Poetry Centered

Harmony Holiday: Against Sentimentality

• University of Arizona Poetry Center • Episode 51

Share episode

Harmony Holiday selects poems that shed the skin of nostalgia, testing the boundaries of cruelty as they push toward clarity. She introduces Robert Hass accepting moments of error (“A Story About the Body”), Ai recognizing the humanity of the evil-doer (“Salome”), and Allen Ginsberg acknowledging his mother’s scars as he grieves (“Kaddish”). Holiday closes with her poem “Tale of the Sudden Sweetness of the Dictator,” which refuses sentimentality by telling a story in sharp detail.

Listen to the full recordings of Hass, Ai, and Ginsberg reading for the Poetry Center on Voca:

Robert Hass (September 12, 1984)
Ai (March 6, 1985)
Allen Ginsberg (April 30, 1969)

Check out Holiday’s Substack Black Music and Black Muses.

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.

[MUSIC PLAYING]

JULIE SWARSTAD JOHNSON:

Welcome to Poetry Centered, where you'll hear archival recordings of poets reading from and discussing their work through 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. Our host today is Harmony Holliday, a writer, dancer, and experimental filmmaker. She's the author of five collections of poetry, including her most recent, Maafa. She curates an archive of griot poetics and a related performance and conversation series at 2220 Arts + Archives, a community arts center in Los Angeles. She also has a Substack, Black Music and Black Muses, where she writes about music. We'll have a link in the show notes. In this episode, Harmony follows the threads of sentimentality and cruelty through Voca, tracing poems where humanity and complexity emerge as sentimentality is left behind. You'll hear recordings of Robert Hass, Ai, and Allen Ginsberg, before Harmony closes with a poem of her own. Harmony, thank you for being here to take us on this journey.[MUSIC PLAYING]

HARMONY HOLIDAY:

This is Harmony Holiday, recording in Los Angeles. And today, I'm going to use Voca's archives, poems from the archives, to focus on cruelty as it relates to the absence of sentimentality. Things that might be mistaken for cruelty that just have shed some of the skins of the nostalgia artists and refuse to decorate things in sentimentality. Inspired by James Baldwin's essay,"Everybody's Protest Novel," and this quote specifically."Sentimentality, the ostentatious parading of excessive and spurious emotion, is the mark of dishonesty, the inability to feel. The wet eyes of the sentimentalists betray his aversion to experience, his fear of life, his arid heart. It is always, therefore, the signal of a secret and violent inhumanity, the mask of cruelty." So he does the work of linking these two seemingly separate registers there in that one quote. The sentimentalist is secretly the cruelest person. And I find myself not being able to contest when I read that and think about it again and again. And the poems we're going to listen to today and the one that I'll read of mine touch on that. Like, how can you make a poetry that isn't relying on sentimentality but also isn't relying on cruelty? Because an overreliance on cruelty or gore, like a war poem that has too much blood, that is a form of decadence and sentimentality. I'm going to start with a reading that Robert Hass did in 1984. Bob, as I call him, was my professor at Berkeley when I was an undergrad there, years and years after this. But he's such a striking force in American poetry. And he taught, when I was at Berkeley, a survey on American poetry that made me rethink poetry and what it is and what the literary arts are. And he's single-handedly the reason that I ended up doing an MFA and pursuing formally writing and publishing and being in poetry in these formal ways. It was his apply to these things, apply to the MFA, keep doing this, voice in my head when I applied. And I'll be eternally grateful for that. But beyond the flattery of just him being someone who had my back in the early, awkward days, he, outside of that, is just brilliant and able to bring to life-- you can see when he teaches, when he taught, he had this light in his eyes. Like he really loved comparing Ma Rainey to Sterling Brown and bringing out the power of the blues form in relation to a more traditional volta and a sonnet. And just the connections that he would make were beyond racial or ideological factions, so that he has this really interesting way of both situating himself in the bourgeois consciousness of the academy and simultaneously critiquing it, never fetishizing some sort of outsider, I'm a poet, stance, and it's just really brilliant. But this poem that captures it really well, that has haunted me for years, is called "A Story About the Body," and he read it at the Poetry Center in 1984. First of all, 1984, to situate ourselves there, this was a very different time. And the content of this poem kind of proves that, because the discussions that we have now about the male gaze and the female body and the male body and gender had not been anywhere near close to the surface of consciousness by that point. It was the Reagan era, and things were technocratic and fast and neon and the 80s. The female body was still very much up for objectifying. So this poem takes a look at it that is kind of ahead of its time, but also slightly obsolete. And the reaction that you hear in the poem would be taboo, politically incorrect, worthy of cancelation, maybe, now. So what's beautiful about Robert Hass's "A Story About the Body" is that it is not decadent, it's self-incriminating. It recoils into itself but also opens out into this field of possibility where you are forced to face more about human interaction. And he's describing an experience a lot of us know as writers, being an artists colony, having a kind of infatuation with a woman who's there, a mild-mannered, light-hearted courtship. And then, when it is about to be consummated, she tells him something that causes the offer to be rescinded. And it's disorienting, because what you think is about to be a tender love poem about the act of falling in love becomes something about the grotesque, the complexities of rejection and self-rejection. So we start out with an entitled kind of dude who's like, looking at he's picked, his object of desire, for the duration of an artist's residency. We assume it's mutual, and then by the end, we realize that there is a mask that both parties are wearing. And what's disorienting is we don't know who is to be implicated more, him for being shallow in response to her body or what he perceives as a potential defect, or her having concealed that up until the precipice of them making love. And then you get her sort of putting a curse on him, kind of, at the end, and showing up with a bowl of rose petals that hides dead bees. Bees are interesting because they die, harming or injuring, when they sting someone. It's just a very beautiful, petite act of vengeance that happens in the poem. Instead of going on and on theoretically about neurotically wondering if he's a good guy, poet just tells you flat out that he messed up and did something that he, both clearly regrets, and he won't have the chance to redeem because it's one of those split-second decisions that you can't ever take back. I think it's beautiful, and I think it's unsentimental. It doesn't ask for forgiveness or even repent, really. And the actors in the poem don't do either of those things either. So we're going to listen to his poem, "A Story About the Body."[MUSIC PLAYING][BEGIN AUDIO PLAYBACK]

ROBERT HASS:

This is "A Story About the Body." What time is it? I didn't-- quarter of? The young composer working that summer at an artist's colony, had watched her for a week. She was Japanese, a painter, almost 60. And he thought he was in love with her. He loved her work. And her work was like the way she moved her body, used her hands, looked at him directly when she made amused and considered answers to his questions. One night, walking back from a concert, they came to her door. And she turned to him and said, I think you would like to have me. I would like that too, but I must tell you that I've had a double mastectomy. And when he didn't understand, I've lost both my breasts. The radiance that he had carried around in his belly and chest cavity, like music, withered very quickly. And he made himself look at her when he said, I'm sorry, I don't think I could. He walked back to his own cabin through the pines. And in the morning he found a small blue bowl on the porch outside his house. It looked to be full of rose petals, but he found when he picked it up that the rose petals were on top. The rest of the bowl, she must have swept them from the corners of her studio, was full of dead bees.[END AUDIO PLAYBACK][MUSIC PLAYING]

HARMONY HOLIDAY:

Next, we're going to listen to the poet Ai, reading in 1985 a poem called "Salome." It's very rare that her work has any of the trappings of the a sentimentalist. And sometimes it can be bordering on almost too intent at the knife's edge. It could pull back a little bit before it puts its knife in, but the knife is always there. Often the knife, the weapon, the violent act, or the contemplation of it will show up in her work. And then, often it's just sort of like gently hovering just above the poem, that something murderous might happen. What's beautiful is that that is combined, usually with the pastoral and the really keen sense of the physical and natural worlds around what end up being personas and characters that show up in the poems. One of the threads that kind of runs through poems that dabble in cruelty and veer far, far away from nostalgia or sentimentality is that it forces the telling of a story because you can't really-- if you're going to tell a story well, vague gesturing and abstraction or abstract ideas are less important to the story than the emotion, the actual characters, and events. And so what you end up getting is kind of short stories in the poetic form and that are complete-- that tell a full story, an image that's just kind of in full relief. And that's what "Salome" is describing, presumably, a daughter who is being taken by her stepfather and a mother's attempt at revenge, either real or imagined, and opens up with this casual ruminating on what might happen. The head being like flower petals atop water. Again, we get the petals of a flower. This time, it's not roses as an image for the concealment of cruelty, which is interesting because they're really flimsy. There's just some gorgeous turns of language. She has a line where she talks about some somnolence and musk, and it just rolls off the tongue very beautifully. At the end, we get the shadow of a knife, and it's this almost like a rite of passage, coming-of-age, story in poetic form. In three minutes, she manages to give us a glimpse into someone both growing up and failing up, basically. Someone who goes from victim to seer and who is, in the end, both the mother and the daughter, sort of inflicting a kind of punishing shame on herself and then absolving it. One thing that I also love about Ai's writing is that they aren't just gratuitous persona poems, just like it would be fun to take on the persona of a president or be a white man in the body of a Black woman. They are poems where if there's an evildoer, she also sees the humanity of that person, and it again speaks to how much humanity can be witnessed without sentimental drivel. So it's beautiful. And listen to that now.[MUSIC PLAYING][BEGIN AUDIO PLAYBACK]

AI:

Let's see. I didn't plan this. Obviously, I'm just sort of getting the feel of the audience. I'll see how much you'll stand for. Then, yeah, I'll just read. Let's see. I don't think I read this one, this poem, this well, but it's an interesting poem. I don't even know where it came from exactly. It's not that much like me in a way, or like my work. It was in this issue of antacid-- anniversary issue, and I sent him one that I thought was much better to go in there. And then I realized, actually, this was because it was so different from what I do. This is called a "Salome." I scissor the stem of the red carnation and set it in a bowl of water. It floats the way your head would if I cut it off. But what if I tore you apart for those afternoons when I was 15? And so, like a bird of paradise, slaughtered for its feathers, even my name suggested wings, wicker cages, flight. Come, sit-in my lap, you said. I felt as if I'd flown there. I was weightless. You were 40 and married. That she was my mother never mattered. She was a door that opened onto me. The three of us blended into a kind of somnolence and musk. The musk of Sundays, sweat, and sweetness. That dried plum and licorice taste, always back of my tongue. And your tongue against my teeth, then touching mine. How many times I counted, but could never remember. And when I thought we'd go on forever, that nothing could stop us, as we fell endlessly from consciousness, orders came, war in the North. Your sword, the gold epaulets, the uniform so brightly colored, so unlike war, I thought. And your horse, how you rode out the gate. Know how that horse danced beneath you toward the sound of cannon fire. I could hear it so many leagues away. I could see you fall, your face scarlet, the horse dancing on without you. And at the same moment, Mother sighed and turned clumsily in the hammock. The Madeira in the thin-stemmed glass spilled into the grass, and I felt myself hardening to a brandy-colored wood. My skin, a thousand strings drawn so taut that when I walked to the house, I could hear music tumbling like a waterfall of China silk behind me. I took your letter from my bodice. Salomé, I heard your voice, little bird, fly. But I did not. I untied the lilac ribbon at my breasts and lay down on your bed. After a while, I heard Mother's footsteps, watched her walk to the window. I closed my eyes. And when I opened them, the shadow of a sword passed through my throat, and Mother, dressed like a grenadier, bent and kissed me on the lips.[END AUDIO PLAYBACK][MUSIC PLAYING]

HARMONY HOLIDAY:

And then, the last poem from the Poetry Center Archives I wanted to listen to on this theme is a recording of Allen Ginsberg reading one of my favorite poems in the American language, an elegy, "Kaddish," for his mother, who he called Naomi. This reading was in 1969. So again, to put into context, the first two were in the 80s. In 1969, the kind of visceral-- I won't even call it cruelty what it is in "Kaddish" is this kind of literal accounting for searching for manhood in the eyes of the boy, Allen, the boy, helping his mother through psychological trauma. She succumbs to it eventually, and that's why we get this elegiac book-length poem that catalogs, really gruesomely in some places, her deterioration, her hallucinations, her paranoias, her neediness and clinginess. His dutiful response to this, although confused, showing up, trying to help, trying to pull someone out of the worlds in their mind, and someone who he deeply respects and loves but also maybe slightly fears because everyone may or may not fear becoming the mother, especially if the mother is considered neurotic or, in this case, insane, lost, because of the refusal of sentimentality here. Exactly what James Baldwin describes in his quote, cruelty is also refused. So when we get descriptions of the mother's nude body and scars from different surgeries and giving birth, it's not in the way that you hear in "A Story About the Body," where the scars are punished. The scars are loved because they aren't, the remark is just a matter of fact. These things are there. She's hallucinating at one point that he's a lover in this excerpt, or that he wonders if his mother is confusing him with her father or her lover, or isn't clear what's happening in her mind, and he doesn't pathologize it. And I think sentimentality, because it kind of is its own pathological thing, ends up doing a lot of mythologizing this-- it passes judgment on what it's describing, because in order to be sentimental, something has to be sad or giddy. And when this very difficult, restrained effort to remain even-keeled is met with actual tragedy, it doesn't decrease or diminish the tragedy. What it ends up doing is making it clearer and realer and more confrontational. And I think of all-- out of all of Ginsburg's work, because his work was kind of exploring hipness-- he's part of the Beat Generation. And there was a sort of pressure to be hip and to be a part of a folk revival. But to do something this ancient and reverent, this is the kind of poem that will last thousands of years in the same regard, in my opinion. It's not stylized. It's a slave to no style. It's simple, elegiac grieving in one of the most profound ways. Also, I should say it's situated in Newark. And so, Newark is, in American poetry, like an important city. William Carlos Williams, Baraka, Ginsberg, so many other poets, Lauryn Hill, Whitney Houston, there is the-- maybe American arts in general, Newark is an important city. And we're in that city in this poem because that's where Naomi, Allen Ginsberg's mother resides and where he grew up. And the sister is a neighbor or his aunt. And we hear him say, here, these communist sisters lost their revolution. And it's just the cadence of it, and the way it lands, makes it a pivotal moment in this very long poem. And listen to "Kaddish" now.[MUSIC PLAYING][BEGIN AUDIO PLAYBACK]

ALLEN GINSBERG:

From the center of the narrative section, toward the end of the narrative section. Or through Eleanor or the workmen's circle, where she worked, addressing envelopes, she made out, went shopping for Campbell's tomato soup, saved money Louis mailed her. Later she found a boyfriend and he was a doctor. Dr. Isaac worked for National Maritime Union, now Italian, bald, and pudgy old doll, who was himself an orphan. But they kicked him out, old cruelties. Sloppier, sat around on bed or chair and corset, dreaming to herself. I'm hot. I'm getting fat. I used to have such a beautiful figure before I went to the hospital. You should have seen me in Woodbine. This in a furnished room around the NMU Hall. 1943. Looking at naked baby pictures in the magazine, baby powder advertisements, strained Lamb carrots. I will think nothing but beautiful thoughts. Revolving her head round and round on her neck in window light in summer time, in hypnotized, in doven-dream recall, I touch his cheek, I touch his cheek. He touches my lips with his hand. I think beautiful thoughts. The baby has beautiful hands. Or no-shake of her body, disgust. Some sort of Buchenwald, some insulin passes through her head, a grimace nerve shudder at involuntary, as I shudder when I piss, bad chemical in her cortex. No, don't think of that. He's a rat, Naomi. and when we die, we become an onion, a cabbage, a carrot, or a squash, a vegetable. I come downtown from Colombia and agree. She reads the Bible, thinks beautiful thoughts all day. Yesterday I saw God. What did he look like? Well, in the afternoon I climbed up a ladder. He has a cheap cabin in the country, like Monroe, New York, the chicken farms in the woods. He was a lonely old man with a white beard. I cooked supper for him. I made him a nice supper, lentil soup, vegetables, bread and butter, miltz. He sat down at the table and ate. He was sad. I told him, look at all these fightings and killings down there. What's the matter? Why don't you put a stop to it? I tried, he said. That's all he could do. He looked tired. He's a bachelor so long. And he liked lentil soup.[LAUGHTER] Serving me meanwhile, a plate of cold fish, chopped raw cabbage dripped with tap water, smelly tomatoes, week-old health food, grated beets and carrots with leaky juice, warm. More and more disconsolate food. I can't eat it for nausea sometimes. The charity of her hands stinking of the Manhattan, madness, desire to please me, cold undercooked fish, pale red near the bones. Her smells, and off naked in the room, so that I stare ahead, or turn a book, Ignoring her. One time I thought she was trying to make me come lay her, flirting to herself at the sink, laid back on a huge bed that filled most of the room, dress up around her hip. Big splash of hair, scars of operation, pancreas, belly wound, abortions, appendix, stitching of incisions, pulling down in the fat like hideous thick zippers, ragged long lips between her legs. What, even, smell of asshole? I was cold, later revolted a little, not much. Seemed perhaps a good idea to try, know the monster of the beginning womb. That way, would she care? She needs a lover. Yisborach, v'yistabach, v'yispoar, v'yisroman, v'yisnasch, v'yishador, v'yishalleh, v'yishallol, sh'meh d'kudsho, b'rich hu. And Louis, re-establishing himself in Paterson, grimy apartment in negro district, living in dark rooms, but found himself a girl he later married, falling in love again. Though sere and shy, hurt with 20 years of mad Naomi idealism. Once I came home, after a long time in New York, he's lonely. Sitting in the bedroom, he had desk chair turned round to face me, weeps, tears in red eyes under his glasses. That we'd left him, Gene gone strangely into the army, she out on her own in New York, almost childish in her furnished room. So Louis walked downtown to post office to get mail, taught in high school, stayed at poetry desk, forlorn, ate grief at Bickford's all these years are gone. Eugene got out of the army, came home changed and lone, cut off his nose in Jewish operation. For years. stopped girls on Broadway for cups of coffee to get laid. Went to NYU, serious there, to study law. And Gene lived with her. Ate naked fish cakes cheap, while she got crazier. He got thin, or felt helpless. Naomi, striking 1920, poses at the moon, half-naked in the next bed, bit his nails and studied, was the weird nurse-son. Next year, he moved to a room near Columbia, thought she wanted to live with her children. Listen to your mother's plea, I beg you. Louise, still sending her checks. I was in bughouse that year eight months. My own visions unmentioned in this here lament. But then went half mad, Hitler in her room, she saw his mustache in the sink. Afraid of Dr. Isaac now, suspecting he was in on the Newark plot, went up the Bronx to live near Eleanor's rheumatic heart. And Uncle Max never got up before noon. Though Naomi, at 6 AM was listening to the radio for spies, or searching the window sill, for in the empty lot downstairs. An old man creeps with his bag, stuffing packages of garbage in his hanging black overcoat. Max's sister, Edie work, 17 years bookkeeper at Gimbels, lived downstairs in an apartment house, divorced. So Edie took in Naomi on Rochambeau Avenue, Woodlawn Cemetery across the street, vast dale of graves' where Poe once. Last up on Bronx subway, lot's of communists in that area. Who enrolled for painting classes at night in bronx Adult High School, walked alone under Van Cortlandt Elevated line to class, paints Naomiisms, humans sitting on the grass in some Camp No-Worry summers yore. Saints with droopy faces and long, ill fitting pants from hospital. Brides in front of Lower East Side with short, grooms. lost El trains running over the Babylonian apartment rooftops in the Bronx. Sad painting, but she expressed herself. Her mandolin gone, all strings broke in her head, she tried. Toward beauty or some old life message, But started kicking Eleanor, and Eleanor had heart trouble. Came upstairs and asked her about spydom for hours, Eleanor frazzled, Max away at office, accounting for cigar stores till that night. I am a great woman, a truly beautiful soul. And because of that, they, Hitler. Grandma Hearst, the capitalist, Franco Daily News, The '20s, Mussolini, The Living Dead, want to shut me up. Buba's the the head of a spider network. Kicking the girls, Edie and Eleanor. Woke Edie at midnight to tell her she was a spy, and Eleanor, a rat. Edie worked all day and couldn't take it. She was organizing the union. And Eleanor began dying upstairs in bed. The relatives called me up. She's getting worse. I was the only one left. Went on the subway with Eugene to see her, ate stale fish. My sister whispers in the radio, Louis must be in the apartment. His mother tells him what to say, liars. I cooked for my two children. I played the mandolin.(singing) Last night the Nightingale woke me Last night when all was still It sang in the golden moonlight From on the wintry hills. She did. I pushed her against the door and shouted, don't kick Eleanor. She stared at me, Contempt-- die-- disbelief her sons are so naive, so dumb. Eleanor is the worst spy. She's taking orders. No wires in the room, I'm yelling at her, last ditch, Eugene listening on the bed. What can he do to escape that fatal Mama? You've been away for many years already. Grandma's too old to walk. We're all alive at once then, even me and Jean and Naomi in one mythological cousinesque room. I in Columbia jacket, she half undressed, screaming at each other in the forever. I banging against her head, which saw radios, sticks. Hitlers, the gamut of hallucinations, for real, her own universe, no road that goes elsewhere, to my own. No America, not even a world, that you go as all men, as Van Gogh, as mad Hannah, all the same, to their last doom. Thunder, spirits, lightning. I've seen your grave, oh, strange. Naomi. My own cracked cracked. Shema Y'Israel. I am Svul Avrum, you in death. Your last night in the darkness of the Bronx, I phonecalled, through hospital to secret police, that came when you and I were alone, shrieking at Eleanor in my ear, who breathed hard in her own bed. got thin. Nor will forget, the door knock at your fright of spies. Law advancing on my honor. Eternity entering the room, you running to the bathroom undressed, hiding in protest from the last heroic fate, staring at my eyes, betrayed. The final cops of madness, rescuing me. From your foot against the broken heart of Eleanor. Your voice at Edie, weary of Gimbels coming home to broken radio. And Louis needing a poor divorce, he wants to get married soon. Eugene dreaming, hiding on 125th Street, suing Negroes for money on crud furniture, defending Black girls. Protests from the bathroom said you were sane. Dressed in a cotton robe, your shoes, then new, your purse and newspaper clippings. No, your honesty. As vainly you made your lips more real with lipstick, looking in the mirror to see if the insanity was me, or a car full of police or Grandma spying at 78, your vision. Her Climbing over the walls of the cemetery with a political kidnapper's bag, or what you saw on the walls of the Bronx, in pink nightgown at midnight, staring out the window on the empty lot. Ah, Rochambeau Avenue, playground of phantoms. Last apartment in the Bronx for spies. Last home for Eleanor or Naomi. Here these communist sisters lost their revolution. All right, put on your clothes, Mrs. Let's go. We have the wagon downstairs. You want to come with her to the station? The ride then, held Naomi's hand, and held her head to my breast. I'm taller, kissed her and said I did it for the best. Eleanor sick, and Max with a heart condition, needs . To me, Why did you do this? Yes, Mrs., your son will have to leave you in an hour. The ambulance came in a few hours, drove off at 4 AM to some Bellevue in the night downtown gone, to the hospital forever. I saw her, led away. She waved tears in her eyes. Two years after a trip to Mexico. Bleak in the flat plane near Brentwood, scrub brush and grass around the unused RR tracks to the crazy house, new brick, 20-story building, lost on the vast lawns of mad town on Long Island. Huge cities of the moon. Asylum spreads out giant wings above the path to a mini black hole. The door, I went in, smelt funny, the halls again. Up elevator, to a glass door on a woman's ward, to Naomi. Two nurses, buxom white, they let her out. Naomi stared, and I gasped. She'd had a stroke. Two thin, shrunk on her bones. Age come to Naomi, now broken into white hair, loose dress on her skeleton, face sunk, old, withered, cheek of crone. One hand stiff, heaviness of 40s and menopause reduced by one heart stroke. Lame now, wrinkles, a scar on her head, the lobotomy, ruin, the hand dipping downwards toward death. Oh, Russian-faced woman on the grass. Your long black hair is crowned with flower. The mandolin is on your knees. Communist beauty, Sit here married in the summer Among daisies, promised happiness at hand. Holy mother, now you smile on your love. Your world is born anew. Children run naked in the fields spotted with dandelions, they eat in the plum tree grove at the end of the meadow and find a cabin where the white-haired Negro teaches the mystery of his rain barrel. Blessed daughter, come to America. I long to hear your voice again, remembering your mother's music in the song of the natural front. Oh, glorious muse that bore me from the womb, gave suck first mystic life, and taught me talk and music, from whose pained head I first took vision. Tortured and beaten in the skull, what mad hallucinations of the damned that drive me out of my own skull to seek eternity till I find peace for thee, oh, poetry, and for all humankind call on the origin. Death, which is the mother of the universe. Now wear your nakedness forever. White flowers in your hair. Your marriage sealed behind the sky. No revolution might destroy that maidenhood. Oh, beautiful Garbo of my karma, all photographs from 1920. In camp Nicht-Gedeiget get here unchanged, with all the teachers from Newark, nor Eleanor began, nor Max await his specter, nor Louis retire from this High School.[APPLAUSE][END AUDIO PLAYBACK][MUSIC PLAYING]

HARMONY HOLIDAY:

And then, I'm going to read a newer poem of my own. And I think it fits with this series. I guess I'm pretty decadent. I love language, and I love what it can do and the way it feels on the tongue and in the body when certain sentences are said aloud and when they live on the page. And so with that, sometimes it can come an involuntary turn into the sentimentality, or unintentional sentimentality, that I'm sort of working my way past as I deepen and evolve my voice on the page aloud, et cetera. And so, often what that looks like, or what it looks like recently, is, as I intentionally do that, I'm not allowed to rely on the same tricks and the same gestures, and I'm forced to look at things that I haven't wanted to look at or write about and not hold back as much. Because to tell a true story, you can't really hold back the details that you don't like. And that requires being unsentimental, which is required maturing into that and really like facing what it's valuable to communicate about the human experience versus what is beautiful and what can be aestheticized, because not everything can be. And the stories that can't be are often the most important to tell. So yeah, this is going to be in my next manuscript and also in a chapbook coming out soon called the Museum of Child Stars. And a lot of the things I'm writing are about the way that the world handles children, especially famous ones, but childhood in general, the lost art of it in America. And this is called "Tale of the Sudden Sweetness of the Dictator.""Tale of the Sudden Sweetness of the Dictator." It blew up his heart, fentanyl, pornography, all that love he harbored for me as beatings, regime. You're far too loyal to your mothers to know yourselves, he cries into the gag. And I start cheering, reminiscing. Mine spent my commercial money on cocaine and recording equipment that became her powder harbor, told her parents she was still teaching at the Lutheran School, and stayed home, sleeping off highs and spending Dad's music money on drugs, a bright red fur that ended up in the pawn shop, an infinity of liquor. One week, it got so bad, we took some cash from her purse while she was passed out for the afternoon, walked to the grocery store, got what we could, paid like hookers or buskers do after work, and push the cart home. Me, 10, and my sister, 5, too invaded with adrenaline to be humiliated. That's a lie. Try a Little Tenderness played from a car window, and Madonna's Like a Virgin to interrupt our ritualized disorientation of disgrace and stucco. I can still hear the sound of the cart, stiff wheels on the pavement, metal bar just under my chin. I try to forgive history. Her boyfriend was jacking off in the living room when we got back. Porn on the 24-inch Toshiba television, the same brand I'd done the commercial for with kids who became famous child actors, already big in Japan. Cereal for dinner, we didn't even murder him. I see why some people resent the truth and fantasize about crimes we don't commit. Some spend all their lives menaced by guilt and shame for never speaking of days like this. You're nobody till somebody destroys you.[MUSIC PLAYING]

JULIE SWARSTAD JOHNSON:

You've been listening to Harmony Holiday. And this is Poetry Centered. Harmony, thank you again for following this path through the Voca Archive. Listeners, thank you so much for joining us. As always, we are so grateful. Two weeks from now, join us again for a new episode hosted by Samuel Ace, with more episodes to follow. You're also invited to check out Voca to find your own favorite poems and poets. We have recordings from 1963 through this past May. Thanks again for joining us. Until 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 audiovisual archive online at voca.arizona.edu.