Phosphorescence: Special Edition, A Poetry Event with Victoria Chang and Tyehimba Jess
- I just want to welcome you to this special edition of Phosphorescence, which is a a monthly event presented by the Emily Dickinson Museum. You can find past programs on our website, which is emilydickinsonmuseum.org. You'll also be able to find the new lineup, the 2023 lineup on that website in a few weeks. So I'm Jane Wald. I'm the executive director of the Emily Dickinson Museum, which is owned by the trustees of Amherst College. It's located just two blocks north of here on Main Street, and it's a real privilege to welcome Victoria Chang and Tyehimba Jess to Amherst College's 2023 Lit Fest. Now in its eighth year, Lit Fest is sponsored by the Center for Humanistic Inquiry at Amherst College, the Common Magazine and the Emily Dickinson Museum. And it's made possible by the generous support of the Croxton Lecture Fund and especially the amazing efforts of the college's offices of conferences and special events. Emily Dickinson's Lexicon, which for years she once said was her constant companion, defined phosphorescence as a faint light or luminousnous of body unaccompanied with sensible heat. So to Dickinson, phosphorescence was a kind of a shimmering mystery, a transformative essence that in her own language, elevated plain print vitalics, facts to real learning and prose into poetry. Now, Dickinson didn't use this word casually. She placed it carefully in a letter to one of her most treasured and admired friends, Samuel Bowles, who was editor of the Springfield Republican, a leading newspaper of the day. She wrote, "You're coming welds anew, that strange trinket of life, which each of us wear and none of us own, and the phosphorescence of yours startles us for its permanence, a permanence that phosphorescence really wasn't supposed to have." That was its rarefied significance to Emily Dickinson. And by the way, when she talks about his coming, that reference was evidently his attendance at the 1875 Amherst College commencement. So in that vein of luminous phenomenon, the Phosphorescence Poetry Reading series celebrates creativity and all the flourishing diversity of today's contemporary poetry scene. And that echoes the spark of imagination in Emily Dickinson's own revolutionary poetic voice. So with us today are two remarkable poets, Tyehimba Jess and Victoria Chang. So welcome to you both, and on behalf of New England. I apologize for the five degrees last night and hope you find a warm place later on. Victoria Chang is the author of "The Trees Witness Everything," published just last year, it was named one of the best books of 2022 by the New Yorker and the The Guardian. Her non-fiction book, "Dear Memory," was published in 2021 and was named a favorite non-fiction book of 2021 by Electric Literature and Kirkus. "Obit" came out in 2020, and was named a New York Times notable book, a Time, must read book, and received the Los Angeles Times book prize, the Anisfield Wolf Book Award in poetry , and the PEN Faulkner Award. It was also long listed for the National Book Award and named a finalist for the National Book Critic Circle Award and the Griffin International Poetry Prize. Her previous books include "Barbie Chang," "The Boss," "Salvinia molesta" and "Circle," and she's also written and published at least two children's books, "Love, Love," and "Is Mommy," as well as an anthology of Asian American poetry. Victoria's forthcoming book of poems, "With my Back to the World" will be published next year. She's the recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship and lives in Los Angeles, is a distinguished faculty within Antioch's low residency MFA program. So we're delighted you're with us Victoria. Thank you. And I'll also introduce Tyehimba Jess before we have readings from from both of our guests. Tyehimba Jess is the author of two books of poetry, "Leadbelly and "Olio." "Olio" won the 2017 Pulitzer Prize, the Anisfield Wolf Book Award, the Midland Society Authors Award in Poetry, and received an outstanding contribution to publishing citation from the Black Caucus of the American Library Association. It was also nominated for the Books of Critics Circle Award, the PEN Jean Stein book Award and the Kingsley Tufts Poetry Award. "Leadbelly" was a winner of the 2004 National Poetry Series, the Library Journal and Black Issues Book Review both named it one of the best poetry books of 2005. Tyehimba Jess is a and NYU Alumnus. He received a 2004 literature fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts, and was a 2004/2005 winter fellow at the Provincetown Fine Arts Work Center. Jess is also a veteran of the 2000 and 2001 Green Mill Poetry Slam team, and won a 2000 2001 Illinois Arts Council Fellowship in poetry. He also had a Whiting fellowship in 2006. He presented his poetry at the 2011 TEDx National Nashville Conference and won a 2016 Lannon Literary Award in poetry, and is also the recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship in 2018. He's the professor of English at the College of Staten Island, and his fiction and poetry have appeared in numerous journals as well as numerous anthologies. So please welcome Tyehimba Jess. So I've asked Victoria and Tyehimba to read from their work and then we'll invite your questions and discussion with them. There are a few copies of their books available at a table in the back, near the door, and after the program they may be happy to sign books for you. And unfortunately, there aren't as many copies as we'd hoped due to some unforeseen circumstances. So we encourage you to pick up your own copies later or order from bookshop.org. So Victoria, can I ask you to get us started with some poetry?
- Thank you so much for coming. Thank you so much, Jane, for inviting me and it's such an honor and pleasure to be on a stage with you today. I'm just going to read for a little bit, I'll keep an eye on my watch and I'll just be reading from those three books that that came out in succession and I think of as sort of someone mentioned it to me, they thought it was kind of like a trilogy and I thought maybe that's a good way to think about it. So I'll just start with a few poems from my book "Obit," and there's really nothing you need to know except that my mother passed away a pulmonary fibrosis and my father had a stroke, and they had both since passed away, but lots of, they appear in all of these poems. Music, died on August 7th, 2015. I made a video with old pictures and music for the funeral. I picked Hallelujah in acapella because they weren't really singing but actually crying. When my children came into the room, I pretended I was writing. Instead, I looked at my mother's old photos, the fabric patterns on all her shirts, the way she held her hands together at the front of her body, in each picture, the small brown purse that now sits under my desk. At the funeral, my brother-in-law kept turning the music down. When he wasn't looking, I turned the music up because I wanted these people to feel what I felt. When I wasn't looking, he turned it down again. At the end of the day, someone took the monitor and speakers away, but the music was still there. This was my first understanding of grief. My mother's teeth died twice. Once in 1965, all pulled out from gum disease. Once again, on August 3rd, 2015. The fake teeth sit in a box in the garage. When she died, I touched them, smelled them, thought I heard a whimper. I shoved the teeth into my mouth, but having two sets of teeth only made me hungrier. When my mother died, I saw myself in the mirror, her words in a ring around my mouth, like powder from a donut. Her last words were in English. She asked for Sprite. I wonder whether her last thought was in Chinese. I wonder what her last thought was. I used to think that a dead person's words die with them. Now I know that they scatter looking for meaning to attach to like a scent. My mother used to collect orange blossoms in a small shallow bowl. I passed the tree each spring. I always knew that grief was something I could smell, but I didn't know that it's not actually a noun, but a verb that it moves. Let's see, maybe I'll just read one more from this book and then I'll move to something else. Grief, as I knew it died many times. It died trying to reunite with other lesser deaths. Each morning I lay out my children's clothing to cover their grief. The grief remains but is changed by what it is covered with. A picture of oblivion is not the same as oblivion. My grief is not the same as my pain. My mother was a mathematician, so I tried to calculate my grief. My father was an engineer, so I tried to build a box around my grief along with a small wooden bed that grief could lie down on. The text kept interrupting my grief, forcing me to speak about nothing. If you cut out a rectangle of a perfectly blue sky, no clouds, no wind, no birds, frame it with a blue frame, place it face up on the floor of an empty museum with an open atrium to the sky, that is grief. So I will read, I'll switch to this book called Dear Memory. And when my mother passed away, I thought, oh, I'm done writing about her. And then I found all these boxes in the garage and there were a lot of cool papers in there that I found. I, you know, knew my grandmother's name, knew my grandfather's name, knew what city they were born in, things that I didn't know. But what I didn't expect was having all this information only led to more questions and more grief. So I just started writing a letter to my mother and then it just opened up all these epistolary things that I wrote with some collaging and to teachers, to all sorts of things. And so I'll just read the first one. It's called Dear Mother. I have so many questions. What city were you born in? What was your American birthday? Your Chinese birthday? What did your mother do? What did your grandmother do? Who was your father, grandfather? It's too late now, but I would like to know. I would like to know why your mother followed Chiang Kai-shek, taking you and your six or seven siblings across China to Taiwan. I would like to know what was said in the planning meeting. I would like to know who was in that meeting, where that meeting took place. I would like to know the people who were left behind. I would like to know if there are other people who look like me. I would like to know if you took a train, if you walked, if you had pockets in your dress, if you wore pants, if your hand was in a fist, if you held a small stone, if you thought the trees were black or green at night, if it was cold enough to see your breath, to sting your fingers. I would like to know who you spoke to along the way, if you had some preserved salty plums, which we both love, in your pocket. I would like to know if you carried a bag, if you had a book in your bag, where you got your food for the trip. Why I never knew your mother, father, or your siblings. I would like to have known your father, to know what his voice sounded like, if it was brittle or pale, if it was blue or red, to know the sound he made when he swallowed food. I would like to know if your mother was afraid. During college, I spent several weeks with her in Taiwan. She bought me bao zi or buns every morning. The bao that steamed in small plastic bags with no ties and sweet dou jiang, tofu milk, always too hot for me to drink. She sat there and watched me eat. Complained to me about your brother's wife, complained of being sick and how no one would help her. Do you know how long it took me to figure out how to call an ambulance? And then when they came, she refused to go. I still remember how the two men stared at me, as if I could move a country. Listen, it's the wind, that's the same wind from your countries. Sometimes if I listen closely at night, I can hear you drop a small bag at the door. I hear the sound of the bao touching the ground and the wind trying to open the bag. But when I open the door, there's nothing there. Just the same wind, thousands of years old. Happy birthday wind. Happy birthday mother. April 6th, 1940. I know this now. All the nurses, doctors and morticians asked me, so I memorized it. Your American birthday, April 6th, 1940. I said again and again as if I had known this my whole life. And then I'll just read a few tiny poems. I call them miniature poems. And they're from this book, "The Trees Witness Everything." And they are syllabic poems. So they're all in syllables. And yeah, I'll just read a few, and then I'll read maybe like one new poem, and then we'll be done. And these poems also use W.S. Merwin's poems as titles. So as if to, I constrained myself doubly so. Far along in the story. Once I sat in rain, opened my mouth to the sky, I yearned to be changed. Each drop was a small knife. At first I fainted. But when I woke up, all the ticking had gone. And all the centuries were one. My choices no longer hurt. Losing a language. We were born with a large door on our backs. When will we know if it opens? Snowfall. We say the snow falls, but it really seizes. Because it is light, it takes seven years to grab. By the time it does, the old wars are over and my mother is dead. But it lands on the new wars, melts on a different mother. Still morning. No mornings are still, the newly dead move the most. They force flowers to dilate. Rain at night. To be the last drop of rain each night is sadness. It shuts the last door and jumps. The gods. The fact that leaves can't be put back on trees makes me think that you do not exist. The lovers. There is a wildfire starving on top of a lake. See how the water holds fire but cannot end it. We insist on love, when all we want is mercy. And I'll read one more. This is my reading packet from the Zoom reading days. So that's why I'm flipping through all of these. So yeah, I wrote this book that are all ecrastic poems, and those are poems written in response to any kind of artwork really. And I wrote poems in conversation with the poet, the artwork of Agnes Martin. And I'm sure many of you know her, but if you don't, she's, she works in these grids sometimes, and I just love her work so much. This one is called Friendship 1963. And the pieces in the MoMA, it's huge. It's 10 by 10, and it's one of two pieces she made using gold leaf. So it's shimmers and it's one of the most beautiful things I've ever seen in my life. So I'll just read this to you and then look forward to hearing you read. Friendship 1963. I came to the city so I could see gold, but when I arrived, the leaves were gold too and I became confused. I called the front desk four times and Angel answered each time. By the third call, he ended with, "talk soon." In the morning a different man answered and I burst into tears. On 53rd street, small children kept on running into me. A father yelled so loudly at the boy on the scooter that I thought he knew I was carrying death on my back. By the time I arrived at the museum, there was a long line. The bald man in front of me kept turning around to look at me. I could tell by his forehead that he could hurt me. When I finally found the room, I was the only one in there. Everyone else was below me in the Picasso room. While I stared at the gold rectangles, two attendants talked about whether to work overtime and get paid time and a half. I wanted to tell them that there's no such thing as time, just time and a half. Sometime in the night, Etel Adnan had died. I had just seen her paintings the day before. The crowds were large and I wondered whether our looking had accelerated her death. When I took a photo of Agnes's piece, I saw my dark reflection on the gold. I started counting the grids, but the bald man came up next to me. Suddenly there are two dark shadows on the gold. I asked him to step away, but when he said no, it was Agnes's voice. Thank you.
- Thank you so much Victoria. Thank you. And Tyehimba, would you share some from your work?
- Well, phosphorescence, that was indeed phosphorescent. Thank you Victoria, that was very moving. I have to say I've read Obit in particular several times and taught it to my students. And if you haven't read that book in particular, I would say it's very, you know, it's a very moving experience. In the spirit of rolling with the 1800's, so to speak. I'm going to reach back in the 1800's with some Dickinsonian contemporaries from Olio. And this one in particular is a interesting gentleman that's a Blind Boone. Blind Boone became a very famous piano player. However, when he was born at the age of six months in 1865, caught encephalitis and that's swelling of the brain. And if you don't cure that you will die. The only cure that they had for encephalitis minus, you know, didn't have any antibiotics or any penicillin. The only cure the doctor had to relieve the pressure on the brain, was removal of the eyes. So that's how he became Blind Boone. But he ended up being a very, very successful piano player. Blind Boone's Blessings. Bless the fever in that night, in the sixth month of my life, bless the fever for it gave me sight. It swolled my brain to fit God's gift. It brought the hand that would lift each eye from my infant skull. Bless the sweat, my baby ball, bless the horse that hauled the surgeon through dusk dark half drunk and swearing into mine. Bless the flame, it's sterilized the metal of the spoon. Bless the path between lid and bone. Slipped and slid by that instrument of my deliverance from sight. Bless the handling of the knife. Bless that night that gave me night, wrapped it 'round my bloody face, whispered how I could be grace notes, arpeggios a piano roll of sound, copying each note from everything around me. You see, I'm sure at first there was the hurt and the scalding pain. But then again, bless an infant's too short memory. All I know is what lies beyond light. I've learned this is what's right for this one right here. Yes, bless the fever, then listen close, spare an ear to this piano and shut your eyes closed. So I was curious, how do you tell your, how do you tell your kid, mommy, how did I get blinded? What happened to my eyes? And this poem is about that. Blind Boone's Vision. When I got old enough, I asked my mother, to her surprise, to tell me what she did with my eyes. She balked and stalled, sounding, unsure for the first time I could remember. It was the tender way she held my face and kissed where tears should have rolled. They told me, I'd asked of her the almost impossible. To recount my blinding tale, to tell what became of the rest of me. She took me by the hand and led me to a small sapling that stood not much taller than me. I could smell the green marrow of its promise, reaching free of the soil, like a song from earth's royal dirty mouth. Then mother told me how she newly freed, had prayed like a slave through the night when the surgeon took my eyes to save my fevered life. Then got off her knees come morning to take the severed parts of me for burial, right there beneath that small tree. They fed the roots climbed through its leaves to soak in sunlight. And so she told me, I can see. When the wind rustles up and cools me down, when the earth shakes with footsteps and when the sound of bird calls stirs forest like the black and white bustling 'neath my fingertips, I am of the light and shade of my tree. Now ask me how tall that tree of mine has grown to be after all this time. It touches a place between heaven and here. And I shudder when I hear the earth's wind in my bones through the bones of that boxed up swarm of wood, bird, and bee, I let it loose and beyond me. This Blind Boone, interesting fella. Lived to a ripe old age, as a piano player, played rag time and all kinds of other tunes, whatnot. One of the many characters in this Olio. I think I'll read a couple more from, perhaps from someone else in the book, and one of those folks, so contemporary of Dixon. Well you know what I think it'd be good to pay homage to the first black singing super group with, of international renown. Who traveled the world and were, you know, and really are still singing today. I talk of the Fisk Jubilee singers who are the real first propagators of the what is known as the Negro spiritual. Out of Fisk University, talkin' 1871, roughly teenagers. I tell my students they're the age of my students, That really gets 'em, because they were, and they were nine young, ex-slaves who didn't have much to do, didn't have any Xbox, or any internet to entertain 'em after classes, so they sang to each other. They sang cabin songs and they sang spirituals. Eventually they went around the world on a missionary task, both one of religion and one of proving the humanity of black people. So this is a Fisk Jubilee proclamation. And accompanying each one of these, these poems is a listing of black birch churches that were burned to the ground throughout American history. So let's just, I'm going to take a moment and say this one is dedicated, amongst others to a Mother Emmanuel AME Church in Charleston, South Carolina, 1822 Cross Ankle Church in Palm Meadow, Georgia, 1899 Greenleaf Presbyterian Church in Keeling, Tennessee, 1900 Red Top Church in Hopkinsville, Kentucky. 1915 First Baptist Church in Cadre, New Jersey. 1926 Fisk Jubilee Proclamation, the epigraph from the Bible. Psalm 96, oh sing unto the world a new song. Oh, sang undo the world with blued song, born from newly free throats. Sprung loose from lungs, once bound within bonded skin. Scored from dawn to dusk with cawful and lash, every tongue unfurled as the bodies flag, every breath conjured despite loss we've had. Bear witness to the birthing of our hymn from story depths of America's sin. Soul worn Psalms, blessed in our blood through dark lessons of the past struggling to be heard. Behold the bold sound we found in ourselves that was hidden, cast out of the garden of freedom. It's loud and unbeaten, then soft as a newborn's face. Each note burst in loose from human bondage. Fisk Jubilee Singers. Maybe a couple more. I think we got, yeah, couple more we got. And this one I think how we doing you all good? I like to take a pulse, make sure there's-
- [Jane] Keep going.
- They ain't snoozing on me, ya know? Poetry- People think you know. Anyway... Edmonia Lewis, I was fascinating in that she was probably the most successful African American visual artist of her time. Native American and black. Born not far from here in upstate New York. Went to Oberlin College, didn't have the best of times there. Eventually left, went to, went overseas to Greece to really experience the carving out the stone and actually, you know, claiming the stone for herself and started a sculpting career, eventually was very successful, had commissions of $50,000 or so back in the 1800's. So, this is one of her sculptures. This is from the perspective, I did a series from the perspective of the sculptures. This one is one, Hagar in the wilderness. If you remember Hagar from the Bible. I ain't getting, it's Saturday, ain't Sunday, but I ain't trying to get too Bibley on you. But, here we are, Edmonia Lewis Marble, 1875. My God is the living God, God of the impertinent exile, an outcast to carve me into an outcast, carved by sheer and stony wheel to wander the desert in search of deliverance, the way a mother hunts for her wayward child, God of each eye, fixed to heaven, God of the fallen water jug of all the hope of vessel holds before spilling to barren sand, God of flesh, huned from earth and hammered beneath a will immaculate with the power to bear life from the lifeless, like a well in a wasteland, A maid in the image of a God that knows flight, but stays me rock still to tell a story ancient as slavery, owed as the first time hands clashed together for mercy and parted to find only their own salty blessing of sweat. I have been touched by my God in my creation. I've known her caress of anointing callus across my face. I know the lyric of her post across these lips and yes, I've kissed the fingertips of my dark and mortal God. She has shown me the truth behind each chisel blow that's carved me into this life. The weight any woman might bear to stretch her mouth toward her one true God, her own beaten marble song. So. Maybe, I think I'll leave it at that.
- [Jane] Okay, thank you.
- Thank you.
- So I see over both these seats to my left, this kind of cloud of luminescence that we've been, that we've enjoyed this this morning. So in a, we'll take questions from the audience. There's a microphone right here in the center aisle, and if you have a question for either of our guests, please just approach the microphone and we'll, take the questions in turn. And perhaps while you're thinking of your question, I can begin with one that, you know, your works are so distinct from each other, but in a setting like this, of course, we're always tempted to wonder where the overlaps are. And your works are about telling stories, about uncovering histories, about memory and witness. And so I have taken a couple of lines of yours. So Victoria in "The Trees Witness Everything," your poem, 'It is March,' ends with this question, "How do I live in the past, but right about tomorrow?" And in "Olio," 'Jubilee Mission," which is one of the Fisk Jubilee Singers entries ends with this, "Our home is our voice gathered and honed and wedded and sharpened, cutting slave days down to sermon up salvation." So I, for each of you, I think there's a, there's kind of urgency to memorialize and preserve stories that express identities and create legacies for those who come after us. Is, and I wonder if you could comment on that. Is that what sort of one of your main goals or how do you see that?
- Yeah, I mean it's so interesting and fascinating to hear you read because I learned so much just from hearing you read your poems and had all these things that crackled in my brain because I actually write a lot about historical figures, or I've written a fair number of persona poems and I'm was a, his, an East Asian Studies, so an Asian History major in college and am interested in things that have happened, uncovering things that people don't know about stories. And right now I'm working on a longer poem called Eureka, and it takes place in Eureka, California where the Chinatown was burned down. And yeah, I've just been thinking a lot about that when I was in the Emily Dickinson bedroom this morning working on a poem and how it was kind of around the same time period. And so I was thinking about just all these intersections of time and history and memory and story. And so that's constantly on my mind and interested in history, my own history, personal history in the recent books, but also, you know, how we fit into the scheme of history and what our responsibility is or interest and or interest to bring these stories forward.
- Oh wow, that was a great answer. I think, I hear the history in your work, Victoria, I really do. I feel, and I was thinking about the poem you were with the poem or the writing that you had, that had these questions for your mother about where she was from and who was making the decision to make this journey, these various journeys and at these various decision points. And I think attached those questions are how were they feeling? How did they process these decisions? What was going on in their lives? And those are the many of the questions that I am thinking about when I'm writing about folks from the past. Because in many ways, they're making sim decisions that are similar to the ones I'm trying to make today. They may not, the ones I'm making are very, you know, clearly in my mind they're not as desperate so to speak. They're not as, there's not the life and death kind of gravity behind the decisions, but in certain ways their decisions about, you know, how to carry one's work forward, how to work and walk with integrity, how to preserve one's mission, so to speak. And all of those things are really very interesting to me. I think one other thing that I think, I was thinking about when I was listening to you, Victoria, is the element of surprise, which is something I encounter so often in reading your work and going in one direction and then all of a sudden, wait, oh, I did not expect this to happen or that to happen. I'm talking about line by line, word by word. You're going one place and then you're, suddenly you end up in another place. And I think that is a really, that is an element that I, it's, it can be hard to think like that when you already know the course of somebody's entire life, you know, when you already know what's going to happen. But then, but, and I think that surprise happens in the middle of creation, you know, so it's in the discovery for the author as well as the reader, hopefully.
- That's so interesting, I've been thinking so much about what you've been saying because in my, I have a Saturday morning poetry group and we're called the Unicorns and we meet every Saturday to talk about poems and we are reading Muriel Rukeyser's Book of the Dead or poems from there. And I, that's exactly what I was thinking about, like how do you write about history and atrocities and in Rukeyser's time, you know, current events related to a mine. And when you know the answer, you know, you know the outcome, you know what happened, like how do you make art with that? And you can, cuz she did. And you have and you know, I have, but it's difficult. Like it's one of the challenges when you're making art based on historical events and yeah. And I see a lot of the elements of surprise in yours through sonic elements, like from word to word I see how those your brain is moving from language to language, sound to sound, to sort of transform the direction of the poem in unexpected ways. And, but yeah, that is what I've just been kind of mulling over in my head a lot, so I appreciate that.
- Yeah, thank you, that was tremendous. Very interesting and brings me back to kind of the difference between memory with a kind of interior purpose and witness with kind of a public and political goal. So we are joined with an by an online audience and some of our viewers have sent in some questions. There are a couple about inspiration. Where you get inspiration and who is your go-to poet for inspiration and the pure joy of poetry?
- Well, inspiration, okay. I would say for myself, a lot of inspiration has come from the music so to speak, capital T, capital M music and an attraction to black music. And, its, and the way it has carried us, and salvation us in so many different ways, but also in the people behind the music and what and what their lives were like and what their struggles were like, but also connected with that are, is a frustration when I find out things that I feel like I should have known them in grade school. I feel like I should have known who Edmonia Lewis was in grade school and now there's a stamp, you can go out and get yourself a Edmonia Lewis stamp. I'm very glad to say. But I feel like there was so much, so many dynamic stories that really complicate, you know, the story of this country that we live in. You know, that, you know, you think it was one way, but it was really three or four or five or six or 700 different other ways as well at the same time. And so that, those are the stories that really make, intrigue me. Yeah.
- Yeah, I think, I mean may I build on that or just learning, you know, I'm in just intensely curious and I feel like at any point in time, like right now I'm sitting on the stage and I feel like there are things that I think I understand, or there are things that I think I know, whether it's about myself or about other people or about history. And then like tomorrow I'll realize today in this like moment of bubble of like confidence and knowledge that I may have about something, I was wrong or I had the wrong information or misinformation or I didn't have a deeply enough or nuanced thinking. So I think that's always interesting to me. Like I think back on like five years ago I thought I knew everything about this, or I thought I understood myself so well and then I didn't. And so yeah, I think I'm constantly interested in learning and curiosity, you know, everybody I meet or everybody I see or everything I look at changes something about me. So what a gift, you know, to be alive. And I think to myself, I'm not that young anymore so I want to kind of grab everything, the molecules or just live as much as I can by being curious about everything around me, everyone around me, history that I don't know about myself, which is an endless, you know, kind of learning that we never really, you know, master, I hate that word, but we never really master ourselves, which is really what makes it so fun. It's like there's, you know, it's the search, right? It's the search with no, nothing to find at the end. And that's what I think gives me inspiration as a person, but also as an an artist.
- Well, so there's the search and then there's the research and the cast in "Olio" is so, there's so many stories, so many characters, so much to talk about. I wonder, Tyehimba, what was your, what was researching those stories, like for you?
- Well, I just went and bought a whole library of books that I had, cuz I know if I took check 'em off from the library, I wasn't going to return them on time, so I'd have a whole bunch of fees. And I tracked down, I had a few, there were a few, there's a bibliography in the back of the book with, you know, complete listing of the various books that I used. But there were a couple of, a few books that were, that kind of laid out the general topography so to speak, the general map of where I wanted, of, where I was, what I was interested in. And from there I kind of, I would identify someone and I would be really just interested in their story and if whether or not I could make it work in the context of these other stories. So, it was, there were, in that journey, there were a lot of stories that I just couldn't, I couldn't make work. There was, there's a few stories I worked 6, 7, 8 months on and I was like, ah, I just, I can't make it happen. So the book took about seven years to, to write, but you know, there were a lot of pit stops and stumbles along the way.
- [Jane] Were were you writing poems as you-
- [Tyehimba] Yes.
- [Jane] Learned about.
- Write research, research, write. And to Victoria's point, you know, you only, you can only give the best research that's possible at that time, you know, I mean there's things that I may find out that, or frankly that I have found out about some of the things that I've written that like I didn't, I did not know, that information was not even available when I was researching the person or the subject. And then later on, information comes out and you're like, oh wow, I wish I'd have known that. Like, Edmonia Lewis, like they found out where she was buried a little teeny tiny town in England somewhere. She, I nobody knew where she was, but, and I, you know, I can imagine having like some kind of mention of that in one of the poems. But it didn't happen. But it did, it worked anyway. But what all I'm saying is that it was a, it was research, write, research write. You know, and take the best stab at it that I could, given the most exhaustive research that I could complete at the time.
- And Victoria for "Dear Memory," you, tell me if I've got this wrong or right, but you knew there were things you didn't know, and at first you didn't know where to find the answers. But then there was this kind of, in a way a process and a, and not exactly a trove of material, but things that came to you. How did, what did you do to sift through all that?
- Yeah, I mean I think, I mean I think this is what I find so interesting is like everyone, I always think about this like everybody in this room, like we have so many secrets, and then we have so much history that we just don't know. And in how generation, from generation that information changes and morphs is interesting to me. So yeah, I didn't know anything and I have a terrible memory, but I suddenly had finished like a whole bunch, like basically the whole book without realizing it was the book and then suddenly remembered that, oh I think I may have interviewed my mother once a long time ago when I was younger, and I had lied and said that I was going to write an article or something. And then, yeah, and then I had recorded it and then I was frantic, I was looking for it, and it was on the, you know, desktop the whole time. But yeah, I remember it was hard 'cause, but she would talk to me but my father refused to talk to me cuz he said it was stupid, you know, the project is dumb kind of thing. Like, you know, he's a engineer and this, you know, like the world of the universe of feelings maybe wasn't something he was quite as interested in. So also there's trauma, right? There's trauma in rehashing things and my and my mother had left two countries and he had left one. So, you know, these are things that it's hard to get that information out of people. And but I had done that, and then listened to the recording and was like, oh wow, that's so great. I knew some of this, but somehow I had also buried that information and memories. And so I think things are important to us at different times in our lives. Like things I didn't care about at all, not that long ago, suddenly it was like the centrality of my life, and I find that interesting cuz we do that as a country too, in case you haven't noticed. So that process is interesting to me. Like how do we bring ourselves to a greater sense of awareness so that we're not just going through life, not caring about things that we really should be caring about. And so that was that process of writing that book.
- Again, just a quick reminder that there's a microphone at the front if you'd like, if you have a question and would like to ask one of our guests. And let's see, I think, yes, thank you.
- Oh, okay, this is good. So I was thinking about how this is sponsored by the Dickinson Museum, and Dickinson as we know, liked to write on like scraps of paper and that kind of affected the way she wrote and clearly these two books have very interesting like physicalities. So I guess this is not so much of a direct question, but a request to speak more about that attention to physical form. Cause I'm really curious how you came to these two sizes and the way that especially "Olio" unfolds.
- Well, "Olio," I have to give a lot of props to the publisher. Wave is an extremely unique publisher. There's almost no other publishers that I could think of that would've taken the risk that they did. Frankly, there's four pages in that book that they basically fold out to eight and a half by 14. The book is eight and a half by 11. They fold out to eight and a half by 14 or whatever and they neatly tear out of the book, which I encourage you to do. But really it was because of those pages that the book is that particular size. And it was just being crazy, just being nuts, just being like, you know what? This is a form that I feel like carries the thing that I wanted to do and I don't know what's going to happen with it, but looks fly to me. So let me, let me see what happens. And, I was frankly very, lucky because I, they're an excellent publisher and they're, they're bibliophiles. So there you go. Victoria?
- Yeah, I mean I think the way things look is just a part of the poem and so we have a lot to play with, but we're kind of, you know, wed to these standard sizes for likely commercial reasons, but, you know, to be able to create in all this physical space that we actually have to create is such a fun thing to do. And I think I'm always really attracted to books like "Olio" that really don't seem to think about those physical boundaries as much. And so yeah, I'm constantly trying to think about that, you know, trying not to think, okay, I'm stuck on this eight and a half by 11 sort of thing. Right, so yeah.
- [Audience Member 1] Thank you.
- I had a very similar question, but I did want to ask a little bit, Tyehimba, your work with like the McCoy twins and how you kind of break the sonnet form open. I was wondering if you would be willing to explain like, how you went through that process, like getting to a point where you could read one poem like five different ways, and where that came from?
- Well, you know, that came from, in my previous book "Leadbelly," there's contrapuntal poems and in this book I wanted to carry the idea of contrapuntal poems forward, but I just wanted to, you know, double down on it a little bit. And the way to do that was through form. I chose sonnets because sonnets, well sonnets are, they're very forgiving in a lot of ways. And they're 14 lines, that's a lot of space frankly, to get what you need to do, and do what you need to do and get out. But also they're very familiar to the, to a 19th century sensibility. And I wanted to be in conversation to a certain degree when you, when you're reading about somebody for four or five or six months, and researching everything about them, you know, and trying to understand the world that they lived in, it's like, and you're trying to bring their story in a responsible, you know, way. It is almost like you are in conversation with them in my mind. So I wanted the, I wanted that level of familiarity across, you know, generations so to speak in time periods. As far as making them contrapuntal, you know, the first contrapuntal sonnets were with Blind Tom. And if you look at those poems, you can see how they, some of 'em are like one side, one side and then they slowly meld, and by the time they got to the point where they could, you know, meld with a section down the middle, it became apparent to me that if I just worked certain things, if I just reworded certain things different ways, then they would be have a plasticity which would allow an up and down reading. But it has, you know, the real, in order to not have it just be a gimmick, which I think is critical, is that it's fitting, it's trying to fit with the motif of a few different motifs. One is a syncopation, which was critical to the understanding of ragtime music. Another one is double consciousness referring back to W.E.B. Dubois, who's mentioned in the beginning of the book and kind of plays a role, kind of a distant role in the book. Another one is the idea of call and response and the black church says, can I get a amen?
- [Audience] Amen.
- All right, there's some people here went to a black church at one point, so, so it's a call and response or you know, respond and retort if you so wish to have that kind of dialectic happening throughout the book. Also to introduce a plasticity. And in the case of the McCoy twins to have the reader experience going through the body of the poem tracing the body of the poem in the way their eyes would trace the bodies of the McCoy twins, but trading places and absorbing their stories. So there's a lot of different rationales that I needed to have in place in order to make that worth it.
- [Audience Member 2] Yeah, amazing, thank you.
- Thank you.
- [Jane] So I think we have time for a couple more questions, so please.
- Okay, there we go. I think I have two separate questions for Victoria. First, something we've been talking about in class is like these different ideas of grief and softness and like transformation. So we're sort of curious for you and this question can go two ways, like how do you grieve through your transformation or how do you transform through grief, and is there any like softness in that grief and how would you, and like what does that look like?
- Yeah, I've been thinking about some of those things as well. I was telling Jane that I was reading a book on the plane here called "Racial Melancholia" and it's just something to think about, you know, I think it came from reading a review that a critic had written about the, like the tone of my books or one book being kind of very melancholic, and it felt like a, it was a criticism and that made me think about melancholia and racial melancholia. And then I'm just doing a lot of reading and research and you know, a lot of people have studied things long before me and so I'm constantly trying to learn, but there's, you know, there's something different about like the Asian American experience and there's something different about melancholy related to the Asian American experience. And I have this intuition now looking back on it, that there's something different about, you know, like my particular family grief and also grieving as an Asian, a Chinese-American, Taiwanese-American diaspora. And so I'm kind of thinking about all of those things and what does that mean for kind of personal like transformation. And I used to say a lot of, you know, our, you know like our culture in America can be very much so like this sort of fix it culture, you know, you have to move on and everybody thinks, you know, everybody kind of moves forward really quickly and so you feel like you too have to do what everyone else is doing. And I've just decided to just sit in my own grief bubble for as long as I want and just experience it in my own ways and allow myself to feel all those things at my own pace. Which I know intuitively has a lot to do with my family culture, but also my culture at large. And so, yeah, so now I'm just doing a lot of reading and thinking about things like that. I don't know if it will turn into anything, but I do find it sort of interesting to kind of read what other people have studied about people like me, if that makes sense.
- Thank you. And for, Tyehimba, I was really another form question, but there is a lot of like interesting shapes in how the words take place. I think one reminded me of a butterfly almost. So I was curious like which came first, like the words or the sort of shape that they take place or like the shape or the words?
- Wow, that's a hard one, huh. Well, I guess ideally form and function work on an equal level. So form serves function and function serves form. That, the one you're talking about, you're talking about the McCoy twins, I think, that was planned out beforehand. The only issue was what was going to go, how it was going to be completed, and what was, what were going to be the subjects of the various, their various poems. But I think that what you're asking is really is about form meeting function, and function meeting form. But also it's about, in poetry, a little commercial for poetry, 'cause I think it's the most experimental form like form or genre that you can have because you can typically, you're allowed a kind of agency with the space on the page and the white space on the page, that typically doesn't happen in other forms. And so you can do almost anything in poetry it's crazy. You can be as formal and tight and rigid as you want cuz there's so many forms, there's so many rules with so many forms. Oh my god. But then you can just be all over the page at the same time. So that's the great thing about poetry. It teaches you extreme economy, but also it gives you the ability to be extremely imaginative with the shape on the page.
- [Audience Member 3] Thank you.
- [Jane] For our last question.
- Yeah, hi. I wanted to say thank you for coming and I have a question directed towards both of you, and it's about legacy, and when writing about legacy, I feel like there can be the worry of like doing these people that you're writing about justice and representing their stories accurately, and though arguably I think you guys mentioned before, it's hard to know the full reality of these stories just because they were past figures and you weren't there. But, I guess I wanted to ask how you grapple with the boundary between representing or trying to find the truth in their stories and also like your personal interpretation and the theme that you're trying to go with for your works, yeah.
- Yeah, it's a great question. I think it's difficult whether you're writing memoir and someone's still alive or you're writing a history, like something based on something that actually happened. Yeah, it's really difficult to kind of toggle that back and forth and you know, cause I'm thinking about Muriel Rukeyeser's "Book of the Dead" and how she toggles back and forth between like very journalistic historical, like it almost, you know, cuz she was a journalist in historical aspects of what happened, and then sort of this lyricism and lyric moments when she as an artist kind of enters in moreso through her imagination. And arguably even when you're just saying like, this happened, this happened, this happened, you know, there's editing, you know, we're still curating what we choose and also how we choose to display that information. So that's not really answering your question. But I think that for me, there's always a responsibility absolutely, but there's also a responsibility to the self and the own imagination. And I think that, you know, I get asked this question, especially related to memoirs, like, oh, you know, people will be upset. And it's like, well you can always write it and nobody's sitting on your shoulder looking at you. So you can always write what you want. You know, you, that's your experience really, and your interpretation and your vantage point. Now if it goes out into the world, then you can kind of then put, you know, your editing hat on. But you know, at the end of the day we can only do the best that we can. And with historical things you just do a lot of research, you know, like I went to Eureka, I went to talk to the people there, I took tours, I went to the libraries and the museums and did archival research, and then there are gaps everywhere. And then you fill, as an artist, you fill those gaps in with your imagination. So I think we just do the best we can. And I did love that form question. I loved your response too, cuz I get asked that question a lot too. I think it, it's fun to sort of have things come while you're write, it's like it's all happens at once it seems like too. So I didn't mean to add that in, but I love, I always loved that. I loved hearing your response about form.
- Well I like what you were saying, I have yet to write a memoir cause I'm too scared. But I was, I liked your take on what, especially in regards to, here's the thing, you know, I think it's really critical to get the a really as clear an understanding as you were saying, going and visiting the site, doing the research, visiting the archives, et cetera. Understanding exactly what literally happened, when it happened. That's a critical, like knowing what the actual things are, what are the facts, and then having the imagination, allowing yourself to have the imagination to fill in between the facts, and also having an understanding that you will be in there. It's not going to, you have no way to completely, to conduit somebody else's consciousness in there. You are literally filling in and you, you know, you chose the subject for a reason, and part of the reason you chose the subject is to find out more about yourself. That's the reality. So you are going to be in there somewhere and you might as well not, it's just important to acknowledge that and understand that and say, I'm going like, I know in this person's life this happened, that happened, this happened, this happened. Now I'm writing this poem there at this particular moment, making this particular decision about with these particular factors. You know, given that situation, what would I think? You know, cuz that's when you are in the mix. That's, you know, no matter how many, you know, accents or whatever, you know, you put on it, et cetera, in the bottom line, you're going to be there. You know, and that's just, that's, you can't get past that. And that's the beautiful thing. That's a good thing. You know, because you are talking about the past, but you're talking about we're not, you're talking about issues that are still reverberating in the present and then into the future, you know? And you're there witnessing in between those spaces. So you have the, you know, you have the opportunity, just do one's best to get the facts straight. Cause it, you know, you don't want to be, you just don't want to be the person who, cause this has happened to me. I just, I confess. Poem, it was a poem about a car, it was an old poem I used to about, about a car and my dad's car. It was really my mom's car. And I was talking about, yeah, it had a 457 and duh, duh, duh, duh. And then this cat comes up after the reading. Like, yo, actually- those cars had a 327 cuz the weight ratio was two, duh, duh, duh. It was like, it's like, oh shit, I didn't ask for all this yo! So, you know what I'm saying? There will, that will happen. That will happen. And they'll people who will come in with details that you just did not know. You just had no, and that's okay, you know, but just trying to get to do your due diligence to get, cuz there's been enough sloppy erasure and obfuscation. There's been enough of that. You know, we have, you know, you have the opportunity to come in and tell a true, clear story and also with the understanding that you're coming in with your understanding and bringing your imagination to it. That's what I would say.
- That was a great question and two great responses. Thank you. I am so sorry we're out of time because I think, we've launched into some wonderful discussion and I know I have a lot more questions, pages of them, but we'll have to stop here. And I want to thank you both for what you've given us in your poetry and for joining us here for this eighth Lit Fest.
- Thank you.
- Thank you.