AL FILREIS:
I'm Al Filreis and this is poem talk at the writer's house, where I have the pleasure of convening three friends to collaborate on a close, but not too close reading of some poems. 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. What poems? 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 Penn Sound Archive writing.upenn.edu/pencil. Today I'm joined here in Philadelphia at the Kelly Writers Cells in our Wexler studio by Dagmawi Woubshet, scholar of African American literature and art working at the intersections of African American, LGBTQIA Plus and African Studies, whose 2015 book published by Hopkins, is 'The Calendar of Loss Race, Sexuality, and Mourning in the Early Era of AIDS'. And whose many other publications include the co-edited volume 'Ethiopia Literature, Art, and Culture, a special issue of Callaloo'. And who is. I'm so happy to note, a colleague here at Penn and by Whitney Trettien , who researches the history of the book and other text technologies from print to digital, who explores the past to better understand our present media environment and whose book 'Cut/Copy/Paste', University of Minnesota Press 2021 Journeys to the fringes of the London print trade to uncover maker spaces and collaborators where paper media were cut up and reassembled into radical bespoke publications, and who is also, as is Dag, a member of the faculty here at Penn, and by Divya Victor, special visitor coming from afar, whose amazing book 'Curb' Nightboat books won the 2022 PEN America Open Book Award and the 2022 Kingsley Tufts Poetry Award, who is the author of 'Kith', 'Unsub' and 'Things to Do with Your Mouth', whose work has been performed or installed all over at the Museum of Contemporary Art, MOCA, Los Angeles at the National Gallery of Singapore at MoMA in New York and elsewhere, who has traveled here today to be with us from Michigan, where she is on the faculty at Michigan State University and is director of the creative writing program there. And who, by the time people hearing this recording will have given that's the tense, will have given a reading here at the writer's house, which is to say, a few hours from the time we're recording this and the recording of that will be added to her already vast pens out page. Divya Victor, welcome back to Philly and to Penn.

DIVYA VICTOR:
Thank you Al. So great to be with all of you.

AL FILREIS:
And to the writer's house, how many times have you visited? Too many.

DIVYA VICTOR:
Feels like home.

AL FILREIS:
Yeah, that's great. Whitney. Hi.

WHITNEY TRETTIEN:
Hi.

AL FILREIS:
It's been a while since you were on poem Talk.

WHITNEY TRETTIEN:
It has, I think maybe 2017 or 2018.

AL FILREIS:
Do you remember the episode?

WHITNEY TRETTIEN:
I don't.

AL FILREIS:
We don't remember.

WHITNEY TRETTIEN:
I don't, I remember the picture taken after the episode because it was very unflattering to me.

AL FILREIS:
Oh, Whitney.

WHITNEY TRETTIEN:
But I don't remember.

AL FILREIS:
You remember all the wrong things.

WHITNEY TRETTIEN:
I know. It's really...

AL FILREIS:
And I'm embarrassed that I didn't look it up anyway.

WHITNEY TRETTIEN:
You don't remember either.

AL FILREIS:
It was really fun to have you. Dag. Hello?

DAGMAWI WOUBSHET:
Hey. Yeah,

AL FILREIS:
And you're. You were just on one, John Ashbery, some trees.

DAGMAWI WOUBSHET:
With Carlos Decena and Abdulhamit Arvas.

AL FILREIS:
And that was wild. I mean, we started off a little bit tentative, like we knew we were going to do a queer reading of that early poem by Ashbery. But because Ashbery had himself been a bit closeted, maybe more than a bit, we were hesitant. And then suddenly we were less hesitant and then we had a blast.

DAGMAWI WOUBSHET:
I can't look at trees and not think about cruising now.

AL FILREIS:
I know. And it was you who initiated the conversation. These trees are cruising. Well, today we four have gathered here to talk about two poems in Douglas Kearney's book titled Sho, S-H-O, which was published by Wave Books in 2021. The two poems we'll discuss are 'Welter' and 'Static'. The recordings will here have been recently added to Doug's pen sound page and in fact were made just for this poem Talk episode by Doug. So with gratitude to him for providing the DIY recording, here now is Douglas Kearney performing 'Welter' and 'Static'.
(VIDEO STARTS)

DOUGLAS KEARNEY:
In the US, news broke regarding the discovery of a mass grave of Rohingya Muslims at a human trafficking camp the same day as the first Mayweather-Pacquiao welterweight championship bout." This is my poem, Welter. Sic on it, cameras queasy green lush rush canopy, tilt down, thick bamboo cover twine bound, tilt down, welter, dirt's got rags to gag up, hijab stuck in dun incisors, zoom in and rack what's that flesh there, bone there bindled in cured skin, presence, fowl traffic, twittering pittas, bulbuls up ruffed, hum flies, flies plump as beans, boon, the snowy browed, rufous chested singsong, jungle jangle cut, their throats, rufous that was months and was that months ago, the camp boomed boom, get the boomed shotgun mic out the shot clean cut, there're too many damn birds, dirty cut, we can't use this wrap swelter, late, wait, later fight woot fight's tonight woot of the century tonight woot weight, Welters." Static. If we're base backward, pair of steps back's a progress. Left-foot, peg foot, here, a turnstile spiral into that ill quadrille, to a tune that loops till it cuts we stay attuned. Laps straight-up. Time double took the same-old boreal commute io what? Holler at us, vecinos. Who "move along"? When there is nothing to see here, we're there. Some static jump off our rootedness nukes tupper-worn memory for to grub its neck bone knuckles. We bent on gnawing though it does to def our hearts' condition steady knowing knowing recollection members hunches. That ol' "soon" we mint a "been." We take it, once again, from the bottom a-four, a-three, a-to, ago."
(VIDEO ENDS)

AL FILREIS:
Well, let's start with Walter. Why don't we do a lightning round? Everybody just say one quick thing about the way the words are deployed. The homophonic ness of the whole thing. Just observe a little bit about how that works. Whitney First.

WHITNEY TRETTIEN:
Yeah. Speed, direction, command, are things I'm thinking about. He read it a lot quicker than...

AL FILREIS:
You expected.

WHITNEY TRETTIEN:
Than I expected. Yeah.

AL FILREIS:
And read it a lot quicker than you did as a reader.

WHITNEY TRETTIEN:
Exactly. Because I have to read it slowly because it's really it's the language is itself very sonic. But you also trip up on it a lot because there's a lot of repeated consonants.

AL FILREIS:
Divya?

DIVYA VICTOR:
Yeah, I'm thinking of Montage, the assembly of shots that are taking place here, forced into a sequence. But at the same time, because of the way assonance is working, it feels like you're simultaneously also in a tracking shot.

AL FILREIS:
Perfect. Dag?

DAGMAWI WOUBSHET:
Yeah. In a similar vein, it's kind of unleashing the camera, but towards kind of violent, sinister ends. Right. So there's a kind of imperative to, you know, sic on it, zoom, rack, cut, directions a director would give. But here it has quite a sinister undercurrent.

AL FILREIS:
Yeah. Well, we could go anywhere. Why don't we go to the juxtaposition of the two momentary current events slash historical things that are put together simply because they occurred in the news on the same day. One, of course, is the infamous mass migration, which is associated with a genocide and the other is a welterweight championship bout. So, Divya, there's a classic juxtaposition and it's something that you do as well. So maybe you're the first one to talk about this.

DIVYA VICTOR:
Yeah, it's a. Juxtaposition and it's an enforced simultaneity at the same time, you know. So this discovery of the trafficking camp and the mass grave that happens in 2015, that's right at the border of Malaysia and Thailand. And the other, the match is taking place in Nevada. And I think that suggests something about the anticipated audience that Doug is sort of imagining.

AL FILREIS:
His audience?

DIVYA VICTOR:
Yeah, the audience of the poem. Right. I think about the armchair audience and the armchair witness and the difference between those two.

AL FILREIS:
What's the difference between the witness at a championship bout and the witness to genocide? Boy, that was the dumbest question. But alright, there is a difference. Can we talk about.

DIVYA VICTOR:
Yes. There is a difference between the spectator who is at the Mayweather Pacquiao match and the witness who is anticipated or imagined for this news story. But I think the poem suggests that no witness is really possible because of the kinds of simultaneity that is that it's enforcing.

DAGMAWI WOUBSHET:
Yeah. And that they could be on the same plane. To me, it's the kind of news entertainment world we live in that the violence of, you know, the discovery of this mass grave. And then the next segment would be this fight of the century.

AL FILREIS:
And in other news.

DAGMAWI WOUBSHET:
In other news. Right. So it's a not just a medium, but an entertainment news economy that puts these two violent endeavors on the same plane. And that's jarring, right?

WHITNEY TRETTIEN:
There is a kind of audience here, which is the birds right in the middle of the poem, who are you know, the presence, fowl traffic, twittering pittas, bulbuls up ruffed, hum flies, flies plump as beans. Like there's the kind of jingle jangle presence of people in the background watching or birds in the background watching this happen though.

DIVYA VICTOR:
It's interesting that you called them people.

WHITNEY TRETTIEN:
Yeah I. Know.

DIVYA VICTOR:
Because there is such a distinction between the individuation that's happening with the fowl or the birds and the massness and the density and the welter of what would be human or what was once human in the grave. Right. I think about how welter means a confused mass, a turbulent movement. And so it seems like these birds are just more individuated as compared to the humans.

AL FILREIS:
So we have cameras here and there's a camera right away. There's a zoom. There's a cut. There's a mic. Shotgun mic. So we really need to talk about the news coverage of genocide. Um, the mix of media. And of course, and this is not an unfamiliar topic, this idea that you need to get the boom shotgun out of the shot so that the, so that the mass death of the Rohingya can be naturally caught and not be postmodernist by the presence of a mic that pretend we're really seeing what's there. What is Doug trying to do by insisting that we think of ourselves as seeing this the way a Western camera would see?

DAGMAWI WOUBSHET:
Well, that first line, just in terms of the first instruction that we get, right? Sic on it cameras is that's what earlier what I was saying about unleashing the gaze and the camera for violent purposes, sickle as if you would sic a dog on somebody.

AL FILREIS:
Yeah.

DAGMAWI WOUBSHET:
Right? And so again, we see from the very first word of the poem, you know how he's using terms, puns, double meaning. So it could be, you know, keep watch on it. That could be unleash it in these violent ways.

AL FILREIS:
The speaker is either someone who really wants the witnessing to take place for the world. I don't think it's that, but that's possible. The other is this is a speaker who is implicated in what the media is doing to try to capture this horrific thing. So can we talk about the speaker? I mean, Doug implicates the speaker pretty clearly with all these imperatives.

DIVYA VICTOR:
Yeah. The voice of the director of the catastrophe.

AL FILREIS:
The director. Zoom in sick on it. Get the mic. You know, get the zoom the shotgun out of the shot. I've read many pieces of writing about genocide. I've never read one where the narrator or speaker is the director of the coverage.

DIVYA VICTOR:
Yeah. If I'm not mistaken, in 2015, the United States is still not recognizing the genocide. And I think there's something there about identification, attachment, proximity to the speaker and the sort of US American affiliation that Doug, of course, has as a citizen. Something about complicity, proximity happening there.

WHITNEY TRETTIEN:
I mean, I was looking for news at this moment to see how much this poem is being informed by some of the visuals, and I honestly couldn't find much US news media. So there's a kind of yeah, a director that's directing a film that also isn't being made for a US audience.

AL FILREIS:
Do we get much of the Welterweight championship bout in the language here? Can we? It's clear that we've got the Rohingya catastrophe in the language. Where do we get the boxing?

DAGMAWI WOUBSHET:
It's the anticipation of the fight. This is how I'm visioning it, visualizing it. Right.

AL FILREIS:
The media hoopla?

DAGMAWI WOUBSHET:
So you're watching a segment of news and there's this bit about the the massacre, right? These mass graves being dug. And then in anticipation, there was so much because the fight itself was quite disappointing. But the lead up to the fight and billing it as the fight of the century and the coin to be had and thatrillionun up, right? So there's a whole commercial, you know, enterprise to that fight. And also the juxtaposition for me, whose bodies are rendered to be, you know, a spectacle of violence. Right. We're talking about brown bodies, right? We're talking about two fighters of color. And boxing also has a long history of, you know, parading black bodies and that kind of violent sport for white entertainment and spectacle. Right. So I think of that juxtaposition to like how we cover violence and mass tragedy elsewhere in the world.

AL FILREIS:
You're suggesting that there is a relationship between these two very different news items. Duh. I mean, sorry to say that because it's obvious, but the first thing you think of is, wow, cool, hip 21st century poetry juxtaposition of these two very different news items. But you're suggesting a history that converges them.

DAGMAWI WOUBSHET:
Oh, yeah. Like I think of in Ellison's Invisible Man of the Battle Royale. Right? Like these black kids just, you know, fighting for life in a...

AL FILREIS:
For the scholarship.

DAGMAWI WOUBSHET:
For the scholarship. Right. But until someone is bloody and, so that like the inter boxing as a violent sport of non white bodies for consumption. Right. For enjoyment, for pleasure. But in that loop of the new cycle, all of it is jumbled up into meshed in a way that's hard to disaggregate, even for those of us who are thoughtful. Right?

DIVYA VICTOR:
That disaggregation seems possible in that question, zoom in and rack what's that flesh there, bone there bindled in cured skin. It's asking us to think about what is that flesh. Whose flesh? Which flesh? And zoom in and rack to to really sort of bring together that object, the weapon of torture, a rack and the camera at once, to me is that reference to history sort of collapsing or turning into itself.

AL FILREIS:
Whitney, Language like this, punning, homophonic, doubling or in the case of a word like Welter, you know, reminding us of the three or four meanings of Welter that we had forgotten are part of the English word. This does what's just been described. This language does allow convergence, mixing, lots of different levels and registers of vocabulary so that two very different things can be thought of together. This is what poetry does when it's doing it well. So I guess I would invite you first, Whitney, to just riff on that, find a phrase in this, in welter. We'll turn to Static in a minute. Find a phrase or a word that does that work and play it out for us through a kind of a close reading of soundings.

WHITNEY TRETTIEN:
Yeah. I mean, I had underlined cured skin, but partly because body and skin comes up so much in this book of poems, the just broken bodies like bodies as bags of skin, animals as bags of skin whose skin we don't respect. We wear it. It helps us. But with respect to that, I want to connect it to Welters at the end, the welt, we talked a little bit about the word Welter. This is, this book, we were joking about this before, sent us back to the dictionary, right? This poem sent me back to the dictionary, back to the OED, Welter being as has been brought up, a kind of large number of items in a confused mass, but related to welt, the bruise, right? But also there's this older meaning of welter meaning to lie steeped in blood with no help. Did you?
(CROSSTALK)

AL FILREIS:
I didn't get that far.

WHITNEY TRETTIEN:
Yeah. Yeah.

AL FILREIS:
So, Whitney. One of your welts, Welters, the one that's related to Welt is the provider, the maker of the welts. The Welter, which is a boxer. Oh, my gosh. So, Dag, take it up from there. Let's find some language that really does the work.

DAGMAWI WOUBSHET:
Yeah. You know, reading this poem, but also Doug's poetry. I love the moments where there's a disconnect between what my eye sees on the page and what my tongue does. Right? So a moment like jungle jackal, right? I want to say jingle jangle, right? Because, so there are ways in which he, the poem, the language questions are conventional pattern of speaking conventional grammar. But these association between eye, ear, tongue that he wants to call into question. So I love a moment like that where my tongue is saying something different from what is rendered on the page.

AL FILREIS:
So confusion that Doug is expert at creating.

DIVYA VICTOR:
Shadow Boxer. I really love the the phrase bulbuls up ruffed because of the that lovely distinction between that very liquid L and the sort of precise V and I love the way roughed up shows up alongside up roughed so does rough house. So between roughed up and rough house you have these various other kinds of volitional differences but are we engaged in consensual roughhousing or is this someone roughing me up, beating me up? And of course, it brings up Rufus, which, you know, shows up later in the poem. But reddish brown, right? The color of rust, the color of dirt, the color of drying blood. Which brings us back to Whitney, what you said about the older meaning of Welter or steeped in blood.

DAGMAWI WOUBSHET:
Yeah, just the two really powerful images for me that almost return the violence to the media image that we just simply gloss over is that the, he chopped, stuck and done and scissors. That's such a graphic image. Like I have to linger and reckon with that in a way that a passing media image may not, you know, echo that kind of deep emotion or the bindled in cured skin. Again, going back to this definition, Whitney, that you mentioned of, you know, lying steeped in blood with no help or care. Right? So there's, he does all this stuff with sound and with voice and modulation, but they're also these very arresting images of violence.

AL FILREIS:
Yeah, yeah. Yeah, that's exactly right. I want to turn to Static, but before that, let's do one more topic here. It's related to what you just said Dag. The question of photographs, photographic documentation, whether it's through the media and then used later as document or right at the time to document it for prosecution, etcetera. The question of photographs of mass murder, photographs of genocide is a big one. It's been much written about. What Doug does and you just suggested it is, he puts into words and sounds what a photograph might do, but in a way that would cause you not to notice the detail. I think the hijab stuck in incisors is exactly an example of that. So let's talk again for another minute or so about the photographing of genocide and what it has to do with what Doug is trying to do here. What are the problems inherent in that?

DAGMAWI WOUBSHET:
I mean, this is an obvious point, but you reproduce it. You reify the violence, right? If you're trying to maybe shock your viewers into awareness by, you know, illuminating something really violent is a great chance that the audience uses that violent imagery, to get off. Right. Because Violent has that kind of erotic charge, too.

AL FILREIS:
Along with the innocent, supposedly innocent goal of providing photographic, that is to say, objective documentation for, let's say, a Western audience who can see for themselves without rhetoric. But of course, it's all rhetoric. Photographing dead people, bodies is all rhetoric. Divya.

DIVYA VICTOR:
And that scope of phallic pleasure that the taking advantage of the image, right, is really interrupted I think in that last the conclusive line here, fight woot fight's tonight woot of the century tonight woot weight, Welters. So what, in a conventional conversation I imagine people who watch boxing, they would say, fights tonight, fight of the century tonight. woot. Right? But it interrupts that pleasure in that declaration.

WHITNEY TRETTIEN:
I was going to ask about that wooed because yeah, it's I mean, there's a turn here at the end, right? So the camera is being directed, cut, cut and then wrap swelter late wait later and we're back with people either were in a studio. I kind of two things in my mind either we're in a television studio and we're cutting to the fight or were the film, the people filming, you know, this moment who are cutting away from it and just turning away from it. Right. And becoming excited about watching the fight tonight, that woot, though, it's just kind of stuck in there without punctuation.

AL FILREIS:
Colon Welters, colon Welters. So who are the Welters at that point? I mean, I'll start, I think that the photographers, the photo documentary media hoopla people, the director the speaker is adding welts by these by this documentation. Colon Welters What else is possible for who Welters are? I mean, obviously the boxers.

WHITNEY TRETTIEN:
Boxers. Yeah. And those who lie steeped in blood.

DIVYA VICTOR:
Yeah.

DAGMAWI WOUBSHET:
I can't let Whoo go.

DIVYA VICTOR:
Right?

DAGMAWI WOUBSHET:
Because also, just again, in terms of how Doug minds the vernacular African-American vernacular, be it long arc of including contemporary culture. So immediately what, like in rap songs, the way woot shows up And I was thinking of, 'Whoomp, there it is'. Whoomp, you know, like, that's that's his. He can mine.

AL FILREIS:
That is a musical poet,

DAGMAWI WOUBSHET:
Exactly.

AL FILREIS:
For sure. Zach, I wonder, given that, I wonder if you would play for us the last line so we can hear how Doug does the woot and get a sense of that vernacular the way he wants to deliver it.

DOUGLAS KEARNEY:
"cut, we can't use this wrap swelter, late, wait, later fight woot fight's tonight woot of the century tonight woot weight, Welters."

DAGMAWI WOUBSHET:
At least to me it's like it. It's 90s hip hop and a sound you make as exclamation, right? It's like, boom. That also has a different meaning in kind of black vernacular, like, boom, that's bad. Or boom or woot, right? So just his love just for sound and what sound does.

WHITNEY TRETTIEN:
They're both very conclusive exclamations, like there's a termination of an intense feeling, both boom and whoomped.

AL FILREIS:
Let's turn to Static. Speaking of sound. So, you know, Doug Kearney is just about the best there is at what might be called sound poetry. This book show is more languagy than so much of what Doug has done, but he seems to be so ready for this because the sound poet Doug in the musical poet Doug is has been brought to this poem Static. So I guess we should first say what static means. Whitney, Static?

WHITNEY TRETTIEN:
Yeah. Static. Such a great word. Static being no movement, no action. Right. Something.

AL FILREIS:
Stasis.

WHITNEY TRETTIEN:
Stasis, Right. Static being an electrical charge, like friction between two surfaces that causes a spark, Right?

AL FILREIS:
There's at least two more.

WHITNEY TRETTIEN:
Yeah. Static being television static, right. Like electrical interference in telecommunications?

AL FILREIS:
Not getting, not quite tuning in to the right channel.

WHITNEY TRETTIEN:
Not quite tuning in, Right? Yeah. You haven't hit the hit the right button. Yeah.

AL FILREIS:
That which creates sound less pure than one sometimes would want. And finally, of course, colloquially interference. Somebody blocking you. Somebody keeping you from getting what you deserve.

DIVYA VICTOR:
Keeping you from moving.

AL FILREIS:
Keeping you from moving. And that's there. So the voices are many. And a little while a little ways into it, we hear the idiomatic voice of the police. Can we talk about that?

DIVYA VICTOR:
The move along.

AL FILREIS:
Move along. And there's nothing to see here, which is to say, don't look at what's going on.

DIVYA VICTOR:
Well, we're in a neighborhood and there's always police in the neighborhood, depending on the neighborhood you're in. Holler at us. Vecinos, neighbors, who move along. And I think it's the police are showing up very much in this, like ventriloquist quoted speech. They're being brought into the poem. They're being called into the poem. They're not already there.

AL FILREIS:
Which sense of static is being engaged there?

DIVYA VICTOR:
I think television static or what will become television static, because it's about the spectator and the spectacle and the we who are at the spectacle, even when there is nothing to see or where there is a claim that there is nothing to see. You know, And so my question is, who is supposed to be there when there's when they're not supposed to be the audience?

WHITNEY TRETTIEN:
There's also that flavor of the electrical static, right? I mean, you get a static charge when something rubs up against something that's insulated. So you can't get rid of the electrical charge. I'm trying to remember my basic basics about electric electricity here, but then we immediately get some static jump off, which put that spark into my mind. Some static jump off are rootedness, nukes, Tupper worn, memory. So we have a microwave here happening. Right? And like the kind of idea of something that's kind of warmed over and the in the printing here move along is in quotes so it kind of jumps off the page a little bit out of the out of the verse.

DIVYA VICTOR:
And to play with what Whitney brings up, some static jump off. The jump off. There is also a military term, right? It's the start of a campaign which then inflects the nukes away from the domestic and towards, you know, military violence.

DAGMAWI WOUBSHET:
Yeah. And that whatever, command by authorities, by police to move along also what that could spark. Right. A comment like that with that could spark. Yeah. So here and I can't help but think of static and stasis and progress. Right? Somehow defying, let's say, a narrative of progress because we seem to be in a state of stasis.

DIVYA VICTOR:
We are moving forward. We're moving backward.

DAGMAWI WOUBSHET:
Backward. Exactly.

DIVYA VICTOR:
We are bass ackwards. We are a pair of steps, backs of progress. So backs both in the sense of movement, direction, but also investment. So who is investing in this other definition of progress, which is really backwardness or bass awkwardness? And the image of progress seems to be in that turnstile spiral. Right?

AL FILREIS:
Which seems to be part of the commute, whatever it is, it's the same old commute. But to what? So this again, where are we going? What what is the daily ness of a commute when we don't know where we're going? I really love the idea that the, and you talked about resistance Dag, the demanding of a right to opacity for a sound poet becomes demanding the right to static as opposed to the purity of sound, which is, of course, in Welter. And I you know. I know that when Divya and I talked about what poet we should talk about in this. So you and I co-curated this, this important to you as opposed to do exactly this with sound. So let's go back to this, right to opacity is the resistance to defy the transparency of visual representation, which is a tradition in pictorial art, but also in poetry. But Doug is a sound poet, and static is the equivalent to opacity. Maybe I invite you to respond to that whole question. How resistant is that? How radical is that?

DIVYA VICTOR:
I mean, with static, we are between channels. We are en route to a channel and we are moving away from a channel, right. And so to me, it's about it's about the betweenness and the indeterminacy that one experiences between things.

AL FILREIS:
The sound is unclear. We don't know what station we're at speaking of commute.

DAGMAWI WOUBSHET:
Like a jammed up signal, right? Like maybe it's to...

AL FILREIS:
More noise than signal sometimes.

DAGMAWI WOUBSHET:
Yes.

AL FILREIS:
That's OK in art.

DAGMAWI WOUBSHET:
But to create that in the language, right. That's one way to interrupt transparency of meaning, right? Like if you could introduce something that jams up our ordinary kind of signal of communication, right?

AL FILREIS:
There's so much aural transparency out there. So this is a way of saying what a poem can do is to defy that. And that's where the cops come in. Nothing to see, you know. Move on, move on, move on.

DIVYA VICTOR:
Nothing to see, but so much to hear. You know, so much to pay attention to in the kind of triplet. Knowing, knowing, knowing. To be able to hear the difference in their rather than to move along from the visual, from the spectacle.

AL FILREIS:
So a lot of stuff with temporality here. We take it once again. Once again, Same old song, same old, same old. Also that all soon we mint a been. I don't know if he says being or been. There's a whole question of wait, wait, we can't wait. We've been waiting a long time.

WHITNEY TRETTIEN:
And yet the poem just loops right back to the beginning, right, from the bottom.

AL FILREIS:
A four, a three, a two, ago. Total punning.

DIVYA VICTOR:
And the we who take it right we take it again once again. It's like the start of the rehearsal again. I mean, and why do we rehearse? Towards perfection, Towards progress. But to take it also means, right, to absorb, acquiesce, to start over, to try.

DAGMAWI WOUBSHET:
Yeah. And I think of it loops back to that image of the turnstile spiral. Right. Again, again, again, it I mean just right now thinking of like defying the course progress has a linear, whatever, teleology like you start and you're moving, you know. But Psycho has a very different logic to it. And I was just now thinking of Langston Hughes poem about where is the Jim Crow seat in a in a carousel, right? Like, because you can have a Jim Crow seat on a bus that the back is right. But in a moving circular thing, how? Right. And it's a way of using a different kind of geometry to defy that linear hierarchical.

AL FILREIS:
So bass awkward is not reversed. It's not bottom and top. It defies the very notion of order or progress.

DIVYA VICTOR:
And that circular movement is, of course, in the microwave as well, the carousel that's inside the microwave where there is some static jump off. How do you jump off? How do you get off that carousel? And why is the memory that's on that carousel tupper worn?

AL FILREIS:
OK, let's go to rounds, all of us. The first round will be, say something that works for both poems. Create some kind of generalization about what Kearney is doing in this work. Put the two poems together and what do they add up to? That would be the first round. The second round will be final thoughts something that you came today to want to say but didn't have a chance to yet. So who wants to start with saying something about both poems?

WHITNEY TRETTIEN:
There's a kind of director in both of them. I mean, the ill quadrille, right? The dance. This is a dance that's going on the same that we've talked about, kind of the camera and direction and welter, the imperative...

DIVYA VICTOR:
The performers.

WHITNEY TRETTIEN:
The performers.

DIVYA VICTOR:
Because if there's a director, if there's a choreographer specifically of the quadrille, right, which is this 18th, 19th century dance of the colonies, then someone is assimilating. Someone is learning it to assimilate. And the same goes with the kind of assimilated viewer spectator of both the boxing match and the spectator of the televised catastrophe, which I think of, as, you know, a similar types of viewership.

AL FILREIS:
Dag?

DAGMAWI WOUBSHET:
And the similar gesture for me, again, the in terms of kind of sound poetry and heating sound, I love this line of that old soon we mint, we mint a bit. But the way he says it's meant and Doug's poem in general. But these these moments speak to me as a non-native English speaker who learned English at a late age.

AL FILREIS:
Meaning you.

DAGMAWI WOUBSHET:
Yeah. Which meaning me. So which meant that you're constantly mispronouncing things and you're trying to get your tongue to move in ways it's not intentioned to move or by accident. Sometimes these fortuitous connections that the tongue leads you there. And so just I love, it's like, can one heed once tongue or kind of one heed ones? Is it ear, is it? I love that he creates that kind of richness about what sound can do and meaning in its own right without kind of semantic, you know, backing.

AL FILREIS:
I'm really interested in the line in Static that follows who move along. When there is nothing to see here, we're there. This is really powerful. And it reminds me of Welter. Nothing to see. That's where we are. It's counterintuitive in the photography of mass death. That what is to be seen is not to be seen in a photograph like that. And when there is nothing to see, when there is no document in the case of this profiling, that the cops are pulling off here, you know, move along, move along, to keep the community from interacting with whatever, unfair or brutal thing they're doing that you could see, this is a way of preventing witness, preventing documentation. These poems are written at a time when that is a big issue in the United States. Who gets to see what's going on? In this case, the profiling cops and in this case, a few years earlier, the only way we get to see what's going on in Myanmar and vicinity is the news photographers that bring it to us because we can't see. And that's where we are. We're there and we're there as like an old, almost truest CBS, World War II era like you are there because of documentary media journalism.

DIVYA VICTOR:
Isn't that like a CNN tagline, like CNN were there?

AL FILREIS:
Were there.

DIVYA VICTOR:
It feels like it.

AL FILREIS:
I love. That. It's as vague as advertisements for Coke, you know. OK. Around now of final thoughts. So what one thing you wanted to say about Doug's poems but didn't have a chance to. And I'm looking at Divya's notes and thinking there's probably about 30 things that you want to say, but you'll think of one. Dag, do you want to start?

DAGMAWI WOUBSHET:
In general, now I'm moving away from these poems. Can I do that out?

AL FILREIS:
You can. Of course.

DAGMAWI WOUBSHET:
Alright. Well, the. I think the, you see this in the title poem Sho of stage and page, right? Like, especially when you hear recordings of Doug. Maybe these aren't to me the, you see how he's a performer inhabiting different voices, modulating.

AL FILREIS:
Is that what Sho means by the way? Performance?

DAGMAWI WOUBSHET:
Like yeah Sho meaning Sho but also like for sho. Like for sure.

AL FILREIS:
Sure.

DAGMAWI WOUBSHET:
Right? But that sense of a poet who clearly can command a reader on the page, but then when he when his words, when his score, when he's looking at his poems and reading it, the kind of exertion, intense, kind of unrelenting intensity and velocity in his work. So that's what I mean. In terms of anticipating our conversation, I've been thinking about how these poems do the kind of performance when Doug is reading, right, on the stage, how he does that on the page is something I find really fascinating.

AL FILREIS:
Perfect. Thank you so much, Whitney.

WHITNEY TRETTIEN:
That's really in line with something that that I wanted to bring up because we've talked a lot about the sound and the sonic texture of the poems, but you also have to look at the page while hearing the words, because so much is happening. I mean, even that line we were just talking about at the end, a four, a three, a two, the pun on two, a go, right. The pun on not a dash go, but or a hyphen go but a go long ago. Right. I mean, you could do this with every line bass awkward. Right. That kind of looks like awkward. We also have the spelling of bass, right? Like, every little turn of phrase lends itself to a kind of the the aural punning, but also just what you're seeing in the spelling and the punctuation to the poems that have to be read as much as they have to be heard and they have to be heard in multiple iterations because one performance doesn't do it justice.

AL FILREIS:
Divya.

DIVYA VICTOR:
You know, for me, the two poems really honor something that is present in so much of Doug's work, which is this kind of refusal of the victim par excellence, the individual or the myth of the individual victim, who we can then sort of empathize with and connect onto and project our pity onto. There is such a refusal of that in the kind of production of the mass, the group, the collective and the insistence on the we in Static on one hand and the Welter in Welter on the other. And I think that is just so important in his work.

AL FILREIS:
That's great. You guys are good at this. The final thought thing, my final thought is. Not nearly as interesting as all that, but I'm focused on a line we didn't talk about in Static. A tune that loops till it cuts. We stay attuned. You know, the poetry I admire is such that I can come across a line like that and think, that's a really important thing. I need to think about it. And then the more I think about it, the less I understand of what he's saying. He's certainly talking about certain kind of sound. And being attuned. Both is tuning up. But this is static, so it shouldn't be in tune. And then, of course, attuned is attention, which is what Welter is about as well. Well, we like to end pome talk with a minute or two of gathering paradise, which is a chance for us to spread wide, our narrow Dickinsonian hands to gather a little something really poetically good to hail or commend someone or something going on in the poetry world or the literary world at large, or the film world or the museum world or whatever. Who wants to go first? Divya, you look like you're ready for paradise.

DIVYA VICTOR:
I am so ready for paradise. And I've been finding my paradise in women who are writing about writing. The two books that are on my nightside table are Aisha Sabatini Sloan, very lush 'Borealis' and Amina Cain's book On a 'Horse at Night on writing'.

AL FILREIS:
Fantastic and say the two names again.

SPEAKER:
Amina Cain's 'Horse at Night on Writing' and Aisha Sabatini Sloan 'Borealis'.

AL FILREIS:
Fabulous. Whitney, gather some paradise.

WHITNEY TRETTIEN:
Yeah. I've been really interested in East Asian scripts and characters lately, in part because of a problem with how they've been technologized like interested in literally how, for instance, Chinese characters become Unicode, how they get encoded in digital technologies. So I'm reading Jing Tsu's 'Kingdom of Characters', which is all about how Chinese scripts both have and haven't been able to be accommodated by different technological systems and how that shows just how much has English has taken over, how we talk about and write in technology. So yeah, really interesting that also just I've been learning Korean and so as just for fun mostly and because kind of been listening to K-Pop and wanted to understand how the language works. So yeah, Jing Tzu has written a lot about Chinese characters and technology, and I'm just going to recommend diving into that if people are interested in

AL FILREIS:
Whitney, you just said you buried the lead on the Korean thing. You're such an intellectual. I didn't say scholar because scholars probably don't, first of all, listen to K-Pop and then learn Korean. You are such an intellectual.

DAGMAWI WOUBSHET:
I love it.

AL FILREIS:
You, that is so I so admire you. That is the greatest thing. That is a really cool.

WHITNEY TRETTIEN:
I saw a print historian, you know, East Asia got to it before we did. So I felt this real call like I have to learn more than my training gave me. But...

AL FILREIS:
That's great. And how are you learning Korean?

WHITNEY TRETTIEN:
Through a program called Preppy, where there's a very nice tutor named Seung Hui in South Korea and we meet once a week and speak.

AL FILREIS:
That's fantastic. Dag, can you top that?

DAGMAWI WOUBSHET:
No, I could not and will not even try.

AL FILREIS:
OK. But you got your own paradise.

DAGMAWI WOUBSHET:
Yes. So the book came out maybe a year or two ago, but I'm just getting a chance to to read it. Canisia Lubrin, 'The Dyzgraphxst'. And this is a poem, a poet I recently met over the summer and I heard her read a poem from this collection. And I find her incredible and fascinating and just the, you know, someone interested in lyric, but how someone who's messing with the eye and all these different ways. She is a Saint Lucian poet who lives in Canada now and I think just incredibly talented. And I'm moved by her work and her poetry.

AL FILREIS:
Great recommendation. Thank you. Well, I have two recommendations pertaining to the whole vexed question of photography and genocide. The first is an article I read years ago and just reread by Frank Möller called ‘Rwanda Revisualized Genocide Photography and the Era of Witness', and it was published originally in Alternatives Global, Local, Political. And the other is a really famous reference. This is Susan Sontag's 2003, her second of two books on photography called 'Regarding the Pain of Others'. And she writes “and photographs of the victims of war are themselves a species of rhetoric. They reiterate, they simplify, they agitate, they create the illusion of consensus.” Susan Sontag Holy cow. Well, that's all the rufous chested sing song we have time for on Poem Talk today. Poem Talk at the Writers House is a collaboration of the Center for Programs and Contemporary Writing in the Kelly Writers House at the University of Pennsylvania and the Poetry Foundation, PoetryFoundation.org. Thanks to my guests Whitney Trettien, Divya Victor and Dag Woubshet and to Poem Talk’s director and engineer today Zach Carduner and to poem Talks editor, the same amazing Zach Carduner. Next time on Poem Talk, I'll be talking with Chantine Akiyama Poh, Henry Steinberg, and Murat Nemet-Nejat about Dodie Bellamy's fairly new piece, ‘Vomit Journal’. This is Al Filreis and I hope you'll join us for that or another episode of Poem Talk.