 Okay, welcome to Philip B. Williams and to all of you. I can't wait to get started. We're here to hear Philip Reed from Mutiny, second book by this amazing poet. I'm just gonna speak a little bit about the book and then quickly pass it off to Philip so we can hear some of the constructions that are made within. So the title Mutiny, obviously we hear insurrection uprising, both past and present, the leveling of social orders, the counter-programming of the social that happens in that swift way during physical, political mutiny. But this is a book so full of incredibly tight forms, about the commercial strictness in the service of a kind of glorious anger against anti-blackness and all its forms. So much so that I hear other things in the word mutiny. I hear mute and I hear mute passing into litany. I hear the shift from silence to sound and to soundings. And I think it's a wonderful title precisely because it makes you rehear and re-see rather than only seeing something like rising up against or limiting yourself to a flat or singular sense of what uprising or responding can be. This is a book that is constantly searching for the forms that will constitute a necessary and temporarily sufficient response to the world that we've inherited and live in and the way it hits us unevenly. The book is so full of formal deafness and so unafraid to resurrect things that have fallen out of favor, like rhyme, within academic poetry, obviously, and hip hop rhyme hasn't gone anywhere. But this is a book that will rhyme loudly, adjacently at length again and again and again. And it neither feels like it's embarrassed or ironic. It feels like it's attempting to produce a refreshment of that ancient verse capacity on the grounds of current pain, joy, and the struggle that oscillates between, maybe, those affects of pain and joy. There's an amazing poem in the book, Amazing Among All the Other Good Ones, that involves, I mean, Al Broughwaite's concept of tytolectics, right? This sort of anti-settler colonialist idea that you do not just fix and establish, but instead things are always in flux and reciprocally constituting each other. And the poem works by proceeding through these cursits of intense rhyme then it has a prose interlude and then all the words and cursits reverse and the rhymes along with them all the way to the end, which is also the beginning. Obviously it's memetic of tides coming in and going out and of all the political purposes, we could put that material flow too, but it's also just an incredible self-tasking with multiple structures, rhyme, the mirror poem, the invitation of another genre completely, that prose interlude into the midst. One of them is a poet who's not afraid to mar things with other things and not afraid to be tidy and not afraid to have tidiness and mess, constitute or scale up into a higher order. These are gorgeous-sounded poems. We will recognize our present in them and the past, the multiple paths that led to them. And without further ado, let's hear that. Thank you so much for being here, Phillip. Thank you for having me. That was a beautiful introduction. I want a recording of it. It's the understanding of the book that touches me, Jeffrey. So thank you very much. I've not decided how I will do banter yet. The book is still, it's just a month old. So I typically just start reading and keep going. I may or may not say things in between. Final first poem. In the beginning, I suspect my index is on fire. Days start spasmodic with hunger, my dull teeth catch on pale figures, vowing from an empty heaven. God been left, bored too with ransom for art, illusion stacked like reluctant saints on a pyre. Elliot, allegory, Homer. The sun's glossy odyssey traces half moon above the horizon, clefts these Alexandrian hours into shoddy boats. I'm tired of drifting toward nothing on. There was once a sea I began, having never seen a sea nor been able to seem any time to once. Now I sleep and avoid documenting my rhyme-sourced wet dreams. And who would collect these metered christenings? I want to know what you must know. I own nothing impressive. No noctuaries of gallivanting seeds, no beloveds creeping from sun-bloodied water, and a salt-stained stolen dress. No oceans from which she stole her voice to give to me to offer you, slow blinkingly, awaiting genius. And a circle of rooks, all the crows have gone, my love. And all shovels cradling yarrow in jewels of beetles have rusted away, revealing my face all along held these things and unrequited climax to crown me king. The book is burning. Come, sit at my bedside. Let ash fill the fugue that was your need. Now, open your hands. Reader, read to me what you have stolen and called your life, order of events. First, he taught us to use the dead as shawls and the viscous winter escorting his arrival. Next, he taught us to forget the dead were dead, our dead and dead because of a wager we did not consent him to make with the thin-lipped savior of his own pantomime. Third, he delivered on promises that blew off the tops of homes and places whose names he could not pronounce. Uneasy lies the head that wears a crown, forced to fit a quiet country needing nothing from a crown, where once was honey unhived competition. The drones meant for war, prepared for war. We dusted our shoulders of shadows silent reconnaissance surveilled as practice for a massacre we did not consent to. The royal parade prized melody stuck its sequence through, be drums of human skin from which emanated a rhythm impossible to decipher. I too would shake my ass to the sound of stars falling night-wise in a pit of myth bent nomenclature if the names sounded like home. Under eroding circumstances, this kingdom could become home. Under eroding circumstances, my gas has become home enough. Love not consented to yet detected from beneath my mindless right hand, pressing its devotion to ritual over my heart, flag above waving heaven and blood into the smoke-diffused sky. I quake my way through anthems beneath. Rockets glaring off my breath, forced to evidence I belong. The crown is crooked. We straighten it with a vote of vapid hands. The crown sits too heavy for the king to carry on his own. When it falls, oh, say can you see strikes its inquisition. My knees summon to straighten at the hinges permission most questionably opens from spiked the earth with a kiss. Could I kneel my way to revolution? Would that goad the king to unzip and now upon my head the crown? In the first place, I wanted him and said so when I had only meant to say. His eyes opened beyond open as if such force would unlock me to the other side where daylight gave reason for him to redress. When he put on his shirt after I asked him to keep it off to keep putting off the night's usual end, his face changed beneath the shirt, surprised to grin, to how even the body of another's desire can be a cloak behind which to change one's power, to find it. In the first place he slept, he opened the tight heat of me that had been the only haven he thought to give a name. Is it mine? Why are you running? Don't run from it. As though through questions, doubt would find its way away from me. As though telling me what to do told me who I was. Final poem for the famous poet. Wound wondered, they circle you. Headless monument erosion had before they thought they knew you though did not, claimed. Thick fog hides shoulder up your unhead, hides your excellent circumscribed height beneath which, chanting unaware, they wreath your senseless marble feet. They loud wrath where loud finds no place to enter you and enter their own unthought. Rage bright beacon to nowhere that hath they unfollowed, hath they retraced their steps away from their own unimagining. Ozone settles your barren shoulders that are more like than unlike there. Our mouths open, our heads mourning ourselves. In the book there are poems that use the image, the symbol of a king or the crown in order to not only make an argument against that kind of hierarchy, but to also lay an ironic claim to that hierarchy. Mush mouths may be crowned. One, medical man mangled more overmade menace masks, may be moded moribund, mostly manipulated, magnanimously marred, mired, mushed out. More, moored, more. Medical man meanly measured man monkey mixed myths, murky mirrors, America's man man, menstrual married mop head, magnum man, mama's mine. Might munched, medical man mimics martyr movements, moshes minus music, muses, murder made manifestations, may be madness my master. Two, my madness my master. Many mistake my mood, man handling my mode. Maybe me making minimalist mumblings means my matriculation, man made monster, moves merrily, mystifying monogamy. Mainly me, my monsters, malice municipalities, me make maintainable moans, me menu, me metaphor, me mad men's monitored mission, merchants masturbate midst my mouth, me might munch, might men make men make mugs my molars, my mausoleum multiplies. Three, my mausoleum multiplies immemorial, me misery, impossible emperor, and maybe me mid-moonlights improvisations, me immediate, might's emissary. May him manes my museum. Me improvise minutes, masticate memory, mortuary mammal, mythic, melisma-minded, memory makes me meet myself minus mink, mirth, magic. Myself's mess makes me member muzzle, mincing mouth. Maybe murder make my mouth mine. Four, maybe murder make my mouth mine. Me embellish mercy, mercy mid-morning. Morning masquerades mercy, imposter. Mercy mouths impaled miracles, miracles midwife my mind. My mind implies miracles emancipating me. Impressive, me embroider impeccable embellishments. Maybe murder make my mouth mine. Me impress embroidered emblems mucks my muscles. Me emaciated emergency, am embargoed myth. My embargoed myth emaciated imagined emergencies, implicated empty embraces. Emotions imitate monsters. Emotions must make music. Me, my monster, am mine, mine, mine. Implosive, me emperor, am imprecise empire. Maybe murder make my mouth's mines. There's not enough water in the world after reading that poem, just not enough water. So after that, I think I'll read, eventually I'll read Final Poem as Tidelectric Elegy, the one that Jeffrey described. But for now I'll do Final Poem for the crow. One, dear crow, you owed an apology from the state of poetry. We done did you a dirty disservice. Poor thing, you must be exhausted notating power lines with your negressive wings. You've been jigaboo and negrous, coon, croon and ace, boon, coon and a slave woman's womb. Little you can do, do, do. You pogems last name for the last time, punctuating coffers, prescribing collards while coughing up 4D hair from church pews. Shea butter make you shine like so. We done made you a coward in the corn, raven them cousin, a lyncher's hunched witness. Your shadow agate the hail and I'm about to hop on through, just to get my pen far on way from you. Two, you convenient contrivance to figs feed their vibrant organs to, storms in their roiling black opera munition you with a brief light streaking their silhouettes. Enough brilliance to distinguish your foes and the parallax of trees, phone poles and a child waiting near his tomb home for the poet to stop killing him in the name of protest in the name of Palestine, of Syria, of too many bombs dropped without the country that dropped them being named. It's real how the poet rushes us into calamity. The poet will not stop rhyming missile with exile, will always find another carcass and corn cob crib full of limbs for you to deliver like a gangster. A mother dies her dress red and screams, blood screams, I am already dead. To repeal your calamus pelting the window. Hicks bird hoodlum, woke face minstrel. You know who built the wall but only caught at the doll caught in the barbed wires reaping. May we feast on you as you pace our eyes, foot in our mouths, a choir of greedy tenors with no way to escape. Final poem for war, during war. Questions for the war poem to host. Who among us could weave one ghost into another? Where find water hosted but in the tulips snapped back and tilted cup? How counted the escaped speed by silt dragged from one ruin to another? Wilt sings the sky's day fabric unwoven into grayscale as though night could coax from a star a paler face. But when night arrives on the failed back of a mule winged on either side by baskets of water and rotten grapes. What verb is tasked with this weight? How many missiles cast their light above a child's gate? When do lions banish to the hills water their hunger? Lie on their roars till the vultures pile on. How many ways can I write exile having never myself been exiled? What is the face of exile besides the one hidden beneath the pyre of music peeling from a liar's head? Bless the mine ads that they retire only after this laughable poet is dead. You're reading that poem aloud. All the rhymes are just like it's fun though. Final poem for the field of poetry. In the grip of a nor'easter you come bearing grief having pieces not come in peace. You arrive bladed with certainty. You slam shut the car door and smolder before the locked cabin rough trip up the Hudson as you distracted yourself with a list of flowers awaiting depth penmanship to groom them tight and bloom them clean. News of your brother's death intercepted your drive to this residency. Fellowship among the crude Madonna's of empty mailboxes draped in robes of days old ice. You have not written about the passing of family before their antagonistic absences. Intrusive, they're teething tombstones in the brain. Pill after pill to sleep, to create, to erase. You swallow and scratch into a notepad what the frozen earth refuses. Bogenvea, lilac, burning bush. Another close kin added to the Bible's kept obituaries. You hated your brother's left eye unruly wanderer settling away from you and observing a world you could not sense. Glossy ivy in all its tenure, the tender fingers of buckeye, the white page frozen before you like rhyme. You dig and discover what you already knew became kin meandering roots, catching his beautiful ankles. You were looking for a way through beauty but beauty only goes where needed. On the pad you write enough, what you've had, how much more of you there is, how much of you will be left when you're gone. Final poem as titlelectic elegy, the middle passage rather than haunting us is still open with water flowing forth in a constant violent rush. In the wake of departure and salt spray, who looks back? In the wake of Atlantic afflictions of this liminal black and the wake of the taken in of ruptures in the track of a sea being entered and what entered ever swallowed. The wake unseals epitaphs from throat salt fallow. The wake spits up familiars flesh and splinter alloy. The wake blamed for the neglect fed nations that sculpt indifference, fluent disdain. Sunken Africans will give aids to the sharks spoke of failed civilization. Dear wake, if my body is 70% water how many likenesses have I imbibed? What shrouds prepare to disclose their semblances within me bountiful with the sweat of the throne overboard that jumped into freedom before the Lord could be given like a disease. Freedom bored with freedom's language, the necessary revision, meanings umbilicus severed, dull pageantry, cloud shadow and the water, black and dingy, ephemera over ephemera, legalese of ghosts and eroded investment, cargo seized up in the ship's wake, a recapturing, a chronic disease, an annotation, sharp asterisk, perpetual annexation. The ways repeat their inexact canon, their mimetic self mastery painting a scene of endless transposition. What is the within? What is in the shipping news? The marine list, La Amistad, Aurora, Duke de Main, Truvedor, Emmanuella, Britannia 1783, Britannia 1788, Wanderer, HMS Monkey, Enterprise, Alexander, Sugarcane, Henrietta Marie, Othello 1781, Othello 1786, Antelope, Queen Anne's Revenge, Robert, Hope, Angola, Thomas Hunter, Nightingale, the HMS Black Joke. In the Mediterranean Sea over which a French warship, like a squall gasps and freezes at the vista, darkening with hunger. It's sailors taking pictures of Nigerians, Ethiopians, Eritreans, Sudanese as their dinghies lose their utterances in the sea. The Mediterranean glances at itself in migrants' eyes, unbalances the boat for a closer look while Europeans burn history from their books and use migrant hair to bait their hooks. I had a dream, you were the ocean. I touch each ship and hear their sun scream back, Big Spring, Cannon, Florence, Hazelton, Mariana, Terrahat, Angola, both prison and not yet, both slave ship and not yet mahogany mutilated into float violence, both nation and vulgar coloniality. Present past self and past present self-detector, mighty chocolate and grandma's quilt. Map to the door of here to four, quillumbo's unhide from dark lines of millinated nail beds and grown pikes that sprout buckra heads and toto. Tongues out, ass out in weary, I practiced marionage and ended up at churches, tongue out weather veining, grease cinched toward other futures. The weather in the flowering mountains shakes like the birth of a new nation. Old dude watching the gate, the clouds make at the peak ain't a legba, though his show smell like funeral flowers, a wild unslocked cupboard rum wasted and doused with pennies. The liquor burn like row houses on old sage, like black wall street scorching wings to the backs of children, like Springfield, Illinois, charred to the fossil. Oh, nostalgia, clemerdum muse, known silhouettes darken the water overhead. I look where one should not look in the heat of a threat. Mone summoned, I look up. In the wake, the past that is not past reappears always to rupture the present and uses migrant hair to bait its hooks while Europeans burn history from their books. Unbalancing the boat for a closer look, the Mediterranean glances at itself in migrants' eyes as their dinghies lose their utterances in the sea of Nigerians, Ethiopians, Eritreans, Sudanese, darkening with hunger. Sailors taking pictures like a squall gas and freezes at the vista. And the Mediterranean over with your French warship, Angola, Thomas Hunter, Nightingale, the HMSS black joke, Queen Anne's revenge. Robert, Hope, Othello 1781, Othello 1786, Antelope, Enterprise, Alexander, Sugarcane, Henrietta Marie, Britannia 1788, Wanderer, HMS monkey, Truvedor, Emmanuella, Britannia 1783, La Amastar, Aurora, Duke Domaine. What is in the shipping news? The marine list as endless transposition. What is the within? My medic self mastery paints a scene. The waves repeat their inexact cannon and annotation sharp asterisk, perpetual annexation up in the ship's wake, a recapturing, a chronic disease of ghosts, and eroded investment cargo sees ephemera over ephemera. Ligolese cloud shadow in the water, black and dingy, revision, meanings umbilicus severed, dull pageantry with freedoms language the necessary could be given like a disease. Freedom bored into the jumped into freedom before the Lord with a sweat of the throne overboard, prepared to disclose their semblances within me, bountiful. Many likenesses I have imbibed. What shrouds, dear wake, if my body is 70% water? How will I give age to the sharks? Speak, failed civilization. Sculpt indifference, fluent disdain, sunken Africans the wake blamed for the neglect fed nations, the wake spits of familiars, flesh and splinter alloy, the wake unseals epitaphs from throat-stalked fallow of a sea being entered and what entered ever swallowed, in the wake of the taken in of ruptures in the track, in the wake of Atlantic afflictions, in this limino black, in the wake of departure and soft spray, who looks back? For my final poem, I will read, oh, I haven't decided yet. I mean, let's see. Yeah, my last poem will be final poem for my father misnamed in my mouth. Sunlight still holds you and gives your shapelessness to every room. By noon, the kitchen catches your hands, misshapen sun rays. The windows have your eyes taken from me, your body. I reorder my life with absence. You are everywhere now, where once I could not find you even in your own body. Death means everything has become possible. I've been told I have your ways, your laughter haunts my mother from my throat. Everything is possible. Father light washes over the kitchen floor. I try to hold a bit of kindness for the dead and make of memory a sponge to wash your corpse. Your name is not addict or sir. This is not a dream. You died and were buried three times. Once after my birth, again against your hellos shedding into closing doors, your face a mask I placed over my face. The final time you beneath my feet. Was I buried with you then? I will not call what you had left anything other than gone and sweet perhaps. I am not your junior, but I fail in love with being your son. Now what? Possibility was a bird I once knew. It had one wing. Thank you. Thank you, Phillip. Wow, those are poems of extraordinary intelligence and moral force. And I think the way you embodied your breath meets the kind of oceanic rhythm of those poems. We'll stay with me for a long time. I wanna thank everyone for joining us today and to invite you to sign up for our email list at lunchpoms.berkeley.edu if you aren't on it, all ready to stay up to date with the latest updates and to invite you to join us on November 4th when we'll invite, we'll welcome our next reader in the series, Kava Akbar. Our past readings as this reading will be are archived on YouTube. So you can review if the wave of Phillips poems can be slowed down and revisited there. And I wanna thank finally the library on whose support this depends. We're grateful as we are grateful for you, our audience. Thank you.