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.

AUDIO TRANSCRIPT

Poetry Off the Shelf: Stay in Character

(MUSIC PLAYING)

Helena de Groot: This is Poetry Off the Shelf. I'm Helena De Groot. Today: "Stay in Character." Gregory Pardlo's father, Gregory Pardlo Sr., was larger than life. He was an upwardly mobile air traffic controller with a fancy car and house on a cul-de-sac in New Jersey. A man who looked good in his suit and knew it. A union leader who liked to pepper his speech with words pulled from classic plays and poems. But in the early ’80s, this proud man lost his job in the infamous air traffic controller strike of 1981. Striking was not allowed for federal employees, but the strikers had convinced themselves they couldn't possibly fire them all. Then, Ronald Reagan did just that. More than 11,000 people were fired, union leader Gregory Pardlo Sr. among them. Thirty-five years later, the man died, right when his son, the poet Gregory Pardlo Jr., was putting the final touches on a memoir about his father—"Big Greg," as he calls him. A "narcissist," as he also calls him. He wanted to investigate how each of them had played their role with such dedication. "I was my father's rival," Pardlo writes, "and he was mine." Today, eight years later, Gregory Pardlo has come out with a new poetry collection titled Spectral Evidence. In this collection, he looks at some of the other roles that have been scripted for him—that of a Black man in America, for instance. Although these days, he's not in America much. He lives in the United Arab Emirates, where he teaches at NYU. Here's our conversation.

Helena de Groot: I wanted to ask you about Abu Dhabi, because like you're a visiting professor. So, are you there just a few weeks out of the year, or like how does it work?

Gregory Pardlo: No. So, I moved my whole family there in 2020. It was COVID, so my kids were eager to get there—it was like, "Get us outta here, we don't care, go anywhere"—so, we've lived full time in Abu Dhabi for the last three years.

Helena de Groot: And what does your home look like?

Gregory Pardlo: We live on campus. I'm always kind of awkward in talking about it, because it's quite beautiful. (LAUGHS)

Helena de Groot: Why does that make you awkward?

Gregory Pardlo: Because, you know, the UAE is such an opulent . . . You know, our images are very blingy and, but the campus is quite tasteful, and our apartment is lovely. It's very large, and I have a beautiful view of the Gulf. And . . .

Helena de Groot: What? You can see the water from your window?

Gregory Pardlo: Yes.

Helena de Groot: And what do you see on the water? I mean, is it, like, people swimming? Is it like industry, you know, ships bringing cargo? What, pleasure boats? Like what is it?

Gregory Pardlo: Well, right now they're building a new island. (LAUGHS)

Helena de Groot: Right. (LAUGHS)

Gregory Pardlo: So, yeah, it's very resort. And then there's a very high-end housing development neighborhood, and the Gulf. And we see, you know, several gradations of blue and green moving out into the Gulf. It's pretty stunning.

Helena de Groot: And when I think about the Gulf, I think about this kind of heat that you really don't want to be in for more than a few seconds. Like, do you spend any time outside, or do you feel like you just go from AC room to AC room?

Gregory Pardlo: Well, it depends on the time of year. So, from probably May to October, you don't wanna spend a whole lot of time outside. I mean, one can, it's a dry heat, but we mostly go from the apartment down to the car, in the parking garage, into the car, to the mall, in the parking garage, and then back up. But this time of year, it is fabulous, 70 to 80 degrees almost every day.

Helena de Groot: And who do you hang out with? Who do you socialize with there?

Gregory Pardlo: Mostly other faculty.

Helena de Groot: Yeah.

Gregory Pardlo: Yeah. Obviously, we spend so much time together, our families are there, and our kids get to know each other. And, so, there's that. But I also play paddle and tennis.

Helena de Groot: OK.

Gregory Pardlo: So, paddle is kind of like . . . pickleball is what's very popular here in the US, but overseas in Europe and in the Middle East, people are absolutely bonkers over paddle. So, that's how I meet people. That's the kind of social thing. I meet people from all industries. And it's an equalizing . . . No, it's not. Because all the people I meet are (LAUGHS) [of a] certain class.

Helena de Groot: Now we're getting there. (LAUGHS) Yeah, I wanted to ask you about all that of course.

Gregory Pardlo: So, my mother-in-law came to visit us last summer. And we were driving around. She was like, "Oh my goodness, this place is just so clean. It's just nobody litters here." I had to tell her, no, it's because in the middle of the night, lots of people come out and are cleaning the city.

Helena de Groot: Wow!

Gregory Pardlo: Yeah. Yeah.

Helena de Groot: And what was it like when you first moved from Bed-Stuy to Abu Dhabi? What was it like to see this completely different social structure?

Gregory Pardlo: It wasn't that shocking. I mean . . . Sadly, I'm kind of used to that kind of stratification. But what was different was that I was very much a part of the elite class there. So, here, no matter what I do, I'm liable to face assumptions in any direction, either direction. But I'm extremely American there . . .

Helena de Groot: Like, what? What is something that you see yourself do, and you're like, "Oh, I did not know I was so central casting."

Gregory Pardlo: Yeah. Well, I'm clearly not local.

Helena de Groot: And how do people know that? Is it like the way you dress? Is it the way you . . .

Gregory Pardlo: Well, as an African American, the darker skinned people are—well, a lot of them are working in the middle of the night or in construction, but even the darkest-skinned Arabs are wearing kandurahs, the long robes and the headgear. So, I dress like somebody from New York.

Helena de Groot: Yeah. And what else? Because like, you know, the reason I'm asking you this is because throughout your work, one of the themes that keeps coming up is seeing and being seen. And the problem with seeing yourself clearly, outside of whatever society projects onto you or your family projects onto you, you know? And I think nothing can shock us into seeing ourselves anew like moving to a foreign country.

Gregory Pardlo: Yeah. No, that's a great point.

Helena de Groot: And, so, I'm wondering like, what were some of the things that you saw about yourself maybe for the first time that you hadn't noticed?

Gregory Pardlo: Well, probably the biggest difference, which was surprising to me—I felt like there was a weight off of me that I was not carrying there. I don't get looks of suspicion. So, again, you know, very American like, "Wow, this must be what it feels like, to be the proverbial middle-class white guy. You know, I can go places and be welcomed without, you know . . . I mean, it's really hard to put into words, because it's something other than microaggression. There's just a kind of attention—a kind of disattention, perhaps, here in the US, right? Where nobody's holding the door, or nobody notices I'm standing in line, right? This kind of thing. But I'm present there socially in a way that's new. Certainly James Baldwin—well, every African American writer who's left the United States has talked about this and why one becomes an expat. And I think all of that still holds, sadly enough, I guess.

Helena de Groot: Yeah. I mean, it's so interesting. I wonder how you look at your relationship to your Blackness in that context. Like, do you feel less Black, or do you feel like you are just as Black, but it just has a different connotation? Like, how do you see that change?

Gregory Pardlo: That's a great question. In the UAE, well, I am cosmopolitan. I am diasporic, right? Which is a very different thing from the way I experience myself here. So, we still have a community of African Americans. There are a lot of African Americans in the UAE. That is a common destination. And so we have friends, and we have Thanksgiving dinner, and we see people who speak the same cultural language. So, I'm still Black, right, in that sense. And my students you know, I code-switch quite a bit in class and, you know, it puts my students at ease. And I do try and, and hold on to just a Black culture, Black American culture When I'm in the classroom. And particularly when I'm in meetings, also, because I am almost always the only African American in the room.

Helena de Groot: Again, yeah. But that is still the same, pretty much.

Gregory Pardlo: That's still the same, yeah. I mean, particularly on campus. Right. So, our students are wildly diverse. They're from every place you can imagine, which is fantastic. Our faculty are from the same handful of universities from Europe and the US. Yeah. (LAUGHS)

Helena de Groot: Can't help but reproduce the same things.

Gregory Pardlo: Yeah, exactly. Right. And that's what institutions do. So, I'm not shocked by it. But I find I have to do a lot of explaining, a lot of educating on . . . So, for example, there was a climate survey that had been done on campus. And so the conversation around diversity when I first arrived was just heating up there. And so [for] a lot of the faculty, particularly from Europe, diversity was a "why?" "What's the point?" And someone said—I suspect without any ill intent—"You know, why would we want diversity, when we should want excellence?"

Helena de Groot: Oh, God! I didn't just hear that. What do you do with your face when someone says that?

Gregory Pardlo: I mean, I had heard such things in the ’90s, but this was a faculty person coming from . . . I think he was from Italy. And it just didn't occur to him. But if that's one measure of the racial intelligence quotient, perhaps, or even just identity intelligence or awareness, you can see that there's a lot of work. And I end up in the job, or on campus, and in these meetings doing a lot of emotional work that I thought I had put behind me.

Helena de Groot: And what about with your students?

Gregory Pardlo: Not with the students. The students are sharp. They're way ahead of me. (LAUGHS) I mean, they're very much conscious of the world, and they have their political views, and they have their sensitivities. What's interesting is how those sensitivities get expressed in the UAE, a place where political dissent is just, you know, unheard of, is unthinkable. But they [are] on campus, and obviously we try [to] cultivate an environment where students are thinking rigorously and critically. But it's nonetheless in the larger context of the UAE. So, they're coming from places where there are literal dictators. I mean, we talk about dictators here—they're actual dictators.

Helena de Groot: Yeah. And what do you see now about your life back home here that strikes you?

Gregory Pardlo: So, Brittney, the basketball player.

Helena de Groot: Who was in prison in Russia.

Gregory Pardlo: In Russia, yeah. Griner. So, when she got back—and I hope I'm remembering this correctly, but at any rate, this is how it lives in my head, whether it's true or not—she was standing for the national anthem, and she said, "No, my relationship to America is very different now." And which is not to say that one forgives anything, but I think, being in places where rights are understood—I mean, it's an abstract concept already, to have the right to do something, the right to free speech. It's a social fiction, no matter where you are. But the way that we think about those social fictions is very different here than in a lot of places. So, I don't feel any kind of political repression in the UAE, but I know there are things, I just don't say, I can't say.

Helena de Groot: Like, what?

Gregory Pardlo: Well, like queer for example, that is a word one does not use. You know, you don't talk about transness, you don't talk about sexuality. You don't talk about gender, because it leads to conversations about the "lines between genders." You certainly don't criticize the government. And there are books that I've ordered for class that don't get approved.

Helena de Groot: So, who's doing the approving or the not approving?

Gregory Pardlo: It's a ministry outside of campus. So, I can't get them into the country, in other words.

Helena de Groot: Wow! OK.

Gregory Pardlo: And again, we can talk about free speech around the world and celebrate what wonderful freedoms and rights we have in the United States. But no . . . (LAUGHS) There are clearly plenty of things one does not teach in the US, too. So, if it's gender there, it's—I mean, I say facetiously—but it's Black history here.

Helena de Groot: Yeah, yeah. Speaking of which, there's one thing that I'm always interested in when I'm talking to writers, and that's how sometimes, you know, one book is written to settle the dust that the previous book kicked up.

Gregory Pardlo: Kinda, yeah.

Helena de Groot: And the dust that I'm talking about in this case is your relationship to Blackness. Because in your previous publication, your memoir Air Traffic which came out six years ago, you write, "If I was raised black, for the most part, it was for economic reasons and apathy. Growing up, my family was not observant, preferring instead to derive our esprit de corps from the community of consumers we'd gather in fellowship with in the tabernacle of Macy's, the mead hall of Ikea. I am not, in other words, a practicing black." And I know I'm not the first one to ask you about that. (LAUGHTER) You probably had to answer a few people when you wrote that, I'm well aware. But here you are with your poetry collection, Spectral Evidence, which is deeply about Blackness in America, and how that affects how you see and are seen. And so can you walk me through what happened between these two books?

Gregory Pardlo: So, what I learned from Air Traffic is that irony is not always read, and subtlety, nuance in some cases, does not get picked up in prose in the way that it does and can, I think, in poetry.

Helena de Groot: Oh, that's so interesting.

Gregory Pardlo: I think readers of poetry are looking for what's not there. There is an understanding that there is a subtext, there's another layer of meaning. Readers of prose think what you see is all there is, right? And so when I write in Air Traffic, "I'm not a practicing black," my intention is to problematize the notion of race, is to question the notion of race as something biological. Right. It doesn't mean what it says on the surface, that I eschew my Blackness, or that I have a negative relationship to my Blackness. But that it is something that one . . . I want to be careful about this, as well, because that the discourse around race is so deeply entrenched that one slips into a kind of, "Oh, I know this kind of person. I know how this kind of person thinks. I know what the logic is." And there's a self-hating logic that, you know, there's one track that the person falls into, and we predict everything about the person. So, what I am hoping to get at, as I say, is suggesting a relationship to identity that is just not biological, I guess, and is not unquestionable. So, one can . . . Minefield! Mine!

Helena de Groot: I know (LAUGHS). That's why you are a writer. You know, you can think about it for a long time.

Gregory Pardlo: Exactly. I can write, can sit and play with it. So, let me, rather than try and make sense of Air Traffic, go to Spectral Evidence. So, the dust that you're referring to, what I'm trying to do in that book, in Spectral Evidence, is something similar, in that . . . There was a book called Racecraft by [Karen] and Barbara Fields. And in that book, the scholars talk about the metaphor of blood, that we talk about race as a blood heritage. We talk about patrilineality, I guess, as something that is in the blood. But as it's also constructed. What I inherit from a patrilineal sense—and I'm talking in a material sense, right, my father's property, my father's debts, perhaps—that kind of stuff is no more determined by nature. And this is what I really want to get at. Because one of the many, many things that frustrates me is the conversations around affirmative action and meritocracy, and this belief that "I worked hard," or "My grandfather worked hard." And behind that is the insinuation that your grandfather did not work as hard. And that enrages me. And the logic that I want to highlight—and I'm searching for ways to get around the deeply entrenched discourse—is that our circumstances are never wholly our own. I mean, our material circumstances. So, there's always history and there's always community. No one exists in isolation. And I think there's a way that as Americans, [with] this kind of celebration of the individual—in order to get there, we have to disassociate the individual from their history. And so while African Americans are deeply attached to their history because, you know, everything that produced us, we understand, is historical; the larger American community is trying to, you know, deny that history in order to suggest not that Black people are not oppressed, but that white people have earned their quote-unquote "privilege."

Helena de Groot: It's interesting, because the way that I read that initial quote, the one about "I'm not a practicing black," I was most focused on that part, you know, that your family derived your esprit de corps from this community of consumers, you know, "going to Macy's, going to Ikea." And I was taking this quote more in the sense of like, OK, it's not because I'm a Black man writing a memoir that it needs to be about my Blackness. Like, what I really wanna write about is our middle-class striving, or ambition, you know, as is the tagline of your book and my relationship to being a part of this kind of grander sort of consumer success or whatever, right? Like, you've made it when you can shop at these places. And it's interesting, because in Spectral Evidence, I see more of a through line, actually, than an opposition. There's this poem in there called "Theatre"—or there's a few poems—they're all called "Theater Selfie."

Gregory Pardlo: Right.

Helena de Groot: But I was wondering if you could read the one on page 68, because I think it also gets at that sort of, you know, what you can spend is what you are worth idea.

Gregory Pardlo: Can I borrow it?

Helena de Groot: Yeah, absolutely. Let me give you the book. There you go.

Gregory Pardlo: Thank you.

'Theatre Selfie."

At the Richard Rodgers Theatre, I shrank my face to the box

office window and confessed to the Lucite’s voice-vent

that I’d told my wife a lie. I had hidden no Christmas gifts

in the basement, nor yet acquired tickets to Hamilton

for my youngest as I’d boasted I would. The ticket

guy pshawed and, like a chilly neighbor, acknowledged me

enough to punctuate his snub.

But the seat map online, I pleaded, showed several vacant dots

in March. No seats, he snapped, and we went on like this until

I looked it up on my phone. Those? He snarled, you can’t—

His pause—its meaning irretrievable now—was heavy with

the ghosts of Broadway’s sins. It was as if a voice offstage

was force-feeding him the line: You can’t afford those.

His cheeks ripened to prove he’d heard it just

as I’d heard it, but that, for once maybe, he’d heard it in the way

that I’d heard it. Just then, his eyes were houselights

making me suddenly real. The veil had fallen between us,

and we two stood outside the magic. We were our only audience.

As one trained in this hackneyed improv, I knew that I might

dress the specter of his fear in comedy to save him. I needed

to draw him out of his head. You got kids? I asked.

He nodded, but I needed to hear the emotion in his voice.

What are you gunna do, huh? I laughed. It’s like, what do you want

from me? Am I right? And he mirrored me, shaking his head:

The things we do. He asked if I could bring my kid next Tuesday.

Hells yeah, I said, to prove that I could stay in character, though

I wasn’t sure where he was taking us. He bent to root

beneath his desk. Then the Lucite spit two miracles

he must have set aside for someone else. The selfie

we took that day tells a partial story. You see us, all teeth

and safe as bros. You see me holding the tickets like a peace sign,

but you could never guess the price we paid to get them.

Helena de Groot: That poem really messed me up. Like [at] the end, you know, what is really most unsettling is the intimacy between the speaker of the poem and this guy who's selling the tickets. Like . . . They're really having a, like a moment together, you know?

Gregory Pardlo: Yeah.

Helena de Groot: You know, "The veil had fallen between us." "We stood outside the magic. We were our only audience,"

Gregory Pardlo: So, now the veil is a W.E.B Du Bois reference, right? So he talks about race as a veil. And for a long time in my scholarly pursuits, I've wondered what is the veil? And Du Bois is very abstract about it. Is it in my head? Is it in the white person's head? Is it something that we two produce together? Do I need to be in communication with someone who believes they're white in order to produce the veil? And so that's one of the things that this poem is talking about. I get this idea of one who believes they're white from Ta-Nehisi Coates' Between the World and Me. Toni Morrison, very insightfully, talks about the Africanist presence in the white imagination. And I often think, what constitutes the Anglo presence in the Black imagination? And, you know, these are scholarly questions that one can't really ask in polite society. And you know, you point out the intimacy. I know this guy, me, the reader that is, I know this guy. I know both of these men very deeply, and they know one another very deeply.

Right? And so there's this pretense that we have nothing alike, we have nothing in common, we come from entirely different worlds. No, we created this world together. This dynamic is something that we both put a lot of effort into. You know, again, materially, this is not—clearly, you know, the African American gets the short end of the stick in terms of the material benefits of that relationship. But we are both in . . . Minefield! So many caveats that one has to kind of heap on. But I am really interested intellectually in carving out a space for myself on the page where I can ask these kinds of questions, that hopefully will not make my reader assume that I am equating Blackness and whiteness. Or, you know, creating kind of false equivalencies and denying, you know, the material histories that attach. But intellectually, these are the questions I'm asking.

Helena de Groot: But I think that's what I found so powerful about your book, is that it tackles scholarly questions, as you said, but it does so in a way that is not scholarly at all. You use tools, like this scene that we can all imagine—we've all been there, you know, on one side or the other, or observing. And you also use the tool of a play. There are several poems that in the shape of a play, with stage directions and so on. And that, too, really creates this kind of unveiling of this scripted interaction that we just keep recreating—different actors, same play, you know?

Gregory Pardlo: Yeah. I mean, it's Erving Goffman, right? The dramaturgical model of social interaction. The Shakespeare line, ". . . All the world's a stage," but that we are performing our roles. And I take to heart—this notion is something that my parents gave me, which I'm very grateful for—the idea that if—and again, I wanna be careful here—if someone gets inside my head, it's because I let them.

Helena de Groot: It's tricky.

Gregory Pardlo: Yeah, it's tricky. I was in Dakar a couple of years ago. Again, the cosmopolitan Black—what excites me about being in the world outside of the West, is that I can see a lot of the different ways that Blackness is experienced and expressed. And one of the participants in the conference said very plainly, you know, "I don't understand why Black Americans are so upset. I would never let racism bother me. It just wouldn't affect me." (LAUGHS) And yeah, that's absurd, we laugh, but I understand where it's coming from. I understand that the world that he sees does not have that load on the shoulders that I was talking about, you know, a while back. And so I don't want to suggest that one can very simply turn off the problems of the world, but I am interested, again, in the veil—what part of this relationship do I have control over? In any . . . Certainly in my marriage and in my relationship with my kids, in every fight, we both have something to carry. So, there was a time when I would very confidently say, "That person has done this to me, and I was a helpless victim, a passive victim in that relationship." And the cases that I'm thinking about, I was very much an active participant. Right. And then this work that I've done for quite a few years now as a recovering alcoholic, you know, with my therapist, has revealed to me how active I actually was, and how invested I was in the very outcomes that I lamented and, and decried. Again, in no way am I suggesting (LAUGHS) that the experience of race, gender, and sexuality are in any way equivalent. But from an intellectual perspective, I am curious, I am interested in at least asking the question, what do we get out of it?

Helena de Groot: It's such a great question. Because like in this poem, you know, there's this hesitation, almost this moment where you're like, "I guess this is where I make a joke," right? This is where I do that, so that he doesn't feel as uncomfortable.

Gregory Pardlo: I know this hackneyed performance. I've been here dozens of times. More than, certainly more than that.

Helena de Groot: Yeah.

Gregory Pardlo: I know it, he knows it. And again, I'm interested in making that silent discourse legible. You know, the dance, what we're doing. We know the rules and the "Yes, and" improv, and we are both engaged in it.

[BREAK]

Helena de Groot: I want to ask you about your father, if that's OK.

Gregory Pardlo: Sure, of course. Yeah.

Helena de Groot: It's been almost eight years now [since] he died. And so for people who haven't read the book, Air Traffic, what was he like? What were you like together?

Gregory Pardlo: So again, I think this is probably one of the root relationships that I'm referring to when I say we both had something invested in the dynamic. So I grew up blaming my father. He was this larger than life . . . blaming in a complex kind of admiring, loathing, shameful, all the emotions that I projected onto him . . . I come to learn, at an advanced stage now, that I needed him to be these things. To whatever extent he was, I needed him to be superlative. I needed him to be a kind of caricature of the reality. Because it took a lot of weight off of me. It allowed me not to do the kind of personal work that . . . It allowed me not to take responsibility for my own attitudes. And I think I asked myself somewhere in the book, you know, how much of my attitudes are mine, and how much did I inherit from him? My father, being the generation that he was, had some loathsome attitudes about women. And shamefully, I inherited those. I mean, he would deride me as this sensitive, evolved guy, you know. And I still recognize the imprint of the logic of his backwards-ass thinking. And there's something painful, in a grief sense, in that realization. Because as I am sort of unpeeling myself from his attitudes, I am also letting him go. And it's a difficult thing to do. And again, you know, what am I responsible for? In many respects, I'm responsible for taking on his attitudes because, again, that's what I needed him to be. And by allowing him his faults, I'm allowing him to be the complex individual that we all are. And not, you know, whatever figment of my imagination I needed him to be.

Helena de Groot: Yeah.

Gregory Pardlo: But, you know, blaming our parents is also a way of holding on to [them], right?

Helena de Groot: Oh, 100%. And you are right‚ it is a way of absolving ourselves or not having to look too closely. And as you said about that poem, about the theater tickets,what do I get out of sustaining this type of interaction. And what I found so remarkable in . . . Just imagining what it must have been like for you. So, OK, your dad dies while you're finishing up Air Traffic, which is about him, and you're not gonna rewrite the whole book, obviously—but now, you know, we're eight years on. And one big project of the book was that project of peeling yourself away from him, and trying to be like, "OK, but who am I?" And I'm wondering, in these eight years that have passed since Air Traffic came out, where are you in that process of individuating from him?

Gregory Pardlo: Much further along. I think I am—you know, one should always be suspicious of declaring . . . (LAUGHS)

Helena de Groot: "I think I'm there!" (LAUGHS)

Gregory Pardlo: "I've done it!" But I am confident that I'm in a place that is much healthier for me than had been. I think in this book, I am consciously using my father as—you know, I'm calling him Bacchus, right. Do I call him anything else? But I'm using him as a symbol in this book more consciously. I'm not trying to trick myself into believing that I'm actually representing the man.

Helena de Groot: That's so interesting, because that's such a big question about memoir writing in general, right? Like, what is your relationship to—especially after time has passed and you have some distance from the work—what is your relationship to the you that you had to create in this memoir, this character, you know? And what is your relationship to the character, your father, in the memoir?

Gregory Pardlo: Yeah. So, my teacher at Columbia would always say, "You make yourself a character." And I was, again, very conscious of the fact that the Greg Pardlo that I was constructing in the memoir was as much a figment as the father was. But I nonetheless believed I was getting at some—or, no, I believed that I wanted to get at some truth about my father. And I think where I am now is: I'll never get at a truth about him. I have truths about me, that exists in the way that I had constructed him. And, again, there's a kind of a letting go in admitting that the man will forever be opaque.

Helena de Groot: And—that process where he's become, or you've acknowledged, that he will forever be opaque. Do you feel closer or further away from him because of that?

Gregory Pardlo: I feel more at peace with him.

Helena de Groot: Yeah.

Gregory Pardlo: Right? Because, I mean, Keats' negative capability. I don't have this kind of reaching after . . . What is the line now? I'm forgetting it because I'm trying to remember it. But there's an annoying reaching after fact, right? I don't need to know. And so there's a peace in acknowledging the complexity, and accepting that complexity, and allowing it to be.

Helena de Groot: Do you think he had to die for you to get there?

Gregory Pardlo: I hope not. But I would say probably. Yeah.

Helena de Groot: Can we read one last poem?

Gregory Pardlo: Of course. Yeah.

Helena de Groot: It's the one on page 82. "'Convertible."

Gregory Pardlo: Yeah. (LAUGHS) Speaking of Dad. So let me read this.

"Convertible."

My pop let me steer when I was small

enough to snug between his belly and the wheel.

Any random intersection, he might hoist

me across the handbrake onto his lap to pilot

the wagon before returning me to earth.

As I got older, he'd make me steer

while he lit a smoke or shed his jacket.

His ashes arrived in a cardboard carton with

shipping labels and barcode, heavy enough

to trigger the seat belt alarm as we clipped home,

honeysuckle in the air, from the post office.

Any normal person would have put the box

on the floor, but I—you know already, don’t you?

I held him in my lap. “You’re mine,” I told

the box of dad dust, lifting my hands occasionally,

reckless to the wind, tempting the evening,

swinging our private chariot of steel and bone.

Helena de Groot: Thank you.

Gregory Pardlo: Thanks.

Helena de Groot: Gregory Pardlo is the author of three poetry collections: Totem, winner of the 2007 American Poetry Review/Honickman first book prize; Digest, for which Pardlo won a Pulitzer in 2015; and Spectral Evidence. He also wrote a memoir, titled Air Traffic. He's received fellowships from the New York Public Library's Cullman Center, the Guggenheim Foundation, the Cave Canem Foundation, the MacDowell Artist Colony, the New York Foundation for the Arts, and the National Endowment for the Arts. Pardlo is poetry editor at Virginia Quarterly Review, co-director of the Institute for the Study of Global Racial Justice at Rutgers University, and visiting associate professor of practice in literature and creative writing at NYU Abu Dhabi. To find out more, check out the Poetry Foundation website. The music in this episode is by Blue Dot Sessions. I'm Helena De Groot and this was Poetry Off the Shelf. Thank you for listening.