybody's just doing everything and you know there is no one way to write black poetry just like we're black and we write poetry so there you go you know like that was just you know that was the really important thing for me was just seeing so many like black people writing about every subject under the sun in all kinds of styles from all walks of life and we're just out here doing it and it's amazing so do you think like if you as a black poet if you're not writing like about a black subject say like Emmett Till or there's other histories in some of the poems I heard like would do you think that there's acceptance for that or like I was always wondering if as a black poet you need to like just write black poetry you know that has like a black subject or that is political and you know it's well I think on one hand like I am the black subject and so everything that I'm writing is like is black so in many ways I think part of the reason I write sort of like about the history or like overt blackness is actually just that that happens to interest me and it happens to interest me in specific ways and also the fact that for a very long time those are the kinds of poems that actually that like black artists couldn't write or like you know for a long long time in order to write poetry as a black person you had to write very specific kinds of poems or at least there was a pressure to like maybe you didn't have to but like the publishers were looking for certain things or white audiences accept certain kinds of narratives and this is still true that there are audiences asking for very particular narratives and so I I don't know part of the reason I'm writing some of the things that I write has to do with like my ability to like I'm both interested in and live in a time in which I can write about violence or the history of like racialized oppression or these different things and I can get them published like people can read them they're important to me and I hope to sort of communicate to an audience why these subjects matter and the fact that I can is like amazing right? Yeah and you know I think something that's really exciting to me about black poetry is when black poets write about subjects where white audiences wouldn't expect us to be versed in you know like one of the poets who I adore is Natasha Trathaway who like blew my mind when I first read her book in high school I bought Native Guard and I'm like oh my god like this is this is it like this is what I want to do and like I love when she writes ecstatic poems poems about like European paintings that reckon with blackness in European art that's like an essential part of our history too you know so I think as a black poet you don't necessarily have to write about black history per se but I think that it's that our subjectivity is important to be everywhere like it's I love when black poets write about science and about ecology and you know medicine and all kinds of fields like we need those voices we need those lenses everywhere and I think like that that too is black poetry you know I have one more Perky that I was just thinking about the name of the book and you said you read a lot of experimental stuff and it just reminded me of Field by Joss Charles and I don't know if you I don't know it actually well I would yeah I recommend it I guess but it's a book where you like read it out loud and the words are like spelled not according to the English dictionary so it's very auditory I feel like it's something you would love but yeah I have to check it out this is one of the things that you realize I feel like the more that you read is how much you still have not read like it's never there's like my list of things that I want to check out is like ever-growing but yeah I have to check it out yeah but I guess my question was like um I guess the word field is important in the poems that you read and I was just wondering what it represents in your collection like what you think of as like the field and I think in Joss Charles collection also like has some significance so I was kind of wondering like how you perceive field and yeah such a good question I think I'm very drawn to words that have many both many definitions and many sort of like like connotations like like I'm very interested in sort of going back to what Derek was saying about black people coming from all these different fields and having perspectives like applying their subjectivity to that field that you know the arts sort of being received by a black person is unique and different and interesting like I'm always interested in the way that words work that way too and one of those words is like the word field which not only is different depending on where you live and like what your races and what your history is and everything it was different for me when I lived in California and when I moved to Kentucky that like it was it felt like a very neutral term in California and when I lived in Kentucky it had like a history attached to it about what happened in the fields and also like simultaneously very like benign or innocent too like like there were lots of fields where I lived that were some of them were like horse fields some of them were just like empty fields like lots where like suburbs were being built and so on and so anyways all that is to say that one of the reasons I was really interested in that word was um was just like the presence of these like big open spaces and and how like the very active like contemplating in them and sort of associating um that space with what had happened there and what had happened to you uh like brings about all these like new thoughts and ideas and um sort of like re-enact history in a certain sense um and yeah like it's a word that I continue to actually write about because it's also like a science word and it has all these other like sort of attachments and so on too so yeah um yeah between that and the word love there's like two words that like are constantly yeah thank you so much as young men I'm so surprised and I just smiled when I walked in um as young men how did you get started and you may have already answered this with poetry what did you think of Langston Hughes and uh Maya Angelo did you ever get intrigued with their writings and feel inspired by them or is it just that you started from you know where you were as younger men looking at uh poets maybe just a little bit older than you I mean definitely when I was like when I first started writing poems in high school I was writing like my terrible sad angsty poems in high school but I you know I was really interested in poetry so you know I feel like I do what a whole lot of poets do is like try and find their people so like I remember just like googling black poets like who were the black poets and you know the google was like Maya Angel Langston Hughes and you know I I read a bunch of them in in high school like that was like my introduction um you know it was like uh the black arts movements poets you know I had uh the black poets anthology was a gift that my mom gave me so I was you know reading Sonia Sanchez and Nikki Giovanni and you know I was I was obsessed with Langston Hughes for a long time I loved County Cullen County Cullen is still one of my favorite poets um but yeah like they they were like a foundation for me when I first started um yeah yeah in high school I read um like the the I read a huge amount of Edgar Allen Poe and I like wrote a lot like him back then which is like wild to me now um and but I remember going to the library actually like I don't remember the first time that I found a poet or a book um of very many poets but I literally remember the day that I found um uh Langston Hughes at the library I like pulled it off the shelf and um and was reading it like in the aisle like I like I was like so arrested by it um especially I think his like directness of language I was just like blown away by it because Edgar Allen Poe who's like the poet and Rudyard Kipling was another poet who I read growing up um their language like felt so old fashioned and sort of like um like highly wrought that I both liked it but also had just never seen anyone sort of be as direct as as Langston Hughes was being in that book and and my Angela actually was way more familiar with as like a as a prose writer I'd read um you know I know I the Caged Bird sings um and and and was you know sort of blown away by that as well um so yeah both of them were very influential to me and then I think the next the like next uh black poet who's super influential to me was actually Yusuf Kominyaka um I like didn't know how to describe what his poems were doing like doing to like my heart basically I was just like I don't know what he's doing but I'm also like blown away by it so there's like three that um uh poets when I was younger who who like really were important to me yeah so maybe we can close with advice for aspiring writers um advice for writers I mean read everything like like read everything you can get your hands on um you know read poetry obviously read contemporary poetry but read the old stuff too read things from hundreds of years ago um you know read fiction read non-fiction like truly because that's all just fuel for your poems you know if you're a person who um gets a lot of inspiration from fashion magazines read all the vocopies you need to um don't feel hemmed in you know I suppose it's like a thing I would say yeah I think my main advice um is also like like there's not always a whole lot that we can do about it but I think the main thing for me that that let me be a poet because I was always going to be creating things um and that might be a fine right like like it might be the case that if you're an artist the main thing you want to do is create things and it's not as important to you actually to share them with like a larger audience um and so I'm always like trying to encourage people like like don't feel pressure to do to like be a published poet if that's not really what you want to do if you like just like creating things sharing them with your family or just keeping them to yourself that's fine but if you are interested in like trying to get stuff published um that's like a like a lot it's like a huge barrier um and it's very it can be very difficult and depressing and so the main thing um my main suggestion for folks who are trying to do that is to try to find some sort of community to like to and that's like the hard thing sometimes right like um but like to not shy away from like finding people online if that's like there are not people where you live because where I live they're only like like two people who are writing poetry um and and you know I tried to spend all the time I could with them but but you know it was hard um but yeah really if you can find some sort of community some friends so you can like share your work with who you can read their work you can talk about poetry you can read a book and be able to talk about it like as a person who's like so um like in the world of poetry now I don't think I still have a hard time sometimes talking about the stuff I'm reading like uh and that's like such a weird thing like when you watch a movie often you've like gone with someone just to see it or you can easily just talk to have you seen the new Marvel movie or whatever um the like closed ofteness of poetry can be so unsettling and difficult that I think it's really important to try to find other folks that you can you can share it with so yeah that's my I think my big advice for anyone trying to like publish yeah I'm just gonna get on camera real quick so I could thank you guys in person so once again thank you so much to Derek Austin and Keith Wilson for coming through their books are available at the library we have Tenderness by Derek Austin and Field Notes on Ordinary Love by Keith Wilson thanks again and please join me in thanking them as well thank you