Poetry Centered
Poetry Centered
Eugenia Leigh: Proclaim a Rising
Eugenia Leigh introduces poems that speak from a particular moment into our own time, offering possibility amidst struggle. She shares John Murillo’s engagement with resistance and reality (“Enter the Dragon”), Monica Sok’s truth-telling about genocide (“Tuol Sleng”), and Angel Dominguez’s joyful protest against capitalism. Leigh closes with her poem “This City,” which ends with renewal.
Watch the full recordings of Murillo, Sok, and Dominguez reading for the Poetry Center on Voca:
John Murillo (April 22, 2021)
Monica Sok (February 13, 2020)
Angel Dominguez (August 3, 2023)
Julie Swarstad Johnson:
[00:00:02.33] Welcome to another episode of Poetry Centered, where you'll hear archival recordings of poets reading from and discussing their work with three selections chosen and introduced by a contemporary poet. The show comes to you from the University of Arizona Poetry Center and features recordings from Voca, our online audiovisual archive. I'm Julie Swarstad Johnson, the Center's archivist, here to welcome you.
[00:00:28.46] We're joined today by poet, teaching artist, and editor Eugenia Leigh, author of two collections of poetry, most recently Bianca. For this episode, Eugenia selects recordings of poems by John Murillo, Monica Sok, and Angel Dominguez, noting the way these poets speak from past into present and even future, offering possibility amidst the world's suffering. Eugenia, thank you for being with us today and for speaking to us in this same spirit.
Eugenia Leigh:
[00:01:03.12] Hello, I am Eugenia Leigh, recording this episode at my desk in Nassau County on Long Island, just outside of New York City. Podcast hosts typically disclose where they are recording from. But it feels important today to tell you when I am recording from as well.
[00:01:24.35] As a podcast listener, I sometimes want podcasts to feel extra-temporal, happening or appearing to happen outside of time. I admit I want to be able to click on an episode and feel like the host is speaking directly to me right now. I want their wisdom from wherever they are and whenever they are to bandage with a poem, everything wrong in my life or wrong with the world.
[00:01:54.71] So as I reflected on how to go about this episode, I did consider whether to remain vague about where in time I am situated. But of course, in the 21st century we know a few things about time. First, that the concept itself may be an illusion, a symptom of our consciousness.
[00:02:18.24] And second, that the events of the world and the events in our lives are cyclical, reoccurring in updated ways. And often even when a podcast episode or a poetry reading wasn't recorded with me and my time in mind, I am often surprised to find that reached me and moved me anyway. This was my experience as I listened to reading after reading in the Voca archives. And this is my hope for you whenever in the future you are.
[00:02:52.62] For me, it is early May 2024. The genocide against Palestinians is entering its eighth month. Israel has killed over 34,000 Palestinians, including over 14,000 children. And Israel has destroyed more than 390 educational institutions in Gaza, including all of Gaza's 12 universities. And this was done with the help of billions of dollars from the United States, as well as American-made weapons.
[00:03:26.52] As a response, university students across the United States have set up Palestine solidarity encampments to urge their schools to divest from weapons manufacturers profiting from Israel's oppression of Palestinians. Some universities have chosen to meet these student protests with militarized police responses, even going so far as to set up snipers on top of university buildings with their weapons aimed at unarmed students. We've seen this scene before.
[00:04:01.77] Fifty-four years ago, almost to the date on May 4th, 1970, at Kent State university, as students rallied in protest of the Vietnam war, Ohio National Guard soldiers fired dozens of rounds in less than a minute, killing four unarmed college students and wounding nine more. Time, it seems, is not linear after all.
[00:04:28.77] So I dug through the Voca archives in search of contemporary poets who while speaking to their specific audience in their specific time, might also transcend their lived moment and speak to us here in my present day reality to buoy us, to give us hope. To show us how amidst all this oppression and repression, resistance is possible and truth telling is possible and living is possible.
[00:04:59.76] To my delight, the search was not hard. The Voca archive contains countless poets doing important humanizing work, diverse voices speaking out against just as many types of oppression as there are people. The hard part actually was to choose just three for today.
[00:05:20.43] The first recording I'd like to share is John Murillo reading "Enter the Dragon" on April 22nd, 2021. I first met John Murillo in 2015 on the drive up from New York City to New Hampshire for the summer poetry seminar at the frost place where John was a faculty member and I was a fellow.
[00:05:42.96] John's kindness and generosity of spirit made a deep impression on me. He had none of that ego that faculty poets at these retreats allegedly tend to have. And in every interaction, he was one of the few people who treated me a lowly fellow as if I might have something to teach him.
[00:06:04.80] I remember John initiated a conversation about what it's like to write about parental domestic abuse and then have to face your parents. After that conversation, he gave a reading which included a poem that was then very new, a long poem called upon reading that Eric Dolphy transcribed even the calls of certain species of birds, which included bits that resonated with our brief conversation.
[00:06:33.48] His reading of that poem has stayed with me all these years, and I have taught and talked about this poem nonstop since its publication in poetry magazine in 2016 and then its appearance in John Murillo's 2020 collection, contemporary American poetry.
[00:06:51.81] OK. I won't derail this episode with a craft talk about this poem's brilliance, but I mention it because that poem along with the poem I chose for today, both contain what I consider to be a trademark of John Murillo's poems, which is his ability to juxtapose moments of wretched violence next to moments of heart-rending tenderness.
[00:07:17.50] The reading you're about to hear was part of a joint reading and conversation with poets Nicole Sealey and Hanif Abdurraqib as part of the Institute for Inquiry and Poetics and the Art for Justice series. I highly recommend you watch the entire event in which the three poets share one poem at a time in round robin fashion and discuss writing that speaks to police violence, the carceral justice system, and racial injustice toward Black Americans.
[00:07:50.11] John Murillo reads "Enter The Dragon" in response to Hanif Abdurraqib poem, "All The TV Shows Are About Cops." You'll hear him in a moment giving a bit of context for this poem about the first time he witnessed an act of resistance to police violence on the movie screen.
[00:08:09.79] But the poem's wisdom and moment of truth comes when the child-self watches his father shrink down to survive an encounter with a cop and learns, "the difference between cinema and city, highlighting the tension between the ways we glorify resistance to the police and the reality of what it can look like to have to survive the violent police state." Here is John Murillo reading "Enter the Dragon."
John Murillo:
[00:08:49.20] I'm actually going to change directions a little bit. I was going to read something from the project and I'll come back to it maybe and say some words about it, but I wanted to read something to piggyback off on this poem.
[00:09:05.20] I don't pretend to be an expert at all on the carceral state, but I do know that it begins long before prison. And Harney's poem about the police and our interaction and procession of the police, I think is right on point because for a lot of us, that's our first interaction with the law, but also law. Yeah. And it really sets a precedents I think for the way we process that and live through that.
[00:09:35.30] And the way that it sets up its adversarial relationship between the community and the people policing the community, it's set early on, right. And then everything we do is a reaction to that, for better or worse. And yeah, in my first book, I wrote a poem called "Enter the Dragon." Enter the dragon was the name of a Bruce Lee movie, as many people watching will know.
[00:10:10.86] In that movie, the most compelling character, most compelling actor for me and a lot of my peers was not Bruce Lee, but Jim Kelly. Jim Kelly in the 70s before, we had positive filmmakers putting positive images on the screen like Lee Daniels and Tyler Perry and people like that. We were left to our own devices. And one of the first people we had to look to was Jim Kelly.
[00:10:38.70] In this film, there's a scene early on where he's either walking down the street or driving down the street and is accosted by some police officers. And I think the police officers are on the take from this mob boss or something. And they go to Jim Kelly up but Jim Kelly is a martial artist and it's a movie. So he beats all their asses, jumps in the police car and drives off.
[00:11:07.60] And I remember being at the movies with my father and watching that scene and being really affected by it. So that was one of the first images that I saw of resistance. And that's where the poem starts. It starts in the movie theater in 1976.
[00:11:29.72] “For me, the movie starts with a black man. Leaping into an orbit of badges, tiny moons. Catching the sheen of his perfect black afro. Arc kicks, karate chops, and thirty cops on their backs. It starts with the swagger, the cool lean into the leather front seat of the black and white he takes off in, deep hallelujahs moviegoers drowning out the wah wah guitar. Salt and butter, high fives, right on, brother and daddy, glowing so bright he can light the screen all by himself. This is how it goes down.
[00:12:18.32] Friday nights and my father drives us home from the late show, two heroes Cadillac-ing across King Boulevard. In the car's dark cab, we jab and clutch. Jim Kelly and Bruce Lee with popcorn breath and almost miss the lights flashing in the cracked side mirror. I know what's under the seat, but when the uniforms approach from the rear quarter panel, when the fat one leans so far into my father's window, I can smell his long day's work.
[00:12:59.85] When my father, this John Henry of a man, hides his hammer, doesn't buck, tucks away his baritone, license and registration shaking as if showing a bathroom pass to a grade school principal. I learn the difference between cinema and city, between the movie house cheers of old men and the silence that gets us home.”
Eugenia Leigh:
[00:13:38.60] The second recording I'd like to share is a longer poem by Monica Sok called "Tuol Sleng" recorded on February 13th, 2020. The poem comes from her collection, A Nail the Evening Hangs on, an unforgettable book that centers the intergenerational trauma and experiences of diasporic Cambodians and specifically calls out the United States' role in escalating the genocide of Cambodians from 1975 to 1979.
[00:14:11.09] Monica Sok is a poet I admire and have the privilege of knowing through Kundiman a fellowship of Asian American poets. I so appreciate and have learned from the work she does to connect present day trauma or mental illness, or the daily struggles of people in the diaspora to traumatic events of the past.
[00:14:33.86] I also appreciate that as a person, Monica doesn't hide behind artifice. A conversation with her goes right to the heart without the chit chat or pleasantries we so often use to guard ourselves. Likewise, Monica's poems cut right to the truth. This poem, "Tuol Sleng" takes place during a visit to the Tuol Sleng genocide museum which was before that a torture prison and before that, a high school.
[00:15:07.23] Monica's poem takes place in the past, but I also feel like I am hearing it read by someone in the future, someone who has survived a more recent genocide and is walking through the halls of what should have been a school. I am thinking of all the schools and places meant for children and for education that have been co-opted by military or by police and state troopers and deformed into places that suppress learning and even life. Here is Monica Sok reading "Tuol Sleng.
Monica Sok:
[00:15:51.08] I'm going to read a long poem called "Tuol Sleng." And Tuol Sleng was formerly known as Chao Ponhea Yat High School, and during the Khmer Rouge regime it was turned into Tuol Sleng, the torture prison. And today it's a museum, a Tuol Sleng genocide Memorial. So having to navigate that space with all of its different histories has been quite an experience.
[00:16:21.22] I went to Tuol Sleng for the first time with my nephew. His mother had arranged a whole field trip just so I could go to all these different sites, including Tuol Sleng, the Choeung Killing Fields memorial site, and also the Royal Palace, and so she thought it would be fun to go with my nephew and his neighborhood friends.
[00:16:45.75] And so I think that I needed to-- I felt like I needed to be strong for these young people, the next generation who may have been aware of the history that took place but maybe were not quite aware. So this poem is happening in sections, so I might pause a little bit.
[00:17:09.27] "Tuol Sleng" “Street houses and shops, dirt roads gathered with rocks and above gray palm trees. Vendors with machetes on blocks of ice, a wagon of green coconuts, hand cracking machines for sugarcane.
[00:17:27.09] In this same place, did they kill Yuos Samon? We know they dented metal bed frames, chained prisoners in schoolrooms. Before the slow act of torture, each prisoner's photo was taken with a film camera flash. And now the screeching wagon wheels hauling, green coconuts, stalks of sugarcane nearby.
[00:17:50.76] I come here with my six-year-old nephew, Ratanak, and two neighborhood girls. My nephew sprints down the halls, ducks his head into every classroom, then off again, as though he hears a school bell ring. You see that boy running in the halls? A tourist asks another tourist. Does he have any respect for history?
[00:18:12.57] Alone inside a classroom instead of desks, a bed frame, it's metal slats rusted, a hammer and some chains at the corner. The floor flecked with blood and the walls the color. I walk to the chalkboard, a small piece of chalk still there, a scribble of Khmer on the dusty board and numbers. I can't understand anything but the numbers.
[00:18:37.74] Meanwhile, in the courtyard a boy plays as if on a playground. Rope hangs from a high wooden frame. Below he fills an urn with water. Take some one prisoner and bobs his head with rope. He plunges the head and the legs struggle upside down. He is just a boy. In Lancaster by the cornfields one afternoon, to the clapping of a horse's hooves across the way, I thought of Tuol Sleng.
[00:19:07.38] In family portraits, I'd blink at the flash of a camera and not be able to see after inside a lighted room without red invading my eyes. That same flash capturing the smiles of my surviving relatives. Before Samon was murdered, my aunt says, he had been studying at West Point with other lieutenant generals of Lon Nol but maybe it was Fort Worth, not West Point or like many foreign troops trained on US soil, Fort Benning.
[00:19:36.33] No way of knowing except for this photograph. Each man smiling around the table, a white man at the head, a blonde curly haired girl sitting in his lap. This picture of my uncle hangs in my grandmother's house. He turns to look at us.
[00:19:54.32] A boy runs through the halls of Tuol Sleng. His narrow footprints turn it back into a school. He checks every room for the other kids. He sits on a chair and waits. When I walk in, he whispers, ghost. The bell rings and off he goes.
[00:20:13.86] Still my nephew speeds down the halls, peeking his head into every room. Ratanak, I call out, stop running. Stop, I say. Don't make me count. He knows, but he doesn't know. One, this was once a tortured prison, now a museum. Two, though to him it's just an old school which is why he is running, which is why inside a sepia toned cell. Three, he feels lost and waits for me.
[00:20:46.53] Visitors to Cambodia who wander around with crushed limes in their sugarcane drinks can say people of this country suffered so much but are so happy. Years later, alone in Phnom Penh, I think of my uncle, whom I did not know, and imagine him returning from the US taken at the airport. And I think of how my mother washing dishes bordered with gray flowers, sobbed over the sink and spoke.
[00:21:14.83] I don't know what happened to my brother. His wife and sons pleaded with him to come home. So heartbroken your grandmother when she learned the news about my brother, hoping all this time he'd been waiting for us in another country only to find out that he died alone. Of all the photographs at Tuol Sleng, not one of my brother. That day we couldn't find his face, we just went home.
[00:21:44.61] I explained to Ratanak, the tourists are here to stroke black and white photographs of tortured prisoners. They pressed closer to look at a picture, a handcuffed boy leaning toward them, walking slow around the prison. They crouch in cramped stalls and shut themselves in to imagine what horrors.
[00:22:04.95] They walk around the metal bed frame, cover their mouths at rusted chains, the hammer and tool box in the corner, the floor stained and the walls the color. They cry. They write on the walls. NEVER FORGET signing their names. Now they have been here. They buy books from the souvenir shops and silk scarves and krama and handmade purses. But we come here to look for someone.
[00:22:32.79] The boy is still inside a classroom. He raises his hand to answer the teacher's question. The teacher offers him a turn at the board and gives him a piece of chalk. His back is turned to the other students. Now the teacher is a soldier. Now the boy has chains on his wrists. Now he's smacked in the face. Now his glasses break on his nose bridge. Now he pretends he cannot spell or count how many teeth knocked out.
[00:23:03.95] Already the tourists have forgotten, while sucking sugar from cane as they head to the Royal Palace for the rest of their tour. But I still stand by the prison entrance with the apparition of a boy who cannot point to me where my uncle died. Look at them shaking their heads at Ratanak. I turn around to find my nephew. He is running again. The girls follow him, and now I chase after them into the schoolyard. “
Eugenia Leigh:
[00:23:41.33] This next poem by Angel Dominguez is called "The Last Billionaire Died Today," and it was recorded as part of their reading as the Poetry Center summer resident on August 3rd, 2023. I don't know Angel personally, not be real with you and admit I discovered Angel's Instagram memes before I discovered their poems.
[00:24:04.48] If you don't already know, Angel's Instagram handle blacklavendermilk, named after their first book, is a treasure trove of hilarious memes that range from jabs at the daily agony of being a poet to snarky, anti-capitalist, anti-imperialist commentary peppered with the usual Instagram announcement or news headline.
[00:24:27.92] Their meme curation is one of my favorite coping mechanisms. They help me feel grounded and clearheaded in an increasingly untenable world. Well, it turns out that anyone who loves Angel's memes is likely Angel's ideal reader as well. Their poems are a light and a protest, tackling everything from gentrification to fascism.
[00:24:53.37] This poem you're about to hear is performed with the audience in the manner of the mic check call, and response we participate in at a protest or action. The poem is just one sentence, but the way Angel chooses to share it and the way the poem imagines a more equitable and just future for all moved me very much.
[00:25:18.81] These days, the world seems so wrong and upside down and inhumane that this one small moment of a future reimagined and claimed out loud through the voice of a crowd surprised me and made me weep. Here is Angel Dominguez reading "The Last Billionaire Died Today."
Angel Dominguez:
[00:25:45.92] And I kind of want to do something fun with all of you. So in organizing, you don't always have a lovely podium and a lovely microphone to be able to communicate with your community. And so we have what's called mic check. Is anyone familiar with mic check? So when I say mic check, I want all of you to repeat back after me. Mic check. Sound good. OK. Mic check.
[00:26:10.93] Mic check.
[00:26:11.70] Yeah, that's right. OK, great. So welcome to being an organizer, and I hope you will dismantle the fascist state with me. But before we get there, I hope you will read this poem with me. So, mic check.
[00:26:28.34] Mic check.
[00:26:29.93] The last billionaire.
[00:26:31.80] The last billionaire.
[00:26:33.56] Died today.
[00:26:35.52] Died today.
[00:26:37.25] No one.
[00:26:38.89] No one.
[00:26:39.66] Could hear.
[00:26:41.01] Could hear.
[00:26:41.85] That last breath.
[00:26:43.90] That last breath.
[00:26:45.33] Over the sound.
[00:26:47.02] Over the sound.
[00:26:48.15] Of everyone eating.
[00:26:50.31] Of everyone eating.
[00:26:52.29] Thank you. Love that one. It's one of my favorite poems. It's new. It's not out yet. OK.
Eugenia Leigh:
[00:27:16.14] I will close by reading a short poem of my own called "This City." This poem appears in my 2023 collection, Bianca, and it closes out the first of the book's three sections. What was happening in the world as I wrote the first draft of this poem where the Ferguson uprisings from 2014 to 2015 after a Black teenager, Michael Brown, was fatally shot by Ferguson police officer Darren Wilson.
[00:27:44.22] What was happening in my life as I wrote this poem was that I was enduring a pretty severe depression after having moved briefly to Chicago, my birthplace, and the place of my childhood abuse and the first of my abusive father's several arrests and prison stays.
[00:28:01.86] But my favorite thing about my poem now is where it ended up. It appears right next to the start of the second section of my book, which begins with this epigraph. An excerpt from a poem by Korean feminist poet Kim Yideum from her book Cheer Up Femme Fatale and published in translation by Action Books in 2016.
[00:28:25.99] Her poem excerpt goes: “The flowers bloom even when I barely water them. Some flowers sprout, even though the soil is parched. Those kinds of flowers are terrifying.” Here is my poem "This City." “This city could use more seraphs. Anything with wings really, a falcon, a caladrius ravenous for marvels. I slit open a chrysalis, inside no caterpillar mid-morph. Only its ghost in a horror of cells.
[00:29:13.53] I pinch the luminous mash of imaginal disks and shudder, imagining the mechanics of disintegration. The wormy larva whole then world. A wonder it did not die even now smeared against my skin. It beams like the angel in the tomb prepared to proclaim a rising.”
Julie Swarstad Johnson:
[00:29:54.75] Thank you so much for this powerful episode, Eugenia. We're grateful for your vision. Listeners, we're always so thankful for your time. We hope this show speaks into your present and future as well. In another two weeks, we'll be back with an episode hosted by Vickie Vertíz. Until then, why not dive into Voca on your own? There are over 1,000 recordings of poets from 1963 to today for you to enjoy. We'll see you next time.
Aria Pahari:
[00:30:25.08] 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,
[00:30:45.06] the Poetry Center’s library and buildings are housed on the indigenous homelands of the Tohono O'odham and Pascua Yaqui. Poetry Centered is the work of Aria Pahari, that's me, and Julie Swarstad Johnson. Explore Voca, the Poetry Center's audiovisual archive online at voca.arizona.edu.