Although the Poetry Foundation works to provide accurate audio transcripts, they may contain errors. If you find mistakes or omissions in this transcript,please contact us with details.

AL FILREIS:
I’m Al Filreis and this is PoemTalk at the Writers House, where I had the pleasure of convening three friends in the world of contemporary poetry and poetics to collaborate on a close but not too close reading of a poem. We'll talk, maybe even disagree a bit, and perhaps open up the verse to a few new possibilities, and we hope, gain for a poem that interests us, some new readers and listeners. And I say listeners because Poem Talk poems are available in recordings made by the poets themselves as part of our PennSound archive, writing.upenn.edu/pennsound. Today I'm joined here in Philadelphia at the Kelly Writers House in our Wexler studio by Amber Rose Johnson, who once earned the title of the Poetry Out Loud National Recitation Champion and has since been featured on The Words for You poetry album alongside Meryl Streep and James Earl Jones; on NPR's The Writer's Almanac; on MSNBC's The Melissa Harris-Perry show, and on stages across the US whose current research explores Caribbean poetic theory and anti-colonial literatures of the Black Atlantic, who is a TA for the open online course called ModPo, and is just all round a really good friend of the writer's house.

And by Davy Knittle, author of the chapbooks empathy for cars, force of July, (horseless press 2016) and cyclorama, (the operating system 2015). Like Amber Rose, a doctoral student in English at Penn, who also curates the amazing City Planning Poetics series here at the Kelley Writer's House. Scholar, investigator of the queer urban space and its relationship to contemporary poetics. And I'm thrilled to say, is also with Amber Rose and others, a teaching assistant for the ongoing online course called ModPo, and who is a reviews editor for Jacket2 magazine. And I’m honored to say by Tonya Foster, a Bloomington born and New Orleans raised poet, author of the collection A Swarm of Bees in High Court (Belladonna 2015), which Steph Burt described as the long delayed American apotheosis of haiku form, and co-editor of the book Third Mind: Creative Writing through Visual Art (2002), whose work has been published in best American experimental writing Boundary2, LitScapes, collected US Writings 2015.

Callaloo (UNKNOWN) Western Humanities Review, the Hat and many other venues who teaches creative writing at the California College of the Arts. Which Tonya is in San Francisco, which means we are welcoming you here in chilly Philly from way across the country. Thank you so much for making the trip.

TONYA FOSTER:
I'm delighted to be here and I love the snow.

AL FILREIS:
You do?

TONYA FOSTER:
From Bloomington, I can't complain.

AL FILREIS:
Well, let the record show that Tonya came to do a series of events, including a reading that was given and recorded just before this PoemTalk. But last night was supposed to do the same for the Temple University audience and it got snowed out. How many interests did we get Davy? You keep track of these things.

DAVY KNITTLE:
Wildly variable but between eight and 12.

AL FILREIS:
Between eight and 12, Davy, thank you for hanging out with us today.

DAVY KNITTLE:
Thanks Al.

AL FILREIS:
It's always good to see you. And Amber Rose, this is our second PoemTalk and I've been looking forward to it all week.

AMBER ROSE JOHNSON:
As have I been.

AL FILREIS:
OK.

AMBER ROSE JOHNSON:
Thank you so much Al.

AL FILREIS:
Fantastic, this is going to be fun. The four of us are here to talk about a poem by Gwendolyn Brooks, it's called Riot, and was published as a broadside by Broadside Press in 1969 and has been collected variously including in the book Blacks of 1994. Now the version we'll discuss is a much shorter version than you'll find in the Broadside Press original and I'm soon will have a chance to talk about that because Tonya also knows that there are other epigraphs that are not with the short version. Our recording of Brooks performing this poem, and it is quite a performance, comes from a reading she gave at the Guggenheim Museum in New York City on May 3rd, 1983. So, here now is Gwendolyn Brooks performing Riot.

GWENDOLYN BROOKS:
A riot is the language of the unheard.

John Cabot, out of Wilma, once a Wycliffe,

all whitebluerose below his golden hair,

wrapped richly in right linen and right wool,

almost forgot his Jaguar and Lake Bluff;

almost forgot Grandtully (which is The

Best Thing That Ever Happened To Scotch); almost

forgot the sculpture at the Richard Gray

and Distelheim; the kidney pie at Maxim’s,

the Grenadine de Boeuf at Maison Henri.

Because the Negroes were coming down the street.

Because the Poor were sweaty and unpretty

(not like Two Dainty Negroes in Winnetka)

and they were coming toward him in rough ranks.

In seas. In windsweep. They were black and loud.

And not detainable. And not discreet.

Gross. Gross. “Que tu es grossier!” John Cabot

itched instantly beneath the nourished white

that told his story of glory to the World.

“Don’t let It touch me! the blackness! Lord!” he whispered

to any handy angel in the sky.

But, in a thrilling announcement, on It drove

and breathed on him: and touched him. In that breath

the fume of pig foot, chitterling and cheap chili,

malign, mocked John. And, in terrific touch, old

averted doubt jerked forward decently,

cried, “Cabot! John! You are a desperate man,

and the desperate die expensively today.”

John Cabot went down in the smoke and fire

and broken glass and blood, and he cried “Lord!

Forgive these nigguhs that know not what they do.”

AL FILREIS:
Amber Rose I'm guessing that you read the poem before you heard that recording. So, what's, what's the tone of the performance, was that a little bit of a surprise to you?

AMBER ROSE JOHNSON:
That is a spectacular performance.

AL FILREIS:
Even on Brooks standards, which are pretty high for performance.

AMBER ROSE JOHNSON:
Right, yeah. She really goes above and beyond for this performance. But it was a little surprising. There's so much punctuation that's working in the way that she performs the poem that's absent from the way that it's written. And it totally changes the kind of tenor and texture. You get so much sass in her performance that really complicates. I mean, she's already telling a very complicated story about these riots, right, in this relationship to John Cabot. But the sassiness that you get in her voice that's absent from the textures on the page totally illuminates, illuminates the the thrust of the poem in a different way.

AL FILREIS:
Tonya, what do you make of the performance?

TONYA FOSTER:
Well, that also changes the blank verse. That parts of this poem are in blank verse, and there's this this sort of movement to sort of set up the the the meter of English poetry and to somehow show to crack it open almost. And that that's what that performance certainly does for me, and I think that's remarkable. There's also something about this this way that it begins with a riot. The epigraph is a riot is the language of the unheard, which we didn't hear her read. And so I...

AL FILREIS:
I think she did at the very beginning...

TONYA FOSTER:
Didn't she?

AL FILREIS:
May have been clipped that little bit. Did anybody look up which King's (CROSSTALK).

TONYA FOSTER:
Yeah, the other America.

AL FILREIS:
Is from the other America, is perfectly selected for this poem, isn't it?

TONYA FOSTER:
It is perfectly selected for this poem, particularly because in in that particular speech, King sets up two Americas, points to the beautiful America, and then the other America, which is not beautiful.

AL FILREIS:
Unpretty she would say.

TONYA FOSTER:
(CROSSTALK) which is unpretty. And so, what is the language spoken in that space? Yeah, it's kind of remarkable how her voice adds another iteration, another measure.

AL FILREIS:
Yeah. Davy, can we pick out and we can do it together. The two of us pick out some phrases that follow nicely from Tonya's idea that the blank verse is brought back into a meter at certain moments. I guess I'll start with one and then I'll turn it to you. The way she says in parentheses two dainty negroes in Winnetka. Now, Winnetka is a is a white suburb, but making that a sound is quite up with the sass is quite a thing, right? Do you have a phrase that where the meter comes out?

DAVY KNITTLE:
Where I was looking to that was at the other end of that stanza in seas in windsweep, they were black and loud and that the way that that comes apart in the reading feels like it's both picking up on some of the emphasis of the meter and then also pulling apart the line as that's happening.

AL FILREIS:
Yeah. Amber Rose, let's get started on John Cabot, what did you make of this figure?

AMBER ROSE JOHNSON:
John Cabot. OK, so here we are giving John Cabot this like 15th century explorer from Italy, totally collapsed in time and space. Now, in Chicago, in the midst of these riots. Part of what I love about this poem is that it's a kind of I don't want to say I am going to say, but don't really want to say revisionist history, I think it's a little more complicated than that. But imagining John Cabot in this moment with his, you know, whitebluerose and golden hair, the way she drags that oh, on gold in and totally paint such a vivid picture of him stoic and like, perfect, and poor John is desperate and pathetic in this poem.

AL FILREIS:
So, John Cabot, the one you mention, historical one you mentioned, is the is the Italian who ended up in England and was sent off to find a passage to India. But there are others, there's the Wycliffe. The Wycliffe is a is a an early reformation of the Wycliffe family. So, an early British or English reformationist who went against who is actually a person of principle, you might say, who went against the Catholic church and the and the pope at the time when Cabot died of natural causes, dug up the body and had burned. So, there is in the Wycliffe story, a person of a white person of principle who was opposing the corruption of the Catholic Church. So, Brooks is really complicating things by bringing John Cabot in here. Tonya, John Cabot, what do we do with that figure?

TONYA FOSTER:
Well, I think it's it's also that the Cabot name has long sort of historical reference in in England, and that there's some way that Cabot is set up. It's significant to me that she uses a canning. Right. Whitebluerose. She uses these compounded phrases in order to point to a particular kind of whiteness in her description of him, which is remarkable. She also has this incredible list of objects that are meant to signal wealth, status and position that she has him speak in French is pretty significant, as if his ability to speak a colonizing language will in fact save him in this moment. And that it sets him up certainly at the end when he does his sort of martyred, you know, forgive them, they know not what they do. So, there are all these ways that his whiteness and his wealth are signaled or and set in contrast to the sort of overwhelming wave that's sweeping down the street.

AL FILREIS:
So, this is written in 69.

TONYA FOSTER:
This is published in 69.

AL FILREIS:
So, written at the time of the riots the previous year and the previous year.

TONYA FOSTER:
Right

AL FILREIS:
Before that, so 68 would be there would be post king assassination riots and of course, the riots associated with the Chicago Democratic Convention.

TONYA FOSTER:
Exactly. And it's also it's her first publication. It's published in the chapbook riot, but it's her first post, Harper and Row publication that comes sort of right after she completely turns away from Harper and Row and the major publishers and spends the next 30 years publishing with Broadside Press and other small presses. And I, I, I'm not sure if this is the case with all of her work with Broadside Press, but I know that for a riot, the royalties went back to Dudley Randall so that he was able to publish more. So, with that, that turned away from Harper and Row, there was a real commitment to not just publishing with this small press, but but economically giving back to it and feeding into it.

AL FILREIS:
What's the it Davy? Capitalized it once or twice.

DAVY KNITTLE:
But in thrilling announcement on it, drove.

AL FILREIS:
On it drove.

DAVY KNITTLE:
There are a couple of things happening there. One is thinking about the collectivity of folks who are participating in the riot, and that being a black collectivity, which he's responding to. It also feels important that part of what that it is, is a usage of urban space that where he goes to try to do his colonial project, that where he sort of pivots himself in this like weird, temporally shaky moment is back to these suburban spaces so, we get Lake Bluff, we get Winnetka, we get all of his points of reference being suburban, points of reference. And so he's been in this urban space, in this urban streetscape, and it feels important that, like, that's the locus of his panic, and that's part of it that's populated the relationship between people in space (CROSSTALK).

AL FILREIS:
One step further on, your observation about the urban situation, because he is clearly a suburbanite.

DAVY KNITTLE:
Yeah.

AL FILREIS:
Who comes into town probably in his Jaguar, but we have who knows? Chicago here we have the Richard Gray, (UNKNOWN) and (UNKNOWN). Maxim's a restaurant, like very a decadent interior Chicago restaurant Maison on reopened in 1965, those are in the in the city. So, this is a wealthy, privileged white colonial project guy, John Cabot, coming from the suburbs into the city. And that's where he encounters it.

DAVY KNITTLE:
Yeah.

AMBER ROSE JOHNSON:
Yeah, I'm interested in this. I'm interested in this isolated line. It's the only isolated line, at least in this version of the poem that we're looking at, because the negroes were coming down the street. And that seems to be the moment where the negroes and the street are actually collapsing in a way that needed to be distinct, because it marks kind of a turn in the Pullman. What's happening with that public space? I also love hearing her say negroes in that line because she draws out the, and you can see both this this group of people kind of expanding and the riot growing in the street, street collapsing. And all of that is is being marked in her voice.

AL FILREIS:
And then in a few lines, Tonya, it becomes naturalized, for better or worse, they're coming down the street, and it's it's seas, it's wind sweeping, it's it's an inexorable force.

TONYA FOSTER:
Well, and this is the thing that's that's intriguing to me. Like, I also think this is about poetry, that the entire chapbook is about artifice. And that there's some way in which the things that that are made that John Cabot points to, they are not able to save him at the end of the day. And he keeps going back to them because he and because they're a reflection of his power in the world. And he imagines that in this moment, in this moment of the riot, that he can call on the on those things to re inscribe his own sort of power in that space. And he cannot control the masses, which are a mass and movement together.

AL FILREIS:
Wow. Can we stay on this matter poetic reading for a little longer? The king epigraph is the same, riot is the language of the unheard. So, the language we speak is a riot of unheard voices. It's a riot is the language. There's that, and then there's this idea that you all been talking about earlier. You, Tonya in particular, that the that what what Brooks is doing is she's taking blank verse, and I don't know what the right word is for this (UNKNOWN) it and bringing and using her high tone, her sarcasm or her sass to make high poetry and essentially to take back what poetry is. OK, I said two things that are matter poetic, can we go from there?

TONYA FOSTER:
Well, we can. Like, I think there's there's something tremendous about thinking about what the shift is. This marks a dramatic shift in Brooks's poetic style. It doesn't mark a dramatic shift in what she attends to. Right.

AL FILREIS:
I mean, thematically, it's not a shift.

TONYA FOSTER:
Thematically is not a shift.

AL FILREIS:
Poetically is a shift.

TONYA FOSTER:
Poetically, it's a shift. There's something about her sense of who she's talking with. That's change that this is part of a booklet that is a small chapbook that people can pay a quarter for or 0.50 for. So, it becomes something that's being distributed in the corner store or wherever Dudley Randall will distribute it and something people can read fairly quickly. And so this is the opening poem in that shift for her, which is, you know, how do I have poetry of, by and for the people? I mean.

AL FILREIS:
So it's a...

TONYA FOSTER:
That's a huge (CROSSTALK).

AL FILREIS:
It's a in terms of the means of poetic production, it's a radical left populist alternative, and the lead poem or the lead section is a riot in which whiteness I mean, what happens to John in the last three lines of this excerpt is he went down in smoke and fire. So, there's no there's no doubt what happens to him. And this is the sort of leading gesture in this people's poetry and basically the revolution of taking the means of poetic production.

DAVY KNITTLE:
And the revolution also of producing an anti-colonial means of poetic. (CROSSTALK).

AL FILREIS:
Yeah.

GWENDOLYN BROOKS:
Because the negroes were coming down the street, because the poor were sweaty and unpretty. Not like two dainty negroes in Winnetka, and they were coming toward him in rough ranks in seas and windsweeps. They were black and loud and not detainable and not discreet.

AL FILREIS:
Amber Rose, you began by talking about the powerful, energizing sass, can you reflect a little more on that?

AMBER ROSE JOHNSON:
I do love the performance, I mean, I when we were listening to it, I was going through and circling some different words that she really focuses on the right linen and right wool. I mean, these things color the way that we imagine them, right? You can say, John, John Cabot was in this linen, in the wool, but it's the T at the end of the right that speaks to the texture of the whiteness that we're talking about. The negroes that are that are a drag, that his Jaguar almost forgot exclamation point. After that T, in a thrilling announcement, I was thinking about again this the riot as the language of the unheard, and that took me to this line. But in a thrilling announcement, it drove and breathed on him. And to think of an announcement and the action to drive as a kind of language, and so then speaking and being and moving and moving on are all wrapped up in the same thing. The Lord that's at the end cry, Lord, these niggas that know not what they do. I mean she's, she's informing kind of the, the ideas that circulate with these words that exceed just a dictionary definition.

AL FILREIS:
And then when she parenthetically defines his Grandtully just his favorite scotch in all caps, well each word is a cap and it's advertising language. That's the extent of his bullshit poetry. His sense of poetry is some some ad for this scotch. And she really does a number on the best thing that ever happened to Scotch, it's so shallow.

DAVY KNITTLE:
And usefully that we get what the poem is, is populating the space around him that like his shallowness, his negative space is where the poem happens is what's interesting with the poem. It's interesting that he's the subject that we keep hanging out with John Cabot start and we end with him. But the poem is tremendously not interested in him trying to like, see through him and see around him into the spaces that he can't and doesn't want to and refuses to be a part of (UNKNOWN).

AMBER ROSE JOHNSON:
So, this line, John Cabot itched instantly beneath the nourish white. I think that idea of itching beneath the white kind of gets at Davy's point of there's this world that sort of encapsulating this John Cabot. But beneath the right is getting beneath that to a place where he is totally unprotected and is itching in the discomfort and looking still looking for the borders of this whiteness as protection, but almost can't see what's immediately affecting him.

TONYA FOSTER:
When it's his flesh, he's again cast. He's cast into his body, and then and then it's actually contact with the it with the blackness, with the negroes that come as this sort of well of of energy and of life. It's also flesh. And his moment of contact feels like for him, it's something disease that he responds to. And so, she points to because the poor were sweaty and unpretty, they were coming at him. I mean, there's that wonderful sound there were coming toward him in rough ranks, in sea, in windsweep, they were black and loud. And so there's no escaping the body that he's in, in that moment. And there's no escaping the death that he imagined he could escape through the construction of all these things around him. There's no getting away from it.

AL FILREIS:
The first encounter with whiteness we have in the poem is this. Put together word whitebluerose. It gets elaborated later with nourished white. But here, what do we do with the whitebluerose? I mean, to me, it's red, white and blue, I mean, it's American.

DAVY KNITTLE:
It's also like being able to see through his body, into his veins and his blood. It's like...

AL FILREIS:
It's really is white.

DAVY KNITTLE:
That relationship to beneath this, I mean, because what happens to

AL FILREIS:
Translucent.

DAVY KNITTLE:
Right? And he goes down. John Cabot went down as though he were a ship of his own colonial project, Like he's taken out as though he were a vehicle. And that beneathness that we get in the line that Amber Rose you were just talking about beneath the nourished weight, that relationship to beneath this is something we're getting from the very first mention of his whiteness and that second line.

TONYA FOSTER:
And it's also blue blood.

AL FILREIS:
Right? There's blue blood.

TONYA FOSTER:
So, that that signal of the idea of nobility, American blue blood.

AL FILREIS:
Amber Rose.

AMBER ROSE JOHNSON:
I'm thinking about all of these symbols and the way that they speak to both a specific or discrete whiteness and also a totally indiscrete, totally unspecific whiteness. And then I'm looking at in the in that breath, the fume of pig foot chitterling and cheap chili, and thinking again about that being discrete and specific and totally indiscreet. And the way that that's working as a kind of over determination of blackness that he's coming up against. But that is very real in this riot that is both people and street and space, and how these kind of two she set up in both a specific and not specific way. These overdetermined understandings of what race does and how it feels and how it materializes and what it looks like if they were to meet on a street.

TONYA FOSTER:
And who and what gets named right, that he has a name, that his places are named, that his scotch is named, his car is named, that the signals of blackness are not named, are not particularized, and that there's some way in which it is not I don't know if it's the there's something about the idea of the naming, that's about a certain kind of whiteness, but also a certain performance of power.

DAVY KNITTLE:
And that feels important in the way the poem closes that the smoke and fire and broken glass and blood in which he went down. He's obviously not the only person who's dying in that space, and yet it's his death that we close with. Not performance of power leads him like he's his undoing is what we're being set up for from the beginning of the poem by means of his relationship to the riot. But the loudness of that also supersedes our ability to see what's happening to anyone else. There are no other bodies in that stanza except for his.

AL FILREIS:
And, to be sure, or to be specific. This is a play on on Luke, New Testament, Luke, chapter 23, verse 24. And obviously it's ionized, but I suppose we should spell that out a little bit. Why does he get to say something that that one would say as a witness of the crucifixion?

TONYA FOSTER:
Well...

AL FILREIS:
See witnessing his own demise and trying to make it christian?

TONYA FOSTER:
Well, I don't know that he's trying to make it Christian, I think that he's trying to assert his own power and his own rightness that even in the moment of his death, he doesn't see what's in front of him. He doesn't see what's happening and instead he's still, re inscribing re well coming up with some other way of narrating what exactly is going on. And it's oh, I'm Jesus on the cross.

AL FILREIS:
And it wasn't I'm not the one who came up with the story about the John Cabot's ancestor, Wycliffe John Wycliffe. That was I found it in a critical study of Brooks and early critical study. And but the point there to repeat is that Wycliffe is considered a martyr because he went against the corruption of the Catholic Church, led a principled resistance to the orthodoxy of his day. This is the descendant, the completely degraded, superficial white descendant of that major resistance. Which went down in flames, in fire. They dug him up and burned him, and this is the descendant. And so, the the the ironic reclamation of Christian principle at the end is. Is completely empty in that works. Alright. We we could talk about this poem for a long time, but let's when we go around and get final thoughts, something that you came here to say about the poem but didn't have a chance to, so, Davy.

DAVY KNITTLE:
Yeah. Something that I imagined that we might talk about is just these two half sentences that come after the stanza we've been talking about quite a bit. And the line reads, and not detainable and not discrete. Detainable feels really important here that this is participating in both, thinking about legacies of slavery and legacies of imprisonment.

AL FILREIS:
And also what happens to rioters.

DAVY KNITTLE:
And also (CROSSTALK). Right. And what happens to rioters and what happens to some rioters and not other rioters. And thinking about his fear being based in the fact that these rioters are not detainable feels really important. And feels like a thread through this poem that has never been beneath some of our conversation, but that it would be great to, you know, think more about. And then I imagine that like the counterfactual in which we have this conversation all night, we would think about it a lot.

AL FILREIS:
Fantastic. Thank you, Davy. Tonya, final thought?

TONYA FOSTER:
There's a I don't know if this is a final thought as much about the poem. I'm picturing the the chapbook, which you can access online at Eclipse, I think has that, and there is an image of two young boys facing a window pane. And they have one has a statue in this hand, just kind of holding it and they're, and there's the possibility for action in that window. And that's the first thing in the first page you see when you open this black chapbook, which has riot in kind of a bullet hole with riot in red. That that's where you open to and I think of there's something I wanted to read. I guess that's the Henry Miller epigraph is a part of that.

AL FILREIS:
Yes please. So, this was an extra epigraph that was originally with (CROSSTALK).

TONYA FOSTER:
And it's taken from it's on the back of the chapbook and it's from Miller's Sunday After the War, which was published in 1944. And it's it would be a it would be terrible for Chicago if this black fountain of life should suddenly erupt. My friend assures me there is no danger of that. I don't feel so sure about it. Maybe he's right, maybe the negro will always be our friend, no matter what we do to him.

AL FILREIS:
Henry Miller.

TONYA FOSTER:
Henry Miller from 1944 on the back of that chapbook. And there's something about that, this poem that's an articulation of not only the sort of hope that that it opens with this kind of a takedown of John Cabot, but it actually goes on to the kind of complexity of loss. At the same time that it's picking apart is the poem in which she talks about the black blues, another canning in which she really writes about the the other kind of music that can be heard. And it's that music that I think she gives voice to in Riot.

AL FILREIS:
Well, thank you very much. Amber Rose, final thought?

AMBER ROSE JOHNSON:
My final thought. I guess, is around how sensory this whole poem is and sensory, I mean, we have so much taste and touch and sight and smell. And so, a riot becomes a kind of sensory overload, but a riot is also a distinct language in and of itself.

AL FILREIS:
The poem's kind of a riot.

AMBER ROSE JOHNSON:
Yeah, it is. Yes. So I'm trying to think, I guess I'm still sort of thinking through this kind of sensory overload as a way of speaking that does not require a translation or trans mediation. So, what happens when we take all of these sensory to be riotous? And that riotous speaks without translation.

AL FILREIS:
Fantastic. That really so beautifully Amber Rose returns us to your first comment about the performance. I mean, there's she's amped it up to the point of riotousness, you know, sonorous and metrical and emphatic riot. And so I guess my final thought follows from that because I'll throw out my other one. Having heard that brilliant point, the desperation of John Cabot that it or they assigned to him, they we see you're all put together in the first stanza, but we see how desperate you are and the desperate die expensively today. Expensively is really powerful word there, because it's not simply the you know, the Jaguar's probably going to go to. So, there's a certain amount of expense, but the expense as in express put out an expense. And he would be the last person or someone sharing his whiteness as it’s characterized here, would be the last to think of themselves as desperate. Right. But this unnamed, it assigns desperation and then dying expansively. And I think the poem is a kind of expensive poem in the way you just meant it.

That's great. Well, we like to end PoemTalk with a minute or two of gathering paradise. A chance for several of us or all of us to spread wide our narrow hands, to gather a little something really poetically good to hail or commend someone or something going on in the poetry world. Davy, You just look, kinda look like a guy who's got a gathering paradise ready. Like you came in here knowing.

DAVY KNITTLE:
You know this, that in the last few weeks, I've super fallen in love with a 2016 essay by Finn Enke called Stick Figures and Little Bits: Toward a Non-binary Pedagogy, which is a totally amazing way of thinking about the way classroom spaces are gendered and is a really amazing essay to read in conversation with the work of Eileen Myles. It was like made to read with Eileen Myles poetry. So, go do that.

AL FILREIS:
And in fact, we together?

DAVY KNITTLE:
We gonna do that.

AL FILREIS:
You and Amber Rose and I and some others are actually going to teach that essay.

DAVY KNITTLE:
Yeah.

AL FILREIS:
And of course, it's focusing on pedagogy, so. And Myles that week.

DAVY KNITTLE:
And Myles, Yeah.

AL FILREIS:
So great suggestion. Yeah. Tonya, Gather some paradise.

TONYA FOSTER:
Gather some paradise. So my (UNKNOWN).

AL FILREIS:
Tonya it's paradisal to have you here with us, is paradise just that alone.

TONYA FOSTER:
Thank you.

AL FILREIS:
Yeah. It's such a pleasure.

TONYA FOSTER:
Sylvia Winter is blowing my mind, as always. But on being human as a noun, an being human as praxis. She revisits this essay, 1984 essay in 2007 and writes a kind of preface, a preamble to the essay that talks about kind of real examination or return to reclamation of the project of of making a human or signifying what's human. And she says that she failed in the original essay, and so she wanted to revisit it. And she points to Fanon, she points to Aristotle, she points to Bloom, but it's really quite incredible. And I've been reading that and thinking about it, next to Keats refers to Wordsworth or the Wordsworthian egotistical sublime. And and sets himself up as being distinct from that a distinct kind of poet. And so I'm interested in the project in, in African diasporic poetry that tries to re-imagine the subject position. That is not merely the position of being the other. But actually reimagines what's possible in the human space and what can be radical in that space.

AL FILREIS:
That's a great suggestion. Can you say the title again of the essay?

TONYA FOSTER:
Yes, It's on being human as noun, on being human as praxis.

AL FILREIS:
Fantastic. Thank you, Tonya. Amber Rose. Gather some paradise.

AMBER ROSE JOHNSON:
I was also going to give a severe winter plug because I am equally obsessed with her work always. But instead, I will recommend the jazz trumpeter Christian Scott a Tunde who whose album? His one album that I've been listening to obsessively called Stretch Music. I believe he's from New Orleans and he's just doing really, really incredible things. He has a tiny desk performance where he just is (CROSSTALK) really beautifully in between these really incredible performances. So, I would recommend watching that.

AL FILREIS:
Fantastic. Some great gather in Paris. Well, I'll do my gathering paradise on part. it's Tonya M Fosters, a Swarm of Bees in High Court which is a book I read the moment it came out and reread recently in anticipation of your coming here. And when you said something about that, when you were talking about the it, in the Brooks poem, there was a page of this book that it reminded me of, and I found it. And it's the first page of (UNKNOWN) like stanzas in the section called (UNKNOWN). Do we pronounce it that way (UNKNOWN). Anyway, it's the. Yeah, well.

AMBER ROSE JOHNSON:
I mispronounced it.

AL FILREIS:
I always mispronounce it. (UNKNOWN) anyway, it's the. It's a poem written in morning after a night. Right. And this is the as always section, which ends with a wonderful redefinition of pronoun. I wonder if you would read the page for us. You didn't prepare for this but...

TONYA FOSTER:
As always, there is the beat of siren and bass breaking, (UNKNOWN). As always, there is some quadruped barking or meowing (UNKNOWN). As always, there, here is daily asphalt news your are flesh and heat attend. As always, there is a closed face watching from lit and open windows. As always, there here is passage door street gauntlet before between and none. As always, there here is love tossed among vials, spent shells, this his quiet leaving. As always there, here is this here framed time when we becomes I among many.

AL FILREIS:
A Swarm of Bees in High Court, that's my gathering paradise. Thank you so much. Well, that's all the Not detainable. We have time for on PoemTalk today. PoemTalk at the Writer's House is a collaboration of the Center for Programs and Contemporary Writing, the Kelley Writers House at the University of Pennsylvania and the Poetry Foundation. poetryfoundation.org. Thanks so much to my guests Amber Rose Johnson, Davy Knittle, Tonya Foster the two PoemTalk's director and engineer up of late tonight Zach Carduner and to PoemTalk's editor. And by the time he edits this, he will have had some some rest the same amazing, Zach Carduner and a shout out to (UNKNOWN) for their very generous support of PoemTalk. This is Al Filreis and I hope you'll join us again next month for another episode of PoemTalk.