Hanif Abdurraqib presents poems that offer listeners an invitation to reflection via rich details, repetition, and rhythm. He discusses his admiration for Ross Gay’s tenderness (“To the Fig Tree on 9th and Christian”), shares a long poem by Juliana Spahr that creatively engages with the political (“Gentle Now, Don’t Add to Heartache”), and praises Yona Harvey’s tenderness and nuanced understanding of violence (“Hurricane”). Abdurraqib closes by reading his poem “Someone Brought You into This World and Someone Can Take You.”
Listen to the full recordings of Gay, Spahr, and Harvey reading for the Poetry Center on Voca:
Ross Gay (2017)
Juliana Spahr (2009)
Yona Harvey (2014)
Hanif Abdurraqib presents poems that offer listeners an invitation to reflection via rich details, repetition, and rhythm. He discusses his admiration for Ross Gay’s tenderness (“To the Fig Tree on 9th and Christian”), shares a long poem by Juliana Spahr that creatively engages with the political (“Gentle Now, Don’t Add to Heartache”), and praises Yona Harvey’s tenderness and nuanced understanding of violence (“Hurricane”). Abdurraqib closes by reading his poem “Someone Brought You into This World and Someone Can Take You.”
Listen to the full recordings of Gay, Spahr, and Harvey reading for the Poetry Center on Voca:
Ross Gay (2017)
Juliana Spahr (2009)
Yona Harvey (2014)
Thanks for joining us for Poetry Centered, where we invite a guest poet to dive into Voca, the University of Arizona Poetry Center's online, audiovisual archive. Our guest poet selects three recordings to share, and we round out the episode by having the guest read a poem of their own. Our host for this episode is Hanif Abdurraqib, a poet, essayist, and cultural critic. His most recent book of poetry is A Fortune for Your Disaster, and his most recent essay collection is Go Ahead in the Rain: Notes to a Tribe Called Quest. Hanif shares poems by Ross Gay, Juliana Spahr, and Yona Harvey that each invite listeners into rich sonic landscapes alive with energy repetition, rhythm, and committed attention.
Hanif Abdurraqib:Hi, this is Hanif Abdurraqib, and I am recording from the east side of Columbus, Ohio. So the first poem I'm picking is Ross Gay's poem"To the Fig Tree on 9th and Christian," which was recorded January 19th, 2017. And, you know, I'm someone who's really invested in Ross's work, particularly for how it zooms in on small moments, how even in his poems, I think, and his essays now, nonfiction as well, people tend to think about Ross's work only as tackling these large scale issues around gratitude or the earth. I'm saying this in air quotes, large air quotes,"the earth." But I think what's most fascinating about Ross's poems, and what I learned from Ross's poems, is how generous he is about the small movements of people and the small movements of architecture around people, and how he fits into the world he builds. And so this poem, I think, is maybe a perfect example of that. I mean, I think most Ross poems are a perfect example of that, but this one has so many small moving parts and small nuances that fit into the larger lives of people. And I just love it a great deal. And I think it is celebratory in a way that Ross can be celebratory, but also at the end of the celebration, there's kind of just more celebration unfurling, you know, there's dancing and the eating of the fig is also a celebration. And so, I love this poem, I think all the time about how I can inject this kind of eagerness and excitement into my poems. And Ross is someone I learned from a great deal.
Ross Gay:This is called"To the Fig Tree on 9th and Christian." And this is in Philadelphia, it's a Philadelphia poem. Tumbling through the city of my mind without once looking up, the racket in the lugwork probably rehearsing some stupid thing I said, or did, some crime or other. The city they say is a lonely place until yes, the sound of sweeping and a woman, yes, with a broom beneath which you are now to the canopy of a fig, its arms pulling the September sun to it. And she has a hose too and so works hard rinsing and scrubbing the walk lest some poor sod slip on the silk of a fig and break his hip and not probably reach over to gobble up the perpetrator. The light catches the veins in her hands. When I ask about the tree, they flutter in the air and she says, take as much as you can please help me. So I load my pockets and mouth, and she points to the step ladder against the wall to mean more, but I was without a sack, so my meager plunder would have to suffice. And an old woman whom gravity was pulling into the earth loosed one from a low slung branch, and its eye wept like hers, which she dabbed with a kerchief as she cleaved the fig with what remained of her teeth. And soon there were eight or nine people gathered beneath the tree pointing, looking into it like a constellation. Do you see it? And I am tall and so good for these things. And a bald man even told me so when I grabbed three or four for him, reaching into the giddy throngs of yellow jackets, sugar stoned, which he only pointed to smiling and rubbing his stomach. I mean, he was really rubbing his stomach. Like there was a baby in there. It was hot. His head shone while he offered recipes to the group, using words which I couldn't understand. And besides I was a little tipsy on the dance of the velvety heart, rolling in my mouth, pulling me down and down into the oldest countries of my body, where I ate my first fig from the hand of a man who escaped his country by swimming through the nights. And maybe never said more than five words to me at once, but gave me figs. And a man on his way to work hops twice to reach, at last, his fig, which he smiles at and calls baby, come here, baby, he says, and blows a kiss to the tree, which everyone knows can not grow this far north, being Mediterranean and favoring the rocky sun-baked soils of Jordan and Sicily, but no one told the fig tree or the immigrants. There was a way the fig tree grows in groves. It wants, it seems to hold us. Yes, I am anthropomorphizing, goddammit. I have twice in the last 30 seconds rubbed my sweaty forearm into someone else's sweaty shoulder, gleeful, eating out of each other's hands on Christian Street in Philadelphia, a city like most, which has murdered its own people. This is true. We are feeding each other from a tree at the corner of Christian and Ninth. Strangers, maybe, never again.
Hanif Abdurraqib:This poem is Juliana Spahr's"Gentle Now, Don't Add to Heartache," and she read a portion of this poem October 23rd, 2009. But the real, and the portion that is read is beautiful, and you know, very worth spending time with. But I would also encourage people to find the full poem and read the full poem. And Juliana is someone who I think has mastered the long poem in a way that few people have, because the repetition, she often utilizes repetition, but makes the repetition feel new. And she's often turning the eye back to something it's already seen before or turning the reader back to something they've already experienced, but the experience feels new and reshaped by the time it arrives to you again. And I think this poem is such a great example of that because of, you know, and there's section, I don't, you know, section three of this poem is just like actually a long list of naming everything that the speaker and their companion came across while wandering through the woods. And it's just such a brilliant and warm unfurling of nature and an ecosystem. And it is in some ways difficult to read out loud. But it's so wonderful to take in. And so I really, you know, it's rare that a poem this long allows me to arrive at the end, really eager for more. And I feel like Juliana does that in her, she does that in her work a lot, but has also figured out, I think, how to make the political messaging or the political aims of her work shine through in a way that does not feel self righteous or does not feel heavy handed, but does feel inviting and kind of asks the question of the reader as if to say, if you enjoyed all of this or if you feel at all moved by all of this landscape that I've just let you know about, you should also know that it is under siege. And I love how that is represented in this poem.
Juliana Spahr:I'm from this town called Chillicothe in southern Ohio. And for years, I, you know, I moved to Hawaii and I was like, I was writing a lot about Hawaii and I was kind of interested what I would write about Hawaii. And I had this, I kept wanting to, Chillicothe is one of those towns that has a lot of prisons in it. It had a big paper industry, you know, there's no longer paper industries, don't exist in the United States. I mean, it still exists, but it doesn't, it's not the same kind of economic shape, the way it had shaped the town economically for so long, for many ways, for the worse. Because it paper is very dirty. But most of that industry moved south. And so Chillicothe replaced that with prisons, and it has four prisons, including the jails, there's three prisons and a jail, and it bids on them from this, the northern, richer part of the state never wants them. And so Chillicothe's always trying to get them. And it's one of those towns that has more people in prison than residents, and I kept wanting to write about it. And then I couldn't. And I think it was part of, because I don't, I haven't lived there since this kind of transformation into a prison industrial complex town had happened. And, this is the long story to get to why I was writing this poem. In some way, I was still trying to think about what was happening in that place in some way or what it meant. So,"Gentle Now, Don't Add to Heartache." One. We come into the world, we come into the world and there it is, the sun is there, the brown of the river leading to the blue and the brown of the ocean is there. Salmon and eels are there, moving between the brown and the brown and the blue, the green of the land is there, elders and youngers are there, fighting and possibility and love are there. And we begin to breathe. We come into the world and there it is. We come into the world without, and we breathe it in. We come into the world, we come into the world and we too begin to move between the brown and the blue and the green of it. Two. We came into the world at the edge of a stream. The stream had no name, but it began from a spring and flowed down a hill into the Scioto that then flowed into the Ohio that then flowed into the Mississippi that then flowed into the Gulf of Mexico. The stream was a part of us and we were a part of the stream and we were thus part of the rivers and as part of the gulfs and the oceans. And we began to learn the stream. We looked under stones for the caddisfly larva and its adhesive, and we counted the creek chub and we counted the slenderhead darter. We learned to recognize the large, upright, dense candlelight clusters of yellowish flowers at the branch ends of the horse chestnut. And we appreciated the feathery gracefulness of the drooping but upturned branchlets of the larch. We mimic the cat-like meow, the soft quirrt or kwut, and the louder grading ratchet calls of the gray catbird. We put our heads together. We put our heads together with all these things, with the caddisfly larva, with the creek chub and the slenderhead darter and with the horse chestnut and the larch on the gray catbird. And we put our heads together on a narrow pillow, on a stone, on a narrow stone pillow. And we talk to each other all day long because we loved, we loved the stream and we were of the stream and we couldn't help this love because we arrived at the bank of the stream and began breathing. And the stream was various and full of information and it changed our bodies with its rotten, with its cold, with its clean with its mucky with fallen leaves, with its things that bite the edges of the skin, with its sand and dirt with its pungent at moments, with its dry and prickly, with its warmth, with its mushy and moist, with its hard flat stones on the bottom, with its horizon lines of gently rolling hills, with its darkness, with its dappled light, with its cicadas buzz and with its trills of birds. Three. This is where we learn love and where we learn depth and where we learn layers and where we learned connections between layers, and our hearts took on many things. Our hearts took on new shapes, new shapes every day as we went to the stream every day, and our hearts took on the shape of well-defined riffles and pools, clean substrates, woody debris, meandering channels, floodplains, and mature streamside forest. Our hearts took on the shape of the stream and became riffled and calmed and muddy and clean and flooded and shrunk and dry. And our hearts took on the shape of whirligigs swirling across the water. And we shaped our hearts into the sycamore trees along the side of the stream. And we let into our hearts the long pendulous polygamous racemes of its small green flowers, the first formed male flowers with no pistil and then the later arriving hairy ovary with its two curved stigmas. We let ourselves love the one day of the adult life of the mayflies that swarms, mates in flight and dies all without eating. And we shaped our hearts into the water willow and into the eggs spawned in the water willow. And our hearts took on the brilliant blues, reds and oranges, the breeding male rainbow darter, and our hearts swam to the female rainbow darter. And we poked her side with our snout as she buried herself into the gravel. And we laid upon her as she vibrated. We let leaves and algae into our hearts. And then we let the mollusk and the insects and we let the midge larvae into our heart. And then the stonefly nymph. And then a minnow came into our heart. And then we let the blue heron fly yet. And the raccoon amble by and the snapping turtle and the water snake also. We immersed ourselves in the shallow stream. We lied down on the rocks on our narrow pillow stone and let the water pass over us. And our heart was bathed in glochida and other things that attach to the flesh. And as we did this, we sang, we sang gentle now. Gentle now clubshell. Don't add to heartache. Gentle now warmouth, mayfly nymph. Don't add to heartache. Gentle now walnut, goldfish, butterfly, striped fly larva. Don't add to heartache. Gentle now, purple wartyback, narrowwing damselfly, spruce, pirate perch, threehorn wartyback, sumac. Don't add to heartache. Gentle now creek heelsplitter, mulberry, cranefly larva, mountain madtom, oak, bank swallow, wabash pigtoe, damselfly larva. Don't add to heartache. Gentle now whirligig beetle larva, hickory, sparrow, caddisfly larva, fluted shell, horse chestnut, wartyback, white heelsplitter, larch. Don't add to heartache. Gentle now stonefly nymph, dogwood, warbling vireo, sow bug, elktoe, elm, marsh wren, monkey face, central mudminnow, fir, grey-cheeked thrush. Don't add to heartache. Gentle now king eider, river darter, sauger, burning bush, common merganser, limpet, mayfly nymph, cedar, turkey vulture, spectacle case, flat floater, cherry, red tailed hawk. Don't add to heartache. Gentle now, we sang, circle our heart and rapture and love ache, circle our heart. Four. It was not all long lines of connection and utopia. It was a brackish stream, and it went through the field beside our house. And we let into our hearts the brackish parts of it also. Some of it knowingly, we let in soda cans and we let in cigarette butts and we let in pink tampon applicators, and we let in six pack of beer connectors and we let in various other pieces of plastic that would travel through the stream. And some of it unknowingly. We let the run off from agriculture, surface mines, forestry, home wastewater treatment systems, construction sites, urban yards, and roadways into our hearts. We let chloride magnesium sulfate, manganese, iron nitrates, aluminum, suspended solids, zinc, phosphorus, fertilizers, animal waste, oil grease, dioxins, heavy metals and lead go through our skin and into our tissues. We were born at the beginning of these things at the time of chemicals combining, at the time of stream runoff. And these things were a part of us and would become more a part of us, but we did not know it yet. Still, we noticed enough to sing a lament, to sing in lament for whoever lost her elephant ear, lost her mountain madtom and whoever lost her butterfly, lost her hairlip sucker, and whoever lost her white catspaw, lost her rabbitsfoot and whoever lost her monkey face, lost her speckled chub, and whoever lost her wartyback, lost her ebonyshell and whoever lost her pirate perch, lost her Ohio pigtoe, lost her clubshell. Five. What I did not know as I sang the lament of what was becoming lost and what was already lost was how this loss would happen. I did not know that I would turn from the stream to each other. I did not know I would turn to each other, that I would turn to each other to admire the softness of each other's breasts. The folds of each other's elbows, the brightness of each other's eyes, the smoothness of each other's hair, the evenness of each other's teeth. The first blush of each other's lips, a firm softness of each other's breasts, the fuzz of each other's calves, thighs, the rich ripe pungency of each other's smell, all of it. Each other's cheeks legs, neck, roof of mouth, webbing between the fingers, tips of nails and also cuticles. Hair on toes, whorls on fingers, skin discolorations. I turned to each other and snared, bewildered, I turned to each other in front of the stream. I turned to each other and I began to work for the chemical factory. And I began to work for the paper mill and I began to work for the atomic waste disposal plant. And I began to work at keeping men in jail. I turned to each other. I didn't even say goodbye, elephant ear, mountain madtorn, butterfly, hairlip sucker, white catspaw, rabbitsfoot, monkey face, speckled chub, wartyback, ebonyshell, pirate perch, Ohio pigtoe, clubshell. I replaced what I knew of the stream with Lifestream Total Cholesterol Test Packets, with Snuggle Emerald Stream fabric softener dryer sheets, with Tisserand Aromatherapy Aroma Stream Cartridges, with Filterstream Dust Tamer, and Streamzap PC remote control, Acid Stream Launcher and viral data stream. I didn't even say goodbye elephant ear, mountain madtorn, butterfly, hairlip sucker, white catspaw, rabbitsfoot, monkey face, speckled chub, wartyback, ebonyshell, pirate perch, Ohio pigtoe, clubshell. I put a Streamline Tilt Mirror in my shower, and I kept a crystal serenity sphere with a winter stream view on my dresser. And I didn't even say goodbye elephant ear, mountain madtorn, butterfly, hairlip sucker, white catspaw, rabbitsfoot, monkey face, speckled chub, wartyback, ebonyshell, pirate perch, Ohio pigtoe, clubshell. I brought a Gulf Stream blue polyester boat cover for my 14 to 16 foot V-hull fishing boats with beam widths up to 68 feet. And I talked about value stream management with men in suits over a desk. I didn't even say goodbye elephant ear, mountain madtorn, butterfly, hairlip sucker, white catspaw, rabbitsfoot, monkey face, speckled chub, wartyback, ebonyshell, pirate perch, Ohio pigtoe, clubshell. I just turned to each other and the body parts of the other suddenly glowed with the beauty and detail that I had found once in the stream. And I put my head together on a narrow pillow and talked with each other all night long and I did not sing. I did not sing otototoi, dark all merged together, oi. I did not sing the groaning words. I did not sing otototoi, dark, all merged together, oi. I did not sing the groaning words. I did not sing o wo, wo, wo. I did not sing, I see, I see. I did not sing wo, wo.
Hanif Abdurraqib:Yona Harvey on September 18th, 2014 read through a lot of poems, but the one that I love most and probably my favorite Yona Harvey poem is the poem"Hurricane." And I think Yona Harvey specifically is skilled at just summoning many things in the work, but is especially skilled, I think, at honing the intersection between beauty and violence or terror and affection. And you know, I think there's been a lot of work written kind of about and around Hurricane Katrina, but I love"Hurricane" for how tender it is and how musical it is. And again, maybe I'm just a sucker for repetition, but this is another poem that utilizes repetition to great effect, to build a rhythm. And I just love, I love the last section,"the haunts in my pocket I'll keep to a hum. Katrina was a woman I knew." It just for me, I like a poem that has a gentle turn at the end to reveal something at the end and then sends you on your way. And I think Yona Harvey is so skilled at that, not just in this poem, but in all of her poems. She's so good at a slight turn, not exactly a harsh volta, but a slight volta at the end that reveals something, that allows you to peel back the curtain on the poem in a different way before exiting it. And I just think that's really generous.
Yona Harvey:I was talking to these really smart undergraduate classes earlier today, and I told one of the classes, I would tell them the story of this poem,"Hurricane." The thing is, when you write about the mother figure in poetry, eventually you have to turn that on yourself and think about that. So"Hurricane" is a poem that I wrote for my daughter. She was born in New Orleans. But also in Pittsburgh, there's this little small carnival that comes to town and, there's a ride there that's called the Hurricane, and my daughter wanted to get on that ride. And no one else in the family wanted to. We're like, that joint, it's rickety. I don't know if the paperwork's in order. And so when my husband and I were going back and forth about it, my daughter just put up her little hand and she said, just give me the tickets. I'll go by myself. And we let her."Hurricane." Four tickets left. I let her go, firstborn into a hurricane. I thought she escaped the flood waters. No, but her head is empty of the drowned for now though she took her first breath below sea level. Ahh, awe, and, aw, mama, let me go. She speaks what every smart child knows. To get grown you unlatch your hands from the grown. And up, and up, and up, and up. She turned, latched in the seat of a hurricane. You let your girl what? You let your girl what? I did. So she do. I did. So she do. So girl, you can ride a hurricane and she do. And she do. And she do. And she do. She do make my river an ocean. Memorial, Baptist, Protestant birth. My girl walked away from a hurricane and she do, and she do. And she do. And she do. She do take my hand a while longer. The haunts in my pocket, I'll keep to a hum. Katrina was a woman I knew. When you were an infant, she rained on you. And she do. And she do. And she do. And she do.
Hanif Abdurraqib:Though it feels inadequate, I'm going to close with a poem of my own that I think is in many ways in conversation with all of the poets I chose. In conversation with Ross's generosity, in conversation with Juliana's politics, in conversation with Yona's tenderness and understanding of many modes of violence. This poem's title is also its first line. Someone brought you into this world and someone can take you to the moment you first felt the gallop of rain across your face and understood it to be less violent than a parent walking away from the siren of your reaching arms. America, you should know that I feel like the uninvited guest at a funeral for someone I knew well but could never bring myself to love. People have stopped asking me to smile since I surrendered the desire to write about your bullets, your blade slicing the longest journey through stolen fruit and still memory is a cage where only the cruelest animals survive. When Brandon's father could no longer remember the names of his children, he called out whatever leapt to mind first, the names of old enemies, a man who once held a knife to his throat in a Birmingham dive bar. A child answers to their father, calling out for someone who once wished him dead. This is love, I'm told, answer not to what you are called, but how you are called. America, it is getting so late in the poem, and we both find ourselves wanting to be turned into something better than we were when it all began. Both of us, a tapestry of longing for things we do not deserve. I have no memory of when I began waiting for storms to pass, fearing the impermanent stain of water as I might fear the intentions of a man holding a weapon and an empty glass, but maybe that memory will return when I shed the more precious ones, everyone I love running towards the sound of my excavated voice.
Julie Swarstad Johnson:Thank you, Hanif. And thanks to all of you for joining us. In two weeks, come back for our next episode, hosted by Urayoán Noel. Find us on your favorite podcast app or listen on the Poetry Center's website. Poetry Centered is a project of the University of Arizona Poetry Center, home to a world class library collection of more than 80,000 items related to contemporary poetry in English and English translation. Located on the campus of the University of Arizona in Tucson, the Poetry Center library and buildings are housed on the indigenous homelands of the Tohono O'odham people. Poetry Centered is supported by the work of
Diana Marie Delgado:Diana Marie Delgado
Tyler Meier:Tyler Meier
Julie Swarstad Johnson:And I'm your producer, Julie Swarstad Johnson. Explore Voca, the Poetry Center's audiovisual archive online at voca.arizona.edu.