Poetry Centered
Poetry Centered
Kwame Dawes: Cleansing as Fire
Kwame Dawes introduces poems that interrogate loss and violence, transforming them in the flame of irony, elegy, and empathy. He discusses Lucille Clifton distilling “pure moments of tremendous poetry” (“lu 1958”), Michael S. Harper offering a haunting conclusion that serves as both memorial and gift (“We Assume: On the Death of our Son, Reuben Masai Harper”), and Terrance Hayes treading the line where outrage meets compassion (“Carolina Lullaby,” “A Poem That Does Nothing,” “The Poet Ai as Dylann Roof”). Dawes closes with an unpublished poem, “The House of Two Women,” which engages with the turbulent present of American life.
Find the full recordings of Clifton, Harper, and Hayes reading from the Poetry Center on Voca:
Lucille Clifton (November 1, 2007)
Michael S. Harper (April 4, 1973)
Terrance Hayes (February 4, 2016)
Full transcripts of every episode are available on Buzzsprout. Look for the transcript tab under each episode.
Voca is now fully captioned, with interactive transcripts and captions available for all readings! Read more about the project here, or try out this new feature by visiting Voca.
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JULIE SWARSTAD JOHNSON:You're listening to Poetry Centered, a podcast from the University of Arizona Poetry Center, featuring selections from Voca, our online archive of recorded poetry readings dating from 1963 to the present. On this show, we invite a poet to dive into the Voca archive and choose three recordings to share with you. Our host poet closes out the episode with a poem of their own. I'm Julie Swarstad Johnson, the Poetry Center's archivist, here to welcome you. Today, we are truly honored to welcome distinguished poet Kwame Dawes as our host. Kwame is the author of numerous books of poetry, along with books of fiction, criticism, and essays. His most recent collection of poetry is Sturge Town, published in August of last year. He is a professor at Brown University, series editor of the African Poetry Book Series, and director of the African Poetry Book Fund, among many other things. Through 2027, he is the poet laureate of Jamaica. In this episode, Kwame introduces us to poems by Lucille Clifton, Michael S. Harper, and Terrance Hayes. He illuminates how these poets interrogate and transform experiences of loss and violence through irony, elegy, and empathy. He closes with a new unpublished poem that responds to our present moment. Kwame, thank you so much for being our host and sharing your insights on these poems. Welcome.[MUSIC PLAYING]
KWAME DAWES:My name is Kwame Dawes. It's a pleasure to be hosting this conversation about three poets that I admire greatly. And I thought I should say briefly that I'm recording this in Lincoln, Nebraska, where I currently live. And this hopefully engaging discussion will probably reintroduce many of you to the work of three poets-- Lucille Clifton, Terrance Hayes, and the remarkable poet Michael Harper. The first poem I'd love to talk about is by Lucille Clifton. Lucille Clifton was born in 1936 and had a quite remarkable literary career as a poet and has become, quite frankly, one of the great American poets. I do take it as something of an honor that I met Lucille Clifton and was in her presence. I heard her speak. The poem that I want to look at, it was difficult to choose. But it's a poem called "lu 1958." It was published as"this is what I know," and it's somewhat different from the version that we hear on this recording. And I think what is most striking about these recordings on the archive, as much as the poems are illuminating and powerful, there is the commentary that surrounds it. Lucille Clifton talks about her childhood as a Polish Black girl in Buffalo, which is a fascinating idea. But what strikes me about this poem are the ways in which her language resonates. She's brilliant at constraining the ideas in the most organic way, the simplest way so that what emerges are these pure moments of tremendous poetry. There's this line-- "My mother went in my father's house for want of tenderness." The idea of this need for tenderness, the idea of this need for healing. Yet, I think the poem is about violence. The poem is about what we now call toxic masculinity. The poem is about also survival and the survival and triumphing of women. It's a poem about her mother, and she begins by describing her mother as a fierce reader, a woman who wrote poems, a woman who had a limited education but was just consistently reading. And she describes her mother reading everything she could get her hands on, on China, anything about China, though she never met a Chinese person in her life. Yet, where we are ending in the poem is almost circular because the poem ends on the line "The gods are men." And we are asked to quibble this question. It is both an accusation, but it's also profoundly ironic. And it is disarming because, of course, there is something absurd about that declaration. And yet, it is a deep questioning of patriarchal structures within our society. It's a beautiful poem and beautifully read by Lucille Clifton. I'm sure you'll enjoy it. So let's listen to Lucille Clifton reading "lu 1958." The "lu" refers, of course, to Lucille Clifton.[MUSIC PLAYING][AUDIO PLAYBACK]
LUCILLE CLIFTON:This is called "lu 1958." My mother was quite a mad woman, wonderfully mad, just wonderful. And I think mad is what you'd call her. She wrote poetry. Neither of my parents graduated from elementary school. My father didn't write at all. He couldn't write, didn't know how. But he was a great reader. Both my parents were great readers. My mother read everything she could find about China. My mother never saw in the flesh a Chinese person. She was very into reading about China. I still have some of Pearl Buck's books that my mother had. Anyway, "lu 1958." This is what I know, My mother went mad in my father's house for want of tenderness. This is what I know, She was younger than the coffin wood, Still green and possible. This is what I know, Some women burn sorrow on their skin in the kitchens of their lives. This is what I know, The gods are men.[LAUGHTER][END PLAYBACK][MUSIC PLAYING]
KWAME DAWES:The second poem I would love to talk about and is by a poet whose work I am fairly familiar with, but not deeply familiar with. It is Michael Harper. I've read his work, but I've never actually listened to an audio recording of him reading his work. And it brings to mind what is one of the more peculiar things about this exercise and this process of listening to these recordings. This is an old recording, I would say. This was recorded in 1973, April 4, 1973. The rituals and the practices of poetry readings I don't think have changed tremendously, but Michael Harper's introductions are studied. They're very, very carefully organized, and they're narratives that frame the work that he's doing. I think what's interesting, as the poems themselves, is the ways in which the poet introduces them. And the poem that I want to focus on today is "We Assume-- On the Death of our Son, Reuben Masai Harper." And it's a poem that is, in a sense, elegiac. It's an elegy, a memoriam. I think there's nothing elevated that Harper is trying to do in thinking about the death of his son and the pain of his son. He mentions before he actually does the reading that he is able to read the poem because his wife is not present, because it would be too painful for her. But he also experiences a certain kind of pain. After he's read it. When he describes himself introducing another form of having to talk too much. But I would call this a memorial, but I would call the poem a gift. And it's a gift that finds itself resolving itself inside a very tragic and moving statement because it's a statement that makes sense in the face of the death of a child, an infant. The line, I think, that will haunt us again and again, and there's no reason why I can't say the line, is "we assume you did not know we loved you." And this is the "we assume.""We assume you did not know we loved you." The poem is also framed around a very troubling series of reflections that I think are echoed throughout that reading, phrases that I think carry a great deal of power."Survivors will be human" is what Michael Harper says at the end of the poem. Now, let's understand that Harper is talking about the death of an infant, his child. But it allows him to talk about W.E.B. Du Bois facing a questioning of the humanity of Black people, their capacity to mourn and to cry. And yet, of course, he's writing a poem that expresses this human sensation and this human sentiment. There is incredible anger at the heart of this poem, at being questioned, the humanity of a Black person to feel the pain. And it is Du Bois's answer. It has the same kind of construction because it's an answer that is tied to the death of his own child. It's quite a stunning poem. So let's listen to "We Assume-- On the Death of our Son, Reuben Masai Harper."[MUSIC PLAYING][AUDIO PLAYBACK]
MICHAEL S. HARPER:I had a lot of trouble with this poem because I was supposed to give a final reading, and I gave a reading with cello-- a friend of mine who plays for New York Symphony Orchestra. And I didn't want to read this poem because I didn't want to seem I was ungrateful. But finally, I did. And one of the reasons was, I don't think poets can be controlled, and they can't be dictated to. But another thing is because I thought it was a pretty good poem. And I wanted to show off, as we all do. But I'm going to go back to my first book and read you what I think to be some of the things which still are with me. And I wouldn't do this if my wife was here, but I'm going to do it now because, since she's not here, it won't upset her. And there are stories to both of these poems, so I'd like to tell you both of them. My second son was in a hospital in San Francisco, and we knew that he was going to die. And my wife insisted on being taken out of the hospital. We had to sign release papers. And we went home, and I was sitting in my front room watching the fog roll in about 3 o'clock in the afternoon. And I wrote some notes down on an envelope. The envelope became lost. And then about six or eight weeks later, my son, my oldest boy, found the envelope. I'd forgotten about it. And that essentially is this poem. I wrote the poem very quickly and didn't change but one word. And about two hours later, we got a call from the hospital telling us that this boy had expired. And had I not written these notes, I know I wouldn't have written a poem for him. So it's a kind of gift. This is called, "We Assume-- On the Death of our Son, Ruben Masai Harper." We assume that in 28 hours lived in a collapsible isolette, you learn to accept pure oxygen as the natural sky. The scant, shallow breaths that filled those hours cannot, did not make you fly, But dreams were there, Like crooked palm prints on the twin thick windows of the nursery in the glands of your mother. We assumed the sterile hands drank chemicals in and out from lungs opaque with mucus, Pumped your stomach, eked the bicarbonate in crooked, green-winged veins out in a plastic mask. A woman who'd lost her first son consoled us with an angel gone ahead to pray for our family, Gone into that sky seeking oxygen, Gone into autopsy, A fine, brown, powdered sugar, A disposable cremation. We assume you did not know we loved you.[END PLAYBACK][MUSIC PLAYING]
KWAME DAWES:The third and final poet that I would like to talk about is Terrance Hayes. Terrance Hayes, South Carolina-born poet, has really established himself as one of our great poets writing today. This recording was done in February of 2016. And what is interesting is that this recording took place less than a year after one of the great tragedies of our lifetime, certainly, certainly my lifetime, which was the horrendous murder of nine parishioners, church members in a church in Charleston, South Carolina, the Emanuel Episcopal Church. The killer was a man called Dylann Roof, a young man from South Carolina. In this reading, what happens, curiously, is that there are three poems that really Terrance Hayes sort of presents as one poem. I will ultimately focus on at least the final movement, which is "The Poet Ai as Dylann Roof." But prior to that, there's a poem called "Carolina Lullaby" that Terrance Hayes argues was the precursor, the beginning. And what he's actually wrestling with is, how do you address a tragic historical moment like this? And it is an interesting discussion because Terrance Hayes is talking about the ethical value of two things, what he calls spectacle, and then also what he calls metaphor, for he metaphor rises in the lullaby by introducing this idea of the birds and placing in the drama these figures, somebody who is killing a bird or some other creature that's killing the bird. And the bird is wrestling with this reality and this relationship. It's metaphorical. But at the same time, the bird recurs in the other movements."A Poem That Does Nothing" is the second movement or the second poem that he's wrestling with the idea. And finally, in "The Poet AI as Dylann Roof," it seems like Terrance Hayes then introduces a new concept, at least for the moment, which is the concept of empathetic engagement, which is, in many of our eyes, a kind of revolutionary necessity for human relationships for the prevention of violence and for the prevention of things like racism. But in this context, he's troubled by this idea that the poet is going to enter into the imagination of this brutal man, this killer, and derive from that relationship and that engagement and that exploration something that is akin to empathy and understanding. And yet, what we see as the great tension in the poem, and I think it's worth listening for, is the ways in which empathy keeps rushing up against anger, keeps rushing up against outrage, keeps rushing up against a kind of indignation that still underlying all of it is this incredible mourning, this lamentation, and this sorrow. So we will listen to these three poems--"Carolina Lullaby," "A Poem That Does Nothing," and "The Poet Ai as Dylann Roof," all by Terrance Hayes.[MUSIC PLAYING][AUDIO PLAYBACK]
TERRANCE HAYES:All right, so I guess I'll begin by saying what I said a minute ago, which is mostly what I think about when I'm working are the last thing I finished and the thing I'm trying to finish. So I really don't-- I mean, I've never done that. I've never read from all of my books in a reading. And so this one poem that I think is mostly done, I realized that it's connected to you guys on one of y'all's poets. So I don't know how to get to it, though. I'm like, it's new, so I don't know if I want to end with it. So maybe I'll talk about it. So what I'll tell you is the poem is called "The Poet Ai as Dylann Roof." So the thing is, I'm from South Carolina. And Dylann Roof went into the church, and he killed the nine folks. And so usually when things happen, I work on them at my pace. So I'm always thinking about stuff, but I'm not a poet who goes and writes immediately in response, really, to anything. So my poems, they take a year, sometimes two, to make things happen. But someone in town was like, oh, we want to do this thing about these guys. And you're from South Carolina, someone in Pittsburgh where I am. So they were like, will you do something? So I tried a bunch of poems. The first thing I did was this little song that I just lost a nerve. I could never sing it, so I'm not going to sing it. But it's after this dude. I actually have him singing it, but I'm not going to play him singing it either, Richard Dawson. So I wrote this thing last summer, and it only becomes relevant because it will explain how we get to "AI." So this was like me trying to write about, again, spectacle, like their spectacle for you, spectacle of violence, like, nine people killed in a church. I mean, you can't get more spectacular than that. And so what I thought was-- again, maybe we'll have this conversation in the Q&A. My impulse was not to look at it, but to look away from it, to metaphor. So I wrote this thing. It's called "Carolina Lullaby." Say hello to the little boy whose poor head is filled with noise, For I am the bird he's fixed to kill for singing this song in the field, Blue blackbirds, blue blackbirds, Hear what is done to the singing birds. His hands around my wondrous wings plucked feathers my mother once stroked. I held the song within my throat. I sang until my body broke. Black bluebird, Black bluebird, Hear what is done to a singing bird. And now to make my music still, He took a stone up from the field. I sang to the stone like a lover, though, For none could crushed my trembling throat. Poor small boy, poor small boy, Hear what you did to a singing bird. His blows beat down upon my song, But the song remained when I was gone. When the boy walked home to a lonely room, This was the tune he hummed.[HUMMING] So I thought that was done, but there's so much going on. And I mean, we could talk about this in terms of process. But I think, again, it's so great to have this under the rubric of spectacle, because then I thought, well, is that enough? Like, when you think about something like that happening, is it enough to turn to metaphor? It seems like looking away is inappropriate. So then I wrote a poem called"A Poem That Does Nothing." And this is not the main poem. These are just like scraps on the way to our conversation, I guess. So I haven't gotten to the "Ai" poem yet, but this is "A Poem That Does Nothing." After their deaths, the Black men, women, and children, I wanted to sing the song I'd heard once about men killing a poor old horse in a tanner's yard, Except, I wanted to make the horse a small black bird and the men a white child. And I wanted to sing it before American ears. After singing Black Lives Matter, Black Lives Matter, In the end, I couldn't articulate, not to mention singing much more. My voice cracked. I sang the words with fear or some adjacent feeling. The small black bird beneath the stone, The small white boy slammed down, Made the sound of a human voice in the field, beyond his house, And my voice cracked. But what I wanted to ask is whether it matters, Whether it is a poor old horse or a black bird, Whether the men are little more than boys, Whether their parents were too kind or too cruel with them, Whether some mean or indifferent Black person threatened or abused them. I can't think of any stories about adult Blacks bringing harm to white children, Though, I suppose it could have happened. Anything is possible after one has lived for a little while. And after a white boy turns his gun on a room full of children in the North and then upon himself, I suppose you have to assume God is wild. I wanted to know whether you think it matters whether it's a horse or Blacks in the South, Whether it's elementary school children in the North or a small black bird, Whether madness, grief, stupidity, or fear or some adjacent feeling comes before violence. After trying to talk about it, I want to sing for a little while. So the thing that's connected to what I think is interesting about "Ai" is when I started thinking like, well, what if I wanted to write a persona poem, like, this question of empathy for something like that? Could you write from his point of view? And then I was just thinking about models. Like, I like models. I like form. I like frames for context. And I just couldn't think of any poets, really, that look really in the mouth of like a violent act. So again, I feel like metaphor allows us to often look away from spectacle, even though it's all around us all the time. And so the only poet that I could think of that does it or did it as a kind of regular practice was Ai. And so I thought, well, what would I write if she was writing a poem in the voice of this boy, in the voice of Dylann Roof? And then, rather than just sort of working through that, I thought, oh, I'll write a poem in the voice of Ai pretending to be Dylann Roof. I know that's very complicated, but it's a trick. It's just me trying to-- well, how do I get myself to feel empathy? How do I get myself-- again, it's my hometown. I know Lexington. I know everything he's from. And so I thought, she's the only model. And so we could have that conversation, I guess, about her, about the practice. Is that the practice of empathy, or is that the practice of drama to try to embody that to make spectacle part of looking at something, even though she's always inside of it? This is what I meant about the outside, bearing witness, and then getting down inside of it. So this is the last poem, and it's called "The Poet Ai as Dylann Roof." In the hall of my grandmother's house stood an old, upright piano. Wherever I touched the keys, sound sang and sprang out. I never called anyone nigger. I never stood at the edge of a choir, afraid to sing out. Behind my white face, I wear the mask of a Black woman's face. I am lonely enough to murder. I am lonely enough to hate everything in my face. The poet sees a black bird stoned in a field. The black bird lies next to the stone, Like a lover with her arms thrown open, With her small mouth opened, And out of which springs a song the boy cannot decipher. Inside the Mother Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church, Nine beautiful niggers pray in the pews, like birds. And I say, Jesus fucking Christ to myself, and my gun is heavier than the weight of a life. When I was young, I found a Black bird with a broken wing in a field. And as I stoned the bird, I imagined I was stoning a face until I was splattered with ore. And when I got home from the field and went to my room, I sang out a song of inevitable sorrow. When I looked in the mirror and saw the eyes in a Black woman's face, The skin a glow in the distance, Murder is filled with sorrow. I don't know who cares. I don't care, who knows. I am lonely, I am lonely, I am lonely. All right y'all.[APPLAUSE][END PLAYBACK][MUSIC PLAYING]
KWAME DAWES:I will now read a poem in three movements. It's a new poem. I haven't published it anywhere. And it's a poem that I dedicate to my good friend, the poet John Kinsella. There are three movements to the poem, and they are numbered. And they each have a titling that goes with them. And it's a poem written in this moment."The House of Two Women. One, The House of Two Women, November 2024. The prisoner is dragged from the cart. There is no dignity here. At the corner of the rose bushes by the house of two women, This is my new destination, Foreign as all new landings, And strangely welcoming as the promise of silence. My neighbors know we are leaving soon. I walk the streets thick with leaves, And the dusk light of winter's midday settles. I will miss the comfort of chilled and calm and filtered sun, For at the house of two women where we have taken a lease, The darks docks grow heavy with foreboding. For once, I imagine a death in the gloom, Far from the indifference of the Caribbean sun, And the rapid regeneration of the land after the storms of loss and mourning, I know I have arrived at the season of last things, So casually said, I know, And I probably do not believe this, though I know it's true. After the tumult of the season of politicking, the results are in predictable as all foreboding. There is the decency of neighbors who do not gloat. It is an insidious politeness, And I am called churlish for treating it as an affront. Still, there's the quiet assurance of normalcy, The faith in the rightness of this nation's persistence. It is the season of retribution, The long knives of revenge, And we sit in our parochial camps, Watching the carnage through the healing filter of our pocket screens. We take our tragedies only when the mood calls for it in bytes of light. I will miss the numbing of the persistent sun, The stark revelations of his reach on these long walks. Remember when, my dear, we walked for miles during the plague, breathing, And with each breath, testing the weight of our chest. We bantered, and our silences were tender as the light around us. Still, while the news arrived of their massed dead, The indignity of bodies dragged into the gloom, We practiced for this new catastrophe. It is why we are so calm these days, Why we are content waving at the front windows of the house of two women."Two, Election 2024." After "The Expulsion of the Duke of Athens" by Stefano Ussi. It is always the cabal of bearded men in conference, The whispering, stoic aspect. It is death, a kind of language of the patriarchs, And to the side, the pious quiet of the frail, naked limbs of the condemned, The pale halo fading with the centuries, Those drooping eyes, A woman's resignation and the celestial distraction of polished pale-blue skies. This is European history. All great genocides begin with the nodding heads of roped men, The foreground of normalcy, How the love of God becomes obedience, And duty becomes the cleansing slaughter of the lesser ones, How the language of vermin is followed by the conjured dream of holiness, How men say, we will wear the stain of blood on our hands. We will be Christ for the people, We who have been blessed with coin and knowledge. I admit these days that my bitterness is unreasonable. It builds nothing. It makes nothing of me, Flames out and falls away the way of embers, But think useless ashes. And my neighbors, the ones beside the house of two women, Are part of the secret cabal of bearded men, Good city people, the farmers, the soil breakers, the pragmatic savers of their labors' earnings. They gather in the circle of the protectors of their way of life and plot. I wave, they wave back. My enemies are the greatest achievement of my art. I must construct a myth of constant evil metaphors, clear as held truth for them to exist, And it is hard, I understand. Though I sit among the unknowing throngs beyond the open sea, It is the eve of the election, And the world is heavy with the whispering of bearded white men, As it has been, as it will be to come again. I reverse myself. I change my mind. History arrives, cleansing as fire, And makes me flame, for I must flame. And the ash is combustible. It catches. And if a fire, make it burn, If a fire make it burn. If a fire make it burn."Three, Softly Falling," after Robin Robertson."We are all falling now." Rilke. I won't pretend to have read Rilke deeply, And worse still, the translations of him, And worse still, the museums and galleries of his making, And worse still, all the death he saw, And worse and worse and worse. There is a grave sorrow that smells like gin, On those who have seen the faces of women still shocked into pragmatic calm for having buried so many soldiers, And the bombs and the children, and the way that war loses its calculation, Who gives a damn what the leaders think they are doing? The air is heavy, and the room smells of smoke and gin. I know we are living in a world of wars, And we dare not fall asleep and pretend there is green of seas bright against the sky, And the world looks like Aberdeen or Savanna-la-Mar or Heartease, Or a village near the sea where the two women live, One called Mauve and the other Efua. All these glorious green mountains, Cool and leaning over the island. Instead, we carry the rumors of war and the carnage in our pockets, The images repeated, so carefully curated, And we are now dumb to the meaning of tragedy, So much so that we do not know that this is the taste of deepest trauma, And how tired we are by the middle of the day. Yes, we are falling now, Like the leaves have fallen across Nebraska, And the house will be leaving behind will not sell, As if it knows that we might have to stay behind to keep it company. But that is a fantasy. The snow is coming soon, And the world will return to its rituals of meaning. I come back to the scent of gin. My father drank gin and tonic. In the amber twilights of Kingston, He would sit alone, staring into the gloom, gathering monk playing on the stereo, His eyes gleaming as if he was seeing what had been broken and broken. And soon, the sound became the click ticking of the apparatus against itself, The static of the record stuck, Monk's lament hanging in the air. And when the room went completely dark, The scent of gin was left, And the softly falling of night arrived.[MUSIC PLAYING]
JULIE SWARSTAD JOHNSON:You've been listening to Kwame Dawes, and this is Poetry Centered. Kwame, thank you so much for your time and the depth of your reflections on each of these pieces. Thank you also for that closing poem. Listeners, thank you once again for joining us. We're so grateful, as ever, for your time, and we hope this show helps you find new poems and poets to love. This was our final episode in the current season, so we'll be taking a break until the summer. This was also episode 49. So if you're new to the show, we hope you'll dive into that back catalog. And check out Voca on your own. In a few months, we'll be celebrating Voca's 15th anniversary. And there's lots of wonderful content forthcoming at the Poetry Center's blog. Find the Poetry Center online at poetry.arizona.edu. Thanks so much for being with us, and we'll see you next time.
ARIA PAHARI: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 and Pascua Yaqui. Poetry Centered is the work of Aria Pahari-- that's me-- and Julie Swarstad Johnson. Explore Voca, the Poetry Center's audio visual archive online at voca.arizona.edu.